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Keywords: Commercialism

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A merry little Christmas

    • Barry Gittins
    • 20 December 2022
    1 Comment

    There's something to it, the Advent adventure. Its allure transcends and moves us beyond the corny. The sentimental. When we wade our way through the tinsel, the lights and jolly holly, we find there's a deep, sweet magic to the season.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A very varied Christmas

    • Barry Gittins
    • 17 December 2020
    5 Comments

    What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dickens and Christmas as we grow older

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 13 December 2019
    5 Comments

    Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    In praise of Aboriginal trailblazers

    • Michele Madigan
    • 01 October 2019
    9 Comments

    Narungga Elder Tauto Sansbury died 23 September after a lifetime of campaigning to make the criminal justice system just for Aboriginal people, among other matters. He and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trailblazers set a benchmark to which we can all aspire in the pursuit of positive change.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian cricket's great betrayal

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 March 2018
    11 Comments

    The idea of cheating at sport, of setting such a bad example to the young, was quite simply unthinkable then, but now this cricketing episode, I fear, is a disgrace from which Australian sport may never recover. Something ethical, almost spiritual, has gone, and I am left with an acute sense of loss.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Praying to Santa

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 15 December 2010
    6 Comments

    We invented you, Santa, and named you after a hirsute Russian bishop. For anyone who thought about it, you were a kind of parable; you helped us to believe that prayers could be answered, that there was a bounty that was not diminished by the number of clients.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Modern parents' toy story

    • Daniel Donahoo and Tania Andrusiak
    • 12 September 2008
    4 Comments

    Our children are not our children. They live in a world saturated in brands, commercialism and all manner of hyped-up toys. So when, over a pre-dawn hot chocolate, our son told us he wanted to buy a Ninja Turtle, we just smiled.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Idealists don't own cricket

    • Tony Smith
    • 20 January 2008
    2 Comments

    Cricket is a microcosm of society and the furore over sportsmanship reflects the division of Australia into two classes — the venal, whose ultimate measure of success is the potential for profit, and the naïve, who believe in higher values.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pastoral Dreams

    • Matthew Klugman
    • 06 July 2006

    Are they utopian or can they be realised? Matthew Klugman reports.

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