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Keywords: History

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

  • AUSTRALIA

    The Punisher

    • Barry Gittins
    • 24 May 2024

    In the latest Quarterly Essay profile of Peter Dutton, author Lech Blaine may well describe his work as character delineation, rather than character assassination. But we seem to be at an impasse in Australian market of ideas, and scorn gives greater bang for the buck than dialogue.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The strange case of Australian noir

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 24 May 2024

    What's the appeal in Australian noir crime fiction? The genre has always been popular in Australia, and Australian writers of crime fiction have always had plenty of material to draw on. Led by authors like Garry Disher and Jane Harper, it has experienced something of a renaissance during the last decade.

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  • RELIGION

    How Jung turned grief into a philosophy of life

    • Barry Gittins
    • 21 May 2024

    When friends faced a heartbreaking loss, they found solace in Carl Jung's writings, granting them permission to grieve and hope. Given his life of contradictions, how should we evaluate Jung's contributions and his complex relationship with religious faith?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Please, not Bridgerton again

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 May 2024

    What can you say when faced by another season of Bridgerton – that posing, poncing, irony-defying travesty of all history, literature and human relationships? Bridgerton took the Barbara Cartland romance/mild erotica ethos and dumbed it down to fifty shades of fluorescent polyester.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The biggest untold story in the history of money

    • David James
    • 03 May 2024

    It is a truism to say that the way money is constructed defines the power structure under which we live. But allowing private actors to manipulate and game the financial system has not just given them extraordinary power, it has undermined the way money itself is understood.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The paradox of 'wokeness'

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 22 April 2024

    'Wokeness' is often centred around our need to understand others, particularly marginalised groups, and paradoxially, our inability to do so. The only way to overcome this problem is to find a way to transcend it – to centre our efforts on something greater. What if instead of ‘understanding’, we centre on ‘love’?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Courting: An intimate history of love and the law

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 19 April 2024
    1 Comment

    Love is a creature of its time, and so ideas, attitudes and conduct of affairs of the heart change and evolve as time passes. Courting explores breach of promise cases in Australia from 1788 until the 1970s, and in doing do, documents the development of Australian society from a penal colony to a free and much more individualistic one.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 April 2024
    1 Comment

    Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Review: The Shortest History of Economics

    • David James
    • 22 March 2024

    Economics may be useless for forecasting, and its assertions can be overly simplistic. But it is a language that should be understood, and here is a good place to start. In simple and clear prose, Leigh spans the history of human economic activity, beginning in prehistoric times and ending with the modern day.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The messiness of Australia Day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 January 2024
    7 Comments

    For a national day of celebration, Australia Day has had a varied, higgledy-piggledy and divisive history. In this, it echoes Australia itself and so provides a useful lens for reflecting on our national life.

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  • MEDIA

    The whole truth?

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 18 January 2024
    6 Comments

    Once upon a time it was fairly easy to distinguish fact from fiction, but now journalists in particular regularly merge the two. We are now forced to cope with notions such as alternative facts and the post-truth era. I, for one, cope badly with both, with this twisting of what I would like to be an essential and straightforward matter.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    When history becomes myth and memory is lost

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 16 January 2024
    4 Comments

    In a recent survey of young Americans, 20 per cent of respondents, aged from 18 to 29, thought that the Holocaust was a myth. If knowledge of history fades into the mist, the space will be filled with ignorance, and worse, wilful malice. 

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