Journal
Articles
Lost city of the Amazon
In every book I ever read Of travels on the Equator A plague mysterious and dread Imperils the narrator...
What lies beneath
WALK AROUND THE Sydney city block bounded by Kent, Sussex, Napoleon and Erskine Streets and you are on top...
Beating the tyrant distance
ALTHOUGH AUSTRALIANS MAY be increasingly conscious of our unique, ancient, indigenous culture, the national psyche is very much attuned...
The house of roses
The ‘new' stranger in Australia bears the burden of representing not only what ‘Australia' was but also what we...
Reflection
MARIAN IS AMERICAN, from Chicago. I've known her 15 years, ever since she arrived in Hong Kong. About five...
Beyond the refuge of numbers
THE HUMAN MIND, when faced with the need to calculate figures higher than, say, the fingers of two hands,...
Home truths
WE DIDN'T WANT to go. The Gold Coast was a place for holidays, not living. Annual baths of intense...
Antipodeans in America: a cautionary tale
I LEFT AUSTRALIA in 1988 with a bad conscience. Eighteen months earlier, the trustees of the National Gallery of...
The Greek in me
MY FATHER IS George, a Greek refugee from Turkey. That requires some explanation. Until 1922, the western coastline of...
Born to run
Height (six feet six), quickness, balance, shooting touch – Ralph was the embodiment of the complete basketball player. Over the next few years Ralph, and another brother (Warren, who was six feet eleven), were not just among the best players in the New Zealand national league, they were widely considered NBA material. In those days, the US was a more distant shore than it is now and there were fewer navigation aids available, especially for a couple of kids from a tough background in Rotorua.
Learning from the bush
THE OPPOSITION OF the city to the bush was, of course, one of the great topics of late nineteenth...
The gift of the hinterland
CREATING AN ENTIRE city is something hard to plan, even now we know we are supposed to. Since Brasilia...
