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Keywords: World Cup

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scarf stories: Travelling the material world

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 30 July 2019
    1 Comment

    Three times in the past three years I have received a spontaneous gift in the form of a scarf. The gifts came from three different people, on three different continents. As it happens, there's a shelf in my bedroom cupboard stacked with neatly folded scarves and wraps in rainbow hues. Every last one of them has a story to tell.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Modesty does not become her

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 19 July 2019
    6 Comments

    The so-called 'confidence gap', where women don't feel as confident in their own abilities as men, is supposed to be a contributing factor to the gender pay gap. The world of sport, where a little self-assurance and showboating has never gone astray, provides some case studies on why that reasoning rarely works.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ismene in transit

    • Lisa Brockwell
    • 18 June 2019
    6 Comments

    The women are not veiled, the men don't stop to look at the golden boys kicking footballs on giant screens ... Each one I pass is a person, held here by decree, by a boulder placed across the mouth. If I walk through a temple built by slaves, sending a pittance home to countries too poor for anyone to bother waging war over ... then, who am I?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Republic of Religion

    • B. A. Breen
    • 13 May 2019
    4 Comments

    I moved to the Land of Magic, found it full of mumbo-jumbo. I bounced to the Kingdom of Rhythm, too many ups and downs. I went eagerly to Warm-and-Fuzzy, soon bogged down in treacle. I trekked to the Republic of Religion, it was open only on Sundays.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Spirit wit: Five sonnets for Les Murray

    • Philip Harvey
    • 02 May 2019
    4 Comments

    You could contrive a meandering sonnet, broach the third level of meaning with ease — Once main lines are coursing and images breeze. You were in it, around, beyond, upon it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    St Augustine's parable of the deer

    • Ted Witham and Eric D. Nelson
    • 29 April 2019
    3 Comments

    'Another thing you should note about the deer,' Augustine gestures to the crowd. 'They cross a stream in single file. One deer lays its head on the back of its forerunner, and the leader changes place often. In these ways they carry one another's load and show us how to bear burdens of our sisters and brothers.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The gifts of poetry and Down syndrome

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 March 2019
    6 Comments

    To devote the same day to reflection on both Down syndrome and on poetry, though probably unintended, was a very human thing to do. Precisely because one is so commonly regarded as a defect and the other as an idle activity, we need to be reminded that both are a gift.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My blanket cocoon

    • Rachel Kurzyp
    • 06 March 2019
    1 Comment

    I pull the blanket over my head and will sleep to return. If it won't, I'll seek comfort in my blanket-cocoon. The world can't find me here. But I hear the bedroom door handle release and the smell of coffee slips through. 'Wakey, Wakey,' he announces to the twisted blankets as he comes to a standstill by the bed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Enjoying myself alone, if only for once

    • Lu Piao
    • 04 March 2019
    1 Comment

    Racing along the Shenyang-Hainan Island Freeway alone. Going across the Hangzhou Bay alone. Playing amidst the Zhoushan Archipelago alone. Staying in a mountain village alone. Occupying a presidential suite alone. Using eight dinner sets alone. Drinking three hundred glasses alone.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Take me back to Ulan-Ude's frozen wastes

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 05 February 2019
    2 Comments

    As the week progressed and the temperature headed beyond 40 degrees, my vigour flagged like that molten candlestick. I longed to return to the chill of Ulan-Ude, where our eyelashes froze to white feathers and the snowflakes fell in limpid perfection and the cold shook us so viscerally, so expansively, from our spiritual slumber.

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  • RELIGION

    My faith is a remnant of empire

    • Fatima Measham
    • 13 September 2018
    8 Comments

    In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan arrived in Cebu, put up a cross and claimed the Philippine islands for Spain. The cross and crown interlock. I grew up conditioned to think religion was a gift. When I moved to Australia, I found a timid Church seemingly more preoccupied with conserving power than speaking truth to it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Russian spy games: a Novichok fact check

    • Justin Glyn
    • 19 March 2018
    15 Comments

    It's like the plot of a John Le Carre novel: A former double agent found unconscious on a park bench; allegations Mother Russia poisoned him with a secret nerve agent; diplomatic repercussions. Before assuming life imitates art, it would be well to check our facts, not least because stumbling into war with a nuclear power is a silly thing to do.

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