Keywords: The Waiting City
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Julie Perrin
- 18 August 2020
31 Comments
The capacity to story our experience is a powerful tool for reflection and understanding. As adults we learn that no story is pure and we are capable of telling ourselves spin, but the shaping of experience into story is the bread and butter of our lives. Narrative, it has been said, is a primary act of mind.
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AUSTRALIA
- Dustin Halse
- 30 July 2020
4 Comments
In Australia, we have long boasted of our unparalleled prosperity and strong economic growth. We have championed home ownership and the quarter acre block — after all our home is meant to be our castle. But for too many, the basic human right of having a place to call home remains out of reach.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 10 April 2020
15 Comments
In Christian churches the celebration of Easter this year will look more like Lent or Passion week. All Australians, too, will be without football, concerts, interstate and international travel and family gatherings. The atmosphere, too, will be one of constraint, not freedom. Instead of celebrating the present, we may be weighed down by fear and anxiety about the future. We are all captive to COVID-19.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Anchored in the treachery of sand, wearing waves until the snip of a certain comber shreds them landward. They call this weed. There are people here too busy in their pleasure. They stare further out across the stolid hungers of tankers queued to feed national necessity, rapacity.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Bill Rush, Rory Harris, Collen Keating
- 13 January 2020
2 Comments
It's as though it's suddenly turned winter, the way the earth is covered over and the grey stretch of ash is drawn up to its chin like a blanket. And though it's day, the bird-less quiet is a kind of night, and everything we ever thought we knew has been turned upside down, the first now last, and the last first.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 17 December 2019
5 Comments
Stopping along a ridge, we beheld the Garhwal Himalaya range as it came into view: a tumble of mountains crowned on the horizon by an irregular, saw-toothed range ... In that brief moment between sunrise and daylight, when a once-secretive world would be illuminated, our wonder at the world was multiplied many times over.
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AUSTRALIA
- Celeste Liddle
- 28 October 2019
10 Comments
A year ago, I made the decision to call a wrecker and get my car crushed into a cube. While realising how much money I was wasting was the tipping point, it was not the sole deciding factor. Firstly, there was the car accident I had nine years ago. Then there was going to Europe and seeing what public transport could be.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Ramm
- 30 September 2019
2 Comments
This place is new to my son, who doesn't know that satin bowerbirds pilfer the brush ... He's busy tracing each scribble in each gum, and my hands are full of his hands, faintly heavy — faintly delicate. A towering deciduous fig hangs over us; its branches are neural pathways, thin at their tips the way memories thin in time.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Catherine Marshall
- 30 July 2019
1 Comment
Three times in the past three years I have received a spontaneous gift in the form of a scarf. The gifts came from three different people, on three different continents. As it happens, there's a shelf in my bedroom cupboard stacked with neatly folded scarves and wraps in rainbow hues. Every last one of them has a story to tell.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- David Adès
- 25 February 2019
2 Comments
You say you are not in a war zone, but look at all these deaths mounting up around you, this friend and that one suddenly gone, the news coming unexpectedly and from unexpected sources, and with each passing, other deaths: the death of friendships, of anticipation, of familiar voices ...
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 18 February 2019
'We can do this better by breaking down the silos and binding together our concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.' Opening Keynote Address by Fr Frank Brennan SJ at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference, Port Macquarie 19 February 2019.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Ann Deslandes
- 17 January 2019
4 Comments
There are others here on the beach, standing and staring at the border wall as the ocean tides crash and spray. I've met so many now who have been separated from their partners, parents, and children, those physical bonds forcibly torn with little possibility of reconnection.
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