Browsing Category: New writing

13th Freedman Jazz Concert. July 20, The Studio: Sydney Opera House. These nights, which cap a period of assessing recorded submissions by nominees along with their proposals as to what projects they will undertake should they win, are many things. Unfailingly they are thrilling concerts and informed cross sections of the diverse fields of current […]

All of this is united in my mind in a notable coincidence. Essendon is where we lived in Melbourne when we migrated south. In time to see the last game played by the great Essendon full forward John Coleman – having recently seen Clive Churchill play, who was the Australian Rugby League captain and captain also of South Sydney, which was our team. That would have been in 1954.

All politicians are ugly in a way that is deep and foul. It is a profoundly spiritual ugliness. Never are they more ugly than when overtaken by the delusion that they are performance artists. All politicians should leave their personalities at home.I would not wish to wound anybody, so if you are a politician stop […]

You need a certain innocence to tackle projects like a jazz projection of The Illiad and Ithaca and make it meaningful and casual, not overblown. You have to be very highly regarded to be able to recruit such players, such composers and arrangers as he did, for these projects.

Just over there in the city, where from my perspective it first gathers on the hillside across the park, the low sun glitters in the tinted glass of a curtain wall building – perhaps the only one from that period of modernism built down here. I am walking on my side toward the viaduct where […]

Last night a tremendous crack of thunder hurled me thousands of metres into the night sky. I left my body and looked down on it dropping spread-eagled on the city at colossal speed. I think it took about a second to wake up, warm and dry in my bed. At that point the rain began to roar and gurgle in the trees and scrub of the hillside where the light rail runs out onto the viaduct.

I wish I had not begun to read Anne Of Green Gables. Nothing could have lived up to my expectations of what that book would be, in view of its perfect beautiful title. It has been suggested that I might have been more deeply engrossed by the actual text had I read it in another […]

The great Mike Nock and I are approximately the same age. That is we were both born in 1940 and so was the brilliantly individualistic drummer John Pochée. Nevertheless something distinguishes us each from the others. While ill health has limited Pochée’s activities, his various talents still manifest themselves in various ways. For my part, […]

How did my fire start? I can’t say too much, but various authorities, as well as neighbours, have alluded to the, ahem, mentally disturbed woman in the flat above mine – or what used to be mine. They cannot prove anything. I rather suspect her criminal friends, who, it has been repeatedly told to me, […]

At one point hypnogogique images emerged suddenly in my head. People came jostling busily from a shaded lane into a brilliant narrow thoroughfare. I saw the sunlight so clearly it burned me. But who are these people?