I moved to Italy for love...

...the pesto pasta at Luca's restaurant in Rome, I confess, was love. It was served piping hot with the Parmesan and olive oil oozing, a taste that made me weep. All the loneliness I had felt in the few hours before disappeared. This was the reawakening of a love affair I had started with Italian food over 4 years ago here in Rome.

Food and I have always shared a mutual love. Born into the Hindu Hare Krsna Religion just about guaranteed that at the very least we would be well fed with a variety westernised Indian prasadam (a word meaning "spiritual food" - " By the tongue you can chant Hare Krsna, and by the tongue you can taste Krsna prasadam, spiritual food") . It also meant that we were vegetarian, a lifestyle choice I have since, and always will maintain.

How good is payday? That little nudge of joy I feel in the back of my stomach when that wonderful fortnight rolls around started when I was a child. Payday meant food! The food that as a child was better than a birthday; chocolate milk, chips, rice bubbles, ice cream, frozen chips - basically the foods that were shelved at eye level in the supermarket ended up on our kitchen table every second Thursday. I think that Thursday Payday may have been my Mums least favorite day. She despised shopping centers and supermarkets, almost as much as she disliked teenagers. After her long night shift, she would walk into the supermarket with a trolley and walk down each aisle pushing products off the shelf into the basket. After being unloaded from the car and dumped on the kitchen table, "first in best dressed" took its meaning. At best the goodies lasted until Sunday. Not because there wasnt enough, but my brothers had developed tendancies like bears in the winter hibernation season. They could stock up easily until 2 more Thursday rolled around. I guess I can thank them for my slim physique.

My Mums idea of cooking, gotta love her, was filling a pot with cold water and pasta shells and boiling until a block of pasta formed, ready to be sliced and served with split peas or the like. And so our step father became the cook. He wasn't any better, but he didn't actually have a job, so it was the least he could do. What a fortunate country Australia is where you can make a career receiving dole checks!

Thank god for Katy, my eldest sister. She ensured we kept a fine pallet for good food and passed on her knowledge of Indian cooking.

As a result my cooking is really the only thing I am truly "cocky" about. Ive not yet met someone that hasn't enjoyed my culinary skills...

The Man I Was Taught to Fear

There are people we grieve twice in a lifetime. Once for who they were. And once for who we were never allowed to know. My father is one of them. When I was a child, my mother told me he was a paedophile. She didn’t whisper it. She didn’t hesitate. She said it plainly, as fact. As warning. As control. When we misbehaved, she would drop us at the greyhound station and force us to spend sleepless weekends with him. I remember the noise of the station. The way my stomach would knot. The terror that would sit in my chest at night when the lights went out. I was absolutely terrified to sleep. He was a workaholic. Twelve-hour days. Long hours. Absence disguised as provision. He would leave cash on the bench, stockpiles of food in the fridge, and the television on - a wild luxury I couldn’t enjoy because fear had already moved in. At home with my mother, we weren’t allowed a TV at all. Looking back now, my father was unemotional, but never unkind. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer hims...

Versions, and “Versions”

I’ve already written about The Wiiyaan as a journalist. That piece lives in the Tweed Weekly . It’s careful, respectful, measured. It honours Bundjalung origin story, place, and the quiet authority of listening. It was written for a broad audience, many of whom - like me - come from settler families, carrying our own histories alongside the land we now call home. But after filing that story, I knew I wasn’t done. Some stories ask something back from you. This one did. So this is the version that doesn’t fit in a newspaper column. This is the version that explains why that exhibition cracked something open in me - why listening to Kyle Slabb speak about holding one version of Country, with care and restraint, felt like a mirror I wasn’t expecting. Kyle spoke about perspective. About how this telling is not the story, but a story - shaped by lineage, responsibility and law. He was clear, careful, and deeply respectful of other versions held...

The Painter on the hill

I went to meet Scott McDougall deliberately underprepared. This is not how journalists are usually meant to begin. We are supposed to research, cross-check, read the biography, study the exhibition history, arrive with neat questions and enough knowledge to sound vaguely authoritative. But Scott had been recommended to me by artist Hobie Porter, who told me he was someone I might find interesting. That was enough. I did not want to arrive with the internet’s version of him already sitting between us. I wanted to meet the man, see the work, stand in the room where it happened and absorb it without the corruption of other people’s opinions. I am not an art writer. Not really. But I am an artist at heart. A fashion designer by training. A lover of light, texture, form, fabric, structure, composition and the controlled drama of a perfectly judged line. Becoming a journalist has opened a new lens. It has also made me realise how often I underestimate people. My general disappointment in hum...

Rada Priya

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