Blog
“I want to see communities in which our interactions consistently demonstrate what I call the ‘other four-letter words’: kind, hope, care, love.”
Speech Pathology & All the Skills of Human Communication
More than 40 years ago I began a Bachelor of Applied Science in Speech Pathology. A few years before this, in 1975, the profession had been renamed ‘Speech Pathology’, from ‘Speech Therapy’. Speech therapists of that era, forerunners and groundbreakers, had identified...
Literacy & Fairy Rings
I did a year of a general science degree before I studied speech pathology. In the unit on botany, we covered basidiomycetes (aka fungi). I learned that ‘mycelium’ is part of mushroom and toadstool anatomy. It’s a fine structure like a mass of threads that spreads out...
Champagne Parties and the Public Life
I recently came across the phrase "hall of mirrors", used as a metaphor to represent our "whimsical culture", our "fragile and rapidly changing identities" and "needing a lot of affirmation"1. I took the point and could see from the mental picture that had formed in...
Now We Are Without Excuse: A submission to the Tasmanian Literacy Advisory Panel
There has never been a time in history in which we have had both the tools of instruction relevant to all learners together with the social will to bring 100% literacy to all learners. Talking about this possibility and potential with excitement and hope is the...
The Most Imperious of Our Chickens
The five-year-old who lives at my house came bowling up the hill at me clutching one of his eight-week-old chickens. “Grand!” he shouted (he calls me ‘Grand’). “This is Charlie. She’s the most imperious of our chickens.” Delighted with this unexpected and rather...
The Undoing
I recently found myself in front of a mirror making a response that had been conditioned in front of a screen. I was deciding what to wear for the day. I’d already donned a skirt and long-sleeved top… skivvy-ish. I was mooting a second top over the first… sleeveless....
Building Secure Bridges
My four-year-old grandson is fascinated by the Tasman Bridge. This towering structure with its scary and risky stories draws his little mind and its curiosity. Thirty years ago, the same fascination dwelt in his father. I’m regularly caught up in déjà vu as I drive...
Literate Australia
There has never been a time in Australia’s history at which everybody could read and write. Think about it. Before the 20th Century wars, universal education was haphazard. It was the domain primarily of the privileged. Things continued that way during the 1940s and...
Liquid Manure
When I was a kid growing up on the farm, my mum and dad regularly made a concoction that they called liquid manure. The first time I read Roald Dahl’s fabulous ‘George’s Marvelous Medicine’ to my kids, it made me think of the liquid manure – except that mum and dad’s...
The Cup & Communication
Michael Leunig is a national treasure. A few strokes of his uniquely wielded brush, some spare and scruffy words… and suddenly a gentle ‘hey presto’ appears out of nowhere and opens us to depths of our yearning and heights of our hope. I was recently struck with...
Courage to Create Change – Summer
Grace and I are presenting a cycle of powerful, seasonal, leadership retreats focused on the courage to create change. In late August we focused on spring, using metaphors that explored how that which is nascent within us, can be supported to burst forth. On the 3rd,...
Uh oh… He’s Calling the Police
A pottering kind of day My son and I were companionably pottering with a bit of work on our laptops, sitting on couches in the sun in our front room on a Sunday afternoon. My four-year-old grandson was there with his little sister. They were also pottering happily....