I designed the first website for Financial Education Professionals in 2003, when it was a two-person operation run from a home office.

Nowadays, FEP has an office just off Circular Quay in Sydney, with a permanent staff of seven and a team of part-time financial trainers working throughout Australia and South East Asia. And a new website.

As you can imagine, it continues to be a privilege to have a client for long enough to work through several site redesigns – and I’ve written about that before, here and here – but it’s also gratifying to think that my work on the FEP web presence has contributed to their success and ongoing expansion.

For the latest site redesign, I stayed with WordPress as the content management system but took the opportunity to work with a theme called Absolum, which I have previously admired but never used.

I’d recommend Absolum to anyone who wants a robust, flexible theme that will withstand a fair bit of customisation and still look great in all modern browsers. It uses the plain  HTML doctype with divs, and provides a facility to add custom styling – although I still found myself editing style.css directly, and the php files, for that matter.

As well as the usual Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress FireWall (version 2) plug-ins, I installed Contact Form 7 as it powers the Contact Form 7 Widget option to easily customise and place a contact form in a sidebar, and NewsTicker Aink for a scrolling display of training courses, again allowing an adequate amount of easy styling.

I used Typekit to display Pragmatica font for the site title.

For the record, I’m not bothered that Internet Explorer won’t display the text-shadow used on the site title and elsewhere. It limits but doesn’t spoil the intended visual effect and, importantly, it doesn’t undermine actionable information bering provided or affect the functionality of the site in general.

I know this because my Reading List is getting unfeasibly long, which means I haven’t had ‘spare’ time to read.

If you’re a web designer or developer and you’re up for some self-directed professional development reading, the following list should prove fruitful.

Title: HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World
Author: Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris & Estelle Weyl
Publisher: SitePoint
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/htmlcss1/

Title: Adaptive Web Design
Author: Aaron Gustafson
Publisher: Easy Readers
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://easy-readers.net/

Title: The Elements of Content Strategy
Author: Erin Kissane
Publisher: A Book Apart
Publication date: March 2011
Link: http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy

Title: The Smashing Book #2
Author: Various, via Smashing Magazine
Publisher: Smashing Media
Publication date: February 2011
Link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/01/smashing-book-2/

Title: 24 Ways Annual 2010
Author: Edited by Drew McLennan & Brian Suda
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: January 2011
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/the-24-ways-2010-annual/

Title: Hardboiled Web Design
Author: Andy Clarke
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: October 2010
Link: http://hardboiledwebdesign.com

Title: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web
Author: Mark Boulton
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: February 2009
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide-designing-for-the-web

Title: Weaving the Web
Author: Tim Berners-Lee
Publisher: Orion Business
Publication date: November 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html

Elisabeth is an essayist and reviewer who has just published her first novel, Those Who Come After.

The book is based on and extrapolated from Elisabeth’s own experiences, which she previously covered in an essay that won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007.

It might sound like overkill – writing a novel based on your own essay about your own upbringing – but Elisabeth’s is quite a story.

The following extract is from another essay of hers, Missing from my own life, published in 2008.

My full name is Elisabeth Miriam Esther de Rijke-Nassau. I am a medieval dinosaur. When I die, a DNA coiling back to Charlemagne will be declared extinct. In 2010 others who claim a more indirect descent from Charlemagne will gather in a place called Vianden, in Luxemburg, to celebrate one thousand years of identity as the Nassaus. Vianden, a castle in the air, was abandoned in the seventeenth century but reconstructed in the 1960s. It is where my ancestors first established their identities as warlords, dukes and princes. Now it is a tourist site.

The Nassaus led the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spanish in a war that lasted the worst part of eighty years, ending in 1588. A century later, another Nassau, William of Oranje-Nassau, became king of England. At the Battle of the Boyne he defeated his father-in-law, James II, the last Catholic king of the English. Among William’s legacies was a divided Ireland and the wearing of the Orange in support of the Protestant cause.

I was born on a freezing day in January 1947 in a place called Middelburg, on the island of Walcheren, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Middelburg, or Middelbroch as it was known in the Middle Ages, was founded in the twelfth century by Elisabeth Kunigunda, daughter of the king of Thuringia and wife of Wolfert of Nassau. My grandfather, who had many titles but preferred to be known as ‘The Lord of the Islands’, registered my birth the same day. As if he knew I would be the dynasty’s full stop, he added to my birth certificate the title ‘The Lady of the Islands’. The matter of titles is a minefield of arcane conundrums. Only someone born into the family can be known as the Lord of the Islands. As I come from an unbroken male line, there had never been a ‘Lady’ before.

A few days after my birth, I was decked out in eighteenth century lace in preparation for my baptism. The tradition of the Calvinist sect I was born into dictates that one of the godparents should carry the child to church. My godfather, Prince Bernhard, the German-born son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina – a war hero like my father, who was his close friend – emerged from my grandparents’ house, took one look at the snow and ice in the street and removed his army greatcoat. I was carried to my baptism wrapped in the same coat that Prince Bernhard had worn when he accepted the German surrender at Wageningen.

This should tell you two things: Elisabeth has quite a story to tell, and the telling of it plays a large part in her life.

I suppose this is all the more pertinent for me, because I’m Dutch-born myself. It certainly never occurred to me that when I sang the words of the Dutch national anthem as a child that I would later build a website for a descendant of the king mentioned in the song’s opening lyric.

As an immigrant, there is a further level of interest for me in Elisabeth’s story, in that it is very different to my own. My working class parents emigrated to Australia with the specific aim of providing greater educational, social and career opportunities than might have been available in The Netherlands. The Holdsworth family had very different reasons for emigrating and lived in very different circumstances.

The website itself is not a complex one, but that didn’t make it any easier to create. I think quite a few designers are like me and find sites with lots of content rather easier to build than those that only have a few pages. On a small site, every page seems to carry greater value.

In this case, I have probably ended up placing more emphasis on style, look and feel than I might normally. And there is also a kind of freedom in that.

By the way, the castle in the background of each page is the one Elisabeth refers to in the excerpt above. The presence of this edifice is intended to serve as a visual metaphor for the looming sense of historical imperative that pervades Elisabeth’s writing.

One way I have of showing this is to provide pro bono web services to deserving clients.

I consider myself fortunate that this can range from websites for local community groups with which I’m involved, like scouts, soccer and nippers, through to a couple of websites for Helen Caldicott, probably the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner and an Australian, to boot.

I had been planning to migrate Dr Caldicott’s site from a static site to WordPress in a fairly leisurely fashion when it suddenly became important to get this done pronto.

What happened was, of course, events in Japan where natural disasters had highly deleterious effect on the Fukushima nuclear power stations. Naturally, this made many people want to re-examine the words of those who have warned of such dangers for many years. Dr Caldicott was instantly in high demand for comment and analysis and people flocked to her website for background information and news updates.

When I say “flocked”, I mean traffic went from 25 visitors a day to 1,000, where it still hovers. Fortunately, the hosting account I have with Crucial Paradigm was able to handle this with ease but it did mean that I had to fast-track the site upgrade.

As a result I didn’t re-design the site very much at all, just moved it to WordPress and set up a few things to take advantage of what plugins can do for a site.

There’s a fair bit of work to do yet, but I think everything’s working pretty well.

This means, of course, I will have to weave some similar magic for Dr Caldicott’s other website I host, People for a Nuclear-Free Australia.

At least it’s for a good cause.

The first was a passing comment made by a person I admire greatly, Miles Burke, who has graduated from being a web design freelancer to a full-on entrepreneur, businessman and model of success in the web industry in remarkably few years.

Miles was a guest on the 100th podcast by the SitePoint panel, an aural magazine that canvasses what’s interesting and important in web development. The 100th podcast was live, with vision, and featured Australian and international guests who have been pivotal in the web world over the past few years. That comfortably includes Miles, who I also consider a personal friend.

Asked whether it was still possible for someone to find success as a web freelancer, Miles said it was probably not – or at least it was much harder – because the indsutry had grown to support specialisation to such a degree that being a jack-of-all-trades freelancer might now be untenable. As a comment, it was off the cuff and on the spot, but I suspect it is a commonly held belief.

I have to disagree.

In my opinion, the market has grown with the industry – in fact the industry of web professionals has hardly kept up with the expansion of the market for web services – creating market segments that include one of customers who prefer and seek out a single point of contact who can meet all their web needs. This could be a project manager for a small or large web agency of some sort, but it could also be the sole trader who specialises only in understanding and meeting his or her clients’ every possible need.

Personalised service and customised products based on an intimate understanding of the client’s business needs and aspirations is actually easier to deliver when you don’t have to explain it to several staff members or send it through a process of departmental approvals.

As I built my business, I made two conscious decisions. The first was that when my web design clients asked me about domain name registration, web hosting, print design, logo design, copy writing, email newsletters or implementing the right ecommerce options, I chose to say “Yes, I can do that for you”. Sometimes I had to buy in a product or some expertise, most times I had to knuckle down and learn something new. Each time, I made sure I delivered at least what my client wanted and often just that little bit more than they were expecting.

The second decision I made was to build every web site so that my client could run it themselves, either using an HTML editing suite like Dreamweaver or a dynamic content management system like WordPress. You know what’s coming next. Sure enough, as soon as I delivered the site, two out three clients would say, “Great! Can you run it for me?” So they pay me a fee, a retainer of sorts, to manage their content, tweak a page here and there and deal with any issues that may come up.

Not only does this, over time and with a growing stable of clients, add up to a tidy, steady income, but when the time comes for a complete redesign because my client’s business has grown or just becuase they want a new look, I’m there in the box seat. They know they can trust me, they know I understand their business and they know I deliver good product. And, because of my first decision, I’m the one hosting the website and renewing their domain names for them, so there’s no pain for my clients.

This approach also ties in to the second item that made me think about my business today.

Ross Honeywill is an extremely astute observer and analyst of business practices. He has come up with ways of understanding how cosumers behave that have radically changed the way his clients have operated, to their great benefit. He published an article today on his personal website about how Mark Rubbo, owner of Readings Books and Music, fought off an incursion into his Melbourne market by the multinational corporate giant Borders.

Readings is no minnow, of course. Rubbo has, as Ross puts it, “built Australia’s biggest independent book and music group one small step at a time by honouring the local preferences and diverse character of each new neighbourhood.”

In the end, it was Rubbo’s commitment to his Carlton community that engendered a commitment in return from his customers, a willingness to pay full price at Readings rather than half price at the new store across the road. Borders made a few bad public calls about why they had opened directly opposite an independent bookseller, Rubbo invested in an even more personalised, intimate approach than before and a resolve emerged in the book-loving, music-loving, independence-loving local community to support Rubbo.

The bit where a customer hands Rubbo a crumpled note saying “Livres sans Frontieres” (Books without Borders) made me think of nothing so much as Arlo Guthrie’s words in Alice’s Restaurant: “And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? And friends they may think it’s a movement. And that’s what it is.”

When I passed around the link to Honeywill’s article a friend responded, “Nice read, but I find it hard to believe so many people will pay full price for Harry Potter when it is half price across the street.” And that’s true, it is hard to believe.

Then again, it’s hard for me to believe that people will seek me out to design their web sites, not get put off by the rates I charge, pay me more to look after their sites and then pay me still more to redesign them over time.

It’s hard for them to believe the difference a well thought out, well constructed and well designed web site can make to their business.

Frankly, even I find it hard to believe how interested I get in what people do and how enthused I become at the prospect of building a web presence that will help them do it.

Ross Honeywill is right. “Loyalty does not come in the shape of a discount card or coupon. Loyalty … comes from believing in something wonderful and being thought wonderful in return.”

And Miles Burke is wrong. There is ample room in the web industry for freelancers who lovingly and painstakingly craft unique web sites that meet their clients’ needs, further their ambitions and exceed their expectations.

That it is classified as both Reference and Humour gives you some idea of its approach. It is always interesting, often surprising and sometimes very funny.

It does carry, however, a very considerable oversight.

The author, Simon Garfield, is a British journalist and the author of 11 other books, including a Somerset Maugham Award-winning study of Aids in Britain called The End of Innocence.

He writes for The Observer and makes various articles available at his website. He also provides extracts from his books but, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t tell you much about himself at all, although you can download a photo of him.

Anyway, there is a great deal to like about Just My Type. From Gutenberg (the inventor of movable type printing) to Luc(as) de Groot (the designer of Calibri, Microsoft’s default font of choice), Garfield profiles the people behind the fonts we have come to use in print and on the web. He describes the ways in which some of the most famous – and obscure – fonts came into being, and he astutely examines the circumstances which made some successful and others less so: technological advances, social mores, language developments and the roles of politics, religion, advertising and art.

This is complex territory, but Garfield maintains a light touch and an open mind: rather necessary when you look at the lives of some of the people involved.

I have no hesitation in recommending this as an entertaining, diverting and highly informative read.

So, what is the oversight to which I referred earlier?

Well, despite being very clear about how fonts have become vitally important to the web and acknowledging the role that the web now plays in generating new fonts and reviving old ones, and despite showing great awareness of the sometimes difficult circumstances in which font designers ply their trade, Garfield makes no mention of the single most frustrating aspect of font selection and management for web designers, which is the limited control they have over which fonts can actually be displayed on web sites.

As they cannot be sure which fonts a site visitor might have installed on their computer, designers have had to implement a font-stack (at least until the recent advent of hosted fonts and the like). This meant we had to include a line of code in our style sheets that asked a browser to display, for example, Verdana or if the user didn’t have Verdana then Arial or, if the user didn’t have Arial then Helvetica, or at last resort any sans serif font that might be installed.

Herein lies a prime example of the difference between designing for the web and designing for print. Those pixel-perfect type models go out the window in a world defined and limited by browser defaults and user selections.

That such a detailed history of fonts as Just My Type does not even refer to this development, which fundamentally changes the role of the font designer and takes control away from them, seems to me entirely inexplicable.

However, even with that caveat, I still recommend the book: it is guaranteed to make you look twice at the fonts around you in your day to day life.

Most of the time, it’s a straightforward task to work out what the person wants from their website.

Often, it involves digging into the client’s background, achievements, skills, plans and aspirations in order to properly understand them and their product or service and frame a web presence that will do them justice.

Sometimes, as I have just recently found out, that process can take me a year. Step forward, Professor Iain McCalman.

To say Iain is an over-achiever is an understatement.

Just to give you an idea, his CV runs to 16 pages, including 14 books he has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited; 46 articles in books or refereed journals (which includes publications such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography, English Historical Review, American Guide to Historical Sources and Dictionary of Literary Biography), another 16 articles in non-refereed journals and the like (New York Times, The Australian, Cosmos, History Magazine, etc); 51 papers delivered at international conferences and seminars; 34 public lectures delivered at symposiums and festivals; 10 international conferences he co-convened; the four international workshops for professionals he has conducted; and the 17 occasions on which has acted as consultant to international art and msueum exhibitions and documentary films and television series.

Then there are the 34 occasions of professional service on councils, boards and committees, 19 of university service and eight of government service.

He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and Adjunct Professor at ANU. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and has held Visiting Research Fellowships in Britain and the US, including at All Souls, Oxford and as a Mellon Visiting Professor at Californian University of Technology, Pasadena.

He is, of course, a teacher – supervising an average of four PhD students a year plus a number of Masters and Honours students, and was awarded the Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University in 1994. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to history and the humanities.

Iain’s is by no means a dry, academic renown.

His book Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution (2009) was published in separate editions by Penguin in Australia, Simon and Schuster in the UK and WW Norton in the US. It was favourably reviewed by, among others, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Kirkus Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement, the Guardian, and the Australian Literary Review.

It also attracted glowing reviews from major Darwinist scholars such as Janet Browne (Harvard), Harriet Ritvo (Harvard) and Stephen Rose (University of London). An international conference in its honour, Darwin Across the Disciplines was held at Duke University in November 2009. The book was shortlisted for seven Australian literary awards, including the Age Book of the Year and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction.

It was the basis of exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum of Australia and at the Macleay Museum, a Film Australia website and a three-part TV series, Darwin’s Brave New World, shown in Australia, Canada, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Iain’s literary agent decided it was high time he had a website of his own, and sent Iain to me.

I admit I was daunted – by the task, not the man, I should add: Iain is a highly personable and engaging chap, very easy to spend time with – and I admit I dithered and dallied with a range of high falutin’  ideas, before coming back (eventually) to a relatively simple structure that just aimed to make his extraordinary career thus far navigable to the web visitor, and offered scope to include whatever the next chapters of his life may hold.

There is still much work to do in including all the possible content and interlinking it to accommodate as many paths of interest to the visitor as possible, but I am mightily relieved that I have at last been able to launch the site, and that my client is delighted with it.

Phew!

In October last year, Steven Clark – who is not only wise in the ways of the web and in the ways of business but is Tasmanian and therefore infallible – alerted me to the fact that SitePoint had a vacancy for a Tech Editor.

Now, I have been a fan of this publisher of books and online resources relating to web design and development for many years. I wrote admiringly about them back in 2006 and have purchased some two dozen of their print titles over the years.

What I have gleaned from SitePoint books has contributed significantly to the small but meaningful successes I have achieved in the web industry so far. I rank them alongside the Web Directions conferences as my main avenue of ongoing professional development.

So when the opportunity came along to work with them, I thought I’d better give it a go. I believe you can learn a great deal by working with people you admire and who inspire you. I must have done something right because what started as a bit of casual Tech Editing has evolved into recently acquiring the title of Managing Editor, Online Content.

This does not mean I have given up being a web designer. In fact, my part-time work at SitePoints fits hand-in-glove with my own business, as does my continuing involvement with WIPA, the Web Industry Professional Association, of which I am currently and proudly the President.

Not only will I continue to manage and expand the web presence of my stable of long term web clients, which includes people like Anne Summers, Helen Caldicott, Julie McCrossin, Wendy McCarthy, Andrew Buchanan, Peter Wall and Caroline Baum, as well as a hatful of other authors, designers, musicians, theatre performers and broadcasters and the odd financial trainer, school, photographer, winemaker, film-maker, management consultant and a bunch of non-profit organisations – I will continue to take on more work as and when I can fit it in.

Currently, I’m working on two very exciting projects for a rather extraordinary academic and a highly gifted graphic designer, both Australian and both world beaters.

No way am I giving all that up.

So, if you’re interested in writing for one of the world’s leading providers of resources for web professionals: articles, courses, ebooks or print books, please do let me know. Equally, if you’re looking for a web designer and developer to single handedly create an outstanding and effective web presence for you that will grow over time to accommodate your own success, please also get in contact.

I’m glad that’s cleared up.

The main reason for the trip was to allow Hazel and I to go and see The Giacomo Variations, thanks to Christmas present tickets from Hazel’s sister Aileen, an experience I wrote about here.

I also had the opportunity to catch up with a little slice of Sydney history that is very special to me.

We had the kids with us so we also did some fun things with them. We spent a few hours at Sydney Wildlife World, which is an extraordinary experience in itself but was even further enhanced by having enormous LEGO models sprinkled throughout. The whole place is quite wonderful, with sympathetic, sensitive and very educational displays of Australian wildlife from ants to Rex the 5 metre saltwater crocodile (very impressive, as is his knowledgeable and thoroughly charming young keeper). Who knew that the cassowary is a keystone species? And, of course, Cormac and Augusta were thoroughly tickled by the giant LEGO displays built from tens of thousands of the same colourful bricks they play with at home.

We also had a ball at Luna Park, took the ferry back to Circular Quay the long way round the harbour and went out to dinner at Bill & Toni’s with friends. I even managed to squeeze in  a Sydney Festival talk by Larrikin Records and Folkways founder Warren Faheycalled Postcode 2011: The Good Old Bad Old Days.

A special diversion that Hazel kept as a surprise was a visit to the installation by Architects of the Air on the Sydney Opera House forecourt called Mirazozo. This was a quite magical structure made of coloured panels of a translucent plastic material – a luminarium – through which you could walk while soothing music played. It’s perhaps best explained by the photos I posted on flickr.

However, while we had a bit of time to kill before entering Mirazozo, I took Cormac and Augie to see the statue called The Satyr, which sits just inside the main gate to the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain as you enter from the Opera House end.

The Satyr was first sculpted in clay by Frank Lynch (known as Guy) in 1924. He used his younger brother Joseph as the model, and at the time the result was variously praised as genius and damned as paganism.

Joe was himself an artist who sketched in black and white, well enough to have worked for Punch in Melbourne in 1925 where he met Kenneth Slessor before moving to Sydney to join Smith’s Weekly in 1926 as the youngest staff member. Joe was also a wild man, a bohemian with strong political views.

On 14 May 1927, Joe Lynch stepped, fell or jumped off the end of the Manly ferry as it crossed Sydney Harbour, not far from Fort Denison. He was certainly drunk, and reputedly fought off would-be rescuers. He was 30 years old.

Guy Lynch was naturally devastated at the death of his younger brother, described as a “looser and wilder version” of him, but he eventually went on to study, sculpt and exhibit in London, Paris and back in Sydney.  Also in 1927, Slessor became a writer at Smith’s Weekly, rising to Editor by 1935 and briefly Editor-in-Chief in 1939, when he resigned to take up a post as war correspondent.

1939 was also the year Slessor published the poem “Five Bells”, his elegy for Joe Lynch and one of the truly great Australian poems. To my mind, Slessor is the greatest poet Australia has yet produced.

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

Guy Lynch died in 1967, and in 1977 his widow Marjorie paid for The Satyr to be cast in bronze and its owners, The Art Gallery of NSW, allowed it to be placed in the Gardens, within easy reach of the Harbour’s “waves with diamond quills and combs of light, That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand“.

While we were there, a couple stopped to look at the statue. The man draped his hat on Joe’s horns and leaned on his shoulder while the woman took photos. I asked them if they knew the story behind the sculpture but they had just been drawn to its appearance.

When I told them, the man hoped he had not offended, but I assured them that no-one would have liked their antics more than Joe himself.

If you get the chance, stop and take a look at The Satyr. Look at the broadness of the grin, the relaxed and satisfied demeanour of one who had passion and talent to burn, died too young and inspired a marvellous poem.

Like Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy, this is part memoir and part autobiography and there is a considerable overlap in the chronology between the two works. Both authors are counted among Australia’s greatest songwriters, they have places and experiences in common and one or two supporting characters crop up in both books, yet the end results are very different creatures.

Walker’s book is a series of mood-filled vignettes, pictures in prose that describe feelings as much as events and people. Reading this, you won’t find out exactly when and where he went to school, how he came to first write a song or even just who was in his unnamed and eventually successful band, but you will gain an impression of the poetry in him that led to some truly great song lyrics.

What Walker does do extremely well is convey a sense of what it was like growing up in a NSW regional town, watching country life disintegrate, wrestling with the demons of academic potential, becoming absorbed in music, exploring various intoxicants, waking up in strange places, forming bonds with fellow travellers and ultimately coming to no great conclusions about who he is or where he’s going.

You know how I said Kelly’s book was really about me? Well, Walker’s book features the me that perhaps I’d just as soon not remember. I certainly recognise myself in the Sydney sections: taking way too many unsafe substances; hanging out at places like French’s, the Kardomah and the Manzil Room; subsisting on little money and even less good food; forming some pretty unhealthy relationships.

Shots has an undercurrent that isn’t quite bitterness, but it’s not very pleasant either. There’s a sense of relief at having survived at all, rather than pride or even pleasure at having achieved any kind of success.

There are certainly passages where Walker’s lyricism allows him to paint some exquisite pictures of life in Australia in the 60s and 70s, but there’s not a great deal of affection and not a lot of hope. There’s some devastatingly casual cruelty, some figures who fall by the wayside uncared for and a frequent sense of disaster narrowly averted.

I’d tentatively suggest that there’s also a bit of room for tighter editing. No-one wants to mess with a major songwriter’s impressionistic manipulation of English to achieve a desired literary effect but there are some word manglings in here that are either unintentional or misguided.

Nevertheless, I found Shots very hard to put down. Especially reading it late at night with a glass of whiskey nearby.

Shots should probably be required reading for teenagers craving life in a rock and roll band, more so than Paul Kelly’s book.

I should also mention that there is an almost unbearable poignancy in my having read this book in the week that Walker’s bandmate Steve Prestwich died. Cold Chisel’s album East stands tall for me as one the best records ever produced in Australia, and Flame Trees – words by Steve Prestwich, music by Don Walker – is one of my all time favourite songs by anyone, ever.

Where’s that whiskey?