Category: Articles

It’s that time of the year again, when our elected representatives head off on holidays and newspapers are groping for copy. The result is the standard ‘What are our politicians’ holiday reads?’ where our pollies nominate the books they just haven’t had time to get to during the year. The...

Recently, I was  cleaning out an old relative’s garage and I came across bundles of ancient magazines. One such stack was devoted to an obscure journal called The Australasian Sophist. Among articles about bush ballads, inland explorers and rough-hewn heroes of the past was a recurring column of surprising...

Lots of experts have advice to help your children read. I have one suggestion that I’m going to offer in ten different varieties, and it’s all to do with the power of modelling. Your children observe you and are shaped by what you do and say. It’s the power...

Last Friday night, after the headiness of five Melbourne Writers’ Festival engagements in four days – plus two celebratory occasions – my wife and I went out to Melbourne restaurant Prix Fixe. Now, Prix Fixe is a fine dining establishment at any time, but when we saw its August...

Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep isn’t a perfect novel. It has inconsistencies, a few plot holes, some ‘What the …?’ moments, but they’re forgiven because King does something surpassingly well, something that drags us into the story and keeps us reading right through. Character. Stephen King does character like few...

In a dream, I imagined trawling through Tolkien’s papers and unfinished manuscripts and finding a completely new text. It was originally called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Characters of Destiny – with a scrawled marginal note showing that puckish humour that Tolkien is known for where he’s changed this...

Get your tips in the right order. Having your ‘Beginner’ tips coming in at Number 5 is an amateur mistake/ Ease your reader in with some baby tips then graduate to tougher stuff and finish with some tips for Advanced Tip Types. Alternatively, keep your good stuff until last...

All right, creative people the world over – it’s time to give up. We, as a species, have reached the pinnacle of inventiveness, the utmost reaches of imagination, the zenith of ingenuity. We can go no further. Writers, artists, musicians, everyone may as well down tools; our work here...

Many more pix below the break! I’m just coming out of a very busy – but delightful – fortnight where I was a guest at Supanova Gold Coast and Melbourne. It’s good to see this popular culture extravaganzas having a healthy reading and writing stream (thanks to Ineke Prochazka)...