Charango: It looks like a wooden armadillo. You know, those critters always getting skittled on South American back roads. Anteater-like, shell-dwelling rodents that musicians like to behead, gut, slap a fretboard on and then a poultice of nylon or gut strings. Well, no animals were hurt in this musical experiment, if that’s any consolation. Perhaps […]
SINGAPORE, 1862: It’s grainy, indistinct and blurry – about what you’d expect from a photo of a structure snapped off in 1862. But it’s startling nonetheless. What you see, from a distance, is a long, double-storeyed structure, its ground floor well shaded by a deep verandah, overlooking a precipitous cliff with a rude goat-track path […]
He was the lad from Euberta, in dusty southern New South Wales. Cricket, tennis, rugby, rowing, scholarships and a packet of Viscount a day were his vices. He was the bomber-jacketed new agricultural scientist on the block. She was the lass from Werribee. Good Catholic gal, a Sacred Heart boarder, daughter of a leading agrostologist […]
MACHU PICCHU: The wraiths slide down the cliff, clinging to the blue mossy granite, slinking toward the eerie stone structure that is Phuyupatamarka. Chilly tendrils of mist reluctant to give up the earth, they whip down and over its ancient concourse, scrubbing it with a ghostly ether. They then race up the yellow grassy headland […]
North Geelong, August, 1873: TALK about bursting your boiler. This is what happens when a train’s means of power and propulsion, the boiler, breaches its pressure co-efficient. A goods train bound for Ballarat was passing the Telegraph Bridge at what was then called Kildare at 11 in the morning when a ‘terrific explosion’, viz, the bursting […]
Chartwell: It looked an impressive housing estate. On paper, at any rate. There was Oxford Street, that first-rate London shopping thoroughfare. And Mayfair Avenue, after some of the most expensive real estate in London. There was Downing Street, for the British prime minister’s residence; The Mall, for the Horse Guards Parade and the thoroughfare leading […]
TRAVEL: DOUBT if living in the shadow of a Bali volcano is everyone’s cup of tea. Especially one that’s properly blown its stack in ready living memory and poised to do so again any minute now. When you’re a peasant farmer living a subsistence existence in eastern Bali your residential options aren’t many, though. Even so, […]
There’s tourist dollars in stones, stoners and supernatural oddities in the jungle paradise of Koh Samui. Soughing palms, sun-scorched beaches, waterfalls, elephants and croc farms might be the island’s ostensible attractions but it’s giant granite boulders and plain weird that underpin the tourist trade too. At Wat Kunaram, in the island’s south near Ban Thurian, […]
Selling a property and looking for that extra edge to attract potential buyers? Maybe you need to lift your game beyond listing just the normal features and attributes of said property. New owners like to know about their prospective pile’s story. Its background. How it fits in locally. Older houses often boast curious and unusual […]
Funny the things you think of around Fathers Day. Kids, socket sets and drills, belts and socks, burnt toast and scrambled eggs, maybe a bottle of whiskey. All of which is terrific and I love the collection of coloured pasta cards and paintings I’ve been stashing away since the kindergarten years. But, increasingly, I find […]
