Author Archives: susan

It’s odd how sometimes everything connects. In last Saturday’s Age was an article titled The Day the Dog Died… by Aisha Dow. The dog died in the living room, at the foot of the sofa, and it stayed there, decomposing, … Continue reading →

I’ve just finished the Philip Larkin biography and I’m left with a sense of cramped Englishness, a quality of ‘life lived small’. His parents weren’t very good at being happy  – and there’s a famous and much quoted poem about … Continue reading →

Happy New Year! I am off and running with my 2016 reading. I have just finished reading Siri Hestvedt’s What I Loved. I raced through it as if I was reading a thriller. Because it was thrilling. I bought it … Continue reading →

A week or so before Christmas, my local Opportunity Shop closed for the holidays. Not only were all clothes only $1 an item, but there were other magnificent bargains to be had as well. Magnificent? Bargains? I guess it depends … Continue reading →

As the old joke says, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” My trip to Chelsea was a rather melancholy pilgrimage. My old house is gone, almost every house I knew in the street is gone, the playground and bluestone … Continue reading →

PLAINNESS The garden’s grillework gate opens with the ease of a page in a well-thumbed book, and, once inside, our eyes have no need to dwell on objects already fixed and exact in memory. Here habits and minds and the … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I tried to go home again. To my childhood home, in the bayside suburb of Chelsea. I thought that I was prepared for the changes wrought in 35 years (it’s that long since I’ve been there) … Continue reading →

I think that old things, in general, are time machines. Especially if you can handle them, pick them up. Things that have been used by successive generations down the years are especially powerful. Heirlooms, we call them, but they don’t … Continue reading →

Because I write mainly children’s fiction, I think a lot about the child’s view of history. How to give children a sense of the past. Not facts, not dates, but feeling, a sense that the people who lived in this … Continue reading →

  I grew up in Chelsea, one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Our back gate opened onto the beach and I spent a lot of time there, beachcombing. I learned early to look down. Looking down and finding things to pick … Continue reading →