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L-r: Portrait of Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart at Mozart's place of birth, Salzburg; House in St Gilgen where Nannerl lived after she married; Nannerl's and Michael Hayden's grave at St Peter's Monastery, Salzburg I grew up playing the piano, as did my mother, my uncle and my grandmother. By the time I was eighteen, I was studying full time at the conservatorium of music, performing in recitals, singing in choirs, earning a little money accompanying opera singers, and even harbouring dreams ...

There are the trivial questions in life, and then there are the big questions. What is the meaning of life? Why are we all here? What will I leave to the world when I’m gone? Will there be a moment, however brief, when I will understand it all?

​According to legend, Faust exchanged his soul with the devil, Mephistopheles, so he could have a moment, just one moment, in which he would experience the highest, most amazing pleasure attainable by man. A moment so special, that he would want it ...

So, 2023 draws to a close today. And even though it brought its dose of sad and unwanted events, as every year does, it has been one of the best years I’ve had in recent memory. A whole, entire calendar year without a slump in my mood! I cannot actually ascertain when was the last time this happened. I believe it was a decade ago, although that is questionable.

This was the year in which I was able to tick so many items off my list of ‘things to do� because I cut down my working days to fo...

Y de pronto, el año 2023 llega a su fin. Y aunque trajo su dosis de acontecimientos tristes y no deseados, como sucede cada año, ha sido uno de los mejores años que he tenido en los últimos tiempos. ¡Un año entero sin ningún bajón en mi estado de ánimo! En realidad no puedo determinar cuándo fue la última vez que sucedió esto. Creo que fue hace una década, aunque eso es cuestionable.
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Este fue el año en el que pude tachar tantas cosas de mi lista de “cosas por hacer� porque reduje mis ...

One Saturday over three years ago, I caught the train to the city to do a one-day course on journal and memoir writing. After the course, I met my partner nearby, and we went to watch a documentary followed by an Italian dinner. What we didn’t know was that this would be the last time we would go to the city, the cinema, or a restaurant for several months. The following week Sydney, like many places in the world, went into lock down. I know the exact date of the course (10th March, 2020),...

If you drive past my place, which is on one of the busiest roads in Sydney, you wouldn’t imagine that there are two gateways to the bush within walking distance of that river of traffic. These are the Lane Cove National Park and the Berowra Valley Regional Park, each with intricate networks of bush tracks that open up in all directions. Some head hundreds of kilometres north, to Newcastle, others 30 kilometres south, to the city. Others wind through the creeks, gullies, valleys and heights o...

Today is probably the furthest I have travelled in 11 weeks � a whole 35 minutes away from home. The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought international and even domestic travel to a halt, and I can only dream of my next overseas trip, or I can reminisce about past journeys, such as the Ghan adventure I was fortunate to be able to do with my mother in 2015.

Five years ago, I was at the top end of Australia, embarking on the Ghan expedition, a four-day, three-night train journey from Darwin to ...

"I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist" - Bob Dylan Dylan, Neruda and the Power of Metaphors

In the 1994 Italian movie Il Postino (The Postman), an uneducated village man, Mario Rouppolo, is hired as postman to deliver the mail of Pablo Neruda, a famous Chilean poet who has just arrived on Mario’s tiny island. It’s the early 1950s and Neruda is living in exile in Italy due to his political beliefs, and receives so much mail that Mario has to visit...

In one of my first memories, I am nauseous at the back of a truck, which is precariously descending from the glaziers of La Paz to the tropics of the Yungas on the narrow, winding ‘road of death� in Bolivia. My mother is holding a plastic bag under my chin and I am emptying the contents of my stomach into it, repeatedly, whilst other passengers throw us looks of pity. At the best of times I am a scrawny looking child with forlorn eyes, thin limbs and unusually pale complexion, so our fe...

�"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I � I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost. 

How many times have you found yourself at a fork in the road and no matter how impetuous or carefully considered your decision was, you couldn’t help but wonder (either at the time or further down the track) what course would your life have taken had you chosen the other path?

Some such decisions might be momentous, such as a career change, moving to another coun...