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Keywords: Des Ball

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Women still fighting for territory in unequal AFL

    • Erin Riley
    • 19 August 2019

    The AFL's announcement that AFLX would be scrapped after two seasons, despite heavy media coverage, was a strong indication of the league's commitment to women's football. It now needs to follow up with commitments that reflect the increasing scale and importance of the women's competition to the league.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Indonesian democracy is at a crossroads

    • Nicholas Bugeja
    • 02 July 2019
    7 Comments

    Indonesian democracy has proven resilient to challenge and made inroads into combatting problems that have beset the country for decades. But a crossroads approaches. A failure to manage religious radicalism and intolerance, corruption, and other social tensions may imperil or destabilise this democratic epoch.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No simple case of right and wrong

    • Robert DiNapoli
    • 20 May 2019
    6 Comments

    The work that's held my undivided heart now hangs upon the lip of the inane, a path I've struck, unwinding meaning's ball, or else a futile tangle, every day more lost to telos, purpose and design. No one else seems to have passed this way.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian sports need women off-field too

    • Kirby Fenwick
    • 16 November 2018
    2 Comments

    That this attitude persists at the executive level of arguably one of the biggest sporting organisations in the country despite the role women have played in the success of the game is quite damning. That it took a woman, or women, to change it is hardly surprising.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Three musicians and a dog

    • Kevin Gillam
    • 17 September 2018
    1 Comment

    Bach Chaconnes, Chopin Preludes and high pitched whines joining cello duets ... has me thinking though, about the repositories of silence, because it's been here and waiting, in the 45 degrees of stairwell, the angle providing harbour, a balloon of silence, the colour of healing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Silent Jack's birthday grace

    • Julie Perrin
    • 13 February 2018
    18 Comments

    Family and friends gather to wish happy birthday to the boy who does not speak and whose hearing and seeing are easily overloaded. The headphones are designed to cut sound out not bring it in. Even before his diagnosis at 18 months, Jack's parents were translating the world to him. Since then they've been translating him back to the world.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    At St Brendan's

    • Grant Fraser
    • 15 January 2018
    7 Comments

    On days like this, with blisters of tar already softening on the road, the nuns would curdle in the heat, shifting their stays by habit; sometimes, a bead of sweat would tempt their brows. Cooped in our desks, we steered our wilful pens over acreages of white pages.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    African gangs myth shows fear is winning

    • Troy Pittaway
    • 12 January 2018
    20 Comments

    I have been working with Sudanese youth for over eight years and never encountered anything like the gangs of youths that are being talked about. To try and distill an entire culture, with various sub-cultures and values, into a media soundbite about hordes of African gangs, insults not only the Sudanese community, but every Australian.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Magpies must listen to Lumumba and respond

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 September 2017
    10 Comments

    Inspired by the exploits of Aboriginal AFL stars, the young Lumumba quickly recognised football as an arena in which a black man could flourish. This fact makes his treatment at the Collingwood Football Club years later all the more galling. The club so far has failed to Lumumba's comments in any meaningful way. He deserves better, and so do we.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Awareness Campaign and Despair Stalks

    • Haley Joray Arnold and Cassandra Golds
    • 01 August 2017
    2 Comments

    You used to have feet like a Russian ballerina/Arches (like ones plebeians would stand under, lose their breath for a moment)/The weight they carry remarkable for the/Tiny bones inside ... Despair stalks the house/Outside, like weather/Inside, like air/It has no form ...

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bad sports and politics

    • John Warhurst
    • 26 April 2017
    4 Comments

    Recent adverse coverage of sporting organisations has revealed once again what looks like widespread organisational dysfunction. Sport is such a major part of Australian life that we should all be interested in what goes on within the multi-million dollar organisations that run it, whether it be the big football codes, cricket, tennis or the Olympic sports. The stakes are huge and the issues, including self-interest, interstate rivalries and personality conflicts are eerily familiar in public life more generally.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mme. Blanchard hits the roof

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 03 April 2017

    Riding her gondola, a skimpy thing like herself, she sees her balloon ablaze, begins her descent, feathered hat lost, a rushed farewell performance. The house roof's pitch steep, her rigging tangled, fire almost out, burned, broken, she can't hang on, she who once remained aloft all night over Rome.

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