We sit amid the ruins and desolation and wonder how the verities of our age became a 'colossal Wreck'. Our illusions have been snatched away by the course of world affairs. Rights, abrogated. Democracy, denied. Lives, suspended. Not so long ago we were told that we stood at 'the end of history', on the cusp of a 'new world order'. Now that vain boast echoes the mandate of Ozymandias: 'Look on my Works, ye Mighty,…
Over the years it has occurred to me to illustrate my books and newspaper columns and for fifty years I have decorated verse or prose or plays with embroideries to try to brighten up the appearance of the ghostly white paper pages, and it has been a real pleasure indeed to offend or amuse readers, who possibly didn't expect defamation as a drawing and assumed libel had only to do with words.
When I was young you never heard the word 'depression', or the worse word 'anxiety', because where I come from nobody knew what they were. Nobody much knew who they were either, you'd have to say. Folks felt great or else they felt flat.
In some but not all ways the dog that is biting you is acting out of love because it is giving you a wake-up call. I don't expect realism in literature because life is better at it; and so, as the life in dogs goes, you are much more likely to be bored by them than humiliated or annihilated. When we were young, living in rustic Reservoir, there was no escaping them and certainly no…
In a series of articles over four issues of 'Arena Magazine', Barry Dickins interviews staff and reflects on Australia's first Neighbourhood Justice Centre, in Collingwood, Victoria. A Neighbourhood Justice Centre combines a court with a variety of services such as mediation, legal advice, employment and housing support, counselling and mental health services and uses the influence of the justice system to address local problems.
Reading Andy Jackson's 'the thin bridge'. It has to be said that poetry is the genius of suffering and the pilgrim of love, but more than that it is impossible to write not merely originally but beautifully, as it is here. Andy Jackson is a man of many magical responses to the real and unoriginal world; he is just as much at home describing an elephant as a demon.
