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Keywords: Siblings

  • RELIGION

    Finding my religion in Indonesia

    • Erin Cook
    • 04 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The church has always been more about family than religion to me - my grandmother's grandmother did it all in Latin, but isn't it cool that we went through the same motions? - and I thought it always would. Then I got lucky: I moved to the world's most populous Muslim country.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Don't look away from genocide history

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 29 March 2018
    11 Comments

    The repository of a superfluity of victims' faces and their heartbreaking stories leaves visitors questioning how it is possible for a country to turn on its own people like that. Why do humans turn into killing machines at the behest of their leaders, and when will we allow it to happen again?

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  • RELIGION

    A familiar tribute to a marvellous priest

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 January 2018
    2 Comments

    'Most of his life, Dr Johnson was a priest. Most of his life, he started his day sharing this bread of life with the world. He spent his childhood years here in Rocky, and he enjoyed his twilight years here. Rockhampton was home. Yet the cosmopolitan Grove was ever so much more at home in Rome, Paris or Sydney. And he meant that as no offence to the people of Rockhampton.' Homily delivered for the funeral of the 94 year old priest Grove Johnson.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our mothers called us little fish

    • Chelsea Candy
    • 02 November 2017
    2 Comments

    You'd swear a dinghy was alive. Sometimes she was sluggish and moody, refusing to set, dragging me along a grey sea. Or she hurtled like a stallion, not caring if we won or if we went over, me hanging off the side by my ankle straps, not knowing where we would end.

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  • RELIGION

    Ghosts of ministers past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 July 2017
    6 Comments

    When I was a small child, Presbyterians ministers, including my great-uncle Jack, seemed to be everywhere. They march through memory: soberly suited, dog-collared, determinedly cheerful and often dull, although Old Jack preached a fiery sermon, and could well have taken to the stage instead of the pulpit. They were eventually replaced in my life by a procession of Greek Orthodox priests. They would extend their hands to be kissed in a gesture my nonconformist soul found quite shocking.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The story of the dog who wouldn't be ours

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 June 2017
    11 Comments

    It was humiliating, being refused adoption at an animal shelter. But it was worse knowing, in the ensuing months, that there was a little dog out there, and lots more besides him, who was being withheld from a genuinely loving family simply because they had failed to meet unreasonable demands. We tried to find a suitable dog at other shelters, but the pickings were slim. And so we did the very thing the shelter that had refused our application railed against: we bought a puppy from a pet shop.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Remembering, dismembering on World Refugee Day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 June 2017
    3 Comments

    World Refugee Day is a time for remembering. We remember we live in a world of millions of refugees, and that many of our fellow citizens arrived as or are the children of refugees. We may remember refugees, but in their own lives they are dismembered. The tiles we take for granted in the mosaic of our ordinary lives have been hacked out of refugees' lives. Many people lost parents, siblings and children in the persecution and terrors they endured. With each loss part of themselves also died.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Putting a face to the effects of Australia's aid freeze

    • David Holdcroft
    • 12 May 2017
    4 Comments

    Alain is one of around 11,000 people living in this particular camp in the south of Zimbabwe. It seems an unlikely location to talk of the freeze on funding for Australian foreign aid announced in the budget, but it is in places like these, unseen and therefore unknown by the Australian population, that the effects are often felt. Alain is lucky: the camp where he lives has good education. Worldwide however, only 50 per cent of children in forced migrant situations will attend primary school, 22 per cent secondary and a paltry 1 per cent any institution of higher learning.

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  • RELIGION

    Dancing through St Patrick's Day myths

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 16 March 2017
    8 Comments

    My grandfather told me Patrick was a saint because he drove the frogs and snakes out of Ireland. He also told me if I stepped in a fairy ring while we were on our walks I'd disappear forever. So naturally as I grew older, I became skeptical. Each year in my family St Patrick's Day has marked a survival of Irish culture in Australia. Sometimes this can be in subtle ways and sometimes it means singing at the top of our lungs, enjoying a drink and having a dance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Horror year of state care abuse justifies intervention

    • Oliver Jacques
    • 27 January 2017
    10 Comments

    Allowing the Catholic Church to investigate itself was once described by an abuse victim as akin to 'putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank'. The Church now largely accepts the value of outside scrutiny, and has even endorsed a national redress scheme that would subject it to independent examination of its complaint handling and treatment of victims. But there is another institution - plagued by rampant child abuse in 2016 - where the vampires in charge are still trusted to mop up the blood.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What I did in my holidays

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 January 2017
    7 Comments

    It seems incredible that there were ten of those summers, consecutive ones when three generations coexisted happily. My siblings and I had an idyllic Ocean Road beach practically all to ourselves, the men went fishing every afternoon, except when, to Grandfather's annoyance, an easterly was blowing, and the women, in time-honoured fashion, kept everybody fed. Of course change was inevitable, although I didn't really believe it, and started with my grandmother's death. I was 19.

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  • RELIGION

    My mother's burqa: an irreverent history

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 14 December 2016
    2 Comments

    Some of my South Asian 'aunties' are very much opposed to wearing any religious head covering. Mum has only recently started wearing a tiny Egyptian number she picked up during her last Haj. Like many South Asians, she has become a bit more religiously observant as she gets older. She grew up in the Indian university town of Aligarh, some 140km South East of Delhi. Aligarh was a very conservative town, and her father, a professor at the local university, was a rather conservative chap.

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