Turning up early

Turning up early, turning up on time or turning up late comprise one of the defining approaches to leading your life. It's a hard choice to make. Turn up early and you could be waiting around ainlessly while everyone else turns up late. Turn up late and you could miss important business - or avoid being bored by aimless chatter. They say that decisions are made by those who turn up - but what if no-one turns up?

They say that decisions are made by those who turn up. What about those who turn up early ­– or even extra early? Do they get to make the decisions before everyone else – maybe just the important decisions? It could save a lot of time, a bit like holding all meetings with everyone standing up, to keep them short and to the point – another one of my ideas that was never taken up.

Poster on a rubbish bin in Auckland in the lead up to the 2014 New Zealand general election. 

Those who turn up early certainly get to eat before everyone else. Ever since I started booking restaurants at 6 pm, I find I can always get a table. When I used to work in Melbourne and flew to Sydney for work on a regular basis, I used to turn up at the airport so early that they’d put me on the previous flight.

Revisiting the island to the North – a nearby foreign country

Sitting by a roaring fire in a wintry pub in the Central Highlands of Tasmania near where I grew up, I read that Tasmanians liked to call Australia ‘the Island to the North’. Many years later I went back to Tasmania, in early 2019, driving through an island on fire to reach the tiny village where I grew up in the centre of the island, by the shores of Lake St Clair. Now after three more years of bushfires and floods and pandemic, I have been thinking about the island to the North, its tiny neighbours and the vast Pacific Ocean that laps and links them.

The island to the North – a nearby foreign country
As a long-term Tasmanian-in-exile, even if of my own choice, it’s interesting to think about Australia in the 21st century, as someone who hails from another nearby island, looking at its much bigger neighbour as an immigrant. 

I travel the back lanes of this strange land, marvelling at the people. They speak a strange language, not all that different to Tasmanian, though I am aware that Tasmania has many languages – as does the island to the North. Deciphering them is the challenge.

Surviving the pandemic – notes from the plague years September 2020-November 2021

During the pandemic I have become an expert at many new things - early morning raids on enemy supply lines to ensure the household has adequate food supplies, masks, sanitiser, avoiding others, especially the ones I don't like. It's risky – I see that small bands of foot soldiers in the service of assorted warlords are roaming the streets, though luckily in the far South and not here. Sometimes I feel like one of those ancient Vikings heading out from the fjords of Norway to plunder distant shores – today Lindisfarne, tomorrow Sonoma Bakery.

Surviving the pandemic #1 – Early morning raids
During the pandemic I have become an expert at early morning raids on enemy supply lines to ensure the household has adequate food supplies (and alcohol) for our troubled times. It's risky – I see that small bands of foot soldiers in the service of assorted warlords are roaming the streets, though luckily in the far South and not here.

I'm wearing my protective armour

Sometimes I feel like one of those ancient Vikings heading out from the fjords of Norway to plunder distant shores – today Lindisfarne, tomorrow Sonoma Bakery. Unlike them at least I pay for what I take – only on card of course.

Humorous updates on creativity and culture an email away

After many decades working across the Australian cultural sector, I have been regularly posting to my suite of blogs about creativity and culture, ever since I first set them up over 10 years ago. You can follow any of the blogs through email updates, which are sent from time to time. The app that I have used for this is shutting down the feature, so I have found a replacement, ‘follow.it’. If you don’t already follow my blogs and you want to take advantage of this new service, you can simply add your email address to the blog page, and then confirm that you want to receive updates when you receive the follow up email.

There are four blogs in all, covering the gamut of creativity and culture; humour; food and cooking; and creative writing. ‘indefinite article’ is irreverent writing about contemporary Australian society, popular culture, the creative economy and the digital and online world – life in the trenches and on the beaches of the information age. ‘balloon’ is thought balloons for our strange and unsettled times – brief quirky articles about the eccentricities of everyday life, almost always with a sense of short black humour. ‘handwriting’ is homegrown graffiti from the digital world – writing, rhyming and digital animations; ‘tableland’ is food and cooking from land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko. The blogs are complemented by two briefer social media channels – indefinite article on Facebook, which is short arts updates and cultural commentary; and Twitter, short, sharp and shiny.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of my updates, simply select the blogs you are interested in and set up the update by adding your email. For ‘indefinite article’ on Facebook or for Twitter simply follow or like my feed.

Early onset forgetfulness – what day of the week is it?

There used to be a time when a test for dementia amongst the elderly involved a series of questions. The first one was ‘who was the Prime Minister of Australia?’ After one too many leadership spills this fairly quickly went out the window. The other question was ‘what day of the week is it?’

Soups, galettes, crepes - Wednesday - Sunday

I must admit that increasingly I am losing the ability to answer this question correctly. Today is Monday, yet I keep having a nagging feeling that it is really Saturday. This has been going on for some time but it has been accelerated by the pandemic lock down, which turned into a slow down and then into a lie down.

Beyond a joke – surviving troubled times

We live in troubled times – but then can anyone ever say that they lived in times that weren’t troubled? For most of my life Australia has suffered mediocre politicians and politics – with the odd brief exceptions – and it seems our current times are no different. Australia has never really managed to realise its potential. As a nation it seems to be two different countries going in opposite directions – one into the future and the other into the past. It looks as though we’ll be mired in this latest stretch of mediocrity for some time and the only consolation will be creativity, gardens and humour.

A land of bushfires and choking smoke, drought and floods – and plague
Over the last 12 months we have endured bushfires and choking smoke, plague, drought and floods. Australia’s creativity and culture and the whole creative sector have been hammered and it will be the last thing to recover as we move into the new post-pandemic world. At times like this there are a few things you can rely on for consolation – the pleasure of creativity and gardens and the distractions of humour.

Fire-ravaged landscape in the Snowy Mountains.

Over the last decade I seem to have spent most of my writing career producing articles about Australian creativity and culture. Lately some of it has been a bit grim, given the way the current Coalition Government has largely abandoned the creative sector and the higher education sector. Together they comprise much of the clean and clever economy which should underpin a bright global future for Australia. The creative sector has responded to being sidelined by generously sharing a huge amount of advice and experience about how to survive behind enemy lines. Some days I think I should have been an economist, but instead I intend to focus on being a humourist. After all, it’s a bit like those who have written endless reams about Trump in America – at some stage you have to think ‘what more can you say?’ 

Holed up in the mountains

In a time of pandemic, if you can't be on a small island off another island, then being holed up in the mountains might just be the next best thing. While there are some daily things I miss - coffee sitting down in cafes, a quite drink or meal out - in many ways life in lockdown is not all that different to how I lived before. Perhaps I need to take a closer look at what I really miss.

When Australia’s capital was established it was deliberately tucked away in the mountains, far from the coast and any likely threats, such as a Russian invasion – or possibly undue control from the two warring states of the time, Melbourne and Sydney. A recent walk one morning round the foothills of Mt Majura, on the edge of Canberra, underlined that Canberra is indeed sited amongst the mountains, with views of the looming Brindabella Ranges in the chilly distance.

Brindabella Ranges, looking South from National Arboretum.

Now that we are under siege from a new threat – this time an invisible virus – this location seems somehow apt. If we didn’t have flights of politicians regularly materialising here we’d be insulated from most of the worst aspects of what passes for daily life in the rest of the nation, while still able to remember when we travelled elsewhere and what we liked most.