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Ariel rehearses at Armstrong Studios in 1973 (David Porter)

Mike's Pith & Wind - Momentum
I was asked recently was there anything in my musical career that I regretted. I replied that there wasn’t too much I regretted actually, but there were perhaps a couple of opportunities missed along the way that I put down to a lack of vision on my part. I’ve always been very good at missing the very obvious, right down to not understanding that you went to school to learn things - I thought that you went to school to show off how much you knew. This defect meant I didn’t ask the vital questions when I didn’t understand because, by my own definition, it would show that I’d failed.
Similarly I failed to grasp the big picture in school sports. I was all style and grace when it came to taking my guard at the wicket, but if that hard-as-hell cricket ball came at me at more than a modest trickle I didn’t get my bat anywhere near it – but it surely left its mark on me. I took up tennis as my summer sport.
Rugby was the same. It must be said that I was a very good defender, but defending is only half of it and I didn’t have the same instinctive appreciation of the game as my compatriots. I persevered for a few years, but I was never going to get past looking promising in the colts and so I switched to basketball.
Life’s challenges were clearly a mystery to me and they remained so even after I left school to go to Art School. Everybody now knows that Art School’s the standard route taken by aspiring rock musicians, but at that stage I had no particular musical ambitions and.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - A not-so-hot NYE
It is unquestionably hot, undeniably very hot, incontrovertibly boiling. Being fifty metres from the sea I intermittently lower myself into the chilly waters of Bass Strait amongst the crowds of pale, porcine and tattooed exemplars of the human race trying to lower their core temperature. After a while you might consider the sea almost pleasurable but I suspect that a frozen hell is more preferable to spontaneous combustion. I swim in a pootling manner wondering if our house, a hundred kilometres away, perched pensively amongst the gum trees, is burning down: two other houses have stood where our house uncertainly stands and both have been burnt down on days not dissimilar to this.
It is too hot to turn a computer on. The original draft was written on paper desiccating and turning brittle under the pen like Egyptian papyrus.
The cries of young children in the surf.. read more