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Keywords: Anzac

  • AUSTRALIA

    Rebuilding trust in aged care

    • Jenneke Foottit and Sue Gledhill
    • 11 March 2021
    2 Comments

    The recently released report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care does not hold back in describing a situation that should be abhorrent to us all. As the report notes, ‘substandard care and abuse pervades the Australian aged care system’.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tattoos and the endless learning curve of life

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 11 March 2021
    26 Comments

    Of my three sons, two have tattoos. Not all-over body-as-art ones, but tattoos, nonetheless, with my army son leading the way. When he rang to tell me about this new venture, I sarcastically remarked that the only way I could cope with a tattoo was that if it depicted a heart, an arrow and the message MUM. Needless to say, a guffaw greeted this remark.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parallels between the military and the church

    • John Warhurst
    • 01 December 2020
    31 Comments

    The Australian community and its government are struggling to come to terms with the extremely serious allegations against members of the SAS for their alleged criminal misconduct during the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, we Catholics are experiencing a bad case of déjà as there are many echoes of how we felt when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RC) began in 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The shadow of responsibility: Australian war crimes allegations in Afghanistan

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 November 2020
    21 Comments

    The discussion in Australia as to how such atrocities are to be approached is telling. The call for responsibility has varied by degrees. Most tend to some variant of the rotten apple theory: a few particularly fruits that may be isolated and extruded from the barrel. Culpability can thereby be confined, preserving the integrity of other military personnel and, importantly, political decision makers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The beginning's end

    • Barry Gittins
    • 24 April 2020
    8 Comments

    We are at the end of the beginning. ‘If you feel you have coronavirus…’ I tune out emotionally and daydream as the public service announcement plays over and over in empty trams and trains, and in deserted shopping centres.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A modest and muted Anzac day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 April 2020
    18 Comments

    This year the celebration of Anzac Day will be muted. No marches, no large reunions, few speeches at war memorials. The soldiers and others who lost their lives in war will be remembered, however, as they should be. Indeed, the celebration will perhaps speak more eloquently because of its simplicity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stop bombarding us with military metaphors

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 February 2020
    22 Comments

    One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.

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  • RELIGION

    Mother Merle shows me how to die

    • Barry Gittins
    • 05 June 2019
    7 Comments

    At 4am on a cold morning, my brother phoned from the hospital. My final conversation with my mother, while harrowing, was not unexpected. My attempts to thank her for who she was and what she had given to me did not suffice. Mother Merle was in a hurry to leave this life, and the cancer that had drained her strength. She was over it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A new narrative after Christchurch & Colombo

    • Justin Glyn
    • 26 April 2019
    10 Comments

    No security measures will ever be able to suppress inclinations to hatred or violence which grow in the depths of the human heart. And yet there is a difference between Colombo and Christchurch which might be worth exploring. Paradoxically, the most useful things that governments can do are those which are least often tried.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Anzac discomfort after Christchurch

    • Daniel Kleinsman
    • 18 April 2019
    27 Comments

    As I wait to be reunited with my fiancée from Afghanistan, my discomfort is heightened by New Zealand's involvement in her country, and by an awareness of her sense of persecution, as a Muslim, after the Christchurch massacres. I do not feel able to partake in any traditional ANZAC service, as if nothing has changed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    This Anzac Day embrace NZ values

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 April 2019
    10 Comments

    The nationalist values purported to be Australian and to have flowed like blood from Anzac Cove will not do. Australians celebrating Anzac Day this year cannot assume that New Zealanders share all the values that are deemed Australian. Indeed, this Anzac Day New Zealanders might recall Australians to its more authentic meanings.

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  • MEDIA

    The Murdoch press and the end of critique

    • Mark Jennings
    • 03 April 2019
    10 Comments

    Two recent stories in the Australian attack Murdoch University academics who supposedly described Anzacs as 'killers' and detainees on Manus Island as 'prisoners'. The stories display a poor understanding of the academic role, and the nature of 'critique', which is not to merely to present all arguments as if they had equal merit.

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