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Profiles

Mother Teresa

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As the maelstrom of sex abuse charges, broken vows and alcoholism engulfs the Catholic hierarchy at home and abroad, Mother Teresa, herself the subject of controversy and mud slinging tells Kathy Evans what she thinks of the brouhaha.......
Sunday Independent (Ireland)

In Search of Perfection

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Today's music is Beethoven. The gentle Sonata in F wafts through speakers into the sterile room. It is a particularly lovely piece of music; the sweet notes of the violin float above the comatose body of a woman who also wants her share of beauty.  Right now, she doesn't even come close. At this moment, she is grotesque.......
The Age (Melbourne) Magazine

Barry Jones (at 80)

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Barry Jones is one of the National Trust's Australian Living Treasures, which makes you think he should be covered in lichen and come with an interpretive pamphlet pinned to his breast pocket. He is certainly craggy looking; his dark eyes peer from a weathered face framed with a beard and a thick thatch of hair, which is at least 50 shades of grey .....

Philip Nitchke

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I am standing in a stranger's front room being mauled by two hairy black dogs. "Sit!" shouts Dr Death sternly, but the panting pair are deaf to his cries. "Sit!" he bellows. "Sit! Sit! Sit!"  It is becoming clear that these overweight mongrels have no respect for him whatever. As two sets of huge black paws once again lunge at my midriff, I say through gritted teeth, "I'm really not a dog person." "Neither am I," admits Dr Philip Nitschke ......

Robert Doyle

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Robert Doyle and I intended to meet for lunch. Then he had to go to Traralgon and wouldn't be back in time, so could we do afternoon tea? Or how about catching up the following morning for brunch? So that's what we did......

Tony Wheeler

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Once, when travelling in a remote area of Java, I developed a raging toothache. The local dentist-cum-witchdoctor peered at my inflamed gum and offered to remove the offending tooth. While reclining in his archaic dentist's chair in a draughty annexe made of corrugated iron, a slight movement to the left caught my eye. It was a large brown rat sitting on the bench next to his instruments. ......


Health

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The Edge of Life

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Joshua Naua's life has just begun - unexpectedly and traumatically. Love had set him ticking in his mother's womb but now he is being nurtured by cold, hard science, lying in a plastic crib under a layer of bubble wrap. The bleep of a ventilator has replaced the dull thud of a maternal heartbeat. .....
The Melbourne Magazine

Urgent Delivery

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Dawn sees the arrival of Leanne Cannon, who sits in circular splendour on the bed in delivery suite 5, beautifully made up. She appears calm and chatty as she waits for the doctor to do the rounds and examine her. She's booked in to be induced because her baby is 10 days late, but she went into labour in the car on the way. Now she is hoping she will deliver naturally.......

The Gene Genie

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There are few certainties in life, but for Molly Robinson there is this one: in the far-flung future, she will never watch a child of hers die of the disease that killed her brother.......

Hard Labour

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For most women, the memory of their baby's birth remains a vivid mental replay that awakens sensations at times as sharp and clear as the moment itself.......

Forever Young

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This is the moment she has been dreading.  Sitting here in the consultant's office while the young doctor who delivered the bombshell clears his throat ans squirms uncomfortably.....

Clean Streets

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The house is a gem, nestled halfway down a cul-de-sac in a salubrious outer Melbourne suburb. The family boat is parked in the driveway, squeezed between a silver Saab and a gleaming new Mazda. Behind the brick frontage, the setting sun makes looming dark shapes of the Dandenongs. The sounds of the city are far away. But from penthouse to pavement is not that far, so the saying goes........

Alan's World

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Standing in the middle of the Brave New World, I am slowly losing my grasp on reality. Is it the headache which has been gnawing at my temples since breakfast that is making me spin out, or the surroundings?......

Life Starts Here

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The room looks more like a high school science lab than a state-of-the-art centre for human reproduction. A row of microscopes are spaced uniformly on the slightly battered wooden benchtop, and a disorderly array of bell jars and conical flasks, some with silver foil wrapped around the rim, are stuffed in glass cabinets. ......


Social Justice

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Tuesday's Child

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Let me start by saying Conor and I are good parents.Everyone says so.  When our third daughter was born with Down Syndrome, the same sentiment echoed through the congratulations cards; it couldn't have happened to a nicer family.......

Me and My Girl

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In everyone's life there is a defining event that veers them off the path they were steadily treading. For me it was Caoimhe's birth......

Babies Behind Bars

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Visiting time at Deer Park. In the prison's cramped reception, a steady queue is forming. At the back, a harassed dad is trying to juggle three small children with runny noses......

The Crime Society Can't Forgive

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The small room is cramped with boys bearing the hallmarks of youth. Faces sprinkled with pimples, greased hair stuffed under baseball caps, scuffed trainers at the ends of baggy tracksuit pants......


Arts & Music

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ACO's Reflections on Gallipoli

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As World War I's commemoration juggernaut ploughs onwards to encompass the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, it can be difficult to see past the bombast arising from the killing fields that were said to give birth to a nation.....
The Age/Sydney Morning Herald 

ABO, French Baroque and Circa

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Voltaire once declared that French music was not "pleasing" to any other nation. It was "peculiar" and "monotonous", he said. Perhaps that attitude is the reason German and Italian composers snaffle the attention at most Baroque concerts .....
The Age/Sydney Morning Herald  

Steven Isserlis on French Music

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If owners can end up resembling their pets, is it possible that virtuosos can take on the characteristics of their instruments? On stage Steven Isserlis for example, with his long weathered face and dark soulful eyes, deep-set like knots in gnarled wood looks like a living manifestation of a cello.....

Why opera doesn't need to make sense

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Not many teenage girls dream of being opera singers – for good reason. The traditional image of them is often as bloated windbags swathed in too much taffeta.  Not surprising, then, that Californian soprano Lise Lindstrom was hoping for a career in something that seemed to have a little more panache.....
Sydney Morning Herald

Rock, roll and a nice cuppa

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It is not hard to find Tim Rogers' flat; in a quiet block that looks like it's inhabited by largely corporate types, his is the one with a skull on the door and cheerfully loud tango music seeping out underneath. He greets me in true rock-star fashion: half undressed .....
The Melbourne Magazine 

Max Richter's The Four Seasons Recomposed  

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Autumn in Melbourne and anything can happen; one moment we are pulling on the winter woollies only to cast them off again as summer in its death throes blasts out the last rays of heat. Recomposed, Max Richter's take on Vivaldi's masterpiece, The Four Seasons, therefore feels perfect for the Melbourne climate; each season is in there somewhere, but with so many changes of direction as to be entirely unpredictable......

'Loose cannon' Buffy Sainte-Marie  

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Buffy Sainte-Marie is a Native American folk singer, indigenous rights activist and anti-war mouthpiece whose best known hit, ironically, is Up Where We Belong – the signature tune in the Hollywood smash  An Officer and a Gentleman, featuring Richard Gere clad in a Daz-white naval suit.....

Finally, the Wimpy Kid is set to shine  

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JEFF Kinney, author of the Wimpy Kid series, has attention deficit disorder; he is sure of it. This explains why writing the opening pages of a new book is as excruciating as doing a tax return and also why he drifts away at the most inopportune of times....

Nana Mouskouri  

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Nana Mouskouri, the White Rose of Athens, is blooming again. Ten years after announcing her retirement, she's undergone a miraculous osmosis. Whatever they put in the soil in her native Greece has created a hardy perennial.....

Double or nothing  

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WHEN double bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons was the tender age of 16, he fell in love  hook, line and sinker. The only difference between his story and those of other teenage boys in Paris in the 1970s is that the creature of his dreams happened to be six feet tall and made of wood....


Education

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Personalised Learning

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At first glance, the classroom at Oakwood School looks like any other: desks grouped in front of a large whiteboard, on which, traditionally, the teacher imparts the curriculum. But in this room, it is the filing cabinet in the corner that contains the blueprint for learning.....

Lighthouse Schools

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When Abigail Elliott walked her six-year-old son Fynley through the gates of the local inner-city primary school, she imagined she was at the start of a very long road ahead.......


Society

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This is Our Life

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There is a famous quote that pops up on greeting cards and says something like "truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave and impossible to forget"......

The Future is Grey

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WHAT do Barry Humphries, Rupert Murdoch and the Pope have in common? Clearly, not much, but they do share a desire to keep working well into old age......

"I Built it Myself"

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Annabel Mazotti roars towards me in a clapped-out Mitsubishi, headlights flashing. She flings open the passenger door and cries: "Get in!" .....

Men's Interests

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Catherine Prescott is a model and we are looking at her photographs. "This is my favourite," she says, pointing a bony finger to a red-lipped, tangle-haired temptress who bears little resemblance to the demure female in a trousers suit sitting opposite. "......


Travel

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Dogs at the Lodge

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After more than four hours squashed between suitcases in the boot of a car, our dogs wake to a rain-washed garden of roses and camellias that backs on to a river flanked by a footpath exuding exciting odours; and best of all, no leads required.
With barely a backward glance, they are off along the bank chasing butterflies, the car journey from Melbourne to Bright a distant memory.....

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So this is Luxury

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The deluxe room in this seventh-floor heaven is almost spotless. And so it should be. So far, it has taken six hours to polish the chrome to its full glory, mop the marble floor and clean the massive expanse of glass. The piece de resistance, the folding of the toilet paper into a perfect V, takes a little extra time to demonstrate. ......
The Sunday Age

Inexpensive Charm Offensive

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The view from my window is heavenly; a black-and-white-style lido with aquamarine waters that make you want to slice through the surface and scatter the fish below. A pity, then, that it is a fake.......

In NZ, Old Hippies Just go Bush

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THE LAND of the long white cloud has long been known for its environmental awareness. But little did I realise how far hostel owner John Clere was prepared to take the cause......


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