LIFE AND TIMES OF....

22 October 2026   During my 2023 exploration of Japan, I tasted a variety of drinks:     Plum wine in Tokyo, Kanazawa and Hiroshima     Lots of different sakes included unpasturised, 40% alcohol, 60% alcohol, yuzu and plum     Locally made (and fairly horrible) white wine     Spanish cava that one could buy in small bottles from the equivalent of 711 stores     Even whiskey shots in a Katsuhiro restaurant (where all the food is covered in fine breadcrumbs and served on skewers).  Loretta & Ann & Sake, Tokyo, 2023 In the historic wooden town of Takayama, we visited the oldest remaining sake brewery, Hirase, which had just celebrated its 400 th anniversary.   A ball made of the small, dried branches of a cedar tree is hung to indicate that the building houses a brewery and when the next season’s sake is available a green ball of the same material is hung up to let people know about the new vintage. ...

20 October 2026 I was fascinated to read an opinion piece by Chris Marquis in the New York Times called I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down : https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KFE.6j_-.CxCpHNcCZCny&smid=url-share As someone with a Masters of Business Administration and, to be somewhat boastful, a “gold” medal for being the best MBA graduate of my year, you might think I’d disagree with him but I don’t. He’s reached the conclusion that “business schools don’t just reflect our economic system – they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structure driving our overlapping global crises.” And to add insult to injury, these very schools have impacted on the universities that house them where it’s now difficult to defend the existence or philosophy or history courses in any other terms than student enr...

19 October 2026 Next week, I head to Victoria for my first Board meeting with Malthouse Theatre. It does seem somewhat ironic to join a Board (I had been saying “never again” a lot recently) in Melbourne (yes, I will be subsidising some of my own travel) of a theatre that was always seen as a competitor to Melbourne Theatre Company. But I admire their current leadership team, Dean Bryant and Vivia Hickman, have always been an audience member at Malthouse and it gives me a good excuse to get back to Melbourne to see MTC shows.   However,   I’m rather worried about the world I’m heading to. In an article called “ Portrait of an arts scene on fire ” by Gabriella Coslovich, there’s a list of Victorian arts organisations that have lost state government funding in the last year: -           Writers Victoria -           Australian Print Workshop -       ...

19 October 2026 The October edition of The Monthly contains two articles on the perilous state of the arts in Australia: https://www.themonthly.com.au/   They are worth reading in full but I thought I’d capture some of the ideas they contain in this post and the next. In Art for Art’s Sake , Sean Kelly compares countries like Ireland and South Korea, where governments have actively invested in artists and the arts to both deliver better economic outcomes and to enhance their culture, to other countries where “governments – drowning in debt and afraid of citizens they imagine thinking only about their bills – want nothing to do with funding something so obviously superfluous as higher meaning” i.e. the arts. And if governments are prepared to support the arts, then “[a]lgorithmic capitalism has slashed the number of people willing to pay or, or [be] able to find, new and interesting works of art.” And that same “algorithmic capitalism” in the form of AI is stealing the work that ...

19 October 2026   Sadly, this year’s Italian Film Festival has been somewhat of a disappointment. We seen films about Ovid and love (pretentious with some very unlikeable characters), about prisoners hiking through the woods to find an inspiring tree (quirky and somewhat twee), about a man addicted to Sicilian sweets who turns to religion to get the girl ( irritating homage to the Pope), a biopic about a Nobel prize winning author (tedious), about infidelity and murder (with some uncomfortable scenes involving a young girl), about a trafficking ring (but with some odd narrative choices), about orphans and a circus (too much like other stories but without the wit or wisdom). There was only one that we collectively liked: Sweetheart : a tender film set in a Slician seaside village that reminded me of childhood holidays with older relatives. A story that touches lightly on old heartbreak and new relationships.   Ceafalu, Sicily - 2008 Perhaps our choices were just bad th...

18 October 2026 I knew that at least 5 of my Top 10 Australian books submitted to Radio National’s competition wouldn’t be in the Top 100 because they weren’t on the inspiration list to start with. I suspect Susan was the only other person who voted for Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby , a beloved book from our childhood. But that childhood is now so long ago that I didn’t even remember how to spell the author’s name correctly. Others that weren’t going to make it included a book of images of the woodcut prints by Cressida Campbell. Some cooking books turned up in the Top 100 including one of Susan’s votes (the Stephanie Alexander Cookbook )   but not art books.  It was hard to put together such a short list. After all, which Anna Funder book deserved a gig – Wifedom or Stasiland ? Both made it into the Top 100 along with All that I Am . I could have put Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore on but instead I chose two other history bo...

14 October 2026 I was reminded at Hadestown of both the Rainer Maria Rilke poem and that of Carol Ann Duffy. The former has that extraordinary moment when Eurydice, as she and Orpheus are making their way out of hell,   no longer knows who he is: “And when all at once the god stopped her, and with pain in his voice spoke the words: he has turned around–, she couldn't grasp this and quietly said: who?”   Poignant and heart breaking.   Duffy’s poem is the opposite. A Eurydice that is grateful to be away from the endless stalking of Orpheus.   Carol Ann Duffy – « Eurydice », The World’s Wife (1999)  " Girls, I was dead and down   in the Underworld, a shade,   a shadow of my former self, nowhen.   It was a place where language stopped,   a black full stop, a black hole   Where the words had to come to an end.   And end they did there,   last words,   famous or not.   It suited me down t...

13 October 2026 On a visit back to Melbourne last year, Susan and I, Sebastian and a friend, went to see Opera Australia’s production of Hadestown , based on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. There were some directorial choices which I might have questioned but overall, the quality of the performances was impressive. We listened to the Broadway soundtrack when we got home and   I swear the Australian singers were better. Less “black” sounding but greater range and tone. Hades was particularly sinister singing songs such as ‘Why do we build the wall”? And the Fates sounded stronger too. The wall song could have been written about Trump but wasn’t because it was created in 2006. Why do we build the wall? For freedom. From what? From poverty? Because poverty wants what we’ve got. https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/hadestown/whywebuildthewall.htm There were times in the show where I was almost bought to tears. Always a good s...

8 October 2026 Dot and Pete had a   little fibro house along Bolganup Road on the way to the Porongurup Ranges. Some of the land surrounding the house was left as bush with kangaroos bouncing through at dusk and some of it had a range of fruit trees. On our first day in this area this time, we peeked through the gate and it appeared that the orchard that we played in and ate from in the 1960s and 70s was gone. A look at the aerial photos on realestate.com proved the loss. I can’t remember all the different types of fruit trees that Uncle Pete grew but amongst the apricot and plum trees, Granny Smith apples were grown. Being able to step outside and pick a crisp, juicy piece of lusciously green fruit was a miracle. I can even remember owning a small vial of green apple perfume because the sensation of biting into a Granny Smith was a treat for all the senses and I wanted to be reminded of it even when I wasn’t there.  ...

7 October 2026 As kids, Susan and I spent many of our school holidays in 1960s and early 1970s in the Porongorups (as we were taught to spell it). For those of you who haven’t been down to this part of the South West of WA, it’s a billion-year-old mountain range that sits between Mt Barker and Albany. The hills arent’t very tall (670m at the highest point) but they are made up of an extraordinary collection of granite boulders. In those days we’d go climbing Nancy’s Peak and Devil’s Slide and explore the tree-in-the rock and the Karri and Marri forests surrounding the granite. These days, we’re unlikely to be scrambling up hillsides although I do remember Mr Brown climbing the peaks in his 90s which somewhat puts me to shame.  Tree in the Rock Mr Brown, Pete, HH, Susan, GR, Dot - late 1960s When we stayed with Auntie Dot and Uncle Pete we were allowed to do many things that weren’t part of our usual home life including: Dr...