1000 Words or Less

  As the song says, Memories light the corners of my mind.   I can’t express it better and the truth of it becomes more evident every year.   My generation is living longer than any previous one and we are working for fewer hours each week and for fewer years, so we have the luxury of more time to think, and to reflect on the memories we have accumulated   - those Misty water-coloured memories, softened by the passing of time.   The poet, Roger Robinson, talks about each of us having a ‘portable paradise’ which we carry around with us, concealed, so that no one can steal it.   When life puts us under pressure, he tells us, we should find a quiet place, spread the elements of our paradise out under a lamp and look at them again.   I think of my paradise, my memories, as being like a collection of interesting stones, carefully gathered over time, and lovingly saved.   Every now and again, I take them out, polish them and think of the way we...

  “What do you mean, you want a break?”   Jane couldn’t keep the venomous tone out of her voice.   The situation had been coming to a head over the past couple of weeks and, eventually, her anxiety had spilled over during the coffee break when all she needed was a chance to cool down and plan a way forward.   Jane still could not believe her good fortune in getting this job at the glitzy new tech. start-up.   The workplace had all the clichés of the genre: open-plan offices, chill-out corners, segways to move around with, unlimited ice-cream and coca cola, and laid-back but inspiring speeches from the two blonde teenagers who had devised the software which under-pinned the enterprise. With all of this modern approach, the traditional coffee break was still Jane’s favourite part of the day.   For some reason, the room where some of the employees met for coffee was very much of a different era.   There was an old-fashioned urn, belching steam until s...

  One time, in our travels, we found ourselves in the Philippines.   On this particular day, we were travelling to the island of Mindoro and we had been promised that it was famous for its white sand beach and its black pearls.   Locals told us the pearls were found in the Sulu Sea and were better quality than the more famous Tahitian black pearls.   But they would say that, wouldn’t they? There were regular modern ferries which travelled to the island and the fare was only $8 but our hosts were determined to give us an experience to remember, so we lined up on the beach to embark on a traditional wooden banca.   We removed our shoes and I rolled up my trouser legs as the waves seemed to be getting higher.   It was Typhoon season and being on the open sea in a wooden boat didn’t appeal to me.   However, after a rather wet trip, we arrived safely and took a jeepney ride to the famous beach. We had been warned about the hawkers who went along the bea...

  We’re not a close family. Oh, as children, we were well looked after and were never neglected but, looking back I get the impression our parents saw nurturing as an obligation rather than as something they enjoyed.   It’s not surprising, I suppose, that we became very self-centred, thinking only of ourselves and only considering how situations would affect us personally. Even as children, we followed our own paths, finding our own friends and our own individual interests. One of my sisters became obsessed with ballet, another wanted to be a musician and experimented with one instrument or another until she settled on the clarinet.   Robert, my older brother, played football.    I was the studious one, absorbing myself in books, and I joined the local Cub pack after reading The Jungle Book.   On winter evenings, when it got dark early, my parents decided that I shouldn’t walk home from Cub meetings on my own, so it was arranged that I would go to the l...

  We looked at dozens of houses in our search for a place to call home, a place where we would be comfortable in our declining years, a place big enough to show off our memorabilia but small enough not to demand too much attention.   It wasn’t easy.   We didn’t want a mass-produced, ho-hum, seen-it-all-before, unit with a bare minimum of space and just a couple of flashy features to catch attention, like a remote-control garage door or a humidifier in the air conditioning. We wanted something with a bit of character, something we could point to with pride and which would give us a sense of satisfaction that we were a cut above the common herd who were content to be told that the developers knew what the customers needed and they should be grateful that the decision-making had been done for them and be thankful to take what was on offer. Our estate agent, poor man, was showing signs of stress as we rejected property after property.   It got to the point that we no...

  Walter, somehow, had never got around to having girlfriends.   Now in his forties, he had resigned himself to life as a sad bachelor so, when Anita from his office started to seek him out to sit with him during coffee breaks he was a bit nonplussed. Did she really bat her eyelids at him?   He’d read about that but didn’t believe it was a real thing.   After a while, Anita seemed to think he had proposed to her, and maybe he had, but there was a sense that he was being rail-roaded.   If he were honest, though, Walter would have admitted he was flattered by the attention and all of a sudden it was too late to think again. But he quite liked the idea of another presence in his life. Even Walter had to admit it was a great wedding.   The bride wore white, which Walter thought was a bit over the top, and had her heart set on a honeymoon at Katoomba where the last three generations of her family had enjoyed the first days of their nuptial bliss.   They h...

  I was a bit of a loner at school. I was shy and not very sporty and found it difficult to make friends in the rough and tumble of the playground.   I did try, though, making a special effort with any new kid who turned up but, as soon as they had found their feet, they were off to the more satisfying social life with the in-crowd, although I didn’t hear that term until years after I had left school. There was one exception to this pattern.   A new girl appeared one morning.   The headmaster brought her to the classroom door and I thought he looked a little more flustered than usual.   He told us the girl’s name was Amy and we were to make her welcome. She was not wearing school uniform, I noticed and her dress was a bit too long and she had laced-up boots on.   Her dark hair was in two pigtails and she didn’t smile, even when we all chorused, ‘Hello, Amy.”   I also noticed, through the window, her mother as she left after her meeting with the headm...

  On the wall of her apartment, Rose had a framed poster showing the magnificent Anthony Horderns Building in Brickfield Hill in Sydney.   This was where Rose had begun work as a shy 16-year old many years before.   She had only worked there for a few years before marriage and her husband’s career took her overseas, but those few years had left her with very happy memories and a sense of satisfaction and achievement. Rose’s husband worked in the Diplomatic Service so they spent a lot of time overseas, mainly in smaller countries in South America and Africa.   They had never been offered a plum posting to somewhere like Washington or London; these were reserved for favourites of the Government of the day or, more often, as consolation prizes for leadership contenders who were becoming too dangerous, or failed cabinet ministers who had to be shuffled out of sight. There had been dangers, of course, in some of the out-of-the-way places but excitement and satisfactio...

  There were well over 100 houses planned for the new subdivision which would help cope with the flood of migrants from Europe, and the first row of eight dwellings opened in the middle of 1953.   There was something special about this group: all the others in the subdivision would be fibro with tin roofs and seemed to look inwards but this first group were brick and tile and sat with their backs to the rest, bravely facing north.   They looked fairly substantial but none of them had a garage or even a driveway, foreshadowing what a future Federal Treasurer believed: that ‘poor people don’t drive cars’. When the dust settled, and the lucky families moved in, they included nine children altogether: 7 boys and just 2 girls.   Gradually, relationships started to develop and, like children everywhere, they assessed their environment and started to take control of it.   The real focus of their interest sat opposite the houses and was, from Day 1, known as The Paddo...

  The most important celebration in my family’s calendar was New Year’s Eve, although it was always Hogmanay to us.   I think all my parent’s nostalgic feelings for what they had left behind in Scotland were expressed in that one fantastic evening. The Chinese make a fuss about their New Year, and cities like Sydney spend millions on fireworks displays but for drunken, maudlin sentimentality, the Scots win every time. Our New Year celebrations started a couple of days earlier when Mum gave the house a serious clean.   Windows were thrown open and every corner checked twice. Even the chimney was swept.   Special food was prepared: a large pot of soup, griddle scones, shortbread, and black bun, and Dad made sure there was at least one bottle of whisky in the house.   My father never drank but it would have been unthinkable not to have a bottle handy to offer a dram to those who came by.   All the male guests at the party brought a bottle of whisky, whethe...

Life was generally very placid in Jacaranda Crescent.  People went about their business without any fuss. Neighbours smiled at each other when they met and shared a drink at Christmas, so no one in the neighborhood was expecting a genuine feud to break out between two families who lived next door to one another.  Some wag said it was like the Hatfields and the McCoys but that was in West Virginia and they had guns, so it was not quite the same. Nobody is quite sure what sparked off the feud. Walter, Mr Brennan, says it began at a Saturday football match when Ronald, Mr McDonald, made some intemperate remarks about young Rory Brennan’s ability on the field.   Words were exchanged between the two fathers and it might have come to blows if other fathers had not intervened. Mr McDonald has a different story, He says that ‘that bugger Brennan’ had ruined his chances of becoming secretary of the Bowls Club by telling lies about him to other committee members.   Yes, he d...

  Roger sat up in the comfortable bed on the cruise ship.   His ‘phone told him it was just after 2am but he couldn’t sleep.   An inside cabin on a cruise ship is probably one of the darkest places on earth, he thought.   The only glimmer of light he could see was the tiny red glow from the fire alarm.   There was no porthole, and not even a gap under the door to allow light to infiltrate.   In his bedroom at home, even on the darkest night, the yellow numbers on his clock radio made a difference and there was always light from outside elbowing past the curtains. This was certainly turning out not to be the cruise he and Andrea had planned.   Things hadn’t been going well at home; the kids had all moved on and the spark had well and truly disappeared from what had become a fairly pedestrian marriage.   He and Andrea rarely spoke and a sharp word was never far from their lips.   They’d tried marriage counselling but both agreed that a well-m...

  My wife opened her eyes first and nudged me awake to look at the glorious sight unfolding outside our window.   The sun was just beginning to peep over the massive shoulder of Dhaulagiri.   We had seen sunrises before but never one like this one.   The rays of the sun sparkled from the ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere and we sat mesmerised, understanding that we were seeing something we would remember all of our lives.   Perfect! We had flown into the town of Jomsom in Nepal the day before in a small twin-engined plane with only about a dozen seats. It had a pilot and an air hostess who seemed to have only two jobs: hand out boiled lollies to the passengers to help them cope with the change in air pressure, and hold on to a strap to make sure the door didn’t fly open if we hit any turbulence.   As we came into land, we saw the wreckage of previous accidents which littered the approaches to the runway. We were met at the airport by a cheerful l...

  What makes a politician tick is a question I often ask myself.   What drives a man or a woman to set aside the chance of a normal life and choose to swim among the dreadful dangers that lurk in the vile swamps of our national capital? What stimulus is strong enough to overcome the innate sense of survival which has evolved over millennia to help us avoid the dangerous pathways where our lives may change for the worse?   Where is the instinct to look for a comfortable and stress-free life? Is it love for their fellow-humans which provokes the reaction to take the plunge – a desire to be involved in ensuring that the government fulfils its duty to look after the well-being of all its citizens? Or is it a broader love – for the world, its natural beauty, and all the enormous variety within it? Perhaps it’s a sense of duty: the understanding that it’s a thankless task but someone has to do it – that sacrifices must be made for the common good and, if I won’t do it, ...

  I think everyone has a special feeling for the town in which they grew up.   Most of us can bring to mind warm memories of special people and specific places, and of good things that happened there.   It’s hard, though to tease out what it is about that place which evokes such positive thoughts. My family arrived in Gwynneville in the summer of 1952.   We had not long arrived from Scotland and were excited to move into our house in a new subdivision , one of many which were being thrown up to accommodate the huge influx of migrants from Europe after the Second World War. The subdivision was built in a rough square, bounded by Northfield Lane and Murphy’s Lane on two side, the posh estate, Glennifer Brae, on another side and the paddocks of Mr O’Leary’s farm on the fourth. The clear boundaries gave my parents their cue: ‘Don’t go beyond …”   and we knew what our limits were, and that is always reassuring. Because our house was one of the first to be finishe...

  If you take the coast road from Wollongong and head north towards Sydney you will pass through a little town called Stanwell Park.   Most of the houses are clustered around the beach and there’s not much to see on the highway: just a railway station and a shabby hotel, with a few cottages built perilously close to the cliff edge.   Over the years, several of these cottages have collapsed and many of those left have been abandoned.   Overlooking the town is a coal mine, the reason that the town is there in the first place. There’s no reason for you to stop and, if you drive on a little way you might catch sight of a memorial to one Lawrence Hargrave, a giant among the early pioneers of aviation.   The road you are driving on is now known as Lawrence Hargrave Drive. Perhaps his name doesn’t have the same recognition factor as Wilbur or Orville Wright, or even the Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, but without the inspired discoveries of Hargrave, the flights of the Wri...

 Owen Donachie had never felt the pressures of being Head of his family as much as he was feeling it at the moment.  As itinerant farm workers, he and his brothers followed a familiar pattern as they moved from one part of Ireland to another.  Changes in their regular routine were rare and usually agreed to by consensus Tonight, however, he had called his brothers together to discuss a much more difficult decision altogether.   Owen Donachie was informing his brothers that, before they all left in the morning to travel to their next destination, he planned to kill a man. The man in question was a priest, known as Father Patrick.   He was, in fact, the third son of a local landowner who had proved to be a disappointment to his family.   Returning from school in England, he had shown no aptitude to take his place helping to run the family estates.   The army had made it clear that there was no place for the boy as an officer so, in desperation, his f...