A couple months ago I accidentally embarked on a Jack Kerouac reading binge. What happened was that I noticed the copy of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums on the bookshelf and thought it would make rewarding bedtime reading. It did…

One cold, windy afternoon I pass a man playing sax on the Sussex-Goulburn street corner and I look down the road to an old building that I once knew under a different guise. There, some decades ago now, Bob Gould gathered around him a coterie of wayward youth. But Bob has gone and our city is the worse for his parting…

It was in 1978, after a late night start and very little sleep, that a search party set out on Tasmania’s Central Plateau looking for a missing boy…

Solitude and reverence for the mountains experienced on a solo walk along the Overland Track in the Spring of 1980 is tinged with a sense that the journey is also a saying farewell to the beloved high country…

It was a grand weekend adventure to climb Mt Anne but, unknown to the climbers, it was to be their last as a group of friends…

It’s a long time ago now, it seems, but my first jump went well though my second went a little less so…

Meetings with remarkable people and with remarkable books can leave an influence long after they have gone from your life. So it was that, somewhere in the middle of the sixties I moved into a top floor garrett in Kings Cross and encountered some of those books and one of those people…