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Suddenly some young lads started swimming across us. One even swam under me, and joined his friends at the other end of the pool. They were giggling and speaking to each other in Dari. In a few weeks, these kids will join other Hazara Australians for a massive 'new year's' festival. Should Wilders and his friends be afraid?
Ceilings creep upward in silent communion. Porcelain hands like the soft robes of Jesus, reach across a domed fresco from Bethlehem to Nazareth ... When darkness settles on rocks and stones, old churches shrug back into themselves, back into their timber rafters that squeak a thousand Amens.
Looking at a map of the Australian coastline gives no clue about how far Australia's territorial claims extend. As a result, Australian policy makers aren't eager to embrace suggestions that Asian countries disputing possession of small islands and rocky outcrops should resolve their differences by assigning ownership to the closest country.
'My partner Johan gives me a rough time. He says the church has always been horrible to gays; why do you have anything to do with it? But I don't want any old gent in frocks to take my religion from me.' Former High Court Justice Kirby is a practicing Christian and one of Australia's best known openly homosexual citizens.
My crumpled iris-rim lip is her lip; the fine spoked wheel beneath my grimacing eye has etched itself deep with years upon her face. The wet red meat of my viscera is made of her, a shy-hood I cannot take off ... Why are you doing this to me?
Embracing an individualistic Australia that transcends ethnic heritage would leave us with a culture that is young, thin and commercialised. If we wish to promote unity and equality, the best thing we can do is learn our own forgotten stories of ethnic heritage.
Vile denunciations and allegations waft across the vast expanse of space and time. Flatulent Dutch ovens of bigotry aloft fly, as adult, equal love's tagged 'sin', not raft to finding solace, as surely as the Made seeks the Maker's consoling deeps. Published 21 November 2011
Vile denunciations and allegations waft across the vast expanse of space and time. Flatulent Dutch ovens of bigotry aloft fly, as adult, equal love's tagged 'sin', not raft to finding solace, as surely as the Made seeks the Maker's consoling deeps.
A soft toy. A restaurant menu. A business card. An agony so great it swamped the world. While America was busy hunting down Osama bin Laden, my son and his contemporaries, who were children at the time of the attack, grew up and inherited a world irrevocably changed.
Often the reconciliation debate is framed around matters of the perpetrator's reaction, rather than that of the victim, who holds a superior moral currency. Could it be ever feasible for Australia's Indigenous community to countenance unconditional forgiveness?
It is 30 years this week since Catholic radical Dorothy Day died. She was a quirky woman who lived on the margins of Church and United States society. Her life was lived in harsh conditions, but the way she put its elements together was sweet and attractive.