Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Reading

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Updating modern audiences for old texts

    • Kylie Crabbe
    • 29 March 2023
    2 Comments

    The recent decision by Puffin Books to revise new editions of Roald Dahl's corpus has sparked debates about the changing cultural mores of our times and the way we read older texts. Navigating the challenges of reading texts from another time must be accompanied by an awareness of the worldviews that shaped them.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    The book corner: Humanity's Moment

    • Michele Gierck
    • 24 March 2023

    Climate science doesn't make for comfortable reading. As the climate crisis continues to escalate, Dr. Joëlle Gergis, prominent climate scientist and one of Australia's lead authors of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, offers readers a unique perspective on the urgent need for mass climate action and why we have reason to hope. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: The Jane Austen Remedy

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 March 2023
    1 Comment

    It's a truth universally acknowledged that a book can change a life, but can certain books help a reader live more fully at any age? Ruth Wilson, a 90-year-old author, thinks so. Her book, The Jane Austen Remedy, explores the belief that books can cure an ailing soul. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Reassessing assessments in an era of anxiety

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 03 October 2022
    4 Comments

    Assessments serve a valuable purpose: they give us a way to measure what students are learning. The problem is, they don’t seem to be learning. According to the Australian Council for Educational Research, recent results confirm that Australian 15 year-olds continue to show significant declines in math, reading and science when measured against their international counterparts. Australian students are learning less, and at the same time, never have we seen such an emphasis on assessments in schools. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Navigating the Ship of State

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 September 2022
    3 Comments

    The policy of the Labor Government can be described as steady as she goes. This does not mean that it will simply follow the policies of the previous government. Its reading is that the ship of state has been becalmed, responding haphazardly to the political winds with no sense of direction or destination. It had become the ship of fools. The new Government then has committed itself to show that there are captain on board and a competent, disciplined crew that can work together.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Telltale

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    For my grandma

    • William Liu
    • 30 August 2022
    2 Comments

    I was reading / When you left. The news came / Thirteen hours late. So where were you / In that little space of time? Were you breathing softly / In my consciousness? / Should I keep you alive / In morning walks and birdsong, / The smell of braised pork, / And my every achievement?

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: The Matter of Everything and the Premonitions Bureau

    • Juliette Hughes 
    • 28 June 2022
    1 Comment

    How do we know that what we call knowledge is knowledge? How do we know that we know? The two books I have been reading here are both about kinds of knowing. Suzie Sheehy is a particle physicist from my old stamping ground, Melbourne University. Sheehy’s story is of passionate hunters for nothing less than the meaning of everything. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Class in Australia

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 June 2022
    1 Comment

    As I was reading the illuminating contributions to Class in Australia  I had to confront my attitudes to Marxist analysis, to the claims of sociology, social work and psychology to be sciences, to the relative importance of inequality based on wealth, gender and race, and to any claim that canonises individual choice while claiming to be value free.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The unequal pandemic

    • Brigid Meney
    • 31 January 2022
    18 Comments

    When COVID-19 first arrived, it was described as the great equaliser. Infection could happen to anyone. Your race, creed, or the balance of your bank account didn’t matter to the virus that was spreading. But after a summer of dodging the virus and hunting for rapid tests, it is abundantly clear this isn’t a pandemic of equals. Now we have the data which quantifiably measures just how Australia's socio-economic fault lines were exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The value of novels

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 July 2021
    19 Comments

    I was at university when I first heard of the so-called death of the novel, and was frightened by the thought. But I’ve since heard the phrase many times during the ensuing decades, and am cheered by the fact that so far the novel has clung to life, albeit precariously, while novelists persist in writing, despite the many drawbacks attendant upon the practice.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The uncomfortable legacy: colonisation and the church

    • Brian McCoy
    • 07 July 2021
    17 Comments

    Reading the paper, Instrumentum Laboris, written in preparation for the coming Plenary Council, I found myself quite disappointed by the lack of depth, awareness and any sense of the need for an apology. Much less an openness to any serious conversion that is needed within the Church.

    READ MORE