What’s in a name? Someone asked that once, someone in pain and on the theatre stage. It could have once been asked when accusations were brandished like guillotines and the man of the woods stalked the virgin forests of Salem, but that will always be historically obscured. It served Arthur Miller’s purpose, and we all know what somebody else said – if it’s good enough for him… For me it’s always been a case of my name containing within its fragile walls everything that is not. Every...

Universities are interesting institutions these days. That is not to say that they are as interesting as they used to be. What they used to be is what I still love but can no longer find. A thing to immerse yourself in, a sentence to skip over and delight in; a thing of politics and passion; torn t-shirts and slogans written on skin; chants in the hallways and joints on the lawn. The first time I committed myself into a university was in 1994. Sydney University. Two steps from Newtow...

This is my father’s story. He keeps it in his head, behind firmly shut lips, a stare that extends backwards, knowing things that can’t be said or implied. It’s this silence that separates us. The child and his silent father. Whatever distance he has travelled is the distance that is still left for me. A long way in miles, as well as years, before my father can ever take me seriously. He spent his days from birth to adolescence on a tiny Atlantic Island called Madeira, an island th...

It is a crushing experience to have to earn your “bread”. To suffer and swelter in a take away shop knowing that your life is absent, deserting itself and leaving it to fight the hordes that come in, day in and day out, by itself, unsure and frightfully angry. I try to convince myself that I am, in fact, a student. I am enrolled at university and this must count for something, right? Being a student means something, a student is a character in a Russian novel, a man awaiting his destiny, s...

She says “but I’m not” and it’s not always affected. Sometimes, maybe all the time, she really means this “but I’m not”, and you can imagine her looking into the mirror, her mouth turned the wrong way around and thinking this, pre-empting you with that ready fabricated phrase – “but I’m not”. Perhaps it is that we are to generous with such words – beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, amazing, breathless, sexy, etc, etc… We cannot be honest because humanity is generally a kind hearted species that ...

We are not the benign sun worshippers that grace the pages of magazines, nor the marginal wannabes that we often think ourselves to be. Through necessity our memories are short, as our memories have such a fallow field and usually belong to far distant and illustrious others. Cook is more remembered for his inglorious death than his accidental discovery. We are still not certain of who found this country under sail and who left in haste, but we are sure that the candidates are numerous an...