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Keywords: Books

  • 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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sixty-five South

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 May 2024

    Today we leave Antarctic proper; /we’ve seen the penguins and the whales, /the icebergs in their convolutions /and thought about the Age of Sail /whose heroes nosed around down here /sniffing out a sort of fame. /Or was it just the golden oil  /that burned with such a lambent flame?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thoughts and prayers

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 08 May 2024

    'Thoughts and prayers': Is it now a tired, worn-out cliché, its usefulness questionable? It is now used so many times to render its meaning, its core message, void. Sometimes more than words are needed. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    The biggest untold story in the history of money

    • David James
    • 03 May 2024

    It is a truism to say that the way money is constructed defines the power structure under which we live. But allowing private actors to manipulate and game the financial system has not just given them extraordinary power, it has undermined the way money itself is understood.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    In constant repair

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 May 2024

    Where would we be without our friends? Good friends sustain us for decades through good times and bad and steer us through periods of change and crisis. One of the many downsides of old age is the loss of friends: they become ill and die. What to do then? How to cope?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Health: Where rights are gifts

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 April 2024

    Good health is not an achievement to take credit for. It is something to be grateful for, a sign of good fortune as well as of good living. We must press for health to be seen as a right shared equally by all people throughout the world. And addressing that need in Australia must begin by strengthening our public health system.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Normalising war is the road to hell

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 25 April 2024

    How about truth as an antidote to war? Who would have stomach for it, though we see war as part of existence? The trouble with its normalisation, such as in games, both in backyards and in cyberspace, is that becomes uncoupled from reality.

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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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  • AUSTRALIA

    The paradox of 'wokeness'

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 22 April 2024

    'Wokeness' is often centred around our need to understand others, particularly marginalised groups, and paradoxially, our inability to do so. The only way to overcome this problem is to find a way to transcend it – to centre our efforts on something greater. What if instead of ‘understanding’, we centre on ‘love’?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Courting: An intimate history of love and the law

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 19 April 2024
    1 Comment

    Love is a creature of its time, and so ideas, attitudes and conduct of affairs of the heart change and evolve as time passes. Courting explores breach of promise cases in Australia from 1788 until the 1970s, and in doing do, documents the development of Australian society from a penal colony to a free and much more individualistic one.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    By the world forgot

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 April 2024
    3 Comments

    For the men in these conflicts, there was an expectation they would resume the lives they had left behind as if nothing had happened, as if they had been on an extended business trip. It calls to mind a phrase that has become common in recent years: unexamined trauma.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

    • Peter Craven
    • 05 April 2024
    1 Comment

    Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.

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