A poet as beachcomber walks the beach sometimes with pen and paper gathering sights and sounds shells and stones scents and seagull scenes. Yet it is not always about the waves and wind for the sea carries the stories of the world; how it connects and disconnects how it gives and takes reveals how we treat it. Humanity is always ......
If there are any perks from breast cancer Changing Your Life should be one of them. Yeah right. Nearly a year out from my diagnosis – just when everyone expects me to dust myself off and move on – I’m dull and dreary and utterly bogged. So I start a diary – hoping to sift through the quagmire in my head and make sense ......
Two women stepped from the steamship Orient onto Australian soil on a hot December day in 1879. Beatrice Beauchamp epitomises the younger middle-class English woman settler unused to the unpleasant. Yet she combats tragedy and meets challenge and difference with a level of equanimity not commonly expected from one with a genteel upbringing. We ......
'The deepest pools of reflection come from loss and grief. Andrew Drake is among the sweetest gentlest and most patient of human beings but his life has been fraught by sorrows and recriminations. These he turns into a lifeline of loveliness love letters to the past. That pain is a poet's best friend seems unfair. And yet it is in the ......
Beauty in the Darkness explores the concepts of love death grief and the ironic twists and turns that life deals out. With depth and compassion Andrew Drake speaks for the voiceless the marginalised and for those whose lives have been tragically cut short. Honest hard-hitting and poignant Drake’s poetry shines a light into ......
'Simon Stuart writes with a deep understanding of the subtle extraordinary pivotal moments to be found in everyday life. With these six wonderfully understated yet moving stories he invites the reader to join him on a journey through the often chaotic and emotionally harsh everyday worlds of characters who reveal themselves in the ......
One summer’s day thirteen-year-old Kirsty-Lee comes home from school to find her father has left them. This novel explores the ways in which she comes to terms with this and the subsequent changes in her family.
Zenda Vecchio is an award-winning writer whose numerous short stories have been published in a variety of ......
‘With their seeking out of common ground between strangers mothers and daughters friends and lovers Jane Williams’s poems are full of warmth and delight in being alive. Bullies funerals and ‘business as usual’ exist here but so too does the possibility of being ‘surprised by joy’. The language is ......
Surprising personal glimpses of the eminent and enigmatic Australian poet
‘I wonder sometimes if the literary pests are writing memoirs: “The last time I saw her she was pale and sick but smiling bravely.”’ So mused the dying Gwen Harwood in a letter written a few months before she succumbed to cancer. Nearly two ......
