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The Hamas attacks on civilians posed a profound ethical conundrum for some. And it’s been sad to see progressives, who have for years sympathised with the plight of the Palestinian people and followed the actions of hard-line Israeli governments with dismay, attempting to downplay or rationalise the brutality of Hamas. Must empathy for one tragedy necessarily diminish compassion for another?
While it is said we read to know we are not alone, it is also true that libraries and bookstores are communal places, providing a safe environment for all and filling vital, societal roles. Of all my interactions over the years with readers, customers and library patrons, two instances remain strong in my memory.
When the law and the media do their job competently, we can work together to ensure that children are safe and that initiatives such as the national redress scheme deliver truth, justice and healing for all. Once they join a populist movement without regard to the important role they play in ensuring that truth and justice are done, all society is in trouble.
A thread of male entitlement binds the American literary world to a shepherd's world in India's Kashmir valley. Days ago, the American author Junot Diaz left the Sydney Writers Festival amid allegations of sexual abuse. In India there is another, more sinister and tragic manifestation, woven with the use of rape as a weapon of war.
My granddad was a fourth generation white Australian who worked with sheep. I used to tell the story that he was a small town racist who disliked Blacks, Catholics and Jews. The punch line was that his daughter married a Fijian, his son married a Jew and my dad married a Catholic.
In the early 1990s Mark Whitacre, an executive at American agricultural powerhouse Archer Daniels Midland, became an informant for an FBI investigation into price-fixing. But Whitacre is not the 'white hat' he claims to be.
Reader's Feast Bookstore is delighted to once again join with Eureka Street to offer an award in the area of social justice writing. Funded by Reader's Feast Bookstore and organised by Eureka Street, the theme for the essay was 'Climate change and the global financial crisis: can we afford to save the planet?'
Submission guidelines for the Eureka Street/Reader's Feast and Margaret Dooley Awards 2009 are now online.
'For me, talk of the death penalty evoked the young, frightened faces of Scott and Emmanuel, as well as the laughing, haughty faces of Amrozi, Mukhlas and Imam Samudra.' Full text from Frank Brennan's session on 'Killing People for Killing People', Ubud Writers Festival, 17 October 2008.
'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'
Photos from the presentation of the inaugural Eureka Street/Reader's Feast Award the Margaret Dooley Award for Young Writers 2008 were presented by Mary Dalmau of Reader's Feast bookstore and Tim Kroenert from Eureka Street at the opening of the Reader's Feast Crime and Justice Festival on 18 July.