The earliest clear memory I retain is of lying in my pram and pulling down and chewing the poisonous foliage of a macrocarpa tree under which the pram was parked. Hardly less vivid are other early memories of lying looking up at the sky and watching the minute, moving ripples which occur in the liquid […]

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It is barely nine o’clock and already the Solomon Islands’ sun beats down on our backs as we climb the gentle hill to Atoifi Adventist Hospital. The wharf-side dawn market has wound to a close and locals sprawl under the trees nearby, hoping to find buyers for the bananas, raw peanuts and inkori that did […]

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7/5/77 Stamboul Prelude Our Belgrade train left the cavernous Sarajevo station at midnight. In the shove and bustle of the ensuing hours, K and I shared a compartment variously with a conscript, a student, a man with a bandaged foot, another with the fierce eyebrows and defiant cap of someone from an Eisenstein film, a […]

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My mother and father spoke Serbian. We whispered it at home like it was a secret language devised for our house and family alone. We spoke it and yelled in it. We ate our meals with it. The television talked in a different language, but we used Serbian in the commercials. My mother tore strips […]

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We married in Sydney in October 1958 and left for Saigon the following month. On contract to the then Department of External Affairs under the Technical Assistance Scheme—often referred to as the Colombo Plan—I was to assist the South Vietnamese Ministry of Education in the training of teachers of English at Saigon University. A month […]

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Memory is a strange thing. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, it will pop up an image of you standing in a doorway, aged seven, and then a minute later refuse to tell you your PIN. Memory is a shape-shifter, interpreting and re-interpreting, sometimes explaining you to yourself, sometimes excusing, sometimes deceiving. We all have shared […]

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Over more than 100 years, the Commonwealth Public Service has probably employed a million men and women. A.N. Wootton was just one of them, outwardly a likeable and overloaded Commercial Secretary and Assistant Trade Commissioner, but also an incidental spy. Declassified departmental files tell his story, reflecting both the very best and the very worst […]

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We sat at the crossroads; it was early in the rainy season and we all sweated gently in the humidity. I say crossroads, but really they were just dirt tracks. The one from the east led in from the coast and went on to the big lake, to the village where we lived and from which we had motored early in the morning in the Land Rover. The southern track wasn’t up to much but the north-going one went on to the diamond mines.

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Behind Iceland Spar, John Greening’s eleventh collection of poems, lies one wartime narrative and one remarkable mineral. In addition, I must own to a particular, almost jealous interest in the parallel between Greening’s relationship with Iceland and my own, such that, in what follows I will both review his book and write myself into the […]

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The number of immigrants arriving in Australia from Europe increased rapidly just before and after the Second World War. As a postwar immigrant myself I would like to comment on how my experiences differ from the main characters in three Australian books. Moniek Prochownik, the unfulfilled artist in Alex Miller’s novel Prochownik’s Dream (2005), migrated […]

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