The Maroon Diaries

Upon considering my previous post, I felt that the special tree right in front of my home deserved a bit more of an introduction. I've lived so close to her for so long that she has really become a part of the household in her own right. She does protect me directly from the sun and the rain, and beyond that, I feel she has a spiritual guardianship role to this little spot. And yet I still don't know her name. I don't know the proper names of a lot of the plants up here, as they are different to the ones I know from the southern states. As for her personal name, as kind as she is to me, she hasn't chosen to share that with me yet. So she's just the Tree, with a capital letter to distinguish her from all the other trees. When I first arrived, you couldn't exactly tell there was a tree there, so much as infer its existence by the presence of branches poking out of the top of an enormous tangle of weeds. An afternoon's work and a five-foot pile of compost lat...

This is the view from the door of my new home, looking out. Yes, I know. How can I still call it my new home when I've been here more than a year and half now? But something strange is happening to my sense of time as I get older. It was when one year had passed that I got the feeling of really having arrived, of my body knowing that it doesn't live in the city any more. I feel like I'm just starting to get properly set up and organised now. It seems to me now that you have to spend a full year, a full cycle of the seasons, in a place to really know it. Maybe when I get to the second year, this won't be my 'new' home any more. The beautiful tree provides shade in the space immediately in front of the hut, a godsend on hot, sunny days. It's a real faerie tree with lots of deep, mysterious holes in its trunk wherein the otherwordly may dwell - not to mention an astonishing variety of plant and fungal life forms. And just beyond that, you'll see...

If you're not from Australia, there's a very good chance that you have never come across the work of Michael Leunig , which in my opinion would be a great tragedy. How much harder it would have been to work out this whole life caper without his divine words of wisdom to guide me along the way. source Leunig is known primarily as a cartoonist, as that's how he came to be known to the world - creating regular socio-politicial commentary cartoons for The Age newspaper. He is absolutely brilliant at managing to capture an incomprehensively complex human emotion or situation in just a few scrawly little lines, but I think we'd all agree that he's not exactly a fine artist. I think it's kind of hilarious that lately he is being considered in those lofty Fine Art circles and given exhibitions and having limited editions released of his scrawlings that are selling for enormous amounts of money. I reckon Leunig would be finding it all rather amusing himself, actu...

Our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, wants to cut the national spending on the Disability Support Pension. And fair enough. We're expensive, us sick people. I have no idea how much money the government has spent so far on keeping me alive, but I reckon if I knew the actual figure, even I would find it offensive. It's not just the sick people that are too expensive. He's cutting spending all across the welfare and housing sectors, and making it more expensive to get health care or tertiary education. The nation is in debt and in need. We all have to do our bit. For example, as of next year, people under 30 will not be able to receive any unemployment benefits until they show they have been looking for a job for six months. So if you're in your 20's, and you're on a low wage, you probably don't have much in the way of savings. If you lose your job, or you get bullied and abused at work and can't cope with it, or you get sick and can't get to a doctor a...

source: Australian War Memorial I used to be a pacificist. It was so simple - War is Wrong, any violence is wrong, anyone choosing to participate in it is wrong, and that's that. I knew how right I was with all the confidence and ignorance of a member of a generation that has never known war. I grew up in Australia in the 1980's, where there was no war. The blackfellas had long been defeated and their history revised. War was something from history books, something that other, less intelligent countries still did, something you could see on the news, but it was never a part of my life. I was 13 when Australia went to the Gulf War, but I didn't know anyone who was involved, and couldn't see what it had to do with us at all. And because my priveleged, peaceful, Western society was all that I knew, I thought it was normal. I had an image of the history of the world as being mostly peaceful, interrupted by bouts of terror and violence occasionally. I didn't see h...

Salma Hayek playing Frida Kahlo in Frida . I think this is the single most erotic scene ever filmed, and nobody even had to take their clothes off.     The Roxanne Tango from Moulin Rouge . I would barely average one trip a year to the cinema, but when Moulin Rouge was screening, I went five times to see it on the big screen. The Cell Block Tango from Chicago . Yes, I've just realised myself. These are all tangos. I must really like the tango. Okay, no more tangos, I promise. Michael Jackson's Thriller has so many layers of cultural references by now that I couldn't even begin to try to unravel them and watch this objectively. But it rocks as hard as it ever did. I have no idea what happened to this man in the end, but when you look back, my god, he was so extraordinarily talented. And there has to be some belly dancing. Something raw and authentic and unpolished, like Gadjo Dilo with Rona Hartner and Romain Duris. I couldn't decide be...

One of the best things about my childhood was that my mother was a functional alcoholic. I realise what an unusual statement this is, and I want to start with a kind of disclaimer and apology to anyone who might find it upsetting or offensive. I do realise that an enormous number of people have suffered terribly due to their parents' alcohol abuse. I know that the cost of alcohol abuse and related issues like drink driving is tragic and bitter and huge for our society as a whole, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was being disrespectful or flippant about the issue. But my story was different. I never even realised that my mother would, under current conventional terminology, be considered an alcoholic until I was in my late 20's. I happened to be visiting with her on the day of the weekly shopping trip. At this time she was living in a remote area, and had to stock up on all her supplies, alcoholic and otherwise, for the whole week. Her weekly budget of alcohol...

It's often not good for me to read books that are detailed descriptions of other people's mental illness. I'm glad that people are writing and publishing this stuff, it's vital for raising awareness in the wider community. But I find it difficult to immerse myself in such a book, to really go there along with the author. It just reminds me that I'm mad too, and of the suffering it causes in my life and others, and brings all that sensitive stuff up to the surface. I really appreciated this comment in this review on Readings - While I would suggest that this is perhaps not the book for those who are currently suffering deeply from mental illness themselves, it would serve as an invaluable resource for the people who work with and care for them. So when I found Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards in the library I wasn't sure I really wanted to read it. But there was one particular detail here that made me really want to try to read this book - the fact th...

Most of the neighbours at my new home are the non-human variety, which is just lovely. A lot of them are cows. The land we live on sits behind the road from another block of land, with a right-of-access road running through it to get to our home. This land is owned by a cow farmer, so we have to pass through a cow paddock to get in and out. I just love it. Unusually, there seem to be a lot of different breeds of cattle all together in one paddock. I wonder if the farmer just really likes cows and wanted to collect lots of different kinds, like I do with vintage crockery and suchlike. I'm not sure when the official cattle breeding season is meant to be but these cows seem to be producing young regularly. Every now and then there will be a new tiny baby cow in the paddock, following its mother and finding its feet. There's always a mixture of the young ones that stick by their mothers, and the older, more sedate and mellow mothers, and some feisty half-grown adolescents that we...

Happy New Year, everybody! Cheers! I meant to spend the New Year's Eve putting this post online, but instead, I spent the evening socialising with Loved Ones over drinky-poos like a normal human being. I'm so pleased with myself. So here we are with my Year in Books for 2013. 1. Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter by Lloyd Kahn 2012 2. The Joy of Less: A Minimalist Living Guide by Francine Jay 2010 3. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 1974 4. The Pickled Pantry by Andrea Chesman 2012 5. Wild Women edited by Sue Thomas 1994 6. Ignorance by Michele Roberts 2012 7. The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson 2012 8. European Mythology by Jacqueline Simpson 1987 9. The Stone Key by Isobelle Carmody 2008 10. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs 2011 11. The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson 2009, English translation 2012 12. World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler 2008 13. Precious ...