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Keywords: Animal Kingdom

  • AUSTRALIA

    The fable of the frog and the federal election

    • Barry Gittins
    • 21 March 2022
    6 Comments

    Like the trusting frog, voters have in the backs of their minds the inkling that when a government achieves power, they lavish time, energy and resources on staying in power. Promises are non-core, or open to interpretation, or de-prioritised as new issues bob up to the surface.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Strong women heroes of grim abduction parables

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 May 2017
    1 Comment

    If two current Australian films are anything to go by, then one social issue weighing on local filmmakers in 2017 is the danger to women of emotionally and physically violent men. Neither film is a mere portrait of victimhood. The heroes of Cate Shortland's recent Berlin Syndrome and Ben Young's upcoming Hounds of Love - in the former, an Australian traveller in Europe, in the latter, a teenage school girl in suburban Perth - are ordinary women with both the will and capacity to fight back against their assailants.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blood and the Bard

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 October 2015
    4 Comments

    Lady Macbeth is left somewhere in the realm of caricature, her 'Out damned spot' soliloquy oddly decontextualised and the circumstances of her death diminished and confused. That said, the conflation of the Macbeths' conspiracy to commit regicide with an act of discreet marital sex is a potent image of their moral codependency. This faithful adaptation by Australian director Justin Kurzel is grimmer even than Polanski's 1971 version, which it is set to displace as the standard-bearer adaptation.

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  • RELIGION

    The preferential option for the poor

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 July 2014
    1 Comment

    'Rohan provides a detailed and accurate analysis and history of the word games that have gone on between the Vatican and the Latin American bishops and theologians wrestling with the concept of the preferential option for the poor.' Frank Brennan launches The Preferential Option for the Poor: A Short History and a Reading Based on the Thought of Bernard Lonergan, by Rohan Michael Curnow. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Malcolm Fraser whacks lackey Australia

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 16 May 2014
    2 Comments

    Fraser was a ruthless, conservative political animal who today is one of our most prominent human rights champions. The elder statesman is quite the angry young man in print. He delights in telegraphing his haymakers and following through with a well-placed elbow or two. Put bluntly, Fraser suggests we need to shed our lackey status. 'We need the United States for defence,' he argues, 'but we only need defence because of the United States.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Paralympics as a work in progress

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 September 2012
    5 Comments

    The Paralympics opening ceremony shows how far we've come in reversing the exclusion of disabled athletes. But they encourage physically disabled athletes at the expense of the intellectually disabled. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Savaging sex and religion

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 December 2011
    4 Comments

    Three teenagers are lured into the midst of a demented cult waging a brutal crusade against society's sexual profligacy; the Westboro Baptists re-imagined as violent extremists. This is not the first time questioning Catholic filmmaker Kevin Smith has had a go at religion.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    South Australia's mundane horror

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 May 2011
    2 Comments

    Hatred against paedophiles and fantasies of violent retaliation are stoked by gossip around dining room tables. Snowtown portrays the evil that humans are capable of under mundane circumstances, and the devolution of morality when it is nourished by sick ideologies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Criminals and other animals

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 June 2010
    4 Comments

    Nicky is curled up asleep on the couch. She is an innocent, and we feel affection for her. But as the camera pans around, we realise we have been sharing Andrew's leering perspective. The scene foreshadows Animal Kingdom's most appalling atrocity.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Zookeeper Irwin preached the wrong message

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 December 2006
    1 Comment

    The story of Irwin's life, already being written, will conclude that he was a good conservationist, a global ambassador for protecting 'dangerous' animals. But how can the owner of a zoo be worthy of such a title? Zoos are enclosures that imply a loss of sanctuary and celebrate the subjugation of nature. From 19 September 2006.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Zookeeper Irwin preached the wrong message

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 18 September 2006
    70 Comments

    The story of Irwin's life, already being written, will conclude that he was a good conservationist, a global ambassador for protecting 'dangerous' animals. But how can the owner of a zoo be worthy of such a title? Zoos are enclosures that imply a loss of sanctuary and celebrate the subjugation of nature.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The creatures & their words

    • Peter Steele
    • 06 July 2006

    Peter Steele looks at poetry about the birds and beasts.

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