Keywords: Memories
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jennifer Zeven
- 22 May 2020
13 Comments
I spent the first six or seven years of my life spellbound by my mum’s stories of her childhood in Far North Queensland. Herstory came from warm, outback and subtropical places. She and her sisters wrote on slates at school, played in custard apple trees, kept their own bees.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
We have always lived thus, in our heads. Bone domes, impenetrable to others, we might project animus, animation, add to Duncan’s questioning. The mind’s construction in the face, enigmatic, Rubik cube with sixteen squares on each face, so any signs I give are laced, graced with ambiguity.
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RELIGION
- Irfan Yusuf
- 08 April 2020
17 Comments
For millions of Australians of varying degrees of religiosity, prayer will play a key role in dealing with the novel stresses associated with this novel virus. Religions bring us not just closer to our creator but also to each other, especially in times of crisis. And you don’t have to be devout to feel the blessing.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jeremy Gadd
- 07 April 2020
5 Comments
It was summer in the midst of drought. The earth was parched, impenetrably hard, and all about leaves fell like rain, clogging gutters and the drains. Leaves fell in clouds, curled and dry, and formed a carpet across the street that crunched beneath pedestrians’ feet.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 03 April 2020
3 Comments
Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 02 April 2020
13 Comments
One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Lucy Alexander
- 23 March 2020
The floodplain is full of the black earth we are made of. All of the world’s particles pass through this zone: yours, too. Have them arranged so your heart can weigh in. Have them in order, crystallised and formatted. The light frothing up will hold your new name.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Andrew Jackson
- 21 February 2020
6 Comments
As the bushfires raged and air quality worsened, we were constantly told to stay indoors, keep cool and be alert for emergency orders on our phones. But with each public service announcement, we continued to leave some of our most vulnerable behind.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Catherine Marshall
- 20 February 2020
3 Comments
This communal outpouring during the bushfires has an opportunity to perpetuate itself indefinitely, even though the embers have been extinguished and those not directly affected by the fires have gotten on with their workaday lives. For even as the fires burned, Tourism Australia was mounting a campaign to encourage Australians to holiday locally instead of taking their patronage abroad, and to persuade international tourists to visit, too.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Brian Matthews
- 06 February 2020
3 Comments
I’d never heard of McKenzie Funk until I came across his marvellous review essay, 'Smoked Out'. I eagerly read on beyond the genial opening paragraphs and almost immediately, I found myself on familiar, if deadly, ground.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 16 December 2019
5 Comments
Dance and music are as innate as breathing. Babies dance while in the womb, and the Yuletide can be prime time for 'playing music, singing and dancing [as a] healthy outlet for their emotions'. As William Stafford observed, kids dance 'before they learn there is anything that isn't music'.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 13 December 2019
5 Comments
Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'.
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