Writer's Note August 2026

 

Image: A spray of blooms in a white vase in a dim lit room.


How do you meet people? Reluctantly. 

I’ve met thousands upon thousands; at times it felt like more than my fair share. 

Observe and fix was a role. 

Now I observe and wonder aloud. 

This week, patches within the mist revealed I’d completed a full cycle mapping the night sky; Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman appeared front and centre to my writing desk. 

Medium density at night, dogs off their leash to fuck in the street. Snarling and snapping at each other, no-one's picking up their shit. 

So I looked up, and nothing compares.


Image: chart of blog hits over the past 30 days, seven thousand, seven hundred and ten approximately.


Thank you for your interest gentle reader. 


Siv Parker

House of Abundant Peace

2026






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Smooth

Image
Smooth by Siv Parker Update Tuesday 23 February 2015, 12.30pm:  This blog post was prompted by a recent incident in Australia.   Rob Thomas best known as singer/songwriter of Matchbox20 is currently touring.  H e said some things at a concert. It triggered a social media firestorm.  He apologized quickly, twice on Facebook (links included below). That was good enough for me.   I decided to make some comments of my own. Rob Thomas’s response is also linked below.   If I had known the page hits to my blog post would be over 30,000 in 24 hours I may have taken longer than an hour to write it, but it is what it is.   Thanks for reading.   The last time I heard Smooth , it was a Sunday afternoon in January. A cover band was playing at the country pub down on the corner from my house. It sounded pretty good.   It wasn’t Santana featuring Rob Thomas, but it was kind of awesome to listen while ...
Read more

The Knockout

Image
Image: Black satin funeral beads tied in a bow. 1.30am Saturday, Canberra Australia. I read The Knockout again last night, first time in many years.  Many of the participants have passed on; young and old they slipped into the life expectancy gap. ... THE KNOCKOUT a tweetyarn from a long time ago   For a time, I worked in a remote community. My job was teaching homeless kids how to make films. Number 1 job criteria: community engagement. * The project target group was 14-17yo kids. I had 12-20yo’s & younger who wanted to join in with their family members. I had to manage that. * I was new to town & they didn’t know me. They told me pretty much everyday for the 1 st year. Who are you? Why are you here? I liked my job. * We ran our youth projects on limited funds. Nowhere near as much funding as the local health service, juvenile justice, or family services. * I’d been a bureaucrat for X years so I know how to fill a form in. So I volunte...
Read more

Reflections on Bourke

I spent three years in Bourke. A few people said to me when I’d announced my next career move was going to be Bourke, ‘have you heard about Bourke?’ …’It’s got problems’ … ‘It’s dangerous.’ For some people, it might be. I had been around, but I had never seen anything like it. I said I would be there for three years. And I was, give or take a week or so. I have nothing short of respect for the people I met in Bourke. ---------- I ran a crisis service for kids in Bourke. I was backed up by a big quiet, unassuming and purposeful guy, and it wouldn’t have been possible to live and work there without him. My 14 to 17 year old clients were what the locals called the ‘bad kids’. The kids who were not going to school, who were in and out of the courthouse and juvenile detention, who caused trouble in the street, and who didn’t have access to safe and secure accommodation in Bourke. It hadn’t been my first choice of a job. I’d been approached three times a...
Read more

A fresh start

Image
I asked my cousin to send some photos of a fence my uncle made for her wedding. She didn’t get why.  She made the fence a tiny portion of a photo of a landscape that means very little to me.  It is not our country.  I had to blow it up to see the detail of the joinery, the finery of the finish, and that made the whole photograph fuzzy and disappointing. We do our family weddings like funerals.   There are more deaths than marriages.  Beside the top table, a collection of photos was arranged on two sideboards, surrounded by vases of roses and hydrangeas, fresh from the garden. I watched the guests on both sides of the invitation list as they realized the family portraits were a shrine.  Polite curiosity, some side ways glances but country folk will keep their criticisms to themselves. The sister of the bride was as immaculate as always. She is a beautiful woman. Thick, smooth hair that day was styled in a regal arrangement of twists and coils ...
Read more

CEO for a Day - 6 May 2015

Some background on why I asked to be considered to be included in Generation One’s campaign for Indigenous Australians to have a ‘CEO for a day’ experience. Melbourne CBD on dusk. #CEOforaday comes with a great view. Can't wait for tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/jpnNoBxjCq — Siv Parker (@SivParker) May 5, 2015 The GenerationOne CEO for a Day campaign is aimed at giving all Indigenous people the hope and belief that they too can be a CEO, of any organisation, one day. It is well out of what would ordinarily be considered a writer’s comfort level.   I spend most days writing in my designated writing space, a short walk down the hallway from the other areas in my house that also from time to time serve as writing areas.  My movements depend on the weather and the time of day, and whether the kids walking to school outside are especially rowdy during the day, or the lowing of the cows in the paddock down the lane are too much of a mou...
Read more

Boots

Image
Archived 2014 I’ll admit to a fleeting desire to change places with Sharon once, but otherwise I've always thought her welcome to her ugly life. I lived in the ugliest town in the Pilbara, and if my bulimic best friend forever hadn’t knocked herself out when she stumbled weakly in her laundry, I wouldn’t have watched Sharon try to force her ugly foot into my boot. Hand tooled leather, they had gaped at the calf and rendered me knock kneed with a Cuban heel. I was never more proud of my tiny feet while I watched Sharon grunt in despair. I’d had some concern because the boots were a little too big for me, but on her, there was no way she was getting her long kangaroo foot around the ankle bend. Sharon had invited herself around, then informed me we were going to the fair. They’d set up in a vacant lot close by, and I could see the ferris wheel rotating above the ridge of company houses at the end of my street. I didn’t want to go, not at the time she bashed on my...
Read more

Review: Midnight Sun

Image
Review Midnight Sun 8-part series, currently screening on SBS On Demand Directed by Marlind & Stein, the team behind Scandi-noir success The Bridge, Midnight Sun follows the investigation of the brutal murder of a French citizen in Kiruna, a small Swedish town in the Arctic Circle where the sun never sets. What ensues is the discovery of a ten-year-old secret conspiracy that no one could ever imagine. As social media increasingly doesn't provide the entertainment it once did, I've returned to an old companion for amusement. I have started watching television again. I recently settled in to binge watch a new Scandinavian drama. It had all the elements I expect from a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian-Icelandic police procedural investigating a murder. Slightly mismatched pair of detectives – check. Lots of exterior shots – check. The Artic Circle is very picturesque in their warmer months. And then it became very interesting – riveting in fact. I sent long t...
Read more

Edit #27

Image
Leaping the abyss into publishing my first book, update in an occasional series by Siv Parker ***** A few months back... Apart from the pain in both eyes unique to checking the edits, the other more pressing demand of getting my first book together was the essential conversation with the family. "What do you mean, ‘we’re not in it’", they’d asked as we sat - aunties, uncles and cousins - passing heavily laden platters of food around the large round table. For people who didn’t know much about writing a book, they had a clear idea what should be in mine. Them. They expected to be in it. I checked the temperature of a party pie, "It’s about blackfellas…and stuff. I didn't want to put anyone on the spot", before putting the whole thing in my mouth. "We’re blackfellas." Three kinds of cold meats and potato salad was being generously divvied up. Another made the correction in carefully enunciated syllables, "We are fam-i...
Read more

PANDORA

Image
PANDORA'S BOX By Siv Parker 3 November 2015 BLOG ANNOUNCEMENT: OnDusk was selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia . This title is scheduled to be re-archived regularly.   PANDORA is a digital archive – set up by the National Library of Australia and now in collaboration with nine other libraries and collection agencies - dedicated to the preservation of and long term access to Australian online electronic publications of national significance. In the early days, to my mind, my blog - my tiny online space on the internet - was a small café off the main street.    My cafe was an old building, faded paint and weathered wood, but the window panes were intact and clean, and the large wooden door swung easily on its hinges.  From the very first, I swept the worn stone steps everyday and tweaked dead leaves from the potted shrubs that sat either side of the wide doorway.  Inside, nests of...
Read more

Nightwalkers 2013

Image
An 11-year-old girl wrote a poem about loneliness in a school yearbook. Decades later, her brother found it.   Loneliness Siv Parker aged 11 years.   He ambled slowly across the dim lit room to the door, His old and tattered shoes padded heavily on the floor. The light streamed in, as the door opened, creaking and crying as if in pain. He looked out hopefully, but it had just been a bush against the window pane. He turned and walked, his eyes downcast, as he remembered the things that had happened in the past. ... Nightwalkers was first published in Review of Australian Fiction , Volume 8, Issue 6 (2013). Nightwalkers Siv Parker They were all sorts united, under his pall. Left alone, their addictions might have faltered. But that became unlikely from the day he walked through the door. The Haven sat about halfway along a long narrow street of renovated terrace houses. It hunkered down on a site deeper than it was wide, like a broken toot...
Read more