Featured Writing on Tall And True

I set off in my son's old HiAce van on a road trip to Uluṟu with my 14-year-old dog, Jet, in September 2025. We spent six days at Uluṟu's Ayers Rock Campground, Jet resting while I walked and rode a bike at Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa. Neither of us was keen on the long drive home in the van.

I read the news today. Oh boy, it's March 30th! You say it's your birthday. It's my birthday, too. How old? Well, when I was younger, so much younger than today, I sang along to the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four" (trying not to sing out of key). But now I am sixty-four. And I need a little help from my friends.

Jez closed her eyes, took a deep breath, savouring the hot, dry air of the sauna in her nostrils and the sweat on her skin. It had been another stressful day. It began with getting the kids ready for school and packing their bags for the weekend with their father. And then she'd worked back late at the office.

The captain noticed muttering among his crew. He shared their frustration. A faulty interstellar drive had slowed the ship's speed. Their Sol Eight expedition would take several more orbits. The only one who appeared unperturbed by the delay was the ship's young science officer, making his first interstellar voyage.

The Australian Writers' Centre's Furious Fiction celebrated eight years of writing challenges in February 2026 with the theme of EIGHT. In their monthly showcase, they reported a "wide range of takes on the theme". And I spotted that my friend Gavin Harris and I had both made the longlist with our widely different stories.

Episode 107 (8 December 2025): Bernie sat by himself on the far side of the emergency department waiting room. Elsie and Rita were sitting together, near the doors to the operating theatres. Elsie was sobbing, and Bernie wanted to console her, but he couldn't face Rita's wrath again. "It's all your fault, Bernie!" she'd shouted at him.

The reality TV game show host and former three-term president was grumpy. And not just because the makeup artist used the wrong orange skin tone on him or that his show's ratings were lousy. He wanted to fire the three remaining contestants on Trillionaire Survivor. But B, Z and M kept cheating and surviving!

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.

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.