Stories from inside life’s big top.

Posts from the “tribute” Category

Radical Acts of Remembrance

Posted on January 3, 2020

A fantastic thing has come out of making From A Whisper To A Bang!   A slew of people have taken to visiting the grave of my great-uncle, Richard “Charles” Spencer, Private, 5218, AIF, (1899-1918). Generous strangers all, asking for nothing in return.   Something I never considered when I began making this podcast series about remembrance, three years ago with the welcome of 2020.   Richard’s final resting place is in the small CWGC cemetery of Spoilbank, a few kilometres south of Ypres in Belgium. I tell his story in Episode 03: ‘City As War Memorial’. Thousands of people in Australia and all over the world have listened to it.   Sad and astonishing as it is, it is a gateway into something…

Requiem for Hugh

Posted on June 21, 2017

I’ve been putting off writing this. Since last Friday. The day Hugh Waller left our world for another.   Hugh Walter John Waller. Born October 23, 1959. Died June 16, 2017.   Hugh was a friend from Bendigo, the regional centre in Australia where I lived before coming to Berlin.   I’d not long been in town. I’d seen Hugh around at art shows but we first ‘properly’ met at a group exhibition at Dudley House, a fundraiser Hugh had organised for the catastrophic floods that had recently swept through the region. (I soon learned such generosity was typical of his nature.)   We took to each other straight away, the professional turning social pretty quick – with Oliver too, my husband. Not long…