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Keywords: Mortality

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Medical school reunion

    • John Frawley
    • 19 March 2018
    4 Comments

    We the remnants, largely spent, professors, teachers, beloved practitioners, scientists, world leaders, pioneers, a menagerie of specialists, some honoured citizens, the sick, the grey, the bent, the pill dependent, divorcees, the widowed, the saints, the sinners, bound and equal, together, all as one, gathered again, searching out new pastures, denying mankind's stark mortality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Children are the yardsticks of our mortality

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 11 November 2016
    5 Comments

    One minute you're escorting your five-year-old daughter to the school gate, the next you're popping a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and wondering where the last 17 years went. My grandmother told me children age you. I thought she meant they wore you down, put grey hairs on your head. But I understood after I'd become a parent myself. Children are hour glasses that cannot be laid on their sides for even a moment, but must be turned over as soon as the last grain of sand has fallen through the flue.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying with dignity in Madrid

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 August 2016
    6 Comments

    The film's quiet humour leaves open many spaces for reflection on getting older, and on mortality. Tomas is uncomfortable with the subject of death, but Julian is determined to confront it with honesty and dignity. His activities during those four short days reveal he possesses a well formed conception of his own humanity and mortality that is not short of admirable. We are as sympathetic to Paula raging against her cousin's resignation, as we are to Tomas' growing acceptance.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mortal touch

    • Anne Elvey
    • 26 July 2016
    4 Comments

    With the same sense that meets the keys I stroke her arm. This tactility makes the tangible seem eternal, as if the want to write were training me to count on time. My mortality is misdirected thus by a capacity to touch. And when I put my arm around her shoulders, I feel beneath the skin the sharpness of the bone.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Death and the (young) maiden

    • Barry Gittins
    • 02 March 2016
    3 Comments

    This year we faced the prospect of having Wolfgang, our 16-year-old apricot Spoodle, euthanised. This was sad for me, my wife, and our son. But for our daughter, entering her first year of high school, it presented a looming disaster. Mark Twain is purported to have said that 'the fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.' Timidity equals preoccupation with mortality? No disrespect to Samuel, but it's unlikely he shared that gem with his daughters.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Puppets' portrait of privilege and pathos

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 February 2016

    As screenwriter for comic such oddities as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Kaufman delineated a particular type of over-educated, middle-class, white male character. His protagonists are artists whose alienation and self-loathing is at odds with their social privilege, and whose creative drive entails a winnowing for authenticity or immortality that leads them inexorably down the rabbit hole of their own navels: the search for meaning as the ultimate act of self-absorption.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Spiritual enlightenment on the transplant waitlist

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 03 September 2015
    1 Comment

    In part, these hallucinogenic, metaphysical digressions are a product of Robert's medically-altered state of consciousness. Chemotherapy brings a sense of disorientation, which often leads patients' minds to wander in directions they wouldn't have otherwise. Through this, Robert discovers an Eastern spiritual and cultural approach to death that informs his own confrontation of mortality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cancer teens in love and death

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 June 2014
    1 Comment

    Augustus and Hazel meet in a support group for cancer sufferers. During the course of their ensuing romance they both prove to be pragmatic about their own mortality. They share frank discussions about God and the afterlife, and gain little comfort from them. It's an inherently sad story, but to parallel the individual horror of their cancer with the experiences of Anne Frank during the Holocaust is a step to far.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mortality made articulate

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 29 January 2013
    2 Comments

    For what, I ask you, was somebody called our saviour in the turbulent middle-east (still in trouble, of course it must be) two long Ks ago? Light flickered on dwellers in death's dark shadow yet those turbulent sandy nations truckle on, just where their ancestors ambled out of Africa toward the hideogram of history.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Meeting mortality

    • Anne Elvey
    • 06 November 2012

    This is the wild thing that turns to loam, the seal pup dead on the shore, a fish caught in a crevice of rock when the tide ebbs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying politician's tilt at immortality

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 July 2012
    2 Comments

    A politician learns he has a degenerative neurological disorder. His marriage is a partnership where political expediency has long supplanted affection. His estranged daughter is a religious minister and wavering ex-addict. He exudes invincibility in public, while privately he is forced to confront his own mortality.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Contraception not the answer to maternal mortality

    • Eugene Hurley
    • 18 July 2012
    67 Comments

    More than 350,000 women die every year from difficulties related to pregnancy or childbirth, many on our own doorstep in East Timor and Papua New Guinea. Senator Bob Carr's announcement of a doubling in AusAID funding for family planning targets pregnancy itself as the problem, rather than the lack of good basic health services.

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