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Keywords: Storytelling

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Eviction porn has ethical foundations

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 November 2015
    1 Comment

    Against the backdrop of the crash of the US housing market, we linger on the lurid details of families' removal from the brick boxes that have been their homes for decades. We can only watch as they cycle through stages of denial, bargaining, fury and grief. These are well meaning people who have innocently fallen foul of a system that deals in laws and dollars, not humanity. It is a system so corrupt it turns the exploited into exploiters; where its desperate victims embrace corruption in turn as a means of survival.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Taliban bullet didn't keep her down

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 November 2015
    2 Comments

    Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai came to international prominence in 2012 after being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman, for her advocacy for girls' education. He Named Me Malala ponders whether her father shares indirect responsibility for the shooting, as he encouraged her advocacy. The question of exploitation is relevant whenever a child enters the public gaze, but here it threatens to undermine Malala's own agency, as a young woman who can think, speak and act powerfully on her own behalf.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Grieving pilgrim's wild days in the wilderness

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 January 2015
    1 Comment

    Cheryl Strayed is haunted by her past — by her own sins, and by tragedies that have befallen her. As she walks, she hums, and the music she hears in her head leads her in and out of the past. Her solo 1600-plus km trek along America's Pacific Crest Trail is a metaphor for her life: each hardship she overcomes brings her a step closer to facing down the fierce regrets that gnash at her heels.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless wonder on Victoria's plains

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 14 March 2014
    2 Comments

    Moira, her kids Zara and Rory, her partner Shane and his brother Midge are the kind of people you wouldn't think to look twice at. Living on welfare and on the constant lookout for abandoned houses to either live in or raid, they're known colloquially as 'trants' (short for itinerants). These otherwise overlooked and forgotten people might be parochial, but they're never parodied. They might be uneducated, but they have a voice.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The empathy revolution

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 14 February 2014
    3 Comments

    While realpolitik can drive us beyond a healthy scepticism to cynicism and indifference, British cultural thinker Roman Krzaric contends that when we look beyond the real — through imagination, creativity, vulnerability and networking — we can bring about the ideal of 'empathy on a mass scale to create social change' and even go about 'extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world'. Without dreamers like Krzaric, we're stuffed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Creation stories from inferno Australia

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 18 October 2013
    1 Comment

    The Garden is populated by the larger-than-strife figures who follow their lust of life and self. Kaos the crocodile, who becomes the first man, and Hades the platypus, the first thief. Orpheus the lyrebird, the first actor, and the first healer, possum Prometheus. The giant red kangaroo, Knuckles, the first ruler. This is storytelling that exults in pain and primordial uncertainty, passion and purpose.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The crying killer

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 21 June 2013
    1 Comment

    Violence is a messy business, even when it is your 'business'. To father, husband and mafia boss Tony Soprano, the conflicting demands of being both a family man and a 'family' man present numerous moral, practical and emotional conflicts. In this role, James Gandolfini took viewers from the softest to the hardest potentialities of human nature.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stories about God and monsters

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 January 2013
    4 Comments

    Life of Pi offers two stories. Both concern a boy who survives a shipwreck and spends months adrift in a lifeboat. One is constructed from mundane albeit horrific facts; the other, from visual and mystical wonders, scenes of terror and transcendence that seek no less than to better understand God. Which do you prefer?

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  • RELIGION

    'Jesuit' James Joyce's Church challenge

    • Philip Harvey
    • 13 June 2012
    24 Comments

    One character sings a risqué satire called 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'. Another wanders into a church and misinterprets the liturgy to comic effect. The puritanical Catholic hierarchy were offended, but Joyce's seemingly anti-religious novels would not exist in their final form were it not for his Jesuit education.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Islamic women's sex and power

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 February 2012
    1 Comment

    The women begin withholding sex from their husbands in order to pressure them into bringing running water to their remote North African village. This act of self-empowerment brings hardships to both the men and the women of this patriarchal Islamic community.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Beyond Australia's adolescent identity crisis

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 January 2012
    9 Comments

    While Australia's early history is marked by violence, the Fraser Government's decision to accept nearly 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, the Mabo decision, and Paul Keating's Redfern speech provide positive narrative touchstones that can help lead Australia to maturity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No clear villains in Facebook tragedy

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 October 2010

    Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly displeased with the film. The decay of his friendship with co-founder Eduardo Savarin during the creation of a site predicated on accumulating 'friends' is the film's greatest irony, and greatest tragedy. 

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