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Keywords: Essendon

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Football, money and the nature of the local

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 April 2021
    4 Comments

    The history of sport, with its varied and often conflictual relationships between local communities, money and administration, provides the context for understanding the Super League move. It also raises more important questions about the nature and importance of the local. 

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  • RELIGION

    Advice to new Bombers fan bishop

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 02 August 2018
    22 Comments

    Ignore the masters who think they control the game. If Essendon is a broken, wounded club it's because it tried too hard to play the game of the corporate masters. It took a corporate approach to manufacturing success, and when it broke the rules they followed the corporate playbook: lawyers and PR experts. Sound familiar?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mack Horton vs the People's Republic of China

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 17 August 2016
    3 Comments

    Horton desired to highlight the need for more stringent application of doping policies but in the process he enabled Chinese nationalists to bolster their inflated national pride, at his and Australia's expense. That he used his concern about drug use as a competitive tactic lessened its effectiveness, and only enabled Chinese nationalists to once more don the mantle of victim. Any chance for reform around issues like drugs in sport got caught in the wake of wounded egos and jingoistic pride.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes (in Latin) on a football scandal

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 February 2016
    2 Comments

    Eslingadene/Isendene/Essendon was its quiet and bucolic self when Richard Green, one of its respectable citizens, farewelled it in the 1850s, migrated to Australia, settled near Melbourne and, honouring his home village, called the area Essendon. Like its northern hemisphere namesake, Essendon does not appear in the Domesday Book, but Macbeth-like vaulting ambition, disjoined from care and humanity, has enrolled it in a modern Doomsday register and stained its name ineradicably.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    When life and death break into the game

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 July 2015
    8 Comments

    Because football and other large sports are an image of life, they are safe spaces in which loss is never final and youth is never lost. But occasionally, as in the death of Philip Hughes and Phil Walsh, real life breaks into the image. Death and horror have to be grappled with.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The real scandal at Essendon

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 29 August 2013
    11 Comments

    The issue is player welfare, not cheating. The turning point was the call to talkback radio from the distraught mother of one of the players who felt her son was being treated like a guinea pig. For one club to gain an advantage over other clubs by cheating is shameful, but for a club to put its own players in harm’s way is unforgivable.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Born-to-rule Bombers glimpse unprivileged reality

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 August 2013
    11 Comments

    When James Hird, coach of the Essendon Football Club, says his club has a 'right' to play finals despite the ongoing drug scandal, he obviously means that the players have won enough games to qualify. But when you wed his use of the word 'right' to his often proclaimed love for the club and his aspiration to put it back where it 'belonged', 'right' starts to assume the force of due privilege.

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  • RELIGION

    When mines and football clubs betray the common good

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 August 2013
    3 Comments

    The common good can seem a very milky-tea concept — too bloodless for the real world. But it is an important idea, one which we need if we are to make sense of phenomena as disparate as the findings on corruption in the awarding of mining licenses in NSW, the initial report of the NSW chief scientist on coal seam gas mining, and the daily excursions in the drugs and footballers epic.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Muslim at a Catholic school

    • Nadine Rabah
    • 16 November 2011
    30 Comments

    Last year, in year ten, we had a subject called 'Religion and Society'. During a lesson on Islam one of the girls said 'I hate Muslims, the world would be better without them.' I bit my lip, turned around and said 'I'm a Muslim.' Confused, she replied, 'But you're nice.'

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  • MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

    My Australian Muslim story

    • Nadine Rabah
    • 31 August 2011
    43 Comments

    My childhood memories are filled with stereotypical Aussie pastimes such as backyard cricket. But as a Muslim, I do feel like an outsider at times. Why do we constantly have to be portrayed as evil people? 'We're not all like that', I find myself shouting at certain news stories.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Embracing Good Friday football

    • Luke Walladge
    • 17 March 2011
    20 Comments

    The NRL and national soccer competition already play matches on Good Friday, a move which they made without input from church groups. Now is the time for churches to collaborate with the AFL on a Good Friday match, or else it will be left behind again.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Burke, Wills and ... Rudd?

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 July 2010
    6 Comments

    Burke and Wills have long since attained the kind of heroic status Australians seem inclined to assign to catastrophic failure. But perhaps, in mid 2010, we might see their expedition's story as being more about the strains, perils and transience of leadership.

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