The Godfather: Peter Corris on going blind
One of the few books in my parents’ house – the collection was kept in a hallway cupboard – was an edition of Henry Lawson’s short stories. Its publication was somehow sponsored by the Sun newspaper. I have no idea how my parents acquired it. Neither...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on chance encounters
It’s a cliché that lives can be changed by chance encounters. Many people meet their life partners through chance encounters it is said. I didn’t; apparently we were set up. But I’ve never ceased to be thankful. I owe my survival beyond, say, the age of 50, to a...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the tyranny of the motor car
Recently, I was walking up Watkin Street from Wilson towards King in Newtown on a Saturday afternoon. The street was parked solid and as one car pulled away another, whose driver must have been lurking and dwelling on the spot, slid in. The look of satisfaction on the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on teaching
I never liked teaching and unlike the people mentioned in a previous column I was no good at it. As a young man I was shy and self-conscious. These are not good attributes for a teacher. A teacher should be confident and know when to exercise authority and when to let...The Godfather: Peter Corris on his Newtown pubs
I frequent four pubs in Newtown. There are different reasons for my visiting them and each has a different atmosphere. Known colloquially as the ‘Marly Bar’, the public bar at the Hotel Marlborough on the corner of Missenden Road and King Street is in an area I visit...The Godfather: Peter Corris on painting
I’m not big on painting. I was notably quite without talent at it when at school. We had to submit several watercolours on paper to pass Art at some point. I could manage a wash, so I did three blue sea washes each with a slightly different foreground – a desert...The Godfather: Peter Corris on his best reads of the year
Again the NRB editors have invited me to nominate the best books I’ve read this year. As I explained in an early column I keep a list of books I’ve read, with a brief assessment, and I assign each book a mark out of ten. Those selected scored either 8.5 or...The Godfather: Peter Corris on memorable teachers
Many memoirs, perhaps especially by writers, acknowledge the roles played by teachers in the shaping of people’s careers. Sometimes the teacher occurs as far back as primary school but more commonly later, and occasionally the mentorship morphs into a lifelong...The Godfather: Peter Corris on book launches
An unusual book launch was held recently at Gleebooks, unusual in that three books were celebrated – novels by Michael Wilding and James Murray and a book of mine comprising three novellas. It was also unusual in that we had no launcher as a result of organisational...The Godfather: Peter Corris on going to the gym
After a lapse of quite a few years I’ve joined a gym again. My first gym was in Wollongong about 20 years ago. I’d broken a bone in my hand, couldn’t play golf and needed something to keep me fit. The gym was run by a West Indian with the fine name of Lincoln Webb,...The Godfather: Peter Corris on getting the news
I used to get the news from a combination of reading the broadsheets, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, listening to ABC radio and watching the 7pm ABC television news. With my eyesight now making reading papers too difficult (I maintain, without objective...
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