Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Kindness

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The subtle art of people-watching

    • Barry Gittins
    • 29 November 2022
    2 Comments

    Sometimes it pays to sit still in a central business district, the aorta of any city, and nod in recognition to life as it passes you by. Bypassed from the stream, you watch and learn as the passers-by flow around you. Mystery and revelation. Connection and dissing. Peace and discord. Meaning, transcendence and futile, random pain. It’s all there if you look close enough. Pause long enough to witness the mysteries.  

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Making My Island Home

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 18 October 2022

    ‘My Island Home’ was first recorded 35 years ago, a song that emerged from a journey and conversation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices. It’s helped Australians better understand our home and place in it, and points to the value of enshrining Indigenous voices in our constitution so they can continue to speak to us all. 

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Praying for convergence?

    • Tracey Edstein
    • 14 September 2022
    6 Comments

    There is no doubt that the institutional Catholic church has lost ground in the last few decades. But unlike the institutional Catholic church, the parallel church is thriving. As people seek to engage with their beliefs and live their lives of faith more deeply, many have come to embrace a spirituality which, framed by authentic Catholic tradition, encompasses an expanded array of practices.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Farewell Uncle

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 17 August 2022
    1 Comment

    Uncle Boda was a figure who managed to tease out an image at one mention with his humble and unambitious doctor’s practice, for which he worked for years to obtain. He had read medicine in India, and to this day it remains unclear how long he spent trying to earn his degree.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Sharing a world both clean and not

    • Barry Gittins
    • 03 August 2022
    1 Comment

    History has repeatedly shown us that what gets us through a crisis, what helps us to recover and rebuild, is responding to it with prosocial behaviour ― working together, starting with our communities at the local level, and from there building mutually supportive relationships at and across every level of society. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    #Kindness

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 02 August 2022
    6 Comments

    We all know the Internet can be a seething cesspool of vitriol, so the presence of heart-warming videos of people slipping $20 into someone’s coat pocket or randomly complimenting a stranger, even the ubiquitous handing out of flowers, is largely welcome. But is this actually kindness? If an act of kindness happens and no one is there to film it, did it really happen?

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Back to Bilo: The Murugappan family and Australian refugee policy

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 09 June 2022
    9 Comments

    In Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, notably those arriving by boat, compassion and fairness have rarely threatened a policy deemed cruel, costly and ineffective. The fate of the Muragappan family has been a continuous, scandalising flashpoint about the nature of Australia’s border protection policies. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Longing for the multiverse

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 02 June 2022
    1 Comment

    At a time when a second baby meant my own choices were fading into the background, I thought a lot about Nora and her life-jumping. What if I’d had kids later? What if I’d finished that degree? What if I’d taken that job? What if, what if, what if… The multiverse casts a web of different lives, all endlessly diverging like branches from a tree. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    All that is solid melts into air

    • John Falzon
    • 20 January 2022
    7 Comments

    Social security payments were once seen as a means of preventing poverty, not prescribing it. A job was once seen, at least for some, as being not only the best guarantee against poverty but the path to economic security. Now it seems, however, multiple jobs are required to stave off poverty.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our hopes and fears for 2022

    • Barry Gittins
    • 14 January 2022
    4 Comments

    We’ve been in a pressure cooker, these past two years. More than a score of historians had memorably described 2020 as the sixth-most ‘stressful year ever’. Predictions and speculations look ahead; I looked at the past trends of the past two years and make these humble observations. With the stage set for dire times, here are six trends to look for in 2022. Here’s hoping.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Best of 2021: Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • John Falzon
    • 04 January 2022
    7 Comments

    When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Observing October

    • Barry Gittins
    • 11 October 2021
    4 Comments

    I have decided to observe October as a month to observe other people observing things. For me, there was a sense of self crumbling under the weight of being house arrested for the good of all. Gravitas, like gravity, can be crushing; I knew I needed a break from howling at the Moon (16 October is the ‘international observe the Moon night’). So to the calendar I turned.

    READ MORE