Week 1. Day 7. Heave to

Sunday is traditionally a day of rest and resetting. At the bottom of the page, there will still be a prompt but today is all about rest. Today we celebrate the power of the circuit-breaker. I was twenty the first time I discovered the power of a circuit breaker. I’d...

Week 1. Day 6. Longing

Longing is at the heart of art. It drives story and it drives storymakers. Longing is such a beautiful word. It feels richer, deeper, than desire. Stronger than wanting. Like many English words, it comes from a mashup of Saxon and Germanic words – one, from the old...

Week 1. Day 5. Feel the earth

When I was twenty and worked for a long, hard season as a deckhand on a trawler in the Timor Sea, I became used to a constantly shifting surface. When we docked in Darwin for repairs, after weeks at sea, I stepped onto land and felt my legs buckle beneath me. I’d...

Week 1. Day 4. The music of language

In my second to last year of high school, my English teacher introduced me to the power ofreading poetry aloud. She began with Hopkins, pacing up and down the classroom, her voicerising and falling. Rather than asking us to study the poems, she invited us to enter...

Week 1. Day 3. Forget the audience

I was ten, the first time I sailed a dinghy. The boat was a sabot, and the coach at the sailingclub drew three lipstick lines on the gunwale of the boat: reach, run, work. I spent summerssailing for several years, and then returned to it in my adult life, sailing...

Week 1. Day 2. The sound of my heartbeat

Quite a few years ago I was asked to deliver the address for the NSW Premier’s LiteraryAwards at a lavish dinner in one of my favourite spaces in Sydney, the Mitchell ReadingRoom. When I arrived at the dinner, I found that I was seated at a table full of people...