As a word nerd I can’t believe I’ve only just discovered the term ‘corflute’. It sounds like it belongs in an orchestra – the lovechild of a flute and a cor anglais, reducing us to tears with a Rachmaninov solo. But it’s something much less romantic.

‘Corflute’ is the name given to those big posters with the grinning faces of political candidates, and Melbourne’s suburbs have been plastered with them for months. There’s even been one propped outside my front fence. Lately I’ve been pondering the psychology of the post-election ‘corflautist’ (yes you’re right, I just made that word up).

If your preferred candidate loses their bid for election, should you take your corflute straight down as a concession of defeat? Or should you leave it up as a silent reproach to your wrong-voting neighbours?

There’s a scene in the Elton John movie Rocketman where young Elton gives a perfect performance of a piano piece he’s just heard for the first time. No sheet music, no preparation. It’s a kind of magic.

I’ve always had to depend on my eyes. Learning the piano as a child I had to look at the notes on the page, then at my fingers on the keyboard, then at the notes again, one painstaking bar at a time.

Imagine my amazement when the blind pianist came to visit.

Was it when the German and the Kiwi did an after-dinner haka? Or was it when the Swede and the Brazilian did the lindyhop that I changed my mind?

I was on my first ever group tour, visiting the Indonesian island of Lombok. The thought of travelling with a group of strangers had always filled me with horror. What if I got stuck with people I didn’t like? I was used to travelling solo or with close friends - people like me. But going solo can be tiring and none of my travel buddies were available this winter. So I bit the bullet and signed up for a tour.

If you want to know if the grass really is greener on the other side, why not spend a day in a stranger’s garden?

For a while now I’ve harboured an escape fantasy from my day job. Telling stories for a living can sometimes feel like hollering into head wind. It’s hard to know whether anyone can hear you. Sometimes I’ve dreamt of buying a mowing franchise. I could prune trees and zig-zag through overgrown grass and at the end of the day the results would be right there in front of me – smooth lawns and happy customers. But would the reality match the fantasy? I decided to find out.

When I was an ABC radio presenter the management mantra in vogue at the time was ‘try to use the present tense’. Reporting in the present tense, we were told, makes stories seem fresh and exciting. For example, ‘An artwork was sold for a million dollars’ sounds like yesterday’s news. ‘Artwork sells for a million dollars!’ sounds like it could be happening right now.

I had a running joke with my producer friend Sally. We tried to out-do each other in ‘freshening up’ imaginary stories. ‘Michelangelo paints ceiling and crowd goes wild!’ she’d say. Then it was my turn: ‘Elvis leaves the building and Elvis impersonators rejoice!’

Sally is one of those ‘social glue’ people. Friendship groups form around her. She used to bring her dog Teddy into the office and stern colleagues would melt at the sight of him. When she left the ABC she took the party vibe with her.

A friend texts me a photo of his teenage son that he’s just taken at a beach. They are holidaying in a tropical place, and in the photo the son is lounging on a wooden bench, next to another young man about the same age. Two youths on a surfing holiday, tanned and bare-chested and bare-legged, all fresh muscle and latent energy. You can almost feel the heat coming off them, smell their sweat. They’re smiling at the camera.

I can’t look at the photo for long. Something coils and uncoils in me, a snake shifting in its hiding place, and I have to put down the phone.

The next day the photo re-surfaces in my mind, and now I’m curious. Why did I look away?

As hurricane winds roar through Europe and south-eastern Australia endures a record-breaking drought, more and more individuals are feeling the need to DO SOMETHING NOW about climate change. Some are installing solar panels and low-energy light-globes. Others are forming local groups committed to greening the local neighbourhood. Still others are writing to politicians, demanding a response to this unprecedented environmental threat.

They’re joining a dedicated band of activists who’ve been campaigning on global warming for many years. Back in the late 1980’s, I was one of them

 I’d like to offer my profound apologies.

 I know it’s belated, but - it’s never too late to say you’re sorry, is it?

 My apology is addressed to the humble platitude, that much-maligned category of idiomatic phrase which I have spent a lifetime despising.

Until now, that is - for I have finally discovered the usefulness of platitudes, and am here to champion them.

 One day early in January 2025 two friends and I trailed along the clifftop at Airey’s Inlet, on the Victorian west coast, heading for the surf. When we reached the carpark above Sandy Gully Beach, an ambulance and a couple of police cars stood waiting. A small crowd had gathered at the top of the wooden stairs. From there we could see two paramedics leaning over a man who was lying by the water’s edge. The man wasn’t moving. I stared and stared, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. Was he alive? We couldn’t tell.

I told a stranger standing next to me that my father had drowned at a surf beach sixty years ago. Her eyes widened, then her gaze returned to the man lying below us. I wanted to stay. I wanted to leave. My friends and I left, found another beach for our dip, but the image of the prone figure stayed with me.

Out in the Wimmera everything is enormous. Wheat fields march towards the horizon. The mammoth machines that harvest them are straight out of a Mad Max movie. The sky stretches further than any other sky I’ve seen, and humans are Lilliputian, tottering around under the endless blue.

I discovered the wondrous scale of things in the Wimmera on a recent jaunt to see the silo art up there. Giants with delicate paintbrushes have been striding the landscape, stopping to paint delicate portraits on concrete wheat silos – or that’s how it looked to me.

If I’d consulted a de-cluttering expert this story wouldn’t have had a happy ending. De-clutterers advise us to throw away anything we’re not using all the time, and any objects that make us feel bad. My old Ipod ticked both boxes.

It had been a birthday present from an ex, about a decade ago. Not only had he given me the Ipod, he’d loaded it with a vast sound library; soul, pop, jazz, folk, country, reggae, hip-hop and classical music. Tedious tram rides into work were transformed by this glorious gift.

In the house next door to mine lives a dog called Celia. When Celia’s owners go out and leave her alone in the garden she howls. The sound is almost operatic, a high fluting song of desolation. I work from home so there is no escaping the soundtrack to Celia’s loneliness.

Recently I bought a bag of doggie treats and whenever it gets too loud I lean over the fence and drop her a few lumps of processed meat. She goes quiet then. For a while, anyway.

Inside the tram it smelt like wet sheep. The floor was smeared with a cocktail of Coke, coffee and winter rain. We’d all had enough and were heading home. No one looked more debilitated by the working day than the man sitting opposite me. His face was a picture of misery. I looked away then looked back again. The shape of the face, the colour of the eyes. Something familiar from a time when all faces were new and therefore unlike any others. Those faces can stick in your memory for decades.

The word shy has a number of different meanings, none of which are flattering. To ‘shy away from’ something implies avoidance. ‘To shy’ can also mean to move suddenly in fright. To ‘be shy of’ something can mean to come up short, or be insufficient. And to be a shy person in our extrovert-worshipping age can be seen as being inadequate for the task of relentlessly positive self-presentation.

 To the girl standing right in front of me at the Byron Bay Blues Festival recently: Because you have only lived in that creamy clear skin for two decades I don’t expect you to know that it was not polite of you and your friend to push your way through the crowd of people who had been standing on their tired mud-caked feet for over an hour in order to be close to the front when Paul Simon sauntered on stage.

Stepsisters often get a bad rap. Think of poor Cinderella, dealing with not one but two of them, both ugly, selfish and vain. Think of poor Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), whose stepsister Claire Clairmont was rumoured to have had an affair with Shelley’s famous husband, Percy the poet. Just a couple of months ago US gossip magazine Newsweek featured a breathless tale of a poor woman whose dream wedding venue was ‘stolen’ by her wicked stepsister. But I’m here to tell a different tale about these much-maligned siblings.

How do you use language to illuminate the darkest moments in a life? How do you recount the desolation of grief without further wounding yourself - or your readers? Can writing tether you to a place of safety when you are engulfed by vulnerability? These are questions Justy Phillips and Sian Prior were forced to contemplate whilst writing their recently-published memoirs.

Early in May this year, just before Mother’s Day, I flew to Vietnam for the first time. It was a planned escape. I wanted to avoid being ambushed by media images of motherhood - the breakfasts in bed, the bunches of flowers, the adoring children. In Vietnam, mothers are celebrated in August, not May, so my first day in Hanoi would be an ordinary Sunday. No danger of being reminded of my involuntary childlessness. Or so I thought.

We’ve all been there. Walking down a dark laneway at night, our senses suddenly hyper-acute, checking for danger. Listening behind us for footsteps breaking into a run. Listening ahead of us for footsteps falling silent. Using our ears because our eyes don’t work so well in the dark.

This has been my experience night after night as I’ve walked home from the local train station. When you’re a theatre critic night work is inevitable. Most of the time I feel lucky to be living only a ten-minute stroll to the train. And yet, night after night, I’ve had to steel myself to enter the long dark alley between the station and the end of my street.

In the main street of a small town in northwest NSW there’s a street sign covered in hieroglyphics. The strange wedge-shaped strokes look like some ancient Sumerian script. ‘Stock Brands of the Liverpool Plains’, the title says. Next to the hieroglyphics is a list of names - ‘Known Early Squatters’ - and all but one are men.

As I wander the deserted town I notice all the names on all the buildings – lawyers offices, proprietary hotels, automotive repair shops – are men’s names. The women are silent and invisible in the public records of this town. Behind the scenes, though, the women have been making themselves heard.