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Keywords: Advent

  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't fall for Humpty Dumpty politics

    • Justin Glyn
    • 11 April 2016
    10 Comments

    We got a lesson in the art of language from the Minister of Immigration, Peter Dutton, whose redefinition of the word 'detention' was reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty's remark in Alice Through the Looking Glass: 'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' We are social creatures who make real decisions based on the representations of others. Once we know we cannot expect the truth from each other, especially those who govern, society can no longer function.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Close encounters in immigration 'prison'

    • Lisa Stewart
    • 07 December 2015
    14 Comments

    The first thing I see is a familiar tableau: Mother and Child, seated, the sweep of the lines of the mother's body sculpting a circle of security and warmth around the gentle wrigglings of her baby. Except that this is no Christian Madonna, but a young Muslim woman in her early 30s, quiet, gentle and shy. Seated on her lap is her little child who has my heart the minute I lock eyes with her. Dancing around her is a skinny, black-haired seven-year-old girl with the same smile, and far too much energy for the space permitted her.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Called or shunned by Vietnam war conscription

    • B. N. Oakman
    • 10 November 2015
    7 Comments

    I'd never met a Vietnamese, couldn't figure what we had against them. But we were raised in shadow of returned men, the shimmer of lapelled bronze, a presumption we in our turn would go when ordered ... Most of us dodged gap years of sweat and khaki, missing madness, maiming, napalm, agent orange, learning how to kill and to piss ourselves out of fear. Instead we were granted head starts with women, front marks in the greasy pole dash, a less congested clamber to unremarkable lives.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Addiction is about social exclusion not moral failing

    • Paul Jensen
    • 21 July 2015
    11 Comments

    Greens leader Richard di Natale is currently visiting Portugal for a first hand look at how they have successfully bypassed the criminal justice system in treating drug addiction. There’s increasing acceptance of the view that addiction is caused by a lack of social connection and bonding. For Portugal, the most crucial step was to provide addicts with secure housing and subsidised jobs so they had a purpose in life and a sense of responsibility.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The last Anzac's bullshit detector

    • Michael Mullins
    • 20 April 2015
    26 Comments

    We can judge the exuberance of the Anzac commemoration against the nonchalance of the last Anzac Alec Campbell. He said he went to Gallipoli for adventure and, to him, 'Gallipoli is Gallipoli'. John Howard argued Anzac defined our 'sense of self', although he did acknowledge that Anzac is something that was made up. It's better to let historians rather than politicians select events that define the nation, even if they opt for the frontier wars of the 19th century that depict white Australians as violent and racist rather than heroic and virtuous.

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  • RELIGION

    A messy birth and a vulnerable baby

    • Richard Leonard
    • 18 December 2014
    21 Comments

    At a Christmas party, I met the charge nurse of the maternity ward. Pleading that because I was a celibate I would never be at a birth, I enquired if I might be allowed to come and see'. … Mary and I met six hours into her labor, which was an unusual circumstance within which to meet your birthing partner.' She had very little small talk, maybe because she had no breath at all.

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  • CARTOON

    Boys' Own Interventure

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 03 September 2014
    10 Comments

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

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  • MEDIA

    Homes that enable the disabled

    • Andrea McQueen
    • 27 August 2014
    10 Comments

    In recent years, people with disabilities have been coming out of institutions. They are in our streets, our shops and our schools, but not on TV. We need programs like the ABC's Dreamhouse to prompt conversation about what kinds of lives are possible for people with disabilities, and how we can best use our tax money to make dreams come true.

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  • RELIGION

    Why Bishop Morris was sacked

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 June 2014
    53 Comments

    'My one new insight from reading Bill's book is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church ... the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.' Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.

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  • RELIGION

    Lessons from Christian camp's gay discrimination

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 01 May 2014
    29 Comments

    In April the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that a youth camp run by the Christian Brethren had discriminated illegally against same-sex attracted persons by refusing a booking from a community health service for an event for young gay and lesbian people. This is not an isolated case. It is sobering that churches often seem to need the courts to give them lessons, if not about sex, then about hospitality and fairness.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Colouring the fading customs of a Greek Lent

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 March 2014
    6 Comments

    The 'Lenten Lady' has no mouth, because Lent is not a time for eating. Her hands are demurely crossed on her breast, for it is a time for prayer and self-examination. And she has seven feet: every Saturday, with one week elapsed, housewives would cut one foot off, with the last cut off on Holy Saturday. This custom is very old, and supposedly Greece-wide, but neither I, my Peloponnesian children nor my Cretan daughter-in-law knew of it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 18 December 2013
    17 Comments

    After six years in Australia, I am returning home to Scotland to work for the next year's referendum, which will ask if Scotland should become an independent country. It is essentially a contest between the present insular, Little Englander nightmare and a place in the world as a sovereign state. That's worth leaving Australia for!

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