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Keywords: Fires

  • AUSTRALIA

    Fatal firestorm's distant witness

    • Bronwyn Lay
    • 16 February 2009
    8 Comments

    A year ago, on the day of the National Apology, the emotion was palpable over the seas. But it was hard not being there, standing on the same dirt as your fellow countrymen. It is similarly difficult to be away from home during a time of natural disaster.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Politics stymie bushfire response

    • Paul Collins
    • 13 February 2009
    12 Comments

    Though the fires are still burning, the blaming has already begun, with environmentalists and academics pitted against rural people and firefighters. We have entered a new era of fires and will need to take a long, ecologically sensitive look at what has happend.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When Leonard Cohen prays

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 February 2009
    13 Comments

    The world of pop music is dominated by prettiness and skin-deep perfection. In that context, Cohen's greatness is not instantly discernable. Lately a Buddhist, he has spent his latter years in study of religion — 'But cheerfulness keeps breaking through.'

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  • RELIGION

    Putting the flame to blame

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 February 2009
    12 Comments

    A compulsive fire lighter sets fire to a few leaves. The fire grows and ends up causing many deaths. While it is momentarily satisfying to find someone on whom to fix blame for the fires, it is unhelpful to be fixated in blame.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bushfire TV

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 February 2009
    3 Comments

    Kevin Rudd controversially told Channel Nine's Today show that the Victorian firebugs had committed 'mass murder'. Grief and anger compete during such times, and for armchair critics it is often all too easy to take the moral high ground.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When nature is the enemy

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 February 2009
    7 Comments

    Fires and floods, murderous cyclones, unprecedented storms — none of them confined to their time honoured places and seasons. Nature is no longer our familiar element and our inspiration. It's running amok.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    No ark in a firestorm

    • Moira Rayner
    • 11 February 2009
    3 Comments

    What can I do, I think, that first Sunday, other than being a nuisance at an emergency centre, or a gawker? I fall into something practical, fostering survivors' dogs and cats, and caring for bewildered companion animals who survived but whose owners didn't.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Humanity endures in bushfire tragedy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 February 2009
    9 Comments

    During the financial turmoil this summer, images of fire have abounded. The economy is 'going into meltdown'. Shareholdings 'turn to ashes'. This weekend's bushfires make us ask instinctively what really matters.

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  • RELIGION

    Educating leaders for the contemporary Australian Church

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 October 2008

    'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The new Indigenous affairs orthodoxy

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 11 September 2008
    11 Comments

    An emerging school of thought claims that substance abuse is the cause, not the symptom, of the present-day Indigenous crisis. Such myths give an inadequate account for the situation, and fail to provide prescriptions for change.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tibet trauma not written in the stars

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 April 2008

    'Geo-politically astute' astrologer Jessica Murray believes revelations about China's violations against Tibet were prompted by astrological activity. For all their glib outlandishness and pseudo-scientific jargon, contemporary astrologers still fascinate.

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  • RELIGION

    Nonconformist Aussie anticipates traditional Greek Easter

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 March 2008
    3 Comments

    In the Orthodox Church, Lent is a fairly strict period of austerity, which is one reason for Carnival: traditional societies have long understood that sessions of high spirits are needed before and after difficult times. They are also undisturbed by the blurring of the sacred and the secular.

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