Memoir - PacificEdge

The early 1980s: Life in the Inner West

Life in an inner urban share house at the opening of the decade of the 1980s was interesting, busy and directionless...

Farewell, Bob, and thanks for a life that touched so many

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...

Lost in the highlands

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...

Figure in a landscape—walking the Tasmanian high country

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...

To the summit, one last time

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...

First jump

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

A remarkable book and a remarkable person

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...

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 […]

At home with the working class – temporarily

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

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