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Keywords: Golden Years

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Greek consolations in stone

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 13 November 2013
    9 Comments

    Although the tourist season in Greece was better than expected, there is otherwise not much cause for cheer. PM Antonis Samaras says recovery will take six years: other people are more pessimistic. Suicide rates have risen alarmingly in a country where formerly they were very low. The youth continue to seek opportunities elsewhere. Strikes and demonstrations occur regularly. In the midst of it all, a new statue appeared in the city of Kalamata.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blessed are the whistleblowers

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 October 2013
    12 Comments

    The International Day of Non-Violence on 2 October coincides with the birthday of Gandhi, who pioneered the concept of political non-violence and the notion of passive resistance, and paid the highest price for his moral choices. A great many people, like Gandhi, desire a non-violent world, in which whistleblowers and thoughtful, idealistic individuals are honoured rather than punished.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A conversation in the wind

    • Bai Helin
    • 01 October 2013

    When husbands and wives quarrelled, I put it down to personality clashes. It's not till I got married that I found it's a tradition.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Two bulls in the election ring

    • Moira Rayner
    • 23 August 2013
    21 Comments

    Abbott successfully damped down his glee in the taunting and negativity which he aimed so cruelly at the first woman prime minister, when she withdrew from the internal stoush she couldn't win. In the first round both he and Rudd offered the most boring, stagey and value-free 'debate' we have witnessed since the days of Billy McMahon. But the blokes got aggro and personal in the second.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Migrant factory worker's story

    • Selected poems
    • 06 August 2013
    1 Comment

    The factory thrust its bloody quota past her six days a week, and she did what she had to. The gloves and boots and heavy denim became first and last lines of defence. She lost a thumb once, then a fingertip a year later. Language didn't come into it. She got sick and sacked in the same fortnight, then lay doggo for a decade.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The extraordinary sandwiches of Sister Cook

    • Brian Doyle
    • 27 February 2013
    12 Comments

    Many a man has written elegiacally or bitterly of his education under the firm hands of the Sisters, but not so many have sung the quiet corners where perhaps we were better educated than we were in our classrooms. I learned more about communion at the epic timbered table in Sister Cook's golden kitchen than I did in religion class. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Winter of Greece's discontent

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 16 January 2013
    6 Comments

    I have always felt safe in Athens, but recently, while travelling in a crowded train, I was jostled by several large young men. When I alighted, feeling more than a little shaken, I discovered that my wallet was missing from my bag. There have long been beggars in Greece, but now there are many more, and of a new type.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Four Chinese poems

    • Yang Xie and Hu Xian, translated Ouyang Yu
    • 27 November 2012
    2 Comments

    Today I saw a rich man. I knew not what his brains and intestines were like ... Today I saw an old man, one hand holding an old bag, and the other, pressed on his upper abdomen. He looked pale, his head covered in sweat, and the corner of his mouth, it kept quivering.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Before and after Bali's searing flash

    • Pat Walsh
    • 12 October 2012
    4 Comments

    The bombing in Bali ten years ago today did not target Balinese directly, but they took the collateral damage to tourism, their bread and butter, very personally. Drawing his finger across his throat in a slitting motion, a smiling Balinese says he is happy the bombers have been executed.

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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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  • ECONOMICS

    Australia's pension fund perversion

    • David James
    • 03 October 2012
    7 Comments

    The demise of Gunns, Tasmania's biggest paper and pulp mill, has been greeted as a triumph of environmentalists over business. The saga encompasses much more than that. It poses some deep questions about ownership and accountability in Australia's financial system which are yet to be answered persuasively.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying politician's tilt at immortality

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 July 2012
    2 Comments

    A politician learns he has a degenerative neurological disorder. His marriage is a partnership where political expediency has long supplanted affection. His estranged daughter is a religious minister and wavering ex-addict. He exudes invincibility in public, while privately he is forced to confront his own mortality.

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