Submitted by Paul Daley on
Our leaders weave grand, often poetic, narratives around death on the battlefield – and then tragically we let it happen again
Submitted by Paul Daley on
My lifestyle is so attuned to that of my pets I sometimes feel our identities are fused
One of my dogs, Olive, turned five years old this week and, while every minute for her holds unfettered joy, love and promise, the birthday was burnished with a little melancholy for me.
Five!
Submitted by Paul Daley on
The words evoke her presence in a house she never entered. Dad, conversely, feels far more absent – he wasn’t one to write
Some things you only learn with the hindsight of loss and the significant passage of time.
One of them for me is that photographs of family and friends who have died fail to stir my memories of them in quite the same way as encounters with their written words.
Submitted by Anonymous on
Each month Guardian Australia editors and critics pick the upcoming titles they have already devoured – or can’t wait to get their hands on
Nonfiction, Thames & Hudson, $34.99
Submitted by Paul Daley on
On the 10th anniversary of the murder of her son by his father, the anti-violence campaigner talks about irredeemable loss and the passage of time
Rosie Batty has been to Canberra more times than she can remember over the past decade for a reason she wishes didn’t exist.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
He went looking for the ice age story and instead found evidence of the oldest continuous culture on Earth. At 94, Jim Bowler revisits a place of global – and spiritual – importance
Five decades after significantly enhancing understanding of the tens of thousands of years modern humans have inhabited Australia with his discovery of ancient “Mungo man”, Jim Bowler has returned to the dry lake that staged the momentous encounter.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
The old language at the bedrock of the alliance, effectively that Australia will blithely go ‘all the way with the USA’, is not only transparently shallow but condescending to Australians
Submitted by Paul Daley on
From earliest recollections through to later life, moments of holidays by the ocean with family and friends have become memories to hold
Submitted by Paul Daley on
No matter how indignantly the woke-as-a-pejorative crowd screech on their op-ed pages and airwaves, the cultural tide on 26 January is ebbing fast
With each passing year, this one fraught day of the year becomes harder for politicians, especially progressives, to defend as that on which Australia self-congratulates itself and celebrates nationhood.
Submitted by Paul Daley on
Society is inured to the misery of this macabre tally. We must urgently challenge the hegemony of this blithely adopted description
And, so, December ends with the reality-biting grimness that 2023 was the deadliest on Australian roads in five-and-a-half years.