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Last month I travelled to Ethiopia, visiting an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp filled with thousands of people facing a hunger crisis. The triple threats of conflict, COVID and climate have created the perfect storm, with serious impacts on countries that depend heavily on grain, fuel and fertiliser imports from Russia or Ukraine, including Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Daniel Mendelsohn lectures in classics at Bard College, a liberal arts institution in New York State. His retired father, aged 81 in 2011, regrets gaps in his own education, and asks to sit in on his son’s course of seminars on Homer’s The Odyssey. Professor Mendelsohn agrees, and Jay Mendelsohn joins a class of 18-19 year-olds. Later, father and son go on a cruise that retraces The Odyssey where they discover: is home a physical place, or something you carry around with you or within you?
Over recent weeks many people have expressed alarm and despondence at the rising number of infections and deaths from COVID. Just as we were enjoying freedom from restrictions we found ourselves encouraged to work from home if possible and to wear masks. The crisis and the recommendations recall the first onset of COVID in Australia. Yet the response of Governments is much less forceful. The differences between the responses and the reasons for them merit reflection.
How do we know that what we call knowledge is knowledge? How do we know that we know? The two books I have been reading here are both about kinds of knowing. Suzie Sheehy is a particle physicist from my old stamping ground, Melbourne University. Sheehy’s story is of passionate hunters for nothing less than the meaning of everything.
The quality of Niall’s writing is evident in An Accidental Career, though easily unnoticed. It lies in the clarity of her thought, her exact choice of words, the alternation of anecdote and reflection and the self-effacement that creates a direct link between the reader and the work itself. Her writing has the rare gift of simplicity. The precision of the title is characteristic of the book as a whole.
This year Anzac Day promises to be a subdued celebration with local events in which people who have fought in wars and their relatives can take part. Few will be able to travel to Gallipoli to remember the invasion. The focus of the day will remain rightly on the sorrow of war and not on the heroic achievements of soldiers or on deemed distinctive Australian qualities displayed at Gallipoli. The association of soldiers at Gallipoli with footballers playing their games on Anzac Day will seem not only crass but ridiculous.
Like the aged care sector more broadly, home care is in the process of transition as the federal government implements a system designed around the principles of consumer choice and efficiency. The push is driven by expectations that the number of Australians accessing aged care services will more than triple by 2050.
As this conflict unfolds, many governments commit necessary life-saving support for vulnerable people. However, these measures may not reach all citizens and groups, at least equitably. These include frail aged persons, children traveling without parents and those who live an intellectual and developmental disability (IDD).
Fellow traveller, I urge you / do not simply skirt the margins: / stride out across the machair, touch / freedom’s fruitful fabric. / By all means mosey / around the material: But, / for the love of God, always / digress, digress, digress.
It should be troubling for anyone, religious, secular or agnostic, to be told that a human being wields anything approximating to ‘God like’ powers. That very suggestion implies a power unreviewable, unaccountable and at odds with the earthly rule of law.
During his December journey to the eastern Mediterranean nations of Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis drew attention to the conditions for irregular migration that result in thousands drowning at sea and many more languishing for years in camps. The International Organization for Migration records 23,150 missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014.
Under Victoria’s Border Directions after 23 July, people in NSW, including Victorian residents, were effectively prevented from entering the state. Their only option was to request an exemption for a number of specified reasons including ‘attending a funeral or end of life event or returning home for health, wellbeing, care or compassionate reasons or for any other reason under a general discretion’.
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