What I Cooked Last Night

The aunt and the grandmother, travelling together, turned up at three o’clock for the one o’clock Christmas lunch with their contribution, a platter of baked, sliced turkey, which they carried as if they’d stolen it, guilt-ridden. But no-one minded, just relieved they hadn't crashed their car. They had got lost because the place was hard to find, locked in a narrow isthmus between the Seaford wetlands and the shore. The house was a low rectangle with a gently raked roof; inside, ceiling beams poked through like old dinosaur bones. An open-plan lounge, rugs everywhere, floor-to-ceiling windows giving on glimpses of shady garden. It was how we might have lived in the 1960s: a Volkswagen beetle in the drive, black and white television, sherries before dinner, hi-fi high and lights down low. These lucky dip Christmas lunches work well because of the sheer variety. There was some kind of buzzy mango and gem lettuce salad picked out with flecks of avocado and olive and other taste explos...

70. I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren. From his 1972 masterpiece Something/Anything? 69. Streets of Your Town - Go Betweens. Post-optimistic mid-eighties studio air soaks through this hypnotic small-town track like a melancholy alcoholic. 68. Summer Rain - Johnny Rivers. Guitar notes are the early dew of a summer day before rain; Marty Paich strings are a passing storm, and horns blare the optimism that can build a whole new imagined world out of one sun shower. Possibly the best ‘summer’ song ever. 67. A Hundred Pounds of Clay - Gene McDaniels. Brilliant gospel crossover charted higher in Australia than anywhere else. (Banned in the UK, of course. Idiots.) 66. Starfish-on-the-Toast - Donovan. Hauntingly evocative regional psychedelic folk. I was given the album this was on at age 13 and I couldn't believe the tunes were not medieval folk songs. 65. Radio Nowhere - Bruce Springsteen. Reviewed in this blog on 30 January 2008 but blogger won't allow hyperlink. 64. Sylvia's Mo...

I was in Ringwood on the other side of town when the text came through: your child is registered as absent. It was the start of the last week of school. I called him. Where are you? School was optional, he said. Then why did I get an absent text? He was out with a friend. I walked into the store preoccupied with the fractured conversation. Can’t anything be black and white? Dozens of keyboards, organs, pianos were on display. There is no more beautiful object than a brand new German piano, lid open, maker’s name in gold leaf above the keys set in a black mirror-lacquered off-square object that could have been designed by an ancient Grecian architect. The salesman danced out of a rear office and we talked about keyboards and how smaller hands would benefit from the graduated give of a superior model rather than the clunky action of the cheaper ones, and we came to an agreement and I said I’d pick it up on Tuesday. Later, I called the school. Yes, it was optional in this last week, but i...

Somewhere back in the archive is a photograph of an old laundry double sink of the type that our grandparents used. It’s in the back garden and herbs grow in it and occasionally flowers or vegetables. Next to it is a terracotta pot of a similar size. Both are planted with basil, which thrives in the concrete and struggles in the terracotta. Apparently terracotta sucks water out of the soil. The five plants of laundry sink basil are one foot of spreading sheeny green canopy and the three terracotta ones are dry-edged and struggling.  I removed the top half of the sink ones. They’ll redouble in days. Into the blender followed by shredded Parmesan, a couple of garlic cloves, a large handful of pine nuts and a small flood of olive oil, enough to make the blended fragrant mixture run slowly, like a green glacier. You don’t cook this stuff. It will burn. Just spoon it over the steaming pasta and let the eater fold it through. Or serve it on halved, waxy, smooth boiled potatoes with sour ...

80. Come Monday - Jimmy Buffett. Best Monday song ever written: ‘with you I’d walk anywhere’. But come Monday, is she really going to be there? 79. Big Big World - Johnny Burnette. Heartbreak vocals reveal the girl has left apartment 10, 2197 Avenue, so he tries a phone booth - ‘the phone just took my last dime’ 78. I Threw It All Away - Bob Dylan. Bob confesses ‘once I had mountains in the palm of my hand/rivers that run through every day’ while the keyboard hovers high above the vocals like a disapproving church organist 77. My Girl Josephine - Fats Domino. Rumbling R and B gold from master pianist 76. Ride Me High - J. J. Cale. Cale whisper-croons his way through this shuffling roadstop blues-tune, minding the bassline along the way lest it blow his head off 75. I Get a Kick Out of You - Gary Shearston. Unnervingly, disarmingly hypnotic version of the Cole Porter classic complete with shuffling acoustic guitar ... and a violin break. Incredible, but some didn't get it 74. Johnny...

There was a time when one 500 gram pack of lean mince would last a couple of meals. Then the children grew, and the appetites grew, and the food shrank. That’s how it seems. It literally shrinks, metaphorically.  (Teenage language is fascinating: they use ‘literally’ only when they mean ‘metaphorically’. I am literally starving. You are literally a retard.) Now we’re using a kilogram of meat at a sitting. Yesterday I made a baked meat and rice slice that seemed to go down well; you can tell by the response. If it’s ‘yes, that was nice but don’t make it again’ you know it’s doomed; if it’s ‘more-please’; one getting in before the others, then it’s a hit.  Its closest comparison might be that Lebanese baked meat tray thing with bulgur wheat, but this was only a third cousin or maybe just a neighbour. I cooked half a cup of rice until almost done and drained it. Meanwhile, I halved a kilogram of beef mince; and one half I combined with the rice, a lot of chopped parsley and mint,...

They won’t eat cauliflower? Kill the cauliflower with kindness. Turn it into something else; something cheesy, chickeny, mayo/garlicky, with a crispy, golden, melting crust. If they don’t eat it then, at least you’ve done your best. And the cauliflower will go down fighting, with friendly allies. Cut a cauliflower down into florets. Boil a few minutes until just soft; drain. Blend a can of cream of chicken soup with half a cup of mayonnaise and an equal quantity of cheese, a finely chopped garlic clove and cracked pepper to taste. (I use the pre-grated blend of parmesan, mozzarella and cheddar; but you could use just about any cheese or blend thereof.) Toast half a cup of pine nuts. Place the cauliflower florets into a baking dish, add the chicken/cheese mixture, toss the toasted pine nuts over the top and bake. If you’re a cheese freak, add more cheese towards the end of baking. Should take no more than 30 minutes.

90. Oh Girl - Chi-lites. Seventies soft soul couldn’t get any better. Even the harmonica cried 89. You’re My World - Cilla Black. The shy quaver in Cilla Black’s mocha-sexy voice rocketed this to No 1 in Australia. Twice 88. Golden Miles - Healing Force. Overflowing with distorted, honey-soaked L100 Hammond notes hovering around Charlie Tumahai’s powerful vocals. Oozes progressive 1971 Doors-style ambience 87. Lady Scorpio - Strangers. Obscure aural piece of jangly winter 1969 from band with roots at Glenroy High School 86. Kings of the World - Mississippi. Arguably and ironically Little River Band’s best song, a gliding-harmony-drenched, orchestrated and distorted guitar meteorite that fell out of 1972, and recorded under its former name. 85. You’ve Got What it Takes - Marv Johnson. Doo-wop artist discovered by Berry Gordy topped Australian charts for 16 weeks in 1960 84. Darling Be Home Soon - Slade (live). Pre-punk rockers turned the John Sebastian song upside down and took no priso...

When they get this old, they no longer curate their recollections. They just spark up out of nowhere, touched off by the most tangential of references. No faraway looks or dramatic pauses; that tape just plays right out of yesteryear. We were sitting at a table in early summer sunshine outside a cafe in the street where she took me shopping every Saturday morning of my life, Silman's the grocer; Gilbertson's the butcher, until I refused to go at 12 or 13. She was pecking birdishly at a muffin; I was stirring sugar into a chocolate-dusted cappuccino. Botoxed women carried lurid cord-handled shopping bags to the automatic tailgates of their black Audis; high schoolers sauntered past with takeaway food packs and phones, bags slung over their shoulders; mothers steered prams holding babies somewhere down below under the shopping like ship passengers in a hold. It was in the Depression, she said. She was about six. Flemington was not the hipster suburb it is now but a poor grimy in...

Disclaimer: songs in this list have been selected on their merits. Selection had nothing to do with any usage in movies, TV series, commercials or whatever. ‘Nothing’ brought me here - except the song. 100. Saved by the Bell - Robin Gibb. The Bee Gees rejected one of his songs as an A-side, so he recorded this astounding vocal performance and beat everything else the Bee Gees ever did 99. Cooky and Lila - Dr. Hook. Truckstop lovesong lost in the wider Dr. Hook opus, but arguably their best. Written by Dave Hickey: ' ... as the nation rolls along like a semi down the highway/casting lonely broken bodies in the grass along the road 98. Funny How Time Slips Away - Jimmy Elledge. Recorded the Willie Nelson revenge song at age 18 and this remains the best version 97. Scarborough Fair - Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. Turned a pedestrian folk song into a jazz-infused orchestra-backed masterpiece of sixties ambience 96. Brandy - Scott English. Perfectly good song before toneless crooner Barr...

I told them I was going to makes tamales or tacos or whatever that so-called Mexican thing is called, but I ended up having a pot of boiled rice left over from ... whatever it was I cooked the night before; and then I told them no, wait, we’re having fried rice tonight and maybe that meat/cheese/avocado/hard or soft cornbread/sour cream thing tomorrow.  They don’t move continents easily but it had to be done.  I turned three beaten eggs into a non-stick pan that I had insured with butter anyway and let them set. Then I threw a handful of sliced ham and the same of peas into a wok smoking hot with peanut oil tinged with sesame oil. Then the rice. Toss. Then five spring onions cut on the diagonal, a handful each of beanshoots and grated carrot and a can of small shrimps, drained. Toss. A shake of soy. Sometimes I add a dusting of curry powder. Then the egg sliced over the top. Mexico can wait. 

We moved along the beach towards a point where, eons ago, the hills behind had shattered and poured down large granite or sandstone rocks on to the beach.  We climbed them, crossed the point and saw another stretch of beach. This faced directly south. The peaks of Wilson’s Promontory were a grey graph against the southern sky.  But if you turn to the north, you can see another jagged line: Mt. Best. If you drive out of Duck Point, head north out of the promontory’s narrow neck, and take the road up, the view south from that summit makes the peaks of Wilson’s Promontory look like low hills. We left the jumbled cottage estate in the early evening, and the goats watched like sentinels as the car crunched down the curved gravel drive and through the gateway. The curling road out of the bald green hills of Gippsland made me sleepy so I rolled down the window for cold air that wasn’t really cold.

Rolling down the highway under a leaden sky mi-morning. Out of town the landscape changes as you skirt the upper and eastern fringes of Westernport, surrounded by the kind of alien swampland that you can do nothing with except write a book about it; which is what Richard Shears did. Lady of the Swamp is the true story of Margaret Clemment who disappeared in this region decades ago. Recommended. Swampland behind, green hills rose and the road curved and swept all the way almost to Wilson’s Promontory. My sister’s gate is off the main road and opens on a clutch of cottages and small barns in various stages of creative wire-and-concrete rendering about which wander a couple of goats. Inside the main cottage squeezed oil paint tubes, brushes and half-sketched roughs littered the kitchen table and a couple of dogs rushed us. It was as comfortably chaotic a welcome as you could wish for, like your favourite old threadbare sofa. Later, at Duck Point, the three teenage cousins, two mine and o...

It goes with you when you leave in the morning, and it comes home with you when you come home, and it’s like a worm in an apple, and it doesn’t leave you alone until another one kicks it out. If it’s bad, it’s a nightmare; but if it’s good, it’s an obsession: and that’s why people make lists. The greatest hits of all time, the top 40, the top 100, the top 500 ‘as voted by our readers, our listeners, our viewers’. But polls are tricky. I kept a bunch of old greatest-ever lists in my files, and one from 1975 commissioned by 3XY had, in its top thirty (of 200) songs of all time, four by the Sweet, three by Sherbert and two by Skyhooks. Others are based on sales - check some Billboard lists full of obvious million sellers - or attitude: see NME or Rolling Stone. How hip can you get. So I made my own list of songs; some ordinary, some great, some famous, some unknown. But one way or another, they got into my head, and stayed.

I once wrote about the supermarket cashier who brightly remarked, “Oh, a white carrot!” as she scanned my parsnip. It happened again the other day when I visited a supermarket without self-service checkouts. “Yes, they’re quite rare,” I replied. “But tasty.” In fact I prefer the earthiness of parsnips to the jaded sweetness of the carrot. Or maybe there are just too many carrots in the world. I baked a topped head of garlic, squeezed out the pulp, and combined it with four boiled parsnips, a tablespoon each of butter and cream, and a shake of nutmeg. Salt to taste and a quick vroom with the beater, and a slurp or two of the reserved cooking liquid, just to thin it out very slightly. Then I seared scotch fillet steaks, served them over a plinth of garlicky parsnip purée ... and rained down a mess of deep brown pepper-studded sauce over the steaks. Where the sauce met the purée was culinary cloud nine. The steak was just the meat in the sandwich.

An hour to Dromana from the sharp end of the peninsula, on what is usually a fifteen minute drive. Late Sunday. The sun behind us. This will jam up even tighter once everyone tries to muscle onto the freeway back to the city. Sure enough, I rounded the curve away from the beach road and there they were, almost stationary on the overpass, just their roofs showing. I spurned the turn-in and kept ahead, passing under the city bound ant-trail of cars. I flicked a quick left and right hook at the Mornington turn-off, and in a few minutes we were on a dead straight roller coaster through farm land where, at the peaks, as you pass under linear stands of old windbreak pines dating to the nineteenth century, you can glimpse Westernport’s oily flat wetness in the distance ahead before it drops out of sight. Then north again, through Hastings, and onto the other freeway and home in an hour.  There had been whispers of permanent - mainly of the ‘retired’ type - residents spying, or appointing ...

I grew up, and the dentist grew old and retired, and life went on. Decades later, I'm halfway through a book, and I read this: They waited for the Novocain to take effect.  ... Above her feet a large window curtained in dun sacking framed an abstract view; the slate roof of the Tarbox post office descended in courses of smaller to greater from a ridge of copper flashing set smack, it seemed, against the sky. The day was balmy for this late in November. ... a small blond radio played colourless music ... In mid-melody, the radio music stopped. ... ‘A special bulletin. Shots have been heard in Dallas in the vicinity of the Presidential motorcade.’ ...  (Couples by John Updike, reviewed here 21/10/20.)

The dentist’s surgery was upstairs in a Victorian-era Newmarket shopfront just down from the old Flemington post office. You climbed the steps into darkness and came out in a dim hallway with name-plated doors on both sides all the way to other end, which seemed a couple of buildings away. The dentist owned two of the doors; the second being the grey waiting room where you sat on 1950s steel and leather chairs, and you either picked up a Women’s Weekly, or stared out the long narrow window at a vertical cross-section of slate roof and a terracotta chimney and blue sky. When the muffled noise of the drill through the adjoining wall fell silent, you could hear the dentist and the ug-ug-ik reply of the patient, and behind that the soft murmur of a radio. It was November. I was about six. I sat on the chair and read the comics in the magazine while I waited. When I was called in, the dentist and the nurse were statues as if someone had switched them off. The radio was louder, but not becau...

I was revising Part One of the book. (Part One covers the quarter century from 1895 to 1919.) Soft music drifted up the hall into the white sunny room where I work. I prefer music at a distance when I'm working, so that it comes to you from around corners, like a shy cat. As usual when I am writing, time means nothing. Hours die.  In the book, the Club is coming out of war and is about to face its first pandemic restrictions (Spanish flu 1918-19). I commenced a new paragraph: 'Armistice Day came, but the battles continued.' As I wrote that sentence, the cat music changed and a different sound floated up the hallway. It was a bugle. It was eleven o'clock.

Late afternoon; the rocky waterhole where children have been gathering these past few months when other amusements were out of reach, or banned, or closed. Dogs wheel and race; children splash. The angelic man from the church is there with assorted family; grandchildren in the water, knots of adults on the bank. After a while wife and daughter depart with two grandchildren, leaving him with the youngest, a boy of about four. The child ploughs the water, and for a time the man darts along the bank, following him up and down; seems unfamiliar with the technique of calm supervision. The child is crying, must have slipped or stood on a sharp rock. The grandfather shouts at him; the quavering alto now with a hint of wheedling menace. The boy ignores him and gives little soliloquised sobs, face cast downward as if looking sorrowfully for a lost fish. He nears the edge of the water. The man seizes him and shakes him. ‘Stop crying!’ he commands. ‘Why are you crying? You are a boy! Boys never c...

His face beams; short, dark, an angelic sixty year old, the star of the show in the small choir in front of the small congregation in the large church that was built for hundreds. It would probably fit a thousand. The short angelic man has dark hair greying at the ends, and expressively reverent hands, like a French silent comic who has washed his face paint off. He sings in a quavering alto. The Lord’s Prayer is the highlight of his day, or maybe the moment he takes communion. You can see it on his transcendent face. He’s in everything. He runs around with the collection basket on a long stick that comically looks like a butterfly net. He shuts the church after mass. One year before the Easter vigil he tried to light the brazier, but overloaded it with some kind of incendiary or propellant, like an over-enthusiastic Holy Spirit, and nearly set some hovering parishioners on fire. The white-light glare lit their gathered, aging faces in a two-second photographic capture of surprise turn...

'I never saw it,' I said. They were talking about some movie that featured a well-known song. Studios hijack famous songs and then everyone associates it with the movie. (Likewise, play some Vivaldi and someone says, 'That's the dog food ad!') Incredulity all round. 'What do you mean, you've never seen it? Everyone's seen it!' Then someone mentioned a scene out of one of the Star Wars movies. I said I hadn't seen it. They were staggered. I added conversationally I hadn't seen any of the Star Wars movies. They all but fell off their chairs. 'What, not even on TV?' Not even on TV. 'But ... why?', as if I'd murdered my mother or something. I didn't know. I just hadn't. I didn't object to Star Wars movies; well, the idea was a bit boring, but I just hadn't gotten around to it. (I did once see a Star Trek movie by accident; the plot was several hysterical people run up and down inside an astero...

Now let's go back a few days to that peninsula jungle. I slashed my block while the overgrowth was still alive, making it easier to dispose of. As summer sets in, anything not removed will dry out and die, creating a vast layer of combustible material. Inevitably some owners will not carry be able out this work in the narrowing  window of time before Christmas. Well into November, they are still banned from entering the peninsula at all - and there not enough local tradesmen to clear thousands of properties, even if they could access them. The peninsula is already a fire-prone narrow isthmus of land carrying a population that doubles over summer, exceeding that of Hobart. And there’s only a few ways out. It was dangerous here even before the pandemic - I posted this on the last day of 2019 .

Hot afternoon in the shade. The first of the season. A noise bubbled quietly in the background; as if from long ago and far away. I drifted somewhere and it was green and a shaft of sunlight fell to earth. Flute. A flight of children came into the garden and the slanting sunlight pixelated them into medieval elven sprites wearing mirrored tunics that blinded me. Mellotron. Melismatic notes fell out of the bubbling noise and lay on the ground in neatly ordered lines. I woke. The elves had gone. The music was amusing itself now with little introverted self-congratulatory notelets as if rewarding itself for lasting forty-five minutes. That was the thing about progressive rock. Some of the over-serious stuff was not as good as those who were satirising it.   Playlist: Thick as a Brick: Jethro Tull, 1972; Trilogy: Emerson Lake and Palmer, 1972; Music inspired by Lord of the Rings: Bo Hansson, 1972. Highlight: From the Beginning from Trilogy, a diamond of a song lost in a forest of ...

Interviewer: ‘Did Coronavirus disrupt your plans for 2020?’

Gnocchi in olive oil, a scattering of parsley growing wild - approved wild - in the back garden, and a dusting of parmesan sent me sleep (I found a bottle of red as well). I had worked until after sundown.  Now it was 7.30am. I walked down the hill for the morning paper and it was a ghost town, even in the early morning sunshine. The permanents must have been still quaking inside their houses set behind front gardens fussily manicured as if in purse-lipped contrast to their enforced back-to-nature neighbours. Now, back at the house, coffee and the paper, and back to work. The mountain of thistles lay behind the old bungalow, the original fisherman’s hut that sat further down the block a couple of decades before the modern square flat-roofed timber house was built on the crown of the hill to catch the 1970s sun. I got the mower out of the shed. By mid-afternoon the place looked half-civilised again, the mower modified by leaving off the catcher and wiring the flap to half-open. I cl...

It was late afternoon now, and I stared at the once-lawn. My thoughts raced ahead of themselves, and one of them won, so I abandoned the idea of resting after the four-hour journey with a cup of tea and one of several half-finished books on my chair at the north-facing window of the lounge room. No motor-mower could cut down a hundred four- to five-foot thistles. And I didn’t have any other power tools. A combine harvester would have been handy. But that was wishful thinking. I might have to pull them out by hand. The sheer force of unbridled nature had produced an almost perfect three-tiered wild garden. The thistles towered over a lower level, those weeds that grow to about two feet and produce seed heads that stick to your socks. The understorey below that was a mess of assorted flora of the weed and non-weed kind. In one corner, a poppy about four feet high was about to raise its several heads into flower. I hadn't had poppies here for years, but this was clearly offspring. Its...

This time there were no trapped birds or mice plagues, and the ever-present unkillable cockroaches were minding their own business in dark corners. They were probably hibernating, long having finished off any micro-crumbs of food that might have been left the last time humans were here.  First things first: the refrigerator. I couldn’t remember what I’d left in it, if anything. Having travelled directly by tram, train and long bus ride, I did not want to set off again to the supermarket which in any case was several kilometres away - and furthermore - was off limits, due to lockdown regulations. I opened the freezer door. One pack frozen pumpkin gnocchi, one pack frozen mixed vegetables: that’s dinner. Frozen bread rolls and sliced bread, and frozen sliced ham. That’s for tomorrow.  Oil, salt, pepper, tea, coffee, sugar in cupboard, plus random cans: tuna, beetroot, tomatoes. Rice. I could live here for a month without leaving the house. Then I passed through the kitchen and u...

Late afternoon, another lonely Sunday. I got off the bus, empty now apart from the driver, and faced the long road up a gradual hill that rose away from the bay, with the lowering sun to the right of picture. The silence hummed. Ten minutes’ walk past houses where nobody stirred, or that were long vacant, the difference to me immaterial, then a right turn and left again where the hill rose even steeper. The house is at the top, and if it were of two storeys, you could see the bay. There is no fence, just an upstretch of what was once lawn from the road to the house. Now it was a field of weeds to the path that runs along the front of the house connecting the unmade driveway to the porch, and the front door. I unlocked the sliding door and rumbled it open, and moved around raising blinds and looking for whatever you look for when you open up a long-unoccupied house. Years ago I’d left it for a couple of months and when I’d next visited a young Spring-born bird had somehow entered throug...

Pennine is hard to find; it’s just a smaller version of penne. They sit up better on the plate when served, especially with a creamy, rich sauce like the following. These rarer pasta shapes can be in those small densely-packed supermarkets deep in ageing Italian migrant suburbs, such as Foodworks in Hadfield, where the pasta shelves go around about three dark corners and reach up to the ceiling.  Mince six generously thick slices of pancetta with seven garlic cloves and a few fresh sprig-leaves of rosemary. (Yes, this will be flavoursome - and further turbocharged by the cream.) Sauté in olive oil until the pancetta starts to brown. Now add a can of tomato purée or passata equivalent, and allow to simmer away while you cook the pennine. You want a coating consistency, not a fluid. Stir a quarter cup of thick cream into the reducing sauce, combine with pasta and serve, swearing you’ll never eat plain pasta napoli again.

Her television did not have Seven programmed for some reason so I set it up for her, just so she could watch the grand final tonight. It was Saturday afternoon, and had been raining and the race was coming up, and on the screen hi-vis-vested racing officials were bending over the turf on the home turn as if looking for a lost contact lens; but they were probably testing the wetness of the track. In a little while the camera cut to an old guy wearing a blue scarf over a grey sweater on a makeshift stage facing the empty grandstand. He sang ‘Horses’, probably because this was a race track on Cox Plate day.  Then the horses jumped, and two minutes of flying mud later, Glen Boss pumped the air having got his horse around the desperate corners of Moonee Valley quicker than the others. The one hundredth Cox Plate, and no-one there except horses and jockeys, a rock band from the 1970s, and the track officials. I turned the volume up to 100, as she is going deaf now, and went home.

I wrote on 27 July that by the 1960s Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place would be old hat, superseded by a new brace of copycat writers who would turbo-charge the prurience level to an alarming new velocity, a kind of mile-high club of novelists. Then along came John Updike, with Couples, a fictional expose of ten married pairs in a town called Tarbox, published in 1968. There was plenty of turbo-charging; it fills the book, but it is not the subject of the book. In any case ‘subject’ is too mundane a word to describe what a book is about. Updike launches into a reinvention of language that psychoanalyses not just people but actual things using Joyce-like prose that takes storytelling into a stratospheric form of new journalism crossed with transcendental stream-of-consciousness. It’s that good. Or bad. For me, it made Couples easily one of the top ten books I’ve read. (Apologies to the late Mr. Updike if that sounds patronising, which it does very much.) Aspiring novelists should read Updi...

Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli takes up the cudgel against the increasingly sinister sinophile Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, who has decided that if you want to go to Church you can stand outside. Comensoli, in today’s Herald Sun: “Churches, temples, synagogues and mosques are shut. ... Victorian people of faith are not too pleased at being forced to stand outside the doors of their sacred places to celebrate ... their ... beliefs and commitments. ... If they are gathering outside in the wind and rain... it’s pretty hard to explain why the doors of the cafe across the road are invitingly open.” Fr. Anaya, parish priest of Sacred Heart in Wodonga wants to take matters into his own hands: “I might organise to book out a restaurant... stay there for two hours... first half hour as the service ... the rest of the time they can eat.”

But churches are into the sixteenth - or is it the seventeenth? - week of closure, locking out those whose faith may provide them with some of the fortitude necessary to carry on. Fr. Marcus Golding of St. Bernard’s Bacchus Marsh has been on radio this morning accusing the Victorian premier of openly mocking people of faith.  He’s not the only one, but then again the rest are not running the state. The federal treasurer was also on air describing the premier of bloodymindedness and ‘making it up as he goes along’. (Cartoonist Johannes Leak portrays the premier wearing the uniform of the Chinese military thanks to his Belt and Road Initiative ties. They shut down churches in China too.)

The full-page colour ad on page 2 (because you can’t buy page 1) showed a photo of a smiling one-year-old in overalls sitting in a high chair, his beaming mother gazing lovingly, about to feed him. The headline: ‘Raised better. That’s the Australian way.’ OK, we’re good at raising kids, even if the second sentence is needlessly patriotic. All the world raises children. It’s an individual thing. It doesn’t break on national lines. But wait. Read the text: ‘We care about the food ... you eat. That’s why all our ... Chicken comes from ... Approved ... farms, where they are free to perch and forage.’

A survey of international travellers a few years ago found that the world’s best coffee was to found in Melbourne, beating Rome, Vienna and Lviv. A cafe owner quoted in the 2014 story said that Melbourne baristas took pride in their craft and this was appreciated by locals and tourists. Coffee and cafe culture was a part of our lives, he said, and was a unique thing to Melbourne. Melburnians like to think the coffee ascendancy is a modern phenomenon. Not so. The Essendon Gazette, 8 October 1909: “The coffee palaces of Melbourne are said to be the best in the world.”

The Essendon Gazette of 8 October 1903 suggested washing ‘two pailfuls’ of spinach, then boiling it in a very large saucepan with about half a pint of water ‘sufficient to keep the spinach from burning’ and two tablespoonfuls of salt, pressing it down frequently with a wooden spoon for evenness of cooking for ten minutes. Then:  “Drain it into a colander, squeeze it quite dry, and chop it fine. Put the spinach in a stew pan, with (an ounce of) butter, and a seasoning of pepper; stir over the fire until quite hot, then put it in a hot dish ... Grated nutmeg, pounded mace, or lemon juice may also be added to enrich the flavour ... poached eggs are frequently served with spinach ... (these) should be placed in the top of it, and should be garnished with sippets of toasted bread.”

Jon Ralph in today’s Herald Sun: “(Jordan) DeGoey has never finished higher than eighth in the Copeland Trophy. That was after a sensational 48-goal effort in the premiership season of 2018.” Time to bring back the sub-editors. Or even the proofreaders.

Sometimes they don’t finish - or even start - the second lamb cutlet, or chicken drumstick. Children’s appetites are unpredictable, except when you take them to McDonald’s. So let’s make short-cut biryani, the dish that layers meat, rice and vegetables with a fragrant spice blend that gives leftovers a second life especially when, having already cooked the first lot, you hear the call of something different - spicy - later at night. I cleared away the mess of dishes and set the lamb cutlets aside, three or four fat pink glistening handles of protein. Then I boiled a pot of basmati rice adding turmeric for some happy late-evening yellowness. Now you freelance: combine the rice and meat with a shower of spice in a pan with just enough fluid to keep the rice moist. I’ve been using Shan ‘Biryani Recipe and Seasoning Mix’ (the actual name on the pack) which is a turbocharged flavour accelerant without the manufactured aftertaste that affects so many products of this type. Now add cucumber, ...

A few hundred metres before it loses itself in Merri Creek, the smaller waterway twists back on itself and forms a rock pool with its own small natural beach. The switchback extends up to the bank where a small grassy flat sits directly below a section of rock strata, a mini cliff. I sat on the grassy flat with my back against the rock and watched Alex and her friend swimming in the early spring sunshine along with three or four others. I dozed, cap down against the sun. An hour passed. The sun lowered. It was still hot. More people now, and dogs.  The water tumbled and rushed back through the zig-zag. Mothers and fathers stepped precariously, like toddlers, on the crossing rocks. I woke as if from a dream. A dog tore through the water shaking itself as it burst out, its madly winding tail sending a catherine wheel of water droplets backlit and monochrome against the blinding sun. This scene might never have occurred if not for people looking for a place to go in their within their...

I was turning the pages from business to sport when the word Zoom jumped out of the personal notices. Words do that sometimes, even when you are not actually reading the item. It said, ‘ ... after a wonderful Zoom celebration of her life, (name) quietly slipped away ...’. The tentacles of technology have connected everyone to everyone, enabling apparent release from isolation. But its gift was a wooden horse, smuggling its cold convenience into every corner of every life to destroy physical contact and cleave human from human. I turned on the radio. At least there is that. The song came on - Love Letters - a 1962 hit by Ketty Lester, one of the finest singers you could hope to hear, her voice mixed right up front, with the piano down back, an evocative echo just following right along. 

Rick Hall took all the credit for the songs he produced, but his down-home endearing manner probably disarmed any client friction. A kind of doom-laden staccato beat opened Mac Davis’s Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me, with a contrasting melodic guitar note rising behind it, an unnerving mix that painted imminent personal disaster better than words. Any teenager who has just been told the relationship is over knows that. You could feel doom walk into the room before you were told it was over.  Hall did the job on the song for Mac Davis, who died this week. Davis’s lyrics were suggestive and the song could have been mediocre but that atmospheric opening portending doom made the song a masterpiece. Australia agreed, sending the track to number one in early January 1973 just as pop fans were setting off for Sunbury.

The first page said spray them - the army of aphids sent in by some unknowable natural force to quell the rioting spring roses, by occupying their tender young shoots and buds. The next page said don’t, because the spray will kill everything else as well. Use garlic and detergent instead, in a weak solution, it said. I dug deeper, and found sage advice - in a book. It said do nothing. The aphids will naturally attract predators within a week which will do the job for you. That was seven days ago. Today I blinked in the early morning sunshine and watched a fat red round ladybird with brown armour waddle across a big green leaf of my newest rose, John F. Kennedy, planted in July. John Updike was right when he said the ladybird (ladybug) was one of two creatures that looked more toylike than any toy.

Something about early Sunday morning. I remember my sister’s hat, a white yellow-frilled straw boater; maybe because it was incongruous on her 13 year old head outside the mid-century-modern 1960s yellow stain glass windowed church in the pale Sunday sunshine, a kind of dress-up that was thrown to the floor once home again.  But that early amber reverence still remains. Last Sunday, no one else was up and Magic Carpet, the 6am to 9 set before the gospel show, floated soft and clear from the speaker and the first coffee was liquid communion. The music was out of some lost treasure trove of triumphant, doleful R&B tinged with Hank Williams tears and guitars that cry. The announcer played two Mickey Newbury songs in a row, then back-announced them; and added with a note in his voice that sounded like the innocent Chandler character caught with someone else’s gun under his pillow, that a listener had texted him during the first track to chide him because the material was no longer ...

.... get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun. (Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott, 1967)

Of course, my mother knew she had an absent step-son as well as her own seven. She was a conservative Catholic stay-at-home mother with prudent values and a handle on economic management that made frugality feel like luxury. Hence the annual holidays to Inverloch or Somers, with chocolate at night and new Puffin books to read on the beach by day. The seven-children anecdote in the previous post was brought to mind by a couplet in the Weekend Australian. In what should once have been a glaring non sequitur, foreign affairs reporter Greg Sheridan wrote the following two curt but devastatingly telling sentences: Liberal Democrats deeply dislike Barrett. She is a conservative Catholic with seven children .

I was the middle (fourth; three either side) of seven until the half-brother materialised one day. My father took the phone call in another room and returned haggard to the harsh kitchen light where we sat in a ticking silence until he told us the story. He had married a few years after the war. She was on a rebound, someone in Queensland. John was born, but she went back to the Queensland home; left him and my father. Then she changed her mind and John was despatched north. Later, tragedy struck when their own two children died in an accident. Suddenly they couldn't look at John. He was adopted out and lost contact. Years passed, and then that phone call in 1978. He had traced his - my - father.

They opened for the Rolling Stones, the Searchers, Slade and the Moody Blues but never had a huge hit until 1975's Slippin' Away , a mournful ballad of which radio stations often chopped off the dramatic key gear-change near the end. They were Max Merritt (who died this week) and the Meteors. Look for my favourite track, Good Feelin' , with saxophone break and outro by Bob Bertles. It's probably on YouTube but I still have my copy on cassette taped directly off 3XY in 1972 complete with back-announcement by Laurie Bennett.

That last monster paragraph in yesterday's post came about because this new publishing platform or template or whatever they call it did not allow me to break it, and the text kept scrolling up and disappearing like an overwound blind. I will have to reconsider whether I continue with Blogger or find an alternative. Suggestions welcomed.

This is a work in progress, or more accurately a recipe in evolution. The result is an aromatic, flavoursome, spicy dish with a touch of sweetness to temper the heat (if you use a lot of chili). Boil your rice. My current favourite is good quality Basmati; the kind that develops long grains - up to a centimetre - that fork apart easily and don't stick together. I put the rice in the pot, tip the water in and set it to boil. Two cups water to one cup of rice? Start there and then modify. There are too many variables. I add a couple of teaspoons of turmeric for colour more than anything.  In these unprecedented times ... That was an error. The radio is on in the background and I accidentally typed what I heard. Don't copywriters use a Thesaurus any more?  Finely chop an onion and a quarter of a red capsicum and fry them gently with a scored clove of garlic in some peanut oil. Stir through a crushed cardomom pod, a shake ...

We live in a world of truth and lies. Ask Johnny Cash. Man has been forever confronted with right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. Is that tiger a maneater? Try patting it. Is that plant poisonous? Eat it and find out. Can that neighbouring tribe just over the hills be trusted? They gave us food. They could be OK. True or false. The game never ends. It's an endless cycle that allowed man to evolve by trial and error: the only method that works. Animals don't search for truth. They search for food and reproduction and rest. The search for truth is evolution at work. But it tricks people. When real events seem so unlikely that they challenge credibility, the alternative starts to look better. The prime minister went for a swim at a Portsea ocean beach and completely disappeared. Where was his security? There was none. That pushed credibility to its limits. So they said the Chinese got him. In submarines. A couple of years later the US sent a metal cylinde...

We have trudged a muddy path through winter. 588mm of rainfall this year compared to 250-odd at this time last year; so a hill of shoes recognisable as such through their coat of mud sits at the front door like patient dogs. Waiting for someone to clean them. I do it. Not obsessive; I just like clean shoes. People ask me if I have new running shoes and I reply, no, I just cleaned them. I scrub them and then I put them in the washer, I tell them. You can't do that, they reply. Yes you can, I tell them. You just don't use hot water. If you scrub them well enough first they don't need it. OK, maybe I am obsessive. Nine sentences about cleaning shoes. I should see a psychiatrist. Lie on the couch and tell me all about your shoes, says doctor. Is a psychiatrist a doctor? I don't know. I once had a brand new pair of Onitsuka Tiger X-Caliber GTs, I tell him. And the dog got them and destroyed them on the first day. They still smelled new. Red and blue flowing stripes on pu...

The intensity map radiates out from the population centres and fades and dies in the far reaches of the States where it meets the borders. Trouble here. The idiot-class State politicians that were elected to enact politically correct legislation are hopelessly out of their depth. Closing borders bang-shut is cutting the meagre populations and many families in two. Or even three. Bickering amongst themselves, the State fishwives (of both sexes, if you like) have managed to destroy communities. In reply to one case (and there are thousands) in which a family was twenty kilometres from a hospital - which was on the wrong side of the border - was told to fly to Sydney, quarantine for a fortnight and take it from there. 1600 kilometre round trip. The Queensland premier blithely added Queensland has its hospitals and so does New South Wales. A farmer received a kind suggestion from a bureaucrat to fly 45 tonnes of hay to Sydney and then truck it back to his paddock 45 kilometres over the b...

I got it out of an old cookbook but the children said I'd already made it; just in a slightly different version. In any case you don't need a recipe for a dish containing potato, cheese and onion. The three ingredients are fellow travellers and kind of just collide. In the presence of heat, they know what to do, and turn alchemy-like into that clichéd term, comfort food, which means something you don't quite make it to a chair to start eating. The title was 'pan haggerty', but Wikipedia shows several different names for it. That proves the point: the recipe was never written down because it was so intuitively obvious. Pan Haggerty. Peel and cut two large potatoes into very thin slices. Do the same with two onions. Cook the onions in some oil in a pan until just softened. Lay some of the sliced potatoes into the bottom of an oiled baking dish and caress them with melted butter. I use a paint brush (that has never been used to paint - I bought one for the p...

Grade Three: she was only nineteen and just out of teachers' college. She introduced classic music and travel. Her name was Miss Burns. That year, Petula Clark started a massive run of smash hits and she and Miss Burns kind of merged. Later, there were others. Lulu smashed with To Sir With Love in 1967 but her apogee - if singers can have one of those - was the minor hit Oh Me Oh My, a soul-infused love song that never rose into the year's top 100 in '69. 1967 also saw Brit Sandie Shaw impossibly catchy with Puppet on a String - once heard never forgotten. Meanwhile, Morgana King's soul-fired coloratura went in a totally different gospel/soul direction and the Fifth Dimension were on fire. I was at a parish fete one warm October day in 1967. They used to play a radio station over the loudspeaker in between prize draws on the spinning wheel. A southern accent came out of the speaker and the story was some kind of personal disaster and the guitar in front had a weird ...

8 p.m. A midwinter full moon rises over my poplar-ended street as the city falls silent.

I got through the checkpoint without being challenged, and proceeded into the territories that were my ancestral lands, and made my way through distantly familiar streets to the house in which I grew up in bucolic 1960s then-outer-suburban Melbourne, high on the hill overlooking the Maribyrnong valley. I found her snoozing in front of the television, which was shouting at full volume about some political issue. I turned it down slightly and went through to the kitchen where a small mountain of plates and pots and plastic meals-on-wheels containers rose up next to the sink. I made a start on the mountain but didn't get far because the sink wasn't draining. I put the brush down and wandered through the vastness of the house into an old dusty abandoned bedroom full of memories and linoleum. I opened a wardrobe and shoved several hundred 1960s ladies coats along the railing until I found an unused wire coat hanger. Returning to the kitchen, I unwound the coat hanger at the part w...

30 January 1919: The (Essendon) Health Officer, Dr. Flanagan, was informed of an outbreak of the deadly Pneumonic Influenza and immediate action was taken to prevent its spread. An inoculation program was commenced with 150 citizens presenting themselves for inoculation. Theatres were closed locally, and restrictions on Defence Department drills and church gatherings were being considered. Householders were advised to throw open their windows. The Mayor, Cr. Arthur Fenton, amid accusations of over-reaction, took full responsibility for actions taken as 11 mild cases were reported. 10 February 1919: The Essendon Gazette reported that local doctors were inoculating as many as 800 people a day against the disease; that many citizens were wearing masks; that large public gatherings were prohibited and church services were being cancelled, or attended in small numbers. The Public Library was closed, and schools would not open until further notice. Essendon High School was being converte...

The cooking instructions started with Step One: Take the meatloaf out of the fridge. We can safely presume I have already taken this step because, in order to read the cooking instructions which are attached to the package, I am not standing in the fridge doing so.

It was 2010, late July. Mid-afternoon on a crisp but very cold day. Pale sunshine tiptoed across the carpet and onto the bed on which I lay, ill with a severe flu. I subconsciously felt the sun's friendliness on my feet as I finished the third volume of The Lord of the Rings. That night she lay next to me, heavily pregnant. The baby, a girl, was born a few days later, overdue a week. The funny thing is, a few months ago in late summer, and now all grown up at nine, she had finished all of the Famous Five, some 1960s horsey girls books by upper class British writers (Pullein-Thompson sisters etc) and a million of those children’s large-print faux-novels in which the author varies the text point size for emphasis, or prints them in capitals of a different font, or puts words like 'fart' or 'bum' in the title.  And she was looking for something else to read. Browsing my shelves, she pulled down a copy of The Hobbit. Will I like it? she asked me. I don't know,  ...

Although Grace Metalious's novel Peyton Place was a best seller from the day it was published, thanks to its provocative content, it never gained critical acclaim. A 2014 New York Times retrospective marking a half century since the author's death sniffed, 'Metalious's writing is mostly undemanding, but it's also, often ... not bad.' Damned by faint praise fifty-seven years down the track. Metalious can rest in her grave.  By the flower-powered free-loving 1960s Peyton Place 's themes were old hat. Anyway, by this time the fiction prurience index had been turbocharged by any copycat writer who could type. In later decades the book was forgotten almost completely and if mentioned was mistaken for the movie or the TV series or the meme or the lyrics – Tom T. Hall: 'Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites'.  Writers 'who could type' proliferated in the computer era, when they mightn't have bot...

It was a winter Tuesday afternoon with no sun, and the air was ice-cold under a steel sky. I stood on cold concrete staring up at the whirling, swooping amusement park rides. Shrieks and yelps rose and fell, like the ride operator was twirling a volume button. The place seemed smaller inside than it had looked from the street, but that might have been because the entire block was penned by a giant lattice, rising and falling like a suburban picket fence built on a castle-scale. That, of course, was the white-painted timber scaffolding for the roller-coaster, a live relic from the early twentieth century. I stood and gazed as the boys went around again and thought about once when I had stood on the same spot on a sunny spring afternoon, queueing to sail through the river caves with a girl in my arms and her younger brother in the back seat, a kind of idiot chaperone whose presence had been ordered by their mother. The memory I kept was like a postcard, a static picture full of yello...

That pulsating lightning rod of noise I heard in the early 1970s burned itself into my sonic brainbank along with several million other short bits of music that would activate when heard again a year or ten years or forty years later. It was just a guitar. I heard it again a few weeks ago during a radio tribute after its player passed. The player was someone called Lynford Brown and the lightning bolt was the start of a Paul Simon song of that era, something about a reunion. I never particularly liked Paul Simon's work: my favourite Simon or Garfunkel song was the sorrowfully evocative Tim Moore minor hit Second Avenue that Garfunkel covered the same year. By comparison I found, for example, Simon's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover to be the diametric opposite in sentiment; a lightweight collection of hardboiled rhymes. As for El Condor Pasa, I'd rather be a chimney than a sweep. But that guitar on Mother and Child Reunion. So they had a Hux Brown tribute on the serio...

Last weekend, Alan Kohler flagged an alternate universe to the panic-stricken one run by the timorous politicians and their health officer bureaucrats who see no problem in sending the engine room of the country over the cliff (see previous post). In the same paper, Adam Creighton reviewed the priorities of the left, of which he says 'a common theme is now sanctimony, and vast reservoirs of it', quoting the UN: David Beasley, executive director of the UN's World Food Program, warned in April that millions could starve as a result of the economic slump induced by the hysterical response to the coronavirus by advanced countries. Creighton pointed the finger at bureaucrats and politicians: ... the university-educated bureaucrats, teachers, public health advocates, consultants and executives dependent on government contracts, et cetera, whose incomes are more stable (than the poor, itinerant workers, small business owners and independent professionals). More stable? ...

Alan Kohler (Weekend Australian Business Review, 20/6/20) has been talking to the hospitality industry. Right now, 3.3 million people and their employers are being supported by JobKeeper at a cost of $10bn per month. ... JobKeeper (ends) September 27 ... there's a very large and very specific problem with the deadline: the four square metres rule. Kohler suggests the only way this can be lifted is if a vaccine exists, and if the rule is still in place after 27 September hospitality businesses go into receivership en masse and hundreds and possibly millions of people will be thrown out of work. An economic catastrophe would ensue - an industry that represents 7.2 per cent of GDP and more than 10 per cent of the workforce would close. ... each restaurant that keeps to four square metres per patron would need each diner to spend at least $2500 per sitting in Sydney and $1500 in Melbourne. ... It's not possible. ... For another month the waiters, chefs and dishwashers thus un...

Where else would I be? (Apart from walking through that piece of scenery in the previous post.*) There's a million things to which you just would not get around in the normal course of events. One of them is reading pieces of paper found inside the sleeve of an LP record purchased on December 12, 1972 (correct: I used to write in very small script the date of every record I purchased, inside the sleeve in order not to mark the artwork). One of these pieces of paper was an advertising flyer from Festival Records. Here's some of the text: Festival Records proudly presents this comprehensive catalogue of over 700 top selling albums from world renowned artists. These include the greatest overseas and Australian talent such as, Joe Cocker, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cat Stevens, Elton John, Shirley Bassey, Wendy Saddington, Blackfeather, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 77, Bee Gees, Freda Payne, Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Chain, Sandy Sco...

Country? This spot is not a million miles from the city. Indeed, it is within walking distance of my inner suburban house. A long walk, but a walk nevertheless. Question: can you name this isolated location? Hint: it is within 16 kilometres of the CBD.