Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter is a fictional character whose persona I adopted when I had the bright idea five years ago of starting a blog. My name is Maria Spackman and it’s time to come […]
The first kill is the hardest. It gets easier after that. Since my last filing from the Baxter backyard the itchy cow tree has been terminated with extreme prejudice. When we raised our flag at […]
The continuing adventures of my honorary aunt Joan ‘The Bone’ Byrne, my father’s cousin, who left Australia with us in 1967. The plan was to travel across Asia and Europe and on to England but […]
The kitchen at our flat in Macdonnell Road in Hong Kong backed on to a dank, rat-infested space, a convenient landing spot for rubbish hurled from the windows above. Mr Chan, the building manager, was […]
…The Bolshoi theatre serving whole meals in the foyer at interval… the Arts Theatre, home of Stanislavski, where I saw a play in Russian… the woman sitting next to me trying to translate it for […]
When the Royal Navy lowered its flag for the last time on Hong Kong island in 1993, commander-in-chief Governor Chris Patten was elsewhere. In a carefully calculated political move, he was dining with the men and […]
A couple of years’ back Your Girl Reporter was at a family reunion – we hold them often, but not often enough. We’re a good bunch, by and large, and I missed them growing up. […]
Australian journalist Richard Hughes was a lunchtime fixture at the Hongkong Hilton’s Grill bar right up until his last days in 1985. In the 1970s it was men only at The Grill for those famously […]
My father Jack Spackman grew up in abject poverty, a widow’s son, in the tiny town of Grenfell, way out past the Blue Mountains in rural New South Wales, Australia. He was the second of […]
My father Jack Spackman said that, when we arrived in Hong Kong in February 1967, his questions about what would happen in 20 years’ time when Britain’s lease on the New Territories expired were routinely […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
