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Keywords: Craft

  • AUSTRALIA

    My election campaign hibernation

    • Frank Brennan
    • 04 September 2013
    25 Comments

    Over a meal with church members and local party officials in a small village outside Xian in China, a local asks after Lù Kèwén (Kevin Rudd). He had heard that Mr Murdoch was being very tough on him! This unsurprisingly is the only mention of Australian politics the whole week. But they were surprised to learn that yet again Australia was likely to lose its only Mandarin speaking PM. They have no idea of the alternatives.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Torn by Chopper's inner torment

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 23 August 2013
    3 Comments

    Chopper's a racist, self-billed sociopath with acknowledged mental and physical health issues and a highly evolved if bizarre set of moral principles. A raconteur ever-ready to discuss the robbing, bashing, torture, murder and disappearance of various peers and colleagues. Yet he is also a man who recognises the damage done by the spiritual, emotional and physical abuse he took as a child.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bad teacher's classroom voyeurism

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 04 July 2013
    1 Comment

    'Those who can't do, teach,' declares the unkind truism. Germain is the proverbial failed writer turned English teacher, who has grown jaded and cynical to the point of sociopathy. Education, like art, should enhance humanity, not diminish it — Germain's ultimate failure as a teacher is in neglecting his students' human reality.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker deaths, more unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 11 June 2013
    34 Comments

    The fact that the boat was seen as stationary on Wednesday should have alerted Border Protection Command to the risk of likely engine failure. Had they reacted more quickly, the 55 or 60 drowned people may have been rescued. Instead, their boat drifted helplessly westwards, away from Christmas Island, and at some stage capsized and began to sink.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Baz Luhrmann versus the god of capitalism

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 June 2013
    5 Comments

    In the 1920s New York society of Gatsby, money is literally God: benevolent to some; laying waste to the lives of others. It's a tough call whether Luhrmann has deliberately dumbed down Fitzgerald's text in order to appeal more readily to a mass market. If cinema was a medium to excite the eyes and ears while relaxing the brain, he'd be a master.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My father's memorial service gets edgy

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 21 May 2013
    1 Comment

    Smoke pours from a meter box outside. Firemen scurry like comic extras, unable to locate the smoke's source. Spaced apart in orderly rows we swivel, casting sideways glances through tall windows. Organist and minister struggle with focus.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Coming to terms with Christmas

    • Ellena Savage
    • 21 December 2012
    2 Comments

    My most vivid childhood Christmas memories have little to do with Christmas. In one, I'm rifling through the antique wooden bowl beside my grandmother's fireplace, finding hundreds of ancient marbles. They glow in the amber light that spills through the hand-crafted lead-glass lights. I don't even remember the presents I got that year.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dead father's voice comes home

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 09 October 2012
    3 Comments

    'Coming up to Canberra was the worst. We came through some pretty atrocious thunderstorm weather ... It really is a delightful aircraft to fly even in those conditions.' Voice of Stuart Graham Pearce, killed as a test pilot in 1976, as heard by his son Guy 36 years later.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When gamers rule Australia

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 25 July 2012
    2 Comments

    Imagine if life was a video game. You could earn health points for a good diet, citizenship points for catching the train, social awareness points for reading the news. But how many points would you get for helping a homeless person? And how would you measure an activity such as talking to your family?

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  • MEDIA

    Peter Roebuck's ordered passion for cricket

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 November 2011
    11 Comments

    As a cricket writer Roebuck appreciated that other things in life matter more than sport. But precisely because sport does not matter ultimately, he was freed to take it very seriously indeed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    ABC deaths put journalism in perspective

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 August 2011
    12 Comments

    The image of journalism that has dominated the news in the last month has been one of grubbiness, corruption and cover-ups. The of ABC journalist Paul Lockyer in a helicopter crash reminds us how much we are indebted to ordinary, decent and self-effacing journalists.

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