Keywords: Death
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Diane Fahey
- 24 March 2015
8 Comments
'If I'm deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I'm a Tamil.' On the day I hear of Leo's death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo's family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound.
READ MORE 
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 19 March 2015
2 Comments
In 1993 Joaquin Phoenix's brother, River, died of a drug overdose, in front of a club owned by Johnny Depp. Depp later starred in an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, prompting one film critic to wonder how Depp could see much humour in the material. One might now be tempted to ask the same question of Phoenix, who was present during his brother's fatal overdose.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 09 March 2015
31 Comments
President Joko Widodo has appeared consistently unmoved by Australia's pleas on behalf of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. Many Indonesians look upon Australian protests – especially those of our PM – as a joke. They would take us more seriously if we gave a thought to the nationals of other countries who are also on death row, and made it clear that we are not disingenuous when we talk about the moral abhorrence of the death penalty.
READ MORE
-
- Brian McCoy
- 25 February 2015
2 Comments
I have witnessed Aboriginal payback. It was in the Kimberley on an open sports oval. A young girl from the community had been found killed and I watched the community's desire to re-balance itself with the serious and public punishment of the offender. The whole community was present as the family of the deceased took it in turns to beat his back and stab his thigh. It was one of the most highly charged emotional events I have ever experienced.
At the end, after all the punishment, he fell. The nurses took him into the health clinic and he was later evacuated to hospital. After the ritual was over I remember speaking to the father of the young girl. 'I want to kill him', he said. 'But even that will not remove your pain', I replied. His hurt was raw and tangible and nothing seemed able, at that time, to even get close to healing it. Read more
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 23 February 2015
21 Comments
While people are alive there is the possibility, admittedly sometimes remote, that they will respond by reflecting on their lives, becoming deeper and more generous as human beings, making connections with others and contributing even in small ways to the happiness of others and to society. Capital punishment brutally excludes possibility and leaves all of us the smaller for it.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Pat Walsh
- 04 February 2015
17 Comments
The execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran is expected to take place on Nusakembangan, a prison island off Central Java. Visitors there are greeted by a sign which translates: 'They are not criminals, just lost people, and it is never too late to repent'. To be executed after you repent, however, is certainly too late. It also diminishes Indonesia. But let’s not write Indonesia off.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 19 January 2015
12 Comments
Bali Nine drug runners Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan are on track to be executed by firing squad during the first half of this year. Tony Abbott deserves praise for his statement abhorring the death penalty, but not for his qualification that Australia should avoid jeopardising its relationship with Indonesia by its representations on behalf of Sukumaran and Chan. Such caution did not apply when Australia turned back asylum seeker boats, and any Indonesian upset did not last long.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 15 December 2014
9 Comments
Our fickle politics shows that the majority of Australians are prepared to gloss over serious issues such as how to answer the life and death needs of the refugees whose lives have been disrupted by the wars we wage. Politicians are driven by opinion polls, and most corporate sponsors are inclined to follow their lead. That is why Saturday's 63rd Blake religious art prize may be the last.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 December 2014
11 Comments
Hughes' death became a media event. Media analysis of death and grieving makes it more difficult to respond simply and naturally because we are made self-conscious, aware of what we are doing and how it might be seen by others. It affects the intimate connections associated with grieving, as well as our ability to be touched by hope. A specificity that only exacerbates loss.
READ MORE
-
MEDIA
- Fatima Measham
- 08 December 2014
6 Comments
Death loses its abstraction when a person like Stella Young dies. It becomes material. It makes itself manifest in the silence, which it somehow solidifies: the unwritten word, the unspoken retort, the unmade joke. 'Disability doesn't make you exceptional,' she told a TED audience in Sydney last April. 'But questioning what you think you know about it does.' Stella flipped what we thought we knew about many things.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Jim Pilmer
- 05 December 2014
10 Comments
Personal grief, complicated by group dynamics, is a volatile mixture. Phillip Hughes' death reminds us that personal stories highlight the huge variety of needs and perceptions surrounding a death in the workplace. When do we tidy the desk of the colleague who won't be back? There is a time, but maybe it's not yet.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 05 December 2014
4 Comments
Greg Chappell has already made the comparison with the response to Princess Diana's death, but it goes back further than that, to John Donne, for example, in 1624: 'No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main'. Death haunts the newspapers and the airwaves. Just? Not at all. Every now and then, we cower and weep before Death's undiscriminating might.
READ MORE