On Monday, 11 December 2023, my twenty-one-year-old son and I set off in his van on a 10-day, 4600-kilometre dad-and-son road trip from Sydney to Margaret River. We had planned the trip for over six months to spend Xmas/New Year with our WA family. And yet, I only had a vague idea of our route.
Episode 98 (1 September 2024): The local dog club, where I volunteered as a trainer for twenty years, ran season-ending Fun Days with events like Fancy Dress, Agility Slalom, Waggliest Tail, and other novelty races that changed from year to year. One of my favourites was the Sack Race, where my dear old dog and I always placed third.
If you thought about it, the process for selecting the first matter transference test pilot was archaic, although Mae considered it a lucky omen when she drew the Blue 15 raffle ticket. Blue, not pink, was her favourite colour as a girl, and at 15, Mae had decided she wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up.
Episode 97 (14 August 2024): Excuse me, humanity, please pay attention. I have an urgent message. "What? Not in the middle of my reality TV show!" I'm sorry. I'll be brief. But first, a little background. My message concerns the fate of a pale blue dot in the inky expanse of the universe. Beyond its fragile borders is vast nothingness.
Writers often comment on the difficulty of naming characters. But I didn't have that problem with one of my earliest stories, which featured four children, sibling pairs, John and Wendy and Jack and Jane. Not very imaginative, I know, but I was ten when I wrote Sand Island, inspired by Enid Blyton.
I arrive late for Josh's athletics carnival. His mum and I attend school events on alternate years. "Tell Josh I'll be there," I'd said when she called to remind me about it. "Don't let him down again, please," she'd replied. The last event in Josh's age group, the 1500 metres, is about to start.
In April 2024, Danielle Baldock from the Twitter/X #WritingCommunity reprised the #30Words30Days microfiction challenge she'd run with Sumitra in April 2023. Danielle posted a daily prompt word to inspire us to write and share our 30-word stories. It was so much fun that we were all keen to do it again in June!
I'm a lone-wolf superhero. Heck, I'm not called Solo Shield for nothing! So, I wasn't keen when Long Vision suggested we buddy up as a dynamic duo. "I don't know, Viz," I replied. "Neither of us wants to play Robin to Batman." "It won't be like the comics, Solo," he asserted. "We'll be equals."
I wrote a post in April 2024 about spending 62 minutes in a float tank on my 62nd birthday in March. In addition to Tall And True, I have an eponymous writer profile and blog site, RobertFairhead.com, where I cross-share posts. This website has an AI page builder, so I thought I'd test it with an AI blog post.
This anthology, drawn from Tall And True and other sources, features 70 examples of my microfiction. Some are Hemingway-esque six-word stories, others one to a few sentences, and there are longer pieces, like the 460-word Her. I hope readers enjoy Tall And True Microfiction as much as I enjoyed creating it.
In May 2023, I joined a local group campaigning for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. We had high hopes. But as the Referendum result proved, in Australia, while some things change, some stay the same. And voters rejected the proposal to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution.
In 2019, approaching the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found a timely book in a secondhand bookshop: The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 by Frederick Taylor. The book inspired me to write about my contrasting visits to Berlin as a backpacker in 1987 and 1995.
Two disclosures. Firstly, I've known Ashley Kalagian Blunt for several years, from her work at Writing NSW and conversations on social media about our writing projects. Secondly, I am not a big reader of crime fiction. But I know it's a popular genre, and after binge-reading Dark Mode, I can see why.
Over the summer holidays, I caught an ABC Science Show podcast, The Year in Tech. Science reporter, Ariel Bogle, discussed with her editor, Jonathan Webb, tech stories which had caught her eye in 2017. She opened with an audio clip from the Ex Machina movie that instantly spiked my interest.
The writer John Banville observed, "Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don't think we remember the past, we imagine it." I have vivid memories of my early childhood (I believe they're memories, not imagination), which is why the #5YearOldSelfie challenge on social media caught my eye.
