Vol 32 No 15

31 July 2022

ARTS AND CULTURE

The book corner: Beyond belief
- Barry Gittins
- 12 August 2022
Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Discovery or cover-up?
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 August 2022
9 Comments
Much has recently written about the doctrine of discovery and its bearing on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States where it grounded an early legal decision. The doctrine enshrined in law claims that the discovery of underpopulated and cultivated lands conferred on the discoverers the right to ownership, and was used to justify colonial occupation of territory in the Americas, Asia and Africa.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

This sporting life
- Gillian Bouras
- 10 August 2022
6 Comments
It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes interested and supportive people to encourage athletic talent. A recent documentary on the world's most successful male distance runner Sir Mo Farah raises questions around how host countries know about waste of talent and opportunity when they routinely deport asylum seekers or lock them up?
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

At Glendalough
- John Kelly
- 10 August 2022
1 Comment
Walk with me a while now / as an up-and-ready sun bids / the blinking world: “Good day!” / in this hallowed place / where two lakes meet, / and Kevin prayed / and studied in his cave; / and where water, wind and light / conspire to cast a faery gossamer / on tree and grass and stream.
READ MORE
INTERNATIONAL

Impending catastrophe leads calls to help fight famine
- Kirsty Robertson
- 10 August 2022
2 Comments
Last month I travelled to Ethiopia, visiting an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp filled with thousands of people facing a hunger crisis. The triple threats of conflict, COVID and climate have created the perfect storm, with serious impacts on countries that depend heavily on grain, fuel and fertiliser imports from Russia or Ukraine, including Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

ARTificial intelligence
- Jamie Wigley
- 09 August 2022
1 Comment
To many who work in the arts industry, the rise of art-making artificial intelligence may pose an eventual threat to their livelihoods. Will independent artists be replaced by corporations using AI to generate mass entertainment?
READ MORE
ENVIRONMENT

How should Labor handle nuclear waste storage in SA?
- Michele Madigan
- 04 August 2022
9 Comments
With $1 trillion of debt accumulating over the last seven years in attempts to establish a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility, the new Labor Government is facing mounting pressure to rethink the nuclear waste storage plan for Kimba.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Home sweet home turns sour
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 August 2022
8 Comments
It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. A home, however, is more than a house. It connotes connections that are central to humanity. Left without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar; they are diminished in their humanity.
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Sharing a world both clean and not
- Barry Gittins
- 03 August 2022
1 Comment
History has repeatedly shown us that what gets us through a crisis, what helps us to recover and rebuild, is responding to it with prosocial behaviour ― working together, starting with our communities at the local level, and from there building mutually supportive relationships at and across every level of society.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

#Kindness
- Cherie Gilmour
- 02 August 2022
6 Comments
We all know the Internet can be a seething cesspool of vitriol, so the presence of heart-warming videos of people slipping $20 into someone’s coat pocket or randomly complimenting a stranger, even the ubiquitous handing out of flowers, is largely welcome. But is this actually kindness? If an act of kindness happens and no one is there to film it, did it really happen?
READ MORE
AUSTRALIA

Former detainee seeks compensation for unlawful detention
- Maeve Elrington
- 02 August 2022
3 Comments
Former detainee, Kurdish-Iranian refugee Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitabar, seeks compensation from the Federal Government for what he alleges was unlawful detention. Detained offshore in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and in Australia for almost eight years, Moz is seeking compensation in the Federal Court of Australia for the physical and emotional toll of his detention, particularly from the final 14 months of detention in two Melbourne based hotels.
READ MORE
ARTS AND CULTURE

Alone
- David Halliday
- 01 August 2022
1 Comment
As the boat pulls away, a figure is left standing alone on the rocky beach beneath a thick wall of fir trees. The person stares out after the boat relishing the last morsel of human contact they will have for an indefinite time.
READ MORE

Subscriber login

Vol 32 No 15