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Keywords: Commemoration

  • AUSTRALIA

    Nuclear weapons the biggest threat to our security

    • Sue Wareham
    • 12 March 2015
    9 Comments

    Competing for attention with the Gallipoli landing centenary is this year’s 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New evidence suggests that even a nuclear war involving a very small fraction of the world’s arsenals would result in the atmospheric accumulation of so much particulate matter from burning cities that there would be reduced sunlight, agricultural decline and famine affecting possibly two billion people.   

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia turns its back on a world in need

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 12 December 2014
    14 Comments

    As we prepare to mark the tenth anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami, Australia's proud achievement in being the largest per capita provider of overseas aid at the time is being overshadowed by reports of further devastating government cuts to our aid program. Successive cuts - including 20 per cent in the May Budget - mean that we are starting to be seen as a country turning inwards. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Is there a defence vote?

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 December 2014
    4 Comments

    The wider Defence community is now ascendant in the Australian community, yet the ADF has still suffered an effective cut in pay. Independent Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie is projecting herself as the defender of defence personnel and promising to vote against all government policy until the pay offer is upgraded. But there are strong reasons to suggest defence welfare may not have much of a political impact at the next election.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The return of the Jesuits

    • Frank Brennan
    • 07 August 2014
    31 Comments

    Everyone knows the Jesuits have had a rocky history. They were fabulously successful in educating the European elite for quite some time. But things went off the rails badly in the eighteenth century, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV issued a decree to 'abolish and suppress the oft-mentioned Society'. Eventually his successor Pope Pius VII issued a papal bull restoring the Society, two hundred years ago this week.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why Tamils flee Sri Lanka

    • David Feith
    • 10 July 2014
    23 Comments

    Many Australians regard these asylum seekers as economic refugees. But systematic discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka has existed since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. Tamils are a minority, and are systematically and routinely treated as second-class citizens by the majority Sinhalese community. The extreme Sinhalese nationalist view regards Sri Lanka as an island sacred to Buddhism, in which non-Sinhalese have no place.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Forgotten' Tiananmen's shadow on modern China

    • Evan Ellis
    • 04 June 2014
    8 Comments

    Twenty-five years ago the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. One eyewitness kept a tally of the dead that reached 2600 before hospitals went mum due to pressure from above. If China is to overcome the challenges it will face in the decades ahead, it must draw upon the great reserve of strength, the spirit of solidarity that was on display among the protesters that spring. Instead there remains a concerted effort to forget.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to honour Aboriginal frontier warriors

    • Paul Newbury
    • 21 January 2014
    23 Comments

    New Zealand, our partner in the Anzac legend, has no problem commemorating the Maori Wars of 1845–1872. Yet the Australian War Memorial refuses to honour Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and their people against white invader settlers in the Frontier Wars of 1788–1928. This is a moral issue, and has the effect of excluding a whole people from commemoration based on a trifle.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    My family connection to Aboriginal genocide

    • Paul Newbury
    • 30 April 2013
    24 Comments

    My great-grandfather John Eckersley Newbury was a convict and a squatter who became wealthy through a generous land policy and because his wife's family helped set him up on the land. During this period, the Kamilaroi of northern NSW fought a guerilla war of resistance against the British.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Australian wars that Anzac Day neglects

    • Dean Ashenden
    • 22 April 2013
    24 Comments

    Around 20,000 people died in a series of violent conflicts between peoples extending across the entire continent and more than half of our history. We have yet to find a way to remember the loss of those people with anything like the scale and intensity of our other commemorations, such as Anzac Day.

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  • RELIGION

    Contemplating Fred Hollows

    • Frank Brennan
    • 11 February 2013
    9 Comments

    'I have been asked to provide a spiritual reflection for Fred who was not always given to spiritual conversation. I find the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah helpful. He came to bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives, bring freedom to the oppressed and sight to the blind. Fred did all these things, sometimes brusquely.' Frank Brennan on the 20th anniversary of Fred Hollows' death.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Supermarket witches and the Australian pumpkin boom

    • Brian Matthews
    • 09 November 2012
    13 Comments

    Last week saw many people all over Australia observe a ritual that is entirely imposed, bears the magic and irresistible imprimatur of the US, and grows out of nothing in our own history, traditions or folk lore. What significance can Halloween have for Australians about to embark on their hot summer?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Back road encounter in the Italian countryside

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 31 October 2012
    3 Comments

    We drove up a narrow road, on the dubious instructions of the GPS. Suddenly the car became unbalanced and the front wheel spun above the side of the road, which had collapsed. We were stuck. We could hear dogs barking in the night. After a while a car approached from one direction, and then a utility from the other.

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