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On death done well.
I reflect on my dad, as always, as we approach the anniversary of his death. How is it seven years have passed already? I had to look it up. It seems impossible, but time is relentless. It moves us away from things and blurs them in our memory. I have the sense of him often…
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Blue Suede Shoes, Baby
The streets of Parkes are wide, and largely empty when we arrive the day before the Elvis festival is due to kick off. At 6pm, as we wander down the main street, tinny-sounds of Elvis waft across the town. There is a haunting note to the music. If it was a story, it would have…
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On doing, rather than being…
The thing I am not very good at is sitting. Being still. Waiting, contemplating. I tend to jump right onto things, without thinking too much about why. I am restless, I suppose. I rearrange the furniture a lot. I believe I am a person who likes an action plan. I like to know where I…
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Ningaloo Reef Road Trip
Stuck in suburbia, it is easy to forget how vast and incredibly beautiful this marvellous land of ours is. Caught up in nonsense of our own making, we lose sight of what really matters. While the news is full of sorrow and hate, of ideologically motivated distrust and ego driven politics, nature proceeds onwards, as…
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Winter in Sydney – Biennale 2018
Notwithstanding the fact that right now it is absolutely bucketing down, Sydney generally puts on a pretty spectacular winter. Still, even when it is grey and glum, there are some soul satisfying things to do in Sydney in winter. Like, the Sydney Biennale. For Mothers’ day, I managed to wrangle the family out into the…
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Life lessons from the Mud
There was mud, a lot of it. Stinky, sticky, slurpy mud that sucked off people’s shoes and clung with a desperation of an addict to legs and feet and knees if you happened to sink that far into it. There were heights – tyres and ropes and walls to be scaled. There were small spaces…
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I saw you and I loved you
I saw you and I loved you From the moment that we met Even if I didn’t know what love meant then And sometimes still forget. We connected in an exploding star Your heart and mine, And travelled separately and together through space To this time and this place. I know this because…
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Winter Wonderland, Kiruna, Sweden.
In the far north of Sweden lies a little town called Kiruna. A small town it might be, but it is home to the biggest iron mine in the world, and, more importantly for us, the staging point for three days’ worth of arctic adventures. As the plane descends, the heavy cloud cover gives way…
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Snowy lessons in Christmas.
Christmas Day dawns quite unceremoniously in Cervinia, nestled in the outstretched arms of the Italian Alps. While this quaint ski-town is bedecked with sparking white lights, and the odd decorative reindeer, the shops will be open today and people shall go about their business with, apparently, scant regard to the occasion. This was the first…
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Growing up – the both of us
Something’s happening in my house, and I’m not sure I like it. I am becoming increasingly irrelevant to my tweeny-child. Irrelevant is perhaps not the right word, but it’s hard to think of one that better captures my feelings. She turns her nose up at suggested activities that were once a mainstay of together time…
