Reading Geoff Cochrane

Featured in

  • Published 20140204
  • ISBN: 9781922182241
  • Extent: 300 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

WHEN I WAS a child I had two dolls in a box. Each night I placed the dolls on the floor of the box and covered them with a sheet of black paper. Sometimes the dolls required reassurance. I told them that the day was finished in their country, that it was no longer time for speaking and that all of the world was asleep.

I meet these two New Zealanders. They are brainy and handsome; they live in an old workers’ cottage on the edge of Melbourne. There is a pāua shell ashtray. There are postcards of Colin McCahon. Kia ora, they murmur, when they pick up the telephone. I’m there one day when a relative arrives off the plane from Wellington. An old cardboard suitcase is snapped open; cake from a teashop on Lambton Quay, jars of bubbled honey, custard powder in an orange packet. The soft comforts of home… I score a slim volume of Geoff Cochrane. It’s 2001 and this is how it begins.

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

About the author

Carrie Tiffany

Carrie Tiffany is a former park ranger who lives in Melbourne where she works as an agricultural journalist and writer.Her first novel, Everyman's Rules for...

More from this edition

The uprising

PoetrySelected for Best New Zealand Poems 201420131.Here we are a skinny country in the largest ocean on earth spell-bound, windswept, lashed.The land is like...

Amending the map

ReportageWE ALMOST FORGOT. The manicured gardens, the orderly course of the Avon River, the neat grid of streets – the very structure of this...

An A-frame in Antarctica

EssayAHEAD WAS A peculiar vision. Black Island appeared to levitate above the Ross Ice Shelf. A shimmering dark lake had formed below it where...

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