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Keywords: Alchemy

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Yesterday to today

    • David Rowland
    • 25 October 2023
    1 Comment

    Paul McCartney's concerts evoke a communal magic, lighting up arenas with shared cultural memory spanning generations. Seeing the legendary musician perform in concert, retaining a youthful vigour, the experience can feel like a poignant rendezvous across time. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Carrying the weight of the daily news

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 29 March 2022

    A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ormiston Gorge revelation

    • James Orrock
    • 20 January 2020
    2 Comments

    Rest in late afternoon silence, the vision quest in flight / Red ramparts attenuate to pink mauve in muted light; / Only gold could slake the Depression fever of Lewis Lasseter / Lead to an alchemy of empty jam tins and broken beer bottles / Fibula and femur disjoint, wrecked on iron pyrite reefs.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Boris, Brexit and taking it up to political bull

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 June 2019
    2 Comments

    An enduring memory of the 2016 Brexit campaign was the claim by pro-leavers that the EU was extracting some £350 million a week. The claim, ignoring EU subsidies, returns and contributions to Britain, was so outrageously proud and inaccurate, it stuck. Which leads us to a novel citizen's experiment on the issue of lying in politics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Birthday ballot

    • David Atkinson
    • 01 October 2018

    I am transported to the sappers. In a pitch-dark deluge like this, gun turrets and slush banish daydreams of beaches and cobalt rockpools. Recollections of the birthday ballot, tremble of black and white TV in the corner. My fingers drag a crested envelope from the letterbox, the breeze brings ironic coo of peaceful doves.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Walt Whitman on Donald Trump

    • Wally Swist
    • 03 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    I am not ephemeral

    • Marjon Mossammaparast
    • 24 February 2015
    8 Comments

    How many times rooted are we to earth, though we would reach away from it, lifting our arms like trees? My stem, yielding to the fashioner’s knowing hand? I am not after all ephemeral. No petals of a flower.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The asphalt ribbon hauling us home

    • Angela O'Rourke and Will Day
    • 07 October 2014
    5 Comments

    Cresting the hill our breath suspends in unison. We are laughing, eye-spying. You, the one not driving, spy it first: a Jeff Koons puppy, backlit, riding a wave.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bogan Jesus

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 29 August 2014
    5 Comments

    Casting Christ as a bogan will rub theological feathers awry; a larger linguistic burden for many readers, however, is the unrelenting Strine and hoary cultural references. High art? No. Engaging? Highly. Jesse Adams is on about peace; an inclusive peace that includes social outcasts.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The alchemy of Australia's personality politics

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 July 2013
    9 Comments

    Voters find it difficult to buy ideas wholesale when they don't make sense in retail. Imagine a voter who would like to see the Labor Party build on reforms in education and health but cannot abide its policy on asylum seekers. This is where the focus on personalities actually matters. Much of the dissatisfaction with leaders ultimately rests on a public assessment of the way policies are prosecuted.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Olympics silver whining

    • Various
    • 07 August 2012

    Our species believes it progresses without limitation. We shout when a swimmer wins silver, 'That's no inspiration'. As humans pound forward, no 'burden of care' limitation ... We deserve only winners, our species the sole inspiration.

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