I was fenced off from the sky 
on the first day of a Sydney spring
the preview heat that was rising
carried away in fresh exalting 
by a casual twilight wind 
the first star was out 
the telegraph poles 
stood in rows like holy soldiers 
tilted, leaning, wooden grey 
my childhood returned with them 
scented with headlights and street lights 
me running to be home 
their beads shining over me 

on a corner tennis court 
men played in slow motion 
while the peach of the sunset 
loomed and then descended 
I listened to Terry Reid singing Dean
something about blowing your mind 
a girl who kept changing 
and a lovely word I love 
“slide”

the trees know me here 
as I keep on walking today 
the ash field of my local ground 
somethin’ tries to connect me 
my mother and father long dead 
they must be somewhere in the kitchen 
a table cloth and lemonade for me 

there’s a bit of fire somewhere 
I can taste smoke in the air 
I’m going and coming see
superhero legs and books in the mind 
arrows, detectives, boys who cry 
Van the Man singing now to me 
of lanes and stretching out 
then incoherent graces 
in repetitious moans and sighs 

I get a slow hill to kiss me 
to let me see the world from high 
accidental for ten minutes
suburban, seeker of the supermarket life
beneath the humming sky
without intention in my discovery 
that sometimes inside the ordinary 
we can be free.

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There’s some dark stuff at the edges of many Paul Kelly’s songs, but somehow or other he mostly seems to be headed for the light.

At the Potts Point Hotel on the main drag of Kings Cross on a bright winter afternoon, the sunshine in his songs somehow matches the day, transforming everything for the time it lasts.

Kelly kicks off with Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. A love song to someone who must be left behind, written by a woman who left us forever in this past week.

Later, Kelly will cover what he calls “my most favourite song ever”. “It’s a song about … writing a song.” He launches into ‘Stardust’, melody by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Michael Parish, written back in the late 1920s.

Asked what the song was about, Hoagy Carmichael long ago said, “ ‘Stardust’ is the stars when your love is new... Then after it goes away, there’s a little dust left, a little glitter for what was bright.”

Happy-sad, or sad-happy, it’s something like that ... Kelly recalls learning ‘Stardust’ during Covid lockdowns “when you couldn’t go anywhere in Melbourne”. His playing is not that great but he gives it what he has to give it: a meaning through attention and care.

The sweetest song tonight is ‘Happy Birthday, Ada-Mae’, written for the second birthday of Kelly’s granddaughter. “Ada-Mae, I hope you find a tree, a bird, a star, a flower, and a love to keep you strong and kind.” But there’s a fleeting aftertaste of danger to that sentiment “when haters try to seize the day”.

As the song starts, Kelly says he won’t be around to see her when she’s 20; then by song’s end he gives in to joy and hope and thinks maybe he will be there after all. A defender, one way or another wishing things well. And being inducted into something fine himself.

You slowly register that love letters are a fundamental form underlying the Kelly aesthetic. Letters to beg forgiveness, letters to seduce, letters of self-deception, letters stretching for a hard or kind truth. Letters to let people know a weary traveller is not entirely gone from them; or, if so, that they are looking in their rear view mirror to say something that might account for their ways. Letters that take their writer back to home, sweet home.

‘How to Make Gravy’ lifts the room into that transcendent space. It has so many familiar figures and feelings floating through it, you just about burst every time you hear the song.

Is it any wonder an effort was made was turn it into a film? It’s as if a whole world of family and friends are with us again in ghost form as the song comes alive.

When Joe writes from jail he will be thinking of everyone when he’s “standing in line” you’re stabbed in the heart. Maybe I mishear the delivery, but today when Kelly sings ‘How to Make Gravy’ it sounds as always like Joe is missing his kids bad, telling his friend Dan to “please let ‘em cry for me”.

The recorded version says “please don’t let ‘em cry for me”.

What kind of darkness and pain and love and empathy is mixed up in those two different phrases? In the annexation of one word for a moment of song?

Earlier, on the way to the show, while passing through Central Station to get the Cross connection, I heard a young busker on the edge of the Devonshire Street tunnel powering into Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’.

His street version was being played too fast, the song blurring into a mess, almost colliding with what should have been the climax of its sacred feeling. At the same time, the youth of the performer, his pursuit of the song and a feeling of failure, somehow made it interesting and human. In a strange way, a premonition too of the Paul Kelly event to come: “Ma take this badge off of me.”

On stage at the Potts Point Hotel, PK is joined by his nephew Dan Kelly. The windows to the main bar are landscape big and wide open. Passers-by will stop when they register what is going on, one of Australia’s musical poet laureates appearing down on the corner.

Beside the small stage where uncle and nephew perform, there’s a large photograph attached to one of the pillars. It’s of the mighty Sydney poet Kenneth Slessor, eternal in works from the 1930s like ‘Five Bells’ and ‘William Street’. The poet has a drink named after him here at the pub, a ‘Slessor Sling’. A journalist and editor as well as a poet, Slessor sung the city up in the same way his precursors Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson once conjured the bush in romance, harshness and humour.

The sight of the Slessor photo makes it easy to picture Kelly in this line of living history and haunted documentary commitment, perhaps the truest spirit of all behind any good Australian story. Every one of them map-makers of the country, helping us to see and feel who and what we are in the places that know and mark us.

For the time being, man not myth is with us here in 2026. You’re struck by a newly youthful freshness to Kelly at age 70, a talkative and more open energy than the sometimes elusive figure of the past. Shiny-bald and lightly bearded, PK is diminutive and unassuming on stage, yet comfortably able to compel your attention. Almost impish, he becomes casually magical as his songs and delivery take us entirely into his world.

Nephew Dan is taller, his unsprung grey hair rising like a whirly-whirly has just hit it. Quiet and sure, Dan Kelly offers a few muted jokes off mike, supportive in every way. While PK plays powerful, driving acoustic guitar and a bit of harmonica, DK is the master of crisp and blistering lead breaks that tilt into flavours from surf music to Hank Williams hard country and ‘50s rock n roll ringing, with additional sonic pushes that hint at why he chose to wear a Rowland S Howard t-shirt and a crucifix for the gig.

In short, Dan Kelly is the very picture of compressed and powerful modesty, serving every song with just enough: hanging back or underneath till his fire power is called on for a few seconds before capably ending on the necessary drop of a penny.

The lock the Kellys have as uncle and nephew thrives in a mutual respect for the songs they play. As stated, ‘How to Make Gravy’ is arguably the highlight, but today is one of those rare times when every song has its gem-like qualities. A new one like ‘Tell Us A Story’ feels downright prophetic, a parable we can all take away to contemplate. “Is there a secret knocking at your door?”

‘Rita Wrote A Letter’, the sequel song to ‘Gravy’, is far stronger live that the half-successful recorded version, somehow more believably emotional: reaching for the female side of a relationship split that can’t be helped when a good man is just too messed-up to bear.

‘I Keep on Coming Back for More’ is about addiction of the sexual kind, the inexplicable and irresistible power of desire, another Kelly theme of repeated significance in his music, the celebratory raunch that matches his more reflective wisdoms elsewhere.

Part of the pleasure of the show today is in the introductions and insights Kelly gives to his songs. He explains how the gift of a book of short stories by the American author Raymond Carver awakened a clarity that he too was a short-form storyteller in song, a lover of tales that best fitted into just three or four minutes. This insight leads into ‘To Her Door’ – with a credit to Carver as the inspiration for the way it was written and the fragile promise the song might ultimately carry. “Carver’s stories suggest so much with very little,” Kelly says. “And they always end with a feeling something is about to begin.”

‘Randwick Bells’ arrives differently, something like a precursor to the events outlined in ‘To Her Door’: the shimmer of a Saturday with church bells ringing for a wedding heading into a darker energy with Dan Kelly’s iceberg-riffing as PK sings that beautiful line to “put a blanket on the window”, calling his lover back to bed, the faintest suggestion of drug-taking about to ensue.

Then there’s a briefly hilarious punchline of sorts to how he arrived in Sydney on the evening bus, walking on down to Don Walker’s home where he wrote ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’ on a piano there. It’s this song that inspired the whole idea of the show today, a return to the beginnings of something important.

Kelly mimics Walker’s grunt of approval when he played him the song. Having interviewed Kelly and Walker many times over the years it’s easy for me to imagine these two conversational minimalists in a duel of silence. Though both have loosened up and mellowed in their later years, taking mercy on chatty journalists and strangers hoping to extract a few extra words.

Kelly plays another new tune, ‘Take It Handy’, its title drawn from a goodbye phrase an Irish friend always says on parting. “I’m hoping I can make the phrase catch on,” Kelly jokes to everyone in the bar.

The afternoon goes on and on like this. Everyone sings along to ‘Dumb Things’, ‘Deeper Water’, “Leaps and Bounds’ … and in a concluding and most wonderful moment, Kelly’s lullaby anthem for Australia co-written with Kev Carmody, ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’: the story of the Gurindji Wave Hill strike and Whitlam’s fistful of sand passing symbolically back into the hands of the elder and union leader, Vincent Lingiarri.

Has it been nearly two hours since Paul and Dan Kelly started playing? Or just a few minutes, fleet and funny, emotional and uplifting?

Or is it much more than that … the years of our lives going right back to the 1980s and travelling all the way up to now, the dead and the living invited to join together with us? With Kelly recalling his own lost friends, fellow musicians like Steve Connolly and Spencer Jones, as if a melody line and a few words might hold them close, body and soul.

Everyone here has their own host of memories associated with Kelly’s remarkable songs. Outside, the Cross is still with us, gathered around on the pavement and beyond the courtyard bar, looking through the wide open windows. Rowdy figures are calling out “brother” to Paul Kelly as an Aboriginal land rights flag is passed in through the doors side-of-stage. Everyone finding their own moment of belonging before the Kelly gang finally leaves the stage. Two men, one afternoon. A great long story told in song.

M

Three days and nights 
of coughing up my guts again 
doctor pops me a tablet 
it does not fill a God-shaped hole 
but it assists 
a minor resurrection 
I drive to the coast 
just to feel a place to go
I carry two books of poems 
one by Frannie Hopkirk
the other by Yevtushenko
hers is called Riffs on Life
his is called 
The City of Yes and No
I ease on down my suburban road 
listening to Gang of Youths 
the twilight turns the sky 
a dirty metal blue 
the singer sings 
that “things take time”
and I think of things 
and time 
what I can give 
and what I stole 
the heart is a beast 
every dream a seance 
for the mystery 
that never stops its flow 
a beautiful woman ends
in mercy
her afternoon shift 
at the medical centre 
sometimes you love someone
for how good they look in jeans 
their intelligence and their struggle 
half of Newtown and Alexandria 
is out on the streets
walking their greyhounds
kids with backpacks on 
tune in to secret music 
swapping films for YouTube stardom 
it’s a start to be okay
to call the dream self into something 
and work upon 
a once upon 
yeah things take time 
on Dacey Avenue the trees are lit
like freaks with bones 
bikes cross-weave through the traffic 
blinking red like some emergency 
requires pizza at its door
by the time I get to Bondi
the ghosts have frangipani hands 
the air is ultra-fresh and clean 
I guess l’m trying to send 
them people near the sand 
into the nite-flight I witness 
taking others like them 
home 
the boys with wet-suits laughing 
the girls with hoodies slung
halfway down their backs 
a drone above going back ‘n’ forth 
at a card table by a barber
some guy just like me 
tapping on his phone 
and drinking a careless beer 
I get closer to the beach
and a theatre where an intense friend 
plans to sit behind a piano 
to talk of Visions Fugitive
and play Prokoviev 
the Walk sign stutters to me 
the sea reflects the lights 
of the apartment blocks 
the many lives inside 
the coast is black and shining 
like a photo of a painting 
- and me 
I’m still riding on my songs 
singing this to myself
without knowing what it is 
as I walk on down a hill
across a tourist’s Calvary
of gentle surf and paving stone 
yeah the lovely oneness 
of it all.

M

They cut it out. A positive skin cancer i.d.’d for what had seemed nothing more than a small irritation on my face. They take the three stitches out today and tell me it’s all okay. As the beautiful-in-spirit doctor announces, “you’re good”.

In the language of the biopsy test results it’s a “hypertrophic actinic keratosis with early invasive squamous cell carcinoma”. I read the typed sheet and take it in.

The word ‘squamous’ is enough to make me feel sick, close to a word like ‘squeamish’ and somehow reminiscent of guts and internal mess. I don’t know why, but I think of being a boy, fishing off an industrial wharf on Newcastle harbour. A bucket with our gains. Voices, the smell of salt, the stained pylons holding us above.

My encounter with the big ‘C’ is minor, fleeting, lucky. What was on my face - and now removed - akin to a single glittering scale on a fish’s body.

I know of many friends who have suffered profoundly, regular visitors to Lifehouse, chemo souls whose skin gets so irritated they feel their fingertips touching things as if they’re caressing needles... the dear presence of my sister, most of all, losing her strength, losing her hair, recovering ever so slowly.

Sometimes I feel like cancer is everywhere these days. A reality and a premonition of some larger wrong in the world. So many I know and love, sent to this other place … never able to fully return, one foot there and one foot here. Not so lucky as me.

When I dwell on them, their faces shimmer and make me sad. As if I am seeing them in a reflection caught across the silver of a pool of water. I can’t quite touch them or they will disappear. I’m near, but I am far away.

I have been thinking lately of the saying “character is destiny”. Apparently it’s derived from the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. This information made me tune into one of those BBC In Our Time podcasts to find out more about his thinking. Other familiar sayings swam into his name: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Aphoristic and paradoxical, Heraclitus believed in unities. Apparently the old Greek word for ‘life’ is also the same as ‘bow’, depending on where you place the accent when you say it.

Life aims towards death, awakeness to sleep. And yet both ends reward the wonder of the reverse also being true - with the illusory idea of any beginning only deceiving us. The bow draws back the arrow; the arrow flies. Of which are you a part of? Are you seeing and sending; or are you arriving? You are always doing both.

It’s wonderful, slightly windy, Sydney winter’s day. I walk the pavement to my car after my more-or-less positive diagnosis, cut free from a problem.

I listen to young band from Adelaide called Swapmeet, indie pop rock with exceptional lyrics about early 20s romance, share houses, rain, sand, relationship breakups, and sitting on the floorboards “of a run down kitchen”.

It reminds me of the crazy, passionate, learning ways of my own early 20s, as if these experiences remain eternal for every generation to experience and know. I step into the same river twice with their songs. But the river flows fast and that feels okay too - older here, though I am not sure wiser, on a backstreet in Newtown searching in the warm sun for where I parked my car.

I double back and find the street I forgot. I touch my face and the new scar upon it with the utmost delicacy. I sing, in some half-formed and secret way, for all those I love and carry with me into another day.

M

Back in 2014 I spent a bit of time with a young spoken-word artist and debut novelist called Omar Musa.

I’d met him in Darwin and was immediately struck by his talent as a performer and storyteller. A few months later I followed through with an interview in Sydney’s Newtown.

Many now know Musa for a body of work that led to the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his latest novel Fierceland.

I am glad to have caught up Musa over a decade ago – and much appreciate then Weekend Australian Literary Editor Stephen Romei running with my idea for a feature piece on a writer already being praised, but relatively unknown at the time outside a small coterie.

I still rate Omar Musa’s first novel Here Come the Dogs as one of his best works, full of burning street poetry and young men’s lives on the edges. Here’s how he was back then. In Darwin, then in Sydney.

A tropical June evening and the wind offers about as much relief as someone breathing over you. Wordstorm 2014, the Northern Territory’s premier literary festival, is being launched at Darwin’s Old Town Hall Ruins.

It would be easy to sink into the soup of this town and forget we cared about anything but the next drink from the bar. That’s when Omar Musa strides out with a poem that hits us like some otherworldly and icy breeze.

He will perform CAPITAL LETTERS again and expand on his hip-hop poetry act in a complete set just a few nights later.

CAPITAL LETTERS throws down the first hand in his game, including a half-humorous preamble Musa partners with the poem to describe his childhood in Queanbeyan, NSW, “which gets really mean nicknames like ‘Struggletown’ or ‘the Soweto of Canberra’ ”.

An electrifying stream of painterly street images follows, transcending the macho self-assertions and tiresome slogan-banging associated with hip-hop poetry.

It’s hard to get a performance over on the page, in this case Musa’s panther-loping, zeal-eyed devotion when he is on the move, not to mention a bantering, over-the-fence ease that can charm. But the opening to CAPITAL LETTERS is worth repeating for glimmers: “Back then some of the most wonderous people I knew were self-destructive, talented vandals who took to relationships with mallet and saw. There was beauty in the streets. You could see it everywhere. In fish tails and donuts, the silver cursive that slanted off tyres, and spray-can fumes and opals of oils and kick-flips and crossovers, cuts and kebab shops, in sneakers that cluster-hung like grapes over power lines. And in that something, that something …”

For the rest of the Wordstorm festival Musa will be the man with “that something”. After doing a bit of research, it’s almost a disappointment to witness him on YouTube bringing a Sydney Opera House TedX conference to a standing ovation with exactly the same performance back in 2013. Make no mistake, Musa’s spontaneity and freshness are hard rehearsed and worked into a purposeful shine.

“I’ve always loved poetry and I’ve always loved acting,” he admits. “I wanted to be an actor when I was younger, that was my aim. But I don’t think I had the confidence. I wanted to combine poetry and the stage. I watched a clip of Chuck D and Flavour Flav (of American hip -hop group Public Enemy). In my mind that was what they were doing. So I just followed it and followed it and … ”

Musa hands part into an open gesture, but he maintains a cat-like presence that can feel both close and far away. You begin to wonder if he might be more ordinary than his work? Alternately, if the intelligence in him is just waiting, deciding when to respond? Such character traits could be taken for Machiavellian coolness, though a subtler reading suggests an inner struggle he is trying to placate.

The winner of Australian Poetry Slam in 2008 and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam in 2009, Musa has self-published two books of poetry, The Clocks and Parang. The latter — dealing powerfully and, at times, mystically with his Malaysian-Australian Islamic heritage — has just been re-released by Penguin Australia, who are now putting out Musa’s novel, Here Come the Dogs.

It’s been quite a while since a mainstream publisher in this country released a book of poetry, let alone a debut novel by the same person in the same year. A novel that goes even further out by combining verse and prose. It’s certainly tribute to Musa’s talented voltage that both Christos Tsiolkas and Irvine Welsh have supplied lavish blurbs for his new book.

In the past few years Musa has done everything from play support shows for Gil Scott Heron in Germany to perform at a private event for Russell Crowe, who personally invited him to his farm after seeing a clip of him online. It was at this event on January 29 that Crowe decided to throw Musa a surprise party when he learnt that the date coincided with the poet’s 30th birthday.

Back in Sydney’s Newtown, Musa moves around the suburb like a visiting lord. He has just moved into a share-house here in the city’s inner west “with two of Australia’s best rappers”.

A few nights ago they “got caught up in a cipher”, a performing circle where people improvise lyrics that bounce off and build on what the previous person has done. Musa doesn’t think he has ever been that great, despite the slam prizes, but it’s fun and it keeps him sharp. It only takes a few weeks of not doing it, he says, “to lose your ability to spit”.

Part of the reason hip-hop gripped him as a young man growing up around Queanbeyan and Canberra, Musa says, was “the Islamic thing in it’’.

“I was brought up very religious. I don’t consider myself religious anymore, but my stuff is influenced by these ecstatic illuminations I’m trying to get to. So it definitely still informs my writing. And even my style of performing for that matter.”

When it comes to deciding who the best rappers are, Musa explains, “Sometimes people get very obsessed with technically complex rhyme schemes and speed. They say it’s lyrical, but really it’s just technical.”

“My stuff is slower. It gives room for the poetry to shine. It’s not rapid fire. It’s just an aesthetic choice by me to do it that way. Some people might think it’s over-simplistic — the style I mean,” he says with particular emphasis.

“But people can be too easily wowed by quite verbose performers. I love performing, but I want my stuff to work on the page too.”

Today he is recovering from a party where “everybody was whammed” on the duty-free gin he brought back after a visit to his father in Malaysia. At a Newtown pub friends roll up as we speak, asking Musa where he disappeared to last night? He says he had to “do a smoke-bomb” or he would have embarrassed himself.

There’s no effort to the jazz of these conversations, it’s just the language of people growing up and having fun. But it’s precisely that loose, rushing, street sound, and, yes, the self-consciously youthful staginess, which makes Musa such a hot literary property today.

Musa says Tsiolkas has been an especially good friend to him and that he has learnt a lot “just by watching Christos struggle with what happened to him after The Slap and talking to him about it all”.

The youthful poet has bulked on a bit of weight since he was the slim, hard, slam-winning poetry god of earlier press release photos. These days Musa looks more like an ex-rugby player, though basketball is actually his preferred sport. He’s decided to take to the courts for the afternoon to sweat out the alcohol still in his system. The passion for basketball also explains the lithe quality he exudes on stage, a stocky guy light on his feet, precise, even delicate with his gestures.

Musa says he has always fought against “the boxes” imposed on him: the hip-hop dude, the ethnic guy, the Islamic thing. His masterstrokes are a surprising use of beauty and dreams, and an ability to forge stunning images that bring them close to you. “It’s something I’ve been aiming at all my life,” he says. “How to access emotions in a very direct and visual way.”

Parang was dedicated to his mother, Helen Musa, a theatre director and arts journalist, whom he obviously admires as well as loves. “She always told me to boil it down, and to simplify, simplify, simplify when I was writing.”

Even so, the poems themselves feel more haunted by the presence of his father, Musa bin Masren, a noted poet in Malaysia.

Musa says his father and mother separated some years ago. He proudly tells a story about how they met in Malaysia when she directed the country’s first ever production of Hamlet with Musa bin Masren in the title role.

“It was a really groundbreaking moment in theatre there,” he says. “Even just translating something like ‘To be, or not to be’ into Bahasa Malay is a difficult concept to understand.”

All this life experience converges in Here Come the Dogs, especially in the novel’s cracking opening sequence where its three antagonists meet at a greyhound race before leaping forth into their worlds to hunt down their desires like the animals they have just been watching. The young men at the novel’s heart are the children of migrants: a Samoan-Australian, his half brother, and their friend, a Macedonian-Australian. The kind of men Musa grew up with in Queanbeyan.

“One of them starts to become an arsonist,” Musa begins to say, before switching off from the specifics of the narrative. “I knew I wanted to write about a bushfire for a long time. In my mind I started to think about an existential fire in society too. A fire where people could self-combust or, at the very least, where men in a certain class could combust. I’m trying to get at a powerlessness of certain type of migrant who comes here. Some people might read that the wrong way. But ya gotta deal with the darkness.”

Here Come the Dogs is charged with numerous references to hip hop, drugs and low-level crime. In many ways it’s a frightening work, the brutality given a redeeming, if eerie glow by the romantic verve of Musa’s slangy imagery and the deeply frustrated love of the antagonists for one another and the cultures they spring from.

“It’s a book about violence and fire and men … And Australia,” Musa adds with unmistakable additional force.

One of his editors worried about the excess of dream sequences on the book, but Musa, a huge fan of writers such as Federico Garcia Lorca and Roberto Bolano, argued for their prominence. “I’m well aware some people will find them pretentious or hard to understand. But I’m prepared to live with that. Because I find it accesses something deep in our consciousness.

“They (say) death and taxes are inescapable. But dreams are inescapable in life too, unless you want to kill yourself,” Musa says.

“If you think about prisoners or slaves, dreams are the thing that is joyous, that keeps them going. But it’s true not just for people in extreme situations, it’s true for ordinary people too. I try to make it so people think it’s gritty realism at first, albeit in a verse novel,” say s Musa. “Then dreams start to invade the real world. I was trying to portray madness in society, a place where we have lost equilibrium.”

Once news got round that Musa had finished writing Here Come the Dogs, his friend the rapper Solo from Horrorshow, approached him and put a hand to his back. “He told me, ‘I didn’t want to say anything but you haven’t been yourself these last few years. I could see it weighing on you.’”

Musa admits, “I had a few breakdowns writing. I was even hyperventilating ...” He looks down, shakes his head. “I quote people all the time. It sounds like some stupid, corny, motivational quote posted on Facebook, but the writer Juno Diaz says if you don’t feel lost in writing a novel it means you’re in a place someone has been before.”

M

Omar Musa’s debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, was published by Hamish Hamilton ($29.99) in 2014. An edited version of my interview appeared in The Weekend Australian 19 July 2014 under the title ‘To a hip hop beat, the beauty of the streets’. Newtown photos night and day by MM. The 2014 Wordstorm Festival in Darwin was curated by Panos Couros, artistic director behind one of the more 'ahead of its time” literary events I’ve ever been a part of, a genuinely creative mix of themes, talents and voices.

It’s a submarine kind of life. Living below the waterline; noticed, sometimes, if and when you appear on the surface.

People can visualise homelessness in that way. Homelessness at its most extreme. The rough sleepers in the city streets ... their numbers growing. The cardboard, the spilt clothes, the shopping cart packed with a life’s belongings; the sleeping bag with a body inside it, zipped up over the head for warmth or privacy on a cold bright day.

But this is only the tip of the issue. The sadly visible. Numbers for homelessness in Australia are now estimated at over 122,000. The upcoming Census may help to give the Addison Road Community Organisation (AKA ‘Addi Road’) a clearer picture of how accurate that statistic is.

Like many other charity and civil society organisations, Addi Road is working as a focal point for the next ABS Census and its activities, helping to get more information about homelessness by reaching those who are often unreachable.

But the complicated truth is that homelessness also involves people who are hanging on to the world as best they can ... sleeping in cars, couch-surfing, or living in temporary and poor circumstances most people would never accept. This is the life of no-choices. Making of that lack-of-choice whatever you can manage.

Fear clouds into it and around it. The psychological as well as physical damage as many forsake meals or are unable to access and afford any medical care. Essentials mutate into hard-to-access luxuries. The body itself a kind of poverty frontline marked by everything from the clothes you wear to the state of your teeth and your skin.

Anyone battling rental duress feels this kind of homelessness as a threat and a form of terror. People ‘coping’ can still get an edge about them; little cracks, the wear and tear and constancy of just coping from payday to payday.

Isolation can kick in, no money for a casual coffee let alone a social outing like going to the cinema with friends ... the shame of not affording things, the slide towards loneliness. To be dehumanised is to be severed from other human beings and social connection. Bit by bit it can happen to even the best of us.

One of Addi Road’s biggest innovations these last few years has been Wednesday Night Lights from 6pm till 8pm, held every week at the community centre in Sydney’s Marrickville.

On the night they offer free nutritious hot meals prepared by their chef Heather and a group of volunteers working all day in their solar-powered kitchen. Tables are set up on the road outside the Addi Road Food Pantry and Office area. Wraparound services surround them, offering everything from free medical help to free laundry, legal advice and more.

Everyone can sit down, dine together and work out what else they might need or want. Each week, Addi Road’s Wednesday Night Lights gets around a 100 people on average. Sometimes almost twice as many; now and then a few less when it’s rainy and very cold. Mostly they’ve been lucky with the weather, serving sit-down meals like it’s an open-air picnic or community fair. Giving people time to access all the extra services that are here on offer from their partners. They also have their resident DJ GK playing her ‘classics’ playlist. Bands and performers often pitch in too, everything from African drumming to blues and classical musicians giving their best.

In the last year or so, Addi Road say they have noticed more and more ‘well off’ people joining them too for dinner after shopping at their budget-priced low-cost Addi Road Food Pantry. Often these people are dealing with mortgage or rental stress too, a relationship break-up, serious illness, or Sydney’s cruel, persistent way of chewing up every last trace of what were once secure financial foundations. Again, that threat of becoming homeless emerges, rising in the heart even if it is something many do their best to keep compartmentalised or secret. Students who can’t afford their rent – and are dropping out of courses and degrees– are part of this growing cohort. Alternatively, they just make the rent and don’t eat, a depressingly common Sydney living equation.

Australia is a very wealthy nation. Having 122,000 people sleeping rough, couch-surfing, living in their cars, and sliding from one boarding house or dubious premises to another is not how this country should be.

When there seem to be just as many people who are in a home (for the time being) – but left perpetually fearing the loss of that roof over their heads – organisations like Addi Road bear witness to how bad things really are.

This need to change. The inequity and pressure is too great. Its repercussions spread like body-blows to the community spirit, affecting everything from mental health to ‘social cohesion’. It’s become a cliche, but we really are only as good as how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

It’s one of the reasons why Addi Road tries to make Wednesday Night Lights a happy and pleasing event. The hot meals are the backstop, a foundation moment each week, for people to come together and feel valued, treated with respect. They sit down at the white-clothed tables, talk, share information, enjoy conversation. The wagon train of services around them allows time for everyone to see them, a set-up provided in comfort and at a steady human pace.

Addi Road also has a Little Sprouts program running on the night from 5.30 to 7.30m. People with kids get a break while they’re having a meal and sorting themselves out. Their children get involved with art, music, sustainability projects and preparing their own lunch-box snacks for the next day. The atmosphere is not hopeless. If anything it is everything but heavy… children playing, music, conversation, food, social services all in one place.

The theme for Homelessness Week 2026 in Australia is ‘Homelessness Action Now’. Addi Road supports this strongly and believes in the base-line assistance it offers – along with something that is harder to ‘give’, a few hours of happiness and no-questions-asked, no-pressure help. A few hours at Addi Road every Wednesday Night Lights where everyone can see how connected we all are. And make the best of it.

M

Disclosure Note: I work for the Addison Road Community Organisation a few days a week as their Media and Communications Manager as well as being the founder and Artistic Director of the Addi Road Writers’ Festival.

My Facebook page has a message for me … “4 Years Later”.

It throws up a poster for Intuition Kingdom. And an offer to add a partner image to match the day’s anniversary. That was then; where you are now?

I forget all the events and nights I have been involved with, sometimes curating, other times a guest... literary festivals, talks, poetry readings. It’s a little like the theatre: all kinds of magic in the moment, some wonderful camaraderie. But a sense, too, of things dissolving quickly and some paradoxical need to do even more – as well as do other things that have a more solid presence, illusory as that may be.

Intuition Kingdom was a combined night of poetry, music and reflection that I created four years ago at Addi Road in Marrickville, bringing together Ali Whitelock, Felicity Plunkett, DC Cross and myself.

We held it in an old military barracks that is now being slowly renovated, disguising the raw space and holes in the floor with sculptures given to us at the last minute by the brilliant Adam Laerkesen. Shafts of coloured light – lamps set at floor level or aimed at the corrugated iron roof – did the rest. It turned into a special night.

The more recent image that I chose to match the Intuition Kingdom poster was a photo of me in my hometown of Newcastle, set against a winter blue sky and billboard roughly stripped of whatever was there being promoted before.

I had spent the previous day at a family funeral, all these memories revived, things forgotten that nonetheless had continued to be in me, just waiting for the right moment or encounter to exist again.

As I headed out of town, I passed by places where I had lived. Familiar tracks, a couple of former homes, old dreamings. I got that peculiar dizziness that happens when you’re in a vehicle going forwards and another vehicle beside you is reversing. A mix of disorientation and vertigo that requires gathering your centre again to work out where you are and what you are doing.

I was listening to Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane through a UE Boom on the passenger seat. The album did not seem nostalgic so much as highly present with memory. It’s so modern sounding and periodically experimental or sonically daring – along with McCartney’s scratched voice – you can’t miss the ‘now’ in it. And yet, of course, heavy, and light too, with memory.

I felt like I was in a rocket ship travelling through time, my car climbing the hill and launching me away from a childhood suburb on the edges of Newcastle. Soon I’d be on the highway south, listening to other music …. The Durutti Column’s Renascent, The Lemon Twigs’ Look for Your Mind!, Ed O’Brien’s Blue Morpho.

By the time I hit Sydney I had on Husker Du’s magnificent and speedily melodic live album, 1985: The Miracle Year. It was as if I were crossing the Harbour Bridge as I did when I first moved to Sydney in the early 1980s. Some accidental reenactment or ritual calling to my youth, to people I had known and who I had been.

Once again I thought about presence. About art as a towering and loving revelation of our best, and the living moment where a chemistry of spirit and great intentions somehow comes together.

I felt a pang of sorrow for Husker Du’s Grant Hart and his struggles with addiction all the while he knocked out scrappy masterpieces of the heart-in-isolation.

Other ghosts came to me, dead and lost friends, the ghost too of my past self, my auntie who had passed away so recently and the books she had given me (Camus’ The Plague, TS Eliot’s Selected Poems), all of them way above my 15-year-old head and taking decades to detonate in me right up to this day.

My thoughts involved me with the loss and transience we all feel and fear … the fast evaporation that takes us from this world. The way things linger and hide and resurface, and how much poetry and music and gathering together with people revives all that we are.

M

Built in 1861, The Lock-Up was a colonial police station and collection of cells. The rooms are mostly cool and dark on a sunny winter’s day in Newcastle, sandstone and iron rubbed back to heritage roughness.

Walls are scratched with names and messages, many inchoate, others legible indicators this old building and its maze of spaces once formed some kind of hide ‘n’ seek shelter for kids who played or slept here in another century.

The building now serves as a gallery space. Sydney artist Wendy Sharpe has moved in for a while, transforming it from now till mid September with a show she calls Into the Dark.

It’s some of the best work she has ever done, all the more powerful and effective for the way she has used the spaces and their shadows. Old stone walls are left bare, paintings sitting in the center of tight, closed cells, a lack of light exploited for mood, as if to frame pictures with shadow alone. Low level prison toilets remind you of former purpose. Sharpe’s intensely female and vaguely self-mythical images offering what starts to coalesce into a journey through her mind and being.

She calls on all her talents and raw materials: paintings; textile works; slide projections; sketch books; decorated lamps and wall objects; a floor painting you’re encouraged to walk across, each step part of a snakes-and-ladders game in the cryptography of her memory.

Colonial themes are subterranean in certain works, scribbled presences in authoritative garb. The children of our technological revolution are painted in black against a burning red smear, a-fire with their addiction. Stick figures and a green face half obscured by blackness and ochre-white swirls imply Awabakal Aboriginal ghosts. Elsewhere demon heads, voluptuous nudes, artist self-portraits afloat or caught in the act of making.

It’s a great show, Wendy Sharpe’s mind-maze of anxiety and artistic energy bringing us the overlap of this colonial place with the radiated presence of revelations coming at us in an apocalyptically communicated world.

Maybe it has always been this way, art and demonology, exorcisms and hauntings, all part and parcel of firelight and shadow-play on a cave wall. Fairytales, too, that tap into our archetypal intuitions and forebodings.

There’s a quote from Bertolt Brecht in a child-like painting of canine beasts eating stick people like us. Sharpe has done this work on a bed-cover doona. The words of her wolfish dream read: “In the dark times there will be singing… Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.”

Sylvia Plath duets with with Brecht, her internal turmoils a mutual song to his political vision: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

M

Wendy Sharpe’s exhibition Into the Dark runs at The Lock-Up in Newcastle till 17 September 2026

My friends Marina Strocchi and Wayne ‘Iggy’ Eager have an exceptional exhibition of their work closing this weekend at Australian Galleries in Sydney’s Paddington. Marina has her pictures dominating the ground floor; Iggy has his paintings all upstairs.

In a massive white gallery space both sets of paintings pull you into worlds. The traditional home of Marina’s father in the Italian countryside, viewed as if from a hill: a town, its trees, vineyards, and surrounding landscape perpetually stretching out like a field of emblems.

Iggy’s pictures are more x-ray and overlay, desert and country-related Australian landscapes that feel like they’re made out of clay, twigs, and stones, hieroglyphs and beaten-up geometry. You talking to me?!

At the opening, Iggy explains to me the value of working on good paper. How he used to buy cheap stuff when he was younger. Now he loves that good paper… you can work over it, even hose away things and get an effect, let it dry and do another layer.

I have to admit I have often failed to see the relationship between their works: Marina’s like moments from a story; Iggy’s like something a weird wind blew in across a dirt floor.

Yet the two of them have been together forever. Almost as long as I can remember.

I first met Iggy in the NT when he and fellow Roar School painter David Larwill gave me a lift in the back of a brand new Toyota 4WD when I needed to get out of Alice Springs. We’d get ripped at night in the Tanami Desert and debate what shapes we saw in the fire, the flames painting something new all the time till we slowly fell asleep in our swags.

I’d get to know Marina later when she and Iggy finally got together, thanks in part to David’s matchmaking.

Marina ended up living in the NT with Iggy. In the early 1990s, she was helping to set up an Aboriginal women’s art collective at a place called Haast’s Bluff. I did the dirt road trip there to see them both. They were kinda crazy in the eyes, happy enough, deep into their work.

A lot of what I know about art came through them.

Iggy introduced me to Dubuffet and practically quadrupled my appreciation of Picasso.

If any of you own a copy of ‘From Her to Eternity’ the cover shot of Nick Cave - looking like a horse about to get the bullet at a knackery run by Dostoyevsky - will likely be memorable. Marina took that photo.

I actually overhear Marina talking to someone in reference to her paintings tonight at the opening. Something about a female Italian author who influenced Elena Ferrante. I’m only eavesdropping but I gather the only reason her father went to town was to get books.

Maybe all this is to say paintings are stories we invent with our eyes. Landscapes, far away and too close, in the way that all memories are. Something to see and dwell on one last Saturday in the city.

~ M

RIP David Larwill with thanks for the ride and the red dust, the fires and the friendship connections.

Marina Strochhi and Wayne Eager exhibition at Australian Galleries in Paddington, Sydney, closes this Saturday 25 July.

https://australiangalleries.com.au/collections/bologna-and-the-lowlands

https://australiangalleries.com.au/collections/field-notes

History: Ikuntji Artists Aboriginal Corporation = https://ikuntji.com.au/pages/history?srsltid=AfmBOoqTpWMZDhoX6irzrfEqo25bZPECO0dgDPsoI7qVjQHZ0uQFIyCd

A superb 10 goal thriller for third place and the bronze medal at the FIFA World Cup.

At half time England appeared to be wiping the floor against a half-hearted France, leading them 4-0.

France swapped four players for the second half and came back full of danger with Mbappe all lights on for scoring.

By game’s end, after mighty runs and counter-attacks back and forth, it ended up being in England’s favour 6-4.

That final score included a brilliant goal from the late addition and new English legend Bellingham. An awesome three goals from Saka. Rice at midfield playing beautiful and crucial football to have opened the scoring for England and help them dominate in that first half. Each player carrying shadow narratives, respectively, of fiery misjudgment, missed chances and illness. Stories they transcended here.

And the Frenchman Mbappe, wow, scoring two for France to put him out front of Argentina’s Messi (for the time being) in the race to be the highest World Cup goal scorer of all time.

The lead in to this play-off for third place felt dispiriting and none-too-thrilling. But both England and France rose to the moment, exciting everyone and inspiring something else… an awakened sense of beauty and nobility about the game itself; the sporting purity of watching great players as they struggled and excelled, individually and as a team.

This World Cup has felt so choked by politics and ill will - much of it magnified online via so-called social media - it’s been hard to keep in mind the games themselves at all.

What a pleasure to see the respect on the field between France and England, and the respect and affection when it was over. What a pleasure to watch a game that was about the grace of the game itself.

“And after all you’re my wonderwall.”

- M

Myles tells me that “God works in mysterious ways”. We get talking outside Addi Road Food Pantry in Marrickville. She doesn’t have much money so she likes to shop here. Because she helps feed a few other people she picks up a hamper and the free bread, fruit and vegetables as well.

Her car is pretty noticeable. Festooned with art and advertisements for assorted Elvis Presley films and tribute shows. Outside and inside as well. She’s a devoted fan.

Ask Myles for her favourite Elvis song and she gets adamant: “All of them!” Then she slices her hand across the air and gets secretive and admits a fondness for ‘Kiss Me Quick’. Oh, she says, shaking her head like it’s just too good.

Turns out the car was a gift from a friend who is a nurse. Her own car got messed up in a minor accident but she had nothing to replace it. This one is a Ford Festiva, with one ding on the back door where someone scraped by her. It was a bit annoying.

Myles wanted to make the car look nice. She explains how Nepalese auto people from Rockdale were persuaded to help her out. It’s a little complicated but that’s how Elvis came to cover her car.

God is always playing a hand in Myles’ good life. She helps people and they help her. The nurse friend who gave her the car for free when she needed it. The Nepalese auto painters who share her taste in music and art. And not so long ago, a friend who gave her a cassette of Elvis, unheard covers of songs like ‘Candle in the Wind’.

“He’s still alive you know, still performing,” Myles says. Pretending to be an impersonator but it’s the real him she assures me. “He looks a bit old but you can see when you are close. His name now is Sean.”

Myles is a bit of a candle in the wind herself. Five foot nothing in height, she’s Filipino, although she was raised here she states firmly. Her conversation rattles and jumps, skews and moves, but it’s all love of people, God and Elvis. And sharing the good vibes.

She loads the bags she got from the Addi Road Food Pantry into the tiny boot of her car. A few deliveries to friends tomorrow and a priest she knows who is not feeling well.

Myles doubles back then to Addi Road’s Wednesday Night Lights where free hot meals are being provided and a host of wraparound services are lined up from vehicles offering free medical help, laundry, legal advice, you name it.

There must be nearly 100 people here sitting at tables, eating and chatting or lining up to take advantage of the food and the help.

Myles is full of beans herself, admiring the way other women are dressed and telling them so, assisting some older people by fetching them table napkins, ping ponging around sociably till she gets a meal of her own and takes a chair to sit down too.

The DJ is playing Bob Marley and Rita Marley. Reggae and pop with sweet wings. Then a bit of toasting over the vinyl to declare how wonderful this place is.

Myles enjoys the reggae music and her meal. All the lovely people. She stays as long as she can before the drive back home. She does not like her picture being taken but is very happy to present her car before she leaves. It’s been nice, it’s always nice, but Elvis is still her King.

~ M

A poem about the American Dream and its inspirational energy as evidenced through its films, books, music and art. And with that inspiration the troubled times too. All the way from Australia, it's a love letter of appreciation and wishing the country well. Poem written and then recited in my parked car in Sydney's Inner West in October 2020. Presented here again as America celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4th, Independence Day.

AMERICA, I LOVE YOU

America, I love you:
you’re Peggy Lipton in Mod Squad,
you’re Patti Smith in the ‘Piss Factory’,
you’re Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier,
Arsenic and Old Lace
and the Lilies of the Field,
my grandmother and I
watching you on the television,
laughing and finding holiness
and beauty in a prayer.
You’re the fast talk and fists
of Muhammad Ali,
all the heavyweight boxers 
of the twentieth century
whose names and stories 
I knew by heart,
so heroic and broken down.
You’re the poems of Gil Scott-Heron
and Robert Lowell and Charles Bukowski,
each man singing of his street,
the junkie twilight, the Nantucket graveyard, 
the booze and unripe corn.
You’re New York in winter 1999,
a very light snow falling
on Christmas morning 
that I taste on my tongue,
above me a billboard 
with Jackson Pollock
drip painting
as if he were lunging from the sky
to flicker me with white enamel 
using only a stick 
and the cosmic weight of history - 
‘The MOMA Exhibition’.
You’re Carson McCullers 
and the story of a girl growing up,
you’re Robert Kennedy’s blood
and the panic of a crowd,
you’re the first time I saw a man
ever get killed for real
sitting as a child, cross-legged
on the lounge-room floor,
getting it in the eyes, live.
You’re Apollo 11 and a flag
and skipping on the moon,
you’re The Doors 
loud on the turntable 
grooving for peace and murder
on the sex of a Saturday afternoon.
You’re the Vietnam I grew up on
like some form of malaria 
that got in my dreams 
and left me with 
apocalypse-now eyes.
You’re Nirvana inspiring,
a band like friends I knew
that somehow got 
to the top of the world
and reversed their way 
In Utero 
into shotgun garage seclusions.
You’re Bewitched and Happy Days,
you ARE my childhood smiling.
You’re Tom Waits talking for me 
in a telephone interview 
about Swordfish and Trombones,
you’re Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man 
floating out to die 
in a burning canoe
like I would wish to do.
You’re Bob Dylan
tangled up in blue,
longing to be young 
and being young
teaching me how to dream.
America, I love you,
you’re so much of everything 
that is me and my world.
And now the man at Rushmore
with a stone in his soul
and gold for skin
is taking you down 
into the valley of guns 
where God and democracy die.
It is the climax of the movie,
violent and complex and unsure,
with high buildings 
and clouds pursuing,
and an escape through
the fierce and strange mesas
of a John Ford film,
the red sandstone 
where God shaped the West
into great sublime beings 
watching you make it through 
into the arms of Katherine Hepburn
and Cormac McCarthy,
your stern but loving parents 
who cut time up into quarters 
like an orange 
and tell you to suck on it,
taste it, sweet and sour,
the juice from California,
the orange as spiritual 
and absolute and full 
of peace and struggle
as a Mark Rothko painting.
Don’t kill yourself America.
Don’t go mad. 
Don’t lose faith 
in your art.
I’m putting on a Joni Mitchell record,
Hejira, following
the difficult journey she made,
and I am once again
light and heavy,
wishing I were
like that coyote Sam Shepard,
floating on a bass line 
to walk the girders
of the Manhattan skyline 
with little Indian kids, 
believing forever 
in your poetry and love.

~ M

“You got me on the run…”

When I was at school in the 1970s every girl I knew LOVED Sherbet. They were their ultimate pinups as they delivered one song after another for the radio. Perhaps strangely, Skyhooks were more the band for the boys as well as any misfits and deviants into ‘other’ music.

Over time I have come to appreciate Sherbet more and more as the great pop band they always were. News today of singer Daryl Braithwaite’s retirement from live performing due to an illness that constricts his breathing is already bringing out a plethora of love and praise.

There’s always been a bit of an infantile war in Australia between pop and rock, the latter tending to be the dominant measure of authenticity and how we value our musical past.

These last few years especially I have found myself listening to Sherbet tracks like ‘You’ve Got the Gun’ and ‘Summer Love’ and being sent back through time, some kinda sonic radio that flies you to a teenage self.

I can see me and my friends on pushbikes, a radio hanging from a handlebar, the volume cranked up as the local station plays all kind of songs. We cut off a main road to cycle down a path by a stormwater drain and finally just dump out bikes and hide out in the long grasses like a a wall between us and the rest of the world.

There we sat and talked and conspired and spoke of girls and our lives. Cigarettes were smoked and the wind blew around us in a circle to confirm a green eye in the grass where we rested. Hit songs like ‘You’ve Got the Gun’ defining who we were without us even knowing it.

M

Last year Writing NSW invited me to join a group of writers for a night of letters to people who had influenced us. It was a stellar evening, really special, as crime genre kings, memoirists, Miles Franklin award winners, and bright new stars all expressed their gratitude as they outlined who and what had shaped them as writers. Many ended up thanking their mother in some way, directly or indirectly. My letter tracked a similar direction along with books I read as a boy and a teenager. Writing is often a path to something you can't see, a kind of journey to understanding with no clear destination at the beginning. You discover a shape along the way, a meaning or message. This one came to me as I traced my own thoughts into a complete article. Am really proud of it and appreciate the journal Verity La publishing it now.

M

You can read my ‘Letter to a Reader’ on link below

https://verityla.com/2026/06/18/letter-to-a-reader-mark-mordue/

Been a fan of the Dirty Three for a long time. They always make me think of the city at night, its lights and dreaming. Also other elemental visions … summer heat, outback roads taken at pace, share-houses, smoke, electricity sparking. Funny how instrumentals almost become the memories themselves, visionary transport, amplification. Have had this old poster marking their second self-titled album in 1996. Could never find a frame to fit its weird size. Rediscovered it recently, edges tattered, got this kid at Officeworks to trim a few millimetres off the blu-tacked and damaged sides.15 cents a cut. The kid smiles at me. “Would you like a receipt?” I say nah, may as well live dangerously and leave no trace I was ever here. I go outside, flip open the boot and set to work with the frame I have from the $1 Shop. The poster fits in the frame with a bit of a push. Only took me thirty years to get it on the road. Here it is hanging on my wall at home.

M

Here's a preview trailer for WHERE THE SKY MEETS THE GROUND.

It's an indie feature made by my son Atticus and his mates, completely DIY with zero funding – apart from their own cash and time. They're all TAFE and film and acting graduates of one kind or another, as well as solo freelancers trying their hand. All in their very early twenties.

Where the Sky Meets the Ground is written and directed by Emrah Akbulut and Jonah Erofeyeff who also star as the characters Danny and Mitchell.

My son Atticus Mordue is the cinematographer.

They spent weekend and spare weekdays out in the bush, initially scouting for locations then putting it all together. They openly speak about the influence of films like Stand By Me as well experiences and friendships in their own lives providing the material.

As the promo puts it, "they are about to grow up and graduate university, but not before one last childish adventure".

Adventures can be a kind of running away, for sure, and a high moment to hang on to forever. They can also reveal other things you can't see coming. As one of the characters says here in the preview reel, "You know me. I don't know what I'm going to do next week, man."

I'm really proud of Atticus being the director of photography on such an ambitious project with a group of friends. Am yet to see the film, but I am thinking one of the biggest adventures will have been what they did behind the cameras to make this film as much as what they achieve on the screen itself. Congratulations to all of them for making it happen. Long live the independent creative spirit.

M

If you want to watch Where the Sky Meets the Ground in a theatre, you can help the makers get it there by expressing your interest below: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdo-AifwVZ2T2LS8ekc066tYypjxb2nDOLAK3T76qW2Gxbhiw/viewform?pli=1

For more information: https://www.instagram.com/wheretheskymeetsthegroundmovie/

Nicholas Pounder profiles himself on FB as a “mild mannered antiquarian”.

I used to love his old bookshop opposite the original Tropicana Cafe back in the 1980s, especially his trick of hiding weary editions with ‘FREE’ written on the inside cover.

I still remember the day I pulled Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ off the shelves. Pounder’s assistant said yes that’s right, take it, all yours.

And take it I did, a brokearse young rock journalist with just enough shrapnel in my pocket to sit at the Tropicana, buy two cappuccinos (so sophisticated) and read my ‘new’ book.

Those were the days. Even if the book crumbled away in my hands after a few months.

Some time ago in this century, I signed up online for Pounder’s Fugitive Paper, a curated set of offerings for sale that includes books, journals, posters, self-published poetry chapbooks, uni magazines, handmade leaflets … all kinds of paper-related curios, wonders and artworks.

The latest Fugitive Paper #5 (May 2026) is a work of art all its own, a kind of loose-weave feminist history of Australia as told through finely detailed appreciations of the items he has for sale at modest prices.

Because so many of these items and documents are connected to counter-cultural life across the 1960s and 1970s it’s a history overlooked and easily lost.

Pounder’s shopping list and highly attentive respect for each item takes you into the lives of the scene makers and artistic creators, the cultural connections and community actions … at street level and home and universities and bars where things were really happening. Culture and history as something lived and human and independent.

I was particularly interested in the artist Clem Weight, who I had never heard of. There’s a beautiful portrait of her by Jon Lewis and examples of her work in the form of silk-screened calendars.

There’s all kinds of stuff and knowledge to be gleaned from merely perusing a copy of Fugitive Paper #5. I recommend you have a good browse through yourself.

Without buying a jot, I still felt like I was somehow helping something important not get lost, if only in the most human and transient of ways. Thank you, Nicholas Pounder. The past is alive here…

M

To subscribe to Fugitive Paper you have to message Nicholas Pounder on Facebook and he will put you on his list for email or messenger delivery. It seems to be the only way you can make a start. Nicholas apologised for any inconvenience regards the initial marketing and delivery contact point when I enquired: “I’m not terribly good at this sort of thing.”

The crickets are ticking and croaking to tell us the night is beginning. It’s a reliably pulsing sound, a reminder of childhood in some way that I can’t quite put a finger on.

Then I think of the sound of heading home, or having to head home after a day’s play. The late air full of summer or winter, the world ultra alive in a last flourish of breath, and breathing it in, somehow being at one with it, before the night finally changes things.

Sitting here exhausted now before tomorrow even begins, the sixth Addi Road Writers’ Festival. Year 2026. Ted my sound guy has been struggling with an echo in the middle of the hall that only T-Rex would want as reverb on their handclaps in 1973. It’s not just bad, it’s another sonic world.

Gavin, the event’s ‘scribe’, is taping down all his leads and his HDMI cable. Tomorrow Gavin will document each every live, drawing people and what they say at literal light speed till it’s complete and shining from a projector on to a white brick wall.

He and Ted get into a cable rave about RCAs and AC lines and cables that are the colour yellow and the nature of modern convenience. The excitement is palpable, another language.

My son Atticus holds fort at the mixing desk, sucking back on a chocolate milkshake while Ted seems to go fishing with the microphones, waving them around front of stage while Atticus keeps an eye on the desk for any movement in the lights.

I sit on my arse, useless as the crickets, watching, eavesdropping, answering emails and texts, sending out a few calls into the world while I write down the last energies of each and all as they work to secure a few things before tomorrow’s early and hectic start.

The week has been kinda scrambled and the month more than busy. Organising an event like Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 I definitely ask myself, why I do these things?

Then I think of the sound of heading home, or having to head home after a day’s play. The late air full of summer or winter, the world ultra-alive in a last flourish of breath, and breathing it in, somehow being at one with it, before the night finally changes things.

Sitting here exhausted now before tomorrow even begins, the sixth Addi Road Writers’ Festival. Year 2026. Ted my sound guy has been struggling with an echo in the middle of the hall that only T-Rex would want as reverb on their handclaps in 1973. It’s not just bad, it’s another sonic world.

Gavin, the event’s ‘scribe’, is taping down all his leads and his HDMI cable. Tomorrow Gavin will document each every live, drawing people and what they say at literal light speed till it’s complete and shining from a projector on to a white brick wall.

He and Ted get into a cable rave about RCAs and AC lines and cables that are the colour yellow and the nature of modern convenience. The excitement is palpable, another language.

My son Atticus holds fort at the mixing desk, sucking back on a chocolate milkshake while Ted seems to go fishing with the microphones, waving them around front of stage while Atticus keeps an eye on the desk for any movement in the lights.

I sit on my arse, useless as the crickets … watching, eavesdropping, answering emails and texts, sending out a few calls into the world while I write down the last energies of each and all as they work to secure a few things before tomorrow’s early and hectic start.

The week has been kinda scrambled and the month more than busy. Organising an event like Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 I definitely ask myself, why I do these things?

Then I think of all the friends I have made and the inspirational moments of the past at the other festivals. The volunteers who work so hard to support it. And the staff at Addi Road that I count as close. The childhood thing, really, of a gang and what a gang is, all the oaths of loyalty and the rituals that get bred into you through the familiarity of the days as they pass.

Here I am again on another night, considerably beyond that childhood rush home before the street lights come on and you get into trouble for being late, though often you’d be running to the last as the lights switched on with your every footstep and the crickets sang in the moon, world humming.

It’s a strange kind of peace this total feeling. Everything outside and inside, all of yesterday and today flowing into some banal moment in a hall where the lights are harsh and the floor boards scuffed, old chairs, pallets of food, equipment spilling from crates and boxes, my son and two half-new friends from these last few years all quietly a work together inbetween a few jokes and obscure jots of conversation.

I’m here at the still point of the turning world. A good day ahead, that’s how it feels.