My grandparents’ set of Chambers’s Encyclopedias, A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge: My prized nutshells

“Could I please have one of those pieces of paper that you put in the chicken wing baskets?” That’s got to be the weirdest question I’ve ever asked.

I was in a café in country NSW and I asked for a piece of wax paper, titled “Our Australia”, because I just had to have one! As I’d munched away, I could read snippets of it, peaking out from behind my wings. I just love how it summarises this great big, beautiful country on one piece of wax paper. In just seven articles, from information about the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to Steve the Quokka, to Tassie scallop pie, it puts Australia in a nutshell.

I’ve always loved the summing up of gargantuan things. In 2016 I went to “A History of the World in 100 Objects” exhibition in Canberra. Starting from a two-million year-old chopping tool from Tanzania and finishing with the 1990s WLAN Prototype test-bed, (the Australian invention that led to modern-day WIFI) I was given a neat and tidy summary of man’s creations on this planet.

My grandparents’ set of Chambers’s Encyclopedias, A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, published in 1901, explains everything that was deemed significant enough to include at that point in time. My prized possessions, they are a priceless 1901 time-capsule.

Those three nutshells starkly contrast to the internet. The never-ending reams of information on the internet utterly overwhelm me!

That feeling of overwhelm reminds me of the comments I sometimes get when I talk to people about life story writing: “I have lived a colossal life, how can we capture it all in a book?” Like the three clever nutshells above, I capture the essence of your life. I joyously wrap your watershed moments, your funny stories and your words of wisdom into a nutshell.