I am learning the piano, more than half a century after I last played. I would like to be able to play Erik Satie. My father was a piano teacher and we even had two pianos in the house for a time when I was a child—one stood in my bedroom. In a London music shop in the 1970s I found a book of sheet music by Satie and, with fond memories of his music enhancing the mood of European films such as Carlos Saura’s Elisa, Vida Mia, I brought the book back to Melbourne and presented it to Dad. He was […]

In the heart of the sleepy Tasmanian town of New Norfolk, half an hour’s drive out of Hobart, lies the Willow Court Precinct. As you wander down the tree-lined streets of the township, the crumbling buildings of Willow Court come slowly into view. On the banks of the Lachlan River, right next door to the new supermarket complex with its perfectly rendered frontage, shiny signs and sparkling clean windows, sit three of the saddest, loneliest-looking buildings you’re ever likely to see. Not a single shard of glass can be found in any of the windows of the multistorey structures. The tallest […]

Yesterday the list clerk asked me to take a case for an Indigenous man who wanted a sentence indication in relation to an appeal he had. He was late, didn’t have a mobile phone and I was told he was over at the Magistrates Court getting a food voucher for lunch. When we got underway I asked him what his language group was. He told me he was from Sorrento. I recognised the name. It was Mick’s girlfriend’s family. I asked him and he said yes, she’s my aunty. I had no idea the family were Indigenous or maybe I […]

No rays of light sneaking long fingers across the pale skin of morning. Not at this time. Beyond the window glass the stars shone precision silver, dew casting a silvery skeen across thirsty grass. I’d lie awake in the darkness waiting to hear the cough of the Toyota bring the catch home and him with it. I’d learnt to wait for the fluorescent light to cast diamante warmth through the white double doors windowed by an earlier deco-age of artistic privacy. When opened, conversations drifted like song, bounced by high ceilings and slick laminate floors. But closed, sound muffled and […]

About three months after Black Saturday dad and I drove up to the place where our house used to be …

If I were to tell you our story in sign language—the story of my grandparents and me—I’d begin with a single finger touching my chest. My hands would form the signs for ‘grew up’ and then ‘next door’: a flattened palm rising from my torso to eye level; followed by my index finger hooked over my thumb and turned over at the wrist like a key in an ignition. I’d use the signs for ‘my grandparents’: a clenched fist over my heart, and the letter signs ‘G, M, F’ to represent ‘grand-mother-father’. Then, placing two fingers over my right ear, […]

This book will change your life is a phrase to make the eyes roll, especially if you’re a book publisher. It is conceivable that a book’s wisdom and insight might make you fitter or smarter, a better lover, cook or parent. It might make you more empathetic and spiritual, calmer and neater to boot. It might transform your social interactions as your friends start twitching as you drone on about a book’s revelations. Residents of the Land of Literature will argue that the pleasure of serious reading—a noble end in itself—is life-changing enough. I am an optimist and a booster […]

The shoulder bumps from strangers that make me shove back during the day go down easier at night. The power dynamic shifts when you hurry against the CBD’s foot traffic as a group, newly animated with the ability to break up other clusters of bodies with your increased speed and size. On the corner of Sydney’s George and Bathurst I glance up, diverted by some Big Four firm’s logo beaming down—its sedate, civilised, civilising weight. The building’s few lit office windows cut and blaze against the ones that have gone dark. I imagine being one of those floating Friday bodies shifting […]

When my daughter was a baby I knitted for her a pair of woollen bootees in red, green and yellow stripes. I liked them so much I kept them safely and sentimentally for 40 years. But in the end I was defeated by moths. The bootees are now just a tragic bundle of bright, broken stitches, a cluster of airy spaces held together by scrappy twists of coloured wool. They are perhaps also a kind of description of memory, a flawed tangle of broken threads, having the power to stimulate vivid images and deep emotions that have lain cradled in […]

My first question to him at six-thirty this morning was, ‘Have you taken your antibiotics?’ His first question to me was, ‘When I take money out of the ATM in Japan do I choose yen or Australian dollars?’ Today my firstborn, Dom, and I ran through another of the many crepe paper banners, of parenting for me, and being an adult for him. I didn’t sleep much. I wasn’t sure if Dom was expecting me to wake him, I assumed not. He was 19 after all, and getting up is something Dom has never had trouble with. The only time […]

On the Saturday my friend dived into his beloved surf for the last time I was closeted away on Canberra’s limestone plains, landlocked, writing. Over the Christmas break I’d fully disconnected, hoping to gather some thoughts about where journalism had landed, or failed to land, after ten years of constant change, and then massage them into publishable form. That weekend was the last big push to get the words right. When I left my desk and plugged back into the world, the messages were there: emails, voicemails, bringing the news that Mick Gordon had gone into the surf and, inexplicably, […]

Central to strong Jewish diaspora support for Israel is a homogenous Jewish community that rarely questions the basic tenets of Zionism. This has been constant in the Australian Jewish community for decades with barely a whisper of dissent.