After tragedy, grief is quickly hijacked by blame. Votes are counted, ideologies accused, and humanity lost in the noise. But violence is not a referendum, and collective guilt solves nothing. What matters is courage, evidence, and a media culture that informs rather than inflames.
The Cowaramup Bullshed is the ‘Men Shed’ for the Margaret River region. Apparently others are planned for Margs itself and there is also one at…
A bunch of really special people start chopping and slicing at the Margaret River Soup Kitchen every Wednesday morning in preparation for the 5.00 pm…
Margs people or ‘Margites’ as I affectionately call them will get a kick out of a newby (a Maggot) who was annoyed about what sounded…
I always wanted to open a bakery…if I win lotto I will and call it ‘This Day’…as in ‘give us this day our daily bread’. …
Travelling companions aren’t always pleasant. If you are forced to sit beside someone who is obnoxious or smelly or you aren’t in the mood to…
The Swan Newspaper is going south…specifically the South West of Western Australia. We will be telling stories about the great southern region, its history and…
With reference to Plutarch’s Life of Brutus In the quiet after terror, when the ghost of Caesar has vanished from Brutus’s tent, Cassius delivers a…
From ‘The Aboriginal People of Alice Springs’ by Dan White This and many more amazing pictures of Indigenous people of Central Australia can be viewed…
Isaac Asimov once joked that humanity might be “a bunch of hicks way out in the sticks,” living too far from the bustling heart of the galaxy for anyone to visit. Perhaps he was right. In this sweeping exploration of the Milky Way’s architecture, Leo O’Hagan argues that our loneliness may simply be the price of distance — that civilisation thrives near the crowded core, while we drift quietly on the rim, listening for voices too far away to hear.
When Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels transformed Horst Wessel’s death into a political myth in 1930s Germany, he showed how martyrdom could be weaponised. Nearly a century later, the Republican Party and MAGA movement are doing the same with Charlie Kirk’s assassination — erasing complexity, amplifying grievance, and turning tragedy into a rallying cry.
AUKUS promised security but delivers obedience. In a blistering speech, Paul Keating calls out Labor’s surrender to American strategy and Britain’s nostalgia. Leo O’Hagan writes that if it is too late to stop AUKUS, it is not too late to own it — on Australian terms.
During a recent White House meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat across from Donald Trump, fielding questions from the assembled media. But rather than focus…