By Mark Butler* FARRAGO 9 – Waterman: A Picaresque Tale of Old Sydney I HAVE always wanted to write something to live up (or down) to that headline which, throughout my many years as a newspaper subeditor never lost its place as one of the top five banned hackneyed puns, so i hope this makes [...]
FARRAGO 8 – A guest post by Peter Solness, artist, teacher, traveller and sometimes Henry Beaufoy Merlin* impersonator. As a young photographer in the 1980’s the jingoism of Australia Day back then never convinced me. I was looking for stories that would engage more fully with our journey as a nation. At 26 years of age in 1985 [...]
By Mark Butler.* SOME time in 1970, while I was still pretending to be a student at Macquarie University, I gave a lecture outlining my belief that Bob Dylan would one day be seen as a great poet on the same level as Eliot, Yeats and Auden, at that time my touchstones for poetic greatness. [...]
By Mark Butler* OUR town’s book nook (motto: “Leave a book, take a book, or both. No batteries required.”) is snugly tucked away in the vestibule of the community hall, and was set up by my wife Mary and me not long after we had moved here in 2016. We maintain and curate it, and [...]
By Mark Butler* THERE are two ways to survive while working for a toxic media organisation such as News Corp: either be a fully paid-up member of the team, which means parking your integrity and your soul outside the building, or take drugs. Or both. There may be a third option, but thinking about that [...]
Warren finally succumbed to his alcohol abuse. He was a benign, permanently shitfaced presence who had found his role as the town drunk.
Image: Alf van Beem By Mark Butler “YOU’LL smoke and drink and wear sandals, grow a beard and be a beatnik, you won’t believe in marriage and you’ll bring your children up the same way …” So my mother, wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke, often predicted during one of her monologues across the [...]
By Mark Butler This is the second of an occasional series of articles by contributing authors under the general title of FARRAGO*. MY initiation in 1956 as a seven-year-old into the realities of sporting fervour was terrifying. My father, who was taking my older brother and me on one of his post-desertion, pre-divorce excursions out of [...]
