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Keywords: Trees

  • 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

    Fellow creatures

    • Ross Jackson
    • 03 February 2020

    With blazes nearby, TV news bars well on fire, we human animals are panicked, feel the shudder of rotors above our roofs. Very soon thirsty helitankers will thunder down to drink from our neighbourhood lake. May we remember tomorrow, nothing will be more worried than pelicans in broken reeds, the night heron in its naked tree.

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  • RELIGION

    Pondering God from the dunny

    • Sue Stevenson
    • 24 January 2020
    8 Comments

    As I sat I noticed some graffiti: 'What you are seeking after is seeking after you. — Rumi.' A beautiful, soulful verse for the alienated children of late capitalism, right? An invitation to live in expectancy, as if you belong in the world. But underneath, someone had struck through What and written Who, and Rumi and written God.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate action requires unity not division

    • Chris Middleton
    • 07 January 2020
    19 Comments

    The Liberals and Nationals have to find a way forward that balances the interests of their supporters with serving the national good. Old arguments and ideological stands need to be re-examined. The PM needs to enable a real debate.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Human rights for the climate 'apocalypse'

    • Cristy Clark
    • 19 December 2019
    10 Comments

    Toxic air, dwindling water supplies, extreme heat: it's bleak stuff. And yet, on Sunday, COP25 finished with very little progress. Our planet will warm to +3C or higher, unless we also do something about the vested interests that continue to profit from our demise. And they aren't going to give up their power (or profits) just because we ask nicely.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Himalayan miracle to carry into the New Year

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 17 December 2019
    5 Comments

    Stopping along a ridge, we beheld the Garhwal Himalaya range as it came into view: a tumble of mountains crowned on the horizon by an irregular, saw-toothed range ... In that brief moment between sunrise and daylight, when a once-secretive world would be illuminated, our wonder at the world was multiplied many times over.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dickens and Christmas as we grow older

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 13 December 2019
    5 Comments

    Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A mystical intrusion in nature

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 20 November 2019
    4 Comments

    Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.

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  • RELIGION

    The good words of John Henry Newman

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 October 2019
    16 Comments

    Of English saints the newly canonised John Henry Newman is the most intellectual and active in public life since Thomas More. When conversation turns to faith it is common to regard the gift of finding good words as no more than a decoration on the hard reasoning that faith demands. Newman stands as a reproach to that view.

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Headland daydreaming

    • Peter Ramm
    • 30 September 2019
    2 Comments

    This place is new to my son, who doesn't know that satin bowerbirds pilfer the brush ... He's busy tracing each scribble in each gum, and my hands are full of his hands, faintly heavy — faintly delicate. A towering deciduous fig hangs over us; its branches are neural pathways, thin at their tips the way memories thin in time.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Existential lessons from road kill

    • Cristy Clark
    • 26 September 2019
    6 Comments

    In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains that we have placed animals in a lethal double bind: they have to move due to the effects of climate change and habitat destruction, but their pathways are blocked by roads or occupied by humans. Some might ask why this mass extinction should matter to us, but we ignore it at our peril.

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