Circa 2010 I collaborated on the production of a podcast titled “Total Education Conversations”. Four episodes of the podcast were produced and published on the website of The School of Total Education (SOTE) in Warwick, Queensland. Our goal with the podcast was to attract an audience of people with an interest in education and in schools which have a spiritual/holistic philosophy.
In March 1974 a few hundred people gathered at Monash University in Melbourne for a weekend listening to “The Personal Philosophies of Some Eminent Australians”.
Eagerly anticipated was Alan Marshall, celebrated Australian author, humanitarian and storyteller par excellence. Mr Marshall was well-known to Australian school children as the author of “I Can Jump Puddles”, the account of his childhood encounter with and triumph over polio.
At 72 years of age, Alan was able to look back on a life filled with diverse experiences from which he had distilled an unusual wisdom. To convey this he chose not a chronological account of events, but a metaphorical story.
Could the observed disappearance of insects in the natural world be a result of the widespread rollout of mobile phone technology? A response prompted by my recent reading of the book “The Invisible Rainbow — A History of Electricity and Life” by Arthur Firstenberg.
I remember Mrs Carbury in her motorised wheelchair, the vehicle that provided mobility within her small bed-sitter and beyond into her large organic vegetable and herb garden, a place of teaching and learning.
The following was written in December 1988 after attending the funeral of Ken Field, former Bursar of Scotch College in Melbourne.
I wrote the following on 29th January 2003. Now we are facing the same situation again it seems. Climate is cyclical?
Sometime in the 1970s the Danes invented a new way of collective living — neighbourhoods designed, built and managed by the people who lived there. The English name for these is “Cohousing”.
Travelling through the Gold Coast in 2006, I was struck by the vista of materialism gone awry.
Some thoughts on moving house.
How do you market houses in an intentional community? Some thoughts from 2003.
For a couple of years now I’ve been attempting to create some software products which could be sold to a wider market — beyond this small town. It’s a slow process.
This is a blog of miscellaneous topics drawn mainly from life experiences, observations and reflections.