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Author: Gillian Bouras

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The persistence of memory

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 28 January 2009
    5 Comments

    As the bush scents drift, I remember: the aroma of fish and chips floating along the platforms at Flinders Street Station; the smell of dust that heralds a storm, as moisture hits bone-dry earth. When your life is sliced in two by migration, you do not scorn nostalgia.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Train story

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 26 November 2008
    6 Comments

    We know it's a suffering world. Many of us plod through a vale of tears, often forgetting to count our blessings. Yet once in a while we are stopped dead in our tracks. By the human, which occasionally turns out to be the miraculous as well.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Life of a perpetual migrant

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 28 October 2008
    4 Comments

    The Rudd Government's rationale for cutting migration to Australia is economic, rather than humane. Migrants are forever tapping at the window of the past, unable to ever truly go home.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blue mood

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 06 October 2008
    5 Comments

    Mental illness has always been with us. Hippocrates attached melancholia to an excess of black bile. Christ cast out demons from the afflicted. My sister suicided after years of suffering, undiagnosed because of fear of stigma.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Matters of life and deaf

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 August 2008
    9 Comments

    Imagine the horror of a completely silent world. The deaf person requires strategies: they must make requests, or provide tactful reminders. Lip-reading is a useful skill, but beards and moustaches can provide difficulty.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Olympics a good time to start wars

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 15 August 2008
    5 Comments

    Politics is never far from the surface at the Olympics. Even at the so-called friendly Games in Melbourne in 1956, the famous 'Blood in the Water' water-polo match reflected tensions surrounding the Soviet invasion of Hungary ten days before.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Guilt edged leaders

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 01 July 2008
    4 Comments

    'Iguanagate' pariahs Belinda Neal and John Della Bosca can hardly be compared with Bush, Blair and Howard, but they are arguably on the same continuum. Surely the notion that leadership and responsibility go together still has some meaning.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Nothing smart about Rudd cluster bomb intransigence

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 30 May 2008
    6 Comments

    This week's international conference in Dublin has agreed on a draft treaty to ban cluster bombs. The Rudd Government has become the bad guy, by ensuring the 'smart bombs' purchased by the former Howard Government were excluded from the treaty.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Big Brother cameras inhibit teacher performance

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 28 April 2008
    6 Comments

    The proposed performance-related pay structure for teachers, whereby short videos will be made of teachers in the classroom, seems geared towards extroverts. Individuals with a more flamboyant style will likely be deemed the better performers.

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  • RELIGION

    Nonconformist Aussie anticipates traditional Greek Easter

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 March 2008
    3 Comments

    In the Orthodox Church, Lent is a fairly strict period of austerity, which is one reason for Carnival: traditional societies have long understood that sessions of high spirits are needed before and after difficult times. They are also undisturbed by the blurring of the sacred and the secular.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A great leap year for reconciliation

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 February 2008
    2 Comments

    According to the Ethiopian ecclesiastical calendar, a leap year belongs to St Luke. Having made its national apology to the Stolen Generations, for Australia this leap year has more in common with China's Great Leap Forward.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The purest of pleasures

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 July 2006

    Or is it? Gillian Bouras gardens in Greece.

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