Travelling light – Journey to the North Country: Scotland and Northern England 2017

Our trip to Scotland and Northern England in 2017 was our first serious international foray in eleven years – trips in our own backyard, to New Zealand and Tahiti, don’t really count. We flew to Singapore – my first night ever in an Asian city – and then to mega airline hub Frankfurt and on to Manchester, followed by a drive through the Scottish Midlands – Glasgow and Edinburgh – and then Durham and York and back through Manchester to Singapore. Somewhere in there we ended up in a stone cottage for a week on a peninsula with the Isle of Islay on one side and the Isle of Arran on the other. Of course it all involved more Roman ruins than you could count because my fellow traveller is both a complete Anglophile and a Roman tragic – possibly, though inexplicably, due to her Austrian and German ancestry. All in all, it was a recipe for lots of fun.

Our trip to New Zealand at the end of 2016 whetted our appetite after a long dry spell of staying put – except for our much-loved regional road tours through the smaller towns and cities of Victoria to Adelaide. In August 2017, we took off for Singapore (once again on Singapore Airlines, of course, thanks to Chief Minister Andrew Barr, whose Government had persuaded the airline to be the first to fly internationally from Canberra – no more the need to get to Sydney first).

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.

Stephen Cassidy – Writing biography

A parallel part of his long career in the arts and culture sector over many decades, Stephen Cassidy’s writing has ranged across articles, poetry, short stories, installations, songs, websites and digital media. It includes several blogs. This one, handwriting stocks homegrown graffiti from the digital world – writing, rhyming and digital animations. balloon floats thought balloons for our strange and unsettled times – short quirky articles about the eccentricities of everyday life, almost always with a sense of short black humour.

More serious articles appear in indefinite article, which publishes irreverent articles 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.

The virtual world – research and commentary on Australian arts and culture

When I established my blog ‘indefinite article’, a couple of years back, it was because I wanted to research and comment on Australian arts and culture. This is my main blog that gets most views. It seems to have taken off. I’d always thought that, given the specialist subject matter – after all it’s not a popular culture blog like a cooking one – that it would grow steadily but no more, which all along is what I had wanted. The rate of growth has surprised me. Now, I’m starting to focus on the other blogs that have played second fiddle – about short humour, gardening and cooking and creative writing.

When I first established my blog ‘indefinite article’, a couple of years back, it was because I wanted to research and comment on Australian arts and culture, something I know something about from working for over 35 years in the arts and culture sector. I could have written about other subjects but that would just be me expressing my opinions like every other man, woman and their dog (and cat) on social media. ‘Who cares?’ I thought. ‘indefinite article’ is irreverent articles 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. This is my main blog and it’s the one that gets most views.

Ages ago I used the phrase on this image, thinking that I had very cleverly been the first person to think of. Recently I saw the same phrase, virtually word for word, on an Internet meme. Whether my words just drifted around on their own and were picked up and reused or whether, more likely, it's just a case of a good idea appearing at the same time in many different widely separated places, is hard to tell. There are no secrets or possessions on the Internet. Here's my illustrated take on the meme.

On the morning of 25 February it passed 8,000 views and is now just over 100 views short of the next milestone of 9,000 views. It seems only a short time ago that I was celebrating having passed 7,000 views. That amount represented the total views from when I effectively started the blog, when I left the public service in late February 2014, to 25 February this year, a period of just under two years. My most recent jump of 1,000 views, from 7,000 to 8,000, took just 5.5 weeks. Three days later I was already a quarter of the way to my next thousand, 9,000 views. I seem to have settled around 1,000 views a month.

State of origin

State of origin was a multimedia piece by Stephen Cassidy, developed with visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn, as part of the Conversations exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery in 2004. It involved many different kinds of creative dialogue between five artists and five writers.

State of origin looked at where we come from, where we go next and where we truly belong. In this work the writer and visual artist combined word, image and computer technology to make visual music. Words and images moved across the computer screen, with no fixed address.

One of the slides from State of origin

While Stephen is primarily a writer, he has always had a strong interest in visual arts and images, though it is not his main area of expertise or interest. For both these reasons, working with a visual artist with a similar approach, stretched the visual side of his skills and also provided a different perspective on his writing.

Word wall

The Conversations exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery in 2004 included a series of poetry and prose, Word wall, by Stephen Cassidy, many with images by visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn. The series developed from the common discussions about the themes of the exhibition during the planning sessions, and reflected long-running subjects in his work.

This series plays with words and images, directly referring to or basing words on Australian geographic icons, such as the Coorong (‘Sitting on twigs’), Broken Hill and Lake George, as well as more personal histories and paths.