By this author
Ballarat–Colac Road
Literature
After our daughter flew out of the country, we took three weeks’ holiday. We’d thought of going to New Zealand but changed our minds. If, in her early weeks away, she should need money, need something, need us, it’d be better that we were …
’The Office: A Hardworking History’ by Gideon Haigh
Books
At my workplace not long ago, an elderly poet inadvertently hung his walking stick on the photocopier’s keypad and, instead of one copy of his mint-new poem, ended up with 413 of them. Gideon Haigh’s latest book is a bit like that. The success of …
‘The Testament of Mary’ by Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín’s last book was titled New Ways To Kill Your Mother. In The Testament of Mary he sticks to the old ways. Mary of Nazareth bears witness, in this 100-page novella, to what befell her son. It’s a …
A Royal Pilgrimage
Queen Elizabeth’s Melbourne Visit
’The Mountain’ by Drusilla Modjeska
arts
It comes as a surprise to realise that The Mountain is Drusilla Modjeska’s first novel, since her writing – acclaimed and awarded as non-fiction – has always inhabited the tidal zone between fact and fiction. Set in Papua New Guinea, The …
The Big Tumbleweed
Architecture
The Docklands and the Broken Wheel
Order is everything
Culture
The state library of Victoria’s card catalogue
A man’s not a camel
Society
An obelisk, I always think, sounds as if it ought to be squat and round. I can’t help knowing otherwise, though, since I live in the shadow of one. Fifty metres from my back gate stands a soaring obelisk dedicated to memory of the doomed explorers Burke …
Cafe clairvoyants
Society
Late on a blustery Tuesday afternoon in July 1932, three customers entered Black’s Café in Bourke Street, Melbourne. Despite the season, the young man ordered ice-cream for himself and his female companions. “With readings?” asked the waitress, …
Ponyboy at 55
Culture
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.” How many times must I have read that opening line during my last year of primary school? Enough that, …
If those trains had only run …
Society
God works for V/Line, the Victorian country rail service. Actually, it's God for short; full name Godfrey, he's an ex-conductor now employed on station duties. "Pass us that stapler, God," you'll hear a colleague say to him. But not even having God on …
