Antipodes

Presentation  by French TV of the year 2015 that was. Between the atrocities of Charlie and those of the Bataclan , it was indeed a grim ye...

Julian Assange has just written an open letter to French president François Hollande asking to be received in France. Click here to ...

Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin in the role of Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath , aka OSS 117, a very French but less-than-brilliant spy at the ti...

For several years, my favorite cheese has been Ossau-Iraty , produced from unpasteurized ewe’s milk in the Béarn and Pays basque region of...

My friends Tineke and Serge spoke to me recently about a couple up near Lyon, named Bruno Richard and his wife Marie-Paul , whom they...

When I was a kid in Waterview (South Grafton), my parents had the habit of using the hackneyed expression " from here to Timbuktu ...

I've decided spontaneously to replace my angry blog post about Rupert by an evocation of France's annual celebration. I've never...

Shortly after the French Revolution, a girl named Marianno was the heroine of a revolutionary song in the Occitanian language. The song bec...

In France, a fast-food chain has just announced that their burgers are composed of beef slaughtered according to Muslim rites, and that the ...

It's not surprising that my blog reflections are inspired by three principal sources: (1) My Australian homeland (2) My adoptive France ...

Two days ago, I was intrigued by a request from a friendly Australian fellow who would like to use an image from my article of 24 June 2007 ...

Cycling is a subtle sport. There has always been only one way of winning: a brilliant performance, combining power and speed, strategy and i...

Today is a public holiday in the historically Catholic but formally laic republic of France. Why? Well, believe it or not, we're celebra...

The transition period from the end of August to the start of September is referred to, in French, as the rentrée : the return to work and se...

My second-favorite computing company has made a graphic effort to remind us that today is the 14th of July, Bastille Day . Symbolically, thi...

Compared to English, the precision of the Latin-based French language is splendid... and I often feel that this explains why French literatu...

After their calamitous initiation into warfare in Turkey in 1915, Australian troops were brought to the region in northern France that the G...

In the current French political climate, I often feel that, every time I dare to throw the term "naturalization" into my Antipodes...

Living on slopes, as I do, is quite different to living on flat land. And living on my own is quite different to being accompanied by a wife...

Often, I like to see how new words have come into existence. And sometimes, to understand a new word that appears to be modern— a neologism ...