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Keywords: Museum

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ai Weiwei is the cultural hero that China needs

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 16 December 2015
    3 Comments

    Ai Weiwei might be more Dada than Dao and a hirsute satirist of Beijing's rulers, but he is no mere trending hashtag. Since his birth in 1957, his life history has moulded him, and given him the courage to speak up for a reformed China. And while he might appear the court jester that a simplistic West wants, he is in fact a clever and pragmatic political operator in his own world pursuing a rights agenda in a systematic, constructive and humorous way, often through artistic production.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Broken porcelain illuminates destructive Dutch colonial legacy

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 16 September 2015
    4 Comments

    400 years ago, when Mauritius was still uninhabited, a cyclone thrust three tall ships of the Dutch East India Company against the coral reef. As the ships were ripped apart and thousands of Ming porcelain pieces on board smashed, the crew fought for their lives, but 75 men including the fleet commander Admiral Pieter Both, drowned. I picture that Sunday afternoon in the 1980s when my mother and I were wading in the water close to a familiar beach and found washed up shards of the porcelain. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Zen and the art of wealth amassment

    • Ellena Savage
    • 17 July 2015
    4 Comments

    There is a suburban myth about migrant families. The first generation toil, the second become professionals, and the third artists. Like all dynasties, the Rineharts are destined to one day represent the crusty relics of former glory. That's fine. I mean, why would the beneficiaries of other people's obsessive toils and struggle work, if they didn't have to?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Complicity in Turkey's wilful forgetting of the Armenian Genocide

    • Michael Mullins
    • 27 April 2015
    11 Comments

    The British commanders used the Australian troops who landed at Gallipoli as cannon fodder. The Turkish Government is doing something similar with the Australian visitors whom it is welcoming with open arms, in that it is using them to help smother the memory of the Armenian Genocide, which also occurred 100 years ago this week. In connection with Genocide, Pope Francis said recently that ‘concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it’.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In awe of David Gulpilil and his barramundi

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 10 March 2015
    1 Comment

    I want to eat a piece of Charlie's fish, speared with a 'dangerous weapon' and coal-charred, in his country. Charlie talked to the fish, 'What a good fish'. Covenant. Better than the white man's supermarket stuff.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Politics of mediocrity threaten Blake religious art prize

    • 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.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Seeking asylum in the Promised Land

    • Nikolas Feith Tan
    • 03 December 2014
    9 Comments

    Israel is one of the world's developed countries that is attempting to deter asylum seekers from accessing the protection that international refugee law entitles them to. Yet Israel is a state with refugeehood in its roots. Israeli refugee advocates have encouraged a change of policy on the basis of Jewish exile in Egypt as recorded in the Torah. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Memories of Gough

    • Frank Brennan
    • 22 October 2014
    44 Comments

    What he did for me, he did for countless other Australians who dreamt of a better world and a nobler Australia. Even his political opponents are forever in his debt for having elevated the national vision and for having given us a more complete and generous image of ourselves. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Using the Uber app in the city of brothers

    • Tess Ashton
    • 30 September 2014
    2 Comments

    Our Uber appeared, a black Chevvy sculpture, a mere click of the fingers, from there to here, Denzel Washington, quipped hubby later was the driver, tall as a Pennsylvania night and lustrous as a god.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Walsh's Catholic guilt

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 26 September 2014
    6 Comments

    A Bone of Fact is one part love letter and two parts plea bargain. That’s how Walsh can take a stab at Catholicism one minute and the next admit that in the 'thrall' of Michelangelo’s Pieta he loses all faculties. And for someone who’s gleamed much from betting, gambling gets short shrift.

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  • MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

    Our future is public

    • Andy Lynch
    • 27 August 2014
    9 Comments

    The kind of Australia we live in today can be directly attributed to the kinds of institutions built 150 years ago - schools, universities, libraries, museums, and more. But in 2014 is it even possible to carve out new public institutions or give new life to those that have waned in relevance?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Traipsing Derry after the Troubles

    • Tony Thompson
    • 05 March 2014
    5 Comments

    The museum traces the civil rights protests right up to the game-changing Bloody Sunday killings of 1972. As I looked at the photographs of the terrible day, a man who worked at the museum stood beside me and asked if I recognised the building. I looked again to realise it was the museum itself. 'That's my brother,' he said, pointing to the badly injured young man in the photo. The young man had died ten feet from where we were standing.

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