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 […]
Read more "What would Gene Hackman do?"Yesterday I presented at an Emergency Management workshop at the Australian Emergency Management Institute for the last time. You see, in order to save $900,000 a year, the Federal government decided to deprive Australia of its emergency management institute.The institute barely survived Ash Wednesday back in 1983. It served as a relief centre for the […]
Read more "vale Macedon"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. […]
Read more "Confession"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 […]
Read more "As the stars fall-guest blogger Emily Richardson"I am a geographer. It is a bold statement. Particularly when you are filling out your tax return, and are asked for occupation, and there is no “geographer” in the list of hundreds of jobs. In the tax office’s eyes, I don’t exist. Still on the birth certificates of my children, I am listed as […]
Read more "Not lost. Mostly."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 […]
Read more "Warning"The last thing you expect as a teacher when you take a school group to the local aquatic centre, is that a 6.3 earthquake throws everyone, including a couple of thousand tonnes of water, up in the air and back down again. According to Carol Mutch, an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, this […]
Read more "Schools"
Sastrugi 