LIFE AND TIMES OF....

6 August 2026 As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve run a couple of contemporary dance companies in my time. Which is why it’s somewhat embarrassing to confess at this late stage in my career that I don’t always “get” the art form. There are pieces where the beauty of the stage image will entrance me. There are works where the sheer physicality of the dancers will enthral me. But often there’ll be pieces where I’m just not sure what I’m looking at or why. But that wasn’t the case with Sydney Dance Company’s recent season in Perth. Called Engine , it consisted of three pieces that vibrated, albeit it differently, with an extraordinary energy. The ensemble of dancers, of varying backgrounds and heights and sizes, moved with precision and passion. 1.    Love Lock by Australian choreographer Melanie Lane (of Indonesian-Anglo heritage) with costumes by Akira Isogawa and music by Clark. It was performed by the whole company and had some magical movement moments in it. I also l...

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...

28 July 2026 As I noted in the Return to Perth blog on 12 March this year, I’ve always been fascinated by Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I’ve seen film versions and theatrical versions so when it was announced that a National Theatre production was showing on screen, I booked my tickets instantly. My enthusiasm was slightly mitigated by the casting of Lesley Manville as the Marquise de Mertieul. Part of the story is that you have to believe that once there was a powerful love affair between the two Machiavellian protagonists, Mertieul and the Vicomte de Valmont. This doesn’t mean that they have to have been the same age. After all there was a 7-year gap between Glenn Close and John Malkovich when they starred in the film version back in 1988. But no matter how wonderful Manville is as a performer, she’s nearly 30 years older than her co-star, Irish actor Aidan Turner. So I went to see the film with some trepidation.  In some ways Turner has the hard...

29 July 2026 In my Return to Perth blog, I talked about how much I like honey. Not all sorts. I love the white Sainfoin honey from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and the dark caramel honey from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the single fruit honeys from Beechworth in Victoria and the tasty of expensive Jarrah honey from WA. But not Tasmanian Leatherwood honey or the Manuka honey from New Zealand.  I was thinking about the joys of honey again because of two recent experiences that capture the unexpected joy that honey can deliver. In Melbourne I went to a café in Coburg, opposite the school which hosted the Saturday Farmer’s Market Susan and I used to regularly attend. Called The Glass Den, it’s in the old gatehouse of Pentridge Prison. When we went to the markets it was always busy with queues out the front door but on this visiit without booking, a friend and I were lucky to snag an outside table in the winter sun. I rather extravagantly choose a dish called “Bee in a Gard...

  30 July 2026 My memory has always had weaknesses. I can’t picture words and so I can’t spell them. I don’t remember the connection between faces and names particularly well. I’ve never been good at learning poetry or remembering quotes from plays or books. And I have to use apps such as Libib and Letterboxd to remember the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. So as the body starts to disintegrate with age, I do worry about what might happen to the mind as well. Recently, I’ve seen the impact of various forms of memory loss amongst friends. I’ve seen how people deal with such challenges. In one case, one has taken on the diagnosis bravely albeit with fear about what this might mean for themselves and their loved ones in the future. In another case, there’s an acknowledgement of what’s happening but no desire to find out more or consider what it might mean going forward. And in the final case, I’ve lost the friend I had. She is no longer capable of recognising me let alone ...

30 July 2026 The challenge for people going to live theatre is that it’s risky. It’s a complex art form and all sorts of things can go wrong. A new script may not hit the mark. An actor may have been miscast or just have had a bad night. The director’s approach may not serve the text. The lighting or sound or set or costume design might not appeal. And that’s before you consider issues such as stress from getting to theatre, a grumpy usher or toilet queues that go on for ever. Let alone the ticket price. So I never have any expectations about plays I go to and try to avoid reading reviews in advance. If they work, that’s wonderful. And if that don’t, that’s the risk I’m willing to take by going in the first place. Going to see three plays in a row on a recent visit to Melbourne wasn’t particularly brave. After all, I used to have weeks in London and New York when I’d see 8-10 shows in as many days. But this time was different. Every single one of them was great – even though the ...

  22 July 2026   The BBC has produced a collection of nine television plays and two documentaries written by Alan Bennett in the 1970s and 80s. Bennett is an English writer and  actor and those of you who are old enough may remember him from Beyond the Fringe with comedians such as Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. Having purchased the DVD set, I confess I didn’t watch the documentaries but I did find all the TV dramas fascinating. Some I had seen before such as An Englishman Abroad about the spy Guy Burgess (played by Alan Bates) and A Question of Attribution about another spy, Anthony Blunt (with the wonderful Prunella Scales as Queen Elizabeth II). But the others were new to me. It’s hard to pick a favourite out of the rest of them because each has its particular charm. A Day Out is a surprisingly powerful anti-war film as we spend the day with a men’s bike riding club in 1911. Our Winnie, with a young Lesley Manville, contrasts a manipulative art student with a family,...

21 July 2026 What can I say about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that hasn’t already been said in the (mainly) rave reviews? And who am I to be less than inspired or moved by the film?   It’s a classic Hollywood block buster with some impressive performances, powerful dramatic moments and rich story telling. But it’s not a film for me. Does that mean that Homer isn’t for me? Probably. I’ve never read the original but I’ve known the stories of Circe and the Cyclops, Helen and Agamemnon, Odysseus and Penelope, since I was a teenager. But this film reinforced my despair about men and war. The only characters I connected to were the women, with people like Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Samantha Morton as Circe giving nuanced and clever performances. Perhaps it’s because I have in the back of my mind all the enslaved women in Pat Barker’s brilliant Women of Troy series and it’s hard to connect to any of the Greek men given their brutality during the war. The only reason they got to...