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Keywords: Nostalgia

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Don't jumble your words: Elegy for Peter Gebhardt

    • Dougal Hurley and Peter Gebhardt
    • 11 September 2017
    3 Comments

    Belief brings solitary repose, no more mimicking gallant pens, poaching pips from wiser minds. Know the moment, listen and find the ephemeral and the luminous born and nurtured in reciprocity.

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  • RELIGION

    Confessions of a literature addict

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 14 August 2017
    12 Comments

    Was Harry Potter’s 20th birthday to blame? Or the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death? Or merely the ageing process? It’s hard to decide, but in a life quite possibly ruined by literature, I have started remembering some of the books I read in childhood.  

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  • RELIGION

    Ghosts of ministers past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 July 2017
    6 Comments

    When I was a small child, Presbyterians ministers, including my great-uncle Jack, seemed to be everywhere. They march through memory: soberly suited, dog-collared, determinedly cheerful and often dull, although Old Jack preached a fiery sermon, and could well have taken to the stage instead of the pulpit. They were eventually replaced in my life by a procession of Greek Orthodox priests. They would extend their hands to be kissed in a gesture my nonconformist soul found quite shocking.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our addiction to connection is centuries old

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 15 June 2017
    4 Comments

    On a recent tour of Vaucluse House in Sydney's east, I couldn't help but notice, in every bedroom, a writing desk. I imagined Sarah Wentworth scribbling away with inkpot and pen 180 years ago. I wonder if the Wentworths went straight to their writing desks first thing in the morning, the way some people check their phones? The desire to receive news from someone somewhere else is century's old. In 1850 Tasmania had 11 newspapers, for a population of 70,000.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    No one wins as public discourse thins

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 March 2017
    18 Comments

    It is a commonplace that our political discourse is much impoverished. Speeches are built around sound bites. The Trump administration is experimenting with letting go of speeches and communicating within the limits set by Twitter. In such a world there is little space for more complex rhetoric, for cultural reference, for reflection on historical precedents, or for wondering. Our politicians' words leave no echoes. It is worth musing on what may be lost in the thinning of public discourse.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My life with dwarfism

    • Julie Guirgis
    • 22 September 2016
    5 Comments

    Being unique has its pros. It has made me a compassionate person able to see past the differences in people. And although I am a dwarf by birth I don't identify as that. Being the creative free-spirit that I am I have come to reject any labels put on me. I haven't let my medical condition define me; instead I have created my own identity. As the writer Helen Keller once said, 'Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hoarding and its discontents

    • Brian Matthews
    • 19 September 2016
    7 Comments

    When the skip arrived and a young bloke named Troy backed it into our driveway with insolent ease, I knew the game was up. Months of sporadic, amiable discussions had now reached a suddenly irrevocable conclusion. Our agenda - what to do with 'hoarded' papers and notes, drawers of never-to-be-worn-again clothes, children's picture books and abandoned Lego, decades old back copies of magazines - was called to order by a higher power and my filibustering and equivocations abruptly ended.

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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

    Neglecting and reconnecting with elderly parents

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 May 2016
    2 Comments

    The film explores the dynamic between men and their ageing parents, as Frank, trying to make up for neglecting his relationship with his own dead mother, clashes with Sarah's neglectful adult son. Essential to this sifting of family and belonging as central to the identity of suburban males, is a rumination on houses as homes versus property. As a real estate agent, Frank is repeatedly chastised by a young father who feels increasingly priced out of the market.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    School reunion cracks the amber of middle age

    • Barry Gittins
    • 06 November 2015
    6 Comments

    I never thought I'd do the whole high school reunion thing. Yet here I am, nametagged and ready to face the music, along with 50 of my fellow 1985 alumni. I recognise some straight off. Others mystify. Teenagers trapped in the amber of middle age. High school was genuinely hard for many of us. Some have died. Some entered Boggo Road's then-penal walls. Some are still paying for decisions made back in those mid-80s. Memory propels the sail of our union and we've left safe harbours.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Windows to grace on the school bus

    • Brian Doyle
    • 13 October 2015
    6 Comments

    I am present in the kitchen window at 7.39 exactly if at all possible, to be given the gift of a kid licking his window, or a kid waving at me, or one little kid inarguably and thoroughly picking his nose. You wouldn't think that a boy picking his nose would be a glorious and poignant and thrilling and joyous sight, something that seemed truly and deeply holy, but it sure was, to me. All children are my children and yours and the bus bounces down the street every morning and we are not dead and all is grace.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The laws of cricket rewritten for the fairy world

    • P. S. Cottier
    • 11 August 2015
    2 Comments

    Batsmen may fly, or even run, after striking the ball, but must never proceed in a straight line. Wickets are to be baked of gingerbread, with sticky marshmallow bails ... A second infringement of bail removal will result in a fifty per cent reduction in the need for gloves of any hue. If this should occur, the severed hand will float into the ether, waving farewell to the game it loved like a wife.

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