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Author: Catherine Marshall

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Revisiting Ukraine

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 12 April 2022
    4 Comments

    The country’s most recent conflict — ongoing skirmishes with Russian-backed separatists in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, just 230km east of here — had been memorialised at an open-air exhibition: a latticework of bronze flowers had been superimposed upon an ambulance wrecked in battle; bullet-ridden place names from affected villages were lined up like a column of condemned POWs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A dog's life

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 30 September 2021
    3 Comments

    For almost two years our pets have had us all to themselves. Everywhere I go now, the dogs follow: to the study, to the television, to the bathroom, to bed. I’m the recipient of that same loyal companionship sought out by so many during the pandemic: across the world, demand to adopt or foster animals — and dogs, in particular — has surged. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why we need to think communally in lockdown

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 29 July 2021
    6 Comments

    The despair induced by daily infection and death tallies would be, in normal times, ameliorated to some extent by one’s workaday routine. And the crisis would be borne in togetherness — an impossible response, since the pandemic calls on us to withdraw into ourselves rather than draw together.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australians are holidaying at home, for now

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 27 May 2021
    1 Comment

    The emptiness is dispelled as I pull into Broome, a frontier city located on Western Australia’s Kimberley coast. The city centre, currently undergoing a major revamp, buzzes with pedestrians. Restaurants require booking. Down on Cable Beach, cameleers are lining up their charges for sunset rides and road-trippers are driving onto the wet sand and setting up camping chairs and cracking beers as they settle in for the show of a lifetime.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To journey without travel

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 20 April 2021
    4 Comments

    Sitting at my garden table one warm February day watching birds dash from paperbark to Tasmanian blue gum to palm tree, I realised with a satisfying jolt that I had been present for every season of this singular year; I had journeyed in sync with my surroundings on their year-long journey around the sun.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Fear of sexual violence pervades from our government to our homes

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 25 February 2021
    22 Comments

    The two most incisive statements relating to the allegations of sexual assault currently miring the Liberal party have come from opposite ends of its hierarchy: the junior employee allegedly raped in a defence ministry office two years ago, and the head of government who denies any prior knowledge of her ordeal.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Masks save lives

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 21 January 2021
    8 Comments

    What will it take, I wonder, to change these people’s minds? In an era as politically divisive as the one Americans (and Australians, for that matter) are living through, nothing is likely to convince detractors that COVID is an omnipresent threat — except perhaps the only thing with tangible currency in this whole blasted catastrophe: the visceral consequences of the pandemic itself. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Discovering the world on our doorstep

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 December 2020
    4 Comments

    There’s not a spare parking spot to be had in the NSW central west town of Orange. Patrons spill from cafes onto pavements and queues trail in orderly ribbons from the gelato shop’s doorway. There’s no room at any inn, and restaurants are bursting at their (COVID-compliant) seams; forget about scoring a table if you haven’t booked ahead of time. Travel is back, and regional Australia is the big winner.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The virtues of weeds

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 17 September 2020
    10 Comments

    The freesias are a delight, for they flower in random places on their knife-edge leaves in yellows and whites and mauves, their beauty absolving them from their dubious classification as weeds. They delight the eye, therefore they are forgiven. But why not the nightshade and the onion weed, with their delicate flowers? What makes a weed a weed, anyway?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The privilege of travel

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 23 July 2020
    8 Comments

    Six months grounded and I’d forgotten how to fly. I was due to take my first COVID-era flight, a brief flip from my home in Sydney to Ballina on the NSW mid-north coast for a meeting a few weeks ago. But I wasn’t ready.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No man is an island

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 May 2020
    7 Comments

    This time last year I was smuggling contraband into one of the world’s most inaccessible places of exile. I’d stared down nervously as we descended onto the island’s lofty runway — a strip of ribbon ending abruptly high above the sea.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Grounded

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 20 April 2020
    7 Comments

    So rapidly have I adapted to this surreal existence in which we now find ourselves, the sound which was once an inseparable part of my morning routine — jets announcing the dawn as they droned overhead — has now become disturbingly anachronistic.

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