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Keywords: Planes

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Nowhere to hide thanks to wi-fi in the sky

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 29 June 2018
    2 Comments

    Who wants wi-fi up in the air anyway? Until the recent arrival of in-flight internet connectivity, flights presented one with a rare opportunity to escape real life and forget it ever existed. This, after all, is the reward for a long, uncomfortable flight: precious time. At least, it used to be.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The meek find the violent absolute

    • Carolyn Masel
    • 07 May 2018

    Early traumas last, the experts say ... but memory can resemble an old wound that presages damp days or, like a sharp new line, make one gasp again. What violence do they endure who with nightmare slowness flee a wolfish past? And are theirs unexamined lives who have attained the modern armour-plated dream?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In my world tigers eat leaves

    • Fitzroy Community School students
    • 04 December 2017
    2 Comments

    These seven poems were written by students of the Fitzroy Community School in Melbourne. They were among the many submitted to the Dorothea MacKellar Poetry Awards, the oldest and largest annual national poetry competition in Australia. This year's subject was 'All Over the World'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remembrance Day, 2016

    • Barnaby Smith and Earl Livings
    • 03 November 2017
    5 Comments

    Think also of you, my father, tending to aircraft engines, or helping out on black-market runs in small cargo planes ... No action as such, though early in the war you crossed submarine-haunted seas on a troop ship, and patrolled a jungle aerodrome ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our mothers called us little fish

    • Chelsea Candy
    • 02 November 2017
    2 Comments

    You'd swear a dinghy was alive. Sometimes she was sluggish and moody, refusing to set, dragging me along a grey sea. Or she hurtled like a stallion, not caring if we won or if we went over, me hanging off the side by my ankle straps, not knowing where we would end.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A world of majesty and cruelty

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 11 August 2017
    14 Comments

    We have just taken off from Dubai for St Petersburg. My son is marvelling at the immensity of Dubai’s airport—now officially the busiest in the world. We have stood on a bus—stifling, cramped—and boarded our air-conditioned connecting flight with a deep sense of relief. We have watched the planes lining up behind ours on the shimmering tarmac, and have noted the outside temperature flashing on the screen: 44 degrees Celsius. Thank God we’re getting out of here. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Jane Goodall's quest to stem the human plague

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 12 July 2017
    7 Comments

    Revered for her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Stream, Goodall has spent the past three decades travelling the world in an effort to alert its human inhabitants to the alarming news: we are destroying the planet. The message seems to have been lost on those in a position to halt the change, for research scientists have just reported that a mass extinction is currently underway, a biological annihilation in which billions of regional or local populations have already been lost.

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  • MEDIA

    Shielding kids from Grenfell Tower televised trauma

    • Barry Gittins
    • 16 June 2017
    4 Comments

    An article focusing on the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings reported that people 'exposed to more than six hours of daily media coverage of the tragedy were more likely to experience symptoms of acute stress than those directly affected by the event'. News junkies, or those who saw extended coverage, were found to be worse off than those who actually survived the bombings. This is sobering as we consider how we deal with our children's exposure to traumatic events playing out on TV news.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Why we will never give up flying

    • Greg Foyster
    • 27 April 2017
    14 Comments

    I haven't flown for six years. I didn't feel a pressing need to travel, but most of all I didn't want to make such an enormous contribution to climate change. A return flight from Melbourne to London pumps about 1.8 tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, wiping out other efforts to reduce emissions at home. But now here I am on a Jetstar flight to Sydney for a climate change conference. As the plane takes off, I squirm with a sense of hypocrisy: I've broken my vow for the same reason I made it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scenes from a city picked clean by investors

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 03 March 2017
    4 Comments

    An unread newspaper tumbles and breaks apart in the wind. A man sits alone on a park bench wondering what it would be like to hear children riding bicycles through the park. As darkness settles the city's workers commence their long journeys home. Not even the music of the street performers is heard anymore. They were all relocated. Car engines hum and airplanes roar. Somehow the city ecosystem continues despite the investment predators having eaten up all other types of life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To feel this world

    • Allan Padgett
    • 01 March 2017

    Notes that humans cannot hear include the sound of thylacines crying in a van diemen forest, a dodo's plaintive shuffle on a nearshore kiwi island, a mammoth's woolly orgasm on an ecstatic arctic tundra, an esperance dog weed's silent transpiration, the rumbles of a gastric brooding frog giving birth by burping - these things are far too late for caring. Things we need to see and taste include the surging milk of human kindness, the euphoric rainbow of random caring - these would make a nice day nicer.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We are links in the chain of asylum seeker cruelty

    • Rod Grant
    • 18 November 2016
    18 Comments

    Having a sense of something as right or wrong, good or bad, is the essence of humanity. We get it from home, from education, religion, friends, the media. It's the sniff test or the pub test or the gut feeling or the Bible or Quran or Torah. We all have it. And just as people have a sense of right and wrong, we also have a very good humbug detector, and it's clanging loudly when politicians unctuously claim all their 'stop the boats' strategies are driven by desire to prevent drownings at sea.

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