LAND SLIDE It was a luxury home, with vaulted ceilings, marble benchtops, European appliances, floor to ceiling glass. There were many indoor plants for Ava to look after. She seemed to either water them too much or too little. She’d already needed to replace two of...
To participate in society, please insert three tokens. Money. The commodity that shapes our lives. The key to full engagement in society (it seems) and the source of so much stress. We’re constantly told it’s getting harder and harder to make money, keep money and...
There once was an ancient Greek philosopher – a student of Plato and a colleague of Aristotle – whose name was Theophrastus. According to Diogenes Laërtius (a third century biographer of Greek philosophers), Theophrastus authored 227 works. A prolific writer indeed!...
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...
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