GR OnlineOne of the first poems MacDiarmid wrote, with his new name and his new sense of what was required of his existence, was ‘The Watergaw’. No doubt it came as a bolt out of the blue and required much fastening to the jinker, but it reads like a bit of the earth’s speech. It’s a burn steadily chanting over the brae, as they’d say in his part of the world.

MemoirBACK IN 2015, when we were getting the local language work going here at the Aireys Inlet Primary School in Mangowak, every Monday morning I’d try to fire up the whole-school assembly about Wadawurrung language. Each week the students...

FictionMICK FELT EXCITED coming down on the train but got cornered in the carriage by a tall heavy-boned old man with grey hair, who plonked himself down with a suitcase on wheels as they pulled out of Kerang. The...