The Tumbrel Diaries

The artist George Stubbs was teetotal for the last forty years of his life, which leaves the first forty intriguingly unaccounted for. At fo...

One can only conclude that in these days of financial catastrophe credit card fraud is becoming an enormous problem for all banks. Last week...

Our lives hang by the most tenuous threads of gossamer. Prompted by a postcard rumination by my wise brother Hamish (received this morning),...

In middle age I seem to have developed the unerring capacity, whilst reading or listening, to fasten onto one or two things that are fascina...

“A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, a...

I have done a good deal of skying—I am determined to conquer all difficulties and that most arduous one among the rest…The sky is the source...

The night before last my computer died. She had been experiencing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and congenital heart problems for some da...

Granny began school at The Hermitage in Geelong on July 27, 1908, aged fourteen. She left school a half term before midwinter in 1912. She w...

According to the brief but lively memoir she wrote towards the end of her life, Granny described the thrill of sailing to England for the fi...

When they got married in Melbourne in 1949, our parents cannot have known that theirs was a distant but plausible echo of a comparable all...