British writer Jed Mercurio builds television shows the way the Cenobites build puzzle boxes in the Hellraiser movies. Get too close to one, and its intricate mechanism shoots its hooks into you, pulling you through a portal into a gyre of suspense from which there’s no escape. —Mike Hale, New York Times One of […]

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Shooting Beryl Women had been banned from the Australian Rifle Club since 1936. Undaunted, Beryl Drynan Rogers, née Quinn, born 1915,  sights down the buckhorn sight of her pre-World War I Winchester Model 94 carbine, special lever-action repeating rifle, the first to use a smokeless powder round (the Winchester Center Fire).   After the Depression, […]

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Emphysema ended the life of Madeleine St John in 2006 at the age of just sixty four, a dozen years before Bruce Beresford finally found the backing to bring her 'The Women in Black' to the screen. How the reclusive and troubled author might have reacted can only guessed, but there is every chance she would bestowed her approval

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For a dead and apparently lifeless planet, Mars certainly gets more that its share of attention. From HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ron Howard and, most recently, Sean Penn, the distant red orb has proven irresistible to any and all with more than an ounce of imagination

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Dr Paul Bauert, an educated man, on Tuesday compared Nauru unfavourably with Auschwitz, a comment so far beyond sanity and couth that he may well have secured forever the crown of Australia's most odious virtue signaller. Joe Dolce wrote in our April, 2018, edition of Maximilian Kolbe and the real death camp. Someone should send Dr Bauert a copy

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The Netflix series Victoria earns top marks for costumes and art direction, and the acting isn't bad either. But as an accurate representation of history, let's just say the dresses are fetching the sets very easy on the eye

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Abbott’s Boobies Papasula abbotti. Endangered seabirds of Christmas Island. White, with black eye patches, wings, tails, marked flanks, blue webbed feet, males have grey bills, females, pink, in face-to-face courtship display, pairs mate for life. Eggs weigh 10% of body weight, incubated under both parents’ feet,   who take turns, in shifts. High risk of extinction, […]

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Broad Arrow Café Broad Arrow Café was busy that day, the tables were arranged tightly to heel— two minutes of terrible shadow play.   A Colt AR-15 Carbine at bay, Martin Bryant went in and ate a meal. Broad Arrow Café was busy that day.   That’s not funny, someone heard someone say, not realising […]

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Lullaby for a Battered Child Toys in darkness far away, shining in a box in my mind, just beyond my reach. Mama’s sleeping, Daddy’s not here, they can’t hear us, in our secret hiding, just you and me.   Punished children soon grow up, mixed up feelings, emotions, they don’t want to know.   Someone […]

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[An] assassin, dressed as a mailman, murdered a former Iranian diplomat inside [the District of Columbia] Beltway, in 1980, a tactic that intelligence and police officials insist came from Condor …   —James Grady In 2010, an Andean Condor named Thaao (pronounced tay-oh) died at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was eighty years […]

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