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‘The foreshore is bleak and desolate with a beauty not at once obvious…’ The Age, 1990 I am sitting on a rock 300 metres from shore. The tide is out. The rock protrudes from the water. Behind me is Port Phillip Bay and beyond that, well beyond, is Bass Strait and then Tasmania. Ahead of […]
January 5, 2015
This story was first published in The Big Issue (#474, 26 Dec 2014 to 8 Jan 2015) He tells me about the pigeons. Racing pigeons. He tells me about the nuns. Swimming nuns. He tells me about skin cancer, and marathons. He tells me about his pacemaker, and watching his daughter’s overseas wedding on Skype. […]
March 6, 2014
This just might be the oddest piece I’ve written in a while. Does it work? Maybe. Maybe not. Shelf life Cereal, butter, pasta, chutney, relish…The supermarket list is long. Very long. And it’s my turn to push the trolley, to walk the bright fluorescent aisles, to face shelf after shelf after shelf. It’s my turn […]
September 23, 2013
What did we do, how did we live, before we had lanyards? First published in The Age, Saturday 18 June 2005 They are called ‘lanyards’, apparently, and they are taking over the world. They are those glorified shoelaces with security cards or club memberships or keys or mobile phones hanging from them. At lunchtime […]
August 22, 2013
When is a local bookshop not a local bookshop? When it has the hide to call itself a local bookshop. The not-so-local bookshop is next door to the local green grocer and opposite the not-local-at-all supermarket. I step inside carrying Jacaranda Avenue, my little self-published book of non-fiction. The not-so-local bookshop sells good books […]
August 5, 2013
Just over 20 years ago I wrote an 800 word piece called The Right Land, about a very common experience – hoping to buy a house. The story was published, appropriately, in an Age supplement called Home and in a West Australian supplement called Habitat. Its genesis was a failed fictional short story. (My cross-over […]
February 23, 2016
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