Dry River Writings
At a referendum later this year we’ll decide if a few sentences will be added to our Constitution so that First Nations peoples will be able to form a body – a Voice – that will advise the Australian Parliament of the day on ways that upcoming legislation affects them. At this stage there are…
September 2003 at the Cobargo pub, the first AGM of The Triangle community newspaper. The committee was celebrating a year of publication and there was a general air of happy incredulity: that it was still a goer; that the community had welcomed the paper and were reading it and contributing stories in increasing numbers; that…
In December 2021 I heard that an exciting clinical trial for progressive MS was enrolling participants again. ATA188 was the work of Professor Michael Pender at the University of Queensland, a study I’d been following for years. In fact I’d enquired about taking part in the Phase 1 trial about 12 years ago, but it…
On a chilly Melbourne morning in September 1998 a bunch of us gathered around a long table at the Tin Pot Café for Surya’s wedding breakfast. Of course, he wasn’t there – he was getting married in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India. So those of us who couldn’t be in Tiru marked the occasion in Fitzroy…
Eight scam phone calls yesterday. Time to dump the landline, it seems. No-one uses it these days. No-one with friendly intentions, anyway. Meanwhile, I have set myself a challenge: if I have the time, and inclination, I consider it a victory when the scammer hangs up on me. Script One Scammer: Hello, madam. I am…
‘It could be worse. You could be waiting for a doctor in an Indian hospital with patients gasping all around you.’ This was a friend – a real friend – on Facebook Messenger last Saturday. An Australian, he’d made a home in Tiruvannamalai, South India, twenty years ago. And when Covid hit he’d decided to…
The middle-aged proprietor of our local news stand was sitting cross-legged in a lunghi on the pavement, chewing paan, his newspapers and magazines in neat stacks around him. ‘Do you keep Manushi journal?’ I asked. He scowled and spat a bright-red, betel-stained gob at my feet. Hmm, I thought – I might be onto something…
‘We had no idea what we were doing. We had no books, no bookshelves. No cash reserves to speak of. And none of us really wanted to work.’ That was Heather O’Connor, remembering a planning meeting in May 2010. Someone had ‘some damn-fool idea’ of a second-hand bookshop in Cobargo, and five women – Heather,…
I discovered recently that my website contact form hasn’t been working since March. If anyone sent a message and expected a response, I’m really sorry. It’s working again now — I can tell from all the spam coming in.
I’ve never been in jail, and I wasn’t educated in a 20th-century British boarding school. So I’m not used to being referred to by my surname and it’s a bit jarring reading the reviews of Long Road to Dry River on Goodreads. ‘Severn is a master wordsmith’ (thanks ‘Lib Kilian’), ‘Severn’s writing encapsulates what is…