When I decided, almost two years ago, to pioneer the career move of corporate lawyer to lollipop lady, I became acutely aware that people around me had conflicting opinions as to whether or not I was wasting my potential. As a twentysomething lawyer in a top-tier Australian firm, I worked in an air-conditioned glass tower […]

“You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or four hours have gone by. So when you meet a musician or a writer, you shouldn’t be surprised that they look exactly like ordinary people, because in that part of their lives they are … All the best artists that I’ve known, like Hemingway and Steinbeck and EB White and Thurber, behave very normally in their private lives … They are ordinary people who have a secret compartment somewhere in their brain which they can switch on when they become quite alone and go to work.”

— Roald Dahl, quoted in Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, HarperPress, London, 2010, p.521.

“Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it. The entire efforts of our government as directed through our society are efforts towards making more and more money. This favours the survival of the dullest. This favours those who prefer to live in a notional reality where goods are worth more than time and where things are more important than ideas.

For the artist, any artist, poet, painter, musician, time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the necessary basics of creativity. By dreaming and idleness and then by intense self-discipline does the artist live. The artist cannot perform between 9 and 6, five days a week, or if she sometimes does, she cannot guarantee to do so. Money culture hates that. It must know what it is getting, when it is getting it, and how much it will cost. The most tyrannical of patrons never demanded from their protegées what the market now demands of artists; if you can’t sell your work regularly and quickly, you can either starve or do something else. The time that art needs, which may not be a long time, but which has to be its own time, is anathema to a money culture. Money confuses time with itself. That is part of its unreality.”

— Jeanette Winterson, ‘Imagination and Reality’, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Vintage, London, 1996, pp.138-139.

Geoff Orton and I met because we happened to be sitting next to each other at a Sydney Writers’ Festival session, Singapore Sling, in May 2011. It was the week after I’d quit corporate law to give myself more time to write, and it was encouraging to see that one of the panellists, the writer Shamini Flint, […]

The assets sale for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby film adaptation was held in Matraville on Wednesday. I didn’t have my usual camera with me, so I took these shots with my smartphone while skipping around the warehouse looking at all the curiosities. The beautiful old chair on the left is now part of my growing collection […]

This is the little corner of the world where I spend a lot of time twiddling my thumbs and looking out the window at the bellies of planes. I’ve had this writing studio since Christmas 2010. Prior to that, I had grand dreams of building my own writing hut. It was going to be as […]