Close-up and Personal – an exceedingly generous profile, courtesy of Melanie Jean Juneau of `Blogcatalog’
Having discovered a rather humbling profile of myself RIGHT HERE, I must thank the respected Canadian writer `motherofnine' for her kind words. Meeting Melanie some time back - via the world blogging communities of Blogcatalog and Broowaha - I've come to know her as a...
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Bells and Whistles – mothers and fathers (Tuscany, Italy)
Dragano is an editor initially from up north. He’s tall and rakish, the wisp of a moustache and sleek brown hair; has the habit of whistling unexpectedly, as he ponders the ways of an unjust world while stroking a precocious black cat. His villa is classic Tuscan, the...
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Lofoten Lost Dogs – back from the brink (Lofoten, Norway)
“Puffin dogs?” Hege shakes her head. “You know, there are none on the island at this point in time?” I’m speechless with disappointment. “Yah,” she adds, “but there were hundreds here last week.” It seems we’ve just missed the Norwegian Lundehund Club 50 Year...
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Children of Earth and Sun – searching for Frank Lloyd Wright (USA)
The sound of our footsteps is muffled by patchwork drifts of snow on a gravel track winding past the bottom of carpark stairs. Surrounding hills are covered in local rhododendron; the air icy, the trees tall, rough barked and bare. Our guide strides ahead – rugged-up...
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Mandela Day – the remaking of South Africa (Johannesburg)
Back in Johannesburg for an extended African stay, I've been away for over 35 years. There's no immigration paperwork, and I'm simply issued a visa at the airport. From Perth it's been an 11hr flight, across the Indian Ocean, skirting Mauritius and Mozambique. The...
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The Price of Progress – fading phantoms (Dili, East Timor)
I'm sitting in Melbourne, recalling a visit to one of the world’s youngest nations – the Republic of East Timor – just 720km northwest of Darwin. My photographs show a damaged city with bullet-marked buildings; a country scarred by a month-long bout of violence...
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Lost and Found – a splendid memory (Cape Arid, Western Australia)
Our truck bumps from side to side, the wheels in deeply rutted tracks. Nearer our coastal camp, scrub turns to woodland and we both lurch to the left as I drop a gear and edge across a scary slab of sloping stone. Back on sand it’s our final descent, to a wild coast...
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Faces of Fame – an ode to John Wilson St
A face stares out from my PC screen: a suited-up man about 30yrs old, the boyish face round, the hairline receding. I see a clean face, but for the sparing outline of a beard. I see a thin mouth, the eyes narrowed and slightly turned, the face of a man who killed...
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My First Interview – courtesy of Alana Munro of Google’s `Support-a-Writer’.
To be perfectly honest, the only things I knew about the town of Karratha until recently, was that it was somewhere up in the northwest Australian outback, and the commercial centre of the Pilbara region; Karratha taking its name from the indigenous language meaning...
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The Real Wild West – inside the Arctic Circle (Vesterålen, Norway)
The narrow road is a roughed-out, potholed track gouged from ragged Norwegian mountains. Winding alongside a grey Arctic Ocean, it’s graced with the occasional passing bay and kept in place against northern tempests by discarded mountain boulders. Turning a last...
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