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Keywords: Please Like Me

  • RELIGION

    Coming out of Cardinal Pell's shadow

    • Chris McGillion
    • 26 February 2014
    75 Comments

    George Pell's promotion to Rome is proof of the powerful friends he has made. As for enemies, it is not hard to compile a list of those who will be glad to see him go. It would include most liberal Catholics, many priests, and a good many of his fellow bishops. One group who are likely to regret Pell's departure are the journalists and commentators for whom he has loomed large as a figure of ridicule if not outright contempt.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On becoming a housewife for the first time

    • Lisa Brockwell
    • 25 February 2014
    13 Comments

    I find myself on tuckshop duty with my dearest friend; we didn't see this coming at university. I learn more than any woman like me needs to know about slashing paddocks. I visit the vet at least once a week. I picture my husband dying in a car crash; this dark bubble rises out of the mud of me much too frequently. Shouting at my five year old, I can't believe it is up to me to keep this baby alive when I am all naked flailing heart.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Exasperated American's note to crazypants Republicans

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 October 2013
    13 Comments

    That's right — the House Republicans shut down the government because they oppose universal health care. Which for the rest of the world is like crazy talk gibberspeak. Opposing people's right to have health coverage is like opposing Disneyland — in fact it's even weirder, because you can at least imagine someone saying 'I just don't like giant smiling mice'. Who in their right mind would say 'I just don't want people to have health care'?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mythologising family history

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 September 2013

    Polley approaches the subject with great patience, like an anthropologist who has a deep love for those whom she is studying. In the beginning she instructs her interviewees simply to start from the start and tell it how it was. She no doubt hopes to find clues in the detail, but she also dignifies each participant by allowing them to have a voice. She is self-effacing, yet the questions she asks are bound up in her very existence.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Invading Australia

    • Saba Hakim, Ray Carmichael and Ouyang Yu
    • 02 April 2013
    1 Comment

    We have wished to invade Australia like you'd never imagined from where we are based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, countries reduced by hegemony to hell. We ruled the waves till we were in sight of an island that looked from afar like a welcome entity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Russia's liberal wind of change

    • Dorothy Horsfield
    • 04 April 2012

    Among Westerners and locals alike, Moscow seems to be afloat on scurrilous innuendo, focused on Putin's bully-boy tactics, fondness for young women and pathological greed. Still, since the eruption of street protests after last December's parliamentary elections, the narratives appear to be shifting.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Last of the cat poems

    • Karl Cameron-Jackson and Mike Hopkins
    • 06 March 2012
    5 Comments

    With fresh blood in your mouth you are no longer cat, house-trained to please. Now you kill wantonly, revel in the fear you invoke in others. Man was created, just like you, to run free in the killing-fields ... Is this what God meant you to be? To revert to what you once were?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Chance meeting with an inventor

    • James Waller
    • 20 September 2011
    2 Comments

    Hans shows me an invention which magnifies letters for his failing eyes, so that still he may read, so that still the winds may turn the bronze art coins of his perception. Cobweb-like sculptures dream upon some shelves, poetry is the wing of his bird-like speech.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mothers, soldiers and other entrepreneurs

    • Brian Doyle
    • 04 May 2011
    3 Comments

    To attempt, to begin, is really to dream, to envision, to speculate, and then to work like a burro to implement, to create, to make real. How is it that a word like entrepreneurship, which means vast and amazing things, has become so commonplace and thin?

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  • RELIGION

    If your income was quarantined

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 June 2010
    6 Comments

    If we look at income quarantining as an ethical and not as a political question, it raises many questions. To answer them we would need to look beyond its effectiveness in preventing excessive expenditure on socially undesirable goods like alcohol and pornography.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Imelda Marcos the Musical

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 April 2010

    'Like most politicians, she was driven by psychological angels and demons', writes musician David Byrne of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady ofthe Philippines. Byrne has written a 'musical' about Marcos' life. From the outset, he risks deifying a monster.

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