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Keywords: Literature

  • AUSTRALIA

    All the deadly women

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 12 July 2024

    Are women truly the villains that modern crime dramas portray them to be? Despite the sensationalised 'evil woman' trope, real-life statistics tell a different story. It’s a cruel irony that the way to really victimise a woman is to tell her that she is the perp when she really is overwhelmingly more likely to be the victim of violent crime.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Is property investment our greatest vulnerability?

    • David James
    • 10 July 2024

    With soaring Australian house prices creating a generational wealth divide, the increasing inequity of the property bubble is damaging to Australian society. Could diversifying investment options, like industry super funds, lure people away from property and cool the market?

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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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  • AUSTRALIA

    What does it mean to be complicit?

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 27 June 2024

    To be complicit, must you share the same intent? If one says nothing, does nothing, does this signify complicity? Is there then such a thing as an innocent bystander? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Can your favourite authors lose their allure?

    • Michele Frankeni
    • 24 June 2024

    I’m not sure if it’s age, personal experience or the way the world has changed but some favourite authors no longer have the same attraction they did 30 years ago. To the extent where I find that some of my favourite books now belong to a past self.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Comic from detention illustrates lives unseen

    • Danielle Terceiro
    • 18 June 2024

    In Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System (2021), artist Safdar Ahmed shares the harrowing stories of asylum seekers through comic art. He vividly depicts their plight by incorporating artwork from a drawing group he started at Villawood Detention Centre. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Waiting on the cash flow oracle

    • David James
    • 05 June 2024

    Early every month Australians with big mortgages anxiously wait to find out if the Reserve Bank will raise interest rates and put more pressure on their domestic budgets. It is a bit like waiting for pronouncements from the modern day equivalent of the Delphic oracle.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Elegy for Peter Porter

    • John Kinsella
    • 05 June 2024

    An elegy doesn’t need to be written straight after a death... and maybe one’s own death catches up before the obituary we write is published. It might be something like re-arranging modernism into structurally sound lines, or discussing the context of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The strange case of Australian noir

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 24 May 2024

    What's the appeal in Australian noir crime fiction? The genre has always been popular in Australia, and Australian writers of crime fiction have always had plenty of material to draw on. Led by authors like Garry Disher and Jane Harper, it has experienced something of a renaissance during the last decade.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Please, not Bridgerton again

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 May 2024

    What can you say when faced by another season of Bridgerton – that posing, poncing, irony-defying travesty of all history, literature and human relationships? Bridgerton took the Barbara Cartland romance/mild erotica ethos and dumbed it down to fifty shades of fluorescent polyester.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Taller when prone: The contradictions of Les Murray

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 10 May 2024

    Les Murray once confessed it was his mission to 'irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people,' by being a paradox that their categories can’t assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems. And therein lies the ‘poem’ of Les Murray: complex, contradictory, sublime, and sometimes ready to whip his enemies with a scorpion’s tail.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Requiem in a dawn light

    • Peter Craven
    • 24 April 2024

    For those born in the wake of World War II, war stories seemed the greatest fun on earth. But the pity of it is monumental and we come to take it – if not for granted – then at least as part of the fabric of minds that had met with all that was terrible in human experience and all that called out for reverence.  

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