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Keywords: Our Girls

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Painful lost years for unmarried mothers

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 06 November 2012
    23 Comments

    The phrase 'enforced adoption' conjures up visions of babies being wrenched from a wailing mother’s arms, or babies being spirited away in the dead of night. Of course it wasn’t like that: girls signed the requisite consent forms. But the idea of force is there, because the notion of choice rarely was.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Historical perspectives on Slutwalk

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 31 August 2012
    15 Comments

    The post-war migration policy favoured single men as labour for the burgeoning heavy industries. By the mid-1950s thousands of lonely male migrants populated the cities, and many local women found them threatening. Like those women, Slutwalk participants defend their right to walk the streets wearing what they want without being harassed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shaking Australia's 'brutal sexual economy'

    • Jen Vuk
    • 16 August 2012
    15 Comments

    Author Kathy Lette recalls: 'We girls were little more than a life support system to a pair of breasts ... Once I realised Germaine Greer wasn't just rhyming slang for beer, I wanted to write down our story.' Puberty Blues is what you get when teenage girls with a grudge show the world what they're made of.

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  • 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.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2011: Greek crisis viewed from the corner store

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 January 2012
    2 Comments

    Panayiotis runs the mini-market he inherited from his father. I have known father and son for 30 years. 'How do you see things at this stage of the krisi?' I ask him, for I'm always asking people what they think of Greece's financial crisis. 'What crisis?' he grins. 'Greece has got a crisis; Greeks haven't.' Published 14 June 2011

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shocking scenes from a teen pregnancy

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 16 December 2011
    23 Comments

    When she had her first baby at 18, her neighbour asked if she was trying to make a buck from the baby bonus. Given the liberalisation of abortion laws, pregnant teens are accused of deliberately ruining their lives or ripping off the public purse if they choose to continue their pregnancies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of children passed

    • Alison Sampson
    • 02 November 2011
    22 Comments

    'Did I have a brother once?' asks a little boy, no longer sure. His mother's eyes fill with tears. 'Yes, darling. A long time ago, you had a baby brother of your own.' He shouts triumphantly, 'I did have a brother!' and runs off. We mothers glance at each other, then look away. There are no words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Single mum's housing hell

    • Debi Hamilton
    • 28 September 2011
    14 Comments

    She is a beautiful, understated woman. She lives in a rented house where, four years ago, she nursed her husband while he died. Since then, she has been raising three children there by herself. One day, the owner turned up at the door and told her he was selling.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Child migrant trauma

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 August 2011
    3 Comments

    At least adults have a little hope of understanding the pain, and coping with it. Even the most equable of children must find the experience bewildering at best, and agonising at worst. My eldest son had a period of not eating. His migration as a child remains the defining fact of his life.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Buddhist nun's social activism

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 17 June 2011
    4 Comments

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Buddhist nun's social activism

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 17 June 2011

    A December 2000 article in The Age said Robina Courtin has 'been a black belt in karate, one of many daughters in a large Catholic family, a supporter of the Black Panthers, a radical lesbian separatist feminist and a lot else besides'. As a little girl she wanted to become a Catholic priest. Instead she became a Buddhist nun.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Greek crisis viewed from the corner store

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 June 2011
    4 Comments

    Panayiotis runs the mini-market he inherited from his father. I have known father and son for 30 years. 'How do you see things at this stage of the krisi?' I ask him, for I'm always asking people what they think of Greece's financial crisis. 'What crisis?' he grins. 'Greece has got a crisis; Greeks haven't.'

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