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Keywords: The House On The Hill

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ecuador's example for Australia's neglected arts

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 25 September 2015
    1 Comment

    On a terrace just below the house is the beloved, late Ecuadorian artist Guayasamin's masterpiece, La Capillla del Hombre. A collection of his imposing artworks fills the space, works that ask the unanswerable question: why is man equally capable of such cruelty, and such compassion? It is a question that all good art should pose — a point that Australia's newly appointed Minister for the Arts would do well to remember.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shorten and Clinton's joust with the past

    • Jim McDermott
    • 22 September 2015
    3 Comments

    US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is not just an astonishingly brilliant candidate; she is the wife of President Bill Clinton, who flamed out spectacularly in the late 1990s over revelations that he was having an affair with an intern. He has been mostly nowhere to be seen so far in the campaign, and that's undoubtedly an intentional move meant to keep that complicated, messy past out of the conversation. The past haunts Australian Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in a different but no less significant way.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Greece's lonely season

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 04 August 2015
    5 Comments

    A tarnished pomegranate warms the chill niche of the windowsill, mottled like a faded kilim, mellow rose, dull gold; the island in the autumn thrums to lyres of the bourini, the pagan tongues of log fires in the chimneys; ancient ferries plying the Aegean in the winter run the gauntlet of the gales like emissaries of reason. It is the lonely season.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Winter chill has a purpose

    • Megan Graham
    • 03 June 2015
    2 Comments

    I can't hate the season entirely. Perhaps winter gives the sun the due reverence it’s owed - a chance for its power to be known intimately through its absence. Over a book, warmed by the words on the page and the cup of tea in your hand, you can muse about what it all means to be alive. Sometimes a little hibernation is what it takes to heal.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Quake forces Nepalis to walk on water

    • Angela Ford
    • 02 June 2015
    2 Comments

    As a kiwi I had grown up with earthquakes. I remember them large, small and intrusive. Awed by their power, I cherished the still that followed. This is what made Nepal’s second major earthquake so different for me. I will never forget the beginning of the 7.3-magnitude quake, but will never recall the end.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    ISIS not the only enemy for Iraqi Kurds

    • Vanessa Powell
    • 11 February 2015
    6 Comments

    In Northern Iraq, foreign owned oil companies have been moving in. As locals are turfed from their land to make way for oil production, they must fight for their rights and their environment. They say poisonous gases are causing crop failure. Australians bear some of the responsibility.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A faithful woman visits me weekly

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 18 November 2014
    1 Comment

    Supplying food, whisky, news, loving sex. All this on a pine-scented mountain. I trim my stark white beard, shampoo, sweep, spray, squeegee and swipe. The hour you drive up our steep hill I open our front gates like a greeting.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The asphalt ribbon hauling us home

    • Angela O'Rourke and Will Day
    • 07 October 2014
    5 Comments

    Cresting the hill our breath suspends in unison. We are laughing, eye-spying. You, the one not driving, spy it first: a Jeff Koons puppy, backlit, riding a wave.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No longer thumped

    • Isabella Fels
    • 22 July 2014
    2 Comments

    First kiss was kind of crass. Like a big bite on the bottom. Not bliss. Not my idea of a wish. I could have crossed it off the list ... You only get one life. For some women it's all about being a wife. I stay away from the conventions of life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hillary Clinton's bloodless memoir

    • Barry Gittins
    • 04 July 2014
    2 Comments

    This was akin to reading a carefully vetted resume. An intelligent and formidable first lady, senator and Secretary of State, and no shrinking violet, the author presents a largely passionless, desiccated record. There's the odd poignant reflection. Absurd depictions of Mel Brooksian secure rooms (and the reading of documents with a blanket over her head in non-secure rooms). But, overall, Clinton draws pictures without drawing blood.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The weight and wonder of a brother's last words

    • Brian Doyle
    • 18 June 2014
    12 Comments

    We give great weight to last words. Most of the time I'd guess that those words are about love. I'd guess that some of those final words are shrieks or gasps or utterances of astonishment. The very last thing my brother said before he died was 'The answer is in the questioning.' I have thought about those words for two years now. It turns out you can ponder them from every conceivable angle and never get to the bottom of what they mean.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2013: Margaret Thatcher versus the Scots

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 10 January 2014

    While any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind', I must admit to pouring a glass of good malt at the news of Thatcher's passing. The Southern English may laud her as the greatest prime minister after Churchill but for us Scots she was a hate figure who in the last days of her premiership scarcely dared to cross the border for fear of being assassinated.

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