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Keywords: Epidemics

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Reappropriating stolen memory

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Joel Birnie’s short and admirable book provokes reflection both on what should have mattered in the relationships between colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and on what matters in the relationships that constitute Australia today. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The return of the invisible worm

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 July 2022
    2 Comments

    Over recent weeks many people have expressed alarm and despondence at the rising number of infections and deaths from COVID. Just as we were enjoying freedom from restrictions we found ourselves encouraged to work from home if possible and to wear masks. The crisis and the recommendations recall the first onset of COVID in Australia. Yet the response of Governments is much less forceful. The differences between the responses and the reasons for them merit reflection.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Epidemiologists and unexpected lessons

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 September 2021
    7 Comments

    A striking feature of the Australia’s path through Coronavirus has been the coming out of epidemiologists and social biologists. From being little known members of small institutes they became rock stars, invited to press conferences, deferred to by politicians, selectively chosen for comment by the media, but also resented by representatives of big business and defenders of individual freedom.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The complexity of epidemics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 July 2021
    9 Comments

    It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Living in a gendered pandemic

    • Fernanda Fain-Binda
    • 27 August 2020

    When I read Jess Hill’s piece in The Monthly which calls the coronavirus lockdown a ‘gendered pandemic’, I felt heard. I wanted everyone to read this article, to understand that feminist wins were being erased in the name of a national emergency, and that women were stepping up to the now larger domestic workload with a career cost further down the line.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human rights in a pandemic

    • Cristy Clark
    • 30 July 2020
    9 Comments

    The need to contain the spread of COVID-19 has led to a raft of emergency laws that have challenged us to deeply consider the appropriate balance between community and individual rights. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The truths beyond uncertainty

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 May 2020
    9 Comments

    This period of social distancing and restriction has been called many things, some of them printable. One of the most common has been a time of uncertainty. Uncertainty, however, is not an impediment to life which can be removed by clear and authoritative statements of dates to remove restrictions and get back to work.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trump, turtles and the new nuclear threat

    • Justin Glyn
    • 24 October 2018
    5 Comments

    While nuclear weapon stockpiles have reduced massively since the 1980s, the major arms controls treaties have been gradually eroded. At the same time, and even more dangerously, the world has seen a repudiation of the diplomacy which limited the numbers of nuclear weapons and which has prevented their accidental use.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Another dog day for cultural appropriation

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 April 2018
    1 Comment

    The commentary around the film's appropriation of Japanese culture has been sustained and substantial. At least these allusions are for the most part detailed and respectful; that the hero is named after a defunct American video game company is less palatable. Trickier still are the creative decisions related to language.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    When we give ourselves permission

    • Fatima Measham
    • 08 December 2016
    12 Comments

    It is hard to overstate the sort of things that become permissible when the dominant political culture appeals to our darker nature. Take the cascade of brutality in the Philippines, or the stream of hateful incidents in the US. In Australia, white supremacist groups staged 'victory rallies' after the US election, and posters appeared last weekend at Melbourne University telling 'dunecoons, shitskins, niggers, chinks' to get out. This permissiveness isn't just about Trump, though he is a catalyst.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why we're slow to help Pakistan

    • Michael Mullins
    • 30 August 2010
    4 Comments

    The Australian public is being delivered a profoundly misleading subliminal message that, because the Taliban are active in the region, they are tied up in providing relief for flood victims. We need to forget politics for a while and think about the part we can play in helping Pakistanis through their crisis.

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  • RELIGION

    Behind the Pope's condom 'gaffe'

    • Michael Czerny
    • 05 May 2009
    2 Comments

    Abstinence and fidelity win little public support in Western discourse, but are increasingly included, even favoured, in national AIDS strategies in Africa. Culture counts, and a condom is more than a piece of latex.

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