Over the past two months Scott Morrison has experienced a spectacular fall from grace. He's gone from being the miracle man who won the unwinnable election, to a Coalition leader who can't show his face in rural Australia without being heckled out of town.
Even ten years after his death, Ian Satunovskii remains a little-known poet. This incomprehensible fact is partially explained by circumstances: the reader of selections of his poetry published in journals unwittingly overlaid old ideas onto new impressions and tried to fit Satunovskii's pieces into the current concept of "verse." This was an awkward, tight fit, something obviously did not match. The Event that is Satunovskii's poetry can probably be understood only by proceeding from the general to the specific. From the whole or at least from that part of it that went into his recently published, first (!) collection, Do I Want Posthumous Fame….1 The book's appearance is a fact of literature, but reading it leaves the impression of some precious personal acquaintance; it is more a fact of your own biography. In the author's attitude toward the reader there is no special kind of confiding; the author simply conducts himself in his verse with an unforced dignity that few are capable of in life. The specif...
This year the celebration of Anzac Day will be muted. No marches, no large reunions, few speeches at war memorials. The soldiers and others who lost their lives in war will be remembered, however, ...
In season and out of season, in these times of COVID-19 emergency as well as when they were first written, the words of dual Miles Franklin award author Rodney Hall OAM remain true: 'That our overs...
At the brink of dawn, the blazing white sun has ground to a halt. And paradise teeters on life support. It was only yesterday, I heard the sun spluttering, weep out in a whisper - a bridge will tak...
In 1982, The Clash released the lil' ditty 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' forever capturing the agony of indecision. The song has amused and informed generations; its longevity points to the truth that making choices, large or small, costs us something.
Pink sharp Paris, antic clown on Liverpool and Wentworth Festooned with spangled flags and vaudeville shrieks...
The Pacific island of Kiribati is doomed to disappear. Its people are fated to become a generation of climate change refugees. The direction jurisprudence on this will take is not merely of academic interest.
For many people, illness has a narrative: a clear beginning, middle and end. If we're lucky, the ending is actually a fresh start where the illness is gone and our hero is returned to normal life, changed but stronger because of their ordeals. In the lives of those with chronic illness, however, those lines are blurred; our descent into illness may have been gradual and there might be no end in sight.
A recent intervention by the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, OP, was both unremarkable and, paradoxically, significant. In a letter to the Prime Minister on August 20th, co-signed by the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, and the Greek Orthodox Primate, Archbishop Makarios, Archbishop Fisher suggested that the projected use of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine might cause a crisis of conscience for some potential recipients because cell lines derived from a 1973 aborted foetus were involved in its production.
On January 31st, just three days before he offered his resignation as Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Senator Matthew Canavan made his long awaited, if predictable, announcement: Australia's long lived intermediate radioactive waste will be stored, and the low level waste deposited, at the Napandee site in the Kimba region of South Australia.
Balochistan, the largest of the four provinces of Pakistan, is well known for its abundant resources like natural gas, coal and minerals, its unique culture and extreme climate. Also, its location is of extraordinary geostrategic and geo-economic importance.
I've often wondered what it means to belong to a religion. I'm a Muslim and Islam is defined as either meaning 'peace' or 'submission'. Although it is both of these things, for me it represents renewal and the ability to make a brand new start at each point in the day. We pray five daily prayers, a tenet of my faith, and in each prayer there is a new beginning where old and new intentions meet, passing each other by just enough to say hello.
The multi-front war in the Middle East continues to heat up. After the American assassination of Iran's Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and the deputy leader of the Iraqi military's Popular Mobilisation Committee at the start of the year, and the subsequent refusal of the US to heed the Iraqi Parliament's request to end its occupation, the focus has recently moved back to the Syrian front.
On 20 September 2019, an estimated 300,000 students attended the many 'School Strike 4 Climate' protests across Australia. According to the ABC, the protestors called for the federal government to commit to powering Australia entirely by renewable energy sources by 2030, stop providing federal funding for coal and oil projects, and ensure 'a just transition and job creation for all fossil fuel industry workers and communities'.
When I opened my social media on the morning of New Year's Eve - I came face to face with pictures posted by my friends and family of flames licking the outskirts of my hometown.
In the years before then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Apology to the Stolen Generations in February 2008, politicians debated the value of the gesture. Some contrasted symbolic reconciliation with real reconciliation. Those of us with a theological bent were reminded of debates between Catholics and Protestants about sacraments. Whether in the Eucharist, for example, Christ was made really or merely symbolically present. In both cases opposing the real to the symbolic devalued the real power of the symbol to create a new reality.
