A good day to die
She wants to know if I’m nervous about talking to her. I tell her I am. People don’t speak much about death, I say. “Oh, I do,” she says. “I laugh and joke about it. I carry on and people say, ‘You’re crazy’. Look. I’ve been preparing for my own funeral. I say to people, ‘It’s just like a wedding. The only thing is you don’t send out invitations.”‘ Read …
Heart of the country
OUT HERE on the Wimmera, locals cherish the story of the night when the people of Murtoa were so incensed by a vote to locate the Dunmunkle Shire Council in nearby Rupanyup they stole the town hall. Read …
The harder they fall
ONCE, talk on the Melbourne waterfront was of iron men and wooden ships. “Now,” muses Reg Sims, a burly man in white-on-black polka- dot shirt, gleam of gold at his wrist, “there’s wooden men and iron f….. ships”. Read …
High Society – the Right Stuff?
Below him, the earth has vanished momentarily from sight and all he can see is a field of azure blue. He should be unconscious, but for a special suit he wears. With the force of gravity bearing down, his blood should be rushing to his toes as his body bears back in the seat, eight times its normal weight. Read …
A league of their own
They may not be the best footballers around. But, in the league for the intellectually disabled, winning is not all that counts. Read …
Living on the edge – In defence of suburbia
IN THE semi-autobiographical `My Brother Jack’, George Johnston has his protagonist muse from the rooftop at the sight of a plain of dull red rooftops, rectangles of lawn, ribbons of asphalt and cement. Read …
Soul survivors
`I’M SURE you know the story. Here is another story. Here, you have to know a little story.” Des Lee picks at rough gems in the dust of memory. “Here. Another one. See.” One moment he’s on a train headed for Auschwitz; the next, pinching potato peels in Theresienstadt. Read …
A beautiful place
EARLY afternoon in classroom B8. Tiny fish flit about a small aquarium. A blue-tongued lizard among lifeless specimens preserved in jars. “You get a release?” asks the teacher. “Of insulin,” says one of 17 students in this afternoon’s year12 biology class. “Diana, can you read that please?” says the teacher. “Michael, have you done question three?” “You all right, Scott?” Read …
The Cruel Sea
Pitched into Homer’s “wine-dark” Aegean, they live with the memory of voices that cried out in the dark and the silence of corpses lit up by flares after the Greek ferry Express Samina ran aground against rocks near the island of Paros. Read …
When towns lose hope
THE store window announces a Tupperware demonstration, a quilting display and, to go to a good home, a pure-bred shar-pei male called Sully. On the door is a caricature of one man with a gun; another, fleeing, has dropped his suitcase. “We shoot every third salesman,” it says. “The second one just left.” Read …
A scar is borne
Woomera’s detention centre is in mothballs, but the pain of its existence will leave a mark on the inmates and the nation. Read …
A fledgling Voice
THIS is the way a political party is born. Just 10 people sit around a table on a chilly night in suburban Thornbury enjoying good food – roast lamb with potatoes, peas, beans and carrots dripping in gravy. Read …
Fashionably late
IF IT’S close to midnight, chances are Trish, of Essendon, is getting ready to tune into 3AW’s midnight-to-dawn Overnighters program. Read …
Larry Schwartz Writer 