Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Black Swans

  • AUSTRALIA

    Black swans and the art of expecting the unexpected

    • Max Jeganathan
    • 24 January 2024
    2 Comments

    Even the best forecasting gets it wrong, and every year has its own 'Black Swan' events, characterised by their unpredictability and impact. They remind us that the future is unpredictable, perpetually lurching between prediction and confusion.

    READ MORE
  • 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.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Reckoning is due after Afghanistan endgame

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 31 January 2019
    18 Comments

    John Howard promised to 'stay the course' in Afghanistan. So too did Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. So complete was the political consensus that parliament didn't even debate the Afghan intervention until nine years after it began. Now that there's no longer a course on which to stay, we're due some accountability.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Unready for sudden fatherhood

    • B. N. Oakman
    • 01 April 2014
    5 Comments

    My father took a train to Melbourne, watched his Swans play, fell asleep on the homeward journey, missed Bungaree, and walked miles from Ballarat to his parents' farmlet in the heart of the spud country. I see him tramping an empty road, blackness mitigated by a wan winter's moon, hear the clash of leather boots on bitumen, the baying of disturbed farmyard dogs; him scarcely more than a big boy who played bush footy.

    READ MORE