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Keywords: Indian Ocean

  • 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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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hervey Bay boat arrival from Ireland

    • Frank Brennan
    • 22 September 2014
    5 Comments

    Considering my indebtedness to the two Aborigines who met [my family's ship arriving in Hervey Bay from Ireland] 151 years ago, I owe it to all my fellow Australians to agitate these issues of law, morality and politics here in Ireland so that back in Australia, the homeland which, in my religious tradition, was known as the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mexican border reflections on Australian asylum seeker policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 August 2014
    30 Comments

    We Australians confront none of the complexities of sharing a land border with a poor neighbour. Most Americans, I find, consider our policy morally repulsive and just stupid. They cannot believe that we routinely lock up children, that we recently held 157 people on a ship in the Indian Ocean for almost a month, and that we are now going to send up to 1000 asylum seekers to Cambodia.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Transcendent ordeal of an outback pilgrim

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 March 2014
    3 Comments

    Robyn Davidson's trek in 1978, 2700km overland from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with only four camels and a dog for company, is the stuff of legend. Her physical ordeal takes her also to the jagged ends of her emotional and mental being, as she is pestered by tourists, for whom 'the camel lady' is already a living legend, and by paparazzi, who assail her at her most frayed. There is no missing the spiritual dimensions of her journey.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2013: Mandela crosses the burning water

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 January 2014
    1 Comment

    I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland of South Africa. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mandela crosses the burning water

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 09 December 2013
    13 Comments

    I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland of South Africa. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hyphenated migrant's homeland homage

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 01 November 2013
    7 Comments

    Leaving Mauritius for Australia changed everything and nothing. While I am now liberated from a suffocating horizon, I only need to step outside to sense the presence of a different horizon, one that sits instead as a formidable continent behind me. My understanding of home has also evolved. As a hyphenated migrant, my home does not have a main entry, but a few side doors.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Human stories from Tim Winton's Australia

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 September 2013
    3 Comments

    A boy plays a treacherous prank on his brother while visiting the beach. A domestic violence victim finds comfort in a bizarre distortion of Christian faith. A man sees a news report and follows his memories back to the day of a childhood tragedy. A woman, grieving for a broken marriage, paws through her husband's box of memories. The filmmakers put their stamp on each story while paying due reverance to Winton's sublime prose.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    New maritime rescue failure leaves unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 May 2013
    19 Comments

    On Friday, Fairfax reported on another ordeal at sea, over ten days between 27 April and 7 May. Only two people died, but the toll could easily have been far worse. The story as we know it so far raises disturbing questions about Australia’s adherence to its rescue-at-sea obligations.

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  • RELIGION

    Seeking a more ethical way to stop the boats and deaths at sea

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 September 2012
    4 Comments

    In the lead up to the election, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are sure to continue insisting that the Gillard Government's Pacific Solution Mark II will not work. In all probability this will undermine the efficacy of the Gillard Solution in stopping the boats. Read the full text of Fr Frank Brennan's address to the Migration Institute of Australia, Menzies Hotel, Sydney, 14 September 2012 

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  • RELIGION

    There is an ethical way to stop the boats

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 August 2012
    11 Comments

    Behind all the legal technicalities and political argument about boat people, there is room for deeper ethical reflection and a more principled proposal. But first, to clear away some of the debris.

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  • RELIGION

    Malaysia solution is not there yet

    • Frank Brennan
    • 10 August 2012
    9 Comments

    Next week Parliament reconvenes; meanwhile the boats keep coming. Chris Bowen will be armed with a report from an expert panel that has been hearing from the community. We're still awaiting an answer on unaccompanied minors under the Malaysia solution. Until one is provided no one in good conscience can give it the tick.

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