Quotes from Julia Baird

It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words.

She just wants the world to know she was a hurricane and not a zephyr.

Seek awe and nature daily... show kindness; practise grace; eschew vanity; be bold; embrace friends, family, faith and doubt, imperfection and mess; and live deliberately.

The sublime Academy Award winning actor, Halle Berry, told a group of reporters in London in 2004 when she was promoting Cat Woman, "Being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory".

In short: when we are exposed to sunlight, trees, water or even just a view of green leaves, we become happier, healthier and stronger. People living in green spaces have more energy and a stronger sense of purpose, and being able to see green spaces from your home is associated with reduced cravings for alcohol, cigarettes and harmful foods.

In greeting each morning remind yourself of Dadirri by blessing yourself with the following; "Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day".

All the early stages took place in water: the origin of life; the birth of animals, the evolution of nervous systems and brains, and the appearance of complex bodies that makes brains worth having [...] When animals did crawl onto dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.

on June 20, 1837, the destiny of a nation wheeled, spun, and came to rest on the small frame of an eighteen-year-old girl. A girl who read Charles Dickens, worried about the welfare of Gypsies, adored animals, loved to sing opera, was fascinated with lion tamers, and hated insects and turtle soup; a girl who was bullied by those closest to her until her determination set like concrete; a girl whose heart was wound tight with cords of sentiment and stoicism.

the top hat was now considered the mark of a gentleman, even though the first man to sport one in public, forty years earlier, was arrested on the grounds that it had "a shiny luster calculated to alarm timid people." (Four women had fainted upon seeing it, and pedestrians had booed.) Lord

a girl who was bullied by those closest to her until her determination set like concrete;

young, old, British or foreign, the entire

It can take a while, sometimes, to be the woman you want to be, and to excavate the misogyny or critical eye we too often internalise

In Australia, the dawn is an arsonist who pours petrol along the horizon, throws a match on it and watches it burn.

When our days are shadowed and leached of meaning, when circumstances shower us with mud, how can we be sure to re-emit lessons we absorb in the sunlight?

sent clothes for the refugees and lent them

Know this, too: You deserve love. Real, enduring love. Buckets of it. Love is the greatest high on Earth. But remember Proverbs 4:23: "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.

I realise now that my mother was grieving as well as living. She went on loving us and smiling and hugging with such warmth while the life was being squeezed right out of her bones.

So much of what is broadly called wellness now involves an expensive kind of burrowing into our selves, wobbling on the plank between self-care and self-obsession. Many get lost in the labyrinth of internal observation, an endless cycle of maintenance of muscle, mood and self-medication.

Dacher Keltner and Jonathain Haidt wrote: 'Two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures.

When Victoria was born, food was cooked in open fireplaces, horses carried messages, half of the population was illiterate, and a narrow band of property owners were the only ones with political power. By the end of her life in 1901, people traveled by subway, telegraphs shot messages across oceans, education was compulsory, and women had some basic rights.

While so much of our self-exploration today is hash-tagged #wellness and performed for all to see, it became obvious to me in the far reach of sacred lands, encircled by campfires and eucalypts, that sometimes the best way to pay attention to country is to keep your mouth shut, open your eyes and just listen.

Germany was then a collection of states that had been bundled together in a union called the German Confederation in 1815 after Napoleon was defeated. (The country would not exist as one nation until 1871.) Some of the states had sided with France in the Napoleonic Wars, but the largest and most powerful—Prussia—was allied with England. One small state, Hanover, was, oddly, ruled from London by the English kings, who were Hanoverian by heritage.

As he once told her, "a long closely connected train of reasoning is like a beautiful strain of music.")

The charge of the Light Brigade was forever memorialized as a moment of glorious sacrifice, as needless slaughters ordered by shortsighted generals so often are.