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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As one tyranny replaced another, Natalie Makarova was allowed to work with the immigration authorities processing refugees. She may have hoped to make some contact there or gather information that might help the family to get out of the country. Even the faintest possibility had to be followed through

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Commissario Guido Brunetti, a Venetian police inspector, is Donna Leon’s fictional resident of San Polo. He speaks “Veneziano” and admires those who do so with a specific sestiere accent—from Castello. The crime writer Donna Leon has lived in Cannaregio, the closest sestiere to the railway station, where Venetians who still work and live in the […]

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Despite our times of comfort and plenty, optimism is under assault. Pessimism is leaping to the attack. Optimism appears to have fewer and fewer adherents. While natural temperament, derived from heredity or environment or both, is the foundation, philosophical conviction builds on it, sometimes in surprising ways. An illustration of this is the case of […]

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