Journal
Articles
Big time unna?
Our 1985 season did not start well. We lost every game until about halfway through the season. This was not to say we did not have a good side, we did. It was just that the other three teams were better. As a means to try and spark a winning streak, Quiny got us all together one night at training. As we huddled together he promised us an eighteen-gallon keg (of Swan) if we won the premiership. We all started hollering like bastards, but deep in our hearts we knew that the contents of that keg were never going to pass our lips.
Like a tourist with benefits
I HAVE A friend who says she weeps every time the plane descends over her hometown of Johannesburg. She...
Creative Darwinism
This is my city and I’m never gonna leave it. Channel 7 News ad WRITING ABOUT MY experience of making music...
Monsters
We’re not just afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly...
Calcutta
I’M PERCHED ON the western edge of Australia, looking out on the buoyant and impressive Indian Ocean. The vista,...
Might be rainbows
ON THE SOUTH-WEST boundary of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia, an unmarked red-dirt track turns left off the Lasseter Highway. For the few kilometres still within park lines it’s known as Docker River Road. Beyond that point it becomes Tjukaruru Road, leading to Western Australia through Aboriginal freehold land. In 2006, as a member of the park staff, I occasionally had to go down Docker River Road for work. From the park boundary I would stare into the seemingly untouched red landscape, both delighting and recoiling at the expanse of land ahead. I had never ventured any further.
The worm in the bud
I’M SITTING IN the climate-controlled archival room at the Battye Library in central Perth, reading through old Police Gazettes....
Playing with fire
WE SIT IN the shade on the back veranda of Mardoo cattle station sipping hot, sweet tea from pannikins....
Mirror rim
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2015 I THOUGHT BATAVIA was the story I was carrying on my trip to...
From now on
AT HOME IN Melbourne, they play kick-to-kick wherever they can: in the backyard, the hallway, at the park, on...
The quiet slave
Episode One: Near MutinyIn 1820, Alexander Hare, the owner of a household of slaves and an increasingly controversial figure...
Nullius
Leavings I: 1928THE CLEARING IS unknown to her, a flat irregularity in a broad swathe of rocky ground the...
