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Keywords: Bass Strait

  • AUSTRALIA

    The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Then and now

    • John Honner
    • 28 July 2022
    4 Comments

    The ‘Land Rights Now’ banner is hoisted against the wind, and the marchers set off for the Embassy. A young Aboriginal woman walks ahead of the banner. She has dyed her hair red. She turns and leans into the wind to face the marchers, holding a megaphone to her mouth. ‘What do we want?’ she shouts, ‘When do we want it?’ And she keeps going, exhorting the marchers. We reply ‘Land Rights … Now!’ The crowd tires before she does.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Poetry in lockdown: Recent work of Hermina Burns

    • Jennifer Gribble
    • 14 October 2021
    8 Comments

    Well before the pandemic, the future for poetry’s slim volumes was looking far from healthy.  Last November, the threatened closure of UWA Press, one of the largest publishers of poetry in Australia, drew attention to the narrowing opportunities for emerging poets to make their mark. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Republic of Religion

    • B. A. Breen
    • 13 May 2019
    4 Comments

    I moved to the Land of Magic, found it full of mumbo-jumbo. I bounced to the Kingdom of Rhythm, too many ups and downs. I went eagerly to Warm-and-Fuzzy, soon bogged down in treacle. I trekked to the Republic of Religion, it was open only on Sundays.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Not owning but belonging to the land

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 July 2018
    7 Comments

    There are severe limitations in the western ways we tend to think about land. Land is conceived in terms of ownership and property — ideas that are implicated not just in colonial histories, but in extractive industries and concentrations of wealth. In this model, land is a fulcrum of power.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ghost of weddings past, present and future

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 December 2013
    6 Comments

    Is there a spirit of place, a kind of psychological imprint that endows a particular location? There are spots along the Coorong in South Australia where, as twilight deepens, you could swear that wraith-like, dark figures are moving through the dunes. Recent events made me wonder if the legendary William Buckley lives on in that way on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula, where he lived for 32 years among the local Wataurong people.

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  • RELIGION

    Working out what white Australia wants

    • Frank Brennan
    • 30 January 2012
    10 Comments

    I have been feeling sad and confused about the happenings in Canberra since Australia Day. On Saturday I got on my bike and went down to the lawn of Old Parliament House. I passed a sign: 'You are now entering or leaving the Australian Aboriginal Tent Embassy ... Abusive behaviour will not be tolerated.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Coastal communion

    • Gregory Day
    • 01 June 2011
    6 Comments

    In the tiny church built of ecumenical brick, with barely any aesthetic pleasure to distract from the humility of the message, Patrick and his cohort in both the earlier football match and in the communion to come, sat quietly, though with the telltale legs of novices swinging restlessly under the front pew.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Personal reflections on the Christmas Island tragedy

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 December 2010
    23 Comments

    It is curious and sad that in weeks when our media are celebrating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, we can accept so easily a government-managed story, whose public accountability obligation stares us in the face. Perhaps because editors know that our complacent society really does not want to go there.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shark encounter

    • Vince Chadwick
    • 24 November 2010
    2 Comments

    The full moon illuminated the silky water and tepid sand like a disco ball. Rounding one corner suddenly we could see a kilometer of open beach and, in the middle distance, two men standing around a fire. The group mentality did not counsel caution. But what were they doing here?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tasmanian Church's reverse missionaries solution

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 03 June 2010
    23 Comments

    The Nigerian priests are disturbed that many Australian Catholic parents send their children to Catholic school but not to Mass. The structured religious lives of children in Nigeria mean that one seminary has had to restrict its intake numbers to 90 per year.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Black Saturday gibe mars Murray's might

    • Philip Harvey
    • 16 April 2010
    6 Comments

    In one poem Les Murray would reduce the causes of the Black Saturday fires to differences in forest management between 'hippies' and 'rednecks'. Utilising poetry to play the blame game demeans our understanding of the complexity of that disaster.

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  • INFORMATION

    'They've never faced an angry man'

    • Phil Pyke
    • 19 December 2008
    2 Comments

    This was a known criminal with a history of violence. I drew my weapon, and yelled at him to get down on the ground. He ignored me, raised his arm, and possibly the weapon. Everything went into slow motion as I began to pull the trigger. I've often wondered what would have happened if I had shot him.

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