Marysville Swimming Pool and the Cloud of Doom
(9 Feb 2009)
“The water in the Marysville swimming pool was deliciously cooling as I swam some laps, watched children playing with inflatable toys and reflected on what a pleasant spot it was. A shadow passed across the sun. Cool change at last! Glancing up, I saw the sun obscured not by clouds but by a massive column of grey and orange smoke billowing upwards a kilometre or more and cascading down over itself as it rolled towards the town from the north.”
Read in full: Marysville Swimming Pool and the Cloud of Doom, originally published in The Big Issue of March 2009
Afloat in the Royal Melbourne Hospital (2018)
“I went to speak to Dave, but instead of words, a bag of chaff opened inside my mouth and blew into the wind. I’d been sick for several days with what I thought was gastro, before collapsing one morning into a strange delirium. An ambulance arrived, only it wasn’t an ambulance. It was a small van with canvas walls and roof and then it became a pencil case. The pencil case ambulance was for people like me who were not sick enough to be taken to hospital in big shiny ambulances with all the trimmings.”
A Turning Point for Rubicon’s Fragmented Forests? (2020)
“Tall trees, white flowering shrubs and green ferny undergrowth are illuminated in the late afternoon sun. The forest is sweet with eucalyptus perfume and birdsong. I am in a remote corner of the Rubicon State Forest near Snobs Creek, on the slopes of Mt Torbreck, Victoria’s second highest mountain, midway between Eildon and Marysville.
My companions are local citizen scientists set on saving this glorious tract of as yet unburned, unlogged forest from the chipping mill. They have come to retrieve infra-red video cameras rigged in trees to record endangered wildlife. Video evidence of Leadbeater’s possums, greater gliders, sooty owls, powerful owls or a broad-toothed rat could win a reprieve or partial reprieve from logging for this bit of forest, and force VicForest’s harvesting juggernaut to move elsewhere.”
More here. (Victorian Forest Alliance news letter, Dec 2020.)
My gutsy great-great-grandmother (2018)
I take pride in my convict forebears who were transported to Hobart in the 1850s, survived slavery, incarceration, and harsh punishments, and once freed, settled down and produced a strong family. This is the story of my great-great-grandmother Mary Wilson and her husband Lewis Williams. It was written for a book produced by the Convict Women’s Research Centre in Hobart, documenting the lives of women who had been punished with imprisonment in the Cascades Female Factory.
