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Keywords: Travel

  • ENVIRONMENT

    A view from Africa of Australia burning

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 14 November 2019
    10 Comments

    As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Literature's power is in self not identity

    • Mark Tredinnick
    • 30 September 2019
    11 Comments

    I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    US gun culture and travel advisories

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 13 September 2019
    3 Comments

    The attack, and the travel advisories it prompted, was disquieting: I'd visited El Paso before, had driven from there all along the Mexican border to the remote artists' refuge of Marfa. Now I was about to embark on a journey through New Mexico, and onwards through a different part of Texas. I'd never relied on travel advisories before.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scarf stories: Travelling the material world

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 30 July 2019
    1 Comment

    Three times in the past three years I have received a spontaneous gift in the form of a scarf. The gifts came from three different people, on three different continents. As it happens, there's a shelf in my bedroom cupboard stacked with neatly folded scarves and wraps in rainbow hues. Every last one of them has a story to tell.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    First trip to red earth

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 18 April 2019
    2 Comments

    The isolation is familiar — like the Mauritius I grew up in, but these swans also capture a different Australia to the one I have known until now. What appears spectacular to a tourist travelling in an air conditioned car remains brutal for the locals, as evidenced by the drought and near ghost towns forced to reinvent themselves through tourism.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Militarising the Moon

    • Barry Gittins
    • 17 April 2019
    4 Comments

    This journey outwards is threatened by demagoguery. The UN's treaty declaring 'celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes' has been challenged by sabre-rattling by Donald Trump, with his declaration that 'it is not enough to have American presence in space; we must have American dominance'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    People with disabilities confront travel injustice

    • Jane Britt
    • 14 March 2019
    2 Comments

    Several incidents in Australia this week highlight the inherent challenges of undertaking travel which people in the Australian disabled community have long understood. Travel is neither completely accessible nor inclusive, even in 2019. I know this from experience. I have low vision and I'm profoundly deaf in one ear.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not even with time travel

    • Earl Livings
    • 03 December 2018
    3 Comments

    You never will know all ... You'd have to be everywhere at once, be behind and in every word and act, flow with the charged breath of mote and light. To sum up: You'd have to be God. Poor Thing. For the one fact denied God is the unforeseen.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Still a long way to go, period

    • Yen-Rong Wong
    • 16 November 2018
    2 Comments

    Uteruses, and in particular, periods, have long been used against menstruators — to malign, to marginalise, to make us feel lesser than. In ancient Greece, it was thought that the uterus (hysterika) was able to travel throughout the body, and that a wandering uterus was a sign of mental illness. The word hysteria has been used since then to minimise the severity of women’s mental health issues.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Nowhere to hide thanks to wi-fi in the sky

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 29 June 2018
    2 Comments

    Who wants wi-fi up in the air anyway? Until the recent arrival of in-flight internet connectivity, flights presented one with a rare opportunity to escape real life and forget it ever existed. This, after all, is the reward for a long, uncomfortable flight: precious time. At least, it used to be.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    New responses to global humanitarian crises

    • Denis Dragovic
    • 29 June 2018
    3 Comments

    A few years ago, I travelled back to the war zones where I had worked providing humanitarian assistance to see what happened to the people and projects. I realised then that some things need to change. One of them is that we need to give communities who have borne the brunt of wars more time to recover.

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  • RELIGION

    Muslim forgiveness jars circle of prejudice

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 November 2017
    5 Comments

    Last week we saw the magnanimity and depth of Raeed Darwiche. While travelling in the hearse carrying the body of Jihad, his eight year old son, he pleaded for an end to the vituperation directed at Maha Al-Shennag, whose car had crushed his son. Darwiche appealed to his Islamic faith in explaining why he forgave Al-Shennag.

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