Updates on creativity and culture an email away

After many decades working across the Australian cultural sector, I have been regularly posting to my suite of blogs about creativity and culture, ever since I first set them up over 10 years ago. You can follow any of the blogs through email updates, which are sent from time to time. The app that I have used for this is shutting down the feature, so I have found a replacement, ‘follow.it’. If you don’t already follow my blogs and you want to take advantage of this new service, you can simply add your email address to the blog page, and then confirm that you want to receive updates when you receive the follow up email.

There are four blogs in all, covering the gamut of creativity and culture; humour; food and cooking; and creative writing. ‘indefinite article’ is irreverent writing about contemporary Australian society, popular culture, the creative economy and the digital and online world – life in the trenches and on the beaches of the information age. ‘balloon’ is thought balloons for our strange and unsettled times – brief quirky articles about the eccentricities of everyday life, almost always with a sense of short black humour. ‘handwriting’ is homegrown graffiti from the digital world – writing, rhyming and digital animations; ‘tableland’ is food and cooking from land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko. The blogs are complemented by two briefer social media channels – indefinite article on Facebook, which is short arts updates and cultural commentary; and Twitter, short, sharp and shiny.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of my updates, simply select the blogs you are interested in and set up the update by adding your email. For ‘indefinite article’ on Facebook or for Twitter simply follow or like my feed.

Travelling light – Island on fire: Tasmania 2019

On an island you’re never far from the sea – that is unless the island is huge, like Australia. In tiny Tasmania, perched like an afterthought at the foot of Australia, even the mountains in the centre are not far from the ocean raging around them – just as in the distant homeland from which those who settled it came. On the main island, though, everywhere is a long way from everywhere else. Two islands, very different in size, in many ways with both similar and different histories. Both on fire. But this not just about the fires – it’s about what happened in front of the fire, the life lived in a time of warming and burning, even if it sometimes felt like a rehearsal for the end of the world.

The year before the new decade started, the last year of the old decade, began with fires in the centre of his island home, Tasmania, where he had grown up. It was burning in the very spot where he spent his earliest years. That year he had decided it was time to travel back. It didn’t start well. The year started off dry and hot and ended even drier and hotter. Luckily global warming didn’t exist or who knows how bad it could have been. Luckily the Earth was flat, because that would stop all the water needed to fight the fires running down the sloping edges of the world and falling off.

Ferry leaving Melbourne for Tasmania

It was a year book-ended by bushfires. A year that began with fires and ended with fires – a warning of a future to come.