What I cooked last night.

The plant had outlasted summer. It didn’t sicken and grow spindly and yellow like the others, but retained its healthy greenness and even seemed to grow, although that might have been illusory. It was situated in the spot that gets the most sun; moreover, no tomato vine has been planted there in the almost twenty years we have had this house, although whether that theory (don't plant tomatoes twice in the same spot) holds water, who knows.  Every year, I rip them out automatically, harvest and let the green fruit ripen in cardboard boxes. This year I left the healthy one in the ground, and it continued to produce bunches of green-yellow orbs. And I kept harvesting them and ripening them and using them. And now it is mid-winter and I have seasonal tomatoes. Climate change, everyone says. Maybe. I don't know. Persian fetta and fresh tomatoes with fettuccine.   No apologies for this flagrantly summerish dish in the depths of winter; after all, I make stews and brisket and lasagne

I drove to the back blocks of Thomastown to get a book on philosophy: don’t laugh. It was a VCE text for Tom and the academic book store is essentially a factory outlet on the northern basalt plain where hulking grey warehouses line the streets like monstrous black windowless mansions. The location keeps the prices down but I still walked away with $72 worth of Nietzsche. It was about midday. This being the winter solstice, the buildings on the north side of the street were in deep shadow but, on the south side, the glassed entrance to Campion was flooded with angled sun. I rang the bell. The place was empty except for an enticing aroma of cooking food. A woman came out and apologised and said she had just put her lunch in the microwave. On the contrary, I said, sorry for interrupting. She disappeared into the warehouse to fetch the book and when she came back I asked if she would take cash as my bank account had been hacked, and I was still waiting for a new card. She put the book in

That afternoon at Heide we wandered around the grounds that were once a farm. Inside the modernist house the limestone walls glowed pale pink, butter yellow or deep orange depending on their orientation to the low winter sun. The 1967 house, now a sparse gallery, was built when bohemians John and Sunday Reed outgrew the old farmhouse, now known as Heide Cottage, thirty yards up the hill and obscured behind rambling garden beds and some ancient spreading trees. Almost sixty years later the design brief for the building has been fulfilled: that it should ‘... have a sense of mystery and weather over time to take on the appearance of a ruin in a landscape’. Indeed, it now recalls the white walls of Eucla's abandoned telegraph station. At age ten I had visited a similar house at the edge of a forest, disappearing with the occupants’ children into the trees; and the clean-lined modernist building seen from the distance was a low white cave radiating soft yellow light in a dusky steel sk

First came the aroma, a kind of steamy spiciness, like woks in an Asian market. Then a plate appeared. On it was an explosion of glistening red barbecued pork erupting out of a bread roll containing a sea of coriander, sliced cucumber, pieces of dynamite chili and shredded carrot. It was a cold early autumn day under a steel grey sky heavy with cloud. We had been driving: what they used to call a day trip. East out of the city, and an early  lunch stop; a shopping square off the main highway. Selected at random. More plates arrived. Barbecue pork banh mi. Roast pork banh mi. Pork crackling banh mi. Roast chicken banh mi. The place was a hybrid cafe bakery: laminex tables with chairs that shriek when you pushed them back, help-yourself refrigerators, those straw cylinders on the counter where you pull one and two others fall out. The front was all glass, framing the looming mountains above the shopping square.  Iced coffee Vietnamese-style: a cold tawny caffeine blast designed to rocket

Some years ago I put a hedge of rosemary where some old geraniums had been, in a narrow garden strip under the north-facing front window bordering the path to the front door. Now, fully grown, its pine forest-blue-green needled stems tap at the windows; and, if you brush your hand against it as you pass, leaves an aromatic earthy perfume you seem to be able to detect all day. On a more practical level, rosemary adds an immense flavour and aroma boost to meat dishes, particularly gelatinous stews from cuts such as lamb shank. I made the recipe below the other night, the coldest this year; a night when the pain of almost-molten sand underfoot goes from recent memory - just a few weeks ago on Point Leo beach - into some cerebral receptor vault: another summer dies (although it was already autumn). And they are finite. Tick, tick. * I browned salted and peppered four lamb shanks in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and then transferred them to a baking dish. In the same pan, I

The new freeway skirting Geelong (pop. 250,000) is an arc so perfect it is almost artificial, half-circling the city like a whining Electrolux floor polisher wielded by a 1950s frocked housewife on linoleum, pink roses rampant.  New? The bypass has probably been there fifteen years, but I don’t come down this way much any more. In the early 1970s my family purchased a slightly down-at-heel ex-farmhouse in Birregurra, a small farming town in the western district. Geelong was the halfway point, and the road faltered through the city’s endless stoplights, over a railway bridge under which old diesels slept in glittering rail dust, past industries and factories and a cement works and the Ford engine plant and a greyhound track and the fourth-division soccer fields and a water park. Once past Geelong, the journey's second half had been easy, like a long gradual landing in a light aircraft on a gigantic flat green field. The house was a rambling - and possibly even slightly crumbling - t

The neighbours left a large bag of apples they had harvested in the wicker chair on our front porch one hot day in late summer. A text message said they’d be away for a few days, and we might also collect some cherry tomatoes from their garden before they became overripe.  I opened their big gate and walked into a kind of eclectic sub-tropical Japanese-style garden in which flowering vines trailed over brick walls, freakishly tall sunflowers towered out of raised garden beds, and hundreds of cherry tomatoes sprawled; their vines winding through and around other plants rather than being lashed to their uprights like crucified lawyers. Amid this psychedelic jungle sat a red-beamed gazebo topped bizarrely but satisfyingly by a Danish maritime flag. The apple tree was somewhere behind all this eclecticism. The place seemed to have its own atmosphere, if not its own climate.  The neighbours sit out here at night under coloured lights listening to Shankar and watching parti-coloured smoke on

The couple walking up the hill was bent into a wind; or rather, were: she slightly ahead, he struggling. We crossed the road just ahead of them. Recognition: she was the mother of my two grown-up children; he, the man who married her later. Two couples, a partner of each who were once married to each other, had converged on a corner in one of those disjointed greetings that grow out of sudden recognition. Cordial now, have been for years: children in common. They had had a child. We had had three. Total: six. This week, we baptise a great-grandchild. A generation seems to have been overlooked. How did that happen? How? Years collide, crash; like waves on Inverloch beach in 1978 when I filmed on Super 8 the innocent gold optimistic sunset like the colours on her yellow and ref caftan, while a one-year-old child staggered on the sand as she watched, sitting, the fluctuating breeze alternately flicking her long auburn hair, revealing and obscuring her pale face, and later set the three-mi

Rosella was an early Melbourne cannery. The following link (that seems to be un-hyperlinkable) is a potted history of the Richmond company.  Rosella products included game soup, kidney soup and mutton broth and were far much more important than what today would be merely ‘convenience’ foods; in the pre-refrigeration era they provided reliable weatherproof sustenance. As an example, see in the link a letter of commendation from Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson. https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/our-stories/collection-care/rosella-preserving-company/ Thanks to State Library of Victoria for the link.

New product: ‘Free Range Chicken Pâté: made (only) from free range Tasmanian chickens’ . I find invoking woke sensibilities before eating dead animals to be somewhat macabre, like some quasi-religious moral cleansing.

The song burst onto the charts in the golden halcyon days of early 1972; a rollingly precocious, almost insane melody with bouncy allusive single-syllable lyrics,  bringing forth in the listener nothing but sheer unadulterated joy; except for the actual adults of the time who, as always, read into the song every weird obsession they could think of. I remember the song being banned from some radio stations, as if in 1972 we were still struggling vainly against the Reformation.  The writer, Melanie Safka, who died last week at age 76, later admitted having written the song, Brand New Key, in about fifteen minutes. It was a very good fifteen minutes, producing two minutes and twenty -six seconds of pop-song perfection. RIP.

Blurb on a bottle of AirWick air freshener:   Transport yourself to the orange-lined streets of charming cities like the city of Seville, Spain. Be transformed with the zesty fragrance of sweet citrus accompanied by warm and alluring aromatic undertones. I'm glad they pointed out that Seville was in Spain.

Six feet high and rising, to be precise.  Rain and moderate heat have conspired to produce this multi-bloomed cluster of magnificent pure pink petalled flowers; just one of many on the incredible Radox Bouquet rose variety, first developed in England in 1980 by Harkness, with one of its ancestor varieties being Fruhlingsmorgen. The photo is not intentionally soft focus, it is just sheer out of focus - the cluster was swaying in the wind. * The rose taps at the window ... with flower-laden boughs (With apologies to Gustav Mahler)