(courtesy Hachette Australia) There’s a lovely, and surprisingly enduring, romantic idea that if you could just take humanity away from its usual surroundings that somehow we’d suddenly morph into thoughtful, more caring and emotionally and intellectually advanced beings. It’s borne from that post-World War Two optimism, now being sadly and Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) When you have spent much of your life being placed in the “Others” camp, that is, not part of the heteronormative white mainstream, then it can be tough to explain to those firmly in that camp what it’s like not slot neatly and without censure into Continue Reading

It’s often the case that when our lives change, they change in fairly big ways. Sure, we witness incremental shifts on an almost daily basis, but that’s usually to do with small things such as a picking different café to get our coffees or walking a different way to work. Continue Reading

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Stuck, as many of us lamentably often are, in a variety of fairly unchanging workplaces, the idea that we might be condemned to wandering the earth without ceasing for our entire lives might seem an attractive Continue Reading

(not final cover; courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) SNAPSHOTIn Wynbridge, the scent of autumn is on the breeze and love is in the air… Clemmie Bennett has been renovating beautiful Rowan Cottage on the outskirts of the small town of Wynbridge, for eighteen months following a very public heartbreak back Continue Reading

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Once upon a time, a certain reader devoured all of Agatha Christie’s novels in one roughly year-long go at the suggestion of his book-loving dad who saw the works of the masterful English crime writer as Continue Reading