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Keywords: Critic

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Pandering with pandas: Australia-China relations turn warm and fuzzy

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 19 June 2024

    In a significant thaw in Sino-Australian relations, Premier Li Qiang's visit to Canberra brought strategic agreements on education, climate change, and trade, and the promise of new pandas for Adelaide Zoo. Prime Minister Albanese emphasised cooperation and dialogue over confrontation, contrasting with the hawkish rhetoric of domestic critics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Elegy for Peter Porter

    • John Kinsella
    • 05 June 2024

    An elegy doesn’t need to be written straight after a death... and maybe one’s own death catches up before the obituary we write is published. It might be something like re-arranging modernism into structurally sound lines, or discussing the context of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Terry Pratchett and the nuclear energy debate

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 05 June 2024

    Since Peter Dutton has reignited the appetite for the dream of unlimited energy from atom-splitting, we have to think about the risks again. Is it more dangerous to keep burning coal and gas and oil and boil the planet than to have a few Chernobyls or Windscales? How do we balance such risks?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of the human kind

    • Ken Haley
    • 31 May 2024

    Social psychologist Hugh Mackay has been people-watching for more than 60 years. At 86 he has published The Way We Are: Lessons from a lifetime of listening, a compendium of his choicest insights on Australian life quarter-way through the new century.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    All sound and Furiosa

    • Eddie Hampson
    • 30 May 2024

    With Furiosa, George Miller returns to the Mad Max franchise that launched his almost five-decade-long career. Apocalyptic wastelands with their cacophony of blaring engines and vistas of desert panoramas are second nature to him by now. But fans of the film (myself included) must sadly admit that Furiosa is tanking at the box office, and is only the most recent in a string of female-led actioners that have flopped.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget balancing act fails working poor

    • David Halliday
    • 23 May 2024

    In light of the gains made in lifting people out of poverty during the pandemic, it seems critics are justified in viewing this year’s budget with more than a little disappointment. I wonder, when it comes to the federal budget, who are we trying to serve?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Please, not Bridgerton again

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 May 2024

    What can you say when faced by another season of Bridgerton – that posing, poncing, irony-defying travesty of all history, literature and human relationships? Bridgerton took the Barbara Cartland romance/mild erotica ethos and dumbed it down to fifty shades of fluorescent polyester.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Taller when prone: The contradictions of Les Murray

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 10 May 2024

    Les Murray once confessed it was his mission to 'irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people,' by being a paradox that their categories can’t assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems. And therein lies the ‘poem’ of Les Murray: complex, contradictory, sublime, and sometimes ready to whip his enemies with a scorpion’s tail.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Courtship rivalry

    • Eddie Hampson
    • 08 May 2024

    What at first appears to be a light-hearted romantic comedy glosses over the dark intensity of Challengers. The tangled and obsessive nature of the relationships within a love triangle mirrors the sport at the centre of Luca Guadagnino's latest. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Requiem in a dawn light

    • Peter Craven
    • 24 April 2024

    For those born in the wake of World War II, war stories seemed the greatest fun on earth. But the pity of it is monumental and we come to take it – if not for granted – then at least as part of the fabric of minds that had met with all that was terrible in human experience and all that called out for reverence.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 April 2024
    1 Comment

    Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    40 Days: Generosity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 March 2024

    Generosity is most heartwarming when it is a habit. We see it in people whose first inclination is to give something to a beggar, to stop and listen to a hard luck story, to think first of persons affected by war and economic crises and only secondly to policy, to welcome people into their homes and to go out of their way to help.

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