What I cooked last night.

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...

I was scared rigid. My life’s inexorable linear projection was punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and no-one could say where this predilection to be terrified came from. In the middle of nights that never ended I drew the bedclothes up so tightly I wished I could have zipped them around my face, as I’d done once with my older brother’s tartan-lined sleeping bag at a scout camp at Rowallan in the spring of 1968; an irony given that in the company of dozens of sleeping others I felt no fear at all. By day, while a scout leader chased a fear-stricken koala up a tree to the vapid amusement of his minions (an event that revealed to me the vacuous corruption of authority), from a crackling camp radio speaker crept  This Guy’s in Love With You, Witchita Lineman, The Fool on the Hill, Macarthur Park; and my mind climbed into and around every piano intro, vocal inflection and orchestral upsweep, as if each note were an architectural manifestation, a building block, of some other univer...

It’s that time of year. Tomatoes on the vine, basil in the ground, heat in the air. The tomatoes are mainly the cherry type, and they will be prolific. As the vines themselves are over six feet tall, I had to go to that ghastly hardware place and buy stakes. Is there an alternative? Please advise. And I don’t mean ripping thin lengths of timber from a neighbour’s fence.  The stakes are not really tall enough: they lost two of their seven feet on being hit into the ground; even so they are slightly unstable under the weight of a six-foot vine and will go over completely if we have a strong-enough wind. Basil is easy but transient. It is impervious to sun even at forty Celsius, but the snails will eat it. Also, pick it before it goes to seed which this year was quickly.  Ok. Tomatoes and basil organised: now to eat.  Easiest of all, slice tomatoes over good bread brushed with olive oil, crumble some goats’ cheese over (Meredith Dairy, or Coles has its own version - which pr...

The two older teenagers and their mother flew back from the land of her parents’ birth, and late on a warm humid night I met them at the airport, and heard stories of Scotland on the way home. Being mid-winter in the northern hemisphere it had been cold and it had snowed and it was out of tourist season; therefore it had been a good time to travel. The following night we had dinner in a small Vietnamese restaurant and I heard the extended adventures illustrated occasionally by pictures on a phone. Thanks to its immediacy the cell phone has ingeniously obviated that once-common social occasion, the slide night. Overseas travellers once took rolls of film and had them developed as ‘slides’ - transparencies - to be projected against a large bare wall. This function (as well as for projections of Super 8 films) was catered for by architects who penned the cathedral-ceilinged or low-slung modern houses of the cosmopolitan 1950s. The slide night, a cultural shipwreck ironically washed up on ...

New buildings are curated now, with museum-like interpretations of their anthropomorphic value and historical influences: ‘Coburg Station presents as a civic gesture drawing abstract references to the formal language of classical architecture.’ Given the formal language of the station, the sign in front kind of lets the side down.

The magpie stood beneath a photinia shrub in the front garden, beak ajar and slightly upturned, as if it were singing in a film documentary from the silent era; but with no sound it was just a hot bird cooling itself in the shade. I turned on the sprinkler; they like to bathe in the falling drops of water. It was 42 degrees. 107 always sounded better, but you have to be of a certain age to remember Fahrenheit. Another magpie appeared, dropping down from a power line, or someone’s roof. It was probably a sibling or a some other relative of the first. The pair were most likely descendants of a deformed bird I once knew and  wrote about . * Earlier in the afternoon I had taken the youngest teenager to her first shift at a takeaway restaurant. Before picking her up later I had sat at an open-air table outside a cafe in the mall with a drink and an Alberto Moravia novel. It’s only a kilometre and a half from home but in this heat ...  * Two Women is set in the coastal mountains so...

A newspaper item (The Australian, it should know better) reported last week that while the perpetrator of a crime had been captured, the gun he had used to threaten his victim was still ‘at large’. * Mistakes - typos, literals  - happen. I usually ignore them. Everyone makes them. Including me. But there is a change. We are seeing more of the errors that used to be called schoolboy howlers not only submitted but sailing all the way past the increasingly illiterate eyes of the sub-editor and proofreader (if there is one) and into print and digital publication.  So let’s enjoy the chase as we hunt down errors of the type usually described as (the world’s most currently overused word): ‘egregious’.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas.  I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting i...

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010). The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up...

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘  … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’.  While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard : ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’. * (Quotes from obituary published in The Times last week and reprinted in The Australian on 5 December.)