Memoir - PacificEdge

To the island

A day on shark island...it must have been around 1970

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...

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...

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 […]

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

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

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