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Keywords: Homer

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Marr's penance by storytelling

    • Peter Craven
    • 20 October 2023
    3 Comments

    In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: An Odyssey

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 July 2022
    1 Comment

    Daniel Mendelsohn lectures in classics at Bard College, a liberal arts institution in New York State. His retired father, aged 81 in 2011, regrets gaps in his own education, and asks to sit in on his son’s course of seminars on Homer’s The Odyssey. Professor Mendelsohn agrees, and Jay Mendelsohn joins a class of 18-19 year-olds. Later, father and son go on a cruise that retraces The Odyssey where they discover: is home a physical place, or something you carry around with you or within you? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We gather to remember

    • Geoff Page
    • 08 December 2020
    1 Comment

    Twenty-five years from his death we gather to remember, swapping anecdotes like bank notes weathered in our wallets. The one on how as deputy he’d learn, while pausing in a doorway, the names of all three hundred new Year Sevens in a week. And how when actors failed to show for one of his rehearsals, he’d stride the stage himself.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No stranger now

    • Earl Livings
    • 24 February 2020
    2 Comments

    I circle the huge granite standing stone sunwise three times, as my ancestors did long before the designs of cranes and coins, of theory. ‘Tell me how and what they thought.’ No answer but the wheeling murmuration of a thousand starlings. A stubble field.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My mother the Surrealist

    • Michael Sharkey
    • 14 October 2019
    3 Comments

    The voices of two women in the train up to the highlands rise in volume and insistence ... 'Mother, they're not Germans. I said, gerberas, they're all around the farm. Just wait, you'll see them from the window of the lovely room we've set up for your stay. A field of gerberas in full bloom.' 'And are the Germans all in uniforms, then, dear?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Odysseus' guide to life

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 26 August 2019
    3 Comments

    He may be proud, even arrogant, but he's fun. With Odysseus you read yourself; his company is exciting and revealing, so much so that his homecoming is everyone's domesticity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    On first reading Boochani on Manus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 May 2019
    10 Comments

    No Friend But the Mountains deservedly won an Australian prize but was considered ineligible for others because the writer was not Australian. The book itself mocks that exclusion. Boochani's years on Manus Island branded him as Australian in the same way African slaves became American by the brand American owners burned on to them.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    With remembrance goes compassion: Manus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 November 2017
    21 Comments

    The refugees on Manus Island are not simply actors in a dramatic poem. They are human beings like us to whom we have a responsibility. They could have enriched us by their ingenuity and bravery had we accepted them. We should continue to listen to their voices and keep them in our hearts.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's booze culture on trial

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 February 2014
    10 Comments

    Alcohol has a privileged place in polite society. All mood changing substances rely on a myth of a better life and relationships, but the alcohol myth is distinctive because it is rooted in high as well as in popular culture. Attempts to regulate its consumption and limit the damage it does will therefore always be unlikely to succeed.

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  • MEDIA

    When rape is a joking matter

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 20 July 2012
    6 Comments

    US comedian Daniel Tosh sparked a furore with his now notorious rape joke. Many women have at least one story about being inappropriately and non-consensually touched — it first happened to me when I was 13. While jokes like Tosh's perpetuate such a culture, other comedians' 'rape jokes' seek to enlighten as well as entertain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Reinventing Greece's paradise lost

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 09 November 2011
    7 Comments

    In their Greek travels, 20th century writers Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller tried to construct a sort of paradise for themselves. Most foreign inhabitants of Greece try to do the same. I certainly did. I hope now that there is a chance of Paradise being regained.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not just war as teens fight back

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 September 2010
    3 Comments

    The characters voice implicit moral concerns about the right to kill in self-defense, and rationalise why it might be right to take up arms against the invaders. When Ellie is confronted by a mural depicting an encounterbetween Captain Cook and a group of Aboriginal Australians, she ismomentarily arrested.

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