Don Bentley sprawled out under the spreading boughs of a stringybark gum. He had a bottle of Barking Owl shiraz and a ham and cheese sandwich and was seeking a quiet moment to himself on his day off from work: a spot of lunch and a few glasses of good red, the birds singing around him, spring in the air. It had been an impossibly hard week at the Chronicle newspaper and he needed to chill out. Bentley didn’t even take a book or a newspaper up to the Waterworks Reserve in … [Read more...] about Hair of the fox
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Bruny bird festival takes flight again
Bird festivals have become an international phenomenon in recent years but there is only one that can lay claim to having an endangered bird literally on its doorstep. The Bruny Island Bird Festival might not be the biggest - that honour goes to Birdfair in Britain which attracts more than 20,000 birders annually – but it can boast not just lectures and bird tours, but a sighting of the forty-spotted pardalote. “Forty-spot” is one of the rarest birds in world with its … [Read more...] about Bruny bird festival takes flight again
Referee with goals of his own
As a football referee, Tristan Turner flouted the convention that the man in the middle should be unobtrusive and anonymous in ensuring the smooth passage of play. During games, Tristan Turner would dig the toes of his Adidas football boots into the muddy turf and fling up his arms in an extravagant gesture in the style of Rudolph Nureyev. Turner brought ballet to soccer, explaining that the game was ethereal, it floated across the turf untroubled by physical contact, … [Read more...] about Referee with goals of his own
Grub Street reborn
Don Bentley had been brought up in the hot metal days of journalism but he found something exciting, pulsating about the electronic journalism of the internet. It gave him a buzz. He was thinking about it one afternoon, between stories, sitting at his sub-editor’s desk in the Chronicle newspaper. Don Bentley’s life-time love affair with newspapers embraced not only the printed word squeezed between pages of newsprint but the purveyors of this arcane and archaic trade, the … [Read more...] about Grub Street reborn
The white Christmas
CHRISTMAS approached, but Don Bentley was thinking not of the Chronicle’s annual staff party at a local brewery, or the Christmas parade down Liverpool Street in Hobart. Sitting in the Chronicle newsroom late one evening he was thinking of a white Christmas long ago, one in South Africa during the apartheid white-supremacy era. The singing of ‘‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’’ had become an ironic joke in the newsroom of the Star, or at least some sections of it. It was … [Read more...] about The white Christmas