Drifting Notes

It’s Queenie’s eighty-fourth birthday. Buuuut, no trumpets this year, no cake collapsing under too many candles. It’s more gentle. Just a soft room, sunlight on her blanket, and my ukulele. We used to celebrate and roar like the world was ending, hats, laughter, three cakes for good measure. Now the party’s smaller, but maybe closer to the truth. We sang Down Under again and again until the words...

At the point where the Brisbane River divides, the water seems to hesitate, one arm drawn toward the port’s restless industry, the other curling inland, slow and green. From the mangrove-lined banks, the split looks like a question the river keeps asking itself. This reflection drifts through that moment of division, between motion and stillness, boardrooms and harbours, the fast and the quiet ver...

At first light in Nerang, the mountain bike trails are empty, there are just the gum trees, the squiggle of roots, and two old friends. Lisa runs in front, knowing every turn and fork. I follow, arms out like a child on a roller coaster, yelling “weeee” into the forest. This episode drifts through the joy of letting someone else lead, and the trust that comes from twenty-five years of friendship,...

Four bracelets in a cloth pouch - > blue, pink, green, grey. Passed from wrist to wrist, carrying a mother’s touch, a family’s pulse. In this episode, I share a small ritual my family and I have created with Queenie, as she moves through palliative care. The beads remind us how fragile and how strong a circle can be, stretching, holding, always one tug from breaking. This is my little story about...

This drifting note begins with a piece of hot pink cardboard. The kind meant for school science projects. Ours is taped to the wall of a hospice room, and it’s filling up with post-it notes, crooked, bright, and full of life. At my mamma’s bedside, we could spend hours looking back her years in Europe, tennis courts, work events, songs, ski slopes, marrying into a Papua New Guinean family. A film...

Grief feels like the loneliest thing in the world, until it doesn’t. In this episode, I share how the kindness of friends, spread across Berlin, London, Sydney, and home in Queensland, has lightened the weight of spending my days in palliative care with my mamma, Queenie. A table laid under twinkle lights, a mountain painted in the Dolomites, a ukulele practiced , a power puppy walk, wine at night...

There’s a reason we reach for hands, to steady a child learning to walk, to pull someone back from the pool’s edge, to high-five at a finish line, or squeeze tight at a wedding altar. This week, I’m holding my mamma’s hand as she recovers from surgery. The hospital beeps, the future is uncertain, but her hand in mine carries decades of memory. Science tells us that touch lowers stress and synchron...

The Mythen peaks in Switzerland don’t talk to each other. But they look like they’re listening, probably to the weather, or to a conversation glaciers started centuries ago. This weekend, I stayed in the valley between them with my friend of twenty years, Vero, and her rescue dog, Winston (a creature of calm judgement and suspiciously good timing). The rain had other plans for us, so we stretched,...

What happens when you find a field of sunflowers... and none of them are looking up? In this episode, I drift into a small discovery, a sea of bowed yellow heads that caught me mid-run and reminded me that even the brightest things don’t shine all the time. These weren’t the postcard-perfect, face-the-sun kind of sunflowers. They were something else. Tired, maybe. Or just taking a moment. Join me...

In this episode of Drifting Notes , I take you to Île Saint-Honorat , a small island off the coast of Cannes, home to pine trees, shrugging lizards, and monks who make olive oil that could change your outlook on life. I didn’t mean to run the whole island…It just… happened. Join me as I jog a complete loop (28 minutes, thank you very much), witness a boat-to-wine-glass dismount worthy of a slow cl...

Learning to wing foil in the kite-surf capital of the Mediterranean is equal parts exhilaration and slapstick. I look like like I am trying to put a tent up while on a trampoline. Teenagers fly past me in elegant silence. And still, I fall. And fly. And fall again. Buuuuuut in between, I discover something unexpected → you don’t lift to rise. You press down. This episode explores the strange, soar...

What does it mean to truly learn a country—not through guidebooks or Google, but through voice notes to friends? In this episode of Drifting Notes , I reflect on a slow, curious season in southern France, three months of coastal living, café confusions, comic legends I’d never heard of, and the quiet joy of learning a culture through people who call it home. From the mystery of café bowls to the c...

This episode drifts between the Côte d’Azur and the Sunshine Coast, between the cheese aisle and the boat galley, between the deeply ordinary and something that almost feels like magic. It’s a story about my Coles bag, bright red, bought fresh each year when I’m back in Australia, and how it’s become my crunchy companion through dozens of towns and hundreds of unfamiliar grocery stores. Every week...

In the centre of Bandol, in the south of France, stands a cast-iron fountain, green with age, framed by 150 café chairs, and crowned with three small angels. They don’t move. They don’t speak. But on this warm June day, I decided to imagine their lives. In this episode of Drifting Notes, I sit still long enough to give them names, personalities, and preoccupations. One loves watching chairs. One c...

In this quiet morning paddle near Cala Rustella on the Costa Brava, I found myself gliding over a sea garden. I saw shallow rocks bursting with mosses, algae, grasses, and small sea creatures, each clinging to life in brilliant, it was an overlapping chaos. This episode is a slow drift through that moment: above the surface, stillness, yet below, a gentle riot of marine life. I talk about the plea...

In this episode of Drifting Notes, I take you to Süßen, a small town in the Baden-Württemberg countryside, where I found myself with an hour to spare and nowhere in particular to be. Wandering into the village's Kulturzentrum—a timbered former home now serving as library, council hall, and quiet refuge—I slipped into a grey armchair and settled among strangers. Around me, a man read the newspaper,...

Some evenings linger longer than they’re supposed to. Not because of the time, but because of what happens in the quiet afterwards… when the dishes are done, the stories fade to stillness, and someone sings not to perform, but to feel something shift. This drifting note comes from a night in early spring, spent in the upstairs room of my friend Astrid’s house in Donzdorf. No concert. No audience....

In this episode, I share a quiet moment from a hotel lobby in Barcelona—one of those liminal workdays between meetings and flights, where the espresso is on a timer and the leather couch becomes a temporary lifeline. What unfolds is a story about presence, trust, and the kind of kindness that doesn’t announce itself. A woman I never spoke to watched my bag. That’s it. But also, somehow, it was eve...

I take you on an unexpected run—around the outer edges of Munich Airport. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t pretty. But somewhere between perimeter fences, vending machines, and the low hum of jet engines, I found something close to peace. Join me as I jog beside something built for departure, past clumps of frost-bitten grass and blooming dandelions, and into a quiet moment of clarity. This is a story...

This episode of Drifting Notes was recorded after a jog along the east coast of Spain, where storm clouds gathered and the scent of wild rosemary clung to the air. A crumbling rock face on the trail caught my attention—not because it was striking, but because it made me wonder >> What would it be like to read this? In this reflection, I explore the quiet poetry of geology—the ability to see deep t...

In this short episode, we step inside a small-town hardware store that still hums with the he past. From the click-click-fump of a manual pricing machine to a proudly embroidered name tag, this is a quiet ode to the shops—and shopkeepers—who still know their stock by heart and their customers by their needs. Not a megastore, but a haven of small quantities and big care. Listen in for a nostalgic r...

Somewhere between Malaga and Torrevieja, out where the land fades and the sea stretches into forever, a bee appeared on our boat. Not frantic, not lost — just quietly, stubbornly going about her work. In this episode of Drifting Notes , I tell the story of an unexpected companion, the strange beauty of persistence, and the way small lives cross our paths when we least expect them — asking nothing...

In this episode of Drifting Notes, we step into the quiet morning rhythm of Casa Felipe, a café in southern Spain shaped by the steady hand of its founder, Felipe—a former torero who now brings the discipline, ritual, and reverence of his earlier life into every corner of the café. Felipe doesn’t speak loudly, but he sees everything. From washing dishes to making the first coffee of the day, he ca...

Easter in southern Spain, a windy morning led us inside a traditional Spanish café—burgundy velvet chairs, silver-plate service, and long-time waiters who carry the day like ceremony. There, I met an elegant woman sitting alone. What began with a warm smile turned into a moving conversation about her children, her pride in a daughter who once sang her way to second place in Eurovision, and her dee...

In this first audio episode of Drifting Notes, I take you with me on a jog along the coast of Fuengirola in Andalusia, where the scent of olive wood smoke signals more than just lunchtime, it signals a ritual. We pause at the chiringuitos, those humble beach bars where fish is grilled on skewers over open flames shaped like boats. I reflect on the quiet artistry of the grillmasters, the rhythm of...