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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The very first time I stepped on stage was in 1965 when a teacher from the Lake Erie Girls’ College French Club, in Painesville, Ohio, asked a teacher at my high school if there were any boys who were proficient enough in the language to play the role of Mascarille in a production of Moliere’s […]

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13/9/16 My fiddling towards abandon I have agreed to give a talk later today at a Poetry Symposium on the subject of how and why I revise my work. I’m a little uneasy the topic distracts from any more useful matter that might be raised regarding my art, and that my revisions are not really […]

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I usually ask taxi drivers where they come from. It often leads to an interesting journey. When a recent driver said Assyria, I was bowled over. I told him he was the first Assyrian I had met in my life and that I had learnt a poem about the Assyrians at school. I then launched […]

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21/1/15 The blessings This summer evening has been one of distractions. It is my turn to make dinner. I have read and made sharp ripostes to the e-mail material coming in from my colleague-sceptics on the Climate Change wrangle. I have sent off suitably witty birthday greeting to an old love. How take pause? How […]

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