What would Gene Hackman do?

Gene Hackman is one of my favourite actors. Many of his movies are favourites, but two come to mind one wet weekend late last year, The Conversation, and Enemy of the State. In both Hackman plays paranoid surveillance type characters, obsessed with privacy. Both are thrillers, where Hackman is at odds with the powers that […]

But if you write it down

Sendai memories Yesterday, I caught up with Pepi Ronalds, a freelance writer, holding a Wheeler Centre hotdesk fellowship. Pepi was in Sendai during the 3/11 earthquake, teaching English, and since then has been using her writing skills to help make sense of what happened during, and more importantly after the event. Her piece, Memories are […]

Talking (cats)astrophe-the writing of Haruki Murakami

Being in Japan has reminded me that I wanted to come back and write about two works, Underground and After the Quake, by one of favourite writers, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a Japanese writer who the Japanese literary establishment hate, the public love, and generally the western literary establishment love. He writes mainly surreal fiction, […]

Confession

Warning: Graphic Bushfire Related Imagery Dear Miss Hotston, where ever you are, I have a confession to make. You set Ash Road as our Year 7 English text. I didn’t read it beyond the first couple of pages, because I thought it was boring, and the boys were “old fashioned”. I probably copied my essay. […]

As the stars fall-guest blogger Emily Richardson

A book review of As Stars Fall by Christine Nieman I think this is a good book. The writer, Christine Nieman, did a great job writing about emotions in as the stars fall. Although it was good, I think it is definitely for older kids. There is some drug use, and may be advanced for kids […]

Sculthorpe

The great Australian composer, indeed one of the world’s great contemporary composers, Peter Sculthorpe this week passed from this world to the next. Sculthorpe was a prolific giant in the Australian music scene, with an ability to place a western classical music tradition within both the Australian landscape as well as the south east Asian […]

Warning

I went along to the launch of Sophie Cunningham’s Warning, a great non-fiction narrative about Cyclone Tracy, which destroyed Darwin in 1974. I’ve been a fan of Sophie’s writing since her novel Geography was released. The sense of weather at it densest and sometimes extreme pervades her writing. The descriptions of summer storms in Sydney […]

8 cents a day

The national broadcaster is under scrutiny, yet again. The government has announced an efficiency review. It will be interesting to see the terms of reference and how they determine what is valuable and what isn’t. I know what I think is valuable about it for disaster managers. One of the great assets of the ABC, […]

Then the wind changed

One of the best films made about disasters in the recent years, is local Strathewen resident Celeste Geer’s then the wind changed. It is about Strathewen, a little town that I have had a bit to do with after the fires (which I will detail in another post, another time, when I’m ready to cross […]

Objects and Memory

Objects and Memory “There are events that transform ordinary things into irreplaceable carriers of identity, emotion and memory. These objects help us find our way forward.” Laid low by a cold, I finally managed to have a look at a film that I ordered some time ago. Jonathan Fein and Brian Danitz’s Objects and Memory […]

Sastrugi

Culture