Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Ian C Smith

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The matter of trust

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 19 August 2021
    10 Comments

    My son’s Athenian flat was burgled last month. I had been visiting Athens for the first time in more than a year, and so was with the family when they arrived back, after a fairly brief evening absence, to sheer chaos. Anybody who has had this experience will be able to picture the scene: every drawer and cupboard had been opened, with the contents spilled and strewn everywhere. Even the loft had been checked.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dancer

    • Diane Fahey
    • 02 August 2021
    2 Comments

    I'm standing before the portrait of a woman with closed eyes, her hands delicately cupping, almost, her tilted head. In her face, in her composure, a flower-like serenity that speaks of care, reverence.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s spiritual journey

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 01 June 2021
    11 Comments

    Like the best religious poetry, Dylan’s works resists easy interpretation and remains open to endless meditation. Dylan’s overtly political songs — ‘Hurricane’, ‘Political World’ — and love songs — ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Tangled up in Blue’ — have often been challenging. It’s the same with his religious output.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An incarnation of chiaroscuro

    • Ian C Smith
    • 13 April 2021
    3 Comments

    I flip his collar, air chill, damp, my quick fists burrowing into jacket pockets. I long for an angel with Edie’s face, convent-innocent, unlike mine, who might understand, even share, my boyish dream of making the big time.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    When economic policy transcends political division

    • David James
    • 08 April 2021
    5 Comments

    It is one of the ironies of Australian political history that a policy that has profoundly benefited this country’s version of capitalism came, not from the right, but from the Labor party and unions. The mandating of superannuation payments in 1992 under the Keating government has profoundly changed Australia’s financial system.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Australia and China through the ages

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 10 September 2020
    7 Comments

    The China story, described this week by the ABC’s Director of News Gavin Morris as ‘the story of our times’, defies simplistic renderings, however much a significant part of Australian-based commentary masquerades as such. The rapid revolutions of the modern media cycle do not permit much nuance or lengthy historically informed pieces.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That first sanctuary

    • Ian Smith
    • 21 July 2020
    1 Comment

    He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    High Court decision on palace letters

    • Daniel Sleiman
    • 02 June 2020
    19 Comments

    Will former Governor General John Kerr's correspondence with the Queen shed light on what really happened in 1975? It may very well, and historians like Jenny Hocking were willing to challenge the National Archives of Australia's refusal to access such records in High Court.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Allies keeping faith despite Medevac blow

    • Carolina Gottardo and Nishadh Rego
    • 12 December 2019
    6 Comments

    Outside, a Martian-red haze kisses the windows. An ode to the future perhaps. Most of the people present are already aware of the Medevac repeal decision. The room is heavy with silence, the mood is sombre, but far from resigned. We want change, and are willing to have a crack at demanding it.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pro bono prodigal

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 15 July 2019
    4 Comments

    Wandering out of sorts around the lake, my thoughts backward now there is more past than future, I see a boy and girl on a school day wearing uniforms I recognise from when my son arranged his to resemble the garb of an urchin.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An Orwellian view of climate change

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 July 2019
    6 Comments

    By 'belly to earth', Orwell meant not only the uncomplicated, hands-on approach he threw himself into at Wallington. It also denoted a quality of engagement with the natural world that he saw to be threatened by the nature of what he considered to be the 'evil' times in which he lived — a feeling familiar to many in 2019.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Prayers of connection and disconnection

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 06 March 2019
    12 Comments

    I've recently been reading about people who disconnect in radical ways, or else manage a balancing act between connection with society and disconnection. The recently deceased Sister Wendy Beckett was one such. So too is Brother Harold Palmer who, like Sister Wendy, began his seclusion in a caravan.

    READ MORE