The shoe sellers of Karoussades

A short travel memoir about the village of Karoussades, Corfu. Early on my first day in the village, a message came that two respectable ladies of Karoussades, its shoe sellers, needed a section of wall lime-washed. They were willing to use the black market labour organized from the Pirate’s taverna, where I waited for my first job—but they did ask that he send someone polite...

Losing yourself in the moment

A travel article about Thailand, following a journey from Bangkok to Khanom. DEPENDING on how you look at it, you're either hopelessly lost or about to enjoy some fascinating adventures off the usual tourist tracks, as Kari Gislason discovers. One of the great lessons of travel is that getting lost is usually better than getting found. There are various ways of achieving this. I, for one, seem to manage getting lost most easily when I have a map in my hands...

All the Flavours of Asia

A travel article about food and landscape in Thailand. Thick forest islands the first limestone karst that we see. In the cracks and ledges of these cliff faces, low trees make a steady ascent. From the road, it looks an impossible climb, but the forest has managed to find a line to the top and to form a platform of dense canopy. We’re coming into Krabi, an area of southern Thailand famous for these formations. Soon, the forest base will be replaced by ocean. Grottos, undercuts, and yellow beaches will add a skirt of luxury to the drama to the cliffs...

Dancing through the Air (parts one and 2) - Spirit of Akasha

Recording for ARIA nominated Film Soundtrack for Spirit of Akasha. Recorded, Mixed, and Co-produced by Phil Graham. Published by Warner Music Australia

Wilds of the Canadian Rockies

A travel article about touring in the Rockies, Alberta. MORAINE Lake, held up by a crown of mountains near the small town of Lake Louise, is opal blue. You'd need a precious stone to cut the surface. And even on a hot morning in August, there are plenty around: diamonds of snow decorate the mountain tops and, in their reflections, slice the lake with white triangles. We are at the start of a track that climbs from the lake to Mt Temple, the tallest mountain in the area and two or three hours' walk away. When the track zigzags back, we glimpse the lake through gaps in the conifer forest...

After the flood

FRUSTRATED residents of Grantham, the Lockyer Valley township devastated by Queensland's deadly summer floods, are demanding that the commission of inquiry into the disaster investigate whether an earth wall around a sand quarry helped cause the "inland tsunami" that killed 12 people and destroyed scores of homes.

The pirate of Karoussades

A travel memoir about the village of Karoussades, Corfu. When Liam and I caught the overnight ferry to Corfu we didn't have money for food, and my shoes had opened at the seams. Our last lira had been spent on a carton of Lucky Strike, which had been stolen by the time we docked the next day. In the haze of a Greek morning we were ushered into a minivan by the owner of the Karousades Camp Ground, who said there was work in the north of the island. Your best chance was with the Pirate. He took a little getting used to, but you were sure to get something...

Lazy days of simply going with the flow

A travel article about a river cruise from Amsterdam to Basel. When Captain Plamen Veselinov invites me to join him on the bridge, I can at last put a question that’s been running through my mind for days. It’s about the locks. How does he manage to line up the vessel as it approaches? Is the ship guided in electronically? He returns my questions with a boyish smile that does a good deal to veil his many years on the river. Crunching his way through a heavy Bulgarian accent, he says, “No, it’s all in the eyes and the hands. It’s magic. Don’t tell David Copperfield. He would get very jealous...

Kari Gislason's response to the Ottoman Motel by Christopher Currie [The Art of Vanishing Parents]

A review of The Ottoman Hotel by Christopher Currie (Text Publishing, 2011). There is more than one moment in life when parents disappear. Teenagers routinely wish them away. Young adults at university return to find they have been abandoned, their possessions boxed, labelled and stored, their bedrooms turned into guest accommodation sometimes featuring lavender. You call your parents and they're not home. Your mother doesn't accept your friend request...

Queensland farmers rise up to take on the miners

Queensland’s Surat Basin has the third largest energy resource in the world — with vast coal seam gas and coal reserves — but farm groups are warning that mining areas, which are prime farm land, risk catastrophic environmental damage to food-producing areas. Mining development is moving very quickly with 36,000 wells due to be sunk in the next few years. A Senate inquiry into the impacts of mining in the Murray-Darling Basin heard evidence from farm and mining industry representatives in Oakey on the Darling Downs yesterday.

Sweden of the Sagas

In this paper, I discuss the representation of Sweden and Swedes in the Íslendingasögur, with an emphasis on identifying patterns across the works, both in terms of narrative structure and content. The aim in doing so is to shed light on modes of representing non-Icelanders in the Íslendingasögur, as well as on medieval Icelandic conceptions of Sweden as a distinct region within Scandinavia. I also aim here to add to a longer-term project that examines the place of foreign visitors to Iceland in the saga corpus more generally. As the scope of this paper is limited to Swedish characters, I am cautious about drawing broad conclusions about their representation – observations given here will need to be framed by a wider study, and one that reads for the characterisation of Swedes in the context both of other genres of saga literature and representations of characters from other regions beside Sweden. However, it is clear that some similarities exist in saga episodes involving Swedish characters: in four of the Íslendingasögur, Swedes are given roles as intruders or outsiders who threaten the community of the saga and whose deaths bring about a change in the for- tunes of their killers.