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Keywords: Cultural Cringe

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why is it so hard to make good climate change TV?

    • Daniel Simons
    • 22 March 2024

    Featuring a stellar cast of Hollywood’s finest actors, Apple TV's Extrapolations was a bold attempt to center a TV narrative around the dangers of our future on a warming planet, yet failed to capture audiences. But where Extrapolations failed as an effective cautionary tale for society, it may have succeeded as one for filmmakers. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Time for nuanced Asian representation

    • Carolyn Cage
    • 06 February 2020
    8 Comments

    Growing up I cringed at Asian representation in film and television. More often than not we were cast as nerds, martial artists or second to the plot. We had little depth to our characters, which continuously perpetuated racial stereotypes — stereotypes that still exist today.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Philistine invasion is cringe-worthy indeed

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 December 2018
    7 Comments

    Simon Birmingham's recent vetoing of 11 humanities research projects is a good example of cultural cringe's transmutation into populist philistinism. Scientific research projects are often more opaque to the uninitiated than humanities projects but are usually safe from ignorant criticism because their importance is assumed.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Our flailing aid created a Pacific problem

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 19 April 2018

    China and India are rising global powers, thanks to a burgeoning middle class, huge export markets and military might. So why wouldn't they take the western retreat from the Pacific as an invitation to dance? But their support comes with a crippling debt levels and the potential for a favour to be called in down the line.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's fatal attraction to America

    • Tony Kevin
    • 12 October 2015
    6 Comments

    'Other countries in response to one mass shooting have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,' said Barack Obama earlier this month. 'Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia — countries like ours.' Thankfully, America is not like Australia. Though many Australians feel a natural envy for our confident, successful cousin, many disturbing developments — Tea Party style politics, anti-immigrant nativism, know-nothing anti-science — have roots traceable to the US.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Bali fear beyond Rhonda and Ketut

    • Ali Winters
    • 17 March 2014
    14 Comments

    Insurer AAMI's 'Rhonda and Ketut' Balinese love story, teased out over four commercials and three years, has come to its soapy end. Whether you loved it or cringed, its camp, cocktail soaked tentacles have penetrated the Australian mainstream. But the knowledge Australians have for our closest Asian neighbour is poor. According to a DFAT report released last year, 30 per cent of respondents didn't know Bali was part of Indonesia.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cultural snobbery and Wayne Swan's Springsteen mania

    • Ellena Savage
    • 03 August 2012
    6 Comments

    In Australia, land of the cultural cringe, the social elite mainly consume middle- and low-brow culture: mainstream cinema, best-sellers, and Bruce Springsteen, for example. Swan's admiration of Springsteen is positive in its belief in the legitimacy of mainstream taste, which is dictated more democratically than highbrow taste.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Gillard's carbon tax sales pitch

    • Fatima Measham
    • 08 July 2011
    18 Comments

    There is nothing radical about fixing a carbon price. While our politicians and pundits quibble, the rest of the world is already implementing its commitments. Gillard's greatest challenge in selling her carbon scheme is in normalising it in the public mind.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Best of 2009: John Safran the holy fool

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 15 January 2010
    1 Comment

    Safran's stunts — such as hoodwinking a Palestinian sperm bank into donating Palestinian sperm to the Israelis, and vice versa — are cringe-making. But they are in the context of a cogent and pithy argument that has serious intent. October 2009

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    John Safran the holy fool

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 23 October 2009
    4 Comments

    Safran's stunts — such as hoodwinking a Palestinian sperm bank into donating Palestinian sperm to the Israelis, and vice versa — are cringe-making. But they are in the context of a cogent and pithy argument that has serious intent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Deep truths revealed with deceptive simplicity

    • Tony Smith
    • 21 August 2006
    1 Comment

    Powerful prose from a young indigenous woman that makes you remember the feelings of your home, your family, your losses and regrets, and yet makes you determined to continue.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Feeding the habit

    • Geoffrey Milne
    • 06 July 2006

    Theatre critic Geoffrey Milne took time off this summer to write two books on Australian theatre. What has drawn him into theatres more than 100 times a year over the past three decades—as a journalist and as a theatre historian? His excuse is that his university teaching demands close acquaintance with actual performances. But that’s not the whole story.

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