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Keywords: Memoir

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My moments with catholic Les Murray

    • Tracey Edstein
    • 02 May 2019
    3 Comments

    I asked Les then what he anticipated at the end of what was for him a very earthed life. Les was phlegmatic — he imagined a reunion with his parents (his mother died when he was 12) but was content to 'wait and see ... we are on certain post-mortem promises after all'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Echoes of Auschwitz in Manus memoir

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 March 2019
    6 Comments

    Like Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his works, Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains exemplifies among many other things 'the possibilities of human decency' despite the Manus prison's squalor. Like George Orwell in another time and place, he is buoyed by hope in irrepressible nature.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The wake

    • Wally Swist
    • 25 March 2019
    4 Comments

    A child approaches the casket, reaches within to try to lift my folded hands, to make sure, as she tells her mother later, that I am not just sleeping.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The man in the pork-pie hat

    • Julie Perrin
    • 19 March 2019
    7 Comments

    A small commotion at the doorway of the store catches my attention. A man in a pork-pie hat marches across the threshold. He carries a small back pack and steps with an uneven gait. He has a sure message, calling out a gamely, 'Good morning! Good morning everyone!' He looks about with purpose. Initially no one replies.

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  • RELIGION

    John Molony and his Catholicism

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 March 2019
    2 Comments

    'John was Catholic to his bootstraps: Catholic, Irish Australian, a Labor man and a Carlton supporter. He'd have loved the inaugural speech delivered in the Victorian Parliament last month by the new Labor member for Hawthorn.' — Frank Brennan, Great Hall University House, Australian National University, 1 March 2019.

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  • MEDIA

    What to do with the whingeing men

    • Ros Lewis
    • 21 February 2019
    8 Comments

    Gillette's video on toxic masculinity provoked an uproar among a surprising number of men. As a woman of the baby boomer generation, a survivor of intimate partner violence and of rape and attempted rape as a young woman, I have been waiting for a long time for the issues conveyed in the video to be a focus of conversation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Walt Whitman on Donald Trump

    • Wally Swist
    • 03 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Portrait of a killer at school

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 June 2018

    My Friend Dahmer, based on the memoir by John Backderf about his teenage friendship with the soon-to-be killer, is a complex character study of which Dahmer's troubled home life, repressed homosexuality, abuse of alcohol, and experiences of bullying and social alienation are motley features rather than defining characteristics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding hope in shared struggle after trauma

    • Zoë Krupka
    • 20 June 2018
    1 Comment

    Using memoir as a kind of litmus, Atkinson challenges the myth that traumatic events are socially 'out of character' and asks us to look at how by its very nature, patriarchy demands the abuse of its most vulnerable citizens.

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  • EDUCATION

    Bringing the classics back to schools

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 31 October 2017
    9 Comments

    American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cloud meditations

    • Wally Swist
    • 02 October 2017
    2 Comments

    Even when I was a child, I had a distinct intuition that I had lived previous lives in which I was trying to enlighten others around me. I find most people are not receptive.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Madness and poetry in 1960s Australia

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 September 2017
    14 Comments

    Keogh's first onset of madness and loss of identity came with Gilroy's death in a psychiatric institution after intensive, probably reckless, treatment by shock therapy and drugs. Both young women were then in the early years of their university course. The encompassing Catholic framework of meaning taken for granted during childhood fell away under their analytical questioning, and their belief in rationality was tested by the violent social changes of 1968.

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