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Keywords: Brian Matthews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In search of Henry Lawson's mother's birthplace

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 June 2007
    3 Comments

    A literary pilgrimage to rural lands near Wellington, NSW, while writing a book about Louisa Lawson. You never arrive: there is no pub, no post office, no CWA; no change in the benign parquetry of land ploughed, harvested, under crop, straggling with native scrub.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Flavius smirks at tourist-clogged modern Verona

    • Brian Matthews
    • 18 May 2007

    Traffic chaos suggests a reason Italians are so good at opera. Life in their cities unfolds each day not with the rational continuity of the novel, or the spareness of the short story, but with traditional opera’s volatility and impatience with the mundane.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wandering wombats

    • Brian Matthews
    • 18 May 2007

    Your common wombat probably wouldn’t appreciate being described as a ‘lumbering marsupial’ but truth will out.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Drover's Wife echoes in computer data loss

    • Brian Matthews
    • 16 April 2007
    1 Comment

    A desperate attempt to remember often produces fragments which are deeply moving and yet, at the same time, are parodies of the larger, solemn picture we cannot reassemble.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Is this really the worst drought on record?

    • Brian Matthews
    • 02 April 2007
    3 Comments

    Statisticians of weather can have a shot at telling us where this drought stands in the pantheon of arid disasters. Is this the 'worst drought' in a thousand years, as Mike Rann is said to have claimed? Who knows?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The pulsating cut and thrust of international Scrabble

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 February 2007
    1 Comment

    What with the Ashes being a let down, the One Day Internationals more interminable than ever and Federer just too bloody good, serious students of TV sport might instead turn their attention to the National Scrabble Masters Tournament.

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  • RELIGION

    A wide Brown land shaking off its collective memory

    • Brian Matthews
    • 23 December 2006

    In a country which periodically agonises its way through debates about its history and frets regularly about the quality of history teaching, it is remarkable how resistant we are to embedding notes and pointers on our past in the urban and rural landscapes.

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  • RELIGION

    A man of Middle Eastern appearance who dreams of peace

    • Brian Matthews
    • 13 November 2006
    2 Comments

    2:41 am. There was an luminescence in the room. I made one of those random, unaccountable mental connections that such occasions often evoke.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    ANZAC tradition now beyond satire

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 October 2006
    1 Comment

    In an age of continuous and ambiguously justified war, the ANZAC commemoration has become highly politicised, infiltrated by party politics and populist bravura.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No place for Colin Thiele in memorial ratings

    • Brian Matthews
    • 18 September 2006
    4 Comments

    It was hard to notice the recent death of Colin Thiele, arguably Australia's greatest children's writer. In a philistine nation under philistine leadership, Thiele’s quiet cultured tone and its sad silencing could not compete for proper, courteous and deserved recognition with the phony vernacular outpouring that is supposed to be our true voice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Iconoclasts' challenge to turn the other cheek

    • Michael Mullins & James Massola
    • 18 September 2006
    7 Comments

    When the Jesuits' founder St Ignatius Loyola was on the road riding with a Moor in 1522, the Moor argued that the Virgin Mary was no longer a virgin after Christ was born. The recent former soldier Ignatius wanted to kill the Moor on the spot.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Four butchers and a writer

    • Brian Matthews
    • 21 August 2006
    1 Comment

    "With collar up round my ears against the nip of the morning, I enter by the side door. It is a historic moment. I am the first writer-in-residence at a butchers shop."  

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