It rained the day they moved. The rain began early, with a great quietness, the beginning of the cloud, the small steps on leaf and leaf. It was an old tree, and just a privet, but it rose up next to the window and through it she could see a slate roof, the quietest-coloured roof […]

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When John Beatty was three-and-a-half and I was three, my Mommy looked after him while his mother, Mrs Beatty, taught school. He had yellow hair two inches long that stuck straight up, a handsome face and a brawny little body. Until that summer, he had been living with his parents and a dog on a […]

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The evening was normal enough for May. A slight chill in the air; crisp stars set low enough to be sighted between the few tall buildings that Brisbane boasted back in the seventies, and in the background the old river trolled along, barely noticed. The first exodus of city workers had slowed to be replaced […]

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In Chinese and other East Asian societies, a red envelope or red packet or red pocket (known as hong bao in Mandarin, ang pao in Hokkien and lai see in Cantonese, and lì xì in Vietnamese) is a monetary gift which is given on holidays or special occasions. —Wikipedia   Excerpt from a journal entry […]

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The first shafts of daylight probe the Sunday morning shadows, as two men meet under the Redlynch hotel veranda, grunting acknowledgment to each other, crossing over to the little timber railway station where Vince, a sturdy, fair-headed forty-year-old, lifts the linesmen’s telephone off its cradle on the outer wall, cranking two longs and a short. […]

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A north wind was blowing as thirty men gathered at the crossroads north-east of the town for a hare shoot. It was late September and there wasn’t much pasture in the paddocks or even grasses growing along the verges beside the roads. There had been an inexplicable increase in the numbers of hares. Rabbits had […]

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January, 1976 The minibus held eight, but the short man with the missing tooth had been off sick. So, Patrick Bowen had two seats to himself. He stretched out, his arms across the headrests, and watched familiar country pass by: a dry-stone wall that ran most of the length of this stretch between Gilford and […]

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We were living in a flat in Paddington, Sydney, and the burglars were giving us a good going over. They were beating a path down from the Cross and climbing in the windows or jemmying open the front door and making serious inroads. Not that we had much stuff, but we had a lot less […]

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Women are often silent about grave matters. They wait their time. When I was a teenager, my mother told me how full of hate and trickery her sister-in-law had been. Aunt Alice, jealous of her happiness, made trouble constantly, my mother told me in a flat tone, looking out of the window. I listened silently, […]

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In this chapter from the picaresque novel-in-progress, The Poets” Stairwell, Boon and Henry journey across central Ireland to the ruined monastery of Clonmacnoise, a shrine where both are afforded some insight into the character of their respective muses. Percy is an amiable, shrewdly watchful drunk with whom, in an earlier chapter, Boon has had a […]

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