The Long Road to Change
This article is part of our November-December focus on Cultural Shift. For more on this theme, click here. It is also the fourth and final part of the 2013 Right Now Essay Series, which aims to bridge...
View ArticleA right to be lazy? – Part 1
By Jeff Sparrow “Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in...
View ArticleA right to be lazy? – Part 2
This is the second instalment of Jeff Sparrow’s essay for the Right Now Essay Series, ‘A Right to be Lazy’. If you haven’t yet read the first half, click here. By Jeff Sparrow Part 2 picks up where...
View ArticleThe machinery of government: on being a person in the turning cogs of aid
By Laura Jean McKay About 500 women in south and central Iraq were about to be chosen for job training. These women are the heads of their households – their husbands have died, divorced or become...
View ArticleBack to School
By Alice Pung When I return to the suburb where I grew up, I meet an unforgettable boy named Strong with spiked hedgehog hair and a grin that occupies a third of his face. Leaning forward, he tells me...
View ArticleNo Singular Revelation
By Maxine Beneba Clarke Hyperlinks have been provided for this article in accordance with journalistic requirements. But a trigger warning is extended in relation to both the contents of this article...
View ArticleClose Encounters
By Gillian Terzis In today’s networked world, we’re simultaneously better connected and further away from each than ever before. War and its aftermath are no exception. Gillian Terzis looks at how...
View ArticleThe Boat
By Rebecca Giggs That was the year just passed, in which silence turned from an absence of information into a palpable presence – a character recruited into the national story by the Department of...
View ArticleThe Right To Be Old
By Melanie Joosten As each generation lives longer than the last, there is a tendency to see ageing as a medical problem to be solved rather than a natural part of the life course. But if living...
View ArticleNo Dogs, No Fruit, No Firearms, No Professors
By Maria Tumarkin As with any language or dialect, Australian English has its share of idiomatic expressions in which simple-seeming words come together to produce a meaning inexplicable without...
View ArticleIn Small Places
By Emily Maguire Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Eleanor Roosevelt. On 16...
View ArticleThings and their makers: from “European Labour Only” to “Ethical Consumerism”
By Lia Incognita | Reading time: 15 minutes This is a story of things: a wooden desk, a silk shirt, an enamel pin, a fluorescent lightbulb. Each one reveals something about the history of labour, race...
View ArticleThe Country is Like a Body
By Ellen van Neerven | Reading time: 15 minutes On a night last year by the fire at kuril dhagan (water rat’s place) on the Brisbane River Nancy Bamaga, a Torres Strait Islander woman from Saibai...
View ArticleA Child’s Right to a Good Earth
By Kate Holden | Reading time: 15 minutes My two-year-old son is learning the world. Up, down, big and small, purple and yelloooooooow, and “thank you” and “sparkly” and “now” and “later”. He is...
View ArticleAt the knife’s edge
By Robin de Crespigny | Reading time: 25 minutes I spent three days with Arman* recording his story from every angle. As English is not his first language I have reworked some of the material, so while...
View ArticleThe Dog in the Dungeon – Emergency Services and Trauma
By Martin McKenzie-Murray | Reading time: 15 minutes It’s easy to be entranced by Port Arthur. The old penitentiary and ancillary buildings – a church, the small homes of staff officers, “lunatic...
View ArticleGrindring For Justice
By Senthorun Raj | 15 minute read My friends often remark that I can be relied upon to provide commentary about two things at any given time: Australian human rights violations and Grindr. This...
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