The Jacaranda flower rains, especially in the rain. After a couple of weeks in the sun and gently falling in a slow shower in their own slow time the flowers get to a point where rain brings them down more easily. Or so it seems. I fancy they are our storm flowers, arriving at the…
Early hours of the morning. My online Scrabble opponent has retreated. The novel is being tweaked. The silver music of Miles Davis supported by the driving blues of John Lee Hooker has me begging for more. Thanks Clyde for swearing on a stack of Bibles that this was the best sound track of any movie.…
…a country of poverty and perverse Victorian customs lost in time and place. It is not Mother Teresa or slums, cholera or cyclones, terrorists or dodgy airlines. It is first and foremost a country of the senses. India is felt on the skin, tasted in all the mouth, heard through every pore, and smelt even…
There is something very mystical about the Gettysburg battlefield which is hard to explain. There is a very powerful sense of uniformed men still there, lingering over the heartache, savagery, the mundane and the heroic. That is, provided you do not arrive there on a day when thousands of boy scouts are running all over…
I found Iraq to be a very seductive place. There is something about the country, Baghdad in particular, which I found akin my experience of some parts of India. Life is such a precarious thing in these places that people grasp it with both hands and make the most of what they have. Those who…
…and sat down beside her. And Capucine took every advantage of that and put the rest of us to shame with a rollicking story which is full of imagination and characters, has a beginning, middle and end, good versus bad and a whole lot of nuances, subtle and otherwise. But above all it is just…
A quick note – the pictures tell their own story. “Spring is sprung, the flowers are riz” and the wildflowers in the Gore Hill cemetery (Victorian death lost in the middle of Sydney) are abundant and vibrant and powerfully contrast the stones they envelop. It is a great place to wander during a work day,…
Not everything out of Africa is grim. My own limited experience of South Africa and Zimbabwe reinforced the need to be alert to what was happening around you. Its just that kind of environment. Not much different to Soho in that regard though. On Saturday the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on Catherine Hamlin.…
I travel in and out of here with nary a thought for border control, just glad that I can do so easily. But we (Australia) have an extremely fine mesh immigration net that catches all sorts. I know from experience that it hooks the sharks, and does so in such a way that we are…
With power comes responsibility. (Cliched but true!) With great power, great responsibility. The internet is a powerful tool. It can be a plaything, offering self indulgent writing as is the case with this blog. Conversely it can offer a voice to those who have no voice. But only if we,with access to it, make it…