note books

    After all, I was an aspiring   journalist. I used it as a tool to travel and see the world, to understand and get inside some questions that puzzled me from my earliest days. I became a freelancer. It felt better that way, challenged me in unexpected ways and took me to unexpected places.   I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in East Melbourne, Australia. World War Two was drawing to a close and my  first faint memory is my mother holding me in her arms the day she left. And there’s a black and white picture of me and my baby brother, sitting on my grandparent’s front stairs looking straight back into the lens of my father’s Leica camera. He was documenting the departure. It was many years before I saw my mother again. And then it went blank. _____ Her name was Miss Moon and she had a kind face and curling white hair and her voice was soft. She  lived on top of a mountain, the highest point in the Dandenong Ranges overlooking ...

It was one of those Portsea days when the north wind blew across the driest continent, across the vast Australian inland finally reaching the southern edge and continued south on its journey to the bottom of the Earth.  On such magical days the wind compressed the great southern ocean and the waves lay in endless lines like furrows in a blue ploughed field, row after row, rolling mounds of water as far as the eye could see. You could swim out and cross those small mountains to the place where the water dissolved from green to azure to darker and darker shades of blue until you reached a distinct purple line where the sea bottom plunged downwards forty fathoms. It was here the waves began mounding, throwing out their curving chests, expanding and growing taller, the wind whipping their creamy tops so they glistened and shone in the hard sunlight, proud and taller than houses. They held their perfect rolling form which had traveled so far, for a delicious moment before slowly curling...