Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Fitzroy

  • AUSTRALIA

    Maintaining children's rights amid youth detention crises

    • Kate Galloway
    • 13 January 2017
    4 Comments

    The Minister has committed to improving youth detention facilities, the appointment of 100 more staff, and revision of Victoria's youth detention policy. But in doing so, she has sheeted home blame to the former government, and has accused lawyers for the children of pandering to ideology. The government's discourse continues the tough-on-crime narrative rather than acknowledging the causes and contexts of juvenile offending and the consequences of appalling facilities on the youth who are detained.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    A new generation of remembrance

    • Kate Mani
    • 10 November 2016
    8 Comments

    It's 9pm but the setting sun shows no sign of repose as it beams down across the vast wheat fields of Fromelles. The line between land and sky blurs as yellowing crops align with the sun's reach. On the other side of no man's land, a pale moon is just visible. Straight ahead a rough path through the wheat leads to the German lines. It's down this path that I file with the Friends of the 15th Brigade, descendants of the soldiers who fought here 100 years ago in the 59th and 60th AIF battalions.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nuns in love

    • Brian Doyle
    • 31 May 2016
    7 Comments

    O, I had a sweetheart, sure I did, says a tiny stooped nun to me this morning. Long tall handsome man he was too. Did you think I signed up to be a nun before I could fall In love? No. I never met a nun yet wasn't in love before. It's good for you as a nun to have had your heart broken, seems to me, or to break someone else's heart. It's a way of the world. Better to know it so you can be tender when you see it later.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless truths from an agent against poverty

    • Brian Doyle
    • 09 March 2016
    8 Comments

    The tall man had worked for the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence for years, and long ago had lost any illusions about the overarching nobility of people who were hammered and lost and helpless against addictions, diseases, crisis and tragedy. I asked him about the most wonderful people he'd met, and he told me some amazing stories, and then I asked him about the worst, and he told me some horrifying stories, and then his face twisted and he told me about the worst of the worst.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hipster heroes of gentrification

    • Charlotte Howell
    • 02 December 2015
    1 Comment

    I was born into a working class family in Leyton, East London. But in the late 1980s, gentrification in the area forced us to relocate to the poor working class town of Harlow, Essex. In a twist of fate, these days I can't even afford to live there. This time it is not due to gentrification brought about by 'hipster' entrepreneurs, but because powerful construction companies have replaced the historical architecture with new developments and housing estates. I know who I'd rather pick a fight against.

    READ MORE

  • Maintaining the humanity of the public square

    • Greg O'Kelly
    • 01 July 2015
    3 Comments

    The phrase 'the public square' is peppered throughout Frank Brennan's work. The 1988 film Cinema Paradiso depicts the public square in a Sicilian village over 30 or so years, and its slow and subtle change from a place where human beings gather to laugh, play and discuss. Billboards and garish signs appear and it becomes a car park bereft of its humanity.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wee Mary MacKillop minds the shop

    • Brian Doyle
    • 16 December 2014
    4 Comments

    I can tell you that Fitzroy always was and will be a wry wilderness; Every colour and ethnicity and language you can imagine lives there... And now I see wee quiet shy Mary MacKillop there, minding a shop. She is fourteen. Her people are Scottish. She will be legendary, later.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Who wants to be a capitalist?

    • Moira Rayner
    • 31 October 2014
    11 Comments

    Affordable housing ought to be a hot election issue. Sadly it’s not a government priority, with ordinary people being taught to be entitled to look to capital growth in bricks and mortar as the best path to financial security. That is producing a housing price bubble and public housing is being squeezed. As a result, an increasing number of Australians can’t afford to put a roof over their head.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Has the Catholic Church in Australia any credibility left?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 03 October 2013
    18 Comments

    'What a pope; what a man! ... The credibility of the Catholic Church has been enhanced with this new pope. We see in him many of the finest aspects of the presently battered and ageing Church.' Frank Brennan's presentation for Spirituality in the Pub, Pumphouse Hotel, Fitzroy, Vic. on 2 October 2013.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Abused girls' institution trauma

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 05 August 2013
    20 Comments

    Unlike their male counterparts, 'delinquent' girls who ran away from dangerous environments were frequently incarcerated because it was perceived that they might be sexually active and fall pregnant. Their stories demonstrate the wide-ranging effects of ruptured family life and subsequent institutionalisation, and warn against the future unnecessary incarceration of vulnerable youth.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A time when they shared their drugs

    • Susan Adams, Peta Edmonds and Lyn McCredden
    • 18 June 2013
    3 Comments

    A man swims back to you like a friendly dog. Asks you for spare change. He hasn't eaten since Thursday and it's Sunday now in the city. You empty your wallet of all its coins. $2.70. The city is heavenly, full of karma. A kid with a snake tattooed on his wrist gives you two cigarettes.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The best and worst of local government

    • Moira Rayner
    • 10 May 2013
    5 Comments

    At its best local government lifts the vision of its people from NIMBY-ism and road maintenance to a sense of community and attachment. But Australians are now so disengaged from politicians state and federal that the timing of Gillard's announcement of a referendum on local government could do more harm than good.

    READ MORE