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Saturday, Jul 7th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Me outside a Cardiff church (photo: Simon Sellars).
I’ve always been fascinated by Wales. It’s something to do with my interest in ‘edge culture’, with distorted cultural mirrors sharding mainline nationalism into fragments. I used to hear English people put down the Welsh, mocking their accents and their tradition, and it fascinated me. Not the racism, […]
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Monday, Jun 18th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
A view of the ziggurat student quarters at Norwich’s University of East Anglia. This is Brutalism at its finest. (Photo: Simon Sellars 2007).
I woke on the train to Norwich.
I don’t know much at all about Norwich, except a bit about their football team. In John King’s book The Football Factory, the narrator, Tom, recalls how […]
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Wednesday, Jun 13th, 2007 at 1:27 am
‘Hey now, baby, I’m beginning to see the light…’ The author, waiting to go through customs, ponders the notion of ‘flightless travel’ (photo: Simon Sellars 2007).
At one stage I used to listen to people whingeing about long plane flights and think they were dullards with no imagination, that I was above them (literally) because I […]
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Friday, Jan 19th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Station Pier (photo: Simon Sellars). There used to be a sign here saying ‘Melbourne Welcomes You’, the first thing we saw when we got off the boat, I imagine.
I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my family’s immigration story to the second book in Jim Hammerton’s ‘Ten-Pound Poms’ series. Ours is a strange tale, […]
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Saturday, Dec 30th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Sorry for the delay: I’ll be announcing the winner of our Micronations competition very soon…as soon as I get over this terrible flu.
More soon.
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Monday, Aug 21st, 2006 at 8:19 am
Screengrab from the old Sleepy Brain site
All the interviews, features and reviews written by past contributors to Sleepy Brain (from the old magazine-style format) have been lovingly dismantled from the old HTML and reassembled brick-by-brick in the new PHP. Follow the links to the right and above for immediate access.
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Monday, Jun 26th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Looking at some old photos I took of the Westgate Bridge got me thinking about another significant elevated arterial link in Australia, Hobart’s Tasman Bridge, hit by the Lake Illawarra, an iron ore tanker, in 1975. As a young lad the dramatic newspapers pictures were emblazoned on my nascent cultural awareness: two cars hanging precariously […]
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Friday, Jun 23rd, 2006 at 8:38 am
There was an article in the newspaper the other day about the increasing corporatisation of football in Melbourne. The piece talked about how Melbourne footy clubs no longer have any real connection to their history; how the AFL’s relentless “rationalisation” policy means that all the Melbourne clubs now play out of the same ground. Carlton; […]
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Thursday, Jun 22nd, 2006 at 3:12 pm
As a travel writer, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have made my acquaintance with Michel Houellebecq’s nasty, but exhilarating novel, Platform, which I’ve just re-read. It really goes to town on travel guidebooks. It makes even the most seemingly innocuous travel-writing phrase a cringe-worthy exercise in self-loathing, like the term “a good base camp” […]
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Thursday, Jun 1st, 2006 at 1:52 am
This is the new incarnation — Phase IV — of Sleepy Brain, which has been offline for the past six months. It used to be more of a magazine, with regular contributors, but now is basically a blog run by Simon Sellars, a Melbourne writer and editor, as the magazine format was too difficult to […]
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