Archive | Memoir

The white aircraft

The meaning of a large white aircraft remembered from childhood becomes clear decades later…

Life at Serendipity

It’s a morning ritual. Pick up the surfboard not long after sunrise has paled the eastern sky and descend through the rainforest to the small beach below. It’s a good day if the Pacific’s swells are pumping and it’s a good day when the swell is only small. For many who live in this fortunate  Read more »

Home from the mountains— a stopover in Ouse

I remember her then. Checked wool shirt of the kind favored by bushwalkers and outdoor types. Warm wool trousers, dull khaki in colour. Petite wire framed glasses balanced on a delicate nose. Blonde hair tied back I’m bunches. Chunky leather boots. Pack on back…

At home with the working class – temporarily

A story of a temporary but longer than anticipated immersion in working class culture…

Same but different

In the bright light of an early afternoon in the summer of 1970 I stood atop that long flight of stone stairs that connects the valley of Woolloomooloo to the ridge of Victoria Street. There I stopped and looked out onto a city that then seemed full of skyscrapers…

Two families, two lives… so similar but so different

Two families, two lives… so similar but so different

HOW DO YOU ACCOUNT for the different way that life turns out for people, even when they share much in common?

Solitary, long ago

Solitary, long ago

Story & photos: Russ Grayson IT’S PERVERSE, REALLY. To walk  these mountains you start by descending rather than climbing. The reason is that the Blue Mountains do not rise from a plain to culminate in high ridges and peaks. They are a plateau formed when the earth here uplifted millions of years ago. The Blue  Read more »