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Keywords: Shakespeare

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of words

    • Ann Rennie
    • 28 September 2022
    1 Comment

    We celebrate wordsmiths, minor and major, whose gift it is to write the world for us / To create the nourishing broth, the alphabet soup, of words to work their magic / Words that exhort and advocate / That calm and soothe / Words on which to float away / Words for strength on another day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kermit and the green-eyed monster

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 22 February 2022
    17 Comments

    Kermit the Frog, of enduring Muppets and Sesame Street fame, was always a favourite with my children and me: he was so amusing and appealing, and also had a way of unobtrusively communicating simple goodness along with the occasional moral message. He was also concerned with the most important matter of the self, so that in his most famous song he puts a positive spin on the matter of greenness, the colour of envy and jealousy. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Disciplining delinquent words

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 October 2021
    4 Comments

    Sins have often been divided into those of thought, word and deed, with deed regarded as the worst. Today we pay more attention to sinful words, realising the harm that they can do. Bad words can bring social exclusion. Yet complex questions surrounding the use of words remain. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Falling on one's sword

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 October 2021
    16 Comments

    During her last year in office Gladys Berejiklian divided people over her response to the Coronavirus. Even her critics, however, praised her decision to resign from office after the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) announced that it was investigating her conduct. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why I wish I'd never met Philip Roth

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 01 July 2021
    53 Comments

    While we can’t conflate accusations against Roth’s biographer with his subject, this recent Blake Bailey scandal invites us to revisit, through a 21st century lens, the world of someone considered one of the definitive writers of the 20th century.

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  • EDUCATION

    What's the point of schooling?

    • Tim Hutton
    • 29 June 2021
    62 Comments

    The question being asked, however, is one that puts the cart before the horse. The question of ‘What do you want to see in the national curriculum?’ presupposes the answer to another question: What even is the purpose of schooling?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tis the times' plague

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 November 2020
    5 Comments

    In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Illness and the indescribable

    • Brian Matthews
    • 03 April 2020
    3 Comments

    Illness, so apparently explicit and ever more obvious as it progresses, in fact defies definition: submitting apparently to scientific and medical description, it escapes into a quality of pain, exquisite loss or appalled helplessness that is often most clearly captured at the heart of great works of art.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Writing in the apocalypse

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 February 2020
    3 Comments

    I’d never heard of McKenzie Funk until I came across his marvellous review essay, 'Smoked Out'. I eagerly read on beyond the genial opening paragraphs and almost immediately, I found myself on familiar, if deadly, ground.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pigeon English: a 'lost' Les Murray interview

    • Philip Harvey
    • 06 May 2019
    10 Comments

    'English became the best pigeon in the world, it picked up stuff from everywhere.' In this never-before-heard interview from 2013, the late great poet Les Murray reflects on his work, on language, and on what poetry actually 'does'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stop correcting other people’s grammar

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 20 February 2019
    28 Comments

    There is still a segment of the internet obsessed with enforcing 'correct' grammar: the self-styled Grammar Police. In communicating with others, grammar provides clarity, and Australian standard grammar is one way of accomplishing that. But knowing the standardised rules is a skill not everyone has the same access to.

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