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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The following are childhood memories of some people who were “Münzenberg Leute”—as they were then called. On my monthly visits to my mother, Münzenberg was too busy and too remote to bother with me. Yet I too fell under his spell when I first met him. It was Easter 1929 and I was six. I […]

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Late October 1973 The Horse Camps of Central Asia The hilly street where my cousin dwells is recent and unpaved. She lives in Ankara with her husband Denis and her newborn son in order to foster a small Christian community in this part of West Asia not especially hospitable to her faith. Beyond the medium-rise […]

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I had my prison epiphany on January 5, 2009, when I realised what the name of my mother’s last cat meant. I asked her about it many times when she was alive, but she just laughed. Well, Mum, I know now. The cat had the strange name of Chapitucho, which belonged to no language I […]

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On a Friday lunch hour in 1964, hungry and thirsty barristers returning from court were a chattering scrum around the doors of the Owen Dixon Chambers lifts. The doors of a descending lift opened, its interior lights revealing two male occupants; dei ex machina, so to speak. One was tall, ducal looking and immaculate in […]

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About three weeks ago my passport was stolen. I would not have realised it had gone, except that the overseas development aid organisation that I’m registered with as a volunteer e-mailed to say an overseas client was interested in my working with their group. I looked for the passport. Hunted everywhere. It didn’t help that […]

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