It’s hard to believe that the info-babble spewing from those micro-managerial mouths and their clacking, snapping keyboards is produced by members of the same species as the Bard. I refer you to the catalogue of dogs, found later in the play. The curs and mongrels outnumber the noble hounds, I fear. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 78 I Can't Sleep at Night

...in the age of instant indignation fuelled and amplified by Twitter and other social media sites, artists have to be very careful about their choices, remain au fait with the technology and be adroit at turning on a dime to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous tweeters. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 77 The Silver Frame

...Irish navvies who, in their thousands and tens of thousands built the rail, the roads the tunnels and canals and a lot more of the infrastructure in Britain and farther afield in the Nineteenth Century. Their work rate was prodigious and those who could not keep up  with them could only watch in awe as these mighty workmen bent their backs to the task. More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 19

We are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 per cent — a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you're a juvenile it is worse, it is 50 per cent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.  Stan Grant 2015 IQ2 extempore speechMore

Letters From Quotidia Episode 76 It's Been Taken Away

...the pop images of Mel Ramos and one, in particular, had stuck in my mind- his image of a nude pin-up poised on a giant block of Velveeta processed cheese, raised on one arm, her head turned over her shoulder towards the viewer, her elaborate, coiffed hairstyle proudly on show. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 75 Another Saturday in Limbo

David Van Biena...wrote in fascinating detail about the contradictions at the heart of her life and ministry revealed through her letters to her confessors, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church). They reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 74 Another Mother's Day

For me, the Bali bombings of October 2002 sealed the deal. The attack killed 202 people (including 88 Australians, 38 Indonesians, 23 Britons, and people of more than 20 other nationalities). A further 209 people were injured. By the end of the year I knew that, yes, indeed, the world had changed and that there would be no going back. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 73 A World of Pain

Covers of the song, The Irish Rover, stretch across more than fifty years and, I would imagine, will continue fifty years and more, into the future.More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 18

In my own private pantheon, or it may just be Elysium, it will come as no surprise that it is populated with poets, composers, painters, dramatists, novelists, sculptors, and ordinary people. I include cartoonists in this exalted company- I want to pay tribute to Ron Cobb here; a survivor from the counter-culture of America in the ‘sixties (although, it seems a tautology to use counter-culture and cartoonist in the same sentence). Ron passed away on 21 September 2021. Sadly missed.More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 72 No Surrender

...alien super-beings visiting the nuclear wasteland of planet Earth... resurrect a person. Gaining sentience and, blind at first, the man sings hosannas for the fulfillment of the old Promise. Then, as the scales fall from his eyes, he sees the merciless orbs of the aliens who, having extracted the information they wanted, mow him down with their ray-guns and move on to the next phase of their exploration.More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 71 The Emperor of Ice Cream