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Keywords: Authenticity

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Exploiting Van Nguyen

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 July 2013
    7 Comments

    Many Australians feel ownership of Nguyen's story, who was executed for drug trafficking in Singapore in 2005. Khoa Do more than most Australian filmmakers has the moral authority to tell that story without being accused of exploitation. Yet it is hard not to sympathise with the objections of Nguyen's family to Do's SBS new miniseries. Which mother would want public property made of her private grief?

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How an advertiser toppled a dictator

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 April 2013

    Pinochet's supporters are, with good reason, banking on the populace's fear and willingness to maintain the status quo. Enter brash young advertising executive René Saavedra. His rusted-on socialist colleagues are at first aghast but gradually persuaded by his conviction that rather than wallowing in negativity, they should be selling optimism.

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  • MEDIA

    Pope sweet on tweets

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 31 January 2013
    10 Comments

    When the Pope speaks on social media the casual reader might expect to hear the musings of an old man out of touch and out of sympathy with modern technology. If so, Pope Benedict's recent statement for World Media Day may come as a surprise. He pays little attention to risks, focusing on possibilities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Family drama reveals detention contortions

    • Fatima Measham
    • 16 January 2013
    15 Comments

    Ranjini turned up for a routine catch-up with her caseworker only to be told she was deemed a security risk and that she and her young sons would be detained indefinitely. Days later she found out she was pregnant. Last night, she gave birth to that child, a son who will be an Australian citizen.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Going backwards after Abbott's 'urban Aboriginal' gaffe

    • Myrna Tonkinson
    • 19 November 2012
    15 Comments

    The battle of words about what constitutes Aboriginality, sparked by Tony Abbott's ill-conceived remarks about Liberal Party member Ken Wyatt, has been discomfiting. References to Aboriginal 'blood' conjure up the absurd measurements that were used to classify and separate Aboriginal people in the past.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Exploring teacher suicide

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 September 2012

    A teacher commits suicide in her classroom. Her replacement wants to help his students explore their grief, but is met with resistance from other staff members. There are echoes here of institutional cover-ups, where a colleague is protected at the expense of the wellbeing of children.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying politician's tilt at immortality

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 July 2012
    2 Comments

    A politician learns he has a degenerative neurological disorder. His marriage is a partnership where political expediency has long supplanted affection. His estranged daughter is a religious minister and wavering ex-addict. He exudes invincibility in public, while privately he is forced to confront his own mortality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When kids and cancer is a laughing matter

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 31 May 2012

    Sleepless parents, on the eve of their child's surgery for a brain tumour, confess their fears to each other: that he will die, or acquire a disability. But they turn this, too, into a game. Far from making light of the situation, they find, in humour, genuine solace from genuine fear.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2011: The reluctant Australian citizen

    • Fatima Measham
    • 09 January 2012
    7 Comments

    2001: Two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre. A Pakistani refugee self-immolated in front of the Australian Parliament. Asylum seekers were accused of throwing children overboard. These events had nothing to do with me, but I absorbed them. I am brown-skinned. I have an Arabic name. Published 4 September 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Testing nature vs nurture

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 September 2011
    5 Comments

    During the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was placed with and raised by a human family, with the aim of seeing whether he could learn language. On a larger canvas the experiment asked the question, 'how much can we make Nim human?'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The reluctant Australian citizen

    • Fatima Measham
    • 05 September 2011
    16 Comments

    2001: Two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre. A Pakistani refugee self-immolated in front of the Australian Parliament. Asylum seekers were accused of throwing children overboard. These events had nothing to do with me, but I absorbed them. I am brown-skinned. I have an Arabic name.

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