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Keywords: Ceremony

  • AUSTRALIA

    Gratitude needs ambivalence on the costs of war

    • Jim Curtain
    • 24 April 2023
    4 Comments

    Amidst gratitude and remembrance to those who have served, we would do well to look with ambivalence on the toll beyond the battlefield; on families, soldiers' mental health, and questions about government transparency. Anzac day serves as a poignant reminder to acknowledge sacrifices and damages of war.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Cultural Catholic' lives of public service

    • John Warhurst
    • 31 March 2023
    2 Comments

    This life story of Tanya Plibersek, as told with great sensitivity and empathy by Margaret Simons, is a valuable reflection upon the engagement of a progressive modern woman with two of the great institutions in Australian history: the Labor Party and the Catholic Church.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Son of the West: A tribute to Peter Haffenden

    • Arnold Zable
    • 01 February 2023
    1 Comment

    Peter’s playful, profound love of life ranged from the earth to the skies, and from the oceans to the great mysteries of the universe. It was a love that was grounded in family and community rituals. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Duelling playlists

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 14 December 2022
    1 Comment

    Especially around Christmas, we Hugheses tend to get weird about playlists. What music do you want streaming through the house anyway? You can get anything at all on YouTube and Spotify these days. My family members, like me, have always been a tad defensive about playlists although there are a few items we all like. But these are over far too soon, and then the arguments begin about whose taste is more execrable.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Amoral putting: The LIV Golf circuit comes to Adelaide

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 24 November 2022
    5 Comments

    LIV Golf chief executive officer Greg Norman, financed by the pockets of the House of Saud via Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, continues the corporate march across the putting greens of the planet. Complementing the Saudi Kingdom’s funding, South Australia's Major Events Fund is contributing $40 million and in doing so, Premier Malinauskas has linked his government with a regime with a notorious human rights record. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Striving for solemnity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 October 2022

    In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Reappropriating stolen memory

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Joel Birnie’s short and admirable book provokes reflection both on what should have mattered in the relationships between colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and on what matters in the relationships that constitute Australia today. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This sporting life

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 August 2022
    6 Comments

    It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes interested and supportive people to encourage athletic talent. A recent documentary on the world's most successful male distance runner Sir Mo Farah raises questions around how host countries know about waste of talent and opportunity when they routinely deport asylum seekers or lock them up? 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Received lives

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 07 June 2022
    10 Comments

    I admit to a weakness for pomp and pageantry. I am, after all, a child of Empire, and swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II every Monday morning for years on end. So I watched the recent Trooping of the Colour, part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, and thoroughly enjoyed it, admiring the military precision and all the discipline required, the glitter, the splendour, the dashing aristocrats of the equine world, the sheer vividness of the unrolling scene. And all in honour of the Queen’s birthday.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Uluru Statement, the Constitution and the Election

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 May 2022
    5 Comments

    Whoever is Prime Minister after the election on May 21, he will need to address the question of Indigenous recognition in the Australian Constitution. This is the sixth election in a row when the question has been a live, unresolved issue during the election campaign. The patience of Indigenous leaders is understandably wearing thin. Trust is waning. There is still no clear path ahead. So where to from here?  

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A Peloponnesian Anzac

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 21 April 2022
    9 Comments

    The lives of migrants often consist of divisions and collisions at the border between the old life and the new. But sometimes both lives come together in unexpected ways, and one such conjunction is about to happen to me. On Anzac Day my granddaughter will join the great flow of Orthodoxy, but I hope one day she will know about her little trickle of Australian blood. 

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  • RELIGION

    Cancelling in church and society

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 February 2022
    44 Comments

    A local event in the United States Catholic Church has recently aroused interest in Australia. A Bishop declared to be invalid (non-existent and without effect) baptisms celebrated over twenty years by a priest of his diocese. As a result people baptised by the priest will have to be properly baptised. Although the issues raised by this event are specific to the Catholic Church it raises broader questions of how any group should respond to behaviour considered deviant.

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