I don’t remember learning to read. There’s a photograph of me as a small child in Amsterdam, examining a picture book of Peter Pan. The words were in Dutch, which wouldn’t have troubled me because I couldn’t read any language at that point. But the cover showed Captain Hook’s pirate ship, and that was enough…
11 September 2001 This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Peter and I didn’t hear about them until we turned on the television the following morning. Like millions of people around the world, we watched the footage in shock. The aircraft striking the towers. The buildings collapsing. People…
Spring arrived in Australia on Tuesday. Queensland celebrated by turning up the thermostat. Brisbane is expecting temperatures around 33 or 34 degrees over the weekend, while some inland towns will reach the high thirties. Apparently, this is not officially a heatwave, although several headlines have called it one. The Bureau of Meteorology prefers “unseasonably warm.”…
Last Sunday I went whale watching with friends in Hervey Bay. The weather was kind, the company was good, and the whales were underwhelming. We saw a few, but there were no breaches and no close encounters with curious whales gathering around the boat to inspect the humans. One whale managed a lazy spyhop, poking…
Tomorrow I’m going whale watching with friends. That might not sound especially momentous. I live in Hervey Bay, one of the best places in the world to see humpback whales, and I’ve been going out to meet them for years. Some seasons I’ve even managed two trips. But I didn’t go last year, and that…
Most evenings, if the weather is kind, I sit outside in the garden with a glass of something and watch the change of shift. First come the corellas. They stream overhead in noisy, squawking groups, calling to one another as they head off to wherever they spend the night. I have no idea what they’re…
Whatever Happened to Fixing Things? Peter has just finished replacing the flyscreen mesh around the house. This sounds straightforward. Remove old mesh. Put in new mesh. Job done. Naturally, it wasn’t. For a start, we probably needed about ten metres of flyscreen mesh. The sensible option would have been to buy ten metres. So, of…
There is nothing inherently foolish about holding a climate meeting in Fiji. If the purpose is to draw attention to the problems faced by Pacific nations, Fiji is a logical venue. It puts delegates in the region under discussion, rather than in another European conference centre where everybody can admire the catering and agree that…
The Australian Labor Party is holding its fiftieth national conference in Adelaide this week. Or, as I prefer to think of it, the annual gabfest where several hundred people gather to decide how the rest of us ought to live. Naturally, the unions have arrived with their shopping lists. The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union wants…
Cholecystectomy By the time you read this I’ll be home from my laparoscopic cholecystectomy. At least, I hope it will be laparoscopic. The lay term is ‘keyhole’. Being cut open is much more invasive. Whodathunk. The operation removes the gallbladder through several small incisions. Without a gall bladder, the liver still produces bile, but instead…