Molokai: The Australian 1999 Film

Mateship in Australian Films Mateship has long been a major aspect of the national image as projected by Australian films, yet the moralities of mateship and the image of men as mates did not go unchallenged. Australian cinema as a significant part of the whole industry of image-makers in the country, the way it portrays mateship, the single most important mythic element in the cultural identity of Australia, is worth analysing. This paper first reviews the historical background of mateship in Australia and its contemporary development. The review here serves as a general discussion of mateship that provides the potential readers with some basic understandings of the idea, and as background

Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos of the Heart, tells of his experiences during the time he served in Homeboy Industries and of how he saw God’s work in those who felt as if they had no hope in becoming better people nor getting better lives, and how things turned around for them. In this book, he teaches gangsters that the Kingdom of God is for everyone, that it is never too late to start a loving relationship with Him, and that they are always welcome to come back to their Creator. Father Gregory, more fondly called as “G”, demonstrates this act of bringing shalom by using theology, in his own manner, to influence his actions, way of thinking, and words.

The play illustrated by Adu-Gyamfi & Schmidt (2011), “Everyman” written by an anonymous writer late in the fifteenth-century (p. 265-287), interconnects religious allegories with worldly moral lessons on several main reasons that good deeds and works are required and needed, but they do not save humanity from spiritual death. The play conveys a story about Everyman’s (representing human individuals) natural life journey to death. The morality of the play helps the audience appreciate the history of Christianity. The focal point throughout the play is about humanities, life plan and a journey that requires every man to construct an unworldly firm foundation built up strong to help overcome any uprooting storm within a lifetime. Its personification comes in the form of the characters Everyman, Goods, and Goods Deeds, who embodied the concept of teaching lessons to humanity of the significance of living a Christ-centered life and learning to allow the heart restored and guided by God to help aid good judgement (Adu-Gyamfi & Schmidt, 2011). Thomas F. Van Laan (1963) describes Everyman’s play, “The human action and its allegorical significance together form a distinct structural pattern which not only imposes discipline but also contributes its own intrinsic meaning”. From the start of the first phase 5-6, the first point of view of the play engages, “…That of our lives and ending* shows / How transitory we be all day.*…” (Adu-Gyamfi & Schmidt, 2011). The play displays how

Newsfront (1978) is about the commencement of Australian television. It notions the changing times; the context before the television was a household object.

Near the beginning of the movie there is a group of monks seen walking through an impoverished town. Unlike what one would expect from people of God, the monks do not stop to help anyone or even look at them. When there are people lying on the ground half dead, most people would think that the monks would be there to heal and give food to the poor and dying; however, they are seen passing by with their neat robes on. This represents the complete lack of caring that the upper class religious leaders show for the common person.

What film do you think best represents Australian cultural identity? Well, a nationwide survey revealed that more than one-third of people (37%) believe that Rob Sitch’s 1997 film, The Castle best represents the real Australia (The Australian, 2010). An Australian story about the Kerrigan family who live next to an airport. But their life is turned upside-down when the government tries to force them out of their house. The Castle must be cherished as an accurate representation of Australian cultural identity. This is depicted through the family values of pride, closeness and a simplistic life.

To better understand Aboriginals as a Dream Culture I want to give more insight into Aboriginal Australians general culture and their conceptions of “Dream Time.” In his discussion of religion, Mircea Eliade describes a concept of Cosmos vs Chaos (Eliade 1957). In this notion an unordered world is chaotic only until is it transposed during a sacred time: “By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos though a ritual repetition of the cosmogony” (Eliade 1957:31). In other words until a land is tamed or created it is considered unordered. This can be applied to Aboriginal’s understanding of the world prior to their current presence. Aboriginals believe that in a time before the Dreamings, the land and world was a featureless earth. It was not until the dreamtime, or time of creation: “where there is contact with appearances from both realms of inside the earth itself as from ill-defined upper region” that the earth began to have its composed landscapes (Cowan 1992:26). The Dream Time is not only a period but more of a dimension where ancestral beings moved across the earth and created not only land, but every aspect of the earth including animals, plants, and man. It is important to realize that the ancestors created the natural earth and that is why Aboriginals live a particular lifestyle. Most Aboriginals living in this cosmogony are hunter-gatherer tribes. This aspect of their life can be traced to stem from the idea of

Little was known about the clergy during the Black Death. For a long time people believed that the Catholic Church had fled from its duty to serve the people, but that could not be further from the truth. In recent discovery it was found that greater than 50 percent of clergy were killed during the Black Death. This was not because the clergy were running away; rather, the clergy stayed and helped the people in villages, knowing the likelihood they would survive would be slim throughout this epidemic. It is my goal in this paper to describe what was occurring during the Black Death and how the Catholic Church and its clergy reacted to the epidemic.

The minister they had once sought for comfort and solace has become a seductive, mysterious stranger with whom nobody can identify. The congregation feels as though Hooper can reach into their souls and see all the inadequacy and sin hidden within. As expressed in the story, "Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of most hardened breast felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought." Because of his vow, the minister is forced into a life of solitude, forever lacking satisfaction and comfort.

Colonialism in Australia places a detrimental threat to the health of Indigenous Australians. Inherent in colonialism were scientific racisms, institutional racism and structural violence. These factors continues to persist in the fabric of Australian society today and limits the life chances of Indigenous Australians. This essay illuminates colonialism as a major contributor to the social marginalisation and low socioeconomic status experienced by indigenous Australian. An analysis of Aboriginal infant mortality rate, a health indicator highlights the difference between biomedical and sociological approach and the embedded negative impact of social marginalisation and low socioeconomic status on the health of Indigenous Australians. The

Everybody the priest encounters will not harbour him because of fear of the law. These barren lands symbolize the priest's feeling of worthlesness and rejection from God, and the feeling of inevitable sin and the impossibility of martyrdom. "'I don't know how to repent.' That was true: he had lost the faculty. He couldn't say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant and he loved the fruit of it... our sins have so much beauty." (p. 128,130) The priest continues to create damage as several innocent members of passing communities are executed by the police for not being able to provide adequate information on the priest's course of action. The priest's developing knowledge of the damage he is creating adds guilt to his anxiety, and he continues to question God about the meaning behind his situation.

Even the house in which the youthful main character lives adds to the sense of moral decay. The former tenant, a priest (now dead), is shown to have been insensitive to the spiritual needs of his people. His legacy was a collection of books that showed his confusion of the sacred with the secular-and there is evidence that he devoted his life to gathering "money" and "furniture." He left behind no evidence of a life of spiritual influence.

Even though he will not let himself be beaten for no reason, if he has made an inadvertent mistake, he will try to correct it, as he does with his grandmother, after accidentally embarrassing in church. “Later, I convinced her that I had not wanted to hurt her and she immediately seized upon my concern for her feelings as an opportunity to have one more try at bringing me to god. She wept and pleaded with me to pray... I promised; after all, I felt that I owed her something for inadvertently making her ridiculous before the member of her church.” (Wright 119) And he follows through with that. He prays, daily, for an hour. That hour is torture, but he keeps his promise, abiding by his moral code. He is different from the boys and girls of his church congregation, and class: they have been indoctrinated and do as they are told, docilely. One boy walks up to Richard, prompted by the congregation, who think that Richard is doomed to burn in Hell, and tries to convert him; it is obvious that the boy has no real conviction in God of his own, rather, the belief in God has been forced upon him by his parents and community. “Though older than I, he had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel.”(Wright 116) Meanwhile, Wright, in stark contrast, resists the attempts of his Grandmother and extended family to indoctrinate him into religion, instead deciding to

He has invitations to eat in everybody’s houses” (p. 134). Unlike Father Benedict, Father Amadi is not a colonial product. He has the ability to combine the Western traditions of the church with Igbo praise songs, much to the distaste of Papa Eugene. He has managed to create a healthy balance between accepting his Nigerian culture while following a European religion - a very contemporary expression of his faith. Father Amadi becomes socially and spiritually attached to others, such as the young boys he plays football with. He tells Kambili, “I see Christ in their faces, in the boys faces” (p. 178). Kambili struggles to imagine a Godly figure in the faces of ordinary people – this just shows how Father Amadi chooses to see the good of God in others, and wants to use his religion to help others in need. It is clear in the novel that Father Amadi follows God’s word through love, compassion and care for others. His devotion to helping the troubled Kambili acts as an example of his caring nature. He speaks of an all-accepting and forgiving God, offering a huge contrast to Papa Eugene’s constant talk of a revengeful, punishing God, and he echoes the love of God in his everyday life. Adichie uses Father Amadi to show the reader a different kind of priest from the common stereotype; a kind of priest contrasting hugely to the very distant and formal Father Benedict. This could be a great eye-opener for many readers who may realise they themselves had had

This short scene leading to the cross opens the mind of the audience that Jesus loves us vastly to take the punishments of sins.