Topic tags: Jennifer Compton, Maori customs, cannibalism, Kaitangata, poetry
If there's one thing that the recent election campaign and its outcome demonstrated, it's the depth of the divisions that exist in our Australian community.
Our politics is focused on point-scoring, personalities, and name-calling across party lines. The media, for the most part, don't help, driven by the 24-hour news cycle and the pursuit of advertising dollars into a frenzy of click-bait and shallow sensationalism.
What does it mean to be an Australian in times like these? What are the values that unite us?
Eureka Street offers an alternative. It's less a magazine than a wide ranging conversation about the issues that matter in our country and our world; a conversation marked by respect for the dignity of ALL human beings.
Importantly, it's a conversation that takes place in the open, unhindered by paywalls or excessive advertising. And it's through the support of people like you that it is able to do so.
‘Here be dragons’ is how some ancient maps ended, hinting – of course – that they were guardians of a treasure or paradise or a soul-tingling mystery in the uncharted regions beyond. Kaitangata is one of those liminal places (yes! I’ve been there, more than once) where danger and strangeness abut an eerie beauty. Sorry, Jennifer, I have to disagree about the ‘harsher and tougher’ country and the beach where you gaze on nothing. Copper tussock and fog-shrouded sand in the foreground with the smudge of velvet green hills to the south make for one of the most beautiful areas on the planet. Keep on going down the coast to Slope Point and you arrive at a windswept promontory where the occasional praying rabbi is to be seen wandering up the track, past the sheep and the macrocarpas bent almost horizontal with the wind. Apparently it’s the ‘ends of the earth’ in orthodox tradition. I have to admit, however, that it never really felt that way to me. It always felt like the edge of paradise. Maybe those eyes were the same colour as the sword of the cherubim. Blue-white isn’t just ice – it’s also the hottest temperature of stars. Anne Hamilton | 08 February 2009
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