Skip to main content

'Eureka! So, I wrote this thing...'

I wrote this piece about Eureka and it was printed in the Ballarat Courier. There it was: an Opinion piece!  A little tweet from Ballarat flagged my publication, fluttering past me that morning. A tweet on a stick.


Ballarat Courier, p.17. 5th December 2014

My stitching together of a tale across time. A flag, a symbol; staking a claim, owning a story. I have no hard copy of this paper, but I'm glad it's now also online.

So, here are the flowers I bought myself to celebrate.




To see another version of my piece, see also Eureka's Children newsletter from April 2015



Postscipt: On that note of flagging one's own achievements, I loved Sarah Burnside's piece in Overland, about the lexicon of pitching and writing. She writes of how we sell ourselves and our stories, exploring the 'So, I wrote this thing' line of self promotion. See above!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Waiting

Morning walk.  I wake too late to do my nature writing workshop so I decide to get out into nature instead! Head off at about 7 am, sustained on half a cup of hot water with lemon, a banana and a snack KitKat. Make it to the backbeach in time to see the gold coming up from behind the sand dunes, flowering light from the lighthouse. Tiny black and white wren on the rocks, the Plover family just foraging. A heavy gull takes off when I approach. It flies past me, sits and waits, and flies back as it senses I’m no danger. I take photos and slow-mo videos. I can hardly make out the flying birds as they rise into the dark clouds.  I keep stopping to look at things. At one point I lie with my back in the sand on the edge of the dunes. All around the waves continue coming in and the birds call. What would I do without this?  At the lighthouse, Galahs wheel and screech, their pink bellies exposed as they fly above me. A couple fall behind, screeching ‘wait for me, wait f...

Not smiling, wanking

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the station platform, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. Outside; offside: the limits to friendships. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation.  The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. We weren’t allowed to welcome them in. One day, my m...

Coming of Age

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked, my brother and I and the neighbourhood boys. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the train station platform across the road, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation.  The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. One day, my mum greeted me at...