Early in 1879, the New South Wales Legislative Assembly passed a resolution stating that ‘the health of the people should be the primary consideration of all good Governments, and, to ensure the sound health and vigour of the community … all cities towns and villages should be possessed of parks and pleasure grounds as places …
In May, I was meant to go to Croatia. I was invited to join a group exploring Croatia’s Adriatic coast and islands on a skippered catamaran. Starting and finishing in Agana, just south of the city of Split, we would spend a week sailing from one secluded beach or historic town to another, stopping to …
When coronavirus restrictions were imposed six weeks ago and we began adjusting to life under lockdown, a memory started to tug at my mind. It was the memory of reading about another kind of lockdown, in a children’s story by Laura Ingalls Wilder called The Long Winter. As a child growing up in Australia, I loved …
One of my Christmas presents last year was the book Gossip from the Forest by the Scottish writer Sara Maitland. The book, published in 2012, is billed as an inquiry into ‘the tangled roots of our forests and fairytales’. Like much of Maitland’s work, it’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, which interleaves personal accounts of her …
