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Search Results: Dickens

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Crown: As Diana, Elizabeth Debicki is 'a thing of wonder'

    • Peter Craven
    • 15 December 2023

    The Crown, that extraordinary TV series about the British Royal Family, is drawing to a close, with the final six episodes released in the prelude to Christmas. In the meantime, the producers have shrewdly done a quartet of episodes about Diana, with Australia's Elizabeth Debicki giving a dazzling performance as ‘the People's Princess’.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Christmas Carol and the making of a miser

    • David Halliday
    • 30 November 2023
    2 Comments

    Why another Christmas Carol and why now? This version takes a detour from Dickens’ original delving deeper into Scrooge’s past, painting him not just as a villain, but as a victim of circumstances. It suggests that behind every act we hastily label as ‘cruel’ lies a story of fear and anxiety, and a flesh-and-blood human being. And forgiveness, then, becomes an acknowledgment of our shared human frailty.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Marr's penance by storytelling

    • Peter Craven
    • 20 October 2023
    3 Comments

    In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Myths peddling the cycles of cruelty to children

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 July 2023
    6 Comments

    In a society quick to categorize children as either good or bad, reform efforts seem caught in a cyclical battle. Children often fall victim to these broad definitions, especially those from disadvantaged groups. What factors cause these cycles of progress and relapse, and how can lasting reform be achieved? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Initiations

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 March 2023

    Filling up the Webster-pak’s / a weekly exercise /  designed to keep me vertical / with sparkle in my eyes. Fresh from Chemist Warehouse as / my tempo wanes and waxes / my pills dispel my latest ills — if not quite death and taxes.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The beautiful ugliness of Roald Dahl

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 27 February 2023
    9 Comments

    Roald Dahl's beloved children's books have been given a makeover, with 'sensitivity readers' rewording phrases that might offend modern sensibilities. But what has been lost in this sanitisation of Dahl's work? Do we risk losing the very essence of what makes these works so powerful and enduring? 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Christmas in the face of uncertainty

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 December 2022
    4 Comments

    In 1939, King George VI gave an encouraging Christmas address, speaking after the Declaration of War on the Nazis. The future was uncertain, with no assurance of survival. In Australia we do not face the same immediate threat, but we do share the same uncertainty.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Managestocracy

    • David James
    • 28 October 2022

    Who wields the most power in the world? If one follows the money trail, it becomes clear that Western societies have become ruled by a new type of aristocracy: a management aristocracy. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A moral compass at the centre of J.K. Rowling's Ink Black Heart

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 07 September 2022
    4 Comments

    So far it hasn’t been easy to find a review in Australia from someone who has actually read the sixth and latest book in Rowling/Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike crime series, The Ink Black Heart. l wonder if it is too much to ask for people to simply read books (any books) before holding opinions about them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Poetry in lockdown: Recent work of Hermina Burns

    • Jennifer Gribble
    • 14 October 2021
    7 Comments

    Well before the pandemic, the future for poetry’s slim volumes was looking far from healthy.  Last November, the threatened closure of UWA Press, one of the largest publishers of poetry in Australia, drew attention to the narrowing opportunities for emerging poets to make their mark. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The value of novels

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 July 2021
    19 Comments

    I was at university when I first heard of the so-called death of the novel, and was frightened by the thought. But I’ve since heard the phrase many times during the ensuing decades, and am cheered by the fact that so far the novel has clung to life, albeit precariously, while novelists persist in writing, despite the many drawbacks attendant upon the practice.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why I wish I'd never met Philip Roth

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 01 July 2021
    53 Comments

    While we can’t conflate accusations against Roth’s biographer with his subject, this recent Blake Bailey scandal invites us to revisit, through a 21st century lens, the world of someone considered one of the definitive writers of the 20th century.

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