What I Cooked Last Night

AFL umpires' coach Hayden Kennedy, talking to the Herald Sun about a world tour of 25 elite umps he led to 'pick the brains of the best officials from soccer, rugby, tennis and cricket'. According to Kennedy, " ... one EPL ref said he makes about 200 decisions a game and runs 12km over 90 minutes. We'd do that in the first 15 minutes of a game."

I was walking the children home from school on Tuesday. It was a sunny afternoon, and we had crossed the Upfield railway line and were passing the old TAFE building where the pathway is overgrown by ancient oleanders. A figure approached from the other direction and disappeared behind us. I caught a glimpse of him. He had some kind of a hat or cap, a grey straggly beard, a hook nose, and a haunted look. It's amazing what you can catch at one glance. "Hey," said Thomas. "Wasn't that the old guy in the paper?" "What old guy?" I asked. "The one with the cap and the grey beard." That didn't tell me anything more than I had seen, but I knew staright away who he meant. "I know who you mean," I said. "Now let me see." We turned the corner heading north. A plane came low overhead, heading for Essendon airport. "Didn't they cremate him straight away? I believe they did. They used to let people see t...

Black Flat? Let's ask someone who lives there and has taken that original title as their strangely appropriate business name: Black Flat Coffee Brewers was named after "Black Flat", the original name of Glen Waverley before it was renamed in 1921. Originally developed as orchards and farming lands, Black Flat ... was in reference to the dark, rich soil and flat ground. Being precisely descriptive, the original name makes Glen Waverley - a name doubly adopted from a Sir Walter Scott novel via Edinburgh - seem a little pretentious. Perhaps that is why the suburb within a few decades became synonymous with the somewhat pretentious 'Sherry Belt', a sardonic Barry Humphries reference to 1960s stay-at-home upper middle class wives who, bored, took to entertaining their guests with sherry parties.

The book is to be ready by the end of 2019. I have plenty of time but I like to get onto things. Story from the archive: Our route outwards lay through Caulfield till the Waverley Road is reached, thence a straight run to Black Flat, when a sharp turn to the left brought us into the aptly-named Mountain View Hotel, which is about fourteen miles from the GPO. After dining sumptuously and well we inspected a couple of mines, which are to some day make Black Flat famous, to which one is inclined to say – Heaven Forbid! – if it is to ruin the present rustic beauty of the surroundings. Returning, we took a cross road to Tally Ho, thence through Burwood to the Riversdale Road, and through Richmond to town. The road after leaving Caulfield was wet and sloppy and in a state of being repaired, which in these latitudes seems tantamount to a state of disrepair. But the cyclist who never expects to meet with bad roads on a trip should confine his attention to croquet. The story was published i...

I'm turning yellowed papers in an upstairs boardroom. The yellowed papers are 1910 originals and the quality of reporting is very good. Yet the writers do not call themselves journalists. They are 'correspondents'. There are no typos and no mangled language. There are words - good words - that have since fallen into disuse. And this is a sporting newspaper, the Australian Cyclist. Someone had stared a cycling club in the 1890s. Electric power and the car were yet to arrive, a long-gone power-stationless green dream. Solar power dried the washing. You hung it on a line strung up in the back yard. Then a crash followed a speculative boom and a third of Melbourne's breadwinners were thrown out of work. There was no welfare payment. When things got back to late-nineteenth-century normal, people bought bicycles. The safety cycle had replaced the dangerous penny farthing, on which you could die standing still, simply by falling off. The safety cycle let you put your feet o...

Doris Southbridge ... was surprised. "But I really shouldn't be ... . We're on the east coast and there's all those states in the middle, which haven't changed in hundreds of years."

On Friday morning before the Melbourne Cup weekend, there had been furious jockeying between the creative staff to win the Cup Eve Monday off as a holiday. Creative director Jason had a kind of reverse-Solomon moment in preventing inter-staff jealousy by awarding the bonus Monday to himself (as he had in the past three years). Meanwhile, everyone had been called into the boardroom for drawing of the annual Melbourne Cup sweep, which Yasmiijn de Reverien was to draw. Jason has recently appointed her as his new personal assistant, a job title he changed to 'creative co-ordinator' to deflect any suggestion of inferiority, servitude, misogyny, sexism etc. Yasmiijn's employment was greeted with scepticism from the rest of the creative department; and raised eyebrows from management, but Jason insisted he be allowed to staff his own department without interference. Yasmiijn has flame red hair and is wearing a silky thing that looks like it was woven by butterflies. It is prob...

Warning: offensive language, sexist stereotypes, threatened violence and more. Section 18C would not survive a morning in a robust advertising agency. In a place like this, a 'trigger warning' is when you walk through the front door. The following story is true. Some names have been changed. IT IS THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE MELBOURNE CUP. ACROSS THE CITY, THOUSANDS OF EMPLOYEES GALLOP TO THE MANAGING DIRECTOR'S OFFICE (OR IN THIS CASE, THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR'S PENTHOUSE-LIKE SPACE COMPLETE WITH LEATHER SOFAS AND TWO BRETT WHITELEYS) TO ASK FOR THE MONDAY OFF, MAKING IT A FOUR-DAY WEEKEND. JASON IS THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR AT BLAKE, BROWNING, BURNS. WITH HIM IN HIS PALATIAL OFFICE ARE ART DIRECTOR ART (YES, ART. ART IS SHORT FOR ARTHUR. IF YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN FORTY YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW THIS BECAUSE THERE HAVE BEEN NO ARTHURS BORN IN THE LAST THIRTY YEARS, EXCEPT THIS PARTICULAR ART, WHO IS 26) AND JAKE, A WRITER. JASON: I'm not coming in Monday, so you guys will have to ...

A cold wind blasted up from the south and the sky was steel grey. I was walking through a patchwork of emerald green paddocks where I once walked as a child with my parents, picking mushrooms. The mushrooms still pop up occasionally but these days the fields are given over to another purpose. I walked along a fence line and saw a horse standing in the cold air in the middle of the paddock. I came closer. The horse seemed to be on a slight lean. It was old. Its eye was on me. It picked up its hooves and ambled over. I walked slowly along, outside the fence. The horse followed me a little way, and then its attention was drawn by another horse in the corner of the field. I came to a gate. On it a sign read: Fields of Omagh. Suddenly I heard a thunderclap. It sounded like 30,000 people screaming, willing a horse past a finishing post on a tight, curved racecourse track. Then silence. Another paddock. Another old horse. Another sign: Might and Power. The noise and vision this time was...

From a news report: But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether songwriting, however brilliant, rises to the level of literature. And can you believe they're still smarting from the time he picked up an electric guitar?

I was researching a long-defunct 1960s cricket team called the Northern Cricketers. The Northern Cricketers were a social side who played on Sundays at Holbrook Reserve, West Brunswick. The ground was at the westernmost point of the suburb, perched on a horseshoe bend of the Moonee Ponds Creek, so that a good stroke over cover would land in that part of Moonee Ponds immediately south of Moonee Valley Racecourse. Just a short way south of the ground is the Essendon Hockey Club and Ormond Park, home of the Moonee Valley FC, once known as the Fog, as anyone familiar with that low-lying area would know, especially on those cold autumn evenings at the start of footy season. OK, the place is dripping with sporting history. I didn't know if Holbrook Reserve still existed. So I investigated. A glance at the map showed that it looked to be almost obliterated by the Tullamarine freeway, which was built in the early 1970s. However, the ground survived, and I found it. The freeway is its...

Late morning. I was on the phone to yet another 1800 number listening to yet another 'menu'. If you want to give money, press one: you're first. To increase your monthly direct-debit donation, press two: we'll be with you in a millisecond. To hear a heart-warming story about a dog who would have died except for someone's $50 donation, press three. If you have no heart, hang up now. It was the twenty-fifth 'charity' I'd called that day. They call themselves charities, but they are collection agency call centres for non-government organisations. * She averages a dozen request-for-money letters a week. I help her collect them from the letterbox, because she can barely reach it nowadays. She is in her late eighties and elderly widows are gold for the charity sector. Hence the torrent of mail. The fronts of the envelopes have faces with big, sad eyes and short headlines which telegraph the next death sentence that could be delayed or stayed via a q...

Hawthorn has won four of the last eight grand finals, including the last three, for a total of thirteen. Footscray has won one grand final, which no-one under 70 remembers. It's impossible to think of Footscray (or the Western Bulldogs as they are now known) as having ever been a more successful club than Hawthorn. However, the situation was very different early in the 1960s according to one writer: ... they must be classed as the most successful of the three babes of the League - Footscray, Hawthorn and North Melbourne - since they entered the League in 1925. ... their record is nowhere near as dismal as North and Hawthorn's - and St Kilda for that matter, even though they've been in the League much longer. Lou Richards made the claim in his book Boots and All published in 1963 on the strength of Footscray's 1954 flag and its near-miss in its 1961 grand final loss to Hawthorn, the latter team's first premiership. But Richards saw Hawthorn's flag as somethi...

It's one of the health fads of the moment. I keep hearing it everywhere. Curcumin. For relief of inflammation. No-one knows if it works or not, of course, just like no-one knows if fish oil works. You spend your money on hope, like betting with Sportsbet. "If your team loses by less than ten points after leading at half time - CASHBACK!!!!!" Except there's no cash back with supplements and they're a lot dearer than a twenty-buck bet. Turmeric - the source of curcumin - is a lot cheaper and tastier, as in the following curry I made last night: Potato, spinch and eggplant curry - with tumeric. Dice four large potatoes and fry them in oil in a deep frypan in batches until done. Remove. Cube four eggplants and fry these in the same pan, adding more oil if necessary. Remove. Chop two large onions and fry until golden, adding more oil if necessary. Into the frying onions, stir a cubic inch (guess) of finely chopped ginger (a cousin of turmeric), a heaped te...