Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Soldiers

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Not owning but belonging to the land

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 July 2018
    7 Comments

    There are severe limitations in the western ways we tend to think about land. Land is conceived in terms of ownership and property — ideas that are implicated not just in colonial histories, but in extractive industries and concentrations of wealth. In this model, land is a fulcrum of power.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Don't bag plastic bans

    • Fatima Measham
    • 05 July 2018
    13 Comments

    We can speculate on the reasons for the recent rage against plastic bag bans. We don't like change. We don't like being told what to do. We don't like having to think about alternatives and solutions. But at the heart of it, being mad about this particular inconvenience is about refusing to accept one's part in improving the collective lot. This is the one planet we have. There is no Plan B.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Attacks against the ABC are undemocratic

    • Fatima Measham
    • 20 June 2018
    20 Comments

    There is political hay to be made in convincing the right that the ABC has a leftward bias. The strategy counts on short memories. When Labor was in power, it would routinely complain that, in being too stringent with government, the ABC was aiding the Coalition. This only suggests that the ABC does its job, no matter who is in charge.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    ANU right to be wary of 'supremacist' centre

    • Fatima Measham
    • 07 June 2018
    60 Comments

    The Ramsay Centre was an agenda-laden venture at the outset. It has now been left hanging after ANU withdrew from negotiations, with Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt saying that a difference of vision led to the decision. The Ramsay Centre's focus on western 'civilisation' was never neutral to begin with. The people involved gives that away.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Must we remain so exceptionally cruel?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 24 May 2018
    3 Comments

    These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Students need teachers, not technicians

    • Fatima Measham
    • 10 May 2018
    8 Comments

    For the past several years, education has been treated as solely a technical problem. One of the pitfalls of this is that political will becomes a function of money, which in turn rests on political expedience between federal and state governments, further complicated by external lobbying. Education gets ground to a grain.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ireland's 'hard border' irony has a bitter taste

    • Brian Matthews
    • 08 May 2018
    11 Comments

    The word 'irony' is sometimes preceded by 'delicious'. But it is sour and wounding in Ireland, where British withdrawal from the EU, Brexit, and the Irish Republic's firm intention to remain, raises the possibility of what pundits call a 'hard' border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A parent's guide to pop culture diversity

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The moment in Power Rangers when Cam Watanabe turned into the Green Samurai, I looked at my son's face and could sense what it meant to him. Pop culture validates or marginalises, depending on who is in the frame. Who gets to be seen and heard, and under what circumstances, are political decisions, whether consciously or not.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The radical state of being content

    • Fatima Measham
    • 12 April 2018
    10 Comments

    How comfortable does anyone really need to be? The amounts of money that get quoted in remuneration packages or property portfolios is incomprehensible to many Australians who manage to survive, even thrive, on so much less. Inequality seems to be driven by an incapacity to recognise what is enough and to stop.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Another page torn from the glossary of life

    • Fatima Measham
    • 29 March 2018
    10 Comments

    The last male northern white rhinoceros was euthanased in March. With two females still alive, there is hope the subspecies might be saved. The impending loss of an animal that evolved over six million years, and once grazed in hundreds of thousands, is worth noting. There can be room in our hearts to lament.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Do we really value families?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 March 2018
    3 Comments

    Politicians like to talk family. They talk about their own during campaigns, to establish their credential as human beings. They talk about ours, the 'working families' and 'family values' upon which socio-economies rest. There is even a party called Family First. But let's get real. We wreck families all the time.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stepping out of the way of the next generation

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 March 2018
    10 Comments

    I've been thinking about my former students lately. Anyone who has ever spent time with young people over the past ten years would see something inevitable in the current moment over gun control in the US, where Parkland students are charging at the seeming edifice of the NRA - and leaving cracks.

    READ MORE