Word: outback
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carey's title provides an answer to the first and most obvious question: Who on earth would go to the considerable trouble of making a glass church materialize in the Australian outback? Why, Oscar and Lucinda, naturally. But who are (or were) they, what brought them together, and why did they conceive such a pointless, improbable dream? Explanations, as the author supplies them, grow ever less simple and more entertaining...
...Mick's perpetually adoring girlfriend. Then an unlikely band of citizens has to be recruited to help him rescue her. Then the criminals must be lured all the way to Australia so that Mick can prove what we already know: that their street smarts are no match for his outback smarts. Then, then, then. It's a little like listening to a child improvise a tall tale; the innocent charm quickly wears thin...
...compared with 72 for a white Australian. According to Dr. Michael Gracey, a medical researcher in Perth, high levels of infection, unbalanced diets and poor hygiene are all contributing to impaired growth among Aboriginal children. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, some 200 Aborigines rioted in two Outback towns in Queensland and New South Wales this year. Two weeks ago, 40 demonstrators demanding better housing stormed a government office in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart...
...Outback, which is currently In, Chatwin finds that rooms are few and far between. Lonesomeness and cultural dislocation are the norm, and traditional songlines are sometimes surprisingly upbeat. What would the ancestors think of the aboriginal rock band whose record Grandfather's Country reached No. 3 on the antipodean charts? Or of the highly educated tribal leader who twice a year set aside his hunting spear, put on a double-breasted suit and boarded a train for Adelaide, where he read back issues of Scientific American...
...meets The Cosby Show. What a surprise! It works better than a fastidious mind might imagine. One reason is that Mel Gibson himself has been recruited to play Lethal Weapon's lethal weapon, Los Angeles Police Detective Martin Riggs. Sometimes, when Gibson is not wandering the post-atomic Outback, he has a tendency merely to stand around looking internationally handsome. But Riggs is Max's psychological cousin, a man whose wild-eyed courage is based on having witnessed so much cruelty that he no longer cares whether he lives or dies. Gibson knows just how to temper the gaga energy...