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Search Results: diggers

  • AUSTRALIA

    Venerable shards from Broken Hill

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 20 September 2022

    The shards are earthenware with geometric or figurative coloured patterns. Their cracked glazes and ragged edges echo the outback raw aesthetic, and allude to the ongoing challenging narratives of Broken Hill. Now they are sitting large on my desk claiming a distinctive extraction value from a mining city, and whispering, like books on a homely shelf, an intimate lasting merit.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    From the archives: Dad's army

    • Brian Matthews
    • 09 June 2022

    It was Christmas morning of... many years ago. I was about eight years old but, despite my advanced age, I remained a dogged believer in Father Christmas. This belief was maintained in the face of cynicism and derision from the youthful toughs I consorted with and despite my own unspoken qualms in moments of inconvenient rationality. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rebuilding trust in aged care

    • Jenneke Foottit and Sue Gledhill
    • 11 March 2021
    2 Comments

    The recently released report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care does not hold back in describing a situation that should be abhorrent to us all. As the report notes, ‘substandard care and abuse pervades the Australian aged care system’.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Re-imagining a better kind of society

    • Cristy Clark
    • 12 May 2020
    12 Comments

    But just as the frighteningly precarious nature of our lives has been thoroughly exposed, so too has the inequality of it all. Even in a pandemic, we aren't all suffering equally. Even in a pandemic, structures of privilege continue to operate.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's true relationship with Timor-Leste

    • Sophie Raynor
    • 09 September 2019
    13 Comments

    Australia’s priority is clear: self-protection at all costs, no matter the sacrifice required of Timor-Leste. And it’s a theme that continues today: Australia’s neighbourly relationship with Timor-Leste remains one of taking anything it can, not of sharing like friends.  

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Can we share our way out of climate mess?

    • Cristy Clark
    • 05 June 2019
    4 Comments

    These projects support a shift towards a circular economy — one that encourages us to reduce our consumption of resources and our waste by re-using, swapping, and growing our own. They also bring communities together, build resilience, and develop the kind of trust and reciprocity that is fundamental to meaningful action.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    They're not lone wolves, they're canaries

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 14 November 2017
    7 Comments

    These lone-wolf terrorists are more like miners' canaries. Whether it is a paranoid loner, an enraged ideologue, a jihadist or a white supremacist, they are screaming out at the top of their lungs that something is terribly wrong.

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  • RELIGION

    'Equal laws and equal rights ... dealt out to the whole community'. How close 161 years on?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 04 December 2015
    1 Comment

    'Tonight, gathered here in the Southern Cross Club in the national capital, gathered as Eureka's children. We affirm that there is room for everyone under the Southern Cross. I hope you will return to Canberra carrying the Southern Cross flag when we proclaim the Australia Republic on 1 January 2020 which will be two elections after Australia last had a monarchist leader of a major political party. Tony Abbott is the last of his type. Whether the prime minister honoured to witness the proclamation is Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten or another matters not.' Annual Dinner for Eureka's Children, Southern Cross Club, Canberra, 3 December 2015.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Aussie diggers' pen as mighty as their sword

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 December 2014
    9 Comments

    A soldier's life is usually one of bursts of brief action followed by extended periods of drudgery and boredom, and never was this more true than during this dreadful war of attrition that dragged on apparently interminably between 1914 and 1918. A book titled Aussie was published in 1920 as a bound collection of AIF soldiers’ own paper of the battlefield, wholly written, illustrated and printed in the field. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The boy who never stops

    • Clare Locke
    • 10 June 2014
    4 Comments

    I'm sitting on sturdy chair, stretch cotton nightie, baby to my breast in this pale light, my newest success. Memory has framed this view, of life dawning, love nestled quietly in a sure footed chair. Years on, that honeyed perfection, the bliss of triumphant togetherness, soothes the shock of his rage, his energy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Anzac myths beyond the Alan Bond test

    • Ray Cassin
    • 24 April 2014
    14 Comments

    In 1983, when his yacht Australia II won the America's Cup, Alan Bond hailed the feat as the greatest Australian victory since Gallipoli. His ludicrous misspeaking shows that by the 1980s the mythmakers' interpretation of the significance of Gallipoli was dominant. But the notion that the Diggers of Gallipoli and their successors in subsequent wars are somehow the paramount exemplars of Australian virtues does not survive scrutiny.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Colonial garden party

    • Barry Gittins, Michael Sharkey and Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 02 December 2013
    3 Comments

    The diggers' catchcry, liberty, saw fascism a'yawning/ enfranchisement followed suit, with racism adorning/ its streamlined passions for the cause — White Australia Policy a'borning.

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