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When British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla farewelled the hit series The Crown and his character, Dodi Fayed, he knew he was saying goodbye to a role with a depth and significance well beyond merely a love interest for Princess Diana. “Dodi is one of the first Arab characters I can think of in the history of [western] film that you get to know and love, not fear,” says Abdalla, seated in his London home two years after the series ended. “And so, when he dies, you mourn him.”
Glasgow-born Abdalla, 45, whose father and grandfather were leftist political dissidents in Egypt, well understood the cultural significance of fleshing out the character of Alexandria-born Fayed beyond the playboy of legend.
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In 1985, the late Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood was paddling in a borrowed canoe across a tributary in Kakadu in the Northern Territory, seeking a proposed walking track in these wilds she had fought to secure as a national park.
Pulling her canoe over for a “hasty, sodden lunch” in water rising due to flooding, she sensed she was being watched. Torrential rain started up as she pulled back into the main current when a floating stick developed the eyes of a crocodile, repeatedly slamming into her wooden vessel. To avoid capsizing, Plumwood jumped into the branches of a paperbark, but the crocodile leapt too, dragging her down into a triple death roll.
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On the banks of the Lhara Pinta (Finke River) in Central Australia in 1940, Western Arrarnta landscape painter Albert Namatjira began building a two-room home of sandstone and lime with an iron roof, planting watermelon crops around it. The house stands today, and artist Tony Albert, who only recently discovered its existence, says it is a “fantastic destination” that anyone can visit.
“I couldn’t believe this house Albert had built,” he says. “I’ve lined up in the street just to visit Frida Kahlo’s house [La Casa Azul, in Mexico City] and likewise Albert’s house needs to be much better recognised.” The famous watercolourist was permitted to build his modest home on his Country at Ntaria/Hermannsburg, where he lived until 1950, but he was later denied applications to buy a Northern Territory grazing lease and to build a home in Alice Springs because he was Aboriginal.
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