Keywords: Australian Poetry
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jenny Blackford
- 10 September 2018
These days, the military tattoo is just too sad for words, the soldier-children twirling, dancing, fluting, prancing, singing, some with rightful Maori marks, or cheekbones high as Indian hills, thin teenage girls in kilts and fancy Argyle socks ... What have they to do with war or death? Yet men strap bombs on ten-year-olds.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ian C. Smith
- 31 July 2018
In Tahiti I fall ill, bronchitis amid humid splendour. At a summer camp in Dutchess County I get the sack. Cops warn me for hitch-hiking after sundown in Maine. In the wintry Cotswolds I wheeze in a bedewed attic. A lost aunt is found in Liverpool post-Toxteth.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 20 June 2018
12 Comments
An old man boarded the bus, seating himself next to me and behind the boys. He was unshaven, and his jeans had seen better days. He sat quietly for a few minutes, observing the scene, and then he tapped the nearest boy on the shoulder. 'I'm impressed by your enthusiasm, and it so happens I've written a poem about that subject. Here it is.'
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 26 April 2018
8 Comments
Australian writer Beverley Farmer died on 16 April. She and I had been friends, albeit usually long-distance ones, for more than 30 years. It seems to me now that we had so much in common that friendship was almost inevitable: it was just a matter of timing that first meeting.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
For days I passed the black screen, berating and blaming the mass-entertaining hooked on a loop, counting down to more incoming footage ... What if we are not seeking ruin but searching the ruins for a hand, battered and bruised, broad-backed, mud-slicked, bent but unbroken, reaching out of the mire to catch a pale light ...
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- John Frawley
- 19 March 2018
4 Comments
We the remnants, largely spent, professors, teachers, beloved practitioners, scientists, world leaders, pioneers, a menagerie of specialists, some honoured citizens, the sick, the grey, the bent, the pill dependent, divorcees, the widowed, the saints, the sinners, bound and equal, together, all as one, gathered again, searching out new pastures, denying mankind's stark mortality.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ian C. Smith
- 26 February 2018
1 Comment
I once read The Female Eunuch, the only bloke taking a course on feminism, admired Greer's chutzpah, knew she lived in England where I came to dwell on the edge of belonging. I mourn unplanned lives, mine, others', back stories, each of us carrying private clouds of sadness. What happened next, that distant dawn?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ross Jackson
- 12 February 2018
2 Comments
I am so pressed by memories poached in warm air, that I step a good way around circling pavement ants. Though experts say nothing positive about the world, despite the encroaching dark I might just pin badges of purple hibiscus flowers on anyone to hand.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jenny Blackford
- 22 January 2018
3 Comments
I ask the kids to pick a character and write a sentence or a paragraph to start the telling of those lives cut short. A tragedy so far away in space and time is made brand-new, but still as sad, by Aussie Muslim hands and shiny minds.
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EDUCATION
- Gillian Bouras
- 31 October 2017
9 Comments
American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- N. N. Trakakis
- 18 September 2017
1 Comment
We do not know what we want. And we do not want what we know. Like shadows hanging in the air, their threads of reality unravelling, absenting themselves from the world. She said time erases life. He said let's be timeless. She said it would be dark. He said he hated daylight. She said it would be lonely. He said he prostituted his mind talking to people. She said he is mad. He said may God preserve him from sanity. She said: God will. And God did.
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MEDIA
Last week I was rung to say my dog was missing. I finished at work as soon as I could, ringing the local council and neighbourhood vet on the way home. Neither had seen anything of him but suggested we post on social media. As my husband and I drove and walked the streets, the messages came in. People were concerned. He was missing from an enclosed yard. Some offered to look, others from further away, shared hope and the Facebook post. The post went everywhere, the last I saw was in Western Australia.
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