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Keywords: Summer

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Greeks pull together in the face of fire

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 30 July 2018
    11 Comments

    Greece is a fire-prone country, and climate change has meant an extremely hot summer. In addition, the austerity forced on Greece during recent years has meant a reduced fire service, with not enough firefighters and no money to buy the latest equipment. Even so, it is heartening to see the reaction of the Greek public to the fires.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Forecast: political storm over energy

    • Greg Foyster
    • 08 December 2017
    4 Comments

    Summer is here, and so is the political spin about blackouts. This year, with a record November heatwave in Victoria and a press gallery hypersensitised to energy politics, the blame game started early - well before anything has actually gone wrong.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The life of a travel writer is all in the story

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 13 September 2017
    3 Comments

    The Nenet and Russian drivers in our convoy surveyed the scene nonchalantly. They smoked cigarettes and conversed. One of them waded into the water, ice-cold even though it was summer. Their jagged, strident Russian dialect swirled around us in an incomprehensible fog. What was going on? Would we make it across? Were we doomed? I wasn't concerned about any of these things. Indeed, I had never felt so relaxed in my life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What I did in my holidays

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 January 2017
    7 Comments

    It seems incredible that there were ten of those summers, consecutive ones when three generations coexisted happily. My siblings and I had an idyllic Ocean Road beach practically all to ourselves, the men went fishing every afternoon, except when, to Grandfather's annoyance, an easterly was blowing, and the women, in time-honoured fashion, kept everybody fed. Of course change was inevitable, although I didn't really believe it, and started with my grandmother's death. I was 19.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    GOMA's summer of frivolous art

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 13 December 2016
    5 Comments

    I will always remember the first time I saw Giacommeti's statues in in Europe. They were grotesquely thin, elongated people. Giacometti explained how he tried to make people with more flesh, but after World War II and the six million, it was impossible. And so those statues reflect the time he lived in. Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art, on the other hand, is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and has chosen fairy floss and rainbow fuzz to reflect our current society.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Khmer stories illuminate our world's present brutality

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 November 2016
    3 Comments

    I spent some summers in the border camps around the same time as Healy. This was life-changing: it made me subsequently look at policies from the perspective of those affected by them. But on reading these stories told by from the perspective of the Khmer people I recognised how much of their life I had not noticed. This gap between perception and reality may be pertinent to reflection on how we are to respond to the startling recent shifts in our world and to the brutality that runs through them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless, Paris

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 17 November 2015
    3 Comments

    Lone men stand at street corners, look on with apathetic eyes, shabby men from everywhere and nowhere, and beyond. Their tattered, mud-stained tents are massed beneath the overpass, misshapen globes the varicose, bruised colour of unhealthy veins. They make me think of tulip bulbs, caught between the seasons' change - too late for summer's plenitude, too early for the spring.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Negotiating climate deniers and plovers

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 February 2015
    9 Comments

    Call me paranoid if you like, but as I walked away, affecting a nonchalant strolling gait, I knew, I just knew, that she was a climate change denier and was daring me to argue the point. Had I hesitated one more moment, I would have been regaled with statistics about the mild coastal summer and other utterly benign climatological phenomena.

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dangerous, sensual young love and sex

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 May 2014
    4 Comments

    During the summer of her 17th birthday, Isabelle manufactures the circumstances of her first sexual encounter. Not long afterwards, she finds herself working as a prostitute. By making men pay her, Isabelle exerts control over the manner and circumstances of her objectification. These are drastic and tragic measures that condemn the everyday exploitation of women by men, from pop culture to pornography.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When the black lady sang

    • Maureen O'Brien
    • 12 March 2014
    4 Comments

    Soprano Deborah Cheetham was in her 30s when she was reunited with her birth mother. It was the beginning of her understanding of herself as a Yorta Yorta woman and member of the Stolen Generations. At the time she was in the throes of composing her opera, Pecan Summer, based on the 1939 protests by Aboriginals from the Cummeragunja Mission. She soon learned that the story was closer to her than she had realised.

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  • RELIGION

    Discussing a good death with Philip Nitschke

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 February 2014
    25 Comments

    I was able to mix with other writers bemoaning Australia's refugee policy including the obfuscation about the death of an asylum seeker on Manus Island and Julie Bishop's latest diplomatic initiative asking Hun Sen to accept refugees from Australia for permanent resettlement in Cambodia. I came away wondering how passionate refugee advocates could be so sanguine about doctor administered death even for children.

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