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Keywords: Fiction

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • RELIGION

    Uncontrollable Irma and Fr John George

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 September 2017
    20 Comments

    I was reminded of the importance of the uncontrollable by the recent death of Fr John George, a Sydney priest who daily submitted comments on our Eureka Street articles, some of which we published. Though no Hurricane Irma, the literary Fr George, the only one whom we knew, was nevertheless easily seen as terrifying and fascinating. Our efforts to control George reminded us of how limited is our capacity to control and how, as we control, we can turn people into ciphers and threats to be dealt with.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    An interplanetary future favours the wealthy

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 19 September 2017
    11 Comments

    In a ball of fire, Cassini's 20-year journey across the solar system came to an abrupt finale last week. The spacecraft's odyssey soon revealed not 12 but 62 moons orbiting the gas giant. The most significant of these is Titan, which harbours large quantities of liquid water, considered to be essential to the existence of life. Meanwhile back on Earth ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Awareness Campaign and Despair Stalks

    • Haley Joray Arnold and Cassandra Golds
    • 01 August 2017
    2 Comments

    You used to have feet like a Russian ballerina/Arches (like ones plebeians would stand under, lose their breath for a moment)/The weight they carry remarkable for the/Tiny bones inside ... Despair stalks the house/Outside, like weather/Inside, like air/It has no form ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Spider music

    • Chris Jackson
    • 17 July 2017
    1 Comment

    I am, of course, a spider: my obstinacy, a viola; my gossamer back-and-forthing, woven ruminations of a violin. Watch me, busy always to continue a spider's life. All things love the little kingdom they inherit. This is home, intricate with fetched fidget, this scratchy bow-flight is a busy cello urging me to tracery, all tossed about in winds of orchestra.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Health gap widens as wage growth falls

    • Amy Coopes
    • 26 June 2017
    7 Comments

    Universal health care is an ostensibly bipartisan prerogative, but what it actually means and how it's achieved is a somewhat moveable feast. Spending, we are told, is unsustainable as the population ages and we move toward ever-more personalised and technologically-advanced treatment paradigms. The objective of this rhetoric is to rationalise the privatisation of our health system by stealth. The latest wages figures are something of an inconvenient truth in this 'unsustainable spending' fiction.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our addiction to connection is centuries old

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 15 June 2017
    4 Comments

    On a recent tour of Vaucluse House in Sydney's east, I couldn't help but notice, in every bedroom, a writing desk. I imagined Sarah Wentworth scribbling away with inkpot and pen 180 years ago. I wonder if the Wentworths went straight to their writing desks first thing in the morning, the way some people check their phones? The desire to receive news from someone somewhere else is century's old. In 1850 Tasmania had 11 newspapers, for a population of 70,000.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    High school racism in the merry old land of Oz

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 13 June 2017
    10 Comments

    I was told in grade nine I shouldn't bother trying out for the lead of our school play, The Wizard of Oz, because there's no way Dorothy would be Asian. Though I had no intention of trying out for the play, the fact that she told me not to bother made me arc up. The reason she gave - my incongruous Asianness - made me feel angry and ashamed. Angry because it was stupid and unfair. Ashamed because it felt somehow like it was my fault for not being white enough.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Raising feminist men in 1970s America

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 07 June 2017

    Abbie introduces Jamie to the paired liberating movements of punk rock and second-wave feminism. Both lead to illuminating experiences, from his first rock concert, use of alcohol, and kiss, to being beaten for casting aspersions on a peer's grasp of female sexual anatomy. His relationship with Julie on the other hand provides a difficult counterpoint. His peevish concern over her promiscuity is largely possessive; his theoretical understanding of women's agency falling down in the face of adolescent hormones.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Deconstructing the privatisation scam

    • David James
    • 04 April 2017
    13 Comments

    It is increasingly evident how pernicious the privatisation myth is. Two recent examples have underlined it: the failings in Australia's privatised energy grid and the usurious pricing in airport car parks. Both demonstrated that it is folly to expect a public benefit to inevitably emerge from private profit seeking. The purpose of government funded public infrastructure is not to make profits but to lower the cost of doing business, sometimes called the socialisation of the means of production.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Japan's Olympic dream disrupts disaster recovery

    • Pepi Ronalds
    • 06 March 2017
    3 Comments

    This week marks the anniversary of the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown) that hit northern Japan on 11 March 2011. The event took over 18,000 lives, and initially displaced 470,000 people. Six years on, 127,000 are still without a permanent home. Delays have been caused by the sheer physical scope, pre-existing regulations and other restrictions. These are all understandable. What is less easy to accept are the disruptions caused by the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scorsese misses the depths of the 'Japanese swamp'

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 22 February 2017
    7 Comments

    We are treated at length to Rodrigues' reflections upon the face of Christ, yet the beautiful inculturated image 'Madonna of the Snows' passes us quickly by. There are haunting local hymns yet the missionaries speak halting Japanese. The local church is served by a respected un-ordained head, who leads his fellow villagers in prayer and good works. The survival of the Japanese Catholic community rested on the feeble, faith-filled shoulders of the local women and men who kept praying even unto death.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Space race saga's Black history through White eyes

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 14 February 2017
    1 Comment

    There's a gag about sitting in the back of the bus, the realities of segregation dismissed with a giggle; references to university sit-ins and firebombings come via the eyes of a cartoonishly earnest character. Meanwhile the White characters are either the object of contrived sympathy, or too thinly drawn to invoke genuine menace. Accusations of 'cultural appropriation' might be uncharitable, but the short shrift given to the real, continuing hardships of Black experience raises questions about objectives and authenticity.

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