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Keywords: England

  • AUSTRALIA

    Why the debate over AFL origins won't go away

    • Jenny Sinclair
    • 28 March 2025

    The origins of Australian Rules Football are officially recorded, but not necessarily complete. As new questions emerge about Tom Wills, marngrook, and the silences in our national story, the game’s history becomes a mirror reflecting not only what we remember, but what we choose to forget.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shakespeare's war criminal? Henry V and the problem of heroism

    • Peter Craven
    • 14 March 2025

    Shakespeare’s Henry V has long been celebrated as a stirring hymn to English valour, a theatrical counterpart to Churchill’s wartime oratory. But beneath its rousing rhetoric lies a darker truth of a king who breaks hearts as easily as he wins battles, a war epic that disguises the brutality it glorifies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    If he be an honest man, so much better

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 06 March 2025

      What does a forgotten cemetery job ad from 1860 reveal about the lives we honour, the work we overlook, and the honesty we still hope for? A chance discovery in the archives becomes a meditation on honesty, mortality, and the curious poetry of forgotten lives. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What makes a writer, and what breaks one

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 28 February 2025

    What makes a writer? Is it exile, loss, or the relentless pull of history? In One Another, Gail Jones traces the lives of two outsiders—Joseph Conrad and a young Australian academic—both adrift between worlds, both seeking meaning in words. A novel about displacement, identity, and the burden of storytelling.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The spirituality of KFC

    • Michael McGirr
    • 22 November 2024
    3 Comments

    There’s this other place that is neither heaven nor earth but which you might find in the car park of the third busiest KFC in Melbourne, waiting for your son to finish his shift. A bin beside the car is overflowing with all the packaging that comes with fast food, not to mention the remains of poor dead chooks whose life it is hard to imagine. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Reading the entrails of an election

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 November 2024
    5 Comments

      As Australia watches the U.S. navigate its Trump-era transition, we wait in uncertainty. Any interregnum period is a time for rethinking, for wondering about our own nation, and not just for focusing on another. It is a time to rethink what we have taken granted about what is for the good of Australian society.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Race Mathews: A Life in Politics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 November 2024
    1 Comment

      The story of Race Mathews’ career will be an antidote to despair about politics and politicians. It underlines the possibilities of politics, showing how it can be more than a job or a career. It can be a calling to imagine a more just society and ways of building it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When poetry became war reporting

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 16 October 2024

    If only those who send their nation’s youth to war would read Muse of Fire, World War I as seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets. It is both homage and horror story. It carries the reader across several fronts – the disparate journeys that led these men to the killing fields of Europe, the blood-soaked chrysalis from which the words of the war poets arose.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The US election will be won by the candidate with the strongest story

    • Julian Butler
    • 07 October 2024

    As the US election approaches, the focus has shifted from personal narratives to policy positions and voter strategies. Candidates like Trump and Harris have crafted compelling stories, but voters now seek clarity on the issues. With much of the debate settled, the question remains: how will these stories shape the outcome?

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis and the politics of Catholic conscience

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 October 2024
    4 Comments

    During a recent interview on his Papal plane coming back from Singapore Francis made some pointed remarks in response to a veiled question from an American journalist about the US Presidential election contest between the Democrat Kamala Harris and the Republican Donald Trump. He chose to describe the choice as between the ‘lesser of two evils’ because Harris is pro-abortion rights and Trump is anti-immigration.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remembering Maggie Smith’s enduring magic

    • Peter Craven
    • 02 October 2024
    1 Comment

    If you care about theatre and film and television you should be grateful to have lived at the same time as Maggie Smith. She was an artist of incomparable power and nuance, of tremendous wit and complementary poignancy. The Harry Potter kids are lucky to have experienced such style and know-how and grace. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Seasons move and the Earth is reborn

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 21 August 2024
    1 Comment

    In my part of the world, the earth has begun to awaken from its winterlong sleep. The colours of the day are changing and the earth and its attendant branches of family are blooming into beauty. 

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