Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Biography

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bothersome buskers and Twitter twits

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 February 2011
    3 Comments

    Like tweeters, buskers can command a certain amount of attention. They can sing in tune or flat, hit the note or miss it, just as bloggers can turn a stylish paragraph or churn out self regarding rubbish, and tweeters can report every breath they draw.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The back to school blues

    • Brian Matthews
    • 20 January 2011
    3 Comments

    BACK TO SCHOOL shout the billboards and shop window displays and it's still only mid January. I suppose this infuriates present day kids as much as it used to stir my juvenile ire. For former teachers, 'Back to School' arouses other, less youthful associations.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Escaping Oprah and Christmas

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 December 2010
    2 Comments

    'Apodemialgia' is the opposite of nostaligia: a desire to escape. Add the brash, McDonald's-sponsored presence of Oprah to the pleasant but undeniably testing rigours of Christmas and apodemialgics all over the country will be reaching for something stronger than McCoffee. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keith Richards' other church

    • Philip Harvey
    • 08 December 2010

    'When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully — the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you,' writes Richards. Librarians know better than anyone that the library attracts the most unlikely clientele.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    'Sheila' MacKillop boosts Catholic brand

    • Paul Collins
    • 19 November 2010
    9 Comments

    This week it was reported that the canonisation of Mary MacKillop boosted enquiries at Australia's Catholic Enquiry Centre by 63 per cent in the past year. The saturation media coverage of the event suggests the Church may not be as much 'on the nose' as is popularly thought.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Meaning amid wedding chaos

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 November 2010
    1 Comment

    At the edge of each knot of resplendent women stood the groom. Uncomfortable in a constricting collar or a slightly askew bow tie or colours they'd never worn before and would never wear again. Many looked curiously grumpy. Wasn't this their day of days? What was going wrong here?

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fanatic's football fairytale

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 October 2010
    1 Comment

    Fiction writers have to arrange events so that they achieve the required outcome without stretching credulity. Yet real life routinely throws up sequences so bizarre that a fiction writer wouldn't dare to own them. Try this one. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Political farce aboard the Starship Ostracise

    • Brian Matthews
    • 08 September 2010
    1 Comment

    Lieutenant Yoo Hoo Hoo leans forward to read the tape: 'Gillard offers Katter trip to Russian Space Station'. Our voices are drowned out by a persistent beeping sound. The specially engineered Windsor-Oakeshott Thrusters have split and the Ostracise is going into reverse.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Staking out our vampire fetish

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 August 2010
    1 Comment

    For all our modern sophistication, refinement and technology, we remain in imaginative thrall to one of the most venerable and terrifying of folk figures. The vampire combines two of human kind's profoundly obsessive preoccupations: mortality and sex.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wren-Hardy stoush exposes sectarian bigotry

    • Juliette Peers
    • 06 August 2010
    6 Comments

    The Power Without Glory trial ought to be read as a high-profile and long lasting punishment meted out to traitors to a so-called Australian normality. Frank Hardy's acquittal and the campaign to defend his novel partly belong to mid 20th century Australia's strong anti-Catholic undertow.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sympathy for the man who killed God

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 22 July 2010
    1 Comment

    The idea of 'killing God' causes Darwin great anguish. In one scene, after a night spent scribbling his manuscript, he is shown frantically scrubbing at the ink stains on his fingers — Lady Macbeth trying to remove mythical blood.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Forget Keating-Hawke soapie, give Rudd a hug

    • Michael Mullins
    • 19 July 2010
    14 Comments

    The public stoush between Paul Keating and Bob Hawke seems little more than soap opera for political junkies. Australian Jesuit Fr Frank Brennan longs for a political morality to guide politicians at times of political upheaval, such as Kevin Rudd's emotional departure from the Labor leadership.

    READ MORE