Young English bride, Olivia Hennessy falls for the charms of pearling master, Captain Tyndall….
If you smell the plot of a romance novel, your nose is acute. Bodice-ripping queen, Di Morrissey wrote The Tears of the Moon, a girl-and-pearl bonanza based in Broome (WA). She later went on to write an eerie Kimberley quest named the [...]
During WW2, Kylie Tennant, the novelist behind The Battlers, tenanted a hut near Indian Head, northeast of Taree, NSW.
Her bushman husband, Ernie Metcalfe fashioned the writer’s retreat from swamp mahogany slabs. He built it well too, as the retreat still stands, sixty years on.
As a child, Tennant changed her name from Kathless to Kylie as [...]
Sally was dead. Squashed by a truck, the three-year-old dog lay flat as a strap on the Great Eastern Highway, 5kms west of Kalgoorlie, WA. This was September, 1999.
The animal’s pulse was undetectable. The pit bull’s owner, Les Trumper, hoping to hitch to Perth that night, had no choice but to dig a hole and [...]
Minus 5 is both a temperature, and an expression of cool. The novelty vodka bar has set up shop in Sydney’s Circular Quay, occupying the old Aqua Luna site opposite the ferries. With one big difference: the aqua has been frozen into an icescape.
Ice stools. Ice windows. Ice sofas. Even the esoteric shooters come chilled [...]
Phillip Parker King is the less fancied of our explorers for some reason. (Mind you, the same bloke did score a portrait on the 2-quid stamp back in 1963.) Anyway, here’s a fellow who charted the Kimberley coast in 1819, anywhere that Flinders missed, dealing with crocodiles, riptides and shell-shocked Aborigines along the way.
Clues to [...]
Stir one teaspoon of vanilla essence into a cupful of mashed potato, add a pat of butter, sift in a few cups of icing sugar, a tablespoon of cocoa and you may come close to making Mad Murphy’s famous Potato Coconut Roughs.
The recipe’s one of several spud snacks that Val (aka Mad) Murphy offers on [...]
And for those who missed an earlier comment, posted by Allan the Hearse Whisperer, a maven of morbid tourism:
“…I saw the article in the Sydney Morning Herald where you have listed the Langtrees brothel tour in Kalgoorlie as “our only brothel tour.
“Actually as part of the Weird Sydney Ghost and History Tour, we have been [...]
In 1999, while touring Australia on a lecture tour, Mikhail Gorbachev had a free day up his sleeve.
Minders suggested the former head of Russia ought to visit the Blue Mountains, or Bondi Beach or the Opera House. Even Rene Rivkin – a flamboyant stockbroker – offered the Red-Head a run in his opulent cruiser.
Nyet, [...]
This week we’re running two offbeat entries from BYPASS – THE STORY OF A ROAD [Picador2004], the soulful travelogue of Michael McGirr who thought cycling down the Hume Highway made good sense.
One evening, wheeling into Holbrook, the “submarine” town 50kms northeast of Albury, McGirr headed to the pub for tea:
‘The Riverina Hotel in Holbrook… is [...]
MANDARING, WA – Jesus of Nazareth turned water into wine. Charles Yelverton O’Connor made water run uphill.
Necessity, as usual, mothered invention. CY O’Connor had been head-hunted in the late 1800s by WA burghers to bring water to the goldfields of Kalgoorlie. Trouble was, the golden mile was 600 kays inland, with the most reliable water [...]