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Keywords: Solo

  • RELIGION

    The problem with heroes

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 February 2016
    5 Comments

    Periods of anxiety are times for dreaming of heroes. We contemplate our own pedestrian lives and pedestrian politicians, and long for someone who can lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land. Yet although heroes invite us to dismount from our couches, breathe the open air and take on the world as they do, they also persuade us that they are a different breed, urging us to keep within our divinely given limitations and leave the business of change to those sown as lions' teeth.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Government chipping away at our liberties

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 29 May 2015
    13 Comments

    There have been no violent usurpations. No coup. No acts of massive violence. But data retention laws have been passed. National security legislation protecting ASIO from all operations short of murder while punishing the disclosure of material on secret intelligence operations has been enacted. The stripping of citizenship of dual nationals is on the books. And more.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The dark side of a migrant's American Dream

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 05 March 2015

    Abel's life is pointedly contrasted with Peter's, a young truck driver who has been the victim of several violent assaults on the job. Peter idolises Abel, for whom the Dream has apparently come true — if Abel can make it, so too can Peter. The problem is that Abel's Dream stands on the backs of ordinary workers like Peter. Peter is a tragic antihero coming to learn that for many, the Dream will remain just that.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Grieving pilgrim's wild days in the wilderness

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 January 2015
    1 Comment

    Cheryl Strayed is haunted by her past — by her own sins, and by tragedies that have befallen her. As she walks, she hums, and the music she hears in her head leads her in and out of the past. Her solo 1600-plus km trek along America's Pacific Crest Trail is a metaphor for her life: each hardship she overcomes brings her a step closer to facing down the fierce regrets that gnash at her heels.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Nailing Indonesia's next president

    • Pat Walsh
    • 24 June 2014
    9 Comments

    On 9 July, Indonesians will vote on their next president by punching a hole in a ballot paper with a large nail. Timor-Leste used the same system for its historic independence ballot in 1999. The issues differ of course but the choices to be made are equally stark. Democratic development and human rights in Indonesia will either advance or regress depending on who is nailed next month.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia complicit in PNG's Bougainville blight

    • Ellena Savage
    • 02 August 2013
    1 Comment

    Even more disturbing than PNG's poverty and gender-based violence is its military and police human rights record. Evidence of abuses in the form of a military blockade, massacres, rape and torture during the Bougainville Crisis of the 1990s are well-documented. The history of this crisis reveals PNG as incapable of caring for its most vulnerable citizens due to systemic corruption.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Kevin Rudd and Indonesia's Obama

    • Pat Walsh
    • 04 July 2013
    10 Comments

    Rudd's visit to Jakarta this week will be judged on the outcome of asylum seeker discussions. But he needs also to send a clear message about Australia's hopes for next year's presidential elections. Candidates include a former military commander with a dubious human rights record, and a civilian being described as Indonesia's Obama.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rock's radical Australia Day message

    • Donna Mulhearn
    • 23 January 2013
    14 Comments

    As a social and political activist since my teens, people ask me what motivated me early on. A few factors shaped my values, including my Irish Catholic background and my public housing upbringing by a widowed mother on welfare. But it was a rock song that brought it all together. 'Someone lied,' it declares: 'Genocide.' 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

    • Philip Harvey
    • 03 July 2012
    7 Comments

    More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dorothy enjoys a funeral

    • Brook Emery and Rodney Wetherell
    • 05 July 2011
    2 Comments

    Awful to think of her lying in that polished box, plump though somewhat wasted. It's a mercy, someone's bound to say, yet tearful Bill may not agree.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Birdwatcher's odyssey

    • Diane Fahey
    • 03 May 2011
    3 Comments

    those hypnotic swerves, a mark of dominion like all else: its height, its eight-foot span, its primeval patience. The eagle turned, an archer's bow; became a bold emblem that could impress the red seal on a document of war; rip out an eye.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Stations of the Cross reinterpreted

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 21 April 2011
    6 Comments

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