In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere Storyteller Spinks

"We must take it upon ourselves a responsibility to improve the health of these habitats: that’s where the hard yakka comes into it. In some ways, the act of picking up rubbish from the beaches of the south-west is the perfect activity for connecting with the spirit of the place...It’s almost meditative."

In autumn, I joined a long-running marine rubbish clean-up project in south-west Tasmania. These are the reflections that came from ten days in that special part of the world: thoughts on ecology, history, ethics and change.

Follow @teamcleantas on Instagram to support the project.

"The nest of a pink robin is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Imagine, in the palm of your hand, a hollow bowl built of feathery moss and ice-blue lichen, stitched together with spiderwebs and stuffed with a fern’s light-brown fur."

Recorded as live performance from A Festival Called Panama 2024, this series of stories honours the feathered friends who share the forest with us.

A special thanks to sound engineer Henry Rippon, as well as everyone involved with Panama for having me.

"There are places you can go only in summer – over the high passes or down the long peninsulas. Up honey-coloured creeks that climb to craggy façades. Across meadows matted with colourful flowers."

Reading a book called 'The Last Summer', I find myself thinking about the way memories fuse with the phenomena of summer.

"There are other ways to look at it. You might say that as a body gets burnt, as it turns into wisps of smoke, the atoms of which a human is made get separated, wander off into the atmosphere, change form, and become rearranged so that they link up with other operations in the universe."

I'm living in a train carriage on the edge of the bush, on the verge of a bushfire season. Such circumstances elicit a lot of thoughts and stories about the nature of fire.

"Standing on the stump of an old eucalypt, glaring at the yellowy-grey of the forest and the fields, she let out an almighty scream. It echoed through the woods, off towards the new neighbourhoods, running up the avenues and out to the mountains that rose on the horizon."

The Youngtown Regional Reserve is a small patch of bush in the outer suburbs of Launceston. These stories are a personal and ecological study of this modest bit of country. There are tales of ghosts, games, love affairs and magpies. As it happens, so many yarns pass through even a simple little place like this.

The soundtrack is produced in collaboration with my good friend, the ever-creative Yyan Ng.

"The pathways broadened into promenades, and the irresistible route zigged and zagged through innumerable pedestrians, who made bottlenecks and bridges; I twisted my torso and stretched my lanky legs out to squeeze by them. "

I thought I should account for my travels in Venice. But I have only been there for one afternoon; they are mostly travels through my imagination.

A collaboration with Emily Sanzaro on harp.