"Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind." Wallace Stegner
As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. Deborah Levy's autobiography trilogy is proving to be an absorbing reading experience with The Cost of Living being the second installment. I'm working my way through them slowly, savouring the stories of her life as well … Continue reading The Cost of Living | Deborah Levy
In Christopher Koch’s The Boys in the Island, Hobart is described as ‘a city, but only just’. That novel is set in the 1950’s and Hobart has grown a lot since then. Other capital cities have grown proportionately more, however, so maybe the epithet still applies. But only just. In Search of Hobart is a … Continue reading Hobart | Peter Timms
George Orwell believed that up until 1914 Wells was 'a true prophet'. 'Thinking people who were born at the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells' own creation,' he wrote in a 1941 essay on Wells' legacy that could just as well have been written about Leo Szilard's destiny. 'The minds of all … Continue reading Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (4)
The climate and ecological crisis is the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. It will no doubt be the issue that will define and shape our future everyday life like no other. This is painfully clear. In the last few years, the way we see and talk about the crisis has started to shift. … Continue reading The Climate Book | Greta Thunberg
That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Things I Don't Want To Know is Deborah Levy's companion piece to George Orwell's famous 1946 essay, Why I Write. … Continue reading Things I Don’t Want to Know | Deborah Levy
My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s CBD. I don’t know what my dad was making then, but he was a carpenter and apparently the average wage of a carpenter in 1951 was about 80 shillings a week, … Continue reading Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide | Alan Kohler
Tea began in as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it enetered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism - Teaism [chadō]. In his Introduction, Christopher Benfey tells us that The Book of … Continue reading The Book of Tea | Kakuzō Okakura
When I was seventeen years old and still living in the seaside town where I spent my childhood, I would go for a few hours every Sunday morning to the home of a retired teacher of English literature to talk about books. I have four outstanding book reviews (plus several short story reviews that I … Continue reading The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot | Rebecca Mead
Our Gudanji kujiga grew here with Gudanji Country about the same time as our stories, and it was long before paper and words learned to yarn together. I don't know how our mob knew about souls, just that they did, because our stories and our kujiga live inside each other, as well as out there … Continue reading We Come With This Place | Debra Dank
Most of us don't know the perimenopause...will probably start in our early to mid-40's - possibly with invisible symptoms we mistake for going bonkers. Told with Kaz Cooke's trademark sense of humour, It's the Menopause: what you need to know in your 40's, 50's and beyond is exactly what you think it is. For thirty-odd … Continue reading It’s the Menopause | Kaz Cooke
A few weeks ago, on one of the first days of spring in my eighty-second year, I began a project that seemed likely to provide a neat rounding-off to my career as a published writer. Gerald Murnane is, of course, talking about a project that was intended to be a 'reassuring' and 'undemanding' task purely … Continue reading Last Letter to a Reader | Gerald Murnane #AUSessays
We both sat up in bed. 'What was that?' ‘I think it was a motorbike starting up,’ I said, unsure exactly what sort of sound had ended my dreaming. ‘It sounded like a gun to me,’ said Jan. I didn't mean for Womerah Lane: Lives and Landscapes to take me over a year to read, … Continue reading Womerah Lane: Lives and Landscapes | Tom Carment
Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, written by co-author of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Cobble Cobble woman Megan Davis, and fellow constitutional expert George Williams, is essential reading on the Voice to parliament and government, how our Constitution was drafted, what the 1967 referendum achieved, what it left unfinished and the … Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About the Voice | Megan Davis & George Williams
Come on a journey with us. Step lightly, carefully. Let's walk through the oldest, biggest library of knowledge on Earth. Many of my regular readers will already be aware of the First Knowledges series being published by Thames & Hudson in Australia. Originally designed to be a six book series (I believe it will now … Continue reading Songlines: First Knowledges for Young Readers | Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say. Autobiographies are tricky beasts I find. I often find them quite unsatisfactory. In essence they are the writer's own version of events, the stories they wish to be … Continue reading Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography | Zora Neale Hurston
This Reading Life 