Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Roald Dahl – The Complete Short Stories
(Volume One, 1944-1953; Volume Two, 1954-1988) Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) Welsh born, Norwegian descent, started his writing life by accident. Invalidated out of WWII from the RAF, he was asked by C.S. Forester in Washington to prepare some accounts to publicise the war effort. His robust but sometimes surreal war stories ensued; he then enlarged his métier with droll and often shocking tales of the weird and unexpected. He was no great stylist: his sentences at times stray into the excesses reminiscent of Hemingway, but the ingeniousness of his little plots and the dark corners of life he illuminates…
Continue Reading →Being a Creature
(By Helen Parsons) (Wakefield Press, 2026) The Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell of the Christ in the wilderness. Luke 4:1-8, for example, in the King James version, reads: And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying,…
Continue Reading →The Mushroom Tapes
Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025) Erin Scutter was born in 1974 . Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”. Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not. In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023, Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her house in Leongatha, New…
Continue Reading →The Camp of the Saints
(By Jean Raspail) (1973) [Trigger Warning] Western self-loathing has been increasingly documented, with the focus rarely on shame (the healthy recognition of past cultural excesses and infamies) but more particularly on Guilt and Submission. And white people have had their anti-racism homework set. Despite and perhaps because of this, we’ve seen, in recent decades, an elitist multi-cultural rejection of assimilation, an undocumented invasion of the West, run by an unholy trinity of criminal networks, corrupt NGOs and cynical governments (on the supply side, sending away not-their-best; on the demand side, pursuing a growth mirage and co-opting a furtive voting demographic)….
Continue Reading →The Road
(By Cormac McCarthy, 2006) [It is timely to comment on this book, as we read a report in The Weekend Australian newspaper (24/1/26) that Federal Treasurer, Dr. Jim Chalmers, planned to read it over the summer break. Appropriate, for a man under whose stewardship Australia, economically, feels like it is circling the drain.] This dystopian, post-apocalyptic fable won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, so we were duly warned. Evocative? Perhaps. Repetitious? Certainly. Dully and deliberately so. Fatuous? ‘Okay.’ Day after day – gray, ash, cold. Gather wood, light a fire, drink water, eat from cans, walk down a…
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