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Author: Andrew Hamilton

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rocker, writer, activist: The many lives of Paulie Stewart

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 November 2022
    2 Comments

    Paulie had a childlike delight in taking the mickey out of everything and everyone and acting outrageously. The stories of the Painters and Dockers’ engagement with their equally wild audiences and the public, full of hilarious encounters, display the same innocence and the same sublimated rage. If it was his brother Tony’s death that set him on his madcap journey, Paulie has shaped his own life as a monument for Tony more durable than marble. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Dogging the man in the iron mask

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 November 2022
    3 Comments

    In Justice in Kelly Country, author Lachlan Strahan writes on the life of his great-great-grandfather, a policeman whose career stretched over thirty years. When a significant part of that story is intermeshed with such a fiercely contested story as Ned Kelly’s, telling it introduces the further complexities of the writer’s sympathies and judgments.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A brief comment on commentary

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 November 2022
    1 Comment

    Reflecting on the value of newspaper commentary on public life prompts self-reflection concerning the quality of what we columnists write and what we hope to achieve through our work. The ephemeral quality of a column suggests how important it is for us not simply to react to the news but to ask what lies beneath it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Bolshie Cup

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 November 2022

    The Cup is stacked with horses from everywhere but Australia, is designed for celebrities and would-be celebrities to be seen rather than to see, and now restricts the space where the plebeians can ape the dress and the excesses of the privileged. Fortunately, the rain still falls on the rich and the poor alike.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Sticking to the environment

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 November 2022
    2 Comments

    The campaign against global warming has been heating up, and the latest protests have focused on works of art. Like the burning of books, assaults on paintings seemed to express contempt for human culture at its noblest. But as more details became public, the reality seemed more complex.

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  • RELIGION

    Rethinking Reformation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 October 2022
    10 Comments

    What would the world have been like today if the Reformation had not happened? Would it really have been a better Church and a better world?  And how, indeed, can we evaluate these enormous historical events?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    With less than due respect

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 October 2022
    8 Comments

    The one thing lacking in much of the debate about the travails of the Essendon Football Club and the brief tenure of its CEO was a proper respect. That lack of respect may merit reflection. Respect begins with persons, not with principles and opinions. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Life and death in the Cathedral

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 October 2022
    8 Comments

    Two weeks ago, Bishop Hilton Deakin died. My memories of him are inextricably tied to the Mass he celebrated in 1999 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, certainly the most emotionally charged event that I have seen there, following the violence orchestrated by the Indonesian military following the Referendum on Independence in East Timor. During the struggle for Independence, many East Timorese had joined the Catholic Church. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The ceremonious dance of freedom and tyranny

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 October 2022
    1 Comment

    Governments have, with little opposition, passed laws that privilege individual choice on issues related to abortion, contraception, gender equality and marriage. If we regard unrestrained individual choice as the fullest expression of human development, we shall necessarily relativise and erode social bonds.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Striving for solemnity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 October 2022

    In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Devaluing freedom

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 September 2022
    8 Comments

    Recently many people have expressed disquiet about the trend to authoritarian rule throughout the world. They have good reason for doing so. In the world we are entering, the freedom of citizens in the State depends on the will of Governments that will have no enforceable obstacle to withdrawing such freedoms on suspicion of future misconduct and not just for punishment of past, proven misconduct. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Turning back Australia’s refugee policy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 September 2022
    1 Comment

    July marked the tenth anniversary since offshore refugee processing was introduced in Australia, a step that marked a change in Australian policy from an uneasy balance between respect for people in need and the pressure to deter further arrivals. The principle of deterrence is deeply corrupting because it is based on the conviction that it is acceptable to punish one group of people in order to deter others.

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