I’m house sitting at the moment and I’m rapt to be given free reign of an awesome book collection and to be acting custodian of a black and white kitteh who chirrups like a cheering little bird when she’s happy.
I’m looking over my shoulder, however, thinking about what might go wrong. I’ve minded houses [...]
I went to a gig at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival the other night. The first thing I didn’t find amusing was the layout of the Trades Hall building in Carlton. The welcoming eight-foot by eight-foot picture of Gough Whitlam’s face was inspiring, but not even the magic of Gough’s visage could direct me around [...]
When I’m not trawling the web for baby elephant photos, I occasionally catch up with the news and the creative ways people find to hurt themselves.
The story below about a sensible, kindly old gent captured my attention.
90-year-old loses licence for speed, drink-driving
March 1, 2010
VICTORIA has a new oldest hoon - a 90-year-old man [...]
Now that even holding a mobile phone in your hand while driving is a sin, it’s become remarkably thrilling, especially when there’s such easy quarry to photograph while waiting at lights. This advertising sign was plastered on the van in front of me.
Crank-o-meter: your laying had better be good
Everyone outside Victoria picks on Melbourne’s weather with the same rabid assertiveness when debating other national obsessions like Tony Abbott’s choices of sports wear each week.
I love Melbourne’s weather. I love telling visitors to wear their bathers but bring an overcoat when they pack, I love not putting away the bulk of my winter clothes [...]
Lordy, lordy, it’s the last day of January and I haven’t shown off half the people and places I thought I would. I feel like Willy Wonka at the chocolate factory gates, urging the golden ticket winners on: “Hurry, please! We have so much time and so little to see. Wait a minute — strike [...]
Art comes in many guises. One of those guises is the Baxter dog kennel maker’s giant wooden dog. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem high art or accessible public art, but, um, seems representative of the large art movement. We don’t have a giant prawn or big banana or oversized sheep in our locality, so [...]
Adjacent to Crib Point is the small town of Somers. I’d have taken photos of its pretty surrounds for you, but I have a hideous habit of getting lost when driving to Somers and ending up in completely disparate places without realising. The nice people at my last job ended up banning me from driving [...]
Cape Barren is a long swim over Bass Strait from the peninsula town of Crib Point but the handsome and grumpy Cape Barren goose gets around. I’m not sure how because seeing them in a loud and clunky run-up and launch into the air is like filling a zeppelin with water and seeing how far [...]
Much of the Mornington Peninsula’s interior was orchard land in the earlier days, with endless rows of apple and pear trees lining the horizon almost everywhere you looked.
Even when I was younger (which wasn’t that long ago, truly), my mother worked as an apple picker and I loved to spend time out of the [...]
