If you are heading out on safari or planning a trip to a zoo, the prospect of your eyes startling upon previously unseen creatures is fairly high. If you are not, it becomes a bit chancy. Seeing five such creatures […]

When I booked the trip, it was really about the timing and content. My friend who I travelled to Darwin with on the Ghan had to return to work. I still had some time off so was looking for a […]

Inevitably, the year found me thinking a bit about my life to that point. I thought a great deal about friendship and the importance of friends to my life. I decided to find cards I felt suited each and write to […]

This one fell out of my mind as I opened up a packet of water crackers one day. They were the kind that come in a box which on one end has ‘open other end’ and on the other ‘lift […]

An affection for the music of Gershwin and Cole Porter has morphed for me over the years into an interest in most things Art Deco and that period between the wars which at least from a distance seems fascinating and […]

I’d paddled some non-salty water before. I’d never paddled in the sea. In my year of turning 50 my first chance to do so came at Broome in Western Australia. We launched out from the beach at Gantheume Point just […]

A lot of literary classics are ‘done’ at school, dissected in essays and discussions and exams. Others are referenced in popular culture or lodged in language leaving a distinct impression that you surely must have read them at some stage. […]

Unless you still live near it, people returning to the place of their birth are generally either visiting relatives, unravelling the skeins of family history, or participating in a census of the biblical kind. These days the census comes to […]

My first 3D movie experience. It was during the period when the fires were about in the Blue Mountains, not too close at that stage to be an immediate threat to me but I felt the need to get off […]

Like all places you know little of, for me, Western Australia had been a composite of images, stereotypes, snatches of information and expectation. The marvel of travel of course is that no place is what you might imagine it to […]