If you want to enjoy a pure and simple comedy, this is it for you.
Solid Foundations
The Peruvian woman wasn’t sure where to get the mud we needed, but she set off up the dirt road, her young son in his red Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt and me, a volunteer with ProPeru, in tow.
Mud is one of the elements the community must have to successfully build clean-burning stoves. Our [...]
International Waters: Singapore to Bintan Island
Bintan Island is by no means the most interesting or exotic of Southeast Asia’s destinations, but it does offer a lot of appeal for city-weary Singapore residents in need of a quick fix of sea and sand. We make up most of the island’s visitors, and to get there we [...]
Local Knowledge
Our fire siren can sound at any time and it gets all the dogs in the village barking.
If you can hear the siren down in Upper Ferntree Gully as well then it may be serious.
The stretch of Burwood Highway down out of the Yarra Ranges is called [...]
Mongrel
I used to be
brown, with a tinge of yellow
and could never quite colour in the right shade of my skin,
skin dusted with hair that was
brown and black on my head,
with a tongue claimed by two civilisations,
though my heart could call neither its own.
Roots snarled over questions of origin, and what,
exactly, I was.
‘混血儿’ 1
is what a bus [...]
Elegy to the Ingratitudes
She roosts at home, braless, sagging,
picking at nails yellowed with tumeric
and caws at me to learn our native tongue.
Her language, rather,
one that has no word for thank you.
A language living in the nose,
one that crinkles up in disgust
at the Chinese boys I sometimes bring home
to help fix her faulty stove.
This apathatic [...]
