It’s funny that even bad smells can tug nostalgic strings: the compost bin; chicken manure distilled in its most pungent commercial form as Dynamic Lifter; the slight sorrow and regret as you drive along a country road and realise, from the sharp distinctive pong, that there is a dead kangaroo nearby, and its smell has […]

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Last year I travelled on a cruise from Rome down to Naples, across to Sicily and on to Malta, following the route taken by the sixteenth-century painter Caravaggio as he fled from justice after killing a man in a Roman street brawl. In each city the painter’s fame earned him commissions for portraits and altar […]

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The political retrospectives of 1989 rolled in during the last few months of the 2009, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breaching of the totalitarian dam in Russia’s European empire taking, reasonably enough, pride of place. In what we like to call “our part of the world” the memories of the dark days […]

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Death hovered over Vientiane on the night Saigon fell, but I didn’t see it. In retrospect, April 30, 1975, should have been the day my generation began waking up, but it wasn’t. I left Sydney for Luang Prabang early in 1975. I don’t remember the dates. There was a plane flight from Sydney to Singapore […]

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22/3/87 Below Dairy Flat Bridge Returning to Queanbeyan in the pre-dawn after being present at the birth of my second son, I stopped at the Dairy Flat Bridge and went down to stand beside the Molonglo River. The east beyond the airport was beginning to brighten. The sky was a profound blue from which most […]

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Forget all that business about flags and anthems and agonising about national characteristics—perhaps the way people queue is a much better indicator of national identity. So for what it’s worth, here’s a quick trip around the world, according to queue protocol. In Britain, people queue politely, obediently. You always know where a queue is—it stretches, […]

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I go back to my grandfather. He was born into a tribe on the Queensland–Northern Territory border and ran around naked with the rest of the black kids. The people who found him managed Westmoreland. They were Charles Tonner and his wife Millicent who had the lease on the property. The blacks came regularly to […]

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The display at the New South Wales State Library of Ethel Anderson’s ear trumpet brought back a host of memories for me of my childhood in Turramurra in the 1940s, memories in which Ethel Anderson has a firm place. Nowadays routinely referred to as part of the “leafy north shore”, Turramurra was all that and […]

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Consider Austria: a small land-locked nation of a mere eight million people, maintaining and managing borders with eight other countries. An area not much bigger than Tasmania, it’s much shrunken since its great days as the heart of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and before that the Austrian empire and even earlier as an important component of […]

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John Anderson, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 until he retired in 1957, was the single most important influence in my life, and in the lives of a great many other Australians. Reflecting on events, you might say the same about Sir John Kerr. Anderson taught us to think. It is a […]

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