Kilts & Porridge ‘While the men are decked out in Braveheart black tie, with traditional sporrans, fly plaids and kilts designed by Siobhan Mackenzie, the women are given nightclub-ready black heels, skirts that can be hemmed to your personal highlands and sporran-shaped purses.’ … [Read more…]
j She Purred Like a Tiger Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur? Anonymous The writer Elinor Glyn – mentioned in the poem by Anonymous – has been published again this year by Histria … [Read more…]
Autumn It’s been a particularly lovely autumn this year but now the days are getting shorter. Winter is coming this week. When I lived in Melbourne I enjoyed taking the city bound tram and heading off very early to work on golden autumn mornings. There weren’t many passengers on the first leg of … [Read more…]
The Frida Khalo Effect ‘By laying herself bare, we the audience are essentially laying ourselves bare. We see ourselves in a way that we perhaps don’t show to people around us…’ Tansy Curtin, curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia. When Freda Khalo died at 47, she left a body of … [Read more…]
Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights … 179 years later Responses to director Emerald Fennell’s 2026 movie ‘Wuthering Heights’ (adapted from Emily Brönte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights) have been wildly divergent. ‘The movie is soaked in a yearning that females of all persuasions will recognise. Here’s to our inner, liquid howl of want … This … [Read more…]
The Year of the Fire Horse 2026 ‘The fire is kind of a symbol for energy, rushfulness, and the symbol for horse will be meaning energy, vitality, speed and passion’. Fan Shengyu – ANU School of Culture, History and Language. If your 2026 New Year’s Eve wasn’t great in January, … [Read more…]
Love in the Age of Distraction ‘Love activates the same brain areas as cocaine … being intensely in romantic love takes so much attention, it can be hard to keep your life going, let alone have other relationships.’ Professor Arthur Aron Many folk secretly hope that hiding in the wings is their … [Read more…]
Summertime ‘Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good-lookin’ So hush little baby, don’t you cry …’ George Gershwin’s lyrics to Summertime On the island chorusing cicadas are marking the arrival of summer weather in my … [Read more…]
Just breathe deeply … Some time ago, when I was living and working near Tokyo, I got to know a Japanese bullet train driver. Roshi was a witty joker, a rabid opera lover and a layback kind of guy. He drove trains on the Tōhoku Shinkansen line. Roshi’s job carried a lot of … [Read more…]
Halloween While nobody was paying attention, Halloween surreptitiously crept over most of October and Christmas decided to manifest early. But Halloween wasn’t always orange pumpkins, plastic skeletons and job lots of candy. At this time of year Christmas trimmings and Halloween decorations are fighting for shelf space in mega stores. Life-size effigies of witches … [Read more…]
Uber Luxury Goods Earlier this year Amy Odell, a fashion and culture journalist, informed a US journalist she’d sold fifty of her super-expensive handbags, ‘just as a result of being sickened by myself.’ The interesting question is – just how many uber luxury handbags does Odell have left? Having sold off fifty handbags, has she … [Read more…]
Glimpses of HRH Princess Margaret ‘I wouldn’t let that family get near me with a sharp stick – let alone a sword’. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, commenting on the 2003 ceremony to knight Sir Mick Jagger. He was anointed by the future King Charles. The ceremony involved Jagger being tapped on the shoulder … [Read more…]
The Sphinx And at yet another dinner she produced a revolver and placed it beside her. A startled guest enquired: ‘Duchess, what are you going to do with that?’ To which she replied: ‘Oh I don’t know, I might just shoot Marlborough!’ (excerpt from biography The Sphinx … [Read more…]
Winter in Melbourne St Kilda road can be a tad gloomy just before sunrise but the trip improves when the tram trundles past the National Gallery. The bare trees are festive with coloured lights and city buildings are silhouetted against a sky that’s slowly lightening. The tram is past its prime and the … [Read more…]
In praise of bounders & cads Thanks to shows such as Succession, Rivals, The White Lotus and Sirens there’s never a shortage of at shows portraying rich and privileged people behaving badly. It’s become a streaming genre which offers up the possibility of drama, disaster, satire, and humour in one easily consumed package. Movies … [Read more…]
Mystical Mushrooms pine mushrooms live a thousand years in one autumn Den Sutejo 1633-1698 (translated by Makoto Ueda) Wild mushrooms have been getting bad press recently. A murder trial in the Australian country town Morewell has just commenced, but it all began back in 2023. Erin Patterson – known on social media as ‘the … [Read more…]
The Rise & Rise of Chatbots ‘… users are now having genuine problems parsing reality. Peruse AI chat forums and you’ll see women asking one another if they should tell their husband that they’re having an affair with their chatbot.’ Tim Elliott, AGE newspaper article In Bot we trust One of my … [Read more…]
Wild and Wicked Famous women are frequently sensationalized to provide historical fodder for films, plays, operas and books. Facts are wilfully ignored because wickedness, orgies, incest, violence, psychological abuse and criminal activity will always find an audience. Cleopatra was frequently represented as an objectified woman. Everyone from Cicero to Shakespeare used her to … [Read more…]
Yayoi Kusama ‘The first time I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school and went with my grandfather to visit a big seed-harvesting ground…and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head… It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner.’ Yayoi Kusama – … [Read more…]
Champagne Wishes & Caviar Dreams Robin Leach – host of the 80’s television series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous – provided humorous descriptions of yachts, mansions and private jets on his show. He signed off wishing his viewers, champagne wishes and caviar dreams. When I was a child, my mother used to … [Read more…]
The Perils of Romance Some time ago I went to hear Alain de Botton – philosopher and author speaking about modern relationships and love in Melbourne’s gloomy town hall. I’m not sure our drafty town hall is conducive to love. The couple in front of us were engaging in covert hostilities. De Botton is … [Read more…]
The Queen of Crime ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in life … I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.’ Welsh poet Dylan Thomas author of Under Milk Wood (1954). It was described by Thomas as ‘prose with blood pressure’. Agatha Christie was a prolific … [Read more…]
Spring is sprung Spring is sprung, the grass is riz I wonder where the birdies is. They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd. I always thought the wing was on the bird. attributed to Anonymous/Ogden Nash/ obscure 19th Century poets. This year Spring on the island has been preceded … [Read more…]
Detouring with Tim Rogers ‘When I decided to embark on writing, I got my seersucker suit dry-cleaned and bought a case of gin. And I thought, ‘OK – I’ve been given a job. But my first question is: what do I wear?’ I was a Tennessee Williams wannabe – crate of gin … [Read more…]
My old neighbourhood It’s always great sneaking back to my old neighbourhood. Fitzroy has become increasingly gentrified – old houses have been tizzied up and sold for exceedingly high prices. Subsequently most of the artists, writers, junkies, musicians, booze hounds, poets and reprobates I once knew have moved on. Some of them moved to … [Read more…]