Campbell Thomson



Excerpt from KATI THANDA

for Reg Dodd At Curdimurka west of Maree there’s a sign: OLD GHAN RAILWAY HERITAGE TRAIL The Curdimurka Siding, dating from 1888, is the last remaining station yard of significance left intact on the Old Ghan Railway and includes station …

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Review Short: John Emerson’s John Jefferson Bray, a Vigilant Life

Former High Court Justice Michael Kirby writes this book’s forward. In it, he praises Bray’s unorthodox brilliance and judicial logic. The Law Lords of the Privy Council relied upon them.

DPP v Lynch is about whether a man forced at gun point to drive IRA killers to murder a police man could rely upon the defence of duress. Lord Morris approves Chief Justice Bray’s dissenting judgment in a South Australian murder case: ‘In a closely reasoned judgment the persuasive power of which appeals to me he held that it was wrong to say that no type of duress can ever afford a defence to any type of complicity in murder…’

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Review Short: Peter Bakowski’s Personal Weather

Bakowski looks into the lens in the photograph by Nick Walton-Healey on the cover of Personal Weather. The poems are also direct. They eschew simile, ambiguity, and the abstract. Were he an etcher, Bakowski’s work would be figurative with clear outlines and orderly perspective. There is no hesitation in his lines. His skies might be cloudy but there would be no obscuring storms of angst, only fugitive rays spotlighting the quirky in the mundane.

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Mute in the Corner of the Museum of Love

Victorine Meurent, nicknamed La Crevette modeled for Manet in Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’Herbe also posing as a matador and with an African Grey Parrot they were estranged when he rejected the Salon so she became a painter and modeled …

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Tram Line Song Line

On the No 96 tram from the Museum to the Catani Gardens following the rules of relaxed proceduralism A tram line is a song line How to read the signs etched on the Lake Condah possum skin cloak in the …

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The Goulburn Cricket Club Love Song

The cricketers’ girlfriends lounge beyond the boundary They are smoothing their summer dresses over their long tanned legs Lounging with a long glass of beer and lemonade One smoothes the blonde hair of a batsman waiting his turn The fast …

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