What I cooked last night.

I was enduring the effects of a potentially fatal accident, yet forced to stand in the capricious moral light of acknowledging that I was alive. Unlike the other three occupants of the car, I had not been wearing a seatbelt when the car crashed headlong into the pole: the seat in front had stopped me, rather than the windscreen, the road, or the telegraph pole itself. Missing lectures and deadlines, I had to make some adjustments. I converted to part-time study, and found a day job. This only increased my hours but I figured, correctly - or as a precocious eighteen-year-old - that a lowly but paying office job bore fewer mental rigours than full-time academic study. And so began - as Tennessee Williams once wrote* - ‘a short career in the telephone business’  (he was referring to his father). The telephone business - mine, not the playwright’s father’s - was in the London Stores building, a 1925 cube on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets. It was one of those buildings arch...

Thanks to my own impetuosity I had to confront studying film as an academic subject. For me, this was like studying Australian politics without knowing who were the last ten prime ministers. On the first day, a February dragon, I rode a tram, one of the old solid green ones that rumbled with dignity over the points instead of reverberating like an enormous tin can, down the long Mt Alexander Road hill towards the city and got off at Latrobe. I sat alone in a crowd of new students, probably equally alone in their first-day anxiety, and we watched a film by Sydney Pollack called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This was followed by a lecture in a room scattered with plastic chairs and rhomboid-topped tables in the old Building 6 in Bowen Lane. These lectures, discussions really, were to become journeys into dusty locations and long-abandoned sound stages and other cinematic archaeology, where the eyes of forgotten actors told flickering stories of sadness and love and tragedy.  The su...

In that year of the cyclone that destroyed a city, I had finished school, underperforming; not that anyone had been pushing me. One subject saved me in that final year of floods and impeachments and cyclones; and that was down to D. H. Lawrence.  The Virgin and the Gypsy and Sons and Lovers were both for some reason on the English study list. In the former the daughter of a straight-laced rector has an affair with a gipsy while her repulsive grandmother drowns in a flood; the latter concerned a boy’s relationship with his mother and girlfriend in a dreary English mining village. Lawrence wrenched and wrung masterpieces from the bleak shaft-riven hills of northern England, and proved that genius or at least great artistry can emerge from the strictures of anti-intellectual provincialism. I wrote something along those lines for the exam, and after a post-examinations interlude at a relative’s house in a small town called Birregurra overlooking the Warrnambool train line, I returned...

Black pudding is a culinary curiosity, an oddity even, a food item that can excite strong dislike, and one which is rarely seen at dinner parties, as it crosses too many taboos and prejudices and is obviously an acquired taste. To chance it with the dietary requirements of  divers  visiting diners might be considered a host or hostess’s bridge too far. After all we are talking about a product made mainly of congealed pigs’ blood.  I acquired a taste for black pudding early, my mother frying rounds of it sliced off a Don horseshoe-shaped sausage. I didn’t always wait for the frying; being a teenager I could eat the stuff chilled, straight off the roll, straight out of the fridge. Delicious. I bought some recently after a long hiatus. The meal I presented to a certain party featured black pudding in a pasta dish and was an undoubted success, but I had had to resort to a certain subterfuge to enhance its acceptability. I told my dining partner that the recipe for the meal ha...

Thinking Machines , Irving Adler, 1961. 

The sky was as clear as a saint’s conscience. Below its sheer impossibility, awaft on a mercury sea, yachts rolled and turned, their sails convexing and concaving like living breathing creatures. Arriving from ninety-three million miles away, blinding sunlight hit the water at 300,000 kilometres per second and shattered into a lacework of twinkling diamonds prettier than the night stars. (Forgive the figures; I am a reincarnated Rømer trying to convince that sceptic Cassini about Io.) It was idyllic. But the sky was too blue, the sea too perfect, the yachts too three-dimensional, like languorous basking sharks. It wasn’t real: it was a piece of preserved transparent thermoplastic backlit into life by 60,000 lumens (figures again) of anti-darkness; a kind of reverse firing squad in which something dead is shot against a wall to make it live again; if only momentarily. A documentary film. The boats were participants in the 1958 America’s Cup - a yacht race - but the real subject of the f...