LIFE AND TIMES OF....

6 August 2026   Growing up in WA, it’s surprising that I don’t know more about wildflowers. I can identify the obvious ones (kangaroo paws, boronia, wattle, banksia) but not much more. It’s partly because I didn’t find the Australian bush attractive. I was much more interested in the green and pleasant lands of England even though they were only fictional at that time because I’d never been out of the country. It’s partly because the gardeners around me weren’t that interested in native plants. Auntie Dot, in the Porongorups, had a green house full of plants such as fushias and begonias and grew seasonal plants such as daffodils and jonquils in her garden. Betty was also a good gardener but she grew roses and lavender and hibiscus and oleanders. With that in mind, when I saw a talk about wildflowers in Melville (a suburb close to Willagee), I signed up. The presentation was by a young botanist from UWA and she structured her stories around the six Noongar seasons: Currently D...

5 August 2026 People have asked if I’ve made new friends since moving to Perth and that has happened but what has been even better is spending more time with existing friends whom, in the past, one may have only seen once a year if that. Some of those friends go back to high school; some to university; some to 6UVS-FM (now 6RTR-FM); and some to connections built on holidays rather then through work or study. In 2019 Susan and I did a land and sea tour through the Kimberley region. It’s a part of Western Australia that I had never explored and as someone who likes neither camping nor endless driving on straight or dirt roads, letting someone else take responsibility for the transport and accommodation seemed like a good idea. The tour itself was stunning with extraordinary vistas of caves and canyons, mountains and islands, nature and indigenous culture. And the people? We had the best and the worst. Our guide/driver was an Italian woman. Who would have thought? To start I was both surp...

  2 August 2026 Susan and I are still exploring what Perth has to offer and one unexpected pleasure came via a friend who’s much better at scouring Instagram than I am. She spotted a notice about a mini-cabaret festival being presented by the City of Belmont. The suburb, known as Belmont Park when I was growing up, is out near the airport and I don’t remember ever have had a reason to visit there in days gone by. The only aspect I do remember was that it had a race track and was close to the river. The council have created a flyer that summarises its history: https://www.belmont.wa.gov.au/docs/ecm/museum-suburb-booklets-belmont.pdf After Dark was a limited season collection of performances in the Council’s Glasshouse building with discounted prices for ratepayers. We’re not but the prices were perfectly reasonable so we took a punt on a couple of shows. The first, Skinny, was present by Michelle Pearson, a young woman with a rich and powerful voice and a tough story to tell a...

1 August 2026 Why am I too frightened to use AI to write this blog? I suspect the results would be better – more grammatical, more effective use of adjectives, more logical. And it could be….and this is where I really start to worry – more thoughtful, more interesting, more readable. I first started to worry about the impact of AI when discussing the issue with academic colleagues. How does one judge a student’s work if they’ve used AI to write an essay? How do students learn if AI does the learning for them? Then I had a conversation with a colleague whose partner is a lawyer. He was thinking of retiring early because people were using AI to prepare court cases and so his work was drying up. Suddenly one started to think of all the other careers that were likely to disappear because of AI. The doom and gloom stories of AI “agents’ going feral fill the media and that’s before the bad guys start to use it to undermine our community   and government structures. I used to be an ...

31July 2026 It’s been a week of art exhibition openings. Rather unusual because I’m not well trained when it comes to the visual arts. I’m a “like what I like” person without much in the way of analytical skills. I was exposed to contemporary art as a teenager but clearly didn’t “get it” in the same way I did theatre. Betty and Alan used to regularly to go to openings at the Old Fire Station Gallery in Leederville which operated from 1968 to 1976. Somehow or other I was always inveigled into taking drinks around to the guests. Perhaps I was too busy trying not to spill glasses of wine to look at the art on the walls?   Susan and I had connections to all three exhibitions this week. The first was at Early Works in South Fremantle, a series of paintings of women by Tania Ferrier. She’s well known for her Angry Underwear series (of which I own a Treasure Chest) but this was her first solo exhibition for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever been to an exhibition where there were only ...

31 July 2026 Willagee (an indigenous name for swamp lands) was developed as a social housing community in the 1950s. The houses were built for the workers in the nearby industrial zones and we are still surrounded both north and south with factories and shops with big floor prints such as Bunnings and Officeworks. What I didn’t know was that many of the earliest homes in the area were prefabricated wooden houses imported from Austria. There have clearly been waves of “urban renewal” since that initial housing development. The original blocks of land were large and as one by one, the old houses have been demolished, bigger houses have been built on smaller blocks. Our house is one such example, built in 2010, with the house taking up most of the land footprint. Building works in the neighbourhood continue with a major two story town house development at the end of Archibald St and at least six building projects along our street alone. But while the architecture and the building stoc...