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...

Advertising was not my first career choice. I’d wanted to be a traveler and a journalist. But I couldn’t get a job in journalism because I didn’t have a university degree. Advertising was my next choice - it was creative and better paid than journalism but I never got to the “better paid part”.  I spent five years in the ad business learning copywriting and media and printing and design and finally I was an account executive selling the American dream that had become Australia’s. I felt a dark cloud descending. And as it thickened around me I struggled to find a way to escape. I thought about inland Australia. Mining companies paid well and life was rough in the desert. I considered joining the army, something to initiate and toughen and help me escape the malaise I felt. But the war in Vietnam was in the headlines every day and Australians were dying in a distant land, that made no sense and I quickly dropped the idea. And then, one day an old school frie...