Keywords: The Black Balloon
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Kevin Gillam
- 27 January 2015
beering, untangling, cruising, jaunty and blooming, the boys, in the ambered half light, the boys
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 11 December 2014
During an end-of-season trip to Bangkok, impressionable country footy dork Ray is badgered by one of his teammates into turning drug mule. He is picked up in Melbourne, where a couple of nasty cops detain him under supervision for seven days, waiting for him to pass the heroin-filled balloons he ingested. Ray is beset on all sides by systemic corruption, which makes his refusal to poo — fuelled not by greed but by a kind of everyman nobility — seem truly heroic.
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AUSTRALIA
- Catherine Marshall
- 14 November 2014
2 Comments
I looked at the Brahmin and felt a cackle rising in my throat. 'You said this blessing was free,' I said. 'The blessing is free, but you must pay for the maintenance of this place,' he insisted, sweeping his arm up towards the ghats and the temples surrounding it. I wondered briefly what the consequence would be of defying the Brahmin's demand.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Isabella Fels
- 05 September 2014
5 Comments
As I go down Chapel Street, I feel like I am running a million miles an hour trying to look a million dollars. In the past my mother and my father have had to intervene to stop me letting loose. They have both rescued me from keeping totally unsuitable clothes by showing a letter to the shops by my psychiatrist, stating that I have an 'obsessional preoccupation' with spending money and please can the items be refunded.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Isabella Fels
- 21 May 2014
2 Comments
$550 worth of calls on a $69 a month plan seemed like a total dream. I could keep myself hanging on the phone talking to my boyfriend and family all day and night long at my own convenience. I felt a sense of empowerment and freedom that I never felt before ... I woke up screaming over the $700 bill I incurred in just two weeks. What have I done? I felt weak. My future now felt bleak. There was simply no way I could pay it off.
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AUSTRALIA
The Howard Government's radical-right tendencies emerged gradually. By contrast, the Abbott Government has already sent multiple signals that it is intent to radically remake the political fabric. While the restoration of knighthoods to the national honours system is merely a wacky emanation of the prime ministerial psyche, the proposed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act are corroding basic principles of constitutional democracy.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 March 2014
5 Comments
The appearance at the end of Francis' first year of Berlusconi's new magazine, Il Mio Papa, is testimony that the Pope is now mythical, a celebrity, and that the myth can be manipulated, marketed and monetised. It is difficult to give an accounting for celebrities, but merely popping their balloon also misses what in them attracts popular attention. So it is with evaluating what is distinctive about Francis and what he has contributed to the Church.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 13 December 2013
3 Comments
Deveny has made a career out of bungee jumping between the chasms of good taste, good writing and good sense. She's never been content to accept societal hypocrisy, and that's an occasional strength in her novel The Happiness Show. It becomes increasingly hard though to separate the author from her lead character, Lizzie. Thanks to an overly generous sprinkling of sex scenes, this quickly goes from disconcerting to downright awkward.
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INTERNATIONAL
President Mohamed Morsi did not govern particularly well. Egypt's rating on the Failed State Index has slipped from 45 to 34 since the fall of Mubarak. But the truth is that this crisis was not merely 12 months in the making, and Egypt's democracy was merely grafted on to a structure in which the military was the real power.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 06 August 2012
9 Comments
The Olympic Games see many thousands of mainly young athletes from all around the world competing for a hundred or so medals. So the point of the exercise can't be to win. It is to lose. Or rather the Games are a school for learning how to lose and so grow in humanity.
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AUSTRALIA
- Catherine Marshall
- 22 December 2011
5 Comments
My daughter, at seven, imagines a Barbie doll that does not exist, one that has 'a very cool gun and real lipstick'. My son, at five, asks for 'a Jeep, a hot air balloon and real false teeth'. These preserved Christmas lists record my children's growth more accurately than their physical measurements.
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EDUCATION
- Frank O'Shea
- 07 December 2011
13 Comments
Top classes or remedial ones, nerds or footballers, were all the same to Albert: he was first a teacher of boys and then a teacher of maths. One of Sydney's most prestigious schools offered him a position which he turned down due to a disability that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
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