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Roland Fishman conducting a class at The Writers' Studio.
Unleashing Your Inner Writer
Words Anthony Maguire Photo Sheridan Nilsson
Do you have an urge to write a novel or screenplay but need a bit of support to get your creative juices flowing? It might be worth starting the journey by looking into a four-week course called Unlocking Creativity run by The Writers’ Studio in Bronte.
“The course takes people through a step-by-step creative process and is suitable for everyone from experienced writers to complete beginners,” founder Roland Fishman explains to The Beast.
“It will get you writing from the very first session and dramatically improve the quality of your writing and understanding of character development and story structure.”
The idea, says the veteran writer, is to throw away any preconceptions of writing being a painful process.
“Dorothy Parker once said ‘I hate writing, but I love having written.’ In other words, the act of writing creates a natural high that nourishes the writer’s spirit.”
For the Unlocking Creativity course and other courses run by the Studio, writers break into groups of three or four where they exchange ideas and give each other feedback.
“Everyone is their own harshest critic and that can stifle creativity. It helps when you share the journey with like-minded people,” Mr Fishman says.
Talking of journeys, Mr Fishman and his Writers’ Studio tutors get writers’ imaginations working by suggesting they write about something that will take them on an emotional journey they need to go on.
“We tell our writers, ‘Write about something that could change your life.’ It’s the best gift you can give yourself. Fiction isn’t about what happened, it’s about connecting with universal emotional truths.”
Once you’ve got that first draft in the can, it will be time for your second draft, followed by your third - yes, that’s how many times you should rework your novel or script. The Studio runs specific courses on writing successive drafts to make sure your story reaches its full potential.
“The biggest mistake many writers make is sending off work prematurely to agents and publishers or self-publishing without making sure it’s their best,” Mr Fishman says.
He has been writing professionally since 1980, when he joined the staff of the Australian Financial Review as a cadet journalist. A year later, he switched to the Sydney Morning Herald where he covered both general news and sport. A love of cricket sparked his first book, a biography of spin bowler Greg Matthews published in 1986, as well as his next work, Calypso Cricket, which hit the book stands in 1991. Earlier that year, Mr Fishman had accompanied the Australian cricket team on a tour of the West Indies. His latest book is a thriller, No Man’s Land. Its central protagonist, Russell Carter, has been compared to Lee Child’s hugely popular Jack Reacher. He is currently part way through a second Russell Carter novel.
Mr Fishman ran his first writers’ course in 1992 from a flat on Campbell Parade, Bondi. It was a success, and since then The Writers’ Studio has gone from strength to strength, with thousands of people going through the courses both live, in the roomy studio premises, a converted church hall in a quiet Bronte laneway and online. This year Mr Fishman and his life partner Kathleen Allen are celebrating the Studio’s 30th anniversary.
“The great gift of The Writers’ Studio is seeing the pleasure people receive from getting in touch with their imagination, receiving feedback, being part of a creative community and seeing their writing and stories come to life,” he says.
Do you love your garden?
Whether it’s a balcony garden, shared veggie patch, native bush or formal courtyard, Waverley Council’s Garden Awards want to recognise and share your creativity with the community.
To find out more about how to nominate, email connected@waverley.nsw.gov.au or visit our website: waverley.nsw.gov.au/gardenawards
PROMPT TREE SERVICES
is now recruiting...
We are a local tree lopping company located in Botany. We are currently looking for truck drivers and labourers to join the team, as well as a responsible receptionist to perform a variety of administrative and clerical tasks in our small but busy office. Truck drivers and labourers will receive full-time employment on above award rates, and are invited to commence work immediately.
The receptionist role is broad and varied and will encompass:
• Answering and directing phone calls to relevant staff and being the first point of contact • Scheduling appointments and quotes using scheduling software Tradify • Ordering and taking stock of office supplies • Filing and archive management • Excellent time management, organisational skills and the ability to prioritise • High work standards and attention to detail, with the ability to write clear and professional communications • Working autonomously • Hours will be 9-5pm, 5 days a week
Please call Jeff on 0422 259 419 or email your resumé to info@prompttreeservices.com.au
Nice spot for a park.
Independent Assessment Needed for 'Cancer Hill' Development
Words Anthony Maguire Photo Di Oxin
A recent public meeting about a big housing development on military land was dominated by concerns about contamination at the Randwick site.
The meeting was told soil at the 19.5 hectare site, on the northern side of Randwick Barracks, contained asbestos, dioxins and heavy metals. But the Department of Defence plans to remediate the land and build more than 1,000 units for defence personnel there.
Chaired by Kingsford Smith MP Matt Thistlethwaite, the meeting at Munda Street Community Centre featured presentations from Defence officials and other stakeholders, as well as an open mic for the many residents who wanted to ask questions. Almost 100 people attended the meeting and it went on for three hours.
Mr Thistlethwaite said the land contamination issue needed to be addressed through “an independent assessment to determine whether it’s safe for development.” Such a study should take place before further substantial plans for the development move forward.
At the end of the meeting, Mr Thistlethwaite talked to a community spokesperson, Anthony Ryan, about putting together a committee to represent local residents in discussions about the project. Later, Mr Ryan, a 69-year-old retired accountant who lives in Canberra Street, told The Beast that it was important that the NSW Environment Protection Authority carries out the assessment of contamination risks.
“We don’t want Defence doing it,” he said. “The way they’ve gone about this - drawing up detailed plans before it’s established the land can be made safe - does not fill us with confidence.”
Also at the meeting was Margaret Hogg, chairperson of environmental group Saving Sydney’s Trees.
“The area is badly contaminated and a higher than average proportion of the people living nearby have cancer,” she said. “In fact, nurses at Prince of Wales Hospital used to call the area ‘Cancer Hill’.”
“The project should be abandoned and the site given over to community parkland.”
North Bondi Flooding Risk from Golf Club Tree Removals
Words Anthony Maguire Photo Greg Norman
Local residents are concerned that a Royal Sydney Golf Club plan to chop down nearly 600 trees so its fairways can be widened could worsen the flooding problems on the other side of Old South Head Road in North Bondi.
A low-lying stretch of Warners Avenue, North Bondi, can become a mini-lake in heavy rain, much to the angst of residents. In response, Waverley Council recently passed an urgent resolution to investigate “the increased flood risk” that could result from the makeover at the world-renowned golf course.
As well as heightening the flood risk, removal of the trees will have “serious consequences upon our biodiversity, habitat and net zero emissions targets,” warned a report tabled before Council. The golf course would suffer “a 23 per cent loss of canopy equivalent to chopping down an entire urban forest.”
Waverley Councillors called for an independent hydraulic modelling survey and stakeholders are invited to share their concerns.
The floodplain.
War Memorial Hospital
Uniting War Memorial Hospital is a specialist aged rehabilitation facility, nestled conveniently in the suburb of Waverley, where we have been providing important healthcare services to the older Eastern Suburbs community since 1922. We are owned and operated by Uniting and part of South Eastern Sydney Local Health District. Surrounded by tranquil gardens, our unique mix of heritage and contemporary buildings contain clinical services including in-patient, out-patient, day centre and community care for our older population who are wanting to live their lives to the fullest. The hospital is actively seeking a permanent full-time (part-time will be considered) Maintenance & Grounds Officer, to provide direct assistance to our Maintenance Manager, in the day to day maintenance of our beautiful grounds and buildings. This position offers a variety of outdoor and indoor work, a role where you are proudly contributing to the upkeep of quality facilities and services on site.
We invite direct enquiries about the role to the WMH Maintenance Manager, Mr Paul Donnelly on 9369 0100. For further information, please refer to our advertisement:
careers.uniting.org/jobs/maintenance-grounds-officer-nsw-australia
For other clinical and non-clinical UWMH job opportunities, please refer to the Uniting Careers site:
careers.uniting.org/uniting-careers
Interested parties can also scan the Uniting Careers QR Code èèè
A scarce asset.
The King of Crypto Castle
Words and Photo Anthony Maguire
Eastern Beaches internet wunderkind Fred Schebesta is worth $250 million, but he skimps in one department - the purchase and repair of socks. He greets me in the reception area of his city offices. The room glows with muted blue light. There are no magazines or other printed material in this waiting room, just PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles, a pile of games discs and a 50-inch wall-mounted screen. Fred is garbed in all black casual clothes, from his back-to-front baseball cap down to his black socks - he isn’t wearing any shoes. He leads me into the open-plan office area and, walking behind him, I can’t help noticing a hole in the back heel section of his left sock, exposing an area of skin the size of a 20 cent piece.
He ushers me into a conference room where the walls are one big whiteboard, a mass of scrawlings and diagrams that mean nothing to me but could well be plans for the latest arm of web success story Finder, founded by 41-year-old Fred and former Sydney Grammar schoolmate Frank Restuccia. The site helps clients track down the best deals in a range of products, primarily financial ones like credit cards and insurance. It can also help you dip your toe into the turgid financial waters of cryptocurrency. Information on crypto exchanges and brokers has been built into the Finder app.
Cryptocurrency is a subject that makes Fred’s eyes light up with joy. He lives in a five-bedroom Coogee mansion that has been dubbed Crypto Castle because it was largely purchased with profits from Bitcoin trading.
“I love Bitcoin,” Fred enthuses. “It’s digital gold because it’s a scarce asset. There are only 21 million coins and not all have been mined yet.”
Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is another subject that excites Fred. NFTs are an offspring of the internet that started out with exclusive profile pics underwritten by unique identification codes and metadata. People use NFTs for their Twitter profiles and they are also big in the gaming world. Fred sees a range of broader applications.
“NFT is proof of ownership, it’s all about provenance,” he says. “It’s like a land title. NFTs and their underlying technology will soon become a massive part of our society.”
Fred compares cryptocurrency and NFTs to the internet and computer gaming in their infancy - “new and exciting.” As a nerdish teenager in the mid1990s, he spent countless hours playing Age of Empires II, a war strategy game. He started a computer gaming site that was a discussion board for Age of Empires II enthusiasts. Then one day, at the age of 19, a neighbour commissioned him to build an accounting software website. The job earned him $1,500 and his career as an internet entrepreneur got underway.
Finder was established in 2006 and has expanded into an international colossus with 300 employees, offices in seven countries around the globe and an annual revenue of over $100 million. Fred is in demand as a speaker and has written a book called Go Live: 10 Principles to Launch a Business Empire. He takes the financial pulse of his own empire each morning at around 5am when he reaches for the phone to check the markets before getting out of bed.
As our agreed one-hour interview time comes to an end, Fred becomes distracted. He has been an engaging and focused interview subject, but now he has produced his phone and is looking down into the screen.
I thank him for his time and he ushers me out through the blue twilight zone of the waiting room.
Not a bad pad.
Arguably Australia's coolest animal.
Do You Love Wombats?
Words Mars Oopial Photo Anna Culliton
Wombats are beautiful, intelligent creatures with incredible character and personality. They’re an Aussie icon whose digging is essential to soil health and our broader ecosystem. They’re also under threat from a European parasite called mange.
Wombats are the only creature in the world that dies from mange. The mange mite buries itself under the wombat’s skin, lays eggs and multiplies. Mange triggers an extreme itchiness and burning sensation that makes the wombat scratch non-stop and their long claws cause open wounds. These wounds often become horribly infected and the wombat becomes malnourished, severely dehydrated and eventually dies over a series of months.
The good news is that it can be treated. Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group cares for wombats in the Blue Mountains region and surrounds. Volunteers work weekly to administer Cydectin medication to wombats both directly and via a flap installed at the front of their burrows. The flap pours the medicine down their back as they pass through it. If the medication is administered once a week for fifteen weeks or more, the wombats will be rid of the mange for long periods of time.
But without medication, wombats will die. Foxes and other mammals spread mange when they enter burrows, and contrary to popular belief, wombats are actually highly social, so if one wombat gets mange, the whole population will get it. This is why the entire population is treated at each property we are called to.
We are a grassroots community group established after the recent devastating fires, and all of our ‘mange busters’ are volunteers! Our group is completely self-funded and runs on the ‘smell of an oily rag’ - if we could afford the oil.
Medication
Nine litres of the Cydectin medication costs around $1,000, and prices are increasing. Volunteers visit three properties per week, treating somewhere between 15-60 wombats at each property. While the medication works if treatment is continued for months, there is no way of knowing if the sickest wombat is the first one walking through the flap after the medication has been topped up. So, each flap must be topped up weekly for months on end.
These engineers of the wild are constantly extending and adding new entries to their burrow systems. Each new burrow requires a new flap device and more medication, and it can take up to four months to treat wombats with extreme mange.
Fauna Cameras
Fauna cameras capture the nocturnal and diurnal behaviours of wombats. This helps the group monitor the changing health of the wombat if they can’t be found. Camera footage also informs the future placement and maintenance of flaps.
Unfortunately, many of the existing fauna cameras were damaged by recent heavy rain and floods and need to be replaced. More properties are revealing more sick wombats, so more cameras are needed.
Water Pumps
Wombats are Aussies, but they’re not great swimmers. Torrential rain also flooded many burrows recently and these had to be drained with pumps. We currently have one very small pump, but with more heavy rain expected in the next few months, we will need to invest in at least one more.
In addition, volunteers travel from throughout the mountains, and even from Sydney, to properties not serviced by public transport and must spend money on fuel and the upkeep of their vehicles on the deteriorating roads.
You Can Help
Please donate to Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group by searching GoFundMe - ‘Help ‘STOP THE ROT’ in mangy Blue MT Wombats’. You can also check out Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group on Facebook and listen to our podcast ‘Why Wombats are Rotting to Death’ from the Voice of Real Australia on Apple Podcasts.
Shifty bugger.
Crime News
Words Gary Larson
Serial Con Artist Surfaces in the East
Kind-hearted staff from an Eastern Suburbs welfare group were taken in by a well-known con artist, Samantha Azzopardi.
Despite being 33, Azzopardi managed to convince staff at Bondi-based homeless charity Jewish House that she was a 14-year-old. Speaking in broken English with a French accent, she claimed she was the victim of sex trafficking. Police got involved and conducted a welfare check. They too were taken in by the identity Azzopardi had assumed - she has a small, slender build and was wearing a mask. After an officer became suspicious and took her fingerprints, her ruse was unraveled.
The ‘teen’ was exposed as a notorious offender with an international profile. Azzopardi first made headlines back in 2013 when she was found wandering a street in Dublin, Ireland. She told the same story about being a teenage sex trafficking victim. Since then, she has notched up 99 criminal convictions in her native Australia, mainly for fraud. She recently served a prison sentence for child stealing in Victoria, where she conned her way into a nannying job, then went AWOL with the two youngsters she was meant to be caring for. Now Azzopardi faces another conviction and more jail time for making false representations to police.
Audio Could Lead to Break in Double Murder Case
A tape of a phone call claiming responsibility for the murder of a Turkish diplomat and his bodyguard more than 40 years ago has been posted online by police.
The murders took place on 17 December 1980 in Portland Street, Dover Heights. Turkish consul Sarik Ariyak and his bodyguard Engin Sever were leaving the consular residence at 9.45am when two men approached and shot them. Mr Ariyak died at the scene and Mr Sever died a short time later in hospital. Meanwhile, a number of media outlets received phone calls claiming responsibility for the murders.
A woman with a distinctive accent and voice claimed responsibility in the name of the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. At least one of the calls was recorded and passed on to police.
A fresh investigation by the NSW Joint Counter Terrorism Team is hoping to throw light on the cold case by leveraging social media. The one minute recording has been posted on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. There’s a $1 million reward for information leading to a conviction.
Woman Survives Doorstep Stabbing
A woman who answered the door of her Dover Heights home was allegedly stabbed in the chest by a 46-year-old real estate agent, Matthew Ramsay.
A short time later, Ramsay’s Audi A5 was stopped by police on Campbell Parade, Bondi, and he was arrested at gunpoint. The Bellevue Hill resident faces a charge of wounding with intent to murder.
Police say Ramsay and his 45-year-old victim were known to each other. The mother of two suffered a single stab wound and was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital, which released her a couple of days later.
Female Teacher Allegedly Had Sex with Male Students
A former Maroubra teacher has been arrested and charged with historic sexual assaults on three students.
Helga Lam’s victims are said to have been three boys aged between 13 and 15. They were students at since-closed Maroubra Bay High School, where Lam was a teacher. The offences are said to have taken place between 1977 and 1980. Lam is now aged 67 and was arrested at her home in St Ives.
Bondi Man in Court for Cabbie Attack
Bondi recruitment specialist Alex Gotch faced court on an assault charge after punching a taxi driver.
The 39-year-old became embroiled in an argument with the driver after getting into the cab in the Sydney CBD. The cabbie stopped and refused to take him any further. Gotch punched him in the face.
Downing Centre Local Court heard the recruitment firm Gotch works for is a legal one and he has a law degree. He told police he’d consumed five drinks before getting into the cab.
The magistrate gave him an 18-month community corrections order, a condition of which is staying off the sauce for six months.
No Happy Meal for Sloshed Driver
Randwick builder James Mannix had an urge to get a takeaway from McDonald’s at around 3.30am one Sunday morning. However, he had spent the previous 15 hours drinking and his car journey to Maccas Kingsford did not go well. He had not driven far when he slammed into a parked car on Barker Street.
The law arrived and took him to Maroubra Police Station where he blew an alcohol reading of .206 - four times the legal limit.
In Waverley Court, 29-yearold Mannix was convicted of high range drink driving. The magistrate sentenced him to a 15-month community corrections order, seven months driving ban and $750 fine. Plus he has to stay off the booze for three months.
