A Room of One’s Own

I read something today that stayed with me. It was a reminder to do just five small things to inspire creativity. One of them was to gift oneself a day every week entirely devoted to reading, learning and looking.

I’ve been doing just that, in a new room of mine. A warm, chocolate hug of a room where the light falls softly through tall windows and the walls hold the quiet company of books. Once the bank manager’s office, it now belongs to me – a personal space for all the things I love. My books, my dogs, my little collections and the memories of people I love, some here, some gone.

It isn’t quite finished, but it’s coming together: a window seat with a view to the waving bush across the road, the creek tumbling just beyond. It’s where you’ll find me this long weekend, tea in hand in the early hours or perhaps a glass of red in the twilight, the in-between moments before the garden or the studio calls me back. A place for learning – or not. For looking, reading, scribbling, or simply being. A place where scent lingers too – the homely, grounding fragrance of Our Place curling into the corners, carrying memory through the room long after the flame has gone out.

Virginia Woolf once said a woman must have a room of her own. This is mine.

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What I’m reading this long weekend

Exposure: Contemporary Photographers in Australia and New Zealand

A photograph is never just a frozen moment. A split second either side and it would be something else entirely. The best photographs slip between the seen and unseen, stirring something deeper.

Amber Creswell Bell’s Exposure brings together forty contemporary photographers from Australia and New Zealand – among them Leila Jeffreys, Kara Rosenlund, and my own obsessions, Bill Henson’s moody human drama and Scott Perkins’ haunting landscapes. Each artist offers a different way of looking: some whimsical, some wild, all searching for connection.

It’s a book that reminds me why photography matters – how it captures not only what’s in front of us, but what lingers just beyond.

Unsettled – Kate Grenville

I found it deeply unsettling. Kate Grenville has a way of saying the things most of us only think, but rarely give voice to. “What does it mean to live on land that was taken? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?” They’re questions we often turn away from – too hard, too confronting.

Kate Grenville doesn’t. In Unsettled, she steps out from behind fiction and takes to the road, retracing her own family stories across the landscapes where they unfolded. She stands on the very ground that was taken, widening the frame to include those who were already there.

It’s not about blame or guilt. It’s about looking straight at the past – really looking – and seeing where that truth might lead.

Art Against Despair: Pictures to restore hope – The School of Life

Art Against Despair gathers some of the world’s most consoling images—paintings, photographs, abstracts, portraits—stretching across centuries and continents. Each work is paired with a short reflection, reminding us how art can steady us through heartbreak, conflict, or the quiet struggles of daily life.

It’s less about art history than about art as companion. These images become a kind of balm, offering hope, courage, and the gentle reminder that we’re not alone in what we feel.

The Cyprian – Poetry by Amy Crutchfield

Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian is a debut of rare power, circling love in all its guises – longing, desire, deception, joy, and the aching quiet of loss. Reading it, I was struck by how closely her poems echoed my own experience of grief: the way love endures even after death, how it lingers, transforms, and still asks to be held.

Structured in five parts that reflect the many faces of Aphrodite, Crutchfield’s poems move between myth and intimacy, the everyday and the eternal. They speak to love as both gift and burden, a force that remakes us, even in the shadow of absence.

It’s a book that doesn’t shy away from the hardest questions, but meets them with beauty and truth.

Winner of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.