The parish priest was adamant. If I continued to insist on getting married on AFL Grand Final day, and I was a minute late for the cere­mony, he would not wait for me. I got the message. A high noon wedding, but with no guns. We’d had lots of chat with the priest leading up […]

Read More

March 23, 2020, 8 p.m., and opposite me in the hotel shuttle bus to LAX is an airline pilot in full uniform. The bus lurches and I almost fall on him as, like everyone else on the shuttle, I am trying to avoid clinging to the nearby pole with my bare hands. I take my […]

Read More

At various times as a full-time critic, I have wandered the storerooms of state and national galleries. If the public which pays for the art collected in its name could see even a fraction of the ephemeral rubbish it has effectively paid for, there would perhaps be cause for at least some form of cultural revolution

Read More

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 […]

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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 […]

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Read More