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Keywords: Matthew

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Negotiating climate deniers and plovers

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 February 2015
    9 Comments

    Call me paranoid if you like, but as I walked away, affecting a nonchalant strolling gait, I knew, I just knew, that she was a climate change denier and was daring me to argue the point. Had I hesitated one more moment, I would have been regaled with statistics about the mild coastal summer and other utterly benign climatological phenomena.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Reappraising Just War theory

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 18 February 2015

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pop up shop of poetic pollie horrors

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 January 2015
    9 Comments

    We all have these abruptly resurfacing images and references that pop up unannounced. For example, Treasurer Joe Hockey’s musings on the poor, who don’t drive very far – ‘O scathful harme, condition of povertie’ (Chaucer). And the rich, who are ‘lifters’. I was invaded mentally by Yeats’s ‘Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns.’ Without pain and with cigars and smirks of self-congratulation. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ten films that will get you talking

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 December 2014
    8 Comments

    It's December, and film writers everywhere are putting together their lists of the best films of 2014. But best-of lists are so subjective, so here's our take: ten films from 2014 that are guaranteed to get you thinking, and talking!

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How Phillip Hughes' death moved the nation

    • Brian Matthews
    • 05 December 2014
    4 Comments

    Greg Chappell has already made the comparison with the response to Princess Diana's death, but it goes back further than that, to John Donne, for example, in 1624: 'No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main'. Death haunts the newspapers and the airwaves. Just? Not at all. Every now and then, we cower and weep before Death's undiscriminating might.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Cameron's shirtfronting impotence

    • Brian Matthews
    • 07 November 2014
    4 Comments

    Some aspects of the English/Scottish independence referendum confrontation rang interesting bells for Australia. But British PM David Cameron has had to tread cautiously on foreign policy to avoid adding grist to the 'Yes' campaign's mill. Not so Tony Abbott, for whom strutting the world stage works a treat to lift the pall of governmental confusion and unpopularity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The enemy in my kitchen

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 October 2014
    2 Comments

    I have always prided myself on my capacity to do some heavy labouring in my spare time, but a serious back injury put a stop to most of that. Michael doesn't mind though. I point at the pizza oven and its need for removal. 'Well, mate,' he says, 'it's dressed in black and it's totally masked and unidentifiable. It wouldn't be allowed into Parliament would it?'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Society says freak show must go on

    • Michael Mullins
    • 29 September 2014
    6 Comments

    Making fun of mental illness has a long history that was reflected in plans of the Perth Royal Show to offer an amusement based on the notorious Bethlem Sanatorium in London, where residents were cruelly taunted for the sake of public amusement. The WA Agricultural Society refused to cancel the show in reponse to criticism, instead changing the theme to ‘the outbreak of a deadly contagion’, itself an inappropriate subject for public amusement.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Encounter at the gate

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 September 2014
    6 Comments

    I'm standing at the front gate, about to go for a run when he swings round the corner. He speaks in a deep, modulated voice that seems to run on like a quiet stream. Just when you think you might answer, the flow smoothly resumes, and he is an adept prince of the non sequitur. 'Ever take a short cut through the cemetery?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our Lady of the Trap Door Spider

    • Paul Scully
    • 19 August 2014
    2 Comments

    Outside rituals, the salvation of small actions behind closed doors like the spider, my childhood friend, the silence returns, the woods of earlier times thin around me, my own tree shrinks back to its roots.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The shock of the news of Kennedy and Nixon

    • Brian Matthews
    • 15 August 2014
    3 Comments

    Last week, when I heard a Margaret Throsby interview with Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, I immediately remembered in startling detail where I was forty years ago. It was high summer, a beautiful warm day in Oxford. I was strolling along the banks of the Thames through a leafy camping ground; a voice, tragic yet culpable, retrieved from an unseen radio on 8 August 1974 in another country.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Good Christian morality is better than bad science

    • Matthew Beard
    • 12 August 2014
    5 Comments

    The lesson from the Eric Abetz 'abortion causes breast cancer' debacle is that Christians are fools to engage in scientific arguments  they cannot win. They should instead stick to what they know best, and not be afraid to give an explicitly Christian moral voice to public debate. 

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