INTRODUCING EDITOR DES OF BLACKHEATH Thanks for agreeing to this interview Editor Des. I must say, you are the personification of sartorial elegance today. A. Thank you. I bought this suit in a posh shop at Henley-on-Thames. Well that’s in England. It does look quite expensive.
Read more →
‘Oh! All that steam! The pudding had just been taken out of the cauldron. Oh! That smell! The same as the one which prevailed on washing day. It is that of the cloth which wraps the pudding. Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ Christmas in Australia is a
Read more →
AN EARLY STAMP OF STUPIDITY At the age of seven I decided to become a stamp collector. In a generous act of encouragement I was given a stamp album assembled over many years by an older cousin. I cut out the largest and most exotic of his
Read more →
LAWS OF LINGUISTICS In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, chief protagonist Jude Fawley naively assumes that learning a foreign language is like cracking a code; that mastering two or three words will miraculously provide the key to understanding the entire vocabulary. Hardy refers to this as Grimm’s
Read more →
DAYDREAMS I was raised on a small dairy farm near Ulverstone, on the north west coast of Tasmania. Many would consider this an idyllic childhood, and in retrospect it was. However, owing to a steady diet of American comic books I longed to be anywhere else but
Read more →
You know what? Lately my editing hasn’t been going so well, because I missed a few errors in one of Pauline’s articles. I had to award the red tomato trophy to myself, which wasn’t exactly pleasant! The pay isn’t much good either. Hardly enough to keep a
Read more →
Hello, well bottoms are very funny, aren’t they? Q. WHAT HAS A BOTTOM AT THE TOP? A. MY LEGS! That’s a joke I made up by myself. I spend a lot of time with my bottom in the air. It’s so the blood can run
Read more →
When I was very small I went to the Sydney Olympics and since then I have been a sportsman extraordinaire! Mind you, I do face certain physical ‘challenges’. I find it helps if I limber up with a bit of yoga before breakfast. After that I eat
Read more →
A DECIDEDLY FISHY STORY! Back in the 1980s my partner Rob and I owned a little half cabin cruiser called Sixpence. I loved catching blue swimmer crabs in Mosman Bay. We also used to fish for snapper off Sydney Heads, although heavy swells often forced us to
Read more →
THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE TASMANIAN ADVOCATE. THE GHOST OF ULVERSTONE HIGH Some years ago I drove past my old high school and realized I had subconsciously avoided writing a single word about my years there. It’s not that I was particularly unhappy
Read more →