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Writing with Agnes

It was never my dream to become a writer. I wrote from an early age but to my mind, never well enough. It was finding Agnes that set me off. As a kid from a country town, I seemed to drift through school missing many of the basics of English. I was brought up on…

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The White Apron

Born on a farm outside Edinburgh, in the nineteenth century, Agnes is embraced by family, community and tradition. Her youthful hopes and dreams are quashed but she falls in love and marries a Gordon Highlander. Life spirals into dark places as the couple become ensnared in the nightmare that descended on the Scottish working-class during…

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No Use Crying Now

Twenty-five years ago, her child was stolen. Doog Wilson has never forgotten her son and now, with only hazy memories of the place he was taken from her arms, she embarks on a quest to the north-west of Western Australia, but her search seems futile. Contentment comes as she finds work on a bustling cattle…

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Calling Australia Home

An Albany Childhood – part 5

A turning point in my life came in the last year of primary school. David Booth was different – a teacher who made school fun, who breathed life and excitement into works of such as Kipling, C.S. Forester and Shelley, who introduced us to the Australian classics of Patterson and Lawson and delighted us with…

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An Albany Childhood – part 4

 BATTLING For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.                                                                       …

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An Albany Childhood Part 3

‘Albany will never change much – it is a pretty town, but vague. It seems to exist only in a somewhere-on-the-horizon sort of way; I like it all the better for that.’ Henry Lawson 1890 Lawson wrote for the Albany Observer newspaper in 1890 and he was right. Albany is a pretty little town. Snuggled…

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10. An Albany Childhood –  part 2.

                        Then let us pray that come it may, as come it will for a’ that … That man to man the warls o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that          My parents were drawn to Albany, on the south coast of…

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9. An Albany Childhood – part 1

Away to the westward, I’m longing to be Where the beauties of heaven’ unfold by the sea As Dad promised, our new house in Albany did go up fast. He had several mates who lent a hand. For Mum, the small primus stove continued to be the only means of cooking. Washing was done in…

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8. Mount Barker

You can come and see the baby Any day you like to call It’s lying with its Mammy in its wee white shawl It looks so neat and swanky Like a dumpling in a hanky And we’re going to call it….. Eilean was born in Mt Barker when I was four. Dad had a job…

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7. Nyamup

It was time to move from the farm and strike out on our own with our meagre possessions. John’s treasure was his accordion and Mary’s was her sewing machine. My father got a job in the Nyamup mill, so he no longer had the twenty-mile pushbike ride from West Manjimup to Pemberton everyday. Here they were given…

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6. The Marron and Other Stories

Mum, tell us the one about the marron. There was so much to get used to in this new Australian life – and so much to be frighted of. One night, Mary and John sat in the farmhouse alone, the sky darkening with a brewing storm. On other nights, the birdcalls rose to a crescendo before…

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5. Big Trees and Blowflies.

I have been a stranger in a strange land. Exodus 2.22 I’m not sure how we found our way to the farm in Manjimup. Partly by train from Fremantle to Bunbury, a journey held up by a fallen tree on the line. I can only imagine what that trip must have been like for the…

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4. Heady Days

Better to die on your feet than to live forever on your knees. Inscription on the Spanish Civil War Memorial, Customs House, Strathclyde. During the first part of the 20th century, the world was in political and economic turmoil. Between the birth of my mother in 1918 and the onset of the Second World War…

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Meanderings

Every Person is an Artist

Pablo Picasso said: Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. In the 1970’s, I visited Bali, before the island became the popular tourist destination it is today. In those days it really did seem like a Sangri-La full of happy people going about their business…

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Stories

I come from a family of storytellers. Maybe we all do. There were always stories. Stories about past lives, stories about places, magic tales to spark our imaginations and tales of caution to scare the hell out of us. These stories can be lost or recede into the mist of time. But the past, both…

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Poetry#17 – Jess of the Clearfell

Jess of the Clearfell   Eyebrows tangled in angry frown angry mouth, furious hair thin body, thin clothes pierced navel, pierced heart squatting on denuded forest floor powdered dust coat calloused feet wounded eyes confront, challenge plastic obsessions, possessions while ancient giants chipped and pulped become toilet paper.   Fearless spirit of the old-growth battling…

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The Madness of Purple

THE MADNESS OF PURPLE                Pliny proclaimed: pardon the mad desire for purple     rank it with gold in the realms of Gods   Sail south to Mediterranean middens abandoned by Phoenicians recording legions of Tyrian shellfish sacrificed for one purple hat.   Justinian’s purple love coloured Theodora’s…

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