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Keywords: Garden

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Reading in end times

    • Ellena Savage
    • 19 February 2016
    5 Comments

    There's a part in Murakami's Norwegian Wood, I told a friend, where a character loses someone, and walks for weeks around Japan until he reaches the beach, where he just stares out to sea. I feel so desolate, I said, that that's what I want to do. I don't know for sure that that's what really happened in the book, or if I was really that desolate ... Maybe that's what reading is for; to build a repertoire of emotional and social situations in order to connect with feelings that don't have words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kidnapped woman's post-traumatic love

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 February 2016

    For seven years, Joy has been held prisoner in the garden shed of a suburban maniac. During this time she has raised a son, Jack, who is now five, employing elaborate and imaginative methods to nurture and educate him, while protecting him from the reality of their existence. Room is remarkable for its capacity to transmit the bleakness of Joy's situation via the wonder-full gaze of Jack, for whom this makeshift prison is the entire world, bursting with possibilities for recreation, rest and learning.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The last year

    • Diane Fahey
    • 19 January 2016
    2 Comments

    They'd stopped by then, your half-filled crosswords with their fey surmises — inspired leaps from the backs of routine clues ... I glimpsed alcoves of dusty treasure: kris — 'Malayan dagger'; obi — 'a Japanese sash'; écus — 'old French coins'. You summoned bird names from the air: rhea, erne; had the secrets of ponds and streams at your fingertips: eft, orfe, elver ... 'open', 'small seeds'; six letters. You would have got that.

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  • MEDIA

    My mother's last Christmas

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 18 December 2015
    4 Comments

    On her last Christmas, my mother produced a Christmas dinner for 14 people on an ancient anthracite stove in the kitchen of the farmhouse I'd recently moved to. Nothing could distract her from the preparation of this Christmas lunch on a stove that was built last century - except for the pain that had been growing for some months just beneath her ribs. As she stirred the stock and pressed cloves into the ham I saw a wave of discomfort wash over her. It was uncharacteristic and unnerving.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The flight into Egypt

    • Grant Fraser, Anne Ramsay and Rory Harris
    • 15 December 2015
    1 Comment

    Behind them that beast of prey, that Herod, was still glaring doom from his trees of thorn, eyes bulging like a fox. And so, by night, Joseph squired their secret way, prayed the morning kind, prayed empty the brigand-haunted roads. Each day they made another cold remove, with the infant swaddled close, and their way marked by quiet nurseries of straw. Joseph kept close his thoughts, measured each horizon, always with the rumour of dark hoofbeats thrumming in his mind.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless, Paris

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 17 November 2015
    3 Comments

    Lone men stand at street corners, look on with apathetic eyes, shabby men from everywhere and nowhere, and beyond. Their tattered, mud-stained tents are massed beneath the overpass, misshapen globes the varicose, bruised colour of unhealthy veins. They make me think of tulip bulbs, caught between the seasons' change - too late for summer's plenitude, too early for the spring.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Housing fantasy quashed by culture of entitlement

    • Ellena Savage
    • 06 November 2015
    23 Comments

    When I was a child, the house I longed for in my adult future was blonde-bricked, double-storied, concrete-paved, white-carpeted. Now I am older, and renting a room in such a house is possible, if I share the place with six other paying adults. Because it is 2015, I live in Melbourne (the sixth-least affordable city to live in in the world), and am not a merchant banker. No concrete plot will ever by mine, I say in tune with the million other people my age who have just assimilated that knowledge.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ode to the demise of hard rubbish

    • Sally Cloke
    • 23 September 2015
    11 Comments

    Our local council has announced the end of hard rubbish. As an adult, my enthusiasm for what the council calls 'scavenging' has become the source of many beautiful and useful items. But my objections are philosophical as well as practical. Ugliness has its place, and at clean out time, we literally bring to our doorsteps what we would rather put of sight and mind. Hard rubbish symbolises the costs of our throw-away consumer society while going a small way towards recouping some of them.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't fence me in

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 28 August 2015
    5 Comments

    As immigrants settling in Australia, the relative lack of fences and security measures was a sign that we'd chosen a safe and respectful country. This erasing of margins implied at once both mutual trust and an innate respect for the invisible boundaries that demarcated people's personal space. But 13 year later, I'm noticing the emergence of fortified residences boasting shiny black fences and firmly shut gates.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The Lord's Resistance Army is alive and well

    • Dorothy Horsfield
    • 26 August 2015
    1 Comment

    For almost twenty years, across the settlements and subsistence farms of Central Africa the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has preyed upon civilian populations with exceptional cruelty, emerging from the bush in small units to commit unspeakable atrocities. These days there is a common assumption that the LRA has been decimated and scattered and that its leader Joseph Kony is in hiding and probably ineffectual. But visiting activist Sister Angelique Namaika insists this optimistic assessment is misguided. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The enigma of the island

    • Ian C Smith
    • 23 June 2015
    3 Comments

    Our salt-blasted car rental veteran guzzled fuel, gearbox a disaster gasping past wallaby roadkill leaving the dramatic volcanic mountainscape for glimpses of carved bays, Crusoe beaches contrasting with weathered scrub, still farms.

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  • Frank Brennan's 'fifth gospel'

    • William Morris
    • 15 June 2015
    7 Comments

    'Frank points out that the Church cannot credibly proclaim a message of social justice in a pluralist democracy when its own processes fall short of ordinary community standards of justice. It needs to turn its teaching about human rights and human dignity back on itself, the Church, insisting on due process within the life of the Church community.' Bishop William Morris helps launch Frank Brennan's new book Amplifying That Still, Small Voice.

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