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Keywords: Memory

  • INTERNATIONAL

    China's cultural memory can't be contained

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 18 April 2019
    2 Comments

    One hundred years on, the power of symbol lurks uncomfortably. To honour these students — these young protestors in Tiananmen — rallying for their nation in 1919 cannot but bring to mind other students marching through Beijing decades later. And yet, given the historical weight of 4 May, the government must commemorate it all the same.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's Chilean extradition test

    • Ramona Wadi
    • 26 February 2019
    3 Comments

    The news last week of former Pinochet era intelligence agent Adriana Rivas' arrest in Sydney spread like wildfire. Australia should embrace its moral and political responsibility to collaborate, through the appropriate legal channels, towards the Chilean quest for justice and memory.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This see-saw need

    • Thuy On
    • 11 February 2019

    If I could write you out of my system / I would / siphon every last drop away / drain the bloodstream / flatten memory / and sandpaper flesh / where skin impressed / upon skin / on your audio track / I would press delete ...

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We still need libraries and book stores

    • Mary Dalmau
    • 07 December 2018
    16 Comments

    While it is said we read to know we are not alone, it is also true that libraries and bookstores are communal places, providing a safe environment for all and filling vital, societal roles. Of all my interactions over the years with readers, customers and library patrons, two instances remain strong in my memory.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Chile must not forget dictatorship era crimes

    • Ramona Wadi
    • 03 August 2018
    8 Comments

    Last week, Javier Rebolledo, an investigative journalist specialising in uncovering dictatorship era crimes, was taken to court by a convicted torturer and former member of Pinochet's secret police. It is an act of political violence against a committed journalist. Chile needs people like Rebolledo if memory is to survive.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In your absence I sense your presence

    • Maureen O'Brien
    • 24 July 2018
    5 Comments

    Our last walk together on a beach takes place on a balmy autumn day. The sun shining, the sea calm. While there is something beautiful about that scene and moment, I wonder, in retrospect, why I said, 'This is almost like being in heaven.' Unconscious, prophetic words, or simply an acknowledgement of perfection in my mind's eye?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A snatch of memory

    • Elaine Barker
    • 09 July 2018

    She was in her eighties then. And I was thirteen. Now eighty, I've retrieved that memory of hers and hold it as I would my own.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The woman who got me into Ned Kelly’s funeral

    • Martin Flanagan
    • 02 July 2018
    6 Comments

    We share a love of poetry, having come to Gerard Manley Hopkins from opposite directions, her from religious ecstasy, me from the dark sonnets. In the 1980s we met, in a shelter for Aboriginal women in Collingwood. My next memory? Ursula introducing me to the granddaughter of Kelly's sweetheart, an old woman dying in a Melbourne hospital.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The meek find the violent absolute

    • Carolyn Masel
    • 07 May 2018

    Early traumas last, the experts say ... but memory can resemble an old wound that presages damp days or, like a sharp new line, make one gasp again. What violence do they endure who with nightmare slowness flee a wolfish past? And are theirs unexamined lives who have attained the modern armour-plated dream?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to be civil in an uncivil world

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 October 2017
    3 Comments

    In 2017, we have had one of the most uncivil years in memory, with assaults against politicians, institutions, entire demographics. What can we learn from antiquity? The obvious lesson from Rome's post-Caesarian civil wars is that internecine conflict is inevitably punctuated by further conflict and wrestling for power.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of letters past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 October 2017
    4 Comments

    Conscientious friends have recently sent me bundles of the letters I wrote them decades before. I found myself strangely reluctant to look at them, or even loose the letters from their envelopes. The longer I procrastinated, the more I asked myself why I was doing so, and concluded that memory is another form of haunting: those letters are home to ghosts.

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  • RELIGION

    Cultural appropriation a year after Shriver furore

    • Yen-Rong Wong
    • 12 September 2017
    5 Comments

    A little over a year ago, Lionel Shriver delivered the opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival, deriding political correctness and defending the practice of cultural appropriation by white writers. This year's festival didn't attract real controversy, but the memory of last year still lingered, and it's clear that parts of that mentality live on.

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