I find it is impossible not to feel a huge sense of loss when seeing how fragmentary are the records of Aboriginal languages from South East Australia. Even today Aboriginal languages are still slipping away very rapidly. Why is this not...
Last night I saw the Right Hon Malcolm Fraser speaking at the ANU about his new book, Dangerous Allies, about the US influence in Australia. He described the current diplomatic core and bureaucracy as having been “duchessed” by the US, for...
If opium were more widely available, I would take that rather than red wine on some nights (I have a glass of red by my hand as I write this). Michael Dransfield I suppose was of the same opinion. Coleridge, Hafiz;...
Compared to the dancing ephemera of music and art, poems have eternity in their soul. For this reason, reading poems can be a genuinely painful experience. I like to know what I am getting myself into, before I don a suit...
I was recently filling up my motorcycle at Buddha at the Gaspump, a great newish website of interviews with spiritual people, run by Rick Archer, when I came across his great interview with David Godman. David, who lives at Tiruvannamalai in...
The internet mind is growing. It is sorting the threads of sticky intelligence, categorising memes, getting to know itself. There is not yet much policing of the internet. When it is established (probably after many turf wars) will it come from...
Sadly, my long time collaborator Inchiki met his end over the Christmas period. We were on one of our walks when he had the accident. It was beside his favourite green pond, the one with the green rainbows, and he was...
I have daydreamd through the year. Here we are at the end again. war i find accumulating knowledge only confuses things. peace somehow there is a rock in the centre of my life which keeps us safe. but i dream of...
Exploring online, it is always exciting to come across a new habitat, or wilderness of ideas. I’d heard about microblogging and had stumbled through tumblr once or twice without paying much attention. But using twitter more than usual lately and have...
After the Herculean task that is preparing for and sitting an Ancient Greek exam, my normal life seems easy and plain. But I am at last able to turn to other interests, things like tumblr, pieces of silver, marshmallows, and Brian...
I was looking at the 1801 edition of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in the Australian National Library the other day and was amused to find it heavily annotated by Alaric Alexander Watts, the English poet from the 19th century with whom I...
