Browsing Category: New writing

1 Two stories were favourites when Mathew and Rebecca were little; Rebecca being the littlest but not by much. At first I made these stories up and then the main elements were repeated with variations. In one, the three of us were climbing a tree, but the tree began growing faster than we could climb. […]

If  you drive well south of Sydney on the roadway high above the coast, through Heathcote and other vaguely remembered stages on surfing and diving adventures, past the tops of the Bulli Pass and the Macquarie Pass, you will possibly notice the Big Potato at Robertson. Possibly not. It is of modest size – scarcely […]

I have to tell you this. I may never see it again. It is the time of the jacaranda. The sun seems to be at the right distance from earth, exactly. It has been tuned to the right volume. The light is even and so rich you might call it an effulgence. Not gold but […]

Recently there was a little pro and contra re the staging of Bizet’s opera Carmen. Should it be re-enacted in its original setting, which was a cigarette factory? And should the heroine – a pioneer female libertarian – smoke on stage, as per the original directions? I have very personal reasons to be down on […]

1. Ah yes, I see that I have been invited once more to LIKE someone’s new status. At the risk of revealing myself to be a complete snob, I will admit that I do LIKE their new status as Governor General much more than their old status as garbage man. 2. I have yet another […]

When you surf, or skate on ice, you cut the surface. The friction heightens the feeling of speed. On roller skates or riding a bike the wheels tumble under in surrender to the running road. This is a fluid interaction, more particularly on a bike because you are rolling on air and rubber: the inflatable […]

It is no secret that some men, perhaps many, are stimulated by images of women stimulating themselves or pretending to do so. The visual metaphor – the euphemism, the double entendre for this is women fondling their faces. Sometimes I wake up around 6:30 or seven on a Saturday morning, having forgotten that yesterday was […]

When the sun shines in winter on these suburbs it is heaven. That is true, and ‘specially when you are on the bus and the seats are warm against your back. Warm as toast. The wind is cheated. You ride in a mobile shelter. Where? Down King Street, Newtown, then along Enmore Road to Marrickville. […]

If you wade and splosh back through the blergs that precede this bloggh bloopbloophelp  you will come to a blergh called Omen In Malaysia. In this I recall an early encounter with the Islamic Fundamentalist Revival, which was getting only small notice in the Australian news media at the time if I remember aright; and I […]

Although I am a fairly obscure writer – by which I mean not terrifically well known – I do get asked questions about the craft surprisingly often; and it is quite probable that there lies not so far beneath the surface an urge to blather mildly on the subject. After all, language is often cited […]