Welcome to Forest Leaves

My late mother-in-law’s RAN Anzac Biscuit tin – now in our possession and used appropriately … for storing Anzac biscuits.   First, a definition. The Chief Chef at Google sums it up pretty well: “The Anzac Biscuit is a sweet biscuit, popular in Australia and New Zealand, made using rolled oats, flour, sugar, butter, golden syrup, baking soda, boiling water and desiccated coconut.”   But it is more than that … it is a culinary icon, both in Australia and New Zealand, and it is

Frank “Typhoon” Tyson, delivering a thunderbolt during the 1954/5 Ashes   Like most Australians, I am an afficionado of the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (the MCG, usually called simply “The G”). It’s true I have never been to one, being a Western Australian, but I have been watching them on TV for many years, and they rarely disappoint. The most recent match, however, commencing on December 26 th (Boxing Day) 2025, was a dispiriting affair, and disappointed

Giimlet trees in their autumn colours, at Yeerakine Rock (photo by Ian Keally )   Back when I was a lad, in the years just after World War II, I was a devotee of Captain Lorrington King, known as “Gimlet”, the hero of a series of boys' adventure stories. Gimlet was a clever and brave British army commando who made life unpleasant for the Nazis. Accompanied by his two off-siders, one a Cockney former London cop and the other a cunning French-Canadian bear-trapper with a pencha

My fellow-forestry student in 1961: George Matthiessen  – the most intelligent and at the same time the most mischievous man I ever knew (photo by Jack Bradshaw).     It was George Matthiessen who suggested the Great Orange Caper, and that should have been enough to make me wary. George had a way of coming up with little schemes and projects that ended badly, and having known him for a year or two, I should have been alert to their dangers by that time.   But he also had a wa