Best Of 2010

02 January 2011

ARTS AND CULTURE

Best of 2010: Germaine Greer's utopia
- Jasmine-Kim Westendorf
- 14 January 2011
1 Comment
Some say that not only is The Female Enuch of little relevance today: it never was relevant. Such arguments are often based more on attacks on Greer personally, and feminism generally, than considered critiques of the value of the feminist agenda set out in the book.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Other unsung Indigenous heroes
- Myrna Tonkinson
- 14 January 2011
Not yet 40, she must live in Perth, hundreds of kilometres from home, to receive dialysis. She is currently in hospital recovering from spinal surgery, and so is separated even from her city-based loved ones. Yet she appears always with a beaming smile.
READ MORE
INTERNATIONAL

Best of 2010: Arresting Mexico's borderland femicide
- Ellena Savage
- 13 January 2011
2 Comments
Some 5000 women have been killed in Juarez since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1994. Most are workers who have been tortured and sexually abused. Because of the boost to the economy associated with NAFTA, Mexican media outlets and academics often turn a blind eye.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Best of 2010: To Kill A Mockingbird and asylum seeker justice
- Kerry Murphy
- 13 January 2011
1 Comment
Atticus works within the system and hopes thereby to reform it. He wonders 'why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro come up'. Many lawyers will understand the challenge of working for the unpopular 'other': just replace 'Negro' with asylum seeker or 'Muslim woman in burqa'.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Commission flats fable
- Virginia Millen
- 12 January 2011
He had the emaciated cheeks of an addict. She was smaller, toothless and aged beyond her years. As we closed our gate he struck her. She fell on the bitumen, lit by the headlight of a passing car. 'You touch her and I'll belt you too,' the man yelled to my partner.
READ MORE
CARTOON

Best of 2010: More crap about refugees
- Fiona Katauskas
- 12 January 2011
READ MORE
ENVIRONMENT

Best of 2010: Gillard's climate coup
- Tony Kevin
- 12 January 2011
3 Comments
If the Gillard Government manages to serve a full term, there is a good chance that Parliament will pass a well-designed, effective national carbon pricing policy into law in 2012. This would be a major policy success that Gillard could legitimately boast of going into a 2013 full-term election.
READ MORE
EUREKA STREET TV

Best of 2010: Peter Kennedy's first year in exile
- Peter Kirkwood
- 11 January 2011
READ MORE
RELIGION

Best of 2010: Mary MacKillop's Australian story
- Katharine Massam
- 11 January 2011
1 Comment
Mary MacKillop's face is on the Sydney Habour Bridge, at least temporarily. Is she becoming one of the clichés for Australia, alongside bushmen and Hills Hoist mums in our catalogue of national identity?
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Tony Abbott's missing moral core
- Neil Ormerod
- 11 January 2011
18 Comments
Tony Abbott has been in public life for a long time. Most recently there has been his meteoric rise to leadership of the Liberal party and to a hair’s breadth from the prime ministership itself. Charming and disarming as he can be, there is something deeply disturbing in the way he carries out his public role.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Gillard's win a loss for feminists
- Catherine Marshall
- 10 January 2011
3 Comments
Rudd's eviction should strike fear into the hearts of feminists everywhere. For this is how the Labor Government operates, unsheathing the swords, wrenching power, cutting down a leader before he has had time to really prove himself. Imagine what it will do when that leader is a woman.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Don't shoot the messenger, award him the Nobel Peace Prize
- Michael Mullins
- 10 January 2011
2 Comments
The character flaws of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are being exaggerated in order to shift the burden of shame from embarrassed governments on to Assange himself. We need to be told why it's in the public interest to hide the undermining of the international cluster bombs ban by the British Foreign Office.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Don't wimp out at the ballot box
- Edwina Byrne
- 07 January 2011
5 Comments
It would be easy to cast a donkey vote or a vote for a minor party and to thus wash your hands of the responsibility for our governance for the next three or so years. In a representative democracy, a vacuous election represents a lazy polity.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Vote 1 bus 'bludger'
- Sarah Burnside
- 07 January 2011
2 Comments
'This election', says Tony Abbott, 'is about you.' Recently, passengers on a Perth bus found themselves involved in an impromptu social experiment. 'This guy has no money and tried to give me a ticket that's two days old,' the bus driver said, 'What do you reckon? Should I let him on?'
READ MORE
MEDIA

Best of 2010: The dignity of Carl Williams
- Andrew Hamilton
- 06 January 2011
4 Comments
When celebrities who have treated people violently suffer themselves from violence, their suffering is approved because it is an expected part of the plot. The death of Carl Williams has been covered as if it were an episode of Underbelly. Williams deserves better than this.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Best of 2010: Stoning death by male ego
- Tim Kroenert
- 06 January 2011
7 Comments
The trial and execution of Soraya M are portrayed in agonising, visceral detail. The stoning of 'adulterous' women under the auspices of Shariah law is shown to be less about violence inherent to Islam than the egos of brutal and bullying men.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: The crucifixion of Christine Nixon
- Moira Rayner
- 05 January 2011
15 Comments
No firestorm of blame would be raging in the media were Christine Nixon not a woman, a decent and strong woman, a prominent woman and an ethically sound woman of an age and with the experience to possess a raging integrity of her own and, by her very being, to offer ruthless men a soft target.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Best of 2010: Misdiagnosing Benjamin
- Barry Gittins
- 05 January 2011
9 Comments
The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders may merge Asperger's into the broader 'autism spectrum disorder'. The father of a misdiagnosed two-year-old boy reveals the emotional and social implications of mental illness pigeonholing.
READ MORE
RELIGION

Best Of 2010: Why a conscientious Christian could vote for the Greens
- Frank Brennan
- 04 January 2011
19 Comments
It would be regrettable if an attack by Cardinal Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby on the 'anti-Christian' Greens could be construed as an indirect shot across the bows of the atheist Prime Minister. On some policy issues the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Best Of 2010: The thirty good priests
- Brian Doyle
- 04 January 2011
2 Comments
For every greedy evil rapacious liar priest .. there are thirty great and subtle men .. Who wake alone quite early and don their vocations .. Willingly like a thorny endlessly tumultuous prayer
READ MORE
CARTOON

Best Of 2010: Julian Assange spoils Christmas
- Fiona Katauskas
- 04 January 2011
READ MORE
EUREKA STREET TV

Best of 2010: Anwar invokes true meaning of sharia law
- Peter Kirkwood
- 04 January 2011
READ MORE

Subscriber login

Best Of 2010