My life is a movable feast--in pictures. From Brisbane to Peregian Beach. Full time beach living, here I come!

Hello there!

Well, I don't know if anyone out there is blogging at the moment after the BIG NEWS of the AMERICAN ELECTION, but I'll try for some normalcy here. I spent the day glued to CNN and need some light relief, so decided I'd share some pics with you, nothing too deep and meaningful.

Some of you may have picked up that I've been living a split life for several years -- half a week in Brisbane teaching at the State Library of Queensland, living in an 1880's heritage-listed property, and half a week up at the beach, 100 kilometers (62 miles away) to a house we built and moved into on the night of the New Millenium...gah! 16 years ago!

As I say goodbye to permanent living in Brisbane, I took a few photographs to mark the move, and rattled around in my files for some more...

I'm grateful for Brisbane, a beautiful, friendly, laid-back city (hello Lynda Young!)

The sun sets on my Brisbane sojourn!The State Library in the right hand corner.

Inside the State Library. My Library Cafe on right. Also a great bookshop.

View across the river to the city from my teaching room where I tutored students one-on-one.

Favourite muffin and coffee in the Library Cafe

Awesome walkways which are dripping with red bougainvilla each summer...at the South Bank

Each Remembrance Day, the Story Bridge is festooned with red poppies

My writers group working on characterisation at the Brisbane Markets

The Brisbane Writers Festival is held at the State Library. Author friend Charmaine Clancy and I liked to relax and have a drink after attending classes

Always media students acting out on the banks of the Brisbane River

Our Heritage Unit in West End. On the deck when Nas and Ragesh Dean came to stay

They built a huge artificial beach at South Bank many years ago. It's permanent. Well used on those balmy days and nights in summer

The beach house needed extensive renovations as we've had it vacant for a time, rented it out as a holiday home and used it as a bolt hole occasionally, so the wear and tear was showing. It's a big house, so the renos have taken awhile--2 brand-new kitchen makeovers (upstairs and downstairs -- where we have made a private apartment for one of our daughters and which will become a Writers Retreat when she moves out), a new ensuite in a large downstairs bedroom, and the most exciting part--cutting off a little of the huge lounge/dining room for my own private writing room.

View of the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean from my writing room every morning. Inspired? I should think so...

We've been doing the painting ourselves, and finally finished the upstairs a couple of days ago. That's all we'll get done before Christmas.

On the beach at Noosa on the Sunshine Coast

Fishing at Peregian Beach at sunset

Chilling on the beach at Noosa - hmm - melanoma territory!

Peregian Beach's Baked Poetry Cafe's special breed of iced coffee. They even make the ice cream in house. Never tasted better and that's saying something! 

The inside of our beach house before renovations. The walls are now grey. More pics in future as Michael di Gesu has been begging!

My favourite spot at the beach house--sofa bed on the deck to read and think while I watch the whales frolic. They've been awesome this season!

I hope you enjoyed my nostalgic journey through Brisbane and onto Peregian Beach. We'll be renting out the Brisbane unit. Can't bear to part with all that rustic gorgeousness yet! And I've kept a few students who I'll be tutoring online and occasionally meeting up with through 2017.

• How about you? Are you a beach or a city person?
• What's been your most momentous move/career change so far?

As always, thanks for visiting my blog. I'll just go have a good cry now! And not just because there's a brand new MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. 

I Come From a Land Down Under -- Writing and Living in Paradise -- my story and photos.

Hi everyone!

Richard Hughes is running this great series on his blog -- he's asked bloggers to answer some questions about where they live (and write if they are writers). I was honoured when he approached me.

If you want to read about my home/s, please visit Richard's blog. Lots of bright photos!

September 1st is the first day of Spring in Australia. It's a super glorious day here.

So Richard and myself would be very pleased if you popped over there to say hello.


And don't forget if you can in any way support Melissa Bradley financially, please use this link to access the Melissa Bradley Medical Fund. Not only is Melissa undergoing treatment for aggressive cancer, she is unemployed. She needs our help! There is also an e-book anthology to raise money. Click on the badge in my sidebar for this one.

Bohemian Rhapsody (a little bit of what you fancy does you good...)

Hello there!

I know you've missed me on the blogs (((laughs uproariously))) so I thought I'd let you know what a great Easter Holiday I'm having. No school for two weeks, so I'm up at the beach catching up with teacher friends, visiting family and beginning remodelling works on the beach house with the idea of moving back up from the city next year.

So, the bohemian life--in between cyclone watching a la Cyclone Ita, coffee and wine, and cooking and eating some amazing meals like Pork in Cider (thanks Manu Feildel, French chef turned Australian celebrity chef after living here for 20 years and hosting a fabulous cooking show My Kitchen Rules) I've been wielding a paint brush and checking out interior design shops. Peregian (Aboriginal word for emu) Beach is well equipped. For a small village of about 3,000 people it's got everything--great beaches, great surf, great shops, great people...

And as much as I've wanted to blog, there just never seemed to be the time. But most of you have been frantic with the A - Z, so I feel a little guilty for choosing to live real life over the virtual life for a couple of weeks, but just a little. I do a runaround every so often, and the posts I've visited are high quality.

I haven't managed to get much writing done, but I always find time to read late at night. Picked up Sebastian Faulks' Faulks on Fiction (the Village also has a fabulous book shop!) which is wonderful. Love his chapter on Mr Darcy especially. Faulks says reading such books as Pride and Prejudice 'made me think literature was the most important thing on earth.' 

Faulks expresses how readers relate to books:

'I felt myself unaccountably eager that Elizabeth Bennet should be united with Mr Darcy; Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) seemed to express almost everything I had incoherently felt; and when at the end of David Copperfield, the hero turned rhetorically to the woman he loved, 'O Agnes, O my soul!', I found I was making strange snorting noises. These were caused by the fact that I was sobbing but trying to keep my eyes open so that I could read the sentences.' 

Oh yeah Sebastian Faulks! I know where you're coming from!

So as well as reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins (post-war intellectuals in Paris) I've been flipping between e-books. Reading several at the same time--Roland Yeoman's Death in the House of Life, Whiskey Sour Noir by Mickey J Corrigan, and the latest, The Paris Time Capsule by Ella Carey. I will be interviewing Ella on this blog in early May, so impressed am I by what I think is her first novel.

So lovely people, keep enjoying your life of frenzy. I'm going to enjoy this last week of holidays before jumping back on the treadmill of teaching and writing that is my life. 

So I wish you could join me for an iced coffee at Baked Poet's cafe which makes the best coffee I've ever tasted and I've tasted A LOT OF COFFEE!! 

I'll be back with a funny little story next week for the Write...Edit...Publish April challenge. Decided to go ahead even though it was A - Z month. You're welcome to join us if you have a story, poem, photograph/s or whatever that would suit the April Fool prompt. More details on the WEP blog. You can sign up right here in my sidebar.

 

Check out Life on the Muskoka River for my Letter from a friend - all about the Australian beach culture...

My good Canadian blogger friend, Cathy Oliffe-Webster of Life on the Muskoka River is doing a great series: Letter From a Friend so we can learn more about our blogger friends - where they come from, what they value, where they write, that sort  of thing. If you'd like to read my letter to Cathy, go here. You might especially like it if you're snowed under at the moment!

Here's a taste:

Beautiful, laid-back Peregian Beach.

Brisbane is now my home

You know what they say - home is where the heart is - and no matter where you are it is good to feel at home. Now I've moved from the very beautiful Peregian Beach to Brisbane, only a 160 km trip, yet another world. My view from my desk at Peregian was of the Pacific Ocean. I could see surfers, whales in season, and kiteboarders and walkers. My view from my desk in Brisbane couldn't be more different - I can see my kitchen! Wow! So really I have no distractions, I should be able to write and write and write! Here's to anything that'll keep me out of the kitchen!!! I even have a bed behind me, hmmm, feeling a bit tired????

THERE'S ONLY ONE NOOSA

Another beautiful autumn day, arguably the best season in Australia. Sky clear blue, a slight nip in the air, temperature mild. From my desk I can see the Pacific Ocean gently lapping the golden sands of Peregian Beach, lucky me. Peregian Beach is a little European-styled village an ocean drive away from Noosa, the jewel of Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

Noosa has become a mecca for foodies and I'm looking forward to the Settler's Cove Noosa Food and Wine Festival next weekend, May 1, 2 and 3. Famous chefs come from all over to ply their trade, such as Tetsuya of the No 1 Japanese restaurant Tetsuya's. People will be excitedly trying all the food and wine and having a great time.

That's what I like about Noosa. It has so much natural beauty which is reason enough to visit, but there is always a festival, a sporting event, an arty event to swell its numbers. The population is capped at 50,000, but on these weekends you can hardly move.

Hope this perfect weather holds. Our Queensland saying: 'Beautiful one day, perfect the next' is sure to apply.