Keywords: Forgotten
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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INTERNATIONAL
Twenty-five years ago the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. One eyewitness kept a tally of the dead that reached 2600 before hospitals went mum due to pressure from above. If China is to overcome the challenges it will face in the decades ahead, it must draw upon the great reserve of strength, the spirit of solidarity that was on display among the protesters that spring. Instead there remains a concerted effort to forget.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 02 June 2014
4 Comments
The Pope says we have 'forgotten how to weep'. The most potent moments in current affairs television occur when a person is shown to cry, yet we're taught to believe that 'breaking down' means that we're not in command of the argument. Julie Bishop could not have been unmoved if the jostling Sydney University students had instead wept over the lost educational opportunity in the Federal Budget.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael McVeigh
- 28 April 2014
20 Comments
ANZAC Day is a powerful and worthy ritual. But the tales of our soldiers make up only one of the ongoing chapters in the story of our country. There are many others. On 25 January, let us remember the Indigenous people who once nurtured the land. On 25 February, let us remember those who gave their lives in settling this unforgiving land. On 25 March, let us remember the people who lost their lives migrating to this country.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 April 2014
16 Comments
Both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter are exercises in memory. The Jewish child who asks why this day is remembered is told a story of slavery in Egypt followed by deliverance by God. He stands in line with other children who asked the same question during the Holocaust. The devaluation of history and memory has a deeply corrosive effect on society. In our society we can see this in our treatment of asylum seekers.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 01 April 2014
6 Comments
In a party in which conservatives are dominant, life is rarely easy for centrist Liberals. They are a cultural minority within their own party and can be criticised for rocking the boat when their party is on a roll. Those who are further to the left, including Labor and the Greens, should not just hope that the Liberal Left is heard loud and clear, but they should respect and nurture this strand of liberalism.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 14 March 2014
2 Comments
Moira, her kids Zara and Rory, her partner Shane and his brother Midge are the kind of people you wouldn't think to look twice at. Living on welfare and on the constant lookout for abandoned houses to either live in or raid, they're known colloquially as 'trants' (short for itinerants). These otherwise overlooked and forgotten people might be parochial, but they're never parodied. They might be uneducated, but they have a voice.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 March 2014
9 Comments
The conflict began with falling church attendances and a decision by the Koroit parish priest to rationalise resources. Although Regina Lane describes in detail the battles to save St Brigid's, her book is far more than a protest song against the power of the Catholic Church. The larger stories embodied at St Brigid's, the immigrant groups who formed the first congregation and their relationship to the first Australians, have continuing importance.
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AUSTRALIA
- Benedict Coleridge
- 07 March 2014
7 Comments
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam this week excoriated Tony Abbott, homing in on Abbott's politics of fear. Whatever you think of the speech, its implication was that politics includes a struggle over the cultivation, control and directing of public emotions. While our instinct is to think of our politics in terms of discussion and consensus, the public sphere also includes forms of expression beyond speech, such as ritual, recognition and mourning.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Tony Thompson
- 05 March 2014
5 Comments
The museum traces the civil rights protests right up to the game-changing Bloody Sunday killings of 1972. As I looked at the photographs of the terrible day, a man who worked at the museum stood beside me and asked if I recognised the building. I looked again to realise it was the museum itself. 'That's my brother,' he said, pointing to the badly injured young man in the photo. The young man had died ten feet from where we were standing.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Moira Rayner
- 20 February 2014
38 Comments
We created this risk, intending it to 'deter' boat people and people smugglers. As a consequence, we've created racial conflict in PNG and the collapse of the rule of law in Nauru. Now, it is surely a duty to re-evaluate a policy that leads to mental illness, destruction of property, hope, imagination and civil society, and death. I think we have a duty to refugees, because we are descended from refugees and may be refugees ourselves, one day.
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AUSTRALIA
- Paul Newbury
- 21 January 2014
23 Comments
New Zealand, our partner in the Anzac legend, has no problem commemorating the Maori Wars of 1845–1872. Yet the Australian War Memorial refuses to honour Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and their people against white invader settlers in the Frontier Wars of 1788–1928. This is a moral issue, and has the effect of excluding a whole people from commemoration based on a trifle.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ray Cassin
- 04 December 2013
9 Comments
The Education Minister Christopher Pyne has spun the latest developments on education funding reforms as having saved Gonski and achieved what Labor could not. But it is an achievement derived from surrendering oversight of how the money will be spent. If public schools continue to be the losers in the battle for funds, the reversals of the past fortnight will be remembered as the start of a slow burn for the Abbott Government.
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