Guarding the treasure trove

There’s an archive box in the downstairs cupboard full of black and white negatives. There’s also a proof sheet of 24 photos, presumably from one of the 36 negative folders in the box. I can tell by examining the proof with an eyeglass they date from my years as a rural reporter/photographer in the Lockyer Valley, circa 1980s. There are other random photos, some with information on the back, like the photo (left) of Brisbane…

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House music

Check out the audience next time you’re at a classical recital. It’s a fair bet they will be actively listening. There will be no background chatter, no clatter of glasses and cups or the hiss of a cappuccino machine. Classical musicians and house concert performers expect and receive 100% audience attention. So it was at a private house concert we went to last Sunday to listen to Joel Woods play classical guitar pieces and a…

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A degree of merit

For reasons which may suggest the mind is searching for mental challenges, I have been admiring the initiative of a dozen or so older people who have chosen to go (back) to university. In some cases they are university virgins, spreading their intellectual wings for the first time, post-children, pre-retirement. Others are going back, 20 or 30 years after their first degree, to take on post-graduate study. The concept of mature age study has been…

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Bedside manners

So I’m visiting John in hospital and it’s just as well I didn’t come the day before, he says, because he was in a world of pain. Knee operations are like that. Hospital rooms evoke all kinds of memories, most of them not very pleasant, even a private room with a TV, telephone and a view of the painless world. John was telling how his daughter phoned on his world of pain day to see…

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