Captain's Log.

Do 'smells' affect you as much as me? 'Smells' go straight to memory, My father was a sailor with the Australian NAVY. He'd often go away for months at a time. I could tell when he was set to leave because he'd switch after shaving and then press his uniform with starch the night before. I rarely saw him leave but the starch and aftershave left good reminders of his presence. On returning to Australia, he often brought back gifts from the ports he'd visited. Singapore was a regular trading post. There was always another quirky-shaped bottle of after shave brought back as well as gifts for mum and the kids. Our family often enjoyed the best of what the Orient offered and what the crew of a naval ship were allowed to bring back. Sydney Harbour was his home port back then. The city wasn't unusually smelly to me. That's not strange because I was a kid from the area. Nothing stood out... not to my nose, not until the ship had arrived. That...

Brisbane: Research and Reunion Helen turned 50 and a surprise birthday was planned for her in Brisbane. Thanks to her husband's deviousness, he thought to invite all my sister's close friends and family to unite for a secret night of celebration and frivolity. They were to come from everywhere around the state of Queensland. In my case, from the other side of the country. How could I not make the trip? I hadn't seen her in five years! A plan was made. Whistle stop touring from the opposite end of an Aussie continent isn't easy. What does one do when arriving from a distance? There's a long haul flight that changes everything - considering whether to stay just for the party or hang around longer and try to make a holiday out of it. Could I afford the time for one? If so, prioritize what, who, where and when to visit when there? I decided my trip would be broken down to five main elements and pursued with vigor once I got there: Birthday party Vi...

Have you got problems with your G2? Me too...  I swear, this pool cleaner will be the end of me. I spend hours studying it's movements and still can't figure out why it keeps stalling!  Don't get me wrong, I'm totally amazed at it's design just the same. I pay respects to those engineers who've looked at its buoyancy, surface friction, suction, hose flexibility/curves, etc, and measured it so everything is just right. Let's face it. Any pool cleaner is a marvelous work of physics. There's a delicate balance of forces to overcome, to create, to propel the thing forward and to keep it bouncing around all the surfaces for up to eight hours a day. Picking up debris so a pool can look sparkling all the time is a real challenge.  Okay, so that's the sucky part over. Whilst I respect the science behind the G2 (and all other cleaners), I know I shouldn't need to know why it works, just that it works. But I have to figure out th...

If you recognize more than one of those three words then you were once probably knee-deep in the 70's revolution - a mix of afro-hairstyles, flared pants and solid-gold dancers. That's how it was as I felt as though I revisited the 70's this past week, strolling through the suburb of Cooloongup just south of Perth. Australian seventies homes are distinct. It doesn't matter how subsequent owners have tried to mask their home's past by rendering their walls and painting them white. Changing the texture and the colour doesn't hide what a 70's home is. Back in the day, it was all about brown. Brown wallpaper, brown bed covers and brown tiles moved throughout kitchens and bathrooms. Chunky brown brick, arch frontages and textured amber coloured glass windows featured in almost every one of these 70s homes. It was Australia's way of bringing a bit of the Mediterranean Downunder during the era of disco. Timber, brick and mission brown...

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  1979: Space Doom or Excitement?  If you remember this map and those three red orbit lines published for newspapers in 1979, you'll also remember that Skylab's fall back to Earth was both exciting and dangerous for Earth's citizens.  Would it crash on a populated area or plop harmlessly into an open sea?  Did you know that money was offered for pieces of the wreckage? As a small boy living in Logan City, Brisbane, I wasn't anxious but excited. I wanted it to crash into my backyard! They said it could fall anywhere. My home was anywhere . Like other parts of Australia (and World), Brisbane was in the possible crash zone. I ignored NASA's statements that it'd most likely fall into the Indian Ocean. One of Skylab's final orbits tracked over my house. To me, that was the drop point, not some boring ocean! It'd fall somewhere over Woodridge perhaps, and my parents and I would go and pick it up in the morning. Scientists...

From schoolyard bullying to mass killings, the live-stream feature on social-media applications has been abused.  [Un]Social media live-streaming was a step in the wrong direction. Since it's inception, the Internet has rushed into our lives, consumers constantly mesmerised by shiny new gadgets, offers, applications and online facilities believing all of it leads to gold. Gold is simply a lure to opportunity . There's no reward found in live-streaming. It says more about the lure to find one and those lured by what it promises or seems to promise them. What social benefit does a live-stream give a citizen, any citizen? Social media companies certainly know what benefits them. They get to keep/gain members but what does it do for you and I? Deranged individuals are attracted to it too. They are out there  being lured to their kind of gold . Social media doesn't discriminate who logs on or how it's used. If someone wants to strap a Go-Pro ...

Barbie turns 60 but this is NOT a story on the famous doll. It's about human relationships and how NEWS.COM.AU views this toy story. It's easy to overlook the obvious for something shiny, right? Barbie Doll ages 6 decades and viewers click on the link , ready to settle back to see a set of pictures of grey hair, droopy eyes and crêpe-paper neck.   Put that shiny down. Take a look at the break down of this page's web address at the top of the screen-photo. It starts with the standard NEWS.COM leader and then it adds it's sub-categories to place it where this story goes. (click on the pic to enlarge) ../lifestyle/relationships/dating/<barbie story> Every site organises it's posts and pages in the most logical way to help its visitors find articles easily and quickly. That's the life of modern websites. It's how all successful sites work! Good site managers know their readers well because they are feed statistics about them everyday. T...

Logan City's Dark Fiction Writer Speaks My ol' mate Steven Knights and I used to knock about the streets of Logan very late at night. We'd get on our push-bikes and wreak havoc until sunrise. We thought we were tough but it was the eighties. Toughness wasn't measured by drug and knife usage. Staying out late playing Galaga or Space Invaders at the BP servo without our parents permission was our only real crime. Things have changed since my days in Logan. I hear there's a steady stream of the city's citizens frequently visiting the hospital in Meadowbrook. Some are genuinely ill, while others get a visit by doctors AND police. What happened to my little town? Logan City was always a low-socioeconomic area, even right back to its Albert Shire time... but it was safe, young yet growing at a fairly substantial rate. Steven Knights, Simon Jones and myself were never trouble, just enthusiastic teens. After I got my driver's licence and a small ...

More than once I've been accused of being a 'Pincher.' Like a bloody common criminal, I felt. I stole the wind? How does that work?  Wind pinching is a sailing term. There is no robbery, no real crime afoot. It just means I'm sailing a yacht way too close to the breeze. One degree more into it and the boat would stall. Stalling is not ideal. A sailing boat relies on the wind for forward movement so its captain can control it's behaviour through the water. It's called navigating. A stalled boat is uncontrollable, vulnerable, unnavigatible. It's better to turn away from the wind to maintain power and control of the boat. Craig got me into sailing years ago. I took to it right away. The first thing he noticed was my ability to read the wind and find the highest windward angle for his boat. I remember that day well. We took his Hartley 16 out onto Moreton Bay and headed out to Peel Island on a single tack. That one 'tack' thing ...

Chances are, Peter Elvison means nothing to you. He's nobody because the Internet is a large place. It's impossible to know everyone at once, living or dead. But there are some out there who'll do an Internet search in the not-to-distant future and type in the words Peter Elvison - to find out more about who the Mandurah man was. Perhaps you didn't know he was sick, he'd passed without anyone telling you or maybe you're sad you didn't make it to his funeral.  Perhaps you did attend but look for answers to questions you're unable to ask Peter. Things go like that. Life passes us by too fast. We miss stuff and feel annoyed. And in that vain, I'm providing my own memorial here on the Internet. It probably won't answer all your questions or alleviate every hurt but perhaps the mark I leave on this blog will give you some kind of peace.    Peter was my close friend. He died last week and we celebrated his life yesterday. (...

Every gardener in each state of Australia adopts a common plant for their home gardens, something that thrives with little attention or effort. Brisbane's Signature Tree 2 'Poinciana' Brisbane's Signature Tree 1 'Jacaranda' In my old state of Queensland, Poinciana, Jacaranda trees (see above) and Bougainvillea dot the suburbs. That's okay for Queensland and the east coast of Australia  but what about the other states? What about one I moved to recently? Much of Western Australia is on a similar latitude (at least Brisbane / Perth are) and I expected to see similar vegetation when I moved across. This was not the case.  In Western Australia (Perth to Mandurah) there's a different plant duo that dominates yards, car parks, commercial precincts and such. It's Rosemary and Lavender ! I suspect it comes down to soil. The west doesn't have any! Much of the west coast (metro areas) is covered in sand. There's no nutritiona...

Sometimes I just have to laugh at irony's effect on human life. There's nothing else left to do but smile. Golden Bay Western Australia is a picture postcard place. It's a stretch of around 15kms of sapphire blue ocean meeting rolling dunes. It's natural and untouched. No one in Golden Bay wants to see the dunes flattened by a new developer's plans to put a couple of thousand houses on it. Once that happens, the postcard look will be gone. The irony is that most of the placards placed around the Golden Bay area are on properties built in Golden Bay 20-40 years ago. These homes were taking bites out of the dunes long before someone got offended by it. Animals are today's bargaining item. Mass destruction means mass execution - a matter that leans on greater losses over shorter times. Forget that animals were lost when their homes, roads, highways, power, sewage went in. Death and destruction is totally different now. Irony continues as t...

Just looking for an address in Raby Bay, Cleveland for which to focus my next murder story. And I think I've found one! It needed to be on the water - a canal estate. It had to have good water access to Moreton Bay. It needed a berth large enough in which to moor one motherstuffin' sized catamaran. Now I need to write me a hot lady skipper to captain this yacht. She needs to be a doctor and has the credentials to perform surgery on the boat. She'll be a stunning woman, a fertility specialist with an exemplary record of  turning childless couples into parents... but she also has a dark secret. That's all for now. Stay tuned - M

Deaths at music festivals are on the increase. It's sad but this week another innocent teen died at the hands of an accidental overdose. It's occurred three times in the last month. Now's there's a debate about testing the drugs distributed at musical festivals. If you read the tweets and listen to the traditional media on this topic, it'll have us believing the general consensus is that pill testing should take place at every musical festival - to find out what's exactly inside the concoctions that are illegally dispensed to young Aussies before they swallow and then become victims. What has happened to this world? Why are we at the point of debating of testing pills? When I was younger, I was taught not to put foreign things into my body. Don't do it. The message was clear. The extension to that was 'Don't accept anything from strangers.' It was so simple. DON'T DO IT. Each of us are responsible for OUR own mistakes, not s...

Moreton Bay brings many sights and sounds to the eyes and ears of a sailor. During my time on the olive green liquid in the middle bay I saw turtles, dugong, dolphins and such on a regular basis. I have fond memories of everything I did on the water but the one thing that has stayed with me is a sound - the sound of dry, lonely wind wailing through a she-oak tree. She-oaks in Sandgate. They line the coast everywhere. In a light wind they softly pine. At night they whimper from the darkness. When you're alone and anchored near an island covered with them, they whisper their despair openly and endlessley. Only the sounds of cold water lapping on the hull accompany their tears, your tears, my tears. Setting sail out of Manly for the first time was scary. I'd never sailed before. I raised the sail and air quickly filled it, tipping the boat, making the water whoosh around one side of the hull. It lurched forward, leaning further and I thought the boat would tip over....