Overnight the head coach from one of the Australian Rules Football teams, was killed, and his son arrested and charged with his murder. For some international readers, you may be wondering why this is important. Australian Rules is sometimes described akin to religion for many. His death has brought a significant reaction of shock and […]
Read more "Grief in full view"A day in London, on the way to Devon to visit relatives, I managed to convince my girls that we start the day with a visit to the London Bombings memorial. Not quite what they had in mind, as they were hoping for a shopping day. It did feel a little incongruous (particularly as the […]
Read more "London Calling"Over the past three years I’ve been operating in an parallel universe. It’s called Beyond Bushfires, a research study looking at the health impacts of the Black Saturday Bushfires. The reason I call it an alternative reality, as this research stuff is all new to me. It has its own language and rules, and practices, […]
Read more "Parallel universe"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"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 […]
Read more "Sculthorpe"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"Riding to work, my route takes in the magnificent Bay trail. Coming through St Kilda this morning, an empty large concrete slab caught my eye. The iconic century old Stokehouse Restaurant burnt down earlier in the year. The word iconic is important here. It wasn’t a particularly architecturally worthy building (according to the architects). It […]
Read more "Big Yellow Taxi"One of the more fortunate things to happen to me in this work I do, was last Friday night a the Strathewen Remembrance gathering. I was given a chook. I’ll let that sink in. A chook. This is not any old chook. It’s a strathy chook, and rather than me go on about it, Barbara […]
Read more "Keith"Today marks the 5th anniversary of bushfires that devastated Victoria. They were dubbed Black Saturday, although I do often hesitate often to use that label. Some of the people I worked with in the bereavement support groups struggled with being labelled. They were already grieving in public, with media and public interest in the funerals […]
Read more "February 7"The Regional Australia Institute recently released a report on business recovery, From Disaster to Renewal. Those of you who have been reading my blog from the start may recognise that this is the report from the workshop I went to in Marysville back in May. So the report has two unintended positive consequences, that I […]
Read more "It’s the economy, stupid"
Sastrugi 