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Keywords: Ghosts

  • AUSTRALIA

    Sweet dreams and haunted histories

    • Danielle Terceiro
    • 30 October 2024

    As Halloween starts to become a staple in Australian neighbourhoods, for most people its ghosts mean little more than costumes and candy. But from haunted churches to eerie local legends, Halloween says something about us and the way we carry snatches of unresolved history.

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  • RELIGION

    The Bishop of Rome and universal jurisdiction: An ecumenical obstacle?

    • Bill Uren
    • 11 July 2024

    The recent Vatican instruction terminating the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral is a prime example of Vatican officialdom overriding local episcopal authority. Let us hope that in a more decentralized Church some traditional obstacles to ecumenism may be removed without respective ecclesiastical loss of face on the part of the contributing Churches.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    John Grisham and the Camino literary caper

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 July 2024

    For a long time now, John Grisham has been part of the air we breathe. He's one of those writers who’s all things to all people. His latest Camino books are books about books;  a form of meta crime writing and you have to admire the move on the chessboard they represent. Can John Grisham be self-reflexive?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Commemorate or forget: Do we care enough about D-Day?

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 18 June 2024

    I wonder how many Australians were captivated, as was I, by the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations? They seemed epochal to me: a reminder of something remarkable and a pointer to something possible, namely new resolve to maintain peace in Europe. Not too many Australians, as it turned out, were similarly mesmerised. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Normalising war is the road to hell

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 25 April 2024

    How about truth as an antidote to war? Who would have stomach for it, though we see war as part of existence? The trouble with its normalisation, such as in games, both in backyards and in cyberspace, is that becomes uncoupled from reality.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The return of the native

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 February 2024
    6 Comments

    Tolstoy once wrote that exile is a long dream of home, but the dreaming does not persist forever, so that you eventually wake to the knowledge that home exists only in your head and in your memory. Welcome home, various people have been saying, but my silent question is Where is it? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fargo and reconciling debt

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 25 January 2024

    The world of Fargo, like ours, is a fallen one, and it’s clear at the end of this season that the cycle of violence will continue. But we’re also left with a strong hope that some of the characters might have found a way out of that hellish cycle of debt and restitution. And if there’s hope for them, there’s hope for us all.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Six books to read this summer

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 20 December 2023
    1 Comment

    Summer is upon us, and with it — I hope — the reading season. So here are my top reads from the last two years (and one that feels relevant from 2014). What are your recommendations for summer reads?  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Christmas Carol and the making of a miser

    • David Halliday
    • 30 November 2023
    2 Comments

    Why another Christmas Carol and why now? This version takes a detour from Dickens’ original delving deeper into Scrooge’s past, painting him not just as a villain, but as a victim of circumstances. It suggests that behind every act we hastily label as ‘cruel’ lies a story of fear and anxiety, and a flesh-and-blood human being. And forgiveness, then, becomes an acknowledgment of our shared human frailty.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lightning Ghosts

    • John Kinsella
    • 25 September 2023
    1 Comment

    I sense them in the air when it’s said there’s little or no chance of a storm — they are apostrophes to themselves, shaped like diacriticals. This is a mundane observation to offer up when the flash closes the light out —that loss of speech to pyrography.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A songline of the universe

    • Constant Mews
    • 25 July 2023
    6 Comments

    Simultaneously scientific and evocative, 'Origins' an oratorio by Nicholas Buc, offers a modern songline with the story of creation, evolution, and extinction. As we stand at the precipice of a referendum to recognise the first peoples in our constitution, can this musical piece remind us of the value of the stories that shape our understanding of the universe and our place within it?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How the road unravelled: In conversation with Kate Holden

    • Barry Gittins
    • 14 July 2023
    2 Comments

    Kate Holden’s The Winter Road is a ranging meditation on a 2014 execution-style murder committed on a dirt track in Croppa Creek, in northwest NSW. Barry Gittins speaks to Kate Holden about her prize-winning account of the crime, reminding readers of the uneasy history of predation in this country and the damage it does to the land and to the people on it.

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