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Keywords: Wildlife

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Birthday ballot

    • David Atkinson
    • 01 October 2018

    I am transported to the sappers. In a pitch-dark deluge like this, gun turrets and slush banish daydreams of beaches and cobalt rockpools. Recollections of the birthday ballot, tremble of black and white TV in the corner. My fingers drag a crested envelope from the letterbox, the breeze brings ironic coo of peaceful doves.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Wentworth's by-election bellwether

    • Ailsa Piper
    • 06 September 2018
    6 Comments

    Wentworth as I know it is not an electorate that is easily pinned down. It's also not easily duped. At the far eastern tip of the Wentworth electorate, a measured war is being waged. It's a microcosm, at state level, of the forces that will come to play in the upcoming federal by-election.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Around the world in 18 ways

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 31 July 2018

    In Tahiti I fall ill, bronchitis amid humid splendour. At a summer camp in Dutchess County I get the sack. Cops warn me for hitch-hiking after sundown in Maine. In the wintry Cotswolds I wheeze in a bedewed attic. A lost aunt is found in Liverpool post-Toxteth.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Must we remain so exceptionally cruel?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 24 May 2018
    3 Comments

    These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The rosella's last walk (an eco parable)

    • Julie Perrin
    • 30 April 2018
    20 Comments

    The bushland forms part of the scant wild space remaining in coastland eroded by development. I speak my husband's name. 'Look,' I whisper. The bright green bird lies still in the late afternoon light, showing no signs of life. But the rosella is scrambling. No obvious cause of injury is visible.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Another page torn from the glossary of life

    • Fatima Measham
    • 29 March 2018
    10 Comments

    The last male northern white rhinoceros was euthanased in March. With two females still alive, there is hope the subspecies might be saved. The impending loss of an animal that evolved over six million years, and once grazed in hundreds of thousands, is worth noting. There can be room in our hearts to lament.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate champion SA Labor's dark stain

    • Greg Foyster
    • 16 March 2018
    5 Comments

    The complexity of environmental policy in SA echoes a broader trend in environment issues: climate change has monopolised the debate, squeezing out local conservation concerns. The upshot is a Left-leaning government can be progressive on clean energy, while holding a regressive stance on less prominent topics.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Conservatives and conservation

    • Tim Beshara
    • 17 October 2017
    8 Comments

    The most prominent self-described conservative in Australia, former prime minister Tony Abbott, has expressed many views on conservation and on the merits of addressing climate change, but none of these views could be argued as coming from a position of conservatism that Teddy Roosevelt could agree with.

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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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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Latrobe Valley a litmus test for clean energy transition

    • Jarni Blakkarly
    • 09 November 2016
    4 Comments

    The death-knell was sounding for Hazelwood long before the announced closure last week. The 50 year old power plant is one of the country's oldest and most inefficient, making it extremely vulnerable to the lower electricity price and supply surplus. As the most polluting power plant per unit of energy produced in the industrialised world, many will be glad to see the power station go. But its closure also flags a rising dilemma, over who bears the cost of the transition to clean energy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Faith and humanism behind Tim Winton's curtain

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 October 2016
    1 Comment

    'When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window with a rifle and aim it at people.' So begins the opening, titular essay. It is a singularly arresting entre to an essay that charts the author's complex relationship with firearms (part awe, part terror), by way of commenting on the place of guns in Australian society. In this collection of essays Winton adopts this mode frequently, weaving (sometimes deeply) personal narratives into stirring, thoughtful commentary on a broad range of social and political issues.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    We need a grassroots revival to save the reef

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 27 May 2016
    12 Comments

    Many people have hoped that when global warming manifested itself as a concrete threat, politicians would be forced into action. Yet it's becoming horrifyingly clear that the political class is quite willing to let the Great Barrier Reef, one of the natural wonders of the world, slowly die. If we want to save the reef, we're going to have to do it ourselves. The Franklin dam blockade of 1982-1983 transformed the political climate and preserved an iconic river. We need to recapture that energy.

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