Fashionable myths and other misdemeanours
Certain contemporary fashion designers are exalted as gods. These hemline giants create clothing designs for women (and sometimes men) that are intended to transcend the staid ready to wear, the plaintive Peter Pan collar and other fashion faux pas. Certain designers are best known for collections which celebrate their obsessions. The poster child for this […]
It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
‘It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.’ is a truism with an edge. It instructs us that the well-connected will always have better professional and social opportunities. But what about the newcomer? For us, the ‘who you know’ can be very limited. This is a serious dilemma as we try to establish ourselves […]
Be seen and not heard
Growing up, our father warned us ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’ It was his parental way of controlling or at least stifling our behaviour. If my sister and I were expected to be seen but never heard—we were being trained to be passive observers without a voice or opinion. This saying has an emphatic […]
And the runner up is…
As I wrote and revised The Newcomer’s Dictionary, there were a number of excellent words that I did not have the space to include. ‘Nomad’ lost out to ‘Newcomer’; ‘Alien’ was left behind for ‘Abroad’; ‘Immigrant’ was the runner up to ‘Itinerant’; ‘Homesick’ won out over ‘History’ and ‘Transient’ beat out ‘Transfer’. At times, I […]
Learning to speak photography
Generally, families have one main photographic collection to preserve their memories and history. In fact, I have two: a collection of private memories and a collection that documents my activities as a working photographer. The private collection has the standard snapshots: ones of children (whose names we have long forgotten) brightly smiling behind a series of birthday […]
Singing during Covid
Gene Kelly sings, dances and playfully splashes in puddles in one of the most iconic scenes from the 1950s’ Hollywood musical Singing in the Rain. Despite being soaked to the skin, he remains optimistic while ignoring the drenching rain. We suspect that tomorrow he will wake up with a temperature, but in the meantime, he […]
The year of Marley Spoon
Here in Australia, as well as elsewhere in the world, the pandemic brought changes to our daily routines. As we struggled with the strangeness of it all, it was also a time for making creative changes to routines that now were anything but routine. How we shopped for food and dealt with meal making was […]