The Train Driver told me, ‘Down the train track just around the bend, a pair of black swans would return each spring to the same dam in the paddock near the railway line. I have been watching this pair of swans return each year for more than twenty-five years to raise...
Every year for some years, we have been visited by an attractive little bird. He spends several months in our garden but when it is time to build his nest, he leaves. He seems to say ‘this is not my home, I am just a visitor.’ We have formed a bond with him and he...
I have a snapshot of a figurine on a rock in the garden with the rising sun. The figurine is almost obliterated when it is clothed with light as the sun rises behind it. In the snapshot, you cannot see how the figurine is dressed when it is covered with the light of...
My sins were painted clearly. The indictment ran for miles, every man and woman in the city radius and every international visitor to the Festival knew the charges. For this was Festival year and the home crowd as well as the international crowd jammed every venue. I...
"And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!" (Est 4:16 NKJV) If you read her story, Esther is presented as hesitant, as hiding her faith and her cultural identity for fear of personal backlash, and then as a self-centred coward....
After reading a while I switched off the light and looked out the window at the dark sky. The moon was a sliver against the blackness and only two stars shone down from a featureless map. Nothing else, just a fraction of moon and two stars. I closed my eyes wishing I...
For more than half of my life, I have lived where water must be conserved. For many years it was a life and death issue because if the well ran dry, there was simply no alternative. Now, of course, you can buy drinking water from a shop but where I live, water is...
It was unspoken good manners among country people to leave your front door key under the mat. If you were away for a day or a week or a year and your neighbour, or a passing stranger, needed anything from your home, the key was there. Only bad-mannered people would...
"For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight,...
I am told there is a place on the Western Australian coast where the full moon rising over mud flats causes an optical illusion. From March to October each year, on three successive nights in each month, the full moon rising over the mud flats, creates the illusion of...