Articles

The most effective personal goal-setting ritual I use every year to achieve my life goals. Mind, Body, Heart and Soul.

The stakes are high for the vaccine-hesitant on religious grounds. But this has a history much longer than Covid. How do we convince them it’s not the ‘mark of the beast’?

My son is obsessed with trains and it is all my fault. What to do? Feed the obsession. Clothes, books, toys, experiences

The Choke by Sofie Laguna is a superb piece of writing. Structurally well-crafted with prose that’s full of the vigour of youth, the nasty resourcefulness of degrading poverty.

I hope it helps to know what I thought were the guiding principles of a good life.

Personal essay on time spent with a neighbour through the stages of cancer during coronavirus.

About nine of us, including kids, got to touch, smell, crackle and rub our way through an interactive two hours of fascinating local treasures hidden in plain view.

It isn’t from the depths of his immersion in computer and VR technology that his revelations unfurl. It is, rather, from a detached overview, looking down, high on the heady fumes wafting up from the cooking circuitry below him, that he is able to make his prognostications.

It’s loud but nuanced. Polly’s vocals are masterful and she soars over the industry sounds and the male voices to pierce the rafters—pitch perfect, every note. One forgets what an extraordinary vocalist she is.

Archival: LANDMINES I recently saw a Super 8 video filmed by an acquaintance at a Cambodian hospital. The subject was a young man who had to have three men hold him down so that gangrene could be scraped from the inside of his amputated thigh. It is easy to be caught in a western fog […]

Review of The Natural Way of Things, Stella Prize-winning novel by Charlotte Wood

This World Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Day, you may spare a thought for those affected by this chronic, debilitating disease. You may not realise, however, that there are people you meet every day with MS who are keeping it secret from you.

People are afraid of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre because they don’t understand what it does. When pregnant women are brought into the conversation, this fear predictably turns into hysteria.

Last time I did a VIA Institute personality assessment, my score for self-consciousness was off the chart. Now I sing in the street.

When Courtney Love kicked off her tour of Australia last month, I took a tour of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre.

He launched Kate Bush, The Rolling Stones, and Queen, started Ticketek, Sonart, and now EOS. Meet Les Hodge–the Man who loves music.

Clad in a tablecloth and fitted with a face cage and helicopter headphones, I am strapped to some vinyl upholstery and remotely rolled into the tube.

I hear a lot of people bemoan the secularisation of religious holidays. The Crucifix has been passed in for a chocolate rabbit. Children worship Santa, the deity of consumption, rather than baby Jesus.

Street art musings from Melbourne, Victoria.

Initially set up as a hunting lodge for Louis XIII, Chateau de Versailles became France’s grandest and most famous chateau by his successor, Louis XIV—the Sun King.

After nearly 30 hours of flights, the city of Kathmandu was awash with blood and there were headless carcases of horse-sized beasts on every corner. In my shock, I sent a sarcastic email to family saying that the entrails lining the streets to herald my arrival was an absolutely lovely gesture.

The recent Australian mining industry campaign (not shown above) certainly looks impressive. The soulful, worried faces of mums and dads, average looking, average people. It seems so believable and important.  Even if the statistics are the result of heavy-handed play with definitions as basic as “tax”.

July 9th, 2009 “Australians spend half a billion dollars every year on bottled water that we could get for free from a tap, but we complain when petrol goes up a few cents a litre,” said Jon Dee, Founder of Planet Ark and Do Something at a public meeting held in Bundanoon Memorial Hall on […]

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. It was quaint. But dinky. No place for a city chick.  The roads were narrow. You could hide an orphanage in the potholes. And it was creepy, all those doilies.

The corporate world has moved on. They recognise that PR is not a professional working title for an employee and that ‘spin’ does not work in a world of high information search power and acutely tuned radar for any lack of authenticity. Politics, however, seems to be lagging behind.

Australia has a very small population compared with other countries. If we are to remain competitive, we must use our entire population to look for talent. David Gonski, Chairman Coca-Cola Amatil, Investec (Australia), Ingeus I recently saw the short French film by Eleonare Pourriat, Oppressed Majority. It’s a tragicomedy and the premise is simple: a […]

The simplicity of the term ‘world music’ betrays the enormous scope of what the music industry deems non-Western. Everything that is ‘Other’. Three concepts – westernisation, modernisation, and syncretism – are broadly indicate overarching trends.

A self-proclaimed esoteric god that I used to encounter regularly told me one that the TV show The X Files, which was in its first season, was an attempt by the American Government to prepare people for the coming of the aliens and the Age of Aquarius. If it was an exercise in ‘citizenry preparedness’, it probably […]