Perth Words… exploring possibilities.

Where does the rarest of all rhinos live?

…Ujung Kulon National Park, in the western tip of Indonesia.  It is also one of the most densely populated areas on Earth AND one of most volcanically active as well.

Java’s volcanoes have left their mark on the Javan rhinoceros’ fate in many ways.

They gave the island its immense fertility, rich enough to feed the fast-growing population; that is until man began to poach them.  Man drove the rhino to the corners of Java ‑ out of its natural habitat, toward higher grounds and isolated peninsulas, as far as possible from civilization without actually dropping into the Indian Ocean.

Then in 1883, there was a massive volcanic eruption. Afterwards, as the land began to recover, Javan rhinos — under heavy threat elsewhere on the island — re-colonized. Humans never returned in large numbers, so to this day Ujung Kulon remains a safe haven…

As I was dashing into the supermarket a few hours back there was a little exchange that made me slow down and think to myself: This is one of the things I love most about Ireland and Irish people. 

A woman in her 40s or so called across the car park to a man in his 70s, I’d say, who was just leaving with his bag of groceries:

Hello Tom, how are you? 

Marian, good to see you. Grand thanks and you?

As she came a little closer, Marian spoke again to the man:

Oh sorry, I was mixing you up with your son.

And his retort:

Sure I’m much younger looking than him!

Yes, it’s these little things ~ the way people  come back so fluently with answers that you associate with the likes of Oscar Wilde or Brendan Behan.

Yesterday was one of those days that overwhelmed me. It was overwhelming in a positive sense but I suppose any kind of ‘overwhelm’ takes a bit of processing.

There were all sorts of juxtapositions involved that were to do with time. The whole thing developed out of a visit to the ruins of a church and an old grave site close to Dunhill Castle here in Co. Waterford a while back. I wanted to learn more about the people who were buried there but couldn’t read the inscriptions on the tombstones.

It felt a bit weird to be going to the Internet to find out how I might get the inscriptions to reveal themselves to me. Maybe I should just leave them alone and let the ravages of time take their natural course. But, there on YouTube, I watched a short clip in which a man showed how rubbing plain…

Would you like to win a bundle of books for yourself or your friends? Summer is such a great time for reading so I hope you’ll like this competition. I’ll be giving away a bundle of four of my books to each of two winners. You can see which books in the photo. With Christmas and the holiday season looming, you could tick some presents off your list, or line up your summer reading – all in one fell swoop!

To enter the competition all you need to do is opt to follow my blog. That means you will receive my latest blog postings directly into your email inbox. To do that you need to go to my website www.lizbyrski.com and enter your email in the “Follow blog by email” field at the foot of any webpage, and click the “follow me” button.

If you already follow my blog, then…

The Smuggler’s Curseis a story set in Broome, a wild and lawless town in the north-west of Australia in 1896 and is about a boy who is sold by his mother as a cabin boy to a sea captain. Captain Black Bowen turns out to be the most notorious smuggler to ever sail the wild Western Australian coast. Before too long, they are at sea and involved in out-running customs patrols, being chased by murderous pirates, nearly killed in a cyclone and entangled in smuggling guns to guerrillas fighting the colonial Dutch in Sumatra.

Red, the narrator, is the son of Mary Read, owner of The Smuggler’s Curse Hotel which sits high on the cliff overlooking Roebuck Bay in Broome. I borrowed her name from a famous 18th century female pirate of the Caribbean, as well as Red’s name from the pirate, Red Rackham. The other main character, as…

Two years ago, looking up/looking down presented a series on Western Australian women writers to watch out for. As I wrote then:

There’s so much creative energy among writers on the western edge—some of it being nurtured in university writing programs, some finding inspiration and support through writers centres, some brewing entirely independently. This four-part series features eight WA women who are part of that creative flurry. All of them have a manuscript ready, or nearly ready, to submit to agents and publishers, and I hope we’ll be hearing a lot more from them in the future.

It’s a true pleasure to observe the evolution of a creative life, and I’m delighted to present an update on what some of them have been doing. Here’s how Michelle Michau-Crawford and Emily Paull responded to an invitation to review their last two years of writing…

Michelle Michau-Crawford

When I was invited in…

You can listen to my short story “The Two of Hearts” on Soundcloud.

The story was originally broadcast on RTÉ Radio, read by actress Catriona Ni Mhurchú.

Click on the picture to listen:

source: independent.ie