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Keywords: Tram

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate protest is existential

    • Tim Robertson
    • 20 September 2019
    5 Comments

    Anyone at Friday's climate strike couldn't help but notice just how much the terms of the debate have shifted in recent years. The crisis is one of being. Climate change denialism isn't simply a political position anymore. To deny the science is to embrace nihilism; it is to be complicit in one's own extinction.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Revisiting Iola Mathews' feminist battlegrounds

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 May 2019
    5 Comments

    To anyone pressing for social change after the recent election, the Hawke years must seem as far removed as Camelot. Iola Mathews describes the personal and political struggle involved in pressing for any reform. It is a timely book.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This bus is a TARDIS

    • Julie Perrin
    • 19 May 2019
    8 Comments

    It wouldn't take much for an accident to happen, for things to fall apart. But today we have the kindly and calm Bus Driver. He wants the bus to do its job, to move as many people as possible on this afternoon when there is only one train line open, where the street is thick with footy crowds.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The man in the pork-pie hat

    • Julie Perrin
    • 19 March 2019
    7 Comments

    A small commotion at the doorway of the store catches my attention. A man in a pork-pie hat marches across the threshold. He carries a small back pack and steps with an uneven gait. He has a sure message, calling out a gamely, 'Good morning! Good morning everyone!' He looks about with purpose. Initially no one replies.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Walking home alone

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 08 August 2018
    5 Comments

    It's 11.30 on a weeknight. I'm on the train, coming home from catching up with my friends. I'm on the phone with one of them as I move to the doors. 'Yeah, I'm right to walk home,' I tell my worried friend. 'The train's pulling up the station now.' I said that too loudly. I glance behind me and there are two men standing there.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Our government is not family-friendly

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 July 2018
    20 Comments

    These changes make political claims to be family-friendly purely rhetorical. Family values do not shape government policies. Often, governments act not to nurture families and protect the traditions of western civilisation but to devastate families and trample on inherited traditions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The woman who got me into Ned Kelly’s funeral

    • Martin Flanagan
    • 02 July 2018
    6 Comments

    We share a love of poetry, having come to Gerard Manley Hopkins from opposite directions, her from religious ecstasy, me from the dark sonnets. In the 1980s we met, in a shelter for Aboriginal women in Collingwood. My next memory? Ursula introducing me to the granddaughter of Kelly's sweetheart, an old woman dying in a Melbourne hospital.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Joyce's choices in the capital of hypocrisy

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 February 2018
    33 Comments

    Joyce's extramarital affair is far less salient than the choices allegedly made around it. No politician is owed anything. They are dispensable, and the role is not, which means they have an obligation to preserve the dignity of office and maintain confidence in government. Some things need expelling; it gets toxic, otherwise.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2017: Postal survey ends don't justify means

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 10 January 2018
    3 Comments

    In the ensuing debate, we shouldn't let ourselves forget that this postal vote never should have happened in the first place, and nothing like this should happen again to any minority group. The public voting yes or no on human rights is not what democracy looks like.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Postal survey ends don't justify means

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 15 November 2017
    27 Comments

    In the ensuing debate, we shouldn't let ourselves forget that this postal vote never should have happened in the first place, and nothing like this should happen again to any minority group. The public voting yes or no on human rights is not what democracy looks like.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Another stranger on a tram

    • Peta Yowie
    • 05 June 2017
    5 Comments

    It's a no eye contact sport, when I see a girl I like. She's putting lip balm on her lips, as the morning scenery slips by like a young child getting out of his pyjamas. I stare at everyone but her, because her face is like a burning sun ... It's only as I go to get off she looks up and smiles. I smile back, I've done a few miles with these smiles. I'd like to peel the pastry off and eat the sweet thing underneath. I catch my breath like a butterfly in a net. She's another stranger I'll never know the destination of.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    If you vote for me

    • Bill Rush, Marlene Marburg, Maureen O'Brien, John Cranmer
    • 22 May 2017
    3 Comments

    Cars will be turned into flutes; sheep graze in public parks. Trams will be lined with books; prisons, wisteria-walled. Politicians will sing in choirs; accountants taught to tango. The old will have honour and cake and a licence for practical jokes. The middle-aged will lie on grass and watch the procession of clouds. The young will be loved and learn that to live is to be slowly born.

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