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Keywords: Myths

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Subversive pilgrimage in the shoes of St Anthony

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 November 2017
    1 Comment

    Fernando is an avatar for the 13th century saint. He is seen encamped on the bank of a river in the Portuguese wilderness, clad in a brown hoodie that emulates the robes of the Franciscan order of which Anthony was a member. The act of bird-watching evokes St Francis of Assisi, the order's founder (and the present Pope's namesake). But things get rather more surreal from there.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Creating a consent culture beyond 'no means no'

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 18 October 2017
    2 Comments

    The phrase 'no means no' has been bandied about for so long that is has become almost cliché. For many years, it was a great tool for explaining the basics of consent. If someone says no to something, don't do it. But 'no means no' is a tagline, not the start and end of the conversation, and there are obvious gaps in a 'no means no' framework.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    In the 'climate wars' Tony Abbott is Hiroo Onoda

    • Greg Foyster
    • 12 October 2017
    11 Comments

    The conflict has finished, but a stubborn and deluded band of stragglers, led by their belligerent General, Tony Abbott, don't want to believe it. Abbott is behaving like the infamous Imperial Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda, who refused to accept his country's surrender in 1945 and spent a further 29 years fighting phantom enemies in a remote tropical jungle.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Finkel and the climate theatre of the absurd

    • Greg Foyster
    • 22 June 2017
    6 Comments

    If politics is theatre, climate politics is a family drama. For the last decade we've watched two rival households having the same endless argument. Political journos call it the 'climate wars' and mostly focus on the lead actors standing in the spotlight - in the Western narrative tradition, characters drive events. Almost no one has noticed the scenery change. Stagehands dismantled the backdrop years ago, but politicians have carried on as if the same circumstances existed when they started this charade.

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  • RELIGION

    Dancing through St Patrick's Day myths

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 16 March 2017
    8 Comments

    My grandfather told me Patrick was a saint because he drove the frogs and snakes out of Ireland. He also told me if I stepped in a fairy ring while we were on our walks I'd disappear forever. So naturally as I grew older, I became skeptical. Each year in my family St Patrick's Day has marked a survival of Irish culture in Australia. Sometimes this can be in subtle ways and sometimes it means singing at the top of our lungs, enjoying a drink and having a dance.

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  • MEDIA

    Conversations about rape

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 09 March 2017
    5 Comments

    Last Monday, there was a Q and A discussion about feminism and women's rights. On the panel was Thordis Elva, an anti-violence campaigner known for hosting a TED Talk with her rapist Tom Stranger. The debate emulated my own internal monologue. Is there a place for rapists in the conversation about rape? Did I want to hear what a rapist had to say? At the time I was on the phone to someone close to me who had been sexually assaulted in the past. Would I want her anywhere near her rapist again?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Jackie, JFK and the making of American myths

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 January 2017
    2 Comments

    The perspective is Jackie's at all times; JFK himself rarely appears onscreen, and often is just a shoulder or a jaw glimpsed in profile at his wife's side. Portman's is a fine portrayal, displaying at all times an abiding grace and dignity, whether she is washing her husband's blood off her face, or facing down the questions of an astute journalist who may or may not be on her side. In the making of the Camelot myth, Jackie models the presidential funeral on Abraham Lincoln's, by this very process rejecting her brother-in-law Robert's doubts that the Kennedy presidency ultimately amounted to much at all.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Spin counts more than facts in SA wind farm dispute

    • Greg Foyster
    • 21 October 2016
    10 Comments

    On 28 September an extreme storm lashed South Australia and the entire state lost power. How could this have happened? It's a question that has occupied the country for the last three weeks as politicians and commentators have peddled their unqualified opinions in an escalating culture war about the role of renewable energy. No one really knew what had happened until Wednesday this week, when the AEMO released its updated report. Even now, there are more questions than answers.

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  • EDUCATION

    Students are not the monsters in our universities

    • Ellena Savage
    • 02 September 2016
    6 Comments

    In the golden era, I suppose, only a handful of people, selected for their potential to contribute to certain class formations, went to university. And then there was a shift, and this occurred with the supposedly democratising process of neoliberalisation. But neoliberalisation went a bit far and now we don't know how to tell our students that while they are entitled to real attention from their teachers, a lot of the time their teachers are basically volunteers for the charity called their expensive education.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Beyond Brexit doomsday myths

    • David James
    • 28 June 2016
    15 Comments

    Had Greece decided to exit the EU last year the consequences would have been far greater than Brexit, because Greece uses the euro, whereas Britain has the pound. British interest rates are not set in Brussels, they are set by the Bank of England. And it has an independent fiscal and budgetary system, to the extent that it is possible. The British government has been imposing 'austerity' measures because it subscribes to neoliberal orthodoxy, not because it is being told to do so by Brussels or Germany.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    21st century binge and purge

    • Ellena Savage
    • 16 May 2016
    2 Comments

    When my alarm goes off in the morning I reach for my phone: check mail, check ABC, check Twitter. Get up, make filter coffee, pour one. Open my diary and spreadsheet, start working. Pour my second coffee. Eat something, clock calories in. Go for a walk, pick up whatever groceries, clock calories out. Back to work. If whatever I am working on isn't very interesting, this accounting for a day, after day, after day, is fairly sad. But it's also just living a life in 2016.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    New nationalist myths entrench white denial

    • William Scates Frances
    • 11 May 2016
    13 Comments

    Dismantling white myths about history is a positive step, a potential pin in an ethnic nationalism which lingers here. Yet these posters pop up often not in bastions of that denial, but rather on walls across Western Sydney, in suburbs whose demographics hardly tell tales of fortresses of white privilege. It seems that, less than a project to dismantle white myths about history, the popularity of these stories is more an attempt to bring non-white Australians into a new myth in the making.

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