by NRB | 9 Sep 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I’ve written before about being permitted to become a grumpy old man, and now I claim the right to complain about certain household items that annoy me. In no particular order they are: * CD cases. I have many that have stood the test of time, perhaps 20 years...
by NRB | 2 Sep 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
In 2006 Robert Drewe, whose books – like A Cry in the Jungle Bar (1979), The Bodysurfers (1983) and The Shark Net (2000) – I admire, edited a collection of stories entitled The Penguin Book of the Beach. I wasn’t a contributor but I could have been because beaches...
by NRB | 26 Aug 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
We lay under cover by the side of the road for the ambush and Paco passed me the wineskin which was heavy with the resin-tasting wine of that part of the country which feels good when it hits the back of your throat in a spurt but you must be careful to cut the spurt...
by NRB | 19 Aug 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Our third daughter was born early in 1977. I had a vasectomy to forestall any more children but our Wigram Road house seemed cramped with five people, a dog, the magnificent kelpie/border collie cross, Jim, that I’ve written about before, and the cats. Jean noticed a...
by NRB | 12 Aug 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Our decision to move from Melbourne to Sydney early in 1976 seemed impulsive to some but it was not ill-considered. While Melbourne might have been the Mecca for theatre and music, Sydney seemed to be the place for fiction writing and journalism. Moorhouse, Wilding...
by NRB | 5 Aug 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Weather was the determinant of life in Gippsland. It was autumn when we arrived, with pleasant, mild sunny days in which you could do anything out of doors. In the early weeks we had fairly frequent visitors from Melbourne and other parts. We rented an old...
by NRB | 29 Jul 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
In 1974 I held a one-year lectureship in History at the University of Melbourne. I hated it, from the physical setting to the teaching itself. When I was an undergraduate ten or so years before, the History Department had been housed in the imposing Victorian Old Arts...
by NRB | 22 Jul 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Do you remember the boot sale, when cars pulled up in municipal car parks and displayed items for sale at cheap prices from the back of the vehicle plus, perhaps, a small folding table? Some of the cars hauled trailers but this was thought to be not quite right. No...
by NRB | 15 Jul 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
We’ve had four swimming pools and I think it’s fair to say that we shouldn’t have had any. In one way or another they were each doomed. The first accompanied a house we rented for a year when we moved to Byron Bay. It was of a good size but it was old and had some...
by NRB | 8 Jul 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
‘That’s disgraceful,’ a friend said when I admitted that Heath, my then seven-year-old grandson, could beat me at Scrabble. That was 18 months ago and he continues to beat me. In fact, after 40 or so games the closest I’ve come was a game when there was nothing...
by NRB | 1 Jul 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
It is often said that people living cheek by jowl in the city do not know each other or, at best, have only a nodding acquaintance. This was not our experience in Hordern Street, Newtown, as I have recorded in an earlier column, but it has been so recently in a...
by NRB | 24 Jun 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
‘Send me dead flowers by the mail’ – Jagger/Richards I am indifferent to flowers, although I was surrounded by them at home as a child. Where I grew up, in the dreary south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne in a brick veneer house set on a quarter-acre block, there...
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