Writing

Iris flicks the car’s headlights on, even though it’s not long past midday. There’s no rain yet, but you can feel it in the air, smell it coming. When they’d left the city that morning, they’d driven three hours south in midwinter sunshine, under skies of unbroken blue. Then just out of Cassetown they drove in under a thick dark cloud that filled the whole of the sky to the south, and turned the day dusk-dark. In Cassetown, Geologue Bay, Iris and her extended family — her ex-husband and his wife and their new baby; her son and her best friend’s ...

It’s glorious, the water in the morning, when it’s calm like this, when you can just bob on the surface, like a seal, watching. How well it makes me feel, how calm; how light and how heavy at the same time: like heroin – a little bit like heroin. Octogenarian musician Lena Gaunt lives quietly in the Perth suburbs. An early embracer of electronic music – Music’s Most Modern Musician – she found fame in Jazz-age Sydney as a virtuoso of the theremin and travelled the world before settling down to a life of daily swims…and a decades-old heroin habit. Now, for ...