Eureka Street

Keywords: Alchemy

ARTS AND CULTURE

A guitar that sings to the universe
- Warwick McFadyen
- 21 November 2024
David Gilmour’s latest album, Luck and Strange, emerges as a meditative masterpiece, steeped in themes of time, mortality, and the currents of life. With Gilmour’s unmistakable playing style, the album channels the introspection of an artist reflecting on paths taken and those left behind.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Yesterday to today
- David Rowland
- 25 October 2023
1 Comment
Paul McCartney's concerts evoke a communal magic, lighting up arenas with shared cultural memory spanning generations. Seeing the legendary musician perform in concert, retaining a youthful vigour, the experience can feel like a poignant rendezvous across time.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Carrying the weight of the daily news
- Cherie Gilmour
- 29 March 2022
13 Comments
A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

The promise of alchemy
- David Rowland
- 01 November 2021
8 Comments
Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Ormiston Gorge revelation
- James Orrock
- 20 January 2020
2 Comments
Rest in late afternoon silence, the vision quest in flight / Red ramparts attenuate to pink mauve in muted light; / Only gold could slake the Depression fever of Lewis Lasseter / Lead to an alchemy of empty jam tins and broken beer bottles / Fibula and femur disjoint, wrecked on iron pyrite reefs.
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INTERNATIONAL

Boris, Brexit and taking it up to political bull
- Binoy Kampmark
- 03 June 2019
2 Comments
An enduring memory of the 2016 Brexit campaign was the claim by pro-leavers that the EU was extracting some £350 million a week. The claim, ignoring EU subsidies, returns and contributions to Britain, was so outrageously proud and inaccurate, it stuck. Which leads us to a novel citizen's experiment on the issue of lying in politics.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Birthday ballot
- David Atkinson
- 01 October 2018
I am transported to the sappers. In a pitch-dark deluge like this, gun turrets and slush banish daydreams of beaches and cobalt rockpools. Recollections of the birthday ballot, tremble of black and white TV in the corner. My fingers drag a crested envelope from the letterbox, the breeze brings ironic coo of peaceful doves.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Walt Whitman on Donald Trump
- Wally Swist
- 03 September 2018
5 Comments
Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

I am not ephemeral
- Marjon Mossammaparast
- 24 February 2015
8 Comments
How many times rooted are we to earth, though we would reach away from it, lifting our arms like trees? My stem, yielding to the fashioner’s knowing hand? I am not after all ephemeral. No petals of a flower.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

The asphalt ribbon hauling us home
- Angela O'Rourke and Will Day
- 07 October 2014
5 Comments
Cresting the hill our breath suspends in unison. We are laughing, eye-spying. You, the one not driving, spy it first: a Jeff Koons puppy, backlit, riding a wave.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Bogan Jesus
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 29 August 2014
5 Comments
Casting Christ as a bogan will rub theological feathers awry; a larger linguistic burden for many readers, however, is the unrelenting Strine and hoary cultural references. High art? No. Engaging? Highly. Jesse Adams is on about peace; an inclusive peace that includes social outcasts.
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AUSTRALIA

The alchemy of Australia's personality politics
- Fatima Measham
- 15 July 2013
9 Comments
Voters find it difficult to buy ideas wholesale when they don't make sense in retail. Imagine a voter who would like to see the Labor Party build on reforms in education and health but cannot abide its policy on asylum seekers. This is where the focus on personalities actually matters. Much of the dissatisfaction with leaders ultimately rests on a public assessment of the way policies are prosecuted.
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Keywords: Alchemy