Six new mini-mags have recently been added to the list. They are:

Four Last Songs, referring to the famous farewell music of German composer Richard Strauss, written shortly before his death in 1949.

The Camera Sees ..., looking at what and how much is revealed when a portrait’s taken – the life revealed by the printed photo and the life that’s yet to be seen.

Chartres and The Plains, a pair of memoirs about visiting Europe, feeling over-awed by the richness of the countries I saw (Italy, Spain, France), then dealing with my return home and slow recovery of confidence in Australia as the place where I belonged.

Freedom, a reflection on the limits of freedom as much as its nature, approaching the idea of freedom via the related idea of inevitability. Is freedom, perhaps, not a permanent state but the short period, perhaps only a moment or two, that follows the removal of something burdensome?

Men In White, a reflection on umpiring, impartiality or its opposite, and the way in which authority as a form of moral control is being undermined, perhaps, in the contemporary presentation of sport to the public.

A further mini-mag, World Cities, has been completed and will be posted on this site fairly soon.

In an earlier statement I mentioned a plan to write a sequence of opera librettos, to be called Brighter Than Black. This project has been completed, but has turned itself into something quite different from what I expected. I’ve almost finished revising it but I want to think about it a little longer before making it available.

Finally, I would like to record that Escape, the earliest of the mini-mags on this site, has been translated into Mandarin and will appear in an Australian issue of the Beijing magazine World Literature, late in 2012. I have now begun work on a piece, working title The Pilgrims, to go further into the association made in Escape between mountain places and spirituality.