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Toowoomba’s Pubs and Publicans – then and now
The delightfully human snippets of people and events that are sprinkled throughout Maurice French and Judy Brewer’s “Bar and Boniface: a compendium of Toowoomba’s Pubs and Publicans 1844-2020” make for delightful reading on their own. I suspect anyone who starts reading will find a personal connection that they didn’t expect. I did.
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Keep Your Hook Baited
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. Ovid There is no plan. Daniel Pink – The Adventures of Johnny Bunko Ounce by ounce, putting it together Small amounts, adding up to make a work of art First of all […]
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Yr Loving Daughter, Katie Hume
In 2005, the Toowoomba Literary Society asked me to give an address to their November meeting. Here it is. I called it “Giving Voice to the Darling Downs letters of Anna Kate Fowler Hume 1866-1871.” Drayton, 18th February 1870 My dearest Alice,Very many thanks for your nice long letter of November 19, which I received […]
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Spring Cleaning on Winter Solstice Day
Possibly because I have neglected doing it for so long, and because I now have some time, today’s job was to tidy up the disgusting piles of old paper which are much-beloved of silverfish, I see. Among them were gnawed copies (what else has been living in these piles of paper, I wonder) of talks […]
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Directing at a (safe) distance: MACBETH IN THE DARK
Some months ago, I watched David Berthold interview the great director Peter Sellars. Among other things, Sellars noted the possible upsides of the pandemic. There’s an upside, I wondered. But Sellars said something which I’ve kept front and centre in my thinking for the past almost 6 months: “The virus is our teacher.” Those five […]
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Talking Theatre in 2009: Only Connect
This is being written over 10 years after several theatre friends based in the UK and the USA Matt Boothman, Travis Bedard, ‘Old Bear’ and yours truly had been chatting for about a week on a site called Utterli – a kind of mini-podcasting application at the time. We’d turned our attention to the theatre’s use […]