Rocky has taken to barking whenever I raise my voice. Not just barking. He gallops towards me and as he does so, the bark is really a growl and bark combination, almost musical in its effect, which to me, sounds like a plea– if not an order– for me to calm down. If by the time [...]
Unlike me, Rocky is Australian born and bred. It may well be that his ancestors first came to Australia long ago but I cannot be sure how long ago that might be. He was born in an outer suburb of Melbourne, somewhere not far from Bulleen where he was found in a pet shop by [...]
By Evie Gawenda
My daughter wonders whether in this new life, I have grown more eccentric. She also wonders whether I am just getting old. I fear she might be right on both counts.
I am well known amongst my friends and family for giving everyone a nickname. I am a nickname expert for humans and [...]
The morning is cold and dark, so dark that on the beach, the water of the bay looks like an undulating sheet of black tin. Rocky however is as eager as ever to pursue the ball he has found and which I have thrown perhaps twenty metres into the darkness. I can just make him out, his [...]
One consequence of living in a house without children is that Rocky has been condemned to sleep alone. Pluto and Lolly, the two Jack Russells who lived with us through the years when every minute of my day was accounted for in the diary page that my assistant put on my desk each night before she [...]
This Rocky and Gawenda serial–for that’s how I have come to regard it– which has a beginning but as far as I know, has no middle or end, is written with no readers in mind. After 40 years in journalism, that is a relief and a liberation. My children, however, remind me that I have a [...]
In the life I now lead, Rocky’s place looms large, larger by far than the place occupied by any of the dogs of my childhood. He wakes with me in the early morning and prepares for our walk, even as I do, our separate rituals connected by our common purpose. Our days, even when those [...]
The first day of winter and Rocky and I mark this change of seasons at the end of the St Kilda pier, sitting together near the rocks behind the kiosk, both of us looking out across the fog-covered still grey water of the bay, out to the shadowy container ship on the horizon. Rocky is [...]
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