Author Archive

I’m either getting old or becoming an art snob, for I found this year’s Archibald entries challenging. Schaeffer’s withering critique about art in America came to mind when I walked through the door into the exhibition: “Mediocrity masquerading as creativity”. But one exhibit caught my eye, submitted by Leslie Rice. It was a dark picture…

This morning I was wrestling with a piece of firewood that would have defied the strength of Samson! (Well, he might have just managed to split it with a lucky strike….. but he wasn’t around.) The piece was so hard and the wood so knotted. Sharpening the axe would have had no effect. Sometimes of…

You gotta love onomatopoeias. Like ‘Thwack!’ What did you just hear? The sound of a golf ball being driven down the fairway, courtesy of some dynamic one wood? The sound of a dusty cushion being cleaned, courtesy of a large wooden stick being wielded by some strong-armed housecleaner? Thwack! Not crack. That’s more the sound…

It always seemed a big deal at Primary School – the selection of the School Captain. In my day, it was the teachers who determined the result; but today, the candidates give their best pitch and the students give their bought vote. Now looking back, and in comparison with what is called ‘the big scheme…

This Sunday we’re singing Edith Cherry’s hymn, “I have heard Thy voice, Lord Jesus”. And I can’t wait. It’s a song of deep consecration, though this verse unfortunately will be omitted from the final cut: All for Jesus, Master keep it, Chiming on within my heart; Chiming when the way is gladsome, Chiming when the…

My wife was reading aloud a sentence from the web on the history of the Berrima Gaol. “The Berrima Correctional Centre is an Australian prison, located at Berrima, New South Wales. The Centre was operational between 1839 and 2011 with a number of breaks in between”. It sounded to my ears like the prison had…

Whenever I get the chance to visit a plant nursery, I inevitably gravitate toward the shelf that holds the bonsais. I’m not sure what it is about these little miniature trees that makes them so fascinating. Is it their proportionate likeness to their full-size cousins? Or the sense that they carry the weight of the…

Apparently, according to my infallible son, the reason why parents say “shh” when they are trying to console a crying child, is because ‘shh’ is the first sound that children ever hear in the womb. Before they hear the sound of their parent’s voice, they hear the sound of their mother’s blood swooshing rhythmically through…

Churchill once described Stalin as, “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. That may be true, and an apt description of the man from Georgia, but what a painful bundle. Intriguing and insensitive. Charming and cruel. Virtuous and vicious. The ways of Stalin were the weave of a very complex web, and few…

I hate remembering passwords. I wish I had just one that I could use all the time and in every digital space. Once upon a time I did, but then came the rule: ‘It must be at least so many letters long and contain so many numbers, etc’, which threw my online security into confusion….