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Keywords: Memory

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What my father gave me

    • Lerys Byrnes | Flora Smith
    • 12 May 2015
    1 Comment

    My father and I worked quietly together. We would take on the load, touch up the mask, saying too little to each other... His photograph hangs in my study now, watching me write, sharing the silence.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Complicity in Turkey's wilful forgetting of the Armenian Genocide

    • Michael Mullins
    • 27 April 2015
    11 Comments

    The British commanders used the Australian troops who landed at Gallipoli as cannon fodder. The Turkish Government is doing something similar with the Australian visitors whom it is welcoming with open arms, in that it is using them to help smother the memory of the Armenian Genocide, which also occurred 100 years ago this week. In connection with Genocide, Pope Francis said recently that ‘concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it’.  

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  • Anzac Day centenary homily at Harvard Memorial Church

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 April 2015
    5 Comments

    This Memorial Church here at Harvard was dedicated on Armistice Day 1932 in memory of those who died in World War I. It is fitting that we, Australians, New Zealanders, Turks and Americans should gather in this place to mark the centenary of Anzac Day, the day on which Australians and New Zealanders landed in the stillness of the early dawn on the Turkish shoreline wanting to assist with the Allies’ advance on Constantinople, now Istanbul, the day on which the Turks commenced a successful, eight month campaign to defend their homeland against the assault.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Anzac Day a jarring experience for migrant Australians

    • Fatima Measham
    • 20 April 2015
    65 Comments

    Since John Howard promoted the memory of 25 April 2015 in the years after 9/11, it has become entrenched in the public imagination as the definitive Australian moment. I look upon it from a distance, in awe, and as the deification of the white male soldier continues apace, with a deeper sense of alienation. As a non-white Australian who migrated to this country from the Philippines, I did try to make it relevant for myself for a while.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In memory of Leo

    • Diane Fahey
    • 24 March 2015
    8 Comments

    'If I'm deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I'm a Tamil.' On the day I hear of Leo's death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo's family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Medicare co-payment failed to understand illness as a relationship

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 March 2015
    8 Comments

    The Medicare co-payment was not accepted because it was seen as an altogether naked attempt by the Government to control health expenditure without concern for people and their relationships. Chronically ill people move from ordinary human society into the impersonal world of medical science and health bureaucracy, and their condition involves testing changes in relationships, both at a personal level and with institutions.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Helen Garner's 'Best Essays' triumph

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 13 February 2015

    The Best Australian Essays 2014 finely illustrates the unnervingly unclear line between essay and short story, but no-one plays with form quite like the indomitable Helen Garner. She offers such a brooding, aching ode to her mother. Proof again that good writing is an inexorable, spiritual exercise that seers itself into the reader's memory. How does she do it?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lord A of Yarralumla

    • P.S. Cottier
    • 10 February 2015
    8 Comments

    Subtle as a ventriloquist, he clacks and grins ... But the beer is flat and the snags, the snags are burning to memory. Someone should give him a lap. Someone please give him a gong.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The shock of the news of Kennedy and Nixon

    • Brian Matthews
    • 15 August 2014
    3 Comments

    Last week, when I heard a Margaret Throsby interview with Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, I immediately remembered in startling detail where I was forty years ago. It was high summer, a beautiful warm day in Oxford. I was strolling along the banks of the Thames through a leafy camping ground; a voice, tragic yet culpable, retrieved from an unseen radio on 8 August 1974 in another country.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Cambodia's patchy refugee record

    • Denise Coghlan
    • 24 June 2014
    5 Comments

    In 2009 Cambodia enacted its own laws concerning refugees. If asylum seekers are found to be refugees they are given a prakas that allows them to stay legally in Cambodia but which is not accepted as a proof of identity by most employers, businesses and banks. The sense of insecurity of those seeking asylum is heightened by the memory of the 29 Uighur asylum seekers who in 1995 were deported from Cambodia to China at gun point.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The boy who never stops

    • Clare Locke
    • 10 June 2014
    4 Comments

    I'm sitting on sturdy chair, stretch cotton nightie, baby to my breast in this pale light, my newest success. Memory has framed this view, of life dawning, love nestled quietly in a sure footed chair. Years on, that honeyed perfection, the bliss of triumphant togetherness, soothes the shock of his rage, his energy.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter memory loss makes plastic of the present

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 April 2014
    16 Comments

    Both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter are exercises in memory. The Jewish child who asks why this day is remembered is told a story of slavery in Egypt followed by deliverance by God. He stands in line with other children who asked the same question during the Holocaust. The devaluation of history and memory has a deeply corrosive effect on society. In our society we can see this in our treatment of asylum seekers.

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