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Author: Warwick Mcfadyen

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tangled up in Prussian Blue

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 23 May 2024

    The reissuing of a record is not just news for the record, it’s also a reissuing of that part of the life of the listener who knew the original. Thus it is with Richard Clapton, his debut album Prussian Blue, and me.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thoughts and prayers

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 08 May 2024

    'Thoughts and prayers': Is it now a tired, worn-out cliché, its usefulness questionable? It is now used so many times to render its meaning, its core message, void. Sometimes more than words are needed. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Normalising war is the road to hell

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 25 April 2024

    How about truth as an antidote to war? Who would have stomach for it, though we see war as part of existence? The trouble with its normalisation, such as in games, both in backyards and in cyberspace, is that becomes uncoupled from reality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Centre of Zero

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 13 March 2024

    You open the atlas and run your fingers along the edges of continents, climb mountains, trace valleys, pause at coastlines of sand and wave. This is where you have been and this, fingers arched, is where you want to go. Death is too faint to be seen. Though you know it’s there, the undiscovered country.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On the anniversary of a poet's birth, a universal message to nations

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 20 February 2024
    1 Comment

    ‘The loss of memory by a nation is also a loss of its conscience.’ As the loss of conscience grows with each succeeding generation, one day righting the boat on the sea of forgetfulness will become impossible. In the end, what people don’t know, they won’t miss. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    When history becomes myth and memory is lost

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 16 January 2024
    4 Comments

    In a recent survey of young Americans, 20 per cent of respondents, aged from 18 to 29, thought that the Holocaust was a myth. If knowledge of history fades into the mist, the space will be filled with ignorance, and worse, wilful malice. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Looking for the language of hope

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 12 December 2023

    In the gathering days to year’s end, a phrase will rise – as it does every year: Peace on Earth, goodwill to all. The phrase carries a warmth of common humanity. Unfortunately, common humanity has shown itself through history to be rather tribal than universal. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Happy 400th anniversary First Folio, Shakespeare's legacy to the world

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 16 November 2023
    2 Comments

    The First Folio was published in November 1623. Shakespeare didn’t live to see his plays gathered together in the one place. His universe of words, his meteors of wit and description, his galaxy of human frailties and strengths, his shrouds of darkness and rays of light, were collected and bound by colleagues after his death in 1616, aged 52. The world owes them profound gratitude.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    In remembrance of times, and wars, past

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 08 November 2023
    1 Comment

    This November 11, for many at ceremonies around the nation, the clocks will stop, the breath will pause for a minute to remember the dead and injured of war. And like the poppies in Flanders fields, the lists of names of men killed in action continues to grow: in Africa, in Europe and Asia. If history is our teacher, then we are very poor students.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The humdrum of daily murder in America

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 30 October 2023
    4 Comments

    In this latest mass shooting in the United States, horror does not issue automatically, it is weighed down by being too familiar. We feel for the victims, but in that feeling runs the dismal knowledge that it is just another in a long line, seemingly without end. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trying to hold on to the better angels of our nature

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 17 October 2023
    3 Comments

    Most people of sympathy and empathy would believe there is an invisible thread that binds humanity. To think otherwise, to echo British jurist Lord Denning, is to consider a panorama too awful to contemplate, that is, what if a life is just mere object to another? When the massacre becomes the norm, does the world become numb to it? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When poems are like prayers, speaking to us

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 04 October 2023
    2 Comments

    Some people pray in church, some pray alone, some share their prayer through song, and others use poems as prayer. Each carries its own line of faith that they believe unites them with something outside themselves. This union is reached through words written and words said.

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