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Keywords: The Shire

  • INTERNATIONAL

    2015 in review: Contemplating war in France

    • Bronwyn Lay
    • 14 January 2016
    3 Comments

    As I marched for Remembrance Day in our small village in France, I wondered, 'How long will these villages keep these ceremonies? When will someone decide these wars are too long ago or too far away?' Two days later, Paris was attacked. The news came like war does: sudden and violent. Then came declarations of a state of emergency and the closing of borders. My eldest daughter was over the border in Switzerland without a passport. War starts in increments, in the small ordinary worries of families.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Contemplating war in ordinary France

    • Bronwyn Lay
    • 16 November 2015
    16 Comments

    As I marched for Remembrance Day in our small village in France, I wondered, 'How long will these villages keep these ceremonies? When will someone decide these wars are too long ago or too far away?' Two days later, Paris was attacked. The news came like war does: sudden and violent. Then came declarations of a state of emergency and the closing of borders. My eldest daughter was over the border in Switzerland without a passport. War starts in increments, in the small ordinary worries of families.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Government's retrogressive Indigenous Advancement Strategy

    • Michele Madigan
    • 30 June 2015
    8 Comments

    This week sees the new budget allocations for Aboriginal communities take effect, with deep soul-destroying cuts being spun as 'advancement'. They reflect a redefinition of reality faced by many Australians, with indigenous people unsure how they have benefited from the Tony Abbott declaring himself the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and putting the Indigenous Affairs Office within his own Department. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Funding cut signals the destruction of Aboriginal life in Australia

    • Michele Madigan
    • 07 April 2015
    30 Comments

    WA accepted the Federal Government's one off $90 million grant to transfer funding for remote Aboriginal communities, many of which will be closed down. Meanwhile in South Australia, the State Government is challenging the Federal Government to uphold the responsibilities it has held since 1973. But it is cutting the communities' funding by 90 per cent.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The sport of German-baiting during World War I

    • Bruce Pennay
    • 25 September 2014
    4 Comments

    Harry Paech's Great War shows why Australians have been reluctant to give government the authority to arrest on suspicion, even in times of peril. In the midst of talk in 1914 of atrocities committed by the fiendish Huns against Belgian nuns and babies, the president of Hume Shire in southern NSW was determined to show that the district's German settlers were as patriotic as any Australians. 

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  • RELIGION

    Best of 2012: Who is the loudest and ugliest religious donkey?

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 10 January 2013
    2 Comments

    Donkeys are gorgeous but make an ugly sound. Sadly, religious discussion in Australia too often sounds like donkeys competing to see whose braying is the loudest and ugliest. Recently Christian lobbyists spread misinformed messages about sexual orientation. Loud braying was heard on Saturday too when a group of louts hijacked what should have been a peaceful Muslim protest. Tuesday 18 September 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parable of the inhospitable hospital

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 November 2012
    12 Comments

    Even No Advantage, the best of policies, could not control the breaking of bones, crushing of spleens, poisonings, complications in pregnancy, aneurisms and other events. Still the Intruders came: on crutches and stretchers, with drips, catheters and prostheses. The council saw with alarm, and their opponents with grim satisfaction, that the policy was not working. It had to be strengthened.

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  • RELIGION

    Who is the loudest and ugliest religious donkey?

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 18 September 2012
    34 Comments

    Donkeys are gorgeous but make an ugly sound. Sadly, religious discussion in Australia too often sounds like donkeys competing to see whose braying is the loudest and ugliest. Recently Christian lobbyists spread misinformed messages about sexual orientation. Loud braying was heard on Saturday too when a group of louts hijacked what should have been a peaceful Muslim protest.

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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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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Environmental road kill on the highway to Perth

    • H. A. Willis
    • 08 December 2010
    4 Comments

    Like most small settlements along major highways, Eneabba is now bypassed, and reached via a side road. The company responsible for what will be one of Australia's dirtiest coal-fired power stations insists that 'prevailing winds will favour non-populated areas to the east and west'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cronulla racism five years on

    • Sarah Ayoub
    • 06 December 2010
    7 Comments

    In a society where image and representation are everything, our perceptions of the other become blurred across boundaries, suburbs and ways of life. Then, on the off chance that we clash somewhere in the middle, we can't take the interference, and we riot.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Election week poems

    • Mark Carkeet and Graham Kershaw
    • 17 August 2010

    They're elderly, unstable, probably a couple, their cheerful eyes sprung like steel against the cold, their hands arthritic, resigned; their grip carrying no conviction. Concentration lapses. People fail to see. This has never been a Labour town.

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