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I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it.
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
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Sometimes books feel like the only thing that keep her sane. Actually, she knows that they're the only reason she's still even vaguely okay right now. That's what she clings to: reading great books and seeing great films and, for as long as she's immersed in them, being able to forget, if only for a short time, about the reality of her life.
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Steph Bowe (All This Could End)
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Whoo-eeee!”
From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Peter. He was on the road to the side, probably waiting to ensure she’d managed to negotiate the first part of the track. She didn’t stop, her adrenaline pumping. He’d catch up. “Come get me!” she yelled, making a slight counter-direction turn in the air to help her blow into the berm on the other side of the road. The trail crossed a short flat, a marked rock garden, a beam over a bog, another rock drop and berm, a zigzag around massive trees, roots and rocks that kicked the bike’s tyres this way and that and tested her balance, more air over another drop – this one caused by a massive log – enough air for her to do a back flip from a kicker over another part of the forestry trail, steep to the left. The first wall appeared. She took it fast, skidded around to slam into the side of a berm and round off on to another gully crossing.
“Whoo-eeee!
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Miriam Verbeek (The Forest: An idylic Australian setting harbouring a criminal secret (Saskia van Essen crime thrillers))
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The exorcist had a slightly Australian tinge to his voice, and the laid-back, whatever-comes-next attitude of a man who had suddenly realised two degrees short of a sunstroke that exorcism was the perfect career choice he'd never been offered in school.
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Kate Griffin (A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1))
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I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
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An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow. And
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
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The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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In short, connection to culture is so much more complex, rich and diverse than anyone who is non-Indigenous can understand. There's this unspoken feeling that comes with identifying as Aboriginal and being around mob that you'll never know if you aren't an Aboriginal person. Identity for us, is built on family lines, connection to country, stories, traditions and something that can't be measured according to levels of melanin.
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Marlee Silva (My Tidda, My Sister: Stories of Strength and Resilience from Australia's First Women)
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I just seem to have a knack for memorizing star fields,’ he told me, with a frankly apologetic look, when I visited him and his wife, Elaine, in their picture-book bungalow on a tranquil edge of the village of Hazelbrook, out where Sydney finally ends and the boundless Australian bush begins. ‘I’m not particularly good at other things,’ he added. ‘I don’t remember names well.’ ‘Or where he’s put things,’ called Elaine from the kitchen.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called Rheobatrachus silus, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about R. silus (and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’. My
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
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In Europe, the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I'd not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snowcapped range. Alps form a solid barrier, an obstacle every bit as conceptual as visual and physical. Alpine bluffs and crags just don't rear up, they lean outwards, projecting their mass, and their solidity does not relent. For a West Australian like me, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic. I think I was constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short.
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Tim Winton (Island Home)
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The sharpie uniform is perhaps the most unlikely fashion statement you will ever see, a Frankenstein’s monster of baby-doll plucked eyebrows, skinhead-meets-mullet hair, 1970s fat ties and just a hint of bovver boy. Clothes worn too tight and too small. Kerry had prepared a shopping list: • bluebird earrings • three-inch Mary Jane corkie platform shoes • treads (shoes made using recycled tyres for the sole with suede thonging for the upper) • Lee canvas jeans • beachcombers • short white bobby socks • ribbed tights • a short, flared, preferably panelled skirt • satin baggies • a striped Golden Breed t-shirt or a KrestKnit polo shirt • a tight coral necklace from the surf shop • a Conti brand striped cardigan • blue metallic eye shadow from a small pot or a crayon
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Magda Szubanski (Reckoning: A powerful memoir from an Australian icon)
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There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.
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Whitley Strieber (The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained)
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Aware her appearance was nothing short of scandalous, Camille bounded over branches and fallen pine needles to the shield of her horse. Ira’s whistle pierced the air.
“You should’a warned us you weren’t dressed, love. Though I’m not entirely sorry to see you in your unwhisperables.”
She grabbed the blanket from the back of her horse and wrapped herself in it. Oscar appeared from around the bend, four pike speared on a stick. She watched him stride through the water just behind Ira. The muscle of his pale chest, stomach, and arms was enough to make her forget her clothing was still yards away near the water’s edge. Camille faced the forest as he and Ira approached the shallows. She listened to them slosh out of the water and counted off a minute as they pulled on their trousers and shirts.
“Finished. Your innocence won’t be spoiled if you look now,” Ira called.
She turned and saw Oscar had come up to the other side of her horse. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his eyes; they met hers, lowered to the blanket she held tight around her chest, and then focused on the horse’s stringy black mane. He held her dress over the saddle, half looking at her, half trying to be gentlemanly. But when she thanked him and tried to take it, he held on.
“What is it?” he asked, then released the dress. Camille tightened the blanket around her chest. “You look frightened. Did something happen?”
She hadn’t realized she’d looked upset.
“It’s nothing. A deer just startled me, that’s all.” She nodded toward the woods.
He backed up from the horse, his eyes lifting to her bare shoulders and then away.
Ira grabbed the rifle from his horse and sprang for the trees. “When? Which way did it go?”
“Ira Beam, you are not going to shoot an innocent animal,” she said, shaking out her dress.
The Australian leaped into the forest. “I’ll meet you upriver!” he shouted, and then he was gone, his noisy tear into the woods enough to scatter tree ants, let alone any remaining game.
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Angie Frazier (Everlasting (Everlasting, #1))
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One of the representatives wore a long robe and a scarlet headscarf, a sheik-superior from the Wahhabi Caliphate, a Muslim star empire. The second envoy, with a great handlebar mustache, represented the Windsor League, a combination of British, Canadian, Australian and Indian colony worlds. The last was a Spacer, a small woman with dark features and short hair. She symbolized the confederation of traders and industrialists with no fixed abodes other than their starships.
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Vaughn Heppner (The Lost Starship (Lost Starship, #1))
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If a name was long, Australians liked to make it shorter. If it was short, they did the opposite.
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Victoria Purman (The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls)
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How about a quick tub?” Steve said. That was Australian for bath. Somehow, the words “bath” and “crocodile” refused to go together in my mind.
But into the Burdekin we went, in our shorts, barefoot, picking our way through the stones, sticks, and burrs until we got to the smooth rocks of the river. Steve jumped in. I was more cautious. As I edged toward deeper water, he blocked my path and moved himself around in front of me.
“What are you doing?”
He laughed. “I caught the last big male crocodile around here last year, but I can’t be too sure another one hasn’t moved in.”
“So,” I said, “you want to make sure to keep yourself between me and the rest of the river.”
“Right-o, mate,” he replied.
I thought, Is this guy for real? Most guys think they’re doing a girl a favor by opening a door, and here Steve was, putting himself between me and a croc.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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I left the icebox cold of Oregon for the tropical heat of Cairns in early January 1992. As I got off the plane to catch my connecting flight to Brisbane, I found it almost difficult to breathe, it was so hot and muggy.
My mind was working in funny ways. It’s just too hot here, I thought. I could never live here. Then I caught myself. Hang on a minute. What was that? Why would that even be an option, living here? I’m just coming over to see this guy. But that Cairns moment was the first time I actually thought about leaving my Oregon life behind to join Steve in his Australian one.
On my final approach to Brisbane, I had an excited feeling again, a sense of coming home. It seemed like I was the only passenger eager to get off the plane. Everyone else was moving as though they were underwater. I stepped out into the airport. There was Steve, back in his khakis. It was nice to see him in those familiar shorts again, after having to bundle up in Oregon against the cold.
We embraced, and I had the sense that we were one person. Apart, we weren’t whole, but together, we were okay again.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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But my favourite cautionary tale is of Australian junior doctor Barry Marshall and his pathologist colleague Robin Warren. In the early 1980s they disagreed with the general medical consensus that most stomach ulcers were caused by stress, bad diet, alcohol, smoking and genetic factors. Instead Marshall and Warren were convinced that a particular bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the cause. And if they were right, the solution to many patients’ ulcers could be a simple course of antibiotics, not the risky stomach surgery that was often on the cards. Barry must have picked the short straw, because instead of setting up a test on random members of the public – and having to convince those well-known fun-skewerers of human trials: ethics committees – he just went ahead and swallowed a bunch of the little bugs. Imagine the joy, as his hypothesis was proved right! Imagine the horror, as his stomach became infected, which led to gastritis, the first stage of the stomach ulcers! Imagine his poor wife and family, as the vomiting and halitosis became too much to bear! Dr Marshall lasted 14 days before taking antibiotics to kill the H. pylori, but it was another 20 years before he and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. So, hang on, is self-experimenting really that bad if it wins you a Nobel Prize? I guess you can only have a go and find out…but please don’t go as far as US army surgeon Jesse Lazear: in trying to prove that yellow fever was contagious, and that infected blood could be transferred via mosquito bites, he was bitten by one and died. The mosquito that caused his death might not even have been part of his experiment. It’s thought that it could just have been a local specimen. But one that enjoyed both biting humans and dramatic irony. Gastrointestinal elements
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Helen Arney (The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face)
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Finding the Best Immigration Lawyer in Sydney:
Services offered Navigating the complex landscape of immigration law can be daunting, especially in a city as diverse and bustling as Sydney. The right immigration lawyer can be an invaluable asset by providing essential advice and support. Here is a closer look at the services offered by the best immigration lawyers in Sydney and how they can help you during your immigration journey.
Help with visa application
One of the primary services provided by immigration attorneys is assistance with visa applications. There are different visa categories in Australia, including:
Skilled Worker Visa: For individuals with specific skills that are in demand in Australia.
Family visas: For reunification of family members, including partner, child and parent visas. Student visa: For those who want to study in Australia.
Visitor visas: For short-term visits for tourism or business. The best immigration lawyers will help clients determine the most appropriate visa category, prepare the necessary documentation, and ensure correct and timely submission of applications.
Legal advice and representation
Immigration law can be complex, with ever-changing rules and regulations. An experienced immigration attorney provides legal advice customized to your situation. They can clarify complex legal jargon, outline your rights and responsibilities, and discuss the potential risks and benefits of different immigration options.
If your application is refused or if you face visa cancellation, an experienced lawyer will represent you in appeals or judicial reviews. Their experience in handling such cases can greatly increase your chances of a favorable outcome.
Preparation for interviews
Many visa applications require interviews with immigration authorities. The best immigration attorneys will prepare you for these interviews by conducting mock interviews and advising you on how to effectively present your case. They will help you understand the types of questions that may come up and how to confidently answer them, ensuring that you are well prepared for the day.
Compliance and Legal Obligations
Once you have obtained a visa, it is essential to meet its conditions. Immigration attorneys provide advice on your responsibilities as a visa holder and help you understand what it takes to avoid violations that could jeopardize your immigration status. This includes understanding employment rights, study requirements and reporting obligations.
Applications for permanent residence and citizenship
For many immigrants, the ultimate goal is to achieve permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Immigration attorneys can help you with permanent residency applications, guide you through the points test and ensure that you meet all the necessary requirements.
In addition, if you want to apply for Australian citizenship, an immigration lawyer can help you understand the eligibility criteria, prepare your application and deal with any issues. They can also help you prepare for your citizenship test and ensure you are ready to demonstrate your knowledge of Australian history, culture and values.
Help with special cases
Some immigration situations are more complicated than others.
The best immigration lawyers are equipped to handle special cases, including:
Refugee and Humanitarian Visas: For those seeking asylum in Australia due to persecution or significant risk in their home country.
Employer-sponsored visas: We help businesses sponsor foreign workers and ensure compliance with labor laws.
Health and Character Issues: Addressing issues that may arise from health screenings or character evaluations, helps clients prepare necessary documentation and appeals.
Consulting services for businesses
If you are a business looking to hire talent from overseas, an immigration attorney can provide essential services. They can h
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immigration lawyer sydney
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What kind of visa can a person get in Australia during a partner visa process?
The Partner Visa application process can be a lengthy journey that often takes months or even years to complete. During this time, you may be wondering what visa options are available to you while you await the outcome of your partner visa application. This blog will explore the different visa options that can give you legal status in Australia during the waiting period.
Understanding partner visas
Before delving into alternative visa options, it is essential to understand the basics of partner visas in Australia. A partner visa allows the partner of an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen to live in Australia. There are two subclasses:
Temporary Partner Visa (Subclass 820): This visa is granted while your Permanent Partner Visa (Subclass 801) is being processed.
Permanent Partner Visa (Subclass 801): This visa allows you to live in Australia permanently after a temporary visa has been held for a certain period of time.
If you have applied for a partner visa but have not yet received a decision, you may be eligible for additional visa options to ensure you can stay in Australia legally.
Visitor visa (subclass 600)
One of the most common options while waiting for a partner visa is a visitor visa (subclass 600). This visa allows you to stay in Australia temporarily for tourism, family visits or other short-term purposes.
Key Features:
Length: Usually allows stays of up to 3, 6 or 12 months, depending on your specific situation.
Work rights: This visa generally does not allow you to work in Australia.
Eligibility: You must demonstrate that you are a genuine visitor and intend to return to your home country.
Considerations:
While a visitor visa may grant you temporary status, keep in mind that it is not intended for long-term stay. If you intend to work or study, this visa may not be suitable for your needs.
Bridging visa (subclass BVA)
If you are already in Australia on a valid visa and have applied for a partner visa, you may be automatically granted a bridging visa (subclass BVA) which allows you to remain in Australia legally while your partner visa application is in place.
Key Features:
Duration: A bridging visa remains valid until your application for a partner visa is decided.
Work rights: Depending on the circumstances, you may be allowed to work. You may need to prove financial hardship to get work rights.
Conditions: You must meet the conditions set out in your bridging visa, which may include reporting to immigration authorities.
Considerations:
Bridging visas are temporary and specific to your situation. If you are using a bridging visa, make sure you understand its terms and conditions to avoid any breach that could affect your application for a partner visa.
Student visa (subclass 500)
If you want to study while waiting for a partner visa, you can consider applying for a student visa (subclass 500). This visa allows you to enroll in full-time study in Australia.
Key Features:
Duration: Valid for the duration of your course plus a short period afterwards to prepare for departure.
Work rights: Generally allows you to work up to 40 hours per fortnight during the school year and unlimited hours during breaks.
Eligibility: You must be enrolled in a registered course and meet the financial and health requirements.
Considerations:
Studying in Australia can be a great way to improve your skills and make the most of your time while waiting for your partner visa. However, make sure that your study plans are in line with your long-term goals and financial capabilities.
Temporary Work Visa (Subclass 482)
If you have skills that are in demand in Australia, you may be eligible for a temporary work visa (subclass 482). This visa allows skilled workers to work for an approved employer in Australia.
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partner visa australia
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Our fascination with change won’t, of itself, make it more likely or more rapid. Come 2020, I’m confident that Australia will still have one of the world’s strongest economies because the current yearning for magic-pudding economics will turn out to be short-lived. The United States will remain the world’s strongest country by far, and our partnership with America will still be the foundation of our security. We will still be a ‘crowned republic’ because we will have concluded (perhaps reluctantly) that it’s actually the least imperfect system of government. We will be more cosmopolitan than ever but perhaps less multicultural because there will be more stress on unity than on diversity. Some progress will have been made towards ‘closing the gap’ between Aboriginal and other Australians’ standards of living (largely because fewer Aboriginal people will live in welfare villages and more of them will have received a good general education). Families won’t break up any more often, because old-fashioned notions about making the most of imperfect situations will have made something of a comeback. Finally, there will have been bigger fires, more extensive floods and more ferocious storms because records are always being broken. But sea levels will be much the same, desert boundaries will not have changed much, and technology, rather than economic self-denial, will be starting to cut down atmospheric pollution.
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Tony Abbott (Battlelines)
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At the Evian conference in July 1938, which failed to offer help to Germany’s persecuted Jews, it was the Australian representative Thomas White who made the most callous remark: ‘As we have no racial problem we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.’ A short version of the quote is displayed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Australia’s narrow-mindedness juxtaposed with the souls of six million dead.
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George Megalogenis (Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future)
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I liked my Australian women the way I liked my kiwi fruit, sweet yet tart, firm of flesh, yet yielding to the touch, and covered with short brown fuzzy hair.
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Mark Schweizer (The Diva Wore Diamonds (The Liturgical Mystery #7))
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After I paid my admission fee, I saw that the reptile enclosures were kept perfectly clean--the snakes glistened. I kept rescued animals myself at home. I knew zoos, and I knew the variety of nightmares they can fall into. But I saw not a sign of external parasites on these animals, no old food rotting in the cages, no feces or shed skin left unattended.
So I enjoyed myself. I toured around, learned about the snakes, and fed the kangaroos. It was a brilliant, sunlit day.
“There will be a show at the crocodile enclosures in five minutes,” a voice announced on the PA system. “Five minutes.”
That sounded good to me.
I noticed the crocodiles before I noticed the man. There was a whole line of crocodilians: alligators, freshwater crocodiles, and one big saltie. Amazing, modern-day dinosaurs. I didn’t know much about them, but I knew that they had existed unchanged for millions of years. They were a message from our past, from the dawn of time, among the most ancient creatures on the planet.
Then I saw the man. A tall, solid twentysomething (he appeared younger than he was, and had actually turned twenty-nine that February), dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, barefoot, with blond flyaway hair underneath a big Akubra hat and a black-banded wristwatch on his left wrist. Even though he was big and muscular, there was something kind and approachable about him too.
I stood among the fifteen or twenty other park visitors and listened to him talk.
“They can live as long as or even longer than us,” he said, walking casually past the big saltwater croc’s pond. “They can hold their breath underwater for hours.”
He approached the water’s edge with a piece of meat. The crocodile lunged out of the water and snapped the meat from his hand. “This male croc is territorial,” he explained, “and females become really aggressive when they lay eggs in a nest.” He knelt beside the croc that had just tried to nail him. “Crocodiles are such good mothers.”
Every inch of this man, every movement and word exuded his passion for the crocodilians he passed among. I couldn’t help but notice that he never tried to big-note himself. He was there to make sure his audience admired the crocs, not himself.
I recognized his passion, because I felt some of it myself. I spoke the same way about cougars as this Australian zookeeper spoke about crocs. When I heard there would be a special guided tour of the Crocodile Environmental Park, I was first in line for a ticket. I had to hear more. This man was on fire with enthusiasm, and I felt I really connected with him, like I was meeting a kindred spirit.
What was the young zookeeper’s name? Irwin. Steve Irwin.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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Rudd was scathing on the provincial reflex: ‘It’s like so many of the debates in Australia, it’s couched as a zero-sum game – you can’t have an activist foreign policy at the same time as an activist domestic reform policy,’ he said in an interview for this paper shortly before returning to the prime ministership in 2013. Zero-sum-ism is a deep malady in Australian politics. But foreign policy becomes domestic and external becomes internal. For God’s sake, in a country with a million people overseas at any given time, we have a deep interest in engaging. The truth is that foreign policy and what we sell to the world are core national interests and anybody who pretends otherwise is engaging in a tawdry political exercise. Zero-sum-ism is not only analytically flawed – you can be active on both fronts, domestic and foreign – it also undermines Australia’s national interests.
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Peter Hartcher (The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special)
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The Electronic Travel Authority is the name given to the most commonly used Australian Tourist Visa allows you to stay in Australia for up to 3 months on each arrival within 12 months from the date the visa was granted.An eVisitor visa is eligible for the citizens of the European Union countries who hold a valid passport of any of those countries. An Electronic Travel Authority provides authorization to travel to and enter Australia and is electronically linked to your passport. It is for short term stays for tourism or business Visitor activities such as attending a conference, making business enquirers, or for contractual negotiations.
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Australia Tourist visa Application
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New South Wales did not begin as a penal colony; it is better to think of it beginning as a colony of convicts... Why wasn't early New South Wales a penal colony? The short answer is that British officials in 1786 could not conceive of such a beast: a society of wardens and prisoners designed for punishment and control, as the French ran much later on Devil's Island.
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John Hirst (Australian History in Seven Questions)
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... this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.
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Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction)
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... have you ever watched someone you know front their own reflection in a mirror? ... You see a stiffening, a closing, a dimming; you see them pull on their own idea of themselves, the caricature that will soften and melt away the minute they think of something other than the enemy before them.
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Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction)
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I want to be the one doing the looking. I have developed a whole social demeanour with the aim of deflecting attention from my appearance, I actively dislike being looked at.
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Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction)
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Maybe that's what beauty is: loving being looked at. The beautiful are greedy.
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Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction)
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We've been trained in your tradition,' said Natalie. 'We're honorary men.
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Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction)
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Craig Henderson. You are the most attractive real estate agent in the region.
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Laura Jean McKay (Gunflower)
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In December 1941, when Australians began to sense that they were plunged into a new environment, the spectacles they had carried out from Britain were obsolete. They needed spectacles that would correct short-sightedness. They had to see the environment they were in as clearly as the environment they had left across the world.
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Geoffrey Blainey (The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History)
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Alexandra gasped and fell backwards. The blood drained from her face as ice tracked through her veins. She scrambled back to the keyhole and stared at the men in the room.
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Ellen Read (Alexandra & Edith's Escapades - The Diamond Ring)
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Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.
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William Gibson (Distrust That Particular Flavor)