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Author: Gillian Bouras

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lessons from a loveless marriage

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 September 2010
    7 Comments

    Once upon a time a man told me that he had gone ahead and married his wife, even though he knew he didn't love her. 'But why?' I asked, mystified, for surely living with someone you are not in love with is the hardest thing in the world. 'Because it wasn't important,' he replied.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The life and death of Barry and Aristomenis

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 July 2010
    10 Comments

    When you love, you must be prepared to die another death before you die your own. Five minutes before 19-year-old Aristomenis died, he called in at his mother's place of work to tell her he thought the exam had gone well.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Close encounters with Greek unrest

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 May 2010
    5 Comments

    Greek leaders condemned the outbreak of violence that has seen innocent people die on the streets of Athens. However many people fear that worse is to come. Most people are angry, particularly the young. Greece has never treated its youth well.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Death and rebirth of a migrant

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 14 April 2010
    4 Comments

    When such melancholy descends the only thing to do is walk. I fetched up near a chapel on a hill, for the village is ringed by chapels, six of them, in a kind of protective belt. Outside I found a gum tree and a Judas tree standing side by side: my life, or my two lives in a neat symbol.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Losing and finding Dad

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 February 2010
    11 Comments

    Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. My family seemed happy enough, but when my mother died my father rejected his children. As I contemplated a reunion I wondered if he would recognise me. It had been seven years and he had recently been diagnosed with dementia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Lessons in Greek prejudice

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 November 2009
    4 Comments

    My generation of Australians grew up with bigotry: the cordial loathing between Catholics and Protestants has faded only recently. But only when I married into a Greek family did I learn of the bitter and complicated antipathy of the Greeks for Albanians.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning from suicide

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 September 2009
    3 Comments

    The first known suicide document is an Egyptian New Kingdom papyrus entitled 'Dialogue of a World-Weary Man with his Ba-Soul'. In 1996 my sister Jacqui killed herself. Three years later our cousin Andrew did the same thing. Suicide has always been part of the human condition.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lessons from Greek and Australian 'quench-fires'

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 September 2009
    3 Comments

    In Australia it would beggar belief to see elderly nuns directing garden hoses against the fires that threaten their convents. But that is what happened last week in Greece. Australia and Greece resemble each other in many ways, but not in the way they cope with fire.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Daughter of the disappeared

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 June 2009
    5 Comments

    Malign influences seeped into the cracks that brain damage had caused, and in his mind flowered into poisonous paranoia. I found myself facing a most complicated bereavement: mourning the living is often worse than mourning the dead.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The case for publishing poetry

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 May 2009
    6 Comments

    Les Murray describes himself as a poet who is religious rather than a religious poet, and celebrates a sense of wonder and mystery. In an increasingly secular age, poetry has a new function as an alternative or complement to religion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Death, despair and global economic fallout

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 27 April 2009
    4 Comments

    Australian Shareholders Association says the BrisConnections 'lifeline' offered by the Macquarie Group won't cover 'the bulk of desperate investors'. Sometimes bad things happen to good people at the mercy of the clever and the greedy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Against the waning of bushfire grief

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 February 2009
    3 Comments

    My brother, who has been working with the SES, tells me of the eerie silence in the burnt-out bush: there are no birds. He also tells me of quirks of fate: some chooks had a miraculous escape, as did their owners, who later collected 40 eggs.

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