‘AS I FEARED, I eventually succumbed to the photograph of Dinu Lipatti above my workbench. In black and white and shades of grey, it does me no good to look at it, no good at all.’ A wounded soul speaks. A damaged man admits his guilt. How did he cause a suicide? Not long after he types the words above, the narrator of my debut novel The Hands of Pianists, out on 4 March, begins a quest to prove that …
Please forgive my flippant heading to this post. But, as I explained in ‘The Age’ on Monday (online) https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/push-to-make-us-eat-outdoors-is-ridiculous-20200915-p55vro.html and yesterday (in print), eating at restaurants outdoors is a terrible idea. Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and Melbourne’s lord mayor Sally Capp are busting to promote it, and in this post I want to add to my ‘Age’ comments. In the 9 media, I failed to mention Melbourne’s fickle weather. When we can have sun in the morning followed by several …
Ross Gittins, whom we all agree should be prime minister, has written another piercing Age column, this time about the federal government’s new university funding. Citing a Griffith University academic’s research, he showed that universities will be expected to do more with less. Overall, he writes, the government will cut funding per student by $1883 annually. And although it will be cheaper to study disciplines such as engineering, maths, and science, which allegedly lead to jobs and a booming economy, …