There was a time when impecunious musicians and artists wanting to make a CD or mount an exhibition went through a tedious year of applying for grants (and waiting another year to hear if they were successful). Some did succeed, were awarded grants, made CDs, exhibited, and/or went on tour at the expense of State or Federal government or local Councils. Maverick South Australian songwriter Soursob Bob has a song about that – “Grant got…
There was a fellow selling lottery tickets in Kuranda Village last week. He was trying to gain the attention of passers-by, 99% of whom rushed past, oblivious. Sadly, I count myself among the rushers-by. I had just dropped my wife and son at the Skyrail terminal and was on a deadline to drive down the mountain to Cairns, fuel the hire car and pick them up at the other end. Mission accomplished, but now I’m…
She Who Missed The Last Step is the first to fire up and get offended when people, on observing her magnificently bruised face, thoughtlessly imply that I might have done the damage. I’ll get into that later, but let’s say for now that neither of us finds domestic violence remotely funny. Laurel (SWMTLS) went head first from the second-last step of the internal stairs into the edge of the (open) back door about 11am last…
OMG! Our son just turned the age I was when he made his way into the world. What happened to those years, I wonder? This seems like the perfect time to introduce a very occasional flashback to my first newspaper column which appeared in the Toowoomba Chronicle every Friday for three years in the 1980s. I have dusted this one off a few times over the past decade or so as friends and relatives started…