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Keywords: Ellena Savage

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The struggle to resist linguistic empires

    • Ellena Savage
    • 06 July 2012
    10 Comments

    Letting languages disappear is a crime against humanity, asserted a recent article. But reader comments shouted that if a language could not keep up – or rather, if the language was not English – it should die, die, die, as though it were a simple matter of natural selection.

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  • MEDIA

    The feminist diet

    • Ellena Savage
    • 08 June 2012
    3 Comments

    Squeezing my own body fat in front of the mirror is a horrible, but familiar experience. Reflecting on the self-loathing involved makes me red with rage and embarrassment. I should be above that. Today's women are united more by their collective disgust of their bodies than they are by any other factor.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Warm bums and nuclear activism in Tokyo

    • Ellena Savage
    • 11 May 2012
    6 Comments

    I took the train into central Tokyo, my bum warmed by the heated seats. Each time we stopped, the train's engine shut down briefly, and the bum heater switch off for a few seconds. Over the loudspeaker I heard 'Setsuden chu', the catchphrase meaning 'We're currently using less electricity', which is posted all around the city.

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  • MEDIA

    Bewailing Wikipedia's white male bias

    • Ellena Savage
    • 13 April 2012
    17 Comments

    Nearly 90 per cent of Wikipedia's editors are men, the majority in their 20s. This is not Wikipedia's fault: it exists in a world that is already weighted towards the white male experience. The murder in Florida of African-American teen Trayvon Martin has catalysed criticism of the effects of white male privilege.

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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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  • AUSTRALIA

    Feminism in Bougainville

    • Ellena Savage
    • 22 February 2012
    3 Comments

    'Women in Bougainville have no choice but to be political,' I was told by a community leader. From housekeepers to businesswomen, they all seem to be pretty fierce feminists. Even random women I meet at cafes and pubs tell me about the work women do in their communities.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The hell of hoarding

    • Ellena Savage
    • 20 January 2012
    3 Comments

    Inside an old case of art supplies I'd lugged in and out of three houses but rarely opened, I found a plastic bag with something like a dead rat in it. It was not an animal however but a full head of my own hair from the time I shaved my head. There is internal logic to hoarding, but it has its perils.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Death by a thousand yuppies

    • Ellena Savage
    • 25 November 2011
    2 Comments

    Pubs with boutique beer are creeping their way north. Day-old bread at the café where the yummy mummies drink lattes is $4. Gentrification. The cycle of life. I want to save my heartland from this fate, but I should first register my own complicity. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australian larrikinism is a royal myth

    • Ellena Savage
    • 28 October 2011
    22 Comments

    The fact the Queen is a very nice lady doesn't negate her inherited privilege, her arbitrary powers, and the fact her reign isolates many Australians. There is a myth that Australia is a larrikin nation. But we are a nation not of provocateurs, but of conformists.

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  • MEDIA

    'Perverted' Sharia slaps artistic freedom

    • Ellena Savage
    • 14 October 2011
    3 Comments

    Marzieh Vafamehr, the Iranian actor awaiting corporal punishment in Iran for acting in a subversive Australian film, is the victim of a legal system that has abandoned any pretence to public interest. I'm drawn to this case as I, too, am a young woman forging my own way in the arts.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Student journalism's gift to Eureka Street

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 07 October 2011
    2 Comments

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Student journalism's gift to Eureka Street

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 07 October 2011

    In the Australian media landscape, Eureka Street is countercultural, giving space to younger writers such as Ellena Savage. She edited Melbourne University's student newspaper Farrago in 2010, following a range of luminaries including Geoffrey Blainey, Morag Fraser, Lindsay Tanner, Kate Legge, Christos Tsiolkas and Nam Le.

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