The Kate Kelly Song Cycle
The Kate Kelly Song Cycle, a chamber opera and musical tribute to bushranger Ned Kelly’s sister Kate, by Forbes-based writer Merrill Findlay and New Zealand composer Ross Carey, will be premiered on Sunday 4 September, 2011, as the headline act for the inaugural Kalari-Lachlan River Arts Festival and opening event to the NSW State Landcare & Catchment Management Forum. More >>
13 June 2011: Sian Prior talks about the River Arts Festival and premiere of The Kate Kelly Song Cycle with Jon Faine, 774 ABC Melbourne. Listen here >>
Please note: as of June 2011 the Kalari-Lachlan River Arts Festival has its own web site @ www.riverartsfestival.org.au >>
Kate Kelly on the Lachlan, c.1885-1898
NEW! A paper on Kate Kelly’s life and times in and around Forbes presented by Merrill at The Land: Past, Present, Future symposium, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, 5-6 May 2011. More >>
Themes linking Kate Kelly’s time with our own
Kate Kelly was a country girl. She was born into a family of rural ‘battlers’ for whom male violence and delinquency were ‘normal’, and at a time when ‘the bush’ was much more culturally diverse than is generally remembered today. She also lived through an era of great conflict in rural Australia… More >>
Republic of Women: a novel
The phone rings, someone pushes the security buzzer and Daphne Downstairs pops in the back door. At the very same moment, Marie hits her thumb with the hammer. Goddamn, she says and sits on a fruit crate. The phone’s still ringing, the buzzer’s still buzzing and now her thumb is throbbing. She sucks it then leans out the window. Look, I don’t believe in god and I’m really busy, she tells the two Jehovah’s Witnesses at the security door below. More >> And/or read the reviews >>
Understanding place through narrative
No continent can be invaded, no massacre committed, no abuse perpetrated, no people subjugated, vilified or discriminated against, no land degraded, no wetlands drained, no climate changed, no species made extinct and no creeks or rivers despoiled – unless stories make it so. The reverse is also true … More >>
Romancing the grindstone on Gunningbland Creek
The days are lengthening, crops are ripening, and the air is sweet with Spring as I write. For the first time in years of drought there are pools of muddy water in Gunningbland Creek, the ephemeral stream that meanders across our farm towards its river, the Lachlan, in south-eastern Australia; and a brood of grey teal ducklings is dabbling in the sparse rushes and nardoo, a native aquatic fern, now miraculously regenerating after the recent rain. More >>
Beyond Australia’s Great Divides: from Terra Incognita to Cognita
Australia is divided east from west, the coast from the rest, by a cordillera of low mountains, uplands and dissected plateaus stretching from Cape York Peninsula in Queensland’s far north to the island state of Tasmania in the Great Southern Ocean. On one side of this watershed is the densely populated Pacific seaboard, on the other the sparsely populated inland. The partition is such that the twain need never meet: indeed, the coastal plain and the remainder of the continent might as well be completely different countries. More >>
Eddie Mabo Comes Home
It’s hot on the rim of this extinct volcano at the far northern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Bonita Mabo has been waiting in the shade of a battered fibro shed all morning. A small crowd has gathered around her: children, grandchildren, siblings, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, members of the Meriam Council of Elders, young warriors from her late husband’s Piadram clan, a documentary film crew, plus this writer from Melbourne. And there it is, the light aircraft descending from the sky to bring the exhumed remains of Edward Koiki Mabo home to Mer, or Murray Island. More >>
The timeless bond between birds and people
As the days grow shorter in the far-off waters of the North Pacific, hundreds of thousands of hungry, dun-coloured seabirds, millions even, begin their long annual flight south to Big Dog Island from their Arctic feeding grounds to mate, lay their eggs and rear their young, the next generation of short-tailed shearwaters, or mutton birds. More >>
Balochistan, the invisible war
Even my Pakistani friends warned me about Balochistan, and not without reason. In the days immediately before I was to catch the train to Quetta, the provincial capital near Pakistan’s borders with Afghanistan and Iran, ‘terrorists’ detonated a bomb in a shopping plaza in the city’s military cantonment and fired rockets at two of the regular express trains below the Bolan Pass. More >>
Eritrea, just a question of time
In a stone room dug into the side of a narrow rocky gorge we bent towards a tiny transistor radio. It was news time and we were listening to the Voice of the Masses, the frequency of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, transmitting from deep within Eritrea’s “liberated zone”. More >>
Last updated 6 June, 2011.
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