Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Sky News

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A faithful woman visits me weekly

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 18 November 2014
    1 Comment

    Supplying food, whisky, news, loving sex. All this on a pine-scented mountain. I trim my stark white beard, shampoo, sweep, spray, squeegee and swipe. The hour you drive up our steep hill I open our front gates like a greeting.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The shock of the news of Kennedy and Nixon

    • Brian Matthews
    • 15 August 2014
    3 Comments

    Last week, when I heard a Margaret Throsby interview with Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, I immediately remembered in startling detail where I was forty years ago. It was high summer, a beautiful warm day in Oxford. I was strolling along the banks of the Thames through a leafy camping ground; a voice, tragic yet culpable, retrieved from an unseen radio on 8 August 1974 in another country.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Forgotten' Tiananmen's shadow on modern China

    • Evan Ellis
    • 04 June 2014
    8 Comments

    Twenty-five years ago the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. One eyewitness kept a tally of the dead that reached 2600 before hospitals went mum due to pressure from above. If China is to overcome the challenges it will face in the decades ahead, it must draw upon the great reserve of strength, the spirit of solidarity that was on display among the protesters that spring. Instead there remains a concerted effort to forget.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Empowered shock jocks must also be accountable

    • Michael Mullins
    • 10 March 2014
    9 Comments

    The Federal Government plans to change the Racial Discrimination Act to give preference to free speech over protecting individuals and groups from vilification. It is not surprising that there is strong media support for the changes, as they will give investigative reporters and shock jocks alike the legislative freedom they need to do their job. But the Government must include robust legislation to penalise those who get their facts wrong.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Ugly nationalism in support for Qantas bailout

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 March 2014
    10 Comments

    In the face of the Federal Government's resolve to be unemotional in its attitude to financial assistance for Qantas, we have Bill Shorten warning us against 'waving goodbye to an Australian icon'. Underlying mention of Qantas as an 'Australian icon' could be the sentiment associated with the 1990s resurgence of nationalism and its racist undertones associated with Pauline Hanson.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The Christmas story's whisper from the edges

    • John Falzon
    • 17 December 2013
    13 Comments

    Recently Pope Francis blasted the so-called trickle-down economic theories in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Some will scorn his message as naive at best and dangerous at worst, while others will regard it as an urgent enkindling of hope in the face of degradation and despair. The Christmas story hints that another kind of world is possible.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    A frank chat about mental illness

    • Georgina Laidlaw
    • 06 December 2013
    13 Comments

    Mental illness begets mental illness. One glance at the reportage on the Royal Commission into child sex abuse proves that. We won't discuss loved ones' mental health because to do so feels like a betrayal. We won't talk about our own mental health because what right do we have to be unhappy? But ill heath is not a right. Suffering is not indulgence. If you're telling yourself that, shut the hell up.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bless the troublemakers

    • Libby Hart
    • 30 July 2013
    1 Comment

    Fingers dipped into holy water, the grain of the cross drawn on skin. 'God speaks in silence,' he said with such certainty, as if he knew all things.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life beyond IVF purgatory

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 31 May 2013

    It wasn't so much a phone call as a lifeline — the day the fertility clinic called me with news of my pregnancy. After six years of hoping, the life my husband and I had all but given up on was to be ours. At that same time, radio host Sheridan Voysey and his wife Merryn were facing a more heartbreaking outcome.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Scene from an Athens newspaper office

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 16 October 2012
    6 Comments

    The pagemakers wear masks of chronic weariness, and stubbled cheeks: stoics conditioned by a heartless press ... Smoke rises from untidy desks as from a ship that's sinking fast, taking all hands on its burning deck ...

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Moments after meditation

    • Earl Livings
    • 28 August 2012
    1 Comment

    Somewhere else car bombs split-screen the news. Somewhere else couples harangue vows and baggaged fears. Somewhere else children mimic fashion of what works what conceals. Here ... Silence infuses skin and thought ... Much like that pause before a newborn's first surprise of light.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Banning Dante's Divine Comedy is a human tragedy

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 19 March 2012
    17 Comments

    The 17th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels describes Christians as pigs for slaughter. Yet its beautifully imagined world is open to Christian readers who can forgive the comparison. In the same way Dante has much to offer beyond derogatory depictions of gays, Jews and Muslims.

    READ MORE