What I cooked last night.

There was this musician in the 1960s, I told them. He was huge, everywhere - when commercial radio played intelligent music. Sergio Mendes, I said. His band, which was more of a combo or even an orchestra, I went on, was called Brasil ‘66. Nothing they recorded then sounds dated today by even a second. I was chopping parsley at the time. Heavy in the garden right now, on the poised starting gun of spring, is that herb along with its three song compatriots; hence the conversation, driven by random semi-conscious thoughts rather than by any ordered progression of script-like dialogue. It’s a lesson I’ve been teaching ad nauseam to my screenwriter-aspiring older (at least from this marriage) child: write dialogue like it’s not a script. I bluetoothed Scarborough Fair and kept chopping. The searing strings chased the ethereal voices around the kitchen, bouncing off the walls. The 1960s were so long ago that when someone asked if Sergio Mendes was still alive I said he’d have to be about ...

Historian K. A. Austin, in his 1967 work The Lights of Cobb & Co. , described the vast Australian network of routes serviced by the company founded by Freeman Cobb: By 1883, Cobb and Co.'s operations were ... gigantic. ... total length of lines operated in Queensland and New South Wales was over 6,000 miles. Such ... can be compared with ... the Great Southern Overland Mail, which ran between San Francisco, California and the railhead at Tipton, Missouri, ... claimed to be the greatest staging enterprise in the world, ... (however) W. and G. H. Banning in an appendix to their book Six Horses , calculate that the length of the route was 2,325 miles. It is probable that, at their fullest extent, the (Cobb & Co. lines) constituted the most extensive system of coach routes in the world. In 1886 Cobb & Co. decided to transfer its coachbuilding operations from Queensland's capital Brisbane and Bathurst, NSW to outback Charleville, 500 miles inland; on the face of it, to ...

I was given this recipe from someone who knew old Bologna, the Italian city; must have had relatives there, I don’t know. The recipe for the sauce, he told me, was heretical to the accepted wisdom; but as historians know, ‘accepted wisdom’ is just the published ‘truth’ of the time. Housewives knew different. Meat sauce for pasta, in the style of the Bolognese.   First, saute a carrot, an onion, and a stick of celery, all diced, in some olive oil in a pan. Set aside.  Remove the casings from three Italian-style pork sausages, squeeze the meat into a rough burger shape, then sear it on both sides in the pan in which you sautéed the vegetables. Set aside. Do the same with a 500-gram pack of minced beef or beef and veal: flatten slightly and sear the whole thing on both sides. This is messy - yes. But the searing gives a more robust, rustic result without the stewing that sometimes results from the usual browning process. And the meat, seared, takes up the cooked ‘soffritto’ flavo...

Geoff Chambers, a scrupulously fair journalist, doesn’t hold back (The Australian, 9 August), on the wanton woke wreckage that is the national capital: 'Canberra is a town where bikies (outlaw motorcycle gangs) thrive, pitbulls roam, meth heads goon and hard drugs are legalised, while the Greens-Labor government bans gas appliances, locks up cats, installs 40km/h speed cameras, forcibly seized a Catholic-owned hospital , considers abolishing wood fires and imposes massive rate hikes during a cost-of-living crisis.’

Someone, out on a walk, said, ‘Oh, you have a rescue dog - what a sad life he must have led!’ I was walking towards the Northern Memorial Park with Zorro, a greyhound. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘The racing dog eats premium vitamin-balanced food that puts the average African child’s diet to shame. He lives with other dogs, is exercised twice a day and travels the state weekly. He is groomed, cosseted, and patted by trainer, owner, spectator and admirer. He is never alone.’ The sympathiser snorted. Like a horse. ‘Then why did you rescue him?’ came the question. ‘I didn’t. He didn’t need rescuing. On the other hand, the dog left all day in the suburban back yard needs rescuing. The dog locked up in an apartment needs rescuing. Every lone dog in the world needs rescuing. He is not a Hawaiian Monk Seal, nor a Desert Turtle, nor a Snow Leopard. He is a dog. A dog is a pack animal. He will seek companionship even over food.’ They don’t listen. ‘Racing is cruel,’ came the aped response, as if heard fro...

Poet Bernard O'Reilly's prose was arguably better than his verse, which is no real criticism apart from damning by faint praise. O'Reilly's autobiographical trilogy Green Mountains , Cullenbenbong and Over the Hills encompass staggering imagery-laden stories of a pioneer family's new-century Queensland mountain-top selection (land granted by the government on the proviso that it be developed) in virtual jungle; early access to such via a sixteen-mile uphill (virtually cliff) walk prior to a track being cut in the bush to allow avenue on horseback. O'Reilly's language is old-school baroque without slipping into provinciality. His sentences are musical journeys showered in punctuation. People don't write like this any more. A semi-colon could be a truck. ... the change of seasons, each with its own attractions and each eagerly looked forward to in turn; Spring with its coming of warmth and flowers, young willow leaves and baby animals; the return and nes...