As an aspiring writer, I took to the self-publishing path in 2008 to expand my readership circle to at least my family, friends and work colleagues. I’d compiled two dozen travel newsletters into a book Tales of The Bear, The Dragon and Other Wondrous Creatures, an account of my extended travels to mostly Russia, China …
In these few hundred words, I can only offer a fleeting impression of Beezelbub’s Tales to his Grandson by G I Gurdjieff. It’s such a complex and perplexing book. This work of a thousand plus pages carries the subtitle An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. It is here on the very first …
Canaries in the Sunshine is a crowdfunding campaign on the Pozible.com platform. Pozible is a Melbourne-based company which has been operating for ten years and which has raised over ten million dollars for a range of campaigns over that time. Canaries in the Sunshine is a text unusually situated: it occupies a liminal space between …
This is part b) of my found poetry blog. I wrote in part a) that I was introduced to found poems during my creative writing degree years. I later remembered an album of songs from the late seventies I listened to many many times: My Life in The Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and …
I’ve been tapping away each day on my latest project, a collection of poems focused on inventors of energy machines and some questions about science that this field raises. The working title is Canaries in the Sunshine (A Celebration of the Coming Century of Radiant Energy). I set myself the goal of chronicling a few …
This novel is part of my journey, as a resident of Sydney and as a novelist of contemporary Australia. My first memory of any interest in writing about the Georges River was a set of five 500 word short stories I wrote as part of my involvement in a writers group at the South Coast …
I was asked to provide a three minutely eulogy for my father at the church service for his funeral: Gerald, my father, was born in North Sydney in 1936, into a period of human history on the verge of amazing expansion. He attended Saint Aloysius Primary School in Milson’s Point and then went to Saint …
I recently made an English translation of the poem On A Headland In Chile, written in 1956 by Chinese poet, Ai Qing (1910-1996). Previously, I had seen fragments of the poem rendered into English, but never the full work. The poem is a reflection on Ai Qing’s visit to Pablo Neruda’s seaside home in Isla …
I am endlessly fascinated by the genre of found poems. I first learned about them while studying my masters in creative arts at university and have since then developed an eye for the found poem, a series of prose words I pluck from a text and render as a poem. They are fun to discover …
Grace Karsken’s People of the River is an account of the early years of the colony of Sydney’s farming communities along the Nepean-Hawksbury River (Dyarubbin). There’s a Latin saying, the wise man discerns things which the ass confuses*, and I have to admit that after reading this book we Australians have been a bunch of …