In a corner of the sky

Rooftop Bar on the top of Curtin House in Swanston Street has long been on my list of go-to spots for a summer's night of drinks and merry jinks, but it was only this last Sunday that I made it to one of their Rooftop Cinema screenings. Have I been missing out! With a couple of friends and a comfy duffel coat in tow, I caught a moonlit showing of Lost in Translation, a movie just as atmospheric of Tokyo as Rooftop is of Melbourne.

If hope grew on a bush

A sweet rhyme has been flirting with my memory and ringing about my head this week, singing to be shared. They're some words that have always graced the walls of my childhood home at the bottom of a Barbara Hanrahan print and a bit of research has revealed that the author is Christina Rosetti, the nineteenth-century romantic and children's poet.

If hope grew on a bush,

And joy grew on a tree,

What a nosegay for the plucking

There would be!

If hope and joy grow on any bushes, it must be these stems by Melbourne-based artist Kirra Jamison.

Queen Street, Croydon

Queen Street seems to be just springing onto everybody’s lips in Adelaide, making a claim on some local buzz as a spot for breakfast if you’re tired of Hutt Street or Hyde Park, and a location for dreamy Saturday lurking. It's also a bit of an arts hub, home to some of the 2011 SALA venues and hosting a mid-winter street party for the opening of the festival.

Someone else's Melbourne

Here are some bits and pieces that caught my eye whilst walking around and about the Glenferrie Road area. It’s all so wonderfully, redolently Melbourne: the light catching on crumbling Victorian plaster alongside bright and new and shiny architecture, the cables drooping above the tram lines, faded but sunshiny skies, spires and graffiti from the train station.

And that was New York

As a lover of cities, of the pavement and the steel, of the bustling shops, the rushing people, I have been wanting for sometime now to put down in words my experience of that ultimate metropolis, Manhattan.

A Walk in My Melbourne

It’s late afternoon on a Wednesday in August, late winter in Melbourne. I’ve ventured out from my native Carlton North, heading out on foot to cross Nicholson Street, the Carlton-Fitzroy border and a mental barrier between my territory and the unknown. Ostensibly a rare act of exercise (I have on my trackies and runners left over from school hockey trainings

Long hot summer night

Tonight I have discovered a new place to sit. Sleepless in the heat of Melbourne summer, I have been tossing and twisting until now, at 1.35 am, when I can feel — finally! — the breeze of the promised cool change. The sound of overweight raindrops has reached my night-time-alert ears. Anxious to take a breath of this welcome coolness, I have hurried to my window

On Dressing Up and Fitting In

When I was four, my mother dressed me as Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding. Grey tights, grey skivvy, a stocking over my face with currants drawn in permanent marker, and a pudding basin atop my head, the outfit’s crowning glory. No, she wasn’t indulging a deranged whim – it was dress-as-your-favourite-book-character day at kindergarten.

Already, I was different and, even at four, I knew it. All around me swirled tulle tutus and streaks of satin, glittering pinks and purples, cute little button-nosed Goldilocks and Tinkerbells. And here was I, a goddamn pudding. Refusing to submit to the indignity of the stocking, I gazed maliciously at the camera, unwittingly completing the impersonation of that bad-mannered, ill-tempered edible.