Entries by Charles Wooley

Ella Wooley

July 19, 2016 in /by

On a stormy night, on the other side of the earth, in an entirely different time, Eliza Wilson Small, blond and piercingly blue-eyed from her distant Viking ancestors, was blown into the world. It was the second of March 1917 and early spring in the ancient, grey stone, Scottish town of Paisley. As far as […]

Runaway Son

July 19, 2016 in , , /by

My fiendishly cunning and manipulative plan to keep my eldest son, Dave, in Tasmania, has gone terribly wrong. Last year he left me. The little redhead, for years my best mate, was always up for an adventure, splashing around the shallows of my favourite Tasmanian trout lakes in waders many sizes too big. Little Dave […]

The End of the World

July 19, 2016 in /by

I once reported the end of the world and lived to tell the tale. As a radio reporter in Perth WA, in the mid-seventies I was sent to report on a group of Looney Tunes who were convinced not only were we living in the End Times but in the words of a contemporary Rod […]

Apex Predator

July 12, 2016 in , /by

I recently saw a stupid advertisement for a car, the Hyundai Tucson, in which a scantily clad young lady casually removes her belt and lashes out at a snake that appears to be quite innocently gliding past. The predator girl is striking in both senses of the word but the snake is also a creature […]

Dirt Bikes

June 17, 2016 in /by

Mention the Finke Desert Race before last week and I might have guessed it was some long lost tribe of the Never Never. For you never know what you might discover, out it in that vast, ancient, tortured red landscape of Central Australia where for 350,000,000 years the Finke River has wandered, finding and losing […]

Norfolk Island

May 22, 2016 in , , /by

Norfolk Island is only 35 square kilometers. A scrap of land easily lost in the sea mist and gigantic ocean swells fourteen hundred kilometers east of Brisbane. It is a beautiful place with golden ocean-swept beaches and towering cliffs and deep rich red volcanic soil, a legacy of the sudden eruption that raised it from […]