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Keywords: Metaphor

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Illness and the indescribable

    • 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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stop bombarding us with military metaphors

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 February 2020
    22 Comments

    One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The anatomy of hope

    • Fiona Murphy
    • 18 February 2020
    5 Comments

    Over a decade ago, when applying to study physiotherapy, I carefully read through the application form. It contained a brief but troubling caveat: all students must be physically able to participate in the coursework. I felt nervous, even scared. The answer seemed clear cut to me, but would the university agree?

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  • RELIGION

    Pondering God from the dunny

    • Sue Stevenson
    • 24 January 2020
    8 Comments

    As I sat I noticed some graffiti: 'What you are seeking after is seeking after you. — Rumi.' A beautiful, soulful verse for the alienated children of late capitalism, right? An invitation to live in expectancy, as if you belong in the world. But underneath, someone had struck through What and written Who, and Rumi and written God.

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  • RELIGION

    Altyerre-Catholicism's sacred dancing ground

    • Mike Bowden
    • 03 December 2019
    11 Comments

    This would not be accepted by the extremist Catholics who threw an Amazonian indigenous icon of a pregnant indigenous woman into the Tiber River. But the Pope is right to honour the prior religious practises of the Amazonians, just as the Bishop of Darwin supports a process that has seen the development of Altyerre-Catholicism.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why people don’t read modern poetry

    • Thuy On and Francis Bede
    • 19 August 2019
    4 Comments

    What about compoundnounsthatrunlike this. Something here about the glory of native bush even tho you have never been beyond zone 3 on PT. Add doleful '....' Beckettian misery here. (Phew, your 20th century Lit Minor was not a waste!) So winning so woke you never even zzz.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Parliamentary circles

    • Sandra Renew
    • 12 August 2019
    2 Comments

    On the Circle driving around the Parliament ... you say it's all swings and roundabouts, a circumlocutory carousel, a beauty of tautology, movement continuity ... no pause to merge, roundabout way of saying, you will never be us.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Work as gift rather than transaction

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 April 2019
    15 Comments

    It is in the interests of companies and the people who compose them to see the relationships that constitute work more broadly than the image of transaction allows. In a good enterprise work is a form of self-transcendence through relationships with other workers, with the people whom they serve directly and with the broader society.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Art, economics, science, and all that jazz

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 February 2019
    9 Comments

    The Five Quintets is a long, conversational poem of almost 350 pages. In an age that focuses on detail, its topic is vast: the nature of Western modernity and its future. In a secular age its perspective is unobtrusively but deeply religious. It is therefore unlikely to make the best-sellers list. But it is an important and rewarding work.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why no compromise on Manus and Nauru? Pt 2

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 October 2018
    12 Comments

    This is not a matter of holding the moral high ground but of remaining grounded. Refugee advocates should support campaigns to bring people to Australia from Nauru and Manus, but as part of a more universal and explicit commitment to respect people who seek asylum.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Among the ghosts of Chernobyl

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 August 2018
    5 Comments

    The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Loveless in Russia

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 April 2018
    1 Comment

    A grim and gripping tragedy on this personal level, as a whole Loveless functions also as a metaphor for political life in contemporary Russia. The fatal fracturing of its relationship with its neighbour Ukraine provides a backdrop and, for the degeneration of Zhengya and Boris' marriage and the resultant alienation of their son, a touchstone.

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