Memory strikes when we least expect. I’m forced to remember events I would rather leave behind. They come out of nowhere and trip me up, usually as a commentary on my attempts to achieve something. Happily, they are brief and rarely span a complete period in my life. Therefore I was surprised when the following […]

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One problem with Victoria's schools, and a key reason why we quit the state, lies with the benevolent, malleable majority of teachers who assume the state, its schools and the wider popular culture supplant parents and families as arbiters of the most complex moral questions

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I was deeply and passionately in love, as only an adolescent who has glimpsed another existence can be. It happened quickly. I knew almost nothing about him, and he barely registered that I existed, but he was the whole wide world wrapped up as a present for me

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Traffic in Vietnam is 'organised chaos'. Double white lines are ignored, traffic lights turning red are regarded as suggestions rather edicts, and the reminders of the carnage can be harrowing. I think in particular of a dead little girl and the roadside memorial that chills me every time I ride past

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John Dryden once defined music as “inarticulate poesy” (poetry). Turning that around, I define poetry as “articulate music”, for that is what the best poetry is: sound cut into time as rhythm for harmonies of expression. Hybrid Publishers of Ormond in Victoria, who have published my last five books, clearly like both my Australian poetry […]

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Cynicism shares our lunch these days, yet trust survives. It must, for we are human and at that level we still see the shining light of its truth. There’s relief in that, since a tendency to trust others, according to psychologists, is a strong predictor of subjective well-being

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Hagen is indeed a tough town, a place where every shop window had been smashed not long before my arrival in retaliation for some offence to clan honour by a white man. Paybacks are fairly indiscriminate even when love is in the air, as I was soon to discover.

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I am not sure why I decided to travel on the Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin. Recent reading had much to do with it. A book about the painter Rex Battarbee told how he had introduced Albert Namatjira to watercolour painting. I had not realised that as early as the 1930s Battarbee made frequent trips […]

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Snapshot “I’m not an activities person,” she says. “I like my own company.” But she reluctantly accepts me. As a volunteer I join her once a week for conversation in “The Home”. “Hello, my dear. Sit down.” Despite the educated voice, the salon-perfect hair, the tasteful attire, she is not aloof. Nor is she precious. […]

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Weather forecast: very hot, late storm. A revolution is coming. A civilisation is collapsing. Be afraid, be warned. We can’t stop it. We can’t hold back. It is going to happen. Go, read Chateaubriand. Be afraid for those coming after us. It’s mid-summer and hot. Usually, in Hobart, I remind our neighbour, watering his roses, […]

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