From home I can hear the school bell It rings for six-hundred children It rings for me as well Marking out the working day Measuring out the domestic duties At five to nine The children are like leaves blown by a sudden gust of wind Driven from the busy playground to the teacher Alone in […]
Great Ocean Quarterly is a gorgeous new magazine dedicated to ‘art, ideas and the sea’. The publishers are based on The Great Ocean Road in Victoria but the magazine’s stories, including stunning photography and artwork, roam the world’s oceans. I happened across GOQ last December and thought, ‘Where has this magazine been all my life? […]
This story was first published in The Big Issue, in July 2010. Back then it was titled My Father’s Bicycle. Dad’s leather bike helmet hung in the garage, along with his boxing gloves, above the table-tennis table, the paint-tins, the jars of nails and all the other bits and pieces that accumulate in a garage.
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 […]
The first ball of the first Test First comes sport. Later on comes sex and love. Songwriter Paul Kelly, paraphrased from The Age, April 24, 2004 The first ball of the first Test The first rays of the summer sun The first stroke of the willow bat The first run The first bounce of the […]
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 […]
September 2, 2014
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