Etc.

Featured in

Buy $27.99
  • Published 20230801
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-86-3
  • Extent: 200pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

I DIDN’T KNOW whose idea it was to start breaking into houses. Maybe it was nobody’s, just one of those acts of God I’d read about – the burning bush, the parted sea, the unused knife – that appeared from nowhere as if nothing could have happened otherwise. 

Addy, Bel and I lived in a town with many names, none of which mattered. So we called it Et Cetera because there were always more suburbs, more white fences, more water tanks, more fields, more names, more time. 

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

Tweet
Share
Share
Pin
0 Shares

Subscribe to great writing

Access starts at just $6 per month. Print and digital options to suit every budget!

Learn more

More from author

This is my life

Fiction QUINN’S ON THE porch. I can see him over Mum’s shoulder through the smudged vertical strip of glass next to the front door. Golden...

More from this edition

Salted

FictionWe are absorbed in our work until we are not. Mostly we take breaks together, sitting outside in the sunshine waiting for our thoughts to settle, waiting for our lives to begin. Gus and I have both applied for the same scholarship. We’ll find out at the end of the month. Eve is organising a group show and wanted my latest painting as the centrepiece, but I won’t finish it in time, so I drop out.  ‘I’ve got something ready,’ says Gus. Easy enough to find someone to fill my place.

Revolutionary wave

Non-fictionThis was the late ’60s, early ’70s and surfing in Wales was regarded by the parent generation as delinquency. It was for losers, layabouts, rogue males. In those early days Welsh surfers numbered around one hundred, congregated on half a dozen beaches down fifteen miles of coastline west of Swansea, known as the Gower. I knew each one of those surfers by the styles they deployed on the waves. So idiosyncratic was early Welsh surfing that out on the road if you saw a car with boards on the roof coming at you, both drivers would pull over for a chat.

Oh, the shame of it

Non-fictionModern leisure emerged in the West in the early 1700s when French and English cities developed new forms of society built around urban amenities – parks, cafés, fairs and shopping districts – servicing an expanding class of people with discretionary time and income. Public museums as storehouses of national culture appeared a little later in the nineteenth century where they contributed to the development of so-called ‘rational recreation’, a species of serious leisure intended to ‘civilise the masses’.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.