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Keywords: Biographical

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Faith and doubt in American fiction

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 03 February 2023
    6 Comments

    Through exploring the work of nine Catholic American authors — with special focus on Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo — Longing for an Absent God boldly attempts to discover what it is about faith and the desire for transcendence that exerts such influence over the popular imagination. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wit, irony and the Australian vernacular: Remembering Brian Matthews

    • John Schumann
    • 15 June 2022
    4 Comments

    Most of us, when pushed, can name a couple of teachers who had a profound influence on our lives. For me, Brian Matthews was one such teacher. I enrolled in English at Flinders University in 1972. On asking the enrolling officer whether anybody was ‘doing anything about Lawson’, I was directed to the office of Brian Matthews, a recent appointment to the English Department. ‘I hear you know something about Lawson,’ I said, leaning in his doorway.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The ties that bind: How negative campaigns eclipse community focus

    • Julian Butler
    • 12 May 2022
    2 Comments

    Election campaigns can be defined by all sorts of things. Gaffes, negative ads, international incidents, public policy. It is trite but no less true to say that this federal election campaign has been much more about the first three rather than the last. The policy discussion has been edged into the election mix most seriously by various interest groups and by some of the macro party and independent candidates seeking election.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A felicitous career

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 April 2022
    3 Comments

    The quality of Niall’s writing is evident in An Accidental Career, though easily unnoticed. It lies in the clarity of her thought, her exact choice of words, the alternation of anecdote and reflection and the self-effacement that creates a direct link between the reader and the work itself. Her writing has the rare gift of simplicity. The precision of the title is characteristic of the book as a whole.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding fragments of a father

    • Brian Matthews
    • 02 July 2020
    3 Comments

    Daddy Cool is a thoroughly absorbing biography, witty, astonishing, often intensely moving, effortlessly in charge of a crowded and potentially confusing canvas (readers of a certain age will recognise names like Jack Davey, Roy Rene, Dick Bentley, Willie Fennell).

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Everything that ends

    • David Adès
    • 23 June 2020
    2 Comments

    Moment by moment the numbers are rising, tables of the infected and the dead on websites updated every five minutes, the relentless clicking over of lives, like so many fallen leaves in this country.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Friends and Rivals and the ocean in the shell

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 May 2020
    1 Comment

    In Friends and Rivals Brenda Niall brings together four significant Australian women writers. Between them they published works from the 1890s to the 1950s. Ethel Turner and Barbara Baynton were from NSW. Nettie Palmer and Henry Handel Richardson were from Victoria, both schooled at Presbyterian Ladies College.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Quiet pilgrimage of an ageing atheist

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 16 November 2017
    2 Comments

    Lately Lucky has death on his mind, and these and other various acquaintances serve as stars by which he navigates his close-held fears of impending oblivion.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mexican journalists say no to silence and yes to death

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 22 May 2017
    2 Comments

    Last Tuesday night in Mexico City I headed to a bar with some press colleagues. It was late and the bar was lit with candles for mood lighting. As we sat down to order drinks my friend Joan took the candle in front of her and said, 'I'll hold onto this for the next journalist to be murdered.' We had been at a vigil to mourn the murder of journalist Javier Valdez and to protest the ever-escalating number of journalist murders in the country in a legal and political climate of almost total impunity.

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  • RELIGION

    Sister Barbara and the books that changed everything

    • Julie Davies
    • 07 February 2017
    20 Comments

    Sister Barbara taught me in my fifth and sixth years. She had a large multi-grade class, yet she found time to realise I wasn't 'a bit slow' but was actually half-blind, partially deaf and bored witless. She ensured I was placed close to the front where I could hear, and arranged my first eye examination. Sister Barbara also sent away for high school English books just for me and that year this supposedly 'slow' child came first in class. These acts changed the course of my life.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    An ode to speechless Bob Dylan

    • Philip Harvey
    • 04 November 2016
    10 Comments

    Initial silence from Dylan after the announcement of his Nobel Prize led one of the Scandinavian officials to complain he was being 'impolite and arrogant'. This prompted even more vitriolic opinion online on all sides, from fans, litterateurs, Dylanologists, and other armchair grenadiers. Just as things were getting completely tangled up in blue Dylan himself broke the silence to explain that news of the award had left him speechless. We shouldn't be surprised. Speechless is a normal state for a poet.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Antiheroes of the Bush-Cheney arms boom

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 August 2016

    War Dogs is the latest in a string of films from the past few years that are custom made for our cynical times; deeply ironic black comedies and dramas featuring antiheroes who profit to the point of excess off the misery of others. Where those films dealt with the finance industry and gained relevance from the backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis, this one shifts focus to the grimier world of arms dealing, in the context of Bush era conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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