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Keywords: Myths

  • INTERNATIONAL

    History curriculum perpetuates East Timor myths

    • Susan Connelly
    • 10 July 2012
    7 Comments

    The draft senior secondary history curriculum glosses over Australia's relationship with East Timor. It needs to go beyond the false media and political view that Australia's involvement in East Timor has been unremittingly courageous, generous and exemplary. There is a danger that students will believe Australian soldiers went into Portuguese Timor in 1941 'to protect the Timorese' and that Australia 'saved' East Timor in 1999.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Economic hard times even tougher for refugees

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 June 2012
    11 Comments

    The readiness of developed nations to help and receive refugees and asylum seekers has come under greater strain. Xenophobia has intensified in Europe, where Greece's Golden Dawn party threatened to expel migrants from schools and hospitals if elected.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The best and worst of international aid

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 17 April 2012
    4 Comments

    Rumour has it the Government's projected aid budget increases will be cut to ensure a surplus. Some aid doesn't work: I was horrified as a young aid worker in the '80s being told that an open sewer in an Addis Ababa slum was a World Bank project. But aid does work if it is underpinned by a few key principles.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Myths and truths of Australian bigotry

    • Larry Schwartz
    • 23 January 2012
    12 Comments

    Too often I've opened my front door and found myself tempted by some sales pitch. So today I'd answered warily, spoke through the screen door and tried to keep the encounter brief. 'I'm sorry, but we're not interested.' The salesman knew better: 'It's because of the colour of my skin,' he replied.

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  • EUREKA STREET/ READER'S FEAST AWARD

    Migrant myths and memories

    • Julie McNeill
    • 24 August 2011
    4 Comments

    Sociologist Eva Cox heard all the vitriol about boat people when, as a five-year-old Jewish girl, she fled Nazi Germany and headed to Australia. My nine-year-old mother was a different kind of boat arrival: one of 135,000 'child migrants' imported under the 'Populate or Perish' policy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Myths of wartime good and evil

    • Zac Alstin
    • 15 August 2011
    22 Comments

    It is a weakness of human nature that we forgive in our friends what we despise in our enemies. If Germany or Japan had achieved a nuclear weapon and launched it on an Allied city, our condemnation would be unrelenting.

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  • RELIGION

    Morality plays in sport and politics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 August 2011
    5 Comments

    Sport and politics display in minor key all the basic human drives, passions and political moves that we find on the larger public stage. Melbourne AFL club's sacking of coach Dean Bailey, and the forced departure of South Australian Premier Mike Rann, are cases in point.

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  • RELIGION

    Indonesian and Australian justice

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 June 2011
    5 Comments

    At a gallery opening in Bali, the Australia-Indonesia relationship was compared to a rope with many strands, with art and culture the most resilient. In the audience were Australian lawyers who have supported members of the Bali Nine, and lawyers acting for Indonesian minors still held in long term detention in Australia without charge.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Last-ditch confession

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 May 2011
    2 Comments

    First he built a church, an act of penance and a bribe to God. Next came 40 years in self imposed isolation. Neither act could replace the course he needed to take: to confess and accept responsibility; the only true salve for guilt.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Social change based on the 'view from below'

    • John Falzon
    • 22 December 2010
    3 Comments

      Dylan Thomas wrote that 'A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe.' Our 'good poem' is the listening to, and learning from, the people on the margins. But it will only be a 'good poem' if these whispers are translated into collective action.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What we have lost

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 December 2010
    3 Comments

    So Australia has lost its bid to host the World Cup. In a single night the Holy Grail of the World Cup was transmuted to tin, the Light on the Hill of 2022 was snuffed out, the Crystal Sea that would convey worshipful hordes to Australia turned to seaweed.

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  • MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

    Resurrecting Indigenous language

    • Jonathan Hill
    • 01 December 2010
    5 Comments

    Dhurga is a dead language. At my school however it is taught to every student, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. A subject like this is quite radical in an education system that is heavily focused on churning out workers rather than thinkers.

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