Memoir
Recollections of the strangeness of life
Redemption
July 31, 2011 | Russ GraysonTHIS IS A STORY of redemption and change. It concerns a long-time friend and it starts with her on an aircraft returning to Australia after several years living in China. There, she had worked initially as an English language teacher and latterly in journalism on an English language publication. That was quickly being put behind her as the aircrafy droned on southward.
How to buy stamps
July 31, 2011 | Russ Grayson
LABYRYNTHINE… that’s what it’s like… a tangle of streets falling towards the water in one of those North Shore harbourside suburbs. Which One? No idea, they seem to blend one into another with their neat, lookalike houses and old apartment blocks. Wouldn’t like to live in those old blocks of flats… they seem to be pokey little places with tiny windows, I thought.
First brush with poverty
July 31, 2011 | Russ GraysonBack here at 168 Cathedral Street it’s a weekend in 1970 and Yvonne has asked a couple of us to go with her to visit an old woman who lives in the narrow, dingy street that parallels Broughton Lane on its western side.
To the island
July 31, 2011 | Russ GraysonSOME MEMORIES fade and disappear. Some take on that blurry, swirly character of the incompletely remembered. Others remain sharp. Why? Who knows? In reptrospect, they appear nothing of great significance in life.
The early 1980s: Life in the Inner West
July 27, 2011 | Russ Grayson 3
THERE WERE MANY SHARE HOUSES in the Inner West during the 1980s, eclectic assemblages of people thrown together by chance and necessity. Offering benefits of economy with conviviality, share housing had been a popular way to live since the 1960s.
Farewell, Bob, and thanks for a life that touched so many
June 19, 2011 | Russ Grayson
THE MELLOW, MELONCHOLY SOUND of a sax drifted over the Sussex-Goulburn intersection that afternoon. La Vie en Rose, the song popularized by Edith Piaf, was a fitting sound this fine but cold, late Autumn day in the city and it suited my mood as I looked past the player, down the road to a Korean restaurant that wasn’t there forty years ago.
Lost in the highlands
May 2, 2011 | Russ Graysonby Russ Grayson. First published 2001.
“TURN 180 degrees to your right now. We are on the other side of the button grass plain. Look for our orange marker”.
Figure in a landscape—walking the Tasmanian high country
May 2, 2011 | Russ Graysonby Russ Grayson. Originally published 2002.
TO CLIMB or not? That was the debate I held with myself on the walk up from the Waldheim road head.
Social Stats