i.m. Alison Stoddart (1980–2012) It’s a sign of the full force and audacity of the Modernists (I’m using this term, slackly perhaps, both for the writers themselves and for their institutionalisation via Kenner and the rest) that, even now, and after all of what’s been, theirs are the lines I reach for in self-justification.

Between the words ‘I’ve got some bad news’ and those that follow lies an interminable space. Time stretches. The mind focuses. The body tenses. Then J said the words, ‘M died.’ It was a death both expected and unexpected. Others shrugged at the news.

Part 1: Life and death I am writing this post from the shores of beautiful Lake Bunyonyi in the south of Uganda. I have just watched the dark clouds push through the emerald green valley where the lake is nestled, bringing a whipping wind and a burst of rain to clear the air. My cold […]

I read of an exchange that took place between a British journalist who arrived in Rwanda in 1995 and an aid worker who had seen atrocities taking place in one of the refugee camps at around the same time. They were discussing the merits of leaving corpses as they had fallen at sites of massacre […]

The Bee Hut Dorothy Porter Black Inc. Whatever you think of her poetic style, Dorothy Porter was the contemporary godmother of narrative poetry in Australia. Having read and watched the Joanne Davis performance of The Monkey’s Mask, and having also thoroughly enjoyed What A Piece Of Work, I learned some important lessons about how to […]

Not that I’m a great fan of epiphanies or anything. I’ve read of other people having them though. James Joyce, for example, made them must-have experiences for writers, who have been tiresomely talking about them ever since. Perhaps I’m more interested in epiphanies as breakdowns. Not, I hasten to add, in a nihilistic Sweeney Todd […]

Storms around Nimbin often come from the south-west, rolling in from behind Nimbin Rocks with a sound like that of some weird, mysterious train. From the verandah, where I’m sitting, the thunder in the mountains seems like the echo of events taking place in another country. When I think about some of the things that […]

One of the things about working with very young children for a long time is that when another 21st-century catastrophe is revealed to us, the first thing one tends to visualise is the actual concrete effect on children. And the thing about these catastrophes – wars, economic meltdowns, terrorist attacks, illegal occupations and so on […]