Category: Featured
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Honey, I’m home! (reconnecting with myself)
It’s been almost two years since I last wrote a column, and loads of cool and some difficult stuff has happened. I’m excited to be writing again and to share how I’m living as a heartful and hopeful human. Last year I came to realise that despite all of the work I’d been doing to…
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A love letter to inner-west Melbourne
This will be my final column as a full-time resident of the inner west. I’m moving further out west, beyond the fringes of Melbourne, to be nearer where my kids go to school and have their extra-curricular activities. The driving back and forth was fine and manageable, but with my eldest starting high school this…
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Ozzy the rescuing rescue dog
Reading the profile of Ozzy the Australian Bulldog on the Pet Rescue website in March 2018 felt like someone had described me, but pretended I was a dog: “Ozzy likes getting out for walks, but no longer than 10-15 minutes or he will lie on the ground like a big lump and refuse to move.…
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The People’s Choice!
Last month I submitted and read a fiction piece of writing in the Williamstown Literary Festival’s ‘People’s Choice’ awards, and was really chuffed to be voted as the winner!
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On Tuesdays, we Chinwag
This was to be my year for pushing hard against the social anxiety that at times cripples me, or at the least just makes me feel uncomfortable and awkward and seem that way to people. HAHA!
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Gun it coming off of the line, corona
What a batshit crazy year 2020 is turning out to be, hey? Enormous bushfires shut down huge swathes of the country and crippled communities and the tourism industry. And then something I hope was named after a type of beer and an old Toyota reminded us of the actual meaning of ‘going viral’, shut down…
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Looking forward, looking back. I’ve come a long way down the track
Five years is a brilliant achievement for a printed publication, these days. Let alone one that is community-focused and produced largely by volunteers. FIVE. YEARS! Let’s all pause for a moment (or five) to acknowledge that in a period of time when printed newspapers are thinning in both quantity and genuinely-local content, The Westsider is…
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Good riddance?
1999 Green Day’s Time of Your Life was released a year or two before I finished high school, so naturally it was played a few million times by my year level as we approached our fork stuck in the road. Our adolescence coincided with the years of Seinfeld, the show about nothing and everything at the same…
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A brief history of my former life as an occasionally-but-very drunk dickhead
The day I write this piece marks four years since I last had an alcoholic drink. Alcohol of any kind – I don’t even use rum when I make rum balls. Four years and no drinking. I needed to become a non-drinker, and I did. It was embarrassingly easy for me to stop, because I…
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Like father, like son? No. Not at all.
27 March this year was the last ‘coming-of-age’ milestone of my father’s suicide. He took his own life twenty-one years ago, in 1998. Ordinarily I’m overcome with a sense of dread in the weeks before this annual milestone, but this year, I wasn’t.