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Keywords: Les Murray

  • RELIGION

    NAIDOC Week homily

    • Frank Brennan
    • 03 July 2017

    There is no point in proceeding with a referendum on a question which fails to win the approval of you, the First Australians. Neither is there any point in proceeding with a referendum which is unlikely to win the approval of the overwhelming majority of the voting public, regardless of when they or their ancestors first arrived in Australia. Given that you Indigenous Australians have spoken strongly through your representatives at Uluru in support of a First Nations Voice, it is now for the Referendum Council to recommend to government a timetable for constitutional change with maximum prospects of a 'Yes' vote.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    An inclusive Australia

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 June 2017
    1 Comment

    This evening, we come together deliberately as people of diverse faiths and none, affirming the blessing of life in an inclusive country where all world views are to be respected. We are able to affirm that our spiritual lives sustain and strengthen our public lives and the vitality of the polis. Our Muslim hosts show us how to give thanks reverently for all the blessings of life, and how to attest publicly the spiritual dimension of all human life. Those of us who are migrants or descendants of migrants need to be particularly attentive to the yearnings and aspirations of those Australians who rightly claim an indigenous heritage with ancestors who have thrived on this continent for up to 60,000 years.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Turnbull twist tests common good in Murray-Darling Plan

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 November 2015
    8 Comments

    In recent reflection on the future path of Australia the common good has made a welcome return. At the same time the Turnbull Government has transferred responsibility for water resources, including the Murray-Darling Basin, from the Department of the Environment to the Department of Trade. The two things seem to be unrelated. But the concept of the common good has been embodied robustly in the Murray-Darling Basin plan and survives in the midst of continuing conflict.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Contours and prospects for Indigenous recognition in the Australian constitution

    • Frank Brennan
    • 16 October 2015
    2 Comments

    I acknowledge those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who insist that they have never ceded their sovereignty to the rest of us. I join with those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who hope for better days when they are recognised in the Australian Constitution. As an advocate for modest constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians, I respect those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who question the utility of such recognition. But I do take heart from President Obama's line in his Charleston eulogy for the late Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney: 'Justice grows out of recognition'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The gloriously flawed humanity of our federal politics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 August 2015
    9 Comments

    Recent weeks' events in federal politics stretch the imagination. The search for historical parallels brought me to the start of the Burke and Wills Expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria, the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, and the race that saw Fine Cotton unravel. Each of these events was characteristically Australian. In Les Murray’s memorable phrase, they all had sprawl: the mingling of excess, overweening self-confidence, and the cutting of corners. 

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Doogue, Brereton on keeping faith in the face of the abuse crisis

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 05 August 2015
    13 Comments

    'The question for me is: Is the Catholic Church at it's most authentic when it is covering up child abuse?' asks Adam Brereton, opinion editor for The Guardian Australia. Eureka Street TV's Peter Kirkwood talks to Catholic convert Brereton and 'cradle Catholic' Gerladine Doogue about the effect that the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is having on Australian believers.

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  • RELIGION

    Cardinal's legacy transcends gay scandal

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 12 March 2013
    25 Comments

    Many Scottish Catholics are concerned Cardinal O'Brien's legacy will be solely one of drunken fumbles with adult men. We need to remember the other O'Brien: his passion for the poor, his courage in having workshops in Catholic schools on HIV/AIDS, his support for married clergy. The lynching must stop, and compassion begin.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Diabetica and other poems

    • Les Murray
    • 05 February 2013
    3 Comments

    A man coughs like a box and turns on yellow light to follow his bladder out over the gunwale of his bed. He yawns upright trying not to dot the floor with little advance pees.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Taking revenge on idiot America

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 22 November 2012
    2 Comments

    A teen attempts suicide after being ridiculed by the judges of an American Idol style talent show. A news anchor spouts propaganda so extreme it might make a Fox News presenter blush. A reality TV participant extracts an in-use tampon and hurls it at a rival. Appalled by this endless stream of TV trash, one man snaps. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Groundhog Day for refugees

    • Lyn Bender
    • 26 September 2012
    8 Comments

    In March 2002 I spent hours with Afghanis, Iranians, Palestinians and Iraqis on hunger strikes; desperate people who felt they had no power except to use their bodies to convey their message of despair. I am not the only health professional to predict that the resurrected Pacific Solution will create the same destructive circumstances.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The opposite of Australian swimming hubris

    • John Honner
    • 01 August 2012
    10 Comments

    The Spit Baths consist of two swimming areas bounded by boardwalks built on piles sunk into Middle Harbour. At low tide there is barely enough water to swim in. Olympic medallist John Devitt does time trials in just a few feet of water. There is no black line on a sterile tiled floor, just sand and seaweed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

    • Philip Harvey
    • 03 July 2012
    7 Comments

    More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world. 

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