Welcome to Notes From Pig City. This is my online archive for as much of my journalism as I can keep up with. Published pieces will be reposted here as soon as they can be. I also write exclusively on my Patreon page; those pieces are not republished here.
I’m the author of two books: Pig City (2004), a book about Brisbane, and Something To Believe In (2019), a music memoir. I'm currently employed by AAP. I continue to freelance occasionally for other publications, mostly Guardian Australia, where it doesn't conflict with my full-time gig.
I have a wide variety of interests, and they’re reflected by the number of tabs in the main menu. You can click through those, or the archive list at the bottom to find what you might be interested in, whether you’re a casual visitor or looking for something specific.
If you want to get in touch send me a message here.
When I was about 14 years old, kids in my class – or maybe it was the entire eighth grade of Norwood High School, in Melbourne’s outer east – decided they needed a singer for a band. I had no idea who was in this band: who was gonna play guitar, bass, drums or most […]
Yarrabah, an Indigenous community about an hour’s drive south of Cairns, is sometimes referred to as paradise by the sea. Although only just over 50 kilometres from far north Queensland’s tourist capital, it’s isolated, separated from the city by Trinity Inlet on one side and, on the other, dense tropical rainforest that covers the rugged
Yarrabah gets the band back together Read More »
In a classroom of excitable primary school children in Yarrabah – an Indigenous community that lies across Trinity Inlet, an hour’s drive south-east of Cairns – language and culture teacher Nathan Schrieber makes a grand entrance in traditional garb, using biraba, or clapsticks, to call the kids to attention. “Are youse ready?” he asks. “Are
Singing in Gunggandji: the Wiggles at Yarrabah Read More »
Fame froze Tom’s Restaurant in time. Situated on 2880 Broadway, a block from the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan’s affluent, intellectual Upper West Side, its pink-on-blue neon signage formed many of the exterior scenes for Seinfeld, and it’s been coasting on its reputation as a pop-culture tourist attraction ever since. Framed photographs
Suzanne Vega: two hits are better than none Read More »
The Laurels started life as a shoegaze band in thrall to the British sounds of the late 1980s and early 90s: Ride, Swervedriver and, most obviously, My Bloody Valentine. Their first album, Plains, was all Fender Jaguar and Rickenbacker guitars, played at deafening volume (with liberal use of tremolo arm) and, while it wasn’t exactly
The Laurels: Sonicology Read More »
Most of us have a song that we’d like played at our funeral. Some of us aim for the transcendent: spiritual songs that, we hope, might say something to those we leave behind about our approach to life. Others who take the exercise (and themselves) less seriously prefer a more mordant strain of philosophy: Always
Paul Kelly and Charlie Owen: Death’s Dateless Night Read More »