Category Archives: things belonging to the emperor

things not domestic, bunker-related, tracks, or books

slip & sprint

Posted on August 30, 2016 by rustichello

I In his book about memory and the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien tells the story of his first love, at elementary school, and her subsequent death. The story is a neat piece of meta fiction in which … Continue reading →

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words overwhelm

Posted on June 16, 2016 by rustichello

In 1881 the Pretoria Convention established British suzerainty over the youthful republic of the Transvaal, a matter which would be disputed for the next twenty years or so. A small part of this agreement was a guarantee of the independence … Continue reading →

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haunts and haunting

Posted on January 14, 2016 by rustichello

The Chook and I have returned from our sojourn in the west. It was a good long drive, over 2000 kilometres in all. We headed off north through the city, up the central coast, taking a left up the Hunter … Continue reading →

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It’s not about the baggie

Posted on March 4, 2015 by rustichello

It seems certain that Andrew Chan and Myu Sukumaran will be executed over the next few days, and there’s no question that executing them is a greater crime than importing all the heroin in the entire golden triangle. It’s a simple … Continue reading →

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way out west

Posted on January 7, 2015 by rustichello

It was a long drive, ten hours or so, undertaken in the heat of mid-February. Vinyl seats in the P76, dog at my feet, the handmade yellow trailer behind. It was the beginning of our long migration, our time of … Continue reading →

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Mistah Kurtz’s latest affliction

Posted on October 21, 2014 by rustichello

For a while in the early noughties I worked in the back office of an engineering firm doing back office stuff: procurement, dispatch, marketing, web stuff, travel and tender arrangements, and so on. One of my duties was to ensure … Continue reading →

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awful causes and conscience

Posted on October 3, 2014 by rustichello

As a young man I was impressed by war. The scale of human action, the scale of humans acting in concert was the thing. Compared to the tiresome and repetitive tropes of politics, which to my teenage brain resembled nothing … Continue reading →

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a sense of north

Posted on March 2, 2014 by rustichello

I’ve been to a couple of gigs lately, Don Walker and Bruce Springsteen. Both were supporting new albums that no-one is really that fussed about. Bruce played in front of one hundred thousand or so, and charged a couple of … Continue reading →

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the old park

Posted on February 13, 2014 by rustichello

There were two direct routes down to the river from our place on Dooral St. One, the Dairy Road, was mostly bitumen but was gated at the dairy. So you had to jump the fence into the paddock and leave … Continue reading →

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mortality trumps utopia

Posted on January 9, 2014 by rustichello

I’ve been thinking a lot about utopias. It started with Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil. It’s a great read: part political thriller, part personal travelogue and part geo-historical exploration. It’s beautifully written, as are all Robb’s books (Midnight in … Continue reading →

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