Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

Boat alone. The Tasman National Park, Tasmania. October 2013.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson: This is a dark little book that – like a lot of Shirley Jackson’s work – explores the idea of persecution of people who are ‘different’. It is a tricky read full of strangeness and goings on where the moral lines are not clear and the narrator clearly unreliable and quite a bit unstable. Despite a multiplying sense of unease and malevolence, the book also explores concepts of love and devotion. Immensely macabre elements are treated as unremarkable; the sense of agoraphobia is virtually unrelenting. Yet the language is deceptively simple, and the almost dreamlike ‘otherness’ both real and imagined. Together, social class and actions in the past divide the family at the centre of the book and the narrow-minded townsfolk, but just how strange and different the sisters are is beyond them.

Of course, we the reader have an insight that they do not, and the type of horror generated is one that exemplifies wonderful storytelling. Something terrible has happened in the past, and something terrible happens in the narrative, and the reader is not given firm footing to determine who is worthy of our compassion or condemnation. In this way, the framing of the story and progression of the narrative is masterful. It’s the best kind of fairy-tale, both horrible and lovely at the one time. I really enjoyed it.

Rugged coastline. The Tasman National Park, Tasmania. October 2013.

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Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon. Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera? It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself. Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON. We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses. No, all of your Sputniks , "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing , and one thing only : MAD Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction . When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of m...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

This will hurt me...

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