Last week Mona opened Southdale/C’Mona, an exhibition that explores, among other things, the unintended consequences of created utopias. The colonisation/invasion of Tasmania by Europeans, and the debilities that resulted for its inhabitants, are among the areas explored. Another was the potential establishment of a Jewish nation in southwest Tasmania. That project, however, didn't come to such a fraught conclusion, since it disappeared, as did its major proponent.

Last night, after Diamanda Galás entertained, confused and mesmerised me in turn, I spoke to Dark Mofo revellers from Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane (and the latter complained that the Hobart weather was not nearly cold enough to justify the hype). One of them thanked me for the festival. Everybody does, even though I had very little to do with it. While Dark Mofo boss Leigh Carmichael and his mates put it together, I was on my honeymoon. And then she said, ‘Thank God it's not like the Big Day Out. Dark Mofo would be completely ruined if someone like Coldplay played’.

I have stepchildren, and I am one. I suppose it is for this reason that I picked up The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. According to the authors of this potent little tome, a child is one hundred times more likely to be hurt or killed by a step than a genetic parent; this fact has been aggressively shushed, they argue, in an apparent attempt to suppress unpalatable truths about parental love.

Tim, my brother, died over twenty years ago. Some of my earliest memories are of him writing poetry. Before he died he had a plan to get some of his poems together for publication. But he didn't have time. Between diagnosis and death he had only a few months. And morphine and suffering kept him busy.