Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Author: Catherine Marshall

  • AUSTRALIA

    Beyond the Liesel Jones fat spat

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 27 July 2012
    7 Comments

    The brutal media critique of swimmer Liesel Jones on the eve of the Olympics was typical of society's tendency to chew up and spit out its heroes once it deems them to be no longer useful. If it dented her confidence, Jones may have taken strength from Australia's first ever international sports champion.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Lingerie football's naked sexism

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 08 June 2012
    18 Comments

    The largely positive response in Australia to the American Lingerie Football League reveals we are not the progressively egalitarian people we imagine ourselves to be. We give lip service to female equality, but women will still be exploited whenever the opportunity arises, and feminists vilified like it's 1972.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Raising boys who play with dolls

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 April 2012
    14 Comments

    For every girl who feels she is being forced to choose between a thousand shades of pink, there's a boy hemmed in by society's expectations of what a boy should be. Female empowerment will lose its value unless women take men on the journey with them.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Women chained to the human dairy farm

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 08 March 2012
    4 Comments

    Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct. 

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Virgin's sexism in the sky

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 20 February 2012
    33 Comments

    For all the things Qantas stands accused of — selling out its Australian employees, uncompetitive pricing, bad management — it appears to be respectful of women. A ticket on a Virgin flight, on the other hand, brings with it the allure of sex, the commodity on which the company's brand has been built.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Best of 2011: Consumers rule in Murdoch's evil empire

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 11 January 2012
    2 Comments

    The public was quick to claim ignorance and condemn the theft of private information by News of the World. But ignorance is no longer an excuse, especially in these post-Princess Diana years where the role of the paparazzi, traitorous friends and dodgy journalists is well-known. Published 21 July 2011

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    When my kids believed in Santa and God

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 22 December 2011
    5 Comments

    My daughter, at seven, imagines a Barbie doll that does not exist, one that has 'a very cool gun and real lipstick'. My son, at five, asks for 'a Jeep, a hot air balloon and real false teeth'. These preserved Christmas lists record my children's growth more accurately than their physical measurements.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    What was left behind

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 09 September 2011
    2 Comments

    A soft toy. A restaurant menu. A business card. An agony so great it swamped the world. While America was busy hunting down Osama bin Laden, my son and his contemporaries, who were children at the time of the attack, grew up and inherited a world irrevocably changed. 

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Consumers rule in Murdoch's evil empire

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 22 July 2011
    14 Comments

    The public was quick to claim ignorance and condemn the theft of private information by News of the World. But ignorance is no longer an excuse, especially in these post-Princess Diana years where the role of the paparazzi, traitorous friends and dodgy journalists is well-known. 

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Japan's gods of nature

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 21 March 2011
    5 Comments

    In Japan's relief centres and obliterated streets, there is no news of looting or violence, no shouts of blame, no demands for immediate evacuation and coronial inquests. 'Shinto is a nature religion,' says my guide Yoshiko. 'We give thanks to everything we have.'

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Schooling in the classroom without walls

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 31 January 2011
    13 Comments

    The furore that erupted when Chinese-American mother Amy Chua accused Westerners of being too soft on their children masks a subtle sharpening of middle class parental expectations in Australia.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Gillard's win a loss for feminists

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 January 2011
    3 Comments

    Rudd's eviction should strike fear into the hearts of feminists everywhere. For this is how the Labor Government operates, unsheathing the swords, wrenching power, cutting down a leader before he has had time to really prove himself. Imagine what it will do when that leader is a woman.

    READ MORE