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Keywords: Fires

  • AUSTRALIA

    Rudd's gay marriage backflip fires church-state debate

    • Ray Cassin
    • 22 May 2013
    62 Comments

    Most responses to Rudd's conversion on gay marriage have focused on the implications for Australia's political dynamic. Those who bother to read the lengthy blog entry in which he announced his change of heart will be drawn into a broader debate about the relationship between church and state that takes place too rarely in Australian politics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Vegemite interrogation on the Prague night train

    • Anne M. Carson
    • 19 February 2013

    Cash-strapped, post midnight. Transport police rifle our rucksacks, suspicious of backpackers. One prises open my Kodak canister, sniffs, says 'ach!', fires Czech questions at me. 'Vegemite fur frustuck,' I say, trying to convince Vegemite is not hash resin. I smile the smile of someone who doesn't know how bad it can get.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A day in the life of a nun

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 October 2012
    6 Comments

    The convent has a history of catastrophe at the hands of invaders like the Franks and the Turks, not to mention the earthquake of 1986 and fires of 2007. There are now only two nuns in buildings designed to hold 100. One announces that she would rather someone plunged a dagger in her heart than be forced to leave.

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  • MEDIA

    Reality trumps Japanese horror stories

    • Stephen Alomes
    • 23 August 2011
    7 Comments

    All too often anxiety trumps reality. In Melbourne in recent years, we received emails from friends overseas worried that we might be affected by the Queensland floods or NSW bushfires, hundreds of kilometres away. Japan has problems, but Japan it is not a disaster zone.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kinglake undone

    • Jordie Albiston
    • 21 June 2011
    5 Comments

    Prayer has not prevailed. She sits silent without lover or friend: she slumps in her blackened skirts: she slumps in black dust: she slumps in her black that was green.

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  • MEDIA

    Defending defence

    • Jim Molan
    • 21 April 2011
    8 Comments

    Defence has the same problem as society in relation to young people's attitudes to sex, alcohol and social media. I wonder if we handle it better than most. The firestorm of ignorant criticism of the ADF and its 'culture' and leadership was mostly undeserved and could be counterproductive. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: The crucifixion of Christine Nixon

    • Moira Rayner
    • 05 January 2011
    15 Comments

    No firestorm of blame would be raging in the media were Christine Nixon not a woman, a decent and strong woman, a prominent woman and an ethically sound woman of an age and with the experience to possess a raging integrity of her own and, by her very being, to offer ruthless men a soft target.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bushfire blame misses the point

    • Paul Collins
    • 04 August 2010
    16 Comments

    Sadly the Commission played the blame game. This happens after every major fire and originates in the need to find scapegoats. Neither Christine Nixon nor the others who copped the blame could have known they were dealing with a whole new era of firestorm.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bushfire commission's climate denial

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 May 2010
    9 Comments

    The Black Saturday Royal Commission seems to be ignoring scientific evidence that climate change was a major causal factor. The possibility that Victoria's cool mountain ridges and valleys are drying out and that such ferocious fires are the way of the future might be a truth too much to bear.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Black Saturday gibe mars Murray's might

    • Philip Harvey
    • 16 April 2010
    6 Comments

    In one poem Les Murray would reduce the causes of the Black Saturday fires to differences in forest management between 'hippies' and 'rednecks'. Utilising poetry to play the blame game demeans our understanding of the complexity of that disaster.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The crucifixion of Christine Nixon

    • Moira Rayner
    • 09 April 2010
    79 Comments

    No firestorm of blame would be raging in the media were Christine Nixon not a woman, a decent and strong woman, a prominent woman and an ethically sound woman of an age and with the experience to possess a raging integrity of her own and, by her very being, to offer ruthless men a soft target.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    One year after Kinglake burned

    • Susan Fealy
    • 09 February 2010
    1 Comment

    Black stumps, capped with snow — no, capped with lime, beside the road, tree ferns, fanning their wing in the sun. A sign: children crossing. The road is so large. The CFA building, those three letters almost the three sides of a cross.

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