What I cooked last night.

Distant thunder rumbled all night, invading my tortured dream of trying to row a boat backwards up a waterfall that rained swords. Morning got me out of the boat. Under a heavy low leaden sky we pulled out of town and across the Murray River, winding along the long low bridge that traverses its tributaries and creeks. I turned left onto the same B-road we'd taken yesterday, through the farm flatlands of northern Victoria, southbound this time. The opposite direction and a vastly altered sky turned the scene into something entirely different. Yesterday’s hot dry dusty wheatstalk horizon became a wet, pallid, metallic monochrome sci-fi set built for a movie about another planet. My, how it rained.  One of the teenagers had bluetoothed some music from the back seat. A repetitive piano motif stole out of the eight or however many speakers are in the car; they seem to be everywhere, under the seats, behind the dash, a couple in the roof lining; limpid wet notes dropping down like fat ri...

In the southern states mangoes are practically free. The couple of dollars you pay covers the cost of 3000 kilometres worth of trucking and cool storage along the way. Good luck locavoring one of these fat, voluptuous beauties; or running your interstate truck on solar for that matter. Even their variety names are sensuous: Honey Gold, Calypso, Kensington Pride. The combination of mango and coconut milk is a match made in, I don't know, some Pacific Island basking in year-round sun?  I chopped a large onion and half a capsicum and fried them in a non-stick pan in some peanut oil until they were softening, and then added a couple of chopped garlic cloves and the same volume of grated fresh ginger. Powdered ginger gives a different aroma and taste. After a minute or two I threw in a couple of tablespoons of curry powder and a dash of cumin, while stirring to stop everything sticking. Then two tablespoons of vinegar - just the ordinary kind - a can of coconut milk; and a mango, peeled...

The afternoon had been a disjointed dream sequence; a series of passing tableaux that stood still and faded into the next scene. The Murray River: a slow-moving curve of sun-mirrored innocence, its destructive October spate having moved along slowly and currently drowning a bunch of farms near its estuary hundreds of miles away in South Australia, from where Charles Stuart’s 1830 expedition to find a route to the sea had failed due having run into impassable sandbars. The crew had rowed the craft back upstream - against the current - 440 miles. I gazed at the silent deadly flurry in the middle of the river and knew why the crew had toiled in shifts, stopping for only an hour a day. Later. Silent drowsy mid-afternoon with dragonflies: a poolside lounge chair and a sketchy biography of actor Peter Falk, the book a series of mediocre anecdotes before a vaguely interesting section in which the actor collaborates with John Cassavetes.  Then, early evening: corellas, a million screaming ...

Under a hot heavy sky that sang low like a faraway siren I held the six-cylinder engine at just under two thousand revs. It would be a three-hour drive on a sultry Saturday morning with five occupants on board and a playlist of classical music and progressive rock. But the three hours would not be continuous. I like to break it up. We left just after nine. The road to Sydney was the usual snarl through the foothills of the Great Divide, those little mounds of earth that want to be mountains; the ones you look at and think 'I want to run up that hill and roll down again' as you ride past in your remembered childhood. I drove past one of them and left it circling like a slow dancer in the rear vision mirror, and turned off at the second Seymour exit. Then I pointed the car straight north and rolled into Shepparton an hour later.  We parked off the main street and walked around and looked for a place for a late breakfast or an early lunch. The older teenager pointed to a church co...

'I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.' Yet: 'I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.' OK. Publishers are vetting novels via 'sensitivit...