Author Archives: kenfraser20

Bore-pulling camps must dream of beeps. On the Barkly Tablelands, on the grasslands, there are two sources of water, one from above, one from below. Water is everything. The more water, the more cattle. The rain came, and the Rankin … Continue reading →

Life doesn’t happen in stories. Or maybe it does. We take a bunch of fleeting images and half-remembered sensations and form them into stories to make sense of them, or perhaps events follow natural trajectories, and our genres and forms … Continue reading →

Writers like details. So much can be evoked by, say, the glow of a gidgee ember-pile at dawn. The smell of an approaching squall. The calloused hands of Tom Joad, or  the masterful passage describing the journey of a turtle … Continue reading →

The grille made it okay at the Great Southern Hotel. The office was shut off from the guests or potential guests, so I felt safe enough. At the place next door they had no such grille, and the reception desk … Continue reading →

I know what it’s like to die instantaneously. The first time I was knocked clean out was when I slipped in a large storm-water drain in Weston, in Canberra, when it was mostly houseless infrastructure. I was utterly unaware of … Continue reading →

The figure of John Wayne, cowboy, drawled through the culture for half a century so, of course, I was often him. Mostly, though, I wanted to be Shane. When I met Simon Stanhope, I thought he was Shane, with a … Continue reading →

Continuations come from chess, and might also be called possible futures. I’m sure I heard about them once from a book about a chess prodigy who loses her way. Not much of a book, not bad, but a few bits … Continue reading →

Let it last.