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Author: Brian Matthews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Escaping Oprah and Christmas

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 December 2010
    2 Comments

    'Apodemialgia' is the opposite of nostaligia: a desire to escape. Add the brash, McDonald's-sponsored presence of Oprah to the pleasant but undeniably testing rigours of Christmas and apodemialgics all over the country will be reaching for something stronger than McCoffee. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Meaning amid wedding chaos

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 November 2010
    1 Comment

    At the edge of each knot of resplendent women stood the groom. Uncomfortable in a constricting collar or a slightly askew bow tie or colours they'd never worn before and would never wear again. Many looked curiously grumpy. Wasn't this their day of days? What was going wrong here?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fanatic's football fairytale

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 October 2010
    1 Comment

    Fiction writers have to arrange events so that they achieve the required outcome without stretching credulity. Yet real life routinely throws up sequences so bizarre that a fiction writer wouldn't dare to own them. Try this one. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Political farce aboard the Starship Ostracise

    • Brian Matthews
    • 08 September 2010
    1 Comment

    Lieutenant Yoo Hoo Hoo leans forward to read the tape: 'Gillard offers Katter trip to Russian Space Station'. Our voices are drowned out by a persistent beeping sound. The specially engineered Windsor-Oakeshott Thrusters have split and the Ostracise is going into reverse.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Staking out our vampire fetish

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 August 2010
    1 Comment

    For all our modern sophistication, refinement and technology, we remain in imaginative thrall to one of the most venerable and terrifying of folk figures. The vampire combines two of human kind's profoundly obsessive preoccupations: mortality and sex.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Burke, Wills and ... Rudd?

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 July 2010
    6 Comments

    Burke and Wills have long since attained the kind of heroic status Australians seem inclined to assign to catastrophic failure. But perhaps, in mid 2010, we might see their expedition's story as being more about the strains, perils and transience of leadership.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Quasimodo comes to Woolies

    • Brian Matthews
    • 16 June 2010
    1 Comment

    He was horribly contorted. His head was bent over his right shoulder as if being crushed down. The angle of the head concealed the right ear and enforced a distortion of his mouth and right eye. You don't stare at such afflicted people so I gazed elsewhere until he was on the move.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Iceland's ash cloud of the apocalypse

    • Brian Matthews
    • 19 May 2010
    9 Comments

    If Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erruption was disruptive, its cousin Katla may have worse in store. Volcanoes, emanating a kind of preternatural, primal, patience, are landlords whose unchanging message is: you are renting; you haven't bought.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When Harry Hogan went to war

    • Brian Matthews
    • 21 April 2010
    14 Comments

    Harry was 18, a knockabout bush larrikin ready to give anything a try. He joined the Second Machine Gun Battalion on 10 February 1915 and landed at Gallipoli on 16 August. For the next four months he, like so many of his fellow soldiers, had an undistinguished, brutalising time, memories of which would stay with him forever.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cate Blanchett, Peter Garrett and other endangered creatures

    • Brian Matthews
    • 25 March 2010
    5 Comments

    Few people give a toss about Bilbies, the Arts or Heritage, but the moment someone rediscovers them and deems them indispensable, only to find that Bilbies are disappearing and Arts and Heritage are in palliative care, Garrett's a goner — again.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stark raven Barnaby Joyce

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 February 2010
    4 Comments

    In Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, pet raven Grip is given to tantalising but incomprehensible pronouncements, fluttering annoyingly around the edges of conversational gatherings, and launching sudden, inexplicable attacks.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The climate change vanishing act

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 January 2010
    3 Comments

    Senator Steve Fielding attempted to debunk climate change theories using graphs based on Channel 9's Snicko. The debate petered out when Tony Abbott incautiously declared it was all 'crap'. Re-thinking, he amended crap to tax — it was just a big tax.

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