Dry River Writings
Thanks for your kind enquiries—my initial Ocrevus infusions are done, and nothing to report, no adverse reactions. As for any benefits, I won’t know until March. But something new—our neighbour’s bees have been descending en masse onto our birdbath, the shallow one. It must be the only accessible water source within range. They mostly cluster…
Hilary Mantel, on winning Bookers for her consecutive novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, compared it to waiting for a bus: ‘You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once.’ Two major events, years in the build-up, are culminating for me in the next couple of months.
It was my dirty secret for a while. Then I mentioned it to a friend … who confessed to a similar habit. And slowly they came out of the woodwork—other addicts. Or aficionados. In any case, many friends and neighbours with a predilection for jigsaw puzzles.
Did I say ‘carer’? The Mechanic balks at that word. ‘I’m a husband,’ he says. ‘Caring’s just part of the job description, isn’t it?’ Anyway, roles were reversed last week. He woke up on Tuesday with a stiff calf muscle. He’d done an eighty kilometre ride the day before and thought he’d try some gentle…
Someone from the National Disability Insurance Scheme rang a couple of months ago. ‘Good news!’ she said. ‘Funding for your wheelchair has been approved!’ Well, great. Please forgive me for my mixed response to this news. There are days when I notice myself casting envious looks at people in wheelchairs. Pushing my wheelie walker around…
Every year in late August, convoys of semi-trailers converge on two big almond farms outside Mildura on the Murray River. They have journeyed from Queensland, South Australia and from all over NSW and Victoria. The cargo? Bee hives. ‘Almond growers have built a landscape that’s very good at creating almonds but it doesn’t have the…
Al salam Alaikum. Peace be upon you. And peace be upon all of us … For many of us, the memory of the terrorist shooting in Christchurch in March will always be softened by the grace with which New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern applied herself when addressing Parliament, Christchurch families and her nation. So…
Australia’s 28th Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his cabinet were sworn in on Monday, 16 September 2013. His first act was to abolish the Climate Commission. ‘We knew it was going to happen and we had a plan,’ said Professor Lesley Hughes, a founding commissioner. ‘We had already registered the name “Climate Council”.’ She was…
Firstly, Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Arthur Less is a middle-aged, second-tier novelist and has been ignoring literary invitations—the kind of invitations that second-tier novelists receive, like literary panel positions, writer-in-residencies, interviewing slots at literary festivals, all in far-flung locations. But when his young lover, Freddie, out of patience with Less’s reluctance to commit, announces…
I love Radio National in the summer. They give their regular presenters a break and play reruns of the most popular shows and segments of the year. A kind of annual ‘RN Greatest Hits’. So last Saturday we heard on Ockham’s Razor—home of snappy, topical, sciencey talks—an account by cancer researcher Dr Fiona Simpson of…