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Keywords: Lost Innocents

  • AUSTRALIA

    Demonic youths and sacred children

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 31 October 2024

    Two narratives dominate Australia’s view of children. The first casts them as dangerous, irredeemable offenders. The second, as vulnerable innocents threatened by risks online. Both anxieties reveal deep-seated tensions over safety, innocence, and societal responsibility.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Only in America

    • Peter Craven
    • 25 July 2024

    It’s easy, isn’t it – much too easy – to invoke the standard response that only in the so-called Land of the Free could these things transpire. A vulgar, mendacious man who has refused to believe that he lost the last election is now the improbable victim of an assassination attempt. And the incumbent president, who has not done badly at his impossible job, surrenders his chance at re-election.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Uncle George’s war

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 21 June 2024

    Most soldiers don’t like to talk about what they’ve been through, the things they’ve had to see; the things they’ve had to do. Uncle George was more willing to talk as he got older and more willing to be coaxed by a crowd of adoring nieces. But there were some things he'd never say. And the war never went away from him.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The disquieting lessons of Ian McEwan

    • Peter Craven
    • 14 June 2023

    Ian McEwan's Lessons marked a sharp twist in a five-decade literary career, and presents an opportunity to reflect on his expansive body of work. The one-time literary rogue and Booker laureate now stands as the unquestioned doyen of modern English fiction, his audacious work perpetually navigating undercurrents of unease.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love, mercy and schadenfreude

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 02 November 2022
    4 Comments

    The town celebrated Guy Fawkes day and burned an effigy of the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament centuries before. For days beforehand, even as the holy women left the churches where they had prayed for the release of souls from punishment, children would be dragging carts and prams around with Guy Fawkes dummies they’d made, stuffed with straw and newspaper like scarecrows, easy to burn.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Storycatcher - 17 of the best of Brian Doyle

    • Brian Doyle
    • 30 May 2017
    3 Comments

    Brian Doyle was the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, the author most recently of the essay collection Grace Notes, and a long time contributor to Eureka Street. Brian died early Saturday morning 27 May 2017 following complications related to a cancerous brain tumour, at the age of 60. Here we present a collection of some of Brian's best pieces from the past 12 years.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dickensian England lives on in Australia

    • Kate Galloway
    • 26 August 2016
    15 Comments

    Oliver Twist is still used to aid understanding of the trauma arising from poverty, and the suffering of children at the hands of individuals and within institutional settings. In broader Australian society we assume Dickensian attitudes to children have evolved. Aligned with the sentiments behind child protection, society's image of children and childhood is idyllic. Yet beneath this veneer lies a substratum of deeply ambivalent, even malevolent, attitudes towards children with a distinctly Dickensian flavour.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wee Mary MacKillop minds the shop

    • Brian Doyle
    • 16 December 2014
    4 Comments

    I can tell you that Fitzroy always was and will be a wry wilderness; Every colour and ethnicity and language you can imagine lives there... And now I see wee quiet shy Mary MacKillop there, minding a shop. She is fourteen. Her people are Scottish. She will be legendary, later.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A word with dad

    • Brian Doyle
    • 10 September 2014
    4 Comments

    Somehow, even with all those children, and with the usual brawl and bawl among his sons, and what surely must have been many a snide remark from his daughter, our dad never lost his temper, or even, that we remember, his equanimity. Just as amazing, he never seemed to miss a crime or misdemeanour, but somehow knew of it instantly.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    US gun lobbyists miss the logic of feeling

    • Fatima Measham
    • 13 December 2013
    14 Comments

    I woke up to the news on a Saturday morning. One year ago tomorrow, a man walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire. In the aftermath, gun lobbyists seethed with high indignation that President Barack Obama was politicising a tragedy. It goes to show that the ones who complain about the politicisation of tragedy tend to be the ones who do not want to do anything about it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's asylum seeker vergogna

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 15 October 2013
    14 Comments

    Italians are not necessarily more ethical than Australians, but the attitude of their government and local officials to asylum seekers who arrive by boat is in stark contrast with our own. The Pope called it vergogna — shameful, or a disgrace — that so many asylum seekers trying to get to Italy by boat have drowned. Australia's vergogna lies in its official attitudes of punishment and demonisation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No sympathy for abusive clergy

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 June 2011
    15 Comments

    The Christian Brothers have made efforts to atone for cases of child abuse that occurred in their institutions. That Oranges and Sunshine condemns them universally is due less to malice than to the fact that the filmmaker's sympathies sit squarely with the victims.

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