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Keywords: Despair

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

  • AUSTRALIA

    Refugees are the canaries in the mine

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 October 2020
    8 Comments

    If society were a mine, refugees would be the canaries in it. Their condition reveals whether the currents of public air are pure or toxic. By that standard the present currents in Australia are noxious. They mark a change from the first generous response to the coronavirus to the meaner reconstruction of the economy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learn to live with a mountain between us

    • Wally Swist
    • 27 October 2020

    We might have learned that we can no longer feed on the leaves at the tops of the crowns, but need to bend our long necks, which we carry on our small body and relatively short legs, and we have retrained ourselves to consume the leaves on the lower limbs.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Imagining the Budget

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 October 2020
    8 Comments

    The Federal Budget this year coincided with the release of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Both are preoccupied with the shape that society will take after COVID-19. It is tempting to compare their different approaches.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tall Fences, Taller Trees and film as resistance

    • Arnold Zable
    • 06 October 2020
    4 Comments

    Tall Fences, Taller Trees, directed by Dutch-based Iranian filmmaker, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, is a companion to Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, which Sarvestani co-directed with Kurdish-Iranian writer and Manus Island detainee, Behrouz Boochani. On its most basic level Tall Fences, Taller Trees documents the making of the first film, but it is far more than that.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    It is what it is

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 August 2020
    9 Comments

    When watching a news clip recently I was taken by a young woman’s attitude to the coronavirus restrictions. When asked how they had affected her, she said simply, ‘It is what it is’. The answer suggested an impressive acceptance far from the outrage, frustration and resentment that in the circumstances would not have been surprising.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Solidarity with land and environmental defenders

    • Bree Alexander
    • 06 August 2020
    1 Comment

    While the world is largely focused on COVID-19, a recent report from Global Witness revealed that murders of land and environmental defenders, defined as people who take a stand for land and environment in a peaceful manner, reached a high in 2019.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Angry poets society

    • Barry Gittins
    • 16 July 2020
    11 Comments

    Identifying the true nature of things, and capturing their horror or charm? Let’s give it a crack. I recognised and recognise still that there are few humans who will ever approach Les Murray's heights of linguistic mastery and vision of life. But one thing I felt I had in common with Les, apart from our shared rustic heritage, was anger.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Emergence from ideology

    • John Falzon
    • 02 July 2020
    14 Comments

    Ideology is a powerful presence in our lives. It works its way into our consciousness through the dominant discourses of government, media, institutional religion, legal frameworks, popular culture, advertising, all the means at the disposal of the powerful. Once we learn to recognise it we see it everywhere. If it feels like we were born into it, it is because we were.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The importance of connections

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 May 2020
    7 Comments

    In recovering from catastrophic events, we need to look beyond the simple defining of problems, finding solutions that match them and naming agencies responsible to fix them. We need to be curious about the persons involved, their interlocking relationships which have contributed to the trauma and the possibilities for healing within those relationships.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The beginning's end

    • Barry Gittins
    • 24 April 2020
    8 Comments

    We are at the end of the beginning. ‘If you feel you have coronavirus…’ I tune out emotionally and daydream as the public service announcement plays over and over in empty trams and trains, and in deserted shopping centres.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter as an enduring story of loss and hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 April 2020
    15 Comments

    In Christian churches the celebration of Easter this year will look more like Lent or Passion week. All Australians, too, will be without football, concerts, interstate and international travel and family gatherings. The atmosphere, too, will be one of constraint, not freedom. Instead of celebrating the present, we may be weighed down by fear and anxiety about the future. We are all captive to COVID-19.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Illness and the indescribable

    • Brian Matthews
    • 03 April 2020
    3 Comments

    Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.

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