Recent Posts
AC/DC Lane – Another Hidden Melbourne Gem

The key members of AC/DC didn’t come from Melbourne, but they made this city the band’s launch pad to the world. Melbourne was the home of Countdown, the top-rating national TV music show of the mid to late 1970s. At the same time, the city’s pub circuit for rock bands was booming. Bands like AC/DC […]
The Music of Bells

This is the swell the organisers would have liked for last Easter’s Bells Beach pro surfing competition. Pity it arrived on Wednesday 6 May. Yes, it’s grey. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, a large, shiny black seal did a spontaneous sideways leap out of the water in front of us. Why wouldn’t you? It’s mid-week and […]
Anzac Humour

An unwritten law in Australia and New Zealand is “Don’t make jokes about the Anzacs.” You can make jokes about almost anything except the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Particularly on the centenary of their ill-fated storming of Gallipoli in Turkey on 25 April 1915. Likewise, corporations are not allowed to exploit the Anzac “brand”. […]
Barracking Bad

What makes a reader barrack for the main character in a story? The answer in one word is empathy. Note: not sympathy, which is about feeling sorry for someone. But empathy, which is about feeling what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. A good story will make you feel empathy for the main […]
Three Extraordinary Words

The sentence “Je suis Charlie” has been a powerful unifier in the wake of the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7th. But the first edition of the magazine since the murder of 12 of its staff features another three-word sentence that is arguably even more powerful: “Tout est pardonné.” (All […]
How Neanderthal Are You?

The DNA of all homo sapiens (you) includes one to four percent Neanderthal DNA. In his recent book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari quotes research from 2010 that proved modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. Prior to these findings, many scientists doubted that homo sapiens and Neanderthal could have successfully mated because […]
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