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Keywords: Literature

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The snob who snubbed Australia's Indigenous imagination

    • Brian Matthews
    • 01 May 2015
    14 Comments

    Mrs Cowling was formidable. Her significant physical presence was accentuated by a commanding mien, impeccable English enunciation, and an impressive depth and breadth of literary reference supporting rock-firm opinions. All these years later, I wonder just how burdened she was in teaching literature to Australian students, which she continued to do into her 80th year, by her husband's notoriety.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pop up shop of poetic pollie horrors

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 January 2015
    9 Comments

    We all have these abruptly resurfacing images and references that pop up unannounced. For example, Treasurer Joe Hockey’s musings on the poor, who don’t drive very far – ‘O scathful harme, condition of povertie’ (Chaucer). And the rich, who are ‘lifters’. I was invaded mentally by Yeats’s ‘Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns.’ Without pain and with cigars and smirks of self-congratulation. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Aussie diggers' pen as mighty as their sword

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 December 2014
    9 Comments

    A soldier's life is usually one of bursts of brief action followed by extended periods of drudgery and boredom, and never was this more true than during this dreadful war of attrition that dragged on apparently interminably between 1914 and 1918. A book titled Aussie was published in 1920 as a bound collection of AIF soldiers’ own paper of the battlefield, wholly written, illustrated and printed in the field. 

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  • RELIGION

    Not a good time to be Catholic

    • Kevin Donnelly
    • 28 August 2014
    34 Comments

    Growing up in working class Broadmeadows in a Housing Commission estate with a communist father and a Catholic mother – mass on Sunday and the Eureka Youth Movement on Tuesday – taught me first hand about two of the most influential and powerful forces of the 20th century.

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  • EDUCATION

    Inside the women's lit gender ghetto

    • Ellena Savage
    • 11 July 2014
    3 Comments

    Women's lit needs a course of its own'. How original to segment women's work into a category of its own so that it has no bearing on the mainstream! Men's work is universal, and women's work is specific to women. Sixty-five years later, and Simone de Beauvoir still nails it. So should we feminise the mainstream? Or continue to participate at the margins, and hope that the old guard takes notice?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Waiting room blues

    • Brian Matthews
    • 23 May 2014
    6 Comments

    In the specialist’s waiting room, I usually while away the hours with quality BYO literary fare. But one day I had left my book in the car, and I searched the reading rack for reading matter on subjects more interesting than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Australian holiday. Succumbing at last to extreme boredom I got up, slid Soap World from under its ragtag competitors, and all was revealed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Corroboree in the sky

    • Michael Sharkey
    • 17 December 2013
    2 Comments

    The bird that has no feathers mocks my language. Runs and flaps its wings at me but cannot fly. Throws land-things at me. We laugh like water, make corroboree in sky.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teaching literature to rock stars

    • Brian Matthews
    • 01 February 2013
    2 Comments

    He appeared in the doorway of my study one day in 1971 and asked if I was the one who was starting a course in Australian literature. His voice was soft and melodic, his accent beautifully Irish. Born in Belfast in 1947, he had grown up amid the horrors of 'The Troubles' and would in later years refer to himself as 'a recovering Catholic'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Banning Dante's Divine Comedy is a human tragedy

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 19 March 2012
    17 Comments

    The 17th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels describes Christians as pigs for slaughter. Yet its beautifully imagined world is open to Christian readers who can forgive the comparison. In the same way Dante has much to offer beyond derogatory depictions of gays, Jews and Muslims.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bad week for Pell and climate change deniers

    • Tim Stephens
    • 07 November 2011
    76 Comments

    Around 97 per cent of climate scientists actively publishing in peer-reviewed literature support the thesis that human activities are causing climate change. Cardinal George Pell's position is not an informed scientific view, but is driven by politics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    New old ways of understanding justice

    • Alexander Lewis
    • 11 June 2010
    1 Comment

    Amartya Sen suggests we might never know what perfect justice is, but we certainly know injustice when we see it. Instead of giving a tired rehash of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Sen uses vibrant, colourful examples from history, philosophy, and literature, in particular from the Indian tradition.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Chipping away at Australia's frozen heart

    • Cassandra Golds
    • 28 November 2008

    Much of classic Australian literature concerns itself with deepest frustration — the still birth of hopes and dreams, the futility of aspirations, a yawning emptiness at the heart of things. Louis Nowra’s new novel joins this tradition.

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