Keywords: First Australians
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AUSTRALIA
- Barry Gittins
- 16 June 2014
10 Comments
Friends of mine had their first child recently and my first, 'obvious' question — 'Is it a boy or a girl?' — was answered by a jubilant father: 'It's a girl!' Life is complex, however, and our all-too-human desires for normalcy and 'simplicity' (embodied in my automatic query) are sometimes revealed to gleam in the light of unintended prejudice. The reality for some Australians is that my question isn't always as easily answered.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 March 2014
9 Comments
The conflict began with falling church attendances and a decision by the Koroit parish priest to rationalise resources. Although Regina Lane describes in detail the battles to save St Brigid's, her book is far more than a protest song against the power of the Catholic Church. The larger stories embodied at St Brigid's, the immigrant groups who formed the first congregation and their relationship to the first Australians, have continuing importance.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ray Cassin
- 19 February 2014
22 Comments
Scott Morrison is the first Immigration Minister to inspect ADF facilities. There has always been cooperation between the Defence Force and other government agencies, but Operation Sovereign Borders has radically changed the playing field. Indonesia's politicians might relish the irony of seeing in Australia an increasing interpenetration of military and civilian hierarchies — something that Australians used to see as a fault in Indonesia.
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AUSTRALIA
- David Stephens
- 11 November 2013
12 Comments
Remembrance Day has always been for Australians a quieter affair than Anzac Day, particularly as Anzac Day in recent years has taken on a brassy, bragging style. The historian Ken Inglis described Anzac as Australia's civil religion. Although we were the first country anywhere to come together under a national constitution after a mass popular vote, we downplay Federation and venerate instead a failed military campaign in Turkey in 1915.
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AUSTRALIA
- Justin Whelan
- 20 March 2013
9 Comments
Iraq was the first war in history to be declared unjust by the people and by almost all Christian leaders in the West before it had started. One poll found that 90 per cent of Australians opposed the war without UN authorisation. Yet under John Howard's leadership we went to war anyway. Where did the anti-war movement go wrong?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 05 December 2012
4 Comments
Hindrance Day was conceived as a means of commemorating the millions of acts of self-indulgence that marked the First Gillard-Abbott war on unAustralians. The concept of two minutes' ignorance was popularly adopted across what was left of the civilised world and became a key ritual of the annual celebrations.
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RELIGION
- Andrew McGowan
- 03 September 2012
31 Comments
Leading Sydney Anglicans have argued for a notion of male 'headship' within marriage, taking ancient biblical authors' advice about first century existence within a given social order as a prescription for the 21st century social order itself. Most Australians, including most Christians, are rightly disturbed by such suggestions.
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AUSTRALIA
- Dan O'Donovan
- 28 October 2011
6 Comments
Noel Pearson sees self-interest as key to the flourishing of Aboriginal communities. But traditionally self-interest did not occur to the Aboriginal mentality. In the pre-'scientific kinship system, everything was inter-related and inter-dependent. Can the concepts co-exist?
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AUSTRALIA
- Virginia Millen
- 12 January 2011
He had the emaciated cheeks of an addict. She was smaller, toothless and aged beyond her years. As we closed our gate he struck her. She fell on the bitumen, lit by the headlight of a passing car. 'You touch her and I'll belt you too,' the man yelled to my partner.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 18 October 2010
7 Comments
Tony Windsor is proving himself to be a politician of integrity and tact, but has his work cut out for him in the case of the Murray-Darling Basin irrigators. Mary MacKillop was a champion of rural and regional Australians. It is worth considering her strategy in the context of the irrigators' struggle for survival.
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AUSTRALIA
- Virginia Millen
- 05 October 2010
10 Comments
He had the emaciated cheeks of an addict. She was smaller, toothless and aged beyond her years. As we closed our gate he struck her. She fell on the bitumen, lit by the headlight of a passing car. 'You touch her and I'll belt you too,' the man yelled to my partner.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Deborah Ruiz Wall
- 14 October 2008
3 Comments
and so it was, in Canberra .. alongside screens from across the globe .. where many eyes focused on this fateful day to witness
.. a new national leader seize the first opportunity
.. to begin his regime with one word
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