Recent Posts

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.

They say life is a series of imperfect facts with many things we can’t control. But the sequence of washing dishes is not one of them. Glassware first.

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.

The Fracture and other short stories by Danielle Spinks-Earl

There is no gloating or syrup. There are therapy sessions, and a belief that trauma may be genetically carried from one generation to the next through nightmares and imagery.

  It’s eight in the morning. An escalator pulls me down from the street into the intestinal darkness. Streaks of lightning blue rush past my left shoulder, Photoshop motion-blur. Same in orange on the opposite wall, like this is an immersive internet advertisement. This tunnel is the cable. We are the particles. A unitary quantum […]

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.

Money is tight in regional New South Wales. How do two competitive shires deal with paltry funding and generations of rivalry respond to the challenge? A comic and quintessentially Australian short story.

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.

Lying on a white bed in a wooden room listening to the silence watching her read and there is an inkling of a rumble.

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 […]

Thank you for your very kind letter. My initial tax meeting with your very pleasant sub-contracting accountant concluded with a statement I was not expecting to hear. Not the mellifluous, “you’ll be getting a refund of a grand.” Rather, the strong and discordant, “you owe the tax office two thousand dollars.”