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Keywords: Ghosts

  • AUSTRALIA

    Sweet dreams and haunted histories

    • Danielle Terceiro
    • 30 October 2024

    As Halloween starts to become a staple in Australian neighbourhoods, for most people its ghosts mean little more than costumes and candy. But from haunted churches to eerie local legends, Halloween says something about us and the way we carry snatches of unresolved history.

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  • RELIGION

    The Bishop of Rome and universal jurisdiction: An ecumenical obstacle?

    • Bill Uren
    • 11 July 2024

    The recent Vatican instruction terminating the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral is a prime example of Vatican officialdom overriding local episcopal authority. Let us hope that in a more decentralized Church some traditional obstacles to ecumenism may be removed without respective ecclesiastical loss of face on the part of the contributing Churches.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    John Grisham and the Camino literary caper

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 July 2024

    For a long time now, John Grisham has been part of the air we breathe. He's one of those writers who’s all things to all people. His latest Camino books are books about books;  a form of meta crime writing and you have to admire the move on the chessboard they represent. Can John Grisham be self-reflexive?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Commemorate or forget: Do we care enough about D-Day?

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 18 June 2024

    I wonder how many Australians were captivated, as was I, by the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations? They seemed epochal to me: a reminder of something remarkable and a pointer to something possible, namely new resolve to maintain peace in Europe. Not too many Australians, as it turned out, were similarly mesmerised. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lightning Ghosts

    • John Kinsella
    • 25 September 2023
    1 Comment

    I sense them in the air when it’s said there’s little or no chance of a storm — they are apostrophes to themselves, shaped like diacriticals. This is a mundane observation to offer up when the flash closes the light out —that loss of speech to pyrography.

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  • CARTOON

    The horror show

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 02 October 2018

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Among the ghosts of Chernobyl

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 August 2018
    5 Comments

    The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of letters past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 October 2017
    4 Comments

    Conscientious friends have recently sent me bundles of the letters I wrote them decades before. I found myself strangely reluctant to look at them, or even loose the letters from their envelopes. The longer I procrastinated, the more I asked myself why I was doing so, and concluded that memory is another form of haunting: those letters are home to ghosts.

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  • RELIGION

    Ghosts of ministers past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 July 2017
    6 Comments

    When I was a small child, Presbyterians ministers, including my great-uncle Jack, seemed to be everywhere. They march through memory: soberly suited, dog-collared, determinedly cheerful and often dull, although Old Jack preached a fiery sermon, and could well have taken to the stage instead of the pulpit. They were eventually replaced in my life by a procession of Greek Orthodox priests. They would extend their hands to be kissed in a gesture my nonconformist soul found quite shocking.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of grief in modern, secular Paris

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 April 2017
    1 Comment

    Cynical about the prospect of any kind of afterlife, Maureen nonetheless spends time holed up in an old Parisian mansion, trying to commune with the spirit of her dead twin brother. She is employed by a difficult and demanding fashion model as a personal shopper; literally, she spends her paid working days buying clothes, shoes and jewellery for someone else. The juxtaposition of the pure materialistic focus of this work, and her doubt-riven incursions into the spiritual realm, is intriguing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Revisiting river country

    • Rory Harris
    • 28 November 2016
    2 Comments

    Echuca is a string of hand held families in the sun, their floppy hats nodding over ice-creams smeared ear to ear. In Bendigo we sit on the bed eating treats from along the road. The Age is our tablecloth. The ghosts of parents past, promenade the High Street, they holidayed closer to home and always travelled with a deck of cards and a bottle in the suitcase ... Hills wrap Castlemaine, the trains have stopped running, the fruit and veg is biodynamic and the sky is scattered wool ...

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A walk with the ghosts of Chile's September 11

    • Tony Thompson
    • 14 September 2016
    6 Comments

    I don't speak Spanish but I knew I had to try to ask someone. It wasn't an appealing idea. The crowds of people roaming here were the bereaved. They were here to visit their loved ones, not help me tick a box on my tourist adventure. However, I had little choice. I stopped a friendly looking middle aged man. 'Victor Jara,' I said. 'Donde?' He smiled and said a lot of things in Spanish while gesturing in a particular direction. I thanked him and headed the way he had pointed.

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