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Keywords: Thoughts

  • AUSTRALIA

    Taking measures

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 October 2023
    1 Comment

    Stray thoughts are ideally as light as leaves drifting in the wind, which land without making a mark. This week, however, thoughts and words drop as heavily as the hearts of Indigenous Australians after the Referendum on the Voice and the families killed in Israel and Gaza. Prose doesn’t cut it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Critical issues

    • Kate Moriarty
    • 07 February 2023
    2 Comments

    Do you get imposter thoughts? Do you have an inner critic who has nasty things to say whenever you set out to create? You're not alone. If you are looking for a fun activity that will bring you into constant confrontation with your inner critic, write a novel. I did, and here’s what I learnt along the way.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A teacher's thoughts as the new year calls

    • John Kelly
    • 24 January 2023
    2 Comments

    Days shorten, time contracts, as school agendas / rise in gathering waves, break, surge, and cram / into the mind, intruding on the leisure / of swims, beach strolls, and jetty fishing, / and my marvelling at the blithe ease / of the local seabirds at their play / with wind drifts in a cloudless azure sky.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Striving for solemnity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 October 2022

    In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Remembering times past

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 20 September 2022

    Out of the blue I was sent a photograph that is nearly 40 years old. Why did this photograph trigger a wave of nostalgia? For me, nostalgia is not something to be sneered at as a longing to return to a forgotten past, but rather respected for allowing us to reflect on remembered joys.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Live, learn, forget, repeat

    • Barry Gittins
    • 05 September 2022
    2 Comments

    Philosopher George Santayana sagely pronounced, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Yet that repetition is part of being human. We are creatures of habit and don’t necessarily notice or learn from our thoughts and deeds. Nor do we necessarily want to be made aware of that lack of learning.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of naughty thoughts

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 August 2022

    The subject of this Stray Thought is not sleazy thoughts. It is rather the thought of becoming a lion tamer which might steal upon a person focused from childhood on being a musician with all the sacrifices that this choice has entailed. Or the thought that might lead a soccer goalie to leave his position and go forward to score a winning goal for his team. Naughty thoughts are secret, personal and disruptive. They defy the conventional wisdom we have accepted about career, security and responsibility.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stray thoughts: Teams that run on love and joy

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 23 August 2022
    1 Comment

    Is ruthlessness an essential part of sporting success? Or are players better off  remembering how lucky they are, have fun, and allow good things to happen to them by treating people with compassion and playing with joy?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Going doolally over a box of fluffies

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 16 August 2022
    1 Comment

    Headlines in print (newspapers and magazines) have some heavy lifting to do. They need to convey the essence of the story in as few words as possible, be enticing and hopefully be funny, clever or both. In traditional news terms, you should know what the story says from the heading, intro and first paragraph. However, the funny thing about being funny (especially with word play) is you’re assuming your audience knows the same things you do.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Stray thoughts: Living by make-believe

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 July 2022
    1 Comment

    In some ways this habit of association of ordinary personal life with the epic figures of literature or history marks a return to childhood. In it admired figures have a mythical status. I used to imagine that if, in my hand I had a Don Bradman bat, on my cap a Neil Harvey badge, or Mopsy Fraser’s number on my back, their skills would become mine. They never seemed to.

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  • RELIGION

    Stray thoughts: On using our talents

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 12 July 2022
    1 Comment

    Last week at the Plenary Council Second Assembly, it seems many of Australia’s bishops, for whatever reason, wanted to bury the talents available to them. They voted down motions related to the equality of dignity between men and women. The reaction according to commentators was visceral with members, not just women, upset and angry. It is likely the anger was more potent for the fact that the motions had become so anodyne that many assembly members are probably regretting the parsing and pruning. 

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  • Eureka Street Plus

    • Editor
    • 05 July 2022

    Eureka Street Plus is a place where respectful in-depth public conversation can take place in the grey area between polarities; a place to air differing perspectives, thoughts and concerns without fear of reprisals. It’s about making space to further enable the productive conversations necessary for an engaged, functioning society.

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