ANZAC's Lost Meaning

In Martin Place pre-dawn chill the Last Post’s last note fades. An Australian choir sings an English song – Kipling’s Imperial Hymn – that shuffles bent with age. Lest we forget. Governors and premiers, vicars and priests, MPs and generals and admirals and their spouses, schoolkids and veterans and soldiers still on call raise chapped, pink faces to the cenotaph. Cold bronze sentries stand mute. Lest we forget A solemn murmur from this place ripples, out to others ringing a thousand memori

...

There’s a story old women tell in Eastern Europe or the Middle-East. I can't remember which and it doesn't matter. A story told by old women in one of those places where old women – mothers and grandmothers, sisters and wives – understand suffering. I may embellish it in the telling, but that doesn't matter either. The things that have hurt you, the old women say, will never leave you. They talk about a box. You can’t keep that pain inside all the time and can’t keep looking at it, so you p

...

Oswald killed Kennedy. That simple statement, three weeks out from the fiftieth anniversary of the event, remains more controversial than it needs to be. In any group of five people it’s likely at least two will vehemently disagree, while a third – and possibly a fourth – will have “unanswered questions”. It was the CIA. It was the Mob. It was pro-Castro Cubans. It was anti-Castro Cubans. It was the military-industrial complex. It was some combination of the above – maybe all of them. There were

...

www.heroinaddiction.com

"Are you not going to do up all of it?" asked Beni narkily. "I was going to save some for later - for both of us, I mean." Not for the first time, Craig was a little taken aback that someone wasn't in tune with his thoughts without his having to explain them. "And I thought you could do without your neighbours seeing the paramedics arrive." "If you're worried about dropping, take less yourself and give the rest to me - or don't give me any at all. I

...

It’s one of the oldest clichés: the awful silence; the blank page, glaring and menacing; the lonely writer driven to despair by the keyboard's mute mockery. The image is powerful - just like all myths.


But there's no such thing as writer's block. No writer worthy of the name is ever unable to write something. Writing is a kind of mania: it happens to you whether you want it to or not. "Wanting to be a writer" is a daydream indulged by people with other

...

“For those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share,
With courage let us all combine to advance Australia fair.”

So, here we are again, election time. Most of us have already made up our minds, based on what we’ve heard on talk-back radio or what we’ve seen on breakfast TV and the front page of the newspaper. The rest don’t care, just want it to be over, and either won’t vote at all or will vote for whomever we hate the least. Politicians a...