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Keywords: Orwell

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The end of the morning

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 September 2024

    The End of the Morning provides a rich reading experience, showing the reader an Australia that has been largely lost. But most readers will have a sense of dissatisfaction: they will want more. An unfinished novel, and an unfinished life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Searching for the truth about a wartime massacre

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 15 March 2024
    3 Comments

    Two books about a 1942 massacre of Australian nurses were released last year. One is reliable, the other is notable for factual omissions. If we leave something out, are we then guilty of censorship? Alternatively, if our truth-telling offends someone else, what is our justification for so doing?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    When history becomes myth and memory is lost

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 16 January 2024
    4 Comments

    In a recent survey of young Americans, 20 per cent of respondents, aged from 18 to 29, thought that the Holocaust was a myth. If knowledge of history fades into the mist, the space will be filled with ignorance, and worse, wilful malice. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wifedom and the casual patriarchy

    • Bill Uren
    • 26 September 2023
    16 Comments

    Why has Orwell's wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, been strikingly omitted from his many biographies? As Anna Funder's Wifedom delves into this oversight, we're prompted to question: have we truly moved beyond the casual patriarchy?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Censorship in the age of social media

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 01 August 2023
    5 Comments

    When a comedic story is withdrawn from a literary contest for referencing Putin, it bears reflecting on various shades of censorship. In an interconnected world where social media storms can shape the narrative, what does freedom of speech mean for writers today?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Memory and Austen

    • Juliette Hughes 
    • 14 July 2022
    4 Comments

    History is on my mind at the moment, all because of yet another awful Austen adaptation. The latest cinematic mud-pie thrown at her in the new Persuasion movie may even be the worst one yet, which is something, because there’s a lot of competition. Who can forget Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1995 Emma driving a carriage in a yellow ball gown as though she were doing the time trial in Top Gear?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The true quiet Australians: 10 of the best of Brian Matthews

    • Brian Matthews
    • 09 June 2022
    3 Comments

    Brian Matthews, academic, award-winning columnist and biographer, and Australia's foremost scholar on Henry Lawson and his mother Louisa, died last Thursday 2 June following complications related to lymphoma, at the age of 86. Brian first wrote for Eureka Street in February, 2002 and continued to contribute his monthly column for 20 years.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    From the archives: Dad's army

    • Brian Matthews
    • 09 June 2022
    1 Comment

    It was Christmas morning of... many years ago. I was about eight years old but, despite my advanced age, I remained a dogged believer in Father Christmas. This belief was maintained in the face of cynicism and derision from the youthful toughs I consorted with and despite my own unspoken qualms in moments of inconvenient rationality. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The satisfactions of homeliness

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 October 2021
    2 Comments

    I’m reminded of George Orwell in smashed-up thoroughly locked-down, wartime London welcoming the first signs of spring amidst the ruins and winter’s lingering cold but wondering whether he should. ‘Is it wicked,’ he asks, ‘to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible?’ 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Sham Palestinian peace plan is business as usual

    • Daniel Sleiman
    • 04 February 2020
    8 Comments

    The Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, have gotten used to this sham of semantics and pretences of peace, watching on as America continues to fund and support Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its projection of military power in the region with impunity.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stories about the Russia you thought you knew

    • Justin Glyn
    • 06 November 2019
    9 Comments

    A casual reader, picking up Tony Kevin's book without much background knowledge on the events which it covers, might assume that the work was alarmist conspiracy theory, so wildly is it at odds with the standard fare which one reads in the papers about Russia and contemporary politics in general. Frighteningly, it is not.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate science for the birds

    • Brian Matthews
    • 01 November 2019
    3 Comments

    The scene I have described was more than purely peaceful. In these iron days, to write about or seriously discuss the world of nature and its phases and complexions can be a political act, 74 years after Orwell wondered about that very same point in 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.

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