Dan Djurdjevic

I was walking along the deathly quiet streets of Lancefield, Victoria in early hours of the morning, unable to sleep. I remember feeling totally engulfed by the darkness - street lamps and car headlights flickering like candles in the distance, the moonless sky showering me with the milky way, the chill, still air cramping my lungs, the gravel cracking underfoot like someone's knuckles. It was September 2007 and I was staying in a local motel near James' place. Except it wasn't a motel. It was the town's former hospital, converted into an eerie "B 'n B". I remembered how, the previous morning, I'd sat having breakfast at the former nurses' station with a bemused Hege and Lucia (who were sharing a room down the corridor), our spoons clinking against the chipped porcelain bowls on a mottled-green vinyl bench top, the musty smell still hinting at sterility, old people, dying people, isolation. No amount of jarring '50s decor, fake pot plant...

The sun has set behind the Kaohsiung skyline as our bus rattles along in the congested rush-hour traffic. I lie back against the head-rest, feeling the vibration on my scalp through the velour, and try to doze. Every now and again a jolt throws me back into the real world and I see flashes: flashes of the faux wood-panelled interior of our vehicle, the slumped, silent silhouettes of my fellow Chen Pan Ling practitioners, chaos passing in every direction, the smoky-red stain on the horizon and the neon glow of the pea-soup sky. We’re travelling from the Fo Guang Shan monastery into the city centre for our respective appointments with blind masseurs/masseuses. “Go on!” James had said to me in 2009. “Do it. You’ll feel like a new man.” But for whatever reason I declined – a decision I’d come to regret deeply. In fact, the moment I saw them arriving at the Kingship Hotel (each on the back of a scooter) and being escorted in through the foyer to the elevator (aided by the directions ...

It’s almost midnight and I’m limping in the blue shadows of the monastery grounds finally deserted by the maelstrom of day-time activity. I'm limping because I’m alone and no longer inclined to hide the pain in my lower back – pain that stabs like a thick syringe-needle with every step and the slightest knee lift. It is an injury I sustained in my very first training, and which scans will later reveal to be a prolapsed disc in the lumbar spine. Here’s a tip: don’t travel for almost 36 hours, then attempt long xing (dragon form of xingyi) without a sufficient warm-up. What am I doing? Oddly enough, I am searching. I’ve arranged with my photographer friend Lucia to take photos at the following dawn for the cover of my book “ Essential Jo ”. I’ve carted my gi and hakama all the way from Australia for just this purpose. I have come completely prepared – except that I have no jo (4 foot staff). You’d think that a Buddhist monastery built on a bamboo-forested mountain would have...

Lately I've noticed just how "heavy" my non-martial material is. My fiction deals with themes of guilt, betrayal and the past coming back to haunt you. My other writing is mostly a "rant". So I thought I'd break with tradition and write something lighter; something that harks back to halcyon days in my childhood, back to a long-lost era of innocence and limitless possibilities. It was 1972 and I lived with my brother Nenad and my parents in Kavieng - the largest town on the island of New Ireland in the then Australian territory of Papua New Guinea. Kavieng is, I suspect, largely unchanged from those days. It is probably still a "2 street" town with fibreboard demountable homes, one "hotel"/bar, one general store, one Chinese cinema and a 2 room police station. All but the main roads are still almost certainly unsealed, finished instead with a crushed coral called "koronos". The spiky cocos palms still line practically ev...

Introduction Fermat's last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation: a n + b n = c n where a, b and c are real, whole integers and n > 2. The purpose of this paper is to prove Fermat’s last theorem in relation to right-angled triangles. The proof shall be by way of contradiction using algebra and geometry. I shall leave to another day whether it is possible to prove the theorem in relation to any other triangles, or indeed any other non-triangle values. Pythagoras’ theorem: the starting point We know from Pythagoras’ theorem that: c 2 = a 2 + b 2 Pythagoras’ theorem can be illustrated geometrically in the adjacent manner. A square is made on each length of the triangle. The square on the hypotenuse (c) is equal in area to the sum of the area of the squares on the other sides (a and b). But what if we decided to build a cube out of each of those squares? Would the volume of cube c be equal to the sum of the vol...

Ko je ta stara, tuzna zena? (Who is that old, sad woman?) Koga ceka pored reke? (For whom does she wait by the river?) Ceka momka da dodje po nju (She waits for her lover to come for her) Ona je tuzna, tuzna Izabela (She is sad, sad Isabella) Bijo je letnji dan kada su se upoznali (It was a summer's day when they first met) Izabela mlada dama, a Marko roda ciganskog (Isabella a young lady, and Marko from a gypsy family) Kaze: "Marko ti si mi mnogo zgodan" (She says: "Marko I find you very handsome") Kaze: "Bela moja ti si san" (He says: "Bella my love, you're like a dream") "Ajde da se sad vencamo" ("Come let us get married") "Moram ocu reci plan" ("I must tell Father of our plan") Kada otac sazna, on kaze: "Bre!" (When father finds out he says: "Hey!") "Bas takvu uniju pristacu ne!" ("This kind of union I will never allow!") "Molim te oce, daj mi blagosl...

It was late and I was tired, standing behind the bar polishing glasses, watching the baggy-eyed patrons leaning on the counter, plumes spiraling up from their glowing cigarette ends, the smell of stale, end-of-the week beer wafting with the smoke like rising damp. I was going to call for last drinks when this customer walks in; a dark-looking fella, angular, chiseled features partly hidden by his overcoat drawn up at the lapels, a fedora tilted to one side over hooded eyes. He sidles over to the bar where he pulls up a stool, sits himself down and glances sideways before he looks up at me and speaks in a clipped European accent, a mere hiss above the background hum of the voices: "The name's Descartes." "Can I get you a drink Mr Descartes?" I ask, but he snorts, leans back on his stool and shakes his head, a sad smile creasing one corner of his mouth. "I think not," he says. I reach up to hang one of the wine glasses on the overhead rack and hear mysel...