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Keywords: Camus

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The problem of power

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 July 2023
    7 Comments

    As Greece casts its votes and recalls the struggles of its past, what does it mean to heed the lessons of Acton, Curran to safeguard a democracy? In an era where geopolitical power shifts and liberty often seems under siege, what does it mean for a citizenry to answer the call of 'eternal vigilance'?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The elusive search for justice

    • Max Jeganathan
    • 22 June 2023
    2 Comments

    Encompassing the indictment of Donald Trump, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Australia's Indigenous Voice referendum, the quest for justice has evolved into an abstract and bitter fight, obscuring our common humanity, and requiring us to find a restorative, forgiving route.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The disquieting lessons of Ian McEwan

    • Peter Craven
    • 14 June 2023

    Ian McEwan's Lessons marked a sharp twist in a five-decade literary career, and presents an opportunity to reflect on his expansive body of work. The one-time literary rogue and Booker laureate now stands as the unquestioned doyen of modern English fiction, his audacious work perpetually navigating undercurrents of unease.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning in a time of pestilence

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 May 2020
    15 Comments

    What turned out to be extraordinary was the familiarity of the subject matter, and the routines that Camus makes the authorities of the plague-ridden Algerian town Oran put in place: the quarantine, the isolation hospitals, the attempts to develop a vaccine, the volunteer health workers, and the way in which funerals were conducted in haste.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Illness and the indescribable

    • Brian Matthews
    • 03 April 2020
    3 Comments

    Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ordinary heroes shine on suffering

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 January 2016
    9 Comments

    Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer often made his characters ask the eternal questions, chiefly Why do we suffer? I can't profess to have any answers to this, except that it is obvious that 'time and chance happeneth to all'. Two examples of such happenings are the huge numbers of ill-fated refugees fleeing Syria and other trouble spots, and the needless death of young Sarah Paino of Hobart, wife and mother, who was killed when a speeding stolen car crashed into hers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Winter chill has a purpose

    • Megan Graham
    • 03 June 2015
    2 Comments

    I can't hate the season entirely. Perhaps winter gives the sun the due reverence it’s owed - a chance for its power to be known intimately through its absence. Over a book, warmed by the words on the page and the cup of tea in your hand, you can muse about what it all means to be alive. Sometimes a little hibernation is what it takes to heal.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's hymns in sickness

    • Andrew Bullen
    • 14 June 2012
    8 Comments

    'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The politics of suicide

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 May 2012
    14 Comments

    Albert Camus said suicide was the one serious philosophical problem in that it poses the question as to whether life is worth living. Some suicides are a private solution to anger and despair, but others, such as suicide bombings and the recent suicide of retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, are both public and coercive.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Iraq's sexual cleansing

    • Ellena Savage
    • 16 March 2012

    In high school, I'd hack my hair into asymmetrical experiments, dye it impossible colours, and layer myself with kitsch op-shop garments. I was another precocious teenager who wore her individuality on the outside. Right now in Iraq, teenagers like I was are being murdered as 'homosexuals'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Christmas gallows

    • Charlotte Clutterbuck
    • 22 December 2010
    1 Comment

    Despair, Damnation, and Capital Punishment are my Christmas fare this year. During my research into literary executions, I was shocked to find so few cases where they were opposed on Christian grounds, and so many examples of Christian acceptance.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shark encounter

    • Vince Chadwick
    • 24 November 2010
    2 Comments

    The full moon illuminated the silky water and tepid sand like a disco ball. Rounding one corner suddenly we could see a kilometer of open beach and, in the middle distance, two men standing around a fire. The group mentality did not counsel caution. But what were they doing here?

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