All posts by Oak Web Design

WRITING

TIME BOMB

Time poverty is a problem for many Australian households and work is the main culprit. Australians start work young, and we are working more, and longer into old age. While maximising our productivity and enhancing our professional skills, we must also raise our children well, care for our aged, be involved in our community and shrink our carbon footprint – a footprint shaped by the patterns and habits of our work, social obligations and households. What is it costing Australians to try and do it all? And what is it costing our families and communities? Incisive and thought-provoking, Time Bomb throws light on poor urban planning, workplace laws and practices, care obligations and other issues that rob us of time and put our households under pressure. And it looks at how work affects our response to the greatest concern of our time – our environmental challenges. Link to publisher's web site
READING

HISTORY OF THE RAIN

BY NIALL WILLIAMS
Published by Bloomsbury, 2014
Review by Pip Williams

The words of Jane Austen, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and so many others, are woven like snail trails across the cover of this book. They are only visible when light strikes them in just the right way, so I didn’t notice them until I was about a hundred pages in and had found a sunny spot Continue reading

READING

WHAT DAYS ARE FOR

By Robert Dessaix
Published by Knopf, 2014
Review by Pip Williams

I need to preface this review with a bit of context. I recently sat among the greying crowd of Adelaide Writers’ Week enthralled, amused and occasionally titillated (in that delightful way heterosexual women can be when gay men tease them with sexual innuendo). Robert Dessaix was being interviewed, and he was in fine form. He had just Continue reading

READING

DEPT. OF SPECULATION

By Jenny Offill
Published by Granta, 2014
Review by Pip Williams
Speculators on the universe … are no better than madmen.
This quote, from Socrates, begins a story of an ordinary marriage within an ordinary life. But it is told in such an extraordinary way that it demands to be read to the end in one sitting. Of course, I have kids and I work and there are Continue reading