But you are a living vessel, a breathing archive… I wanted to be white. I was seven years old and mad keen on cricket. All of Australia’s players looked white and I didn’t resemble them. I feared—with imminent fury—being perceived as less Aussie, less real, than...
The day long awaited had now arrived. The family gathering had a supplementary purpose to general sociality—the slaughter of an elderly, post-egg-laying chicken: a consumer of crumb, who gave no gift in return (apart from her poop fertilizing the earth). The time had...
We’d zig-zagged our way across the Peninsula today – from Main Ridge to Balnarring, Mount Martha to Mornington. Time for our last job of the day. Only Wendy and I remained. Ordinarily there were four of us, but Gina was sick and Charlotte had left early. The sun was...
You reach a signpost, “this way for the rest of your life,” and you know it’s the direction you must take. It is a deep conviction, in the marrow of bone. And it’s more than the fact that writing gives you words to speak, or a place to belong, or in story you find...
It’s all you want for them, isn’t it, as a mother, a parent? To be happy in what they do, healthy, good in their heart, and to outlive you. I only have two. Both boys. Actually, they’re young men, and the eldest a parent himself now. But I ‘ve always been more...
We all come to writing along different paths. For some it’s a life journey, growing in the magic of words as little ones. Nurtured in a childhood of story-time, exploration and wonder, through the stretch of adolescence and early adulthood to develop the skill and...
Six weeks ago, I embarked on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way twelve-week course to uncover more of the writer within me. I literally picked the book up when I was looking for something else (or was that synchronicity?), while spending a gift voucher at Farrells in...
He’d regarded it (pleased at the metaphor) as the ultimate trompe-l'œil, smiling as he recalled snippets of the brief, since etched-to-memory, report he’d found in The Argus some years ago. An exciting titbit sandwiched between the dry political news ...’Her...
He conceals his true spirit as he now hides me. A respectable facade has been painted, yet inside, hidden deep within, his passions are prone to excitability as readily as mine. God knows you're lying, Rochester. I know...and He knows. Uprooted from my Jamaican home,...
My Babbles has a nasty knack Of keeping monkeys on her back. Her back is filled with 'monkeys' now A tattooed memoir recording how Those she knows have done her wrong She wears these grudges all day long. In actual fact, they do all vary These ink...
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