The original plan involved dinner with visiting friends on Friday night. But thanks to a Jetstar cancellation of their flight from the NSW North Coast, our dinner was postponed twenty four hours. I made a “don’t fly with Jetstar” resolution earlier this year, I told my friend. Too many cancelled flights, too many “rules”, and not enough care for the customers, in my view. A friend in Tasmania told me via email she loathed Jetstar for precisely those reasons. And besides, for most of the flights where I’d have to choose between Virgin and Jetstar, Virgin is generally about the same price, and offers a better service.
So yeah, the plan was to catch up with an old school friend (we’ve known each other since we were both thirteen), his partner, and another old school friend of ours for dinner. My school friend and his partner were coming to Sydney for a wedding. We thought about heading off to Nomad again, but the restaurant was booked out, with only late bookings an option. So instead, we decided on Baccomatto Osteria, an Italian restaurant on Riley Street, Surry Hills.
And what a good choice it was. The food was excellent and the waiter we had was brilliant. She was friendly, very knowledgeable and passionate about the food, and, as it turned out, has a NSW North Coast connection, via family in Mullumbimby. Though at times the restaurant was a little noisy, we really enjoyed it, and I would definitely go back there. Highly recommended.
Walking back to Surry Hills, we popped into Messina for the obligatory “Surry Hills gelato experience”, and enjoyed our ice-cream in the nearby park. And, as my friends are cheese-makers, we also popped in to take in what was on offer at the nearby Maloney’s Grocery store to see what was on offer. The night was capped off with a cup of tea. A terrific Saturday night with great friends and great food.
I met the owner of the recently reopened Mecca Cafe in Lismore and shared my family’s connection to the place. “My granny was a cook here, and my dad used to play in bands here,” I told him, recalling how it was a staple of the 1930s and 40s.
Even though those days were before my time, I still have fond memories of the cafe.
The Mecca had been closed for four years, and the devastating flood that hit Lismore a couple of years ago had caused significant damage, leaving the building empty. Many people wondered what would become of the space, but now, it’s finally back.
The Mecca has a rich history that stretches back to the heart of Lismore’s cafe culture. Established in 1933 by James Forrester and Cliff Gray, it quickly became a local landmark, celebrated for its unique “Art Moderne” style.
The cafe was a hub of activity and a true social institution, famous for its booths with individual jukeboxes—a detail that sparked a shared memory with another customer who came to see the reopening.
The owner and I had a great chat and discovered a serendipitous connection: he used to live in the same suburb as I do, at The Kirk, with Gretel aka “Madam Lash”, just around the corner from my house.
He also shared his own story of resilience, describing how he rebuilt his life after the flood. It was clear this cafe was a new, meaningful step for him.
While we spoke, other people were also coming in to see the revived institution, including memories of the jukeboxes!
The Mecca holds a special place in the hearts of Lismore residents, and it was heartening to see the smiles on everyone’s faces.
As I was talking with the owner, a thought crossed my mind: this would make a great story for the local ABC station, ABC North Coast. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I later found out that Bridie from the ABC had left a note under their door, expressing interest in doing a story. It gave me a great feeling to know that there’s so much community interest in seeing a beloved part of our town brought back to life.
I’m normally asleep before take-off. Within seconds of switching off my mobile phone, my head can normally be found bobbing from side to side, probably to the annoyance of the person sitting next to me. And there is always only one, as I have a preference for aisle seats. I don’t want to be the one who has to ask for permission to slide through on my way to the toilet. Instead, as the person who falls asleep, I’m generally the one who the permission is asked of.
But not today. I scored well in Airline Lotto or Airline Sudoko. I’m not sure what the call it: the process where I carefully select my seat on the basis I’m hoping to score three seats between two. You tend to go towards the back of the flight, as it seens people tend to more commonly book seats in rows closer to the front. You aim for those seats where someone has already chosen a window seat, as no one ever wants to choose a middle seat. Yes, these are the thoughts that go through my mind. There’s just me and one other bloke sharing three, while the rest of the plane to Melbourne is packed to the rafters.
Not that it really matters, I suppose, since I am an awesome sleeper. Friends joke about my ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can sleep on planes, on short bus trips, even when I’m with a friend and we’re lying on the couch together watching television, I can sometimes fall asleep. To my embarassment, I once slept through and missed a dinner invitation. My friends were worried and rang and sent messages, but I slept through. They teaase me about it all the time.
I thought I’d sleep all the way to Melbourne. Yes, I fell asleep before take-off. But after what I thought was a fairly decent nap I awoke, only to discover we were still on the tarmac. So, after a brief nap, I thought I’d take this time of internet silence for a few brief updates.
On the weekend I went to the new film about Erroll Flynn, “In Like Flynn”. As it was billed as a “pensioners screening” at George Street, I was imaginging something quite old fashioned. Instead, the movie is a modern action-packed adventure, telling the story of Flynn’s early life, before he went to Hollywood, when he was quite the adventurer, travelling the Papua New Guinea and Queensland. The film is quite violent, and there were times when I had to turn my ahead away, due to the violence. The film is also “quite sexy” with the lead actors providing a fair bit of “eye candy”. I quite enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it.
In Like Flynn
The other thing I’ve watched lately, and which I’d also recommend, is a Netflix documentary about the life of John Lennon. The focus for the film is Lennon’s time in New York City during the 1970s. Initially attracted to a quieter life (away from the celebrity he enjoyed in Britain), he and Yoko settled in Greenwich Village. I hadn’t realised how much there were attempts to extradite him, due to his anti-war activity. I also hadn’t realised he and Yoko had separated for a time. After a period of heavy drinking, they ended up together together, and he transformed himself into the “home dad” evident in the Double Fantasy albium. Threre’s an interesting reference to the number of times songs on the album use the word “well”, as a description of his sense of well-being. Listen to the song “Woman” and you’ll hear the word many, many times. It’s a really interesting film which I enjoyed very much.
Aside from these cinematic recommendastions, the last few weeks have involved lots and lots of work, and lots of regular catch-ups with friends. I particularly the treasure the catch-ups with my good friend who was diagnosed a few months ago with breast cancer. She’s been through a double-mastectomy and reconstruction, and she’s currently undergoing radiation therapy. Throughout, she’s had a terrific attitude of “fuck cancer”. She even has some ear-rings with that phrase on them. Yes, we talk about how she’s going with the cancer, but we also talk about “normal stuff”.
We caught up last week for dinner at The Paddington. Awesome food. Awesome company.
I’m in Melbourne for the next few days with work. I’ve also organised a catch-up on Thursday night with some friends from different parts of my life, who I think may really enjoy meeting each other. One is someone I’ve known since high school. After a number of years living in the Phillipines, he’s back living in Melbourne with the partner he met there. He loves a good chat, especially about politics, which he worked in for a number of years. Another is a friend I’ve known since university, and who is now living at Geelong. Then there’s the friend who I met many years ago while working in Wagga Wagga. Through a mutual connection, she’s also met and made a friendship with annother friend in Melbourne. They both work in photography and the arts, and through Facebook updates, I see them now catching up regularly. I think they’ll also enjoy meeting and talking about art with another friend who I only met physically about a year ago, but who I’ve been chatting online with since the days of Myspace!
As you travel through life you meet so many interesting people, and too often they are segmented into different and quite separate parts of your life – your high school days, your work colleagues, your hometown and family friends – so I’m quite excited at the prospect of half a dozen people from different parts of my life coming together and meeting each other.
And, thankfully, it’s not at my funeral!!
“How’s the weather?” I asked my friend Sue who has been in Melbourne for several days. “Sunny and 26”, she replied in a text. Clearly, I’ve brought the weather from Sydney down to Melbourne.
Not quite knowing what to expect, I signed up to do a “mapping exercise” of public spaces in Burwood, Sydney. The event was organised by the Physical Disability Council of NSW in conjunction with WheelEasy. While standard online resources like Google Maps can help people with a physical disability navigate, WheelEasy takes it a step further by crowd-sourcing information, empowering people with disabilities to update the maps themselves.
The platform was founded by Max Burt OAM, a prominent Australian disability advocate, entrepreneur, and the driving force behind the WheelEasy charity and web application. Max’s work focuses on improving accessibility information and shifting societal attitudes toward disability—efforts that earned him the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the 2025 Australia Day Honours List.
Before his advocacy work, Max had a fast-paced, highly successful career in the United Kingdom as an advertising executive. In late 1999, his life changed drastically when his car was hit side-on by an on-call fire engine. The collision left him with severe head injuries, partial paralysis on his left side, and significant speech, sight, and hearing impairments. Becoming a permanent wheelchair user meant completely rebuilding his life from scratch.
Driven by the sheer frustration of not knowing which venues he could easily access, Max created the WheelEasy Access Information web app. Often described as a “TripAdvisor for accessibility,” the mobile-friendly web app provides crowd-sourced information, reviews, and photos of accessible locations—ranging from cafes and cinemas to parks and beaches. The ultimate goal is to allow people with mobility needs, the elderly, and parents with prams to enjoy spontaneity when going out.
For our mapping day, a group of wheelchair users and people with limited mobility set out to review various locations around Burwood, including the train station, the library, the shopping centre, the cinema, and local parks. My specific task was to review two small reserves featuring children’s playground equipment. I was accompanied by Jose, a Master of Social Work student originally from Bangladesh who is currently studying here, and doing an internship with WheelEasy.
My Reviews
St Paul’s Close Reserve: The primary issue here is the lack of accessible pathways. Although there is a footpath on the opposite side of the road leading up to the park, there is no connecting path to get to the playground equipment, such as the swings and the slippery dip. Navigating this area in a manual wheelchair would likely be impossible. Even in a mobility scooter, the journey is difficult due to the highly uneven ground you have to cross just to reach the facilities.Jacket Reserve: This reserve is much better in many ways, though some accessibility issues remain. Coming down the street, there is a significant lip to navigate from the gutter onto the footpath, which required a long trip up the road just to find a spot where the lip was low enough to cross. While the footpath itself is fine and a nice path leads directly into the playground, the gate presents a major challenge. It is very difficult to open independently, and because it swings backward toward the user, you have to reverse just to get inside. Once you are through, however, it is a lovely reserve with beautiful trees and plenty of footpaths to travel on. It is the type of space where a child in a wheelchair, or a parent who uses one, could easily visit and enjoy a pleasant afternoon.
It was an incredible experience that forced me to see things from a perspective I might not have noticed before I became an amputee almost three years ago. I also had the chance to speak briefly on video during the day, which I look forward to featuring in an upcoming episode of my podcast.
INTERVIEW WITH MAX BURT OAM
When Max Burt moved to a beachside area north of Sydney in 2011, he discovered a glaring gap in accessibility information. It took him three years to realise the local beach had a mat rolled out for wheelchair access. “And that obviously wasn’t because it didn’t… It’s because it wasn’t promoted in any way whatsoever,” Burt explains. “There was no information.” After conducting an online survey, he found that “over nine in ten” wheelchair users faced similar issues finding reliable details. “It’s not rocket science,” he notes, “and information is really not that hard to gather together if you know what you’re looking for.”
Before WheelEasy, people with mobility needs struggled to find answers. “They normally don’t,” Burt says regarding where people find information. When they look at individual company websites, the details are often “hidden away on the back pages,” sometimes incorrect, incomplete, and there is “hardly ever any use of photos.”
This sparked Burt’s vision for WheelEasy “to become a forum where people… with needs would [share] information that makes a real difference in the quality of their lives.” By crowdsourcing real experiences, the platform provides accurate, community-driven data.
The initiative has grown significantly. “We’ve now done over three and a half thousand” sites in Sydney, Burt shares, adding that they are “nudging nine hundred in Canberra” and expanding into Melbourne, Newcastle, and the Central Coast. “The idea is to one day cover all of Australia.” Following a successful day in Burwood, Burt emphasizes that the goal is not just mapping locations, but to “get them excited about the idea so that they tell other people they know who might need something similar.”
You know you’re bored, or you know you’re desperate for something you read when you read junk mail from “City of Sydney”. It’s not as if it’s lacking, though, since I receive quite a few letters from “City Of Sydney” each week. But anyway, I picked up the brochure this morning about the 2007 Gardening Competition (May 21-June 27) and was inspired to read it. Well you know we boys do have to read in the toilet!
As I don’t have a garden myself, I decided to go for a walk down my favourite street, McElhone Place instead. It’s a great little street directly parallel to Fitzroy Street where the residents have banded together to ban cars and to decorate their former-slum-street with beautiful gardens. The result has been a physically beautiful street, and one which has a great sense of community pride.
Surry Hills, Sydney: It’s a great little street directly parallel to Fitzroy Street where the residents have banded together to ban cars and to decorate their former-slum-street with beautiful gardens. The result has been a physically beautiful street, and one which has a great sense of community pride.
“I really like your shirt”, a bloke told me as I stood outside Sydney’s “Hero Of Waterloo”. We had been sitting in a chilly area, and although shorts and t-shirts were fine for the earlier part of the day, I was beginning to feel the cold, and so I wandered out onto the street to enjoy the sunshine.
The t-shirt I was wearing was one I picked up in Sweden in 2008. It’s amazing the number of times the shirt has been a conversation opener, usually from a visiting Swede who looks a little shocked to see a t-shirt that isn’t necessarily the typical of those you pick up in Gamla Stan.
Swedish T-Shirt and Estonian Gay Badge
The bloke who came up to me for a chat was middle-aged Swedish bloke (he said he had a backpacker aged daughter) who moved to Sydney about six months ago, loving being here, and thinking he might like to stay for the longer-term. We had a fairly lengthy chat about life, the universe, Sydney and Stockholm until I began to feel guilty about having abandoned my friends.
Glenmore Hotel Rooftop Bar
“You were flirting with him”, my friends joked when I arrived back at the table. “It was in your body language. You’re blushing now”. they added. “Wedding ring?”, I was asked. My friends are such bastards :):)
It was a day of catching up with a broader group of friends, as we enjoyed the company of our friends visiting from overseas.
The day had started with lunch at The Glenmore Hotel which is, seriously, one of the best, most affordable places to take visitors from overseas. In the midst of some of the more expensive places around Circular Quay, the Glenmore enjoys good beer prices, good food prices, and spectacular views of the Opera House (though ours was disrupted by a visiting cruise ship). In contrast to the last time we visited The Glenmore as a group, they’ve had a major renovation to the hotel, and the place was packed. They’ve done a really good job and we enjoyed the renovation.
When the chilly winds got altogether to much, we sought indoor accommodation at the nearby Harbour View (our third pub of the day).
By about seven o’clock I was anxious to get home, do some washing and ironing for the week ahead, and relax on the couch. Entertaining people can be an exhausting business :)
There was further catching up today as Damo and I went to the Aroma Festival, briefly pausing for one of those great photographic moments you can experience in The Rocks. I mean, there’s nothing quite like having the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House in the background for a photograph is there? And there were plenty of opportunities for that, as we wandered around drinking coffee and enjoying delicious foods.
It was an odd start to the morning, though, as I’d spent about 15 minutes waiting for the bus to arrive at Surry Hills. Meanwhile, there were two older men (who looked like they could have been related) who had clearly spent the night drinking heavily. They were still drinking at the bus stop this morning as they carried on a very loud, angry, argument with each other about something or other. I’m not exactly sure about what they were discussing, as I’d donned my earphones and was leaning on the railing of the nearby ANZ Bank. Please don’t notice me, I thought to myself, I don’t want to get involved in your argument just by inadvertently looking over.
After about ten minutes or so, the 355 to Bondi Junction arrived, much to the relief of about half a dozen people similar to myself who were hoping to catch a bus, but not wanting to actually be anywhere near the bus stop. When the two men got up to catch the bus, I noticed a collective sigh of relief, although no one actually moved closer to the bus stop until we were sure they had the money for the bus, had bought their tickets, and the bus had moved away.
As I was close to arriving at Circular Quay, I gave Damo a call. “I’m in the queue, meet you here in five”, he told me. “I’m in the queue for Genovese Coffee, what would you like?”, he asked. Just a simple flat white, I replied.
Aroma Festival
And what a flat white it was… probably the best flat white I’ve had in quite some time. Far better than the coffees available at work, far better than those at the cafe around the corner, and far better than the one made for me most days by the surly-looking blonde guy.
We also tasted some chai (which I’d never had before), and feasted on some of those wonderful strawberries dipped in chocolate.
As the crowd thickened, we wandered back to Damo’s place for a very yummy-tasting lunch which consisted of homemade bread, homemade dolmades (made with spinach), homemade sweet potato gnocchi, and homemade lamb ragu. It was a terrific meal topped off with a bottle of Helm 2000 cabernet-merlot, as I recall, which was very tasty about half an hour after the bottle was opened. If I were to give Damo a restaurant review, I’d give him 7 thumbs and at least 1 hat.
After lunch, we thought of heading back to the festival for some chocolate and more coffee, but it was all a bit too crowded.
Feeling quite full and very rested, I came home, watched “Jesus Christ Superstar” and then had a brief afternoon nap.
And so now it’s Sunday night and the only immediate excitement ahead of me is tonight’s double eviction on “Big Brother” and some clothes washing for work this week.
