Neighbourhood Paper Alex Tighe, Author at Neighbourhood Paper

Life is Beautiful and Bleak ‘Sami in Paradise’ at Belvoir Street Theatre

Sami in Paradise takes Nikolai Erdman’s comedy The Suicide – written in late 1920s Stalinist Russia – and turns it into a laugh-out-loud tragedy of refugee life. The Suicide was a subversive work that led to Erdman’s exile. The play explored a doublethink: while acknowledging the wretchedness of life one may cling to the pithy notion that ‘life is beautiful’.

When one character snaps at Semyon (Sami in the adaptation) “Citizen! … Life is beautiful,” Semyon replies, “I read about that in the newspapers, but I think they’ll print a retraction any day now.”

The question: how to live a dignified life in undignified conditions? Erdman’s The Suicide was a black comedy that laughed when only tears seemed appropriate.

In director Eamon Flack’s and company’s update, Sami in Paradise, we leave nondescript Russia for a nondescript refugee camp that we are assured is not Manus or Nauru. Here, Sami (joyously rendered by Yalin Ozucelik) has lived for seven years in a makeshift tent with his wife (Victoria Haralabidou) and mother in law (Paula Arundell).

Sami’s condition is more extreme than Semyon’s. While Semyon reached the depths of despair at home, Sami is in a strange land – this despair goes all the way down.

It is Sami’s dream of learning to play the tuba that keeps him going. Nevertheless, everyone is, despite his objections, quite convinced he wants to kill himself. When Sami realises his tuba-dream is in vain he agrees that suicide is, indeed, the way to go.

Sami cross-eyed, attempting to play the tuba

Photography by Clare Hawley, supplied by Belvoir

Others are quick to try and convince him to commit suicide in the name of their various causes – private aid, sex work, a butcher’s business, girls’ education, art, faith, love and freedom. Each finds in Sami a chance to make the world listen to their woes.

So, for Sami, suicide becomes a reason to live. He becomes a clown martyr – a parody of Christ. While Christ’s message was one of universal love, Sami-the-Clown-Martyr’s is specific to the profound but selfish plights of his fellow campers.

An insight of the play is that these plights pale in comparison to an individual’s will to live. As Sami tells us, his soul is a caged bird and, to quote Dunbar’s Sympathy, when the caged bird

beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core.

Out of Sami’s deep core we hear a deranged prayer from someone who has been given no hope and so must make his own.

In this way, the play is bleak and uplifting. It is bleak because it supports the idea that faith in progress is unfounded. Uplifting because while we may not be able to see utopia on the horizon we can come face-to-face with each other – to sympathise, recognise, love and hope. We must hope for better but engage with the now. The absurd clown world of Sami in Paradise makes this clear.

Sami wearing a paper crown, being pulled in all directions by the rest of the cast

Photography by Clare Hawley, supplied by Belvoir Theatre

This may be why the production has had a mixed response. Some critics have praised the clowning of human misery, others found it distasteful, claiming it is racist in its stereotypes, takes cheap shots at NGOs, and is misogynistic. These claims – which I find unconvincing – show why the work is important not only as a protest for those living under the status ‘refugee’ but also to question the legacy and potentially utopian ideals of political correctness. If a production ‘bigs up’ racial stereotypes it does not follow that it reinforces them. A show does not make a claim or have an opinion – characters do. A role of theatre is to investigate such things as the line between culture and stereotype.

Other critics have noted that the piece is curiously moderate given the subversiveness of the original. What would a subversive work about refugees look like? Perhaps Peter Dutton doing something outrageous with a pig?

At its best, the show is subtly subversive because it damns both the political right’s callousness and – perhaps against its intentions – the left’s moral righteousness. A callousness that treats the refugee as a problem and not a person and a righteousness that does not recognise the overwhelming and perhaps impossible task of governments safe housing or settling the heartbreaking and incomprehensible numbers of displaced persons in the world.

Sami in Paradise is hopeful that sympathy will sweep away callousness and moral righteousness. Sympathy requires us to acknowledge not just the good, but also the bad, ugly and ridiculousness in others, and in turn, ourselves. It demands that we listen to our hearts and that we recognise the reality of the situation so as to bring real and practical change.

This hopefulness is highlighted by Eamon Flack’s direction that ensures we are engaged both directly and indirectly by the ensemble, allowing us the space to laugh at and cry for Sami’s world. It is petered by Dale Ferguson’s purgatorial set – a large concrete warehouse-esque space, lit in a stripped back fashion by Verity Hampson and filled with the upbeat and mellifluous score of Jethro Woodward, with musicians Mahan Ghobadi and Hamed Sadeghi.

And the actors, of course, bring hope to the work through their sheer joy. In addition to Sami’s family, the large cast includes Fayssal Bazzi, Nancy Denis, Charlie Garber, Marta Kaczmarek, Mandela Mathia, Arky Michael, Hazem Shammas, and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash. While one might sense an inexperience in some members and expect tighter ensemble work and more biting, self-assured clowning, none of their faults are fatal, and the joy wins out.

As for Sami, in the end he realises that in death he would not fly to paradise but that he is already there and that paradise in this life is bleak, but beautiful.

At a time in which our immigration minister has said he would support fast track visas for white South African farmers, this is important theatre.

Go see Sami try to kill himself!

Post show I would recommend the film The Death of Stalin and Dostoevsky’s short story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

Peter Milton Walsh The Apartments

For more Peter Milton Walsh, read his letter from Paris: ‘Man With a Blue Cornflower – A refuge in Paris for the music of The Apartments’

Ready Player One The games people play

“A fanboy can always tell a hater,” hero gamer Wade Watts spits at corporate goon Nolan Sorrento midway through Ready Player One. As far as declarations of principle go, it’s a far cry from the impassioned moral stance of Steven Spielberg’s previous film The Post (2017), or 2015’s Bridge of Spies.

The premise: teenager Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a contestant in a game to win control of an expansive virtual reality platform, the OASIS. Its late architect James Halliday has left it littered with a series of ‘Easter eggs’. The first player to decipher Halliday’s clues, beat hidden challenges, and collect all the eggs will win majority ownership of the platform.

To do this, the player must understand Halliday and the pop culture that shaped his youth – 1980s arcade games, cult film curios, and classic blockbusters like the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future. Watts, with his avatar Parzival (anime eyes and boy-band hair), is set to win, with his wonkish ability to recite obscure details of Halliday’s obsessions chapter and verse.

Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) attempts to recruit Watts to the side of his corporation IOI. To help him, Nolan has John Hughes trivia fed to him through an earpiece via a team of researchers. But fanboy Watts can sense a fake.

Ben Mendelsohn as corporate goon Nolan Sorrento. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, and with a screenplay by both Cline and Zak Penn, the film finds its raison d’être in its summoning of trivia. The OASIS is a pop culture mash-up, with Back to the Future’s DeLorean sharing a racetrack with the cherry red motorbike from Akira; where the T-Rex from Jurassic Park can muscle past King Kong; and the Iron Giant can battle MechaGodzilla. The film seems to expect each will inspire happy recognition in its viewers.

Superficial, fun and nostalgia-inducing, for sure. But also maybe a little self-referential and self-congratulatory? Meta-cinema as a directorial form of narcissism?

As a prime mover behind the very objects the film venerates, Spielberg’s recruitment onto the project seemed terribly on the nose. At age 71 it’s undeniable he has established a formal mastery while still retaining the aura of a boy wonder – here, Spielberg elevates the concept and still meets it on its own essentially juvenile level.

Working again in motion capture animation (2016 BFG and 2011 The Adventures of Tintin), Spielberg luxuriates in sweeping and acrobatic digital camera moves, and impossibly sustained spans of action. By cutting regularly back to the non-OASIS real world, he also keeps the film tethered to a sense of the actual.

Much of Spielberg’s sensibility through the 1980s and 1990s (as a director, and through his Amblin production company) is marked by a cheerfully materialist spirit; the gentle clutter of suburban homes denoting the prosperity of post-WW2 American capitalism.

In Back to the Future, when Marty McFly returns from the 1950s, having successfully mediated the courtship of his teenaged parents, he is rewarded with a new car. In Ready Player One, Watts’s private gaming cubby-hole, where he straps on the haptic gear that helps him explore OASIS, is in a sprawling heap of junked cars – an implicit acknowledgement of the lost promise of trickle-down Reaganomics; Spielberg’s middle-class suburbia is now a sprawling slum. In this grimly recognisable future, marked by towering stacks of trailer homes and hovering surveillance drones, where the populace has largely moved everyday life into the virtual sphere, prosperity is now virtual, too – players’ wealth is tied up in their OASIS avatars, and the indebted are forced to labour online for IOI.

The film presents all this as dystopic, but it doesn’t look closely enough at the weirdness of a world dominated by Halliday’s OASIS. It would seem the egg hunting is all good fun, even if the stakes are high. Viewers might wonder how the economic stability of an entire society could come to rest on a very advanced game of Mario Kart?

Watts’ intimate knowledge of Halliday’s pop culture obsessions marks him as a natural heir to OASIS’s founder. On one level it’s the strangest thing the narrative requires us to swallow. What business does a teenager in 2044 have with the fairly overlooked 1984 cult curio Buckaroo Banzai, apparently his favourite movie? Where are the teenagers today stanning for 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman?

Like a lot of science fiction films, Ready Player One has no sense of what culture looks like in the future, and so all its referents are of our recent past. Watts and Halliday’s cultural touchstones are mostly just those of the film’s authors. But in accepting this fiction the audience is obliged to see that in the world of the story pop culture has either not advanced since Halliday’s childhood, or largely regressed back to it, thanks to the founder’s inordinate influence over the society dominated by his platform.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Ready Player One wants its audience to know and feel the joy and companionship in shared cultural references. Trading nods to Akira, Buckaroo Banzai, The Iron Giant, and Future, Watts and his fellow gamers Samantha/Artemis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) establish their compatibility and cement their friendships. Pop culture can be a lingua franca, as anyone who’s forged a conversation by exchanging, say, Simpsons quotes well knows.

But such connections are undeniably superficial, and though the film feints at recognising this – when Watts finally meets Samantha and Aech in person, neither are quite what he expects – its compulsive recitation of geek buzzwords, and dividing of society into fanboys and haters, tells us that it really is that shallow.

While the references accumulate – and as Watts delves deeper into the minutiae of Halliday’s life; the games he played, the films he saw – it begins to feel as though the film is telling us that a person’s identity can be indexed to a list of culture consumed.

As far as theories of the self go, this one is not particularly welcome appearing to us wrapped-up in a glossy package by an entertainment company intent on selling movie tickets. And disturbing, too, given that Watts’ self is really just a mirror image of Halliday’s, whose interests he has absorbed in order to game in the OASIS. Halliday’ OASIS is a shadow of other people’s creations, and its denizens are a shadow of him.

Perhaps the most dystopic idea in the film, one which it never really cares to address, is also, in the age of Facebook and other all-encompassing social media platforms, the most resonant: a society whose knowledge base is shaped by the personal eccentricities of one tech developer.

The Long Goodbye Prince Alfred Municipal Pool

“Nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool,” Raymond Chandler famously wrote in The Long Goodbye. And it’s true. The Prince Alfred Municipal Pool sat empty for months during the autumn of 2012. I’d climb through a hole in the fence after work and the space felt strangely melancholy. There was nothing there except for empty bottles, naive graffiti and pieces of forgotten school uniform. Then after a heavy rain the birds came -– swallows, seagulls, ducks, kookaburras, magpies, currawongs and the ubiquitous ibis. The atmosphere lifted and between the old pool’s destruction and new one’s construction, there was – for a fleeting moment – an urban oasis.

Prince Alfred Municipal Pool. Photography by Johnny Barker

For more, read Perry Keyes’ story Greeks’ Creek – Last summer at Prince Alfred Municipal Public Pool

Greeks’ Creek Last summer at Prince Alfred Municipal Public Pool

It was the summer of The Rubettes hit ‘Sugar Baby Love’ when I dragged my nine-year-old arse out of the deep end of the Prince Alfred Municipal Public Pool.

Having spent hours in the water creating mayhem with other like-minded idiots, I stood by the edge of the blue water and listened as the song’s final exultant crescendo crackled and distorted through the Tannoy speakers that hung above the turnstiles of the pool’s main entrance.

I knew there and then that this magnificent piece of pop puffery would never sound better than it did right at that moment.

Decked out in my stylish black sluggos I strode dripping like a pre-pubescent version of the Solo Man straight from the pool to the kiosk.

At the edge of the southern concourse were multiple Greek families. In the 33 degree heat the obligatory Nannas wearing black from head to toe were handing out cold pastitsio to half-naked grandkids.

It was the mid 70s and it was the waning days of the old inner-city summers. ‘Greeks’ Creek’, as it was known to most of the kids at Redfern Public School, was in full flight.

Returning with a vanilla Paddle Pop, I plonked myself down on my orange and black ‘goofy foot’ beach towel that had yet to see a beach. The thick terry towelling worked well as a buffer against the heat of the concrete pavers that made up the pool’s forecourt.

My companion this day was one Lester Biggs – big by name, big by everything else.

Two weeks earlier, Lester had kicked the shit out of me in the sand pit of the Coronation Activity Centre which was also in Prince Alfred Park. ‘Coro’, as it was known locally, was an obligatory stop off point on the way to the pool.

Lester was nine going on 17 and he was from a particularly mean family that lived in Louis Street Redfern, back when Louis Street still had houses.

Photography by Johnny Barker at the Prince Alfred Municipal Pool

Prince Alfred Municipal Pool. Photography by Johnny Barker

I would eventually take my revenge out on Lester not more than a few hours after my initial belting. It was in the shallow end of the pool that I blindsided him with a chunk of black tar that I had extricated from between the aforementioned pavers.

The tar would soften in the heat and kids would pull it out, roll it into black tar balls and then throw it into the deep end and dive for it. On this occasion I threw my tar ball directly into the part of the pool where Lester’s massive head was taking up too much space. Bullseye! He didn’t feel a thing. As is often the case in these matters we became firm friends for the rest of the summer.

This was also the summer that I found out where babies came from. Where they really came from.

Robert O’Halloran, a little smartarse dressed incongruously in a fake leather jacket and black desert boots revealed the stunning details to myself and half a dozen other boys whilst we devoured Choc Wedges next to the air hockey table in the pool’s arcade area.

A self-styled ‘Mr Know It All’, O’Halloran, never the less, could not enlighten the rest of us on how the baby got to where it was in the first place. It would be one more summer before that penny dropped.

On the Redfern train track side of the cracked and torn asphalt path that led to the pool, about a hundred yards from the entrance, stood an old brown brick structure that had been built sometime before the First World War.

It was a public lavatory. A boarded up public lavatory.

The reason for its closure was the unsolved murder of a woman whose mutilated body had been found in the loo one morning by a cleaner sometime back in the mid 1960s.

The entrance to the toilet block was a tall ornate iron gate that was swathed in large thick chains. The gate had been locked since the killing of the woman. Walking past it at dusk, on my way home from the pool, it never failed to put goosebumps on my skinny nine-year-old arms.

Photography by Johnny Barker at Prince Alfred Municipal Pool

Prince Alfred Municipal Pool. Photography by Johnny Barker

It was the summer that my best friend discovered Bruce Lee and attempted to throw Kung Fu kicks at my head in the pool. Upon witnessing this unbridled assault, the pool inspector promptly banned the assaulter and, inexplicably, the assaulted from the pool for the rest of the day.

It was the summer at the pool when boys wore terry towelling hats and girls wore platform thongs. The only sunscreen that existed was this thick pink zinc that came from a toothpaste tube and the only part of your body suitable for it seemed to be your nose.

It was the summer that a girl, whose name has been lost to the ages, got for herself an all-expenses paid triple decker fruit boat from the pool kiosk simply by allowing my friends and I a fleeting glimpse of something beneath the water, that may or may not have been, well who knows what… anyway, it’s hard to focus and keep your eyes open for very long when they’re awash with chlorine.

They tore down Greeks Creek sometime just after the new millennium kicked in and they’ve since replaced it with a brand new heated pool surrounded by a sloping grass lawn and a platoon of coloured shading umbrellas. There’s energy efficient lighting and a green roof of native grasses to regulate the temperature plus a splash deck with water toys for the toddlers. I wonder if one of those toys is a melted bit of tar direct from a loose paving stone originally laid in 1963?

From the street this new Prince Alfred Park Pool looks a bit like the area surrounding the Fuhrerbunker just before the Russians arrived. No doubt it suits the needs of the new inner-city aquarian and eases the constant anxiety for a lane to do some laps in. But I’m guessing there’s no triple decker fruit boats in the cafe – or old Greek ladies dressed in black in honour of a long lost love left on an ancient shore back in the arse end days of WWII.

I sometimes take a walk on that same old path that runs beside the still standing and greatly enhanced activity centre. Down by the train tracks that lead to Central Station’s Platform 23 I can almost hear above the traffic, above the hiss and roll of the trains, that long ago refrain…

Sugar baby love, sugar baby love. I never meant to make you blue.

For more, see Johnny Barker’s full gallery from 2012, when the Prince Alfred Pool was abandoned.

Real(i)ty Bites Newtown’s knowledge class illusions

“When did this suburb turn to crap?” is a question with no broadly applicable answer. This is because crap exists chiefly in the sense of its beholder. For example: your newest neighbour may be thrilled to find they can freely use French wine terms down at the renovated pub, whereas you may long only to pour factory beer down the throat that utters “terroir”.

We all hold our custom yard-sticks for the measurement of local crap. We all hold our memories, too. This is how fresh young love and tired old hatred for a home may co-exist. I think Newtown is Barangaroo with stale beard oil; she finds it is as “happening!” as the promise of a real estate brochure. One woman’s shit is another’s shortbread. Or, biscotti, probably—I don’t know. Whatever it is the “happening!” investor is nibbling with their single-origin these days.

I’d been a Newtown nuisance, too, though. As my rising knowledge class of prats moved in, working class families moved out. Katarina from next door said, “not another bloody journalist” when I came by to introduce myself. She was entirely justified in her contempt.

I quickly adjusted to contempt for all others who were not of my class and its belief system. People less committed to “progressive values” and tempeh lunches than me were all crap, except for those I pitied or idealised. Which is to say, I lived in a bubble of confirmation bias. Newtown was like, is probably still like, a real-life Facebook feed: we all agree on important moral matters, and only the foolish dissent.

Well, then. I lost the job, the house and, for a bit, the will to wear pants not made from terrycloth. My bubble burst, but others I knew remained buoyant. I became other from what I had long believed myself to be: thoughtful and so deeply, deeply tolerant of difference.

Poverty is one of those rare things we can all agree is shit. Poverty is sure as shit shit. If briefly experienced by a mildly shit person, it can be instructive.

I remember moaning about my sorry lot to a flight attendant at an Erko barbecue. I remember she waved her sausage at me as she advised, “Stop banging on” and to, “remember, this loss is good for you.”

For some years, I remembered only the urge to grab that snag and shove it between her boobs, possibly shrieking, “What would you know about the hard work and disappointments of a finely trained mind like mine?” In time, I remembered that hard work and disappointment are the forces that shape most in the world of the present.

I’d thought it was communication – my business – that made all the difference in the world. I’d supposed good talk, good education and a positive attitude moved entire nation-states. I had come to settle upon the, largely unexamined, belief that the material world does not shape our ideas, but that the reverse was as true as could be. Wasn’t where you lived and how much you had that changed you. Oh, no. It was only your failure to be touched by great ideas.

This loss was good for me. This hardship did upturn my way of thinking. I am not saying there is nobility in poverty or that wisdom only comes when assets disappear. I am saying that a flight attendant—a worker who lugs food, mops up sick and rarely sleeps in her own bed—sees what a knowledge worker often misses: our thoughts are largely formed in material reality.

One might feel profoundly moved by a news item or a television broadcast. But, one is most profoundly shaped by surrounding reality. And if that reality is one populated by knowledge class people who say, “our better ideas can change the world!”, then all you get is some “awareness raising”. No change to reality.

Newtown has changed. It’s some Mason Jar Theme Park, unrecognisable to me. Thinking didn’t make it different. The cost of housing did.

Man with a Blue Cornflower A refuge in Paris for the music of The Apartments

“At the intersection of the Boulevard St. Michel
and the Rue Cujas, the sidewalk slopes a little.
Beautiful, fervent days of youth, I haven’t
lost you…”
from Paris, by Miklós Radnóti

I had come to Paris because my life was a mess. I had come to Paris to sing. Early in that broken-down year of 2009, my birthday had turned up with its usual gift of questions it had for me for ten years now, questions I had never been able to answer. I had been given another year yet my son Riley, who had died just short of his fourth birthday in 1999, had not. Why had I been given every chance at happiness when he had been given so few? Never another birthday. The years that should have been his – where were they?

People like to think loss doesn’t last, that grief and its shadows follow some timetable and fall away. And while it’s true they fade, inside you nothing is changing. You get busy, not better – or you get better at least, at disguise. You give nothing away. And then a day comes, an anniversary perhaps, and something hits hard and the appearance you have built up comes tumbling down. You were a Russian doll of secrets who ended up in pieces. I ended up in Paris, years after I had turned my back on a public musical life when my boy had become sick, because a French journalist, Emmanuel Tellier, had asked me to come and play some shows. I have been forgotten, I told him, No one will be there. He simply said, Trust me.

When the lights of hope had gone out, a man in Paris was offering me a rope. And I would use that rope and climb out of the hole I found myself in. I slept that night on a pillow of doubt. The next morning I wrote back to Emmanuel: I am coming to Paris.

On the Eurostar from London – I had to get up at 5am to catch the train – I fell asleep crossing the Channel and woke as we emerged into sunlit blue and white skies of France, a stream of fields and green farmlands rushing past the window. London, its grim greyness that inhabited every sky, building and street, disappeared from my mind like smoke.

I had a wonderful place to stay. A friend had a small apartment in the 5th, and while she and her family had moved to Tunisia, they kept the place empty so that they could visit Paris whenever they wanted. The first morning I went walking, just around the corner I found a plaque: Paul Verlaine lived here. Another marked James Joyce’s house, Hemingway’s. The next night I found that, though there were over 2 million homes in Paris, Emmanuel lived just two streets away. None of this could have been planned. Destiny was at work.

A week later, it was raining in Paris, it was a holiday and it was 11th November – Remembrance Day, 2009. Autumn. Sometimes in Paris the rain was beautiful and as I moved through it, I would write letters in my head to people who weren’t here anymore. All along the avenues the chestnut trees were losing their leaves. Our concert was that night, and in the late afternoon I walked to soundcheck at the club l’Européen and saw an old man on rue d’Amsterdam with gold in his teeth and a blue cornflower in the buttonhole of his jacket. Who did he want to remember?

That night, in a Paris room in which I felt I no longer knew how to talk, I discovered how four hundred people had together created a kind of sanctuary, there among the low lamps, the piano, the flugelhorn, the guitars and tambourines, so that the old songs could sing themselves up out of the past. All I had to do was step out of the way. In Paris, a miracle in the rain.

A year later, I was invited by a French music magazine, Magic, to play a show on their rooftop. This was not long after I had released a duet with a French singer, Natasha Penot, which had a line it “and your song floats down over the town”. The magazine’s editor Christophe Basterra, listening to the song over a glass of wine, decided it would be a good idea to hear it sung live – and from a rooftop. The songs would float down over the town and the town would be Paris, on the night of the Summer solstice – the longest day of the year. This kind of whimsical, fantastic thing would not happen for me in Australia – in Paris, it did.

So I flew over and stayed in a small hotel in the 6th on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, only later finding out it was the street in which so much of the decadent action in Sartre’s The Age of Reason takes place – the nightclubs, restaurants and bars. Then somebody told me that the nouvelle vague was born at the cinema called Les 3 Luxembourg just across the street, which seemed too good to be true – mainly because it was too good be true.

My wife had read The Age of Reason for the first time during the Summer, and then I read it as well, in translation, the same way I read everything French, just as I watch French movies with subtitles. Most of the people in Sartre’s story were caught in the chaotic whirlwind of their 20s, trying to work out their lives – what to do, how to get ahead, who they are. Though it’s set in 1938 and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it could have been written yesterday, and could be any city around the world where people are that age. The confusions live on.

There have been other scenes in other years, other times when Paris has seemed to work on me like a spell. Rounding a corner in the Montmartre fog, lost, looking for a street that Jean-Pierre Melville had shot Bob le Flambeur on and suddenly finding myself instead on Rue Cortot, where Satie had written the Gymnopédies when he was just 23. Three songs in three months, between the dregs of winter and the spring of 1888. Songs the world would always remember which Satie, in his later life, wished the world would forget. Or strolling down the Quai de la Tournelle, the green boxes of the bookstands being taken down and crossing Pont Alexandre III for the first time, with the streetlamps coming on and the warm, glowing light in the restaurant windows and thinking So this is how the evening comes to Paris.

After we had played the rooftop that night, I was speaking to a girl who, someone told me, had been proposed to by Julian Casablancas from The Strokes. He wanted her to elope with him to New York. For some reason, I decided to ask her if this was true. “Julian Casablancas…maybe,” she said “But leave Paris?? Never.”

The Apartments’ Peter Milton Walsh, Paris rooftop. Photography by Éric Pérez.

The Apartments’ Peter Milton Walsh and Eliot Fish are playing in the intimate setting of Django @ Camelot in Marrickville, on Sunday 22nd April. Doors 7pm. Jep and Dep 8pm, The Apartments 9pm.

The Day the Muesli Died It’s cricket, Jim, but not as we know it

Sportsbet and Betfair are just two advertisers to have condemned the grievous self wound that has killed Australian Cricket and plunged the nation into an orgy of mourning. “We’re shocked,” says Sportsbet spokesman Jack Gambletron. “This kind of cheating is totally un-Australian. Luckily, there’s nothing more Aussie than having a punt. So we’re giving great odds on whose arse is going to roll, and the long term fallout. Please gamble compulsively.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnstile spoke gravely of the ball-nobbling stain, which has stricken the nation. “This is a taping worse than Watergate, a day that will live in infamy,” said Mr Turnstile. “This is one of those JFK moments, one of those Princess Di moments. You’ll remember where you were when you heard Australian Cricket had died. Our once great nation has battled through hardships – bushfires, Gallipoli, Rolf Harris. But I don’t know that we’ll get over this one.”

Former Prime Minister John Howzat agreed. “They’re dead to me,” he said of Australia’s first Eleven. “The once sacred baggy green has been reduced to the status of an old camel’s stinky bollock sack.” Mr Howzat described the great ‘Ball Tampa’ as being something “finally truly worthy of being called a black armband view of history. This kind of sneaky underhanded behaviour strikes at the very core of all that we are as Australians, all our values, all we stand for.”

His words were underscored by reports of mass national weeping and gnashing, of ululating, hair-tearing and grievous hyperbole. It is mourning for the death of a game which all right-thinking Australians hold as dear as their own children. But now, soiled, smeared and besmirched, brought into ignominy and ill repute – in short, trashed, mangled and pummelled to a bloody mash in a muddy mire – the once proud and noble body of Australian cricket is a crow-pecked corpse twisting in the wind. It has triggered unprecedented scenes.

Little country towns nationwide are playing witness to mass communal bonfires of crotch-guards, stumps, pads, bats and balls. Dummies of our once-great cricketing heroes, our erstwhile bronzed gods, are being hung, drawn, quartered and burnt in effigy. Tragically, some of the dummies have turned out to be real.

Meanwhile, legions of teary kiddies are flooding grief counsellors and overrunning trauma units. There are unconfirmed reports that some, in sheer despair, are contemplating careers in the arts. Others, staring into the meaningless void of a cricketless future, have simply given up. Special ‘Ball Tampa’ phone helplines have been inundated, with thousands put on suicide watch. There are reports of men impaling themselves, Roman style, on cricket stumps. Others, in a perverse and profound protest, play a version of Russian roulette. They stand naked in cricket nets while their weeping mates bowl them to death with bodyline bumpers.

Perhaps the greatest victims of the tragedy have been advertisers. Sanitarium has already severed ties with Captain Smith. (The Titanic skipper!) “We can’t go on together,” said Sanitarium’s Eating-with-Ethics coach Pru Blurtfarthing. “Every Smith-endorsed weetbick would taste like ashes in a kiddie’s mouth.” So too, financial giant Magellan and the Commonwealth Bank have deserted the stinking ship. “We find our position untenable,” said Commonwealth mouthpiece Prole Skinner. “How can we compromise the love, trust and integrity that people place in the bank by associating with this kind of win-at-any-cost mentality?”

Marketing analysts agree. “The desertion is understandable,” said Dimity Flartz. “Reputable companies can’t commercially partner with brand ambassadors like these. These cricketers have put the con in icon.” (Representatives for registered icons, including Ned Kelly, Breaker Morant, Phar Lap, Simpson’s Donkey and Spirit of Anzac were unavailable for comment).

“Sir Donald Bradman would be rolling in his grave, like a rotisseried kebab,” said Steve Chinklewipe, head of the Brisbane thinktank Septic. “Sure, Sir Don was a tight-fisted, Masonic wowser who was hated by his own team. But whenever a product bears his name, like commemorative John Howzat Toby Mugs, or chocolate chip cookies, or any one of a thousand other products, you know they’re endorsed from a bedrock of integrity, from a place of iconic grandeur and mystique.”

Well said, Steve, well said.

Yes, we venerate our cricketers like gods. And rightly so. It’s why when Mark Taylor sells you a Fujitsu air conditioner you know it’s going to cool you good and proper. It’s why you know Allan Border believes in the miraculous powers of the Revivitive Circulation Booster. We need no more guarantee than the word of these ex-captains courageous, and the unquestioned integrity of Australian Cricket. It’s why Ricky Ponting is gospel solid on the efficacy of Swisse health supplements. It’s why we can feel so good about gutsing all that beer and fried chicken – it partners seamlessly with our hallowed sport. We trust and respect the integrity of these gladiators with our lives. When legions of baldilocks men grew back a thick, luxuriant, chick-attracting thatch of hair, it was all thanks to the plugging of Advanced Hair Studios by Shane Warne and Greg Matthews. Icons like these could never be accused of bald tampering.

Is there any hope to be dredged from the depths of our current despair? Time is a great healer. Give it a few years and Smith, or Warner, or another of our fallen gods, may just find redemption, may just restore our shattered faith in the integrity and sacred name and status quo of Australian Cricket. Maybe by doing an ad for a sandpaper.

Disclosure: This writer has done ads, some of them sordid. Luckily, he makes no claim to the moral high ground and has no sainted reputation to preserve.

The Resistance An interview with Franklin Foer about Big Tech and the fight for our minds

Franklin Foer knows what it’s like on the coal face of journalism’s struggle with Big Tech. Formerly the editor of the small-but-prestigious New Republic magazine from 2006 to 2010, he was invited back to the helm in 2012 after the publication was bought by Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard and one of Facebook’s founding employees.

Since 1914, New Republic had been an institution for liberal thinking and political analysis – the authoritative sceptical voice between Republican and Democrat ideologies. Hughes was just 28 years old, a booster for Barack Obama and a UN advocate for HIV prevention. Foer was charmed, even “exhilarated”, by the changes Hughes promised and the fresh generational idealism he brought to New Republic as a media institution.

Two worlds collided, and – after a honeymoon period that lasted two years – the acrimony began. Hughes wanted to reinvent the New Republic as a “vertically integrated digital-media company”, Foer resisted, and the guy paying the bills won the fight. Foer was forced out, and two-thirds of his staff quit with him.

As Foer wrote later in the Atlantic (where he is now a staff writer), “The bust-up received its fair share of attention and then the story faded – a bump on Silicon Valley’s route to engulfing journalism.”

In his latest book, World Without Mind, Foer widens his argument: Silicon Valley is not only engulfing journalism, he writes, but fundamentally changing the way we think. In the same way that the Industrial Revolution automated physical processes in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Digital Revolution is attempting to automate our mental processes today, and to replace the art of quiet contemplation with notifications and algorithms.

So far the tech giants are winning this war on our minds: so we’d better wake up and start thinking, Foer argues, before we no longer can.

Franklin Foer

NBHD: Hey Frank, is now a good time to speak?

FOER: Yeah, I’m actually driving to rural Virginia to this elite evangelical college, and I’m debating this libertarian guy about Big Tech. I love these debates, they’re so much fun. It’s also like a wild-card audience. Being able to try and persuade cultural conservatives that this is something they should care about… I love the challenge of trying to bend them around.

You’d think that culturally conservative people would be into your message of slow contemplation, trust in institutions… or have I got the U.S. wrong?

You’ve got the U.S. wrong. I’m sure this is like a place that went, you know, 70, 80 per cent for Donald Trump.

Before we start talking too much about Big Tech, your book is, in part, about quiet contemplation and a love of reading. Do you remember the first book you ever had?

The first book I ever had as a child… my uncle gave me his set of encyclopedias from the 1960s, and they were done by this television personality called Art Linkletter. And they were kind of absurdly popularised, with all sorts of information, and very colourful… which is kind of the pre-digital internet, right? It was just such a good thing to get lost in that trove of knowledge and to have that sense of mastery, but also just the endless surprise that comes with the discovery of each new entry. And to me that was the greatest – the Platonic reading experience.

And do you remember when you first decided that you wanted to work with books? That you wanted to become a writer?

When I was at university I dreamed of becoming a historian. And I discovered journalism, which was academia through less crazy, esoteric means. Journalism as a profession is really such an incredible privilege – to be able to be kind of an amateur expert, who’s constantly shifting from subject to subject. I mean, it’s a bit like reading the encyclopedia, where you never get stuck on one entry for too long, there’s always a surprising next entry to be found.

When did you get serious about writing and journalism?

My senior year of university I interned at a now-defunct magazine called Lingua Franca… a bit of a legendary magazine that was actually about universities, but it had a real mischievous, witty way of writing about them, where they did this puncturing of a lot of the pomposity, and writing about the sacred characters in the university as if they were celebrities. There were quite a few New Yorker writers who started there, it was really an exhilarating place, and short-lived, so it lends itself to mythological treatment.

My editor here is a big fan of your first book, How Soccer Explains the World, about the connection between soccer and globalisation. How it was that you came to bring those two topics together?

As a political nerd I couldn’t help but find part of the thrill of soccer to be the fact that it was rife with politics and geopolitics, and that rivalries had this added dimension of carrying histories of imperialism and war, and that was part of the reason why the game was so authentically intense. I always actually viewed the game through a somewhat political lens. I was a terrible soccer player as a child, so I did what nerdy kids do – which is, you set out to master intellectually the things that you fail at physically.

Who’s your team now?

Arsenal is the team I’m most devoted to, which is a source of constant pain.

A lot of your new book World Without Mind deals with your experience at the New Republic. At the start you say that you’re writing was fuelled by a certain amount of anger, and I want to know: was that anger directed at Chris Hughes or at the C.E.O. [Guy Vidra] or more towards the general crisis of the media at the moment?

I actually don’t have any real anger to any of the individuals that I know in particular. My anger is more directed at Facebook and Google and Amazon, because all these industries – these professions that I love dearly, writing and media and book publishing – they’ve become so intensely dependent on a few big platform companies for their economic health and survival. And so the dictates of the big companies end up having this hugely distorting effect on everybody who depends on those companies.

I see it in media all the time, where when Facebook decides that it wants to switch to video, it wants to prioritise video, all of a sudden every media company in the world makes these incredible investments in producing video, even if video isn’t the thing that they do well. And it comes at the expense of money that would otherwise be spent on the written word.

Or to step back and look at it more generally, it’s that these platforms suck up advertising in a way in which media simply can’t compete. Some of that’s fair wins on their part, but we have to think about these guys also as parasites, who are media companies who don’t produce any actual media. They manage to skim the process without making any of the investments or expenditures, and the result has been a famine in media over an extended period of time.

So the anger that you had when you were writing the book, you still have that now?

Yeah, you know, I didn’t really achieve catharsis.

What advice – if you could go back and talk to 2012 to 2014 Frank or if you saw someone in the same position that you were in over that second period at the New Republic, pushed by the business side to create digital content or snackable content, what advice would you give them?

When I go back and I revisit the New Republic experience in my head, the thing that I wish I did differently was spend less money. When Chris Hughes came I was totally seduced by the prospect of becoming something bigger, shinier, and better. That rather than having a saviour who would save the New Republic as it had existed, I got suckered into the vision of transforming the New Republic into something closer to the New Yorker, which was just an entirely different scale of expenditure… And in retrospect, I wish I’d just preached restraint. Because, I think if we hadn’t lost quite so much money I don’t think Chris would have ever gotten antsy, I don’t think we would have ended up in a crisis – or I don’t think he would have perceived there to be a state of crisis, as he did in 2014.

I just think it’s always the temptation that when you have a new patron… We tend to associate success with scale, whereas excellence can exist in niche forms. And I would have been a lot better off, Chris would have been a lot better off, if we had curbed our pursuit of scale.

Do you think there’s any case to be made for publishers trying to outright reject or turn their back on digital metrics, or perhaps even turning their back on Facebook, focusing on print editions perhaps?

Yes, I think it’s actually happening. It’s a long, slow parting of the ways, but I do have this sense that Facebook is shifting its emphasis away from journalism, because journalism has turned out to be so fraught for Facebook itself. Journalism, politics, these are the things that bring controversies over what’s real and what’s fake, over how the platform could regulate itself for the good of the citizenry. And those are questions that Facebook ultimately doesn’t want to have to address because they’re so complicated and there’s a lot of risk involved.

So I think Facebook is going to peel away from journalism. It’s going to hurt journalism in the short run, but journalism is going to have to accept the fact that its traffic numbers are going to drop, that its digital advertising is never going to be what it hopes it’s going to be. Over the long run that’s healthy because it’s going to force journalism to refocus on subscriptions, and it’s going to enable journalism to liberate itself from some of the pernicious metrics that Facebook uses and which have come to govern journalism.

And so you think there is a sustainable model for writing and for magazines?

I do – but I fear that we’re going to experience greater pain in the transition to that sustainable model. That journalism will probably shrink – shrink even more – before it reaches the point of sustainability. It’s a pretty terrible thought to entertain, but I’m guessing it’s inevitable.

We’ve started to see this here [in the U.S.], where some of the big digital publishers have started to shed employees, kind of in the aftermath of all Facebook’s shifts. So like Vox fired 50 people last month. It’s attributable to the fact that Facebook had started to downgrade journalistic content.

There’s not just a tension between media companies and publishing, and Facebook – I was interested in this connection I noticed with Amazon. Your author bios on Slate and the Atlantic, when they mention your new book World Without Mind the link they provide is to Amazon. I’ve noticed this as well with book reviews on the New Yorker, a lot of the time they’re linking to Amazon. And I was just genuinely curious, is there an explanation for that?

Because it’s the unthinking choice that American consumers make when they purchase basically everything. Has Amazon amassed that kind of dominance in Australia?

They opened their first warehouse in Melbourne only a couple of months ago, just in time for Christmas, and there was a small – it was actually quite a small news item. I don’t think people, especially businesses, quite understand what’s coming for them in the way that Amazon has consumed the States. I get a lot of books off Book Depository and I think the brick-and-mortar stores have certainly felt some of that, but I haven’t seen an independent bookstore close… yet.

Lucky you. If Amazon decides that it wants to win in Australia, it will win, because its ability to sustain losses is so deep. Can I just give you a word of warning about Amazon?

Yeah sure, please, I’ll pass it on.

Okay, so, you know this guy Donald Trump? I think that if you look at a lot of the sense of displacement that so much of America feels right now, it’s attributable in some ways to Amazon. Because, a long time ago, our main streets were decimated, and then we had these malls, and we had Walmart, but they’ve struggled to survive. Well, malls have struggled to survive in the face of Amazon, and even Walmart hasn’t quite figure out how to respond to the power of Amazon.

What happens when you lose commerce, when commerce becomes so concentrated, is that people stop going to stores. And you lose all of the social interaction and sense of community that comes with that, and you start to lose jobs, as well. You can’t attribute all of that damage to Amazon, maybe you can’t even attribute most of that to Amazon, but Amazon has played a role in eroding something fundamental about the fibre of the nation.

Can we switch back to Facebook and publishing – I’m sure you’ve read the Wired piece about the last two years at Facebook. That piece, I thought it concluded on a note of optimism. The journalists, Nick Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, they believe that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have finally come to accept that they’re not just a platform, they’re also a publisher. What do you think about the idea that Facebook and these companies might just govern themselves appropriately according to their moral compasses or because of their own sense of duty?

I don’t buy it. I think that ultimately you just can’t count on these companies to govern themselves. Too many of their incentives push towards increasing the boundaries of surveillance on their customers, and this is what we’re constantly learning anew. So we have the scandal right now over Cambridge Analytica, which is a company that was working with the Trump campaign to come up with psychographic portraits of voters that were going to be exploited on Facebook, and they were tapping Facebook in order to get data about users. And unfortunately I think that Facebook’s comparative advantage is its data, and it’s always going to try to protect that, and the way that it will protect it is by finding new, invasive ways to find out more about you.

This is separate from the problem of whether Facebook can regulate fake news, but what I’m getting at is that, you know, Facebook is never going to be able to regulate itself. It’s almost inevitable that we’re going to arrive at the day when government regulates the technology companies. The fact is that we’re only belatedly understanding the abusive tactics used by these companies, so it feels like each month we awake anew to some different horror. And all these horrors will add up and will take their toll, and the only reason to be optimistic is that they’re going to lead to government finally providing a counterweight to these companies.

I’m sure you’ve also read John Hermann’s book review of World Without Mind, and in that review he uses the words – when he’s talking about your calls for government regulation – he uses the words “idealistic, plain crazy, or just plain impotent”. What do you think of his assessment?

[Laughs] I always place myself on the spectrum between idealistic and plain crazy. I think the thing is that everything is changing so quickly, and the sense of what’s politically possible expands almost every day. So when I first proposed my book, I felt like this was a very strange subject, and it felt like a very quixotic pursuit. And when I tried to explain it to people I felt like they gave me funny looks. But then, over time, calls for regulating the tech companies are shifting closer and closer to the centre of American political discourse, and certainly European political discourse. We’re not there yet, but I don’t know that we’re that far off. Does that just sound plain crazy?

It certainly sounds idealistic, although what the Europeans are doing is good. I notice there’s a lot of talk of thresholds in your book, and the big threshold, the threshold above all the other thresholds, is this concept that we’re going to get to a point where thinking is eroded so much that we can’t actually claw ourselves back… I have a friend who’s got this joke about footballers, rugby players, who play one game of rugby and after that no longer have enough brain cells to realise that playing rugby is bad. Are we in danger of the same kind of lock-in happening with Big Tech?

[There’s a point at which] tech becomes a barrier to being a present human being. And the presence that we have in conversation is not disconnected to the presence that we have in our states of contemplation. And if we’re always connected to the machine, we really do surrender some core element of our mental processes.

This is a question that’s not really unique to issue of the tech giants and the digital age, but it is certainly made more pressing by it: how do people who are engaged in intellectual life, how do they reach across to people who don’t care so much about ideas? How do you reach across the aisle, so to speak?

It’s funny you mention that, because, as I said before, I’m actually kind of engaged in doing this right now as we speak, on my way to the evangelical college, where I want to try to have this type of conversation with people who are hostile to elitist thinking. I think part of it is that we need to be unabashedly elitist.

The temptation of intellectuals over the course of the last generation is to try to dumb it down, fun it up, popularise, decamp from the little magazines and the ivory tower to become public intellectuals – and having intellectuals writing in accessible prose and the like. But I also think it’s important that we don’t degrade the core of what we do in the process. One of the things that we may need to do is nurture the life of the mind in an almost counter-cultural way as we go through these transitions. The life of the mind is something incredibly precious, there’s this gorgeous heritage of ideas that we have, and it’s important that we don’t let it fall into disrepair.

On the last page of your book there’s a similar sentiment. You say that “we need to protect ourselves”. I wanted to ask you what that looks like: what does protecting ourselves from the tech giants involve?

There’s a measure of self-awareness that’s critical: we need to understand the addictive powers of the technologies. To protect ourselves from them there are all sorts of mechanical things that one should do as good intellectual hygiene, you know, in terms of shutting off the notifications on your phone, stripping Facebook off of your phone, not sleeping with your phone.

I make the case for why continuing to read paper books preserves a sanctuary in our lives where we’re not being surveilled, where we’re disconnected from corporate stores, and where people are not trying to steal away our attention. And I think it’s that spirit of resistance, of trying to maintain the quiet spaces in our lives, that helps preserves us as human beings.

Franklin Foer is speaking at Carriageworks on Saturday, 24 March, at 6:30pm, as part of UNSW’s Centre for Ideas

On the Waterfront Sydney’s working harbour is being sold off for city real estate

In the predawn darkness of Blackwattle Bay the smell of diesel and cigarettes competes with the raw ammoniac taint from the Fish Market, where trucks and forklifts are already circling each other in the crowded car park. On the ferry wharf deckhands are coiling ropes and cable, checking off maintenance jobs or carrying cartons of booze aboard their boats.

The backup generator aboard the Arafura Pearl is the loudest thing in earshot, the dull roar of the Hanson Concrete site across the bay just cutting through. As the Arafura Pearl casts off for its early morning run to Manly the skipper keeps one eye on his navigation screens and the other on the kayaks skating around the water.

Those kayaks and the platoons of joggers on the shore are the first harbingers of the residential boom that’s eclipsing Sydney’s working harbour. But the looming high-rises of Pyrmont silhouetted against a crimson sunrise leave no doubt.

The entire Fish Market site and all its working wharves are soon to be displaced by up to 2,760 new apartments and moved to the current Hanson Concrete site. Hanson Concrete will be shunted on to Glebe Island, where residents of Pyrmont’s new apartment blocks are up in arms, having just realised the island has been zoned waterfront industrial for about 100 years. It will soon potentially see 24/7 activity from a new maritime loading facility planned there.

This is at the behest of the Urban Growth Corporation (UGC), the weaponised development arm of the state government. Its job it is to transform the 5.5 kilometres of harbour frontage known as the Bays Precinct (encompassing White Bay, Glebe Island, Rozelle Bay and Blackwattle Bay as well as the former rail yards west of Glebe Island) into “a bustling hub of enterprise, activity and beautiful spaces”.

Their remit also covers the Harbour’s waterways currently used by visiting cruise ships and tankers, fishing fleets, yachts, refuelers, tugs, barges and ferries along with all the maintenance craft that remove floating garbage, transport raw materials and repair docking facilities. And with the abundance of new waterfront residential proposals, including one for Glebe Island, the question has to be asked – has the state government really thought this through?

Without a working harbour Sydney’s roads will become more congested and dangerous. Raw materials for the endless CBD building boom will have to be trucked in. The ubiquitous apartment infestations that are fast blanding the suburbs into dystopian carbuncles will grow to the shoreline. Many jobs will be lost, along with the unique character of this harbour city.

UGC seem an opaque organisation – requests for interview were met with bland mission statements; in this case: “The Bays’ west area is envisaged as a mixed use precinct with a focus on high value ‘jobs of the future’.”

Their press blurbs claim planning includes the needs of a working harbour, but Sydney activist and one-time mayor of Leichhardt Maire Sheehan begs to differ.

“We’ve had seven master plans for the future of the harbour over the last 20 years. In the Bays Precinct there’ll be much more intensive development and it won’t be a working harbour, it’ll be a tech, commercial, restaurant and residential transformation plan. The only working harbour likely to remain will be in Rozelle Bay and across from it there’s no residents.”

“And UGC have been essentially superseded by Westconnex, which has taken over everything along Rozelle Bay, the Crescent, the railyards and a massive chunk of territory including Glebe Island. They have their own plans for Glebe Island, and they don’t even have a contractor yet.”

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

I’m clutching a coffee bought from a baker’s shop front in the Fish Market. There’s no need to hang on; the seas in this domesticated backwater are as calm as the skipper, and the ferry – 24 metres long, capacity 190 people – is built to withstand the cyclone-prone Arafura Sea. Originally commissioned to transport communities from Darwin to Tiwi Island, the Arafura Pearl now runs ten commuter trips a day around the harbour for Manly Fast Ferries.

“It’s a beautiful boat, seen a lot,” says skipper Doug Hazell. Manly Fast Ferries was once a small charter business that became a mainstay of Sydney’s public transport after taking over from the state government’s Sea Cats with two of its own and the Pearl. But like the rest of the working harbour fleet, they’re scrambling to find future berthing space under the proposed developments.

As we taxi under Anzac Bridge, to our left (or portside, whichever you prefer) in Rozelle Bay we can see a big ugly tug amongst the sleek yachts or ‘white boats’ in a crowded dock.

“That’s Sydney City Marine,” says Doug, pointing. “They have one of the last slipways (maritime maintenance facilities) that can handle huge vessels. For that reason they might stay where they are.”

There’s an acrid stench as we approach the White Bay Cruise Terminal.

“The raw crude oil that cruise ships burn,” he tells me. Two of these massive vessels sit at dock, blowing fumes into Balmain.

Greens MP Jamie Parker, who refers to UGC as ‘the government’s glorified real estate agent’, will tell you just how much drama the relocation of this terminal from Circular Quay has caused. “This goes to the ad hoc planning that so many governments have taken to the Bays Precinct,” he fumes. “That’s highly toxic particulates blowing into schools and houses every day.”

Next to the cruise ships are a small fleet of tugs and barges. Tim Gosby, a refueler barge pilot who docks at Goat Island, says its 150 and 50 tonne slipways are endangered by proposals for luxury hotels. “The harbour’s getting pretty small as far as finding berths goes,” he told me. “And when the white boats roar up and down making waves it can get a bit tricky if you’re trying to do a crane job.”

We’re out into the open water as daylight colours the harbour. On our right Walsh Bay shines with private apartments, their luxury marinas built on the old finger wharves that used to go all the way to the Harbour Bridge.

In the Depression, that stretch was known as the Hungry Mile. It’s a dreadful irony that these docksides once resounded with the boots of people desperate for work. The echo of that gig economy must be a sweet irony for the CEOs in these heritage listed developments.

A huge passenger liner is coming under the Harbour Bridge, nudged from behind by one tiny tug. There’s a metaphor there somewhere.

Past the Opera House is the military clutter of Garden Island, whose dry dock is the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. “I’d be very surprised if that got decommissioned,” says Doug. (In fact a $20 billion dollar redevelopment plan has been mooted in government circles.) ‘“But there’s talk of Cockatoo Island being developed to take all the working harbour infrastructure. That would be a nightmare, ‘cos you’d have to start at 3am every morning just to get out to work.”

Then we’re steaming past North Head. Commuter ferries are integral to the Manly lifestyle, affecting demographics and real estate prices. It’s faster to get into the city from a Manly ferry than anywhere else except Pyrmont or Balmain. But negotiating kayaks, swimmers and small boats in these crowded waters is a risky business.

“A skipper could get in big trouble if something went wrong,” Doug comments. “We’re delivering up to 1,000 people a shift. From 7.30 – 9am it’s a human conveyor belt.”

That congestion will only increase. Parramatta River is set to become a major commuter corridor and the working harbour will increasingly be about transport rather than industry.

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi

Leaving Manly, it’s a glorious late summer morning; the white boats fluttering as we run home. A huge swell is breaking hard on Washaway Beach but most commuters are absorbed by their phones, immune to the cruel beauty of Dobroyd Head.

Painters are working under the Coathanger, dangling over the giant clown’s open jaws beyond. Luna Park was once a workshop for the Harbour Bridge construction. The park opened in 1935, just after the Bridge was finished. Luxury entertainments have always come hot on the heels of heavy industry.

A tiny wooden boat is creeping along the shoreline. Doug tells me it’s a ‘line’ boat, carrying cable from big ships to wharf bollards. “That’s probably well over 60 years old. Not many people even know how to build those boats any more. There’s an entire subculture of micro-jobs disappearing.”

A sign on the corner of the wharf at Darling Harbour warns: ‘Make no waves beyond this point.’

Doug rolls his eyes. “They don’t get that a solid moving through a liquid is going to make waves. You go as slow as you can, but you can’t help making a wash. We get people filming us and if their yachts wobble they make a complaint.”

In Walsh Bay a Waterways Constructions barge is parked up against the pylons. There are divers underneath, checking the state of these old wooden constructions. It’s rumoured that Waterways’ base at Rozelle Bay could be in danger of relocation, though as an essential service they have to be able to respond quickly to any maritime emergency.

We check off more working boats: a slow moving Environmental Services barge near Walsh Bay collecting rubbish or stray logs; an Ausbarge doing maintenance under the old Pyrmont Bridge. The harbour can’t function without them. Sea walls need fixing, boats need fuel. There are wooden pylons that rot. Chains that rust and snap.

Back in Blackwattle Bay we tie up at a wharf with around 40 fishing vessels. It’s been condemned. No-one’s certain where they’re going to berth once the Fish Market moves.

Maire Sheehan suggests the confusion in the harbour is as old as corruption. “It’s all about money. The waterfront has become very expensive and the government makes more money out of selling land than leasing to a working harbour business. So you’ve got all these agencies that used to be called government departments, fighting over the land because they’ve got to deliver results in terms of profit.

“Then there’s private developers and Treasury, who put money concerns over anything else, including social or environment.

“Amongst that you’ve got what’s left of the working harbour… what hope has it got amongst that madness?”

4 and 20 Blackbirds Baked in a Pie A recipe to crow about

A crow landed in the huge camphor laurel tree behind our house while I was reading in the courtyard. I looked up as it started its vaguely obscene call. We haven’t had crows in the inner west for long. I remember calling Reverend Ted Noffs at the Wayside Chapel when we were (briefly) exiled to Greenwich on what my father used to call ‘the dark side’.

“Are you calling from the north shore?” he asked. “Sort of,” I said, “but how did you know?”

“The crows cawing in the background.”

They only began crossing the bridge recently. Actually they’re not really crows, they’re ravens but you can’t buck usage.

As I listened to this blackbird, into my head came the old nursery rhyme ‘four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’. It made me wonder: can you eat crows (not crow, that’s a different matter altogether)? So I went looking.

Firstly, those blackbirds were baked alive in a pie with a heavy crust so they’d fly out when the crust was broken. They were served during the course known as the entremets, the course for elaborately surprising dishes. Imagine the mirth when the birds flew out of the pie. And they weren’t the only live things trapped in a pre-baked pie crust: pigs and frogs were others, and once a dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, popped out of a pie served to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta. Alive, of course.

We have our own four and twenty pies – actually Four‘n Twenty – a brand of the good ol’ Aussie meat pie. Our country-classic pie, originally called the Dad and Dave Pie, comes from Bendigo, Victoria dating back to 1947. Mostly mutton and beef shoulder meat in a spice gravy with carrots and peas. No blackbirds. The brand, still going, celebrated its 70th anniversary last year with a cheese and Vegemite version.

But back to eating crows. Apparently you can and, according to one website, the flavours and textures of the blackbird pie are ‘nothing short of scrumptious’. You can find the recipe on a blog by Cast Iron Chef at OutdoorLife.com.

Good luck in hunting crows for your pie. I remember driving through the bush with my father. He hated crows and every time we saw one, he’d pull over to the side of the road, carefully and quietly pull out the loaded .22 he kept under the seat – he was a crack shot. He’d take aim but just as his finger curled around the trigger, the big black bird would take off. He reckoned they had a sixth sense.

According to NSW Parks & Wildlife: “crows and ravens (corvids) are protected only in Greater Sydney Local Land Services region (and national parks and conservation areas), because they are blamed for the deaths of lambs in other areas.”

If you want a good pie recipe and don’t care for killing and cooking crows, The Great Australian Baking Book (Echo) has a cracker one for a beef-and-mushroom pie I’ll be making come cooler weather. And when I serve it to the family, I hope they crow over it. Loudly.

Tropicana Bob and the Min Min Lights The beating heart of Sydney’s wayward bohemians

The Tropicana has been sold. As good as the calamari salad is, and as much as the Tropicana is still an institution on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst, it hasn’t been the same since it hit the big time and Sergio bought a big car.

It was started by the legendary Vince in 1980. The man who opened most of the Italian joints in Darlinghurst offering coffee (no skim, no soy) and toast, served by backpackers, students or young Chinese girls pinballing back and forth. I’m told it was Vince who introduced a machine that squeezed fresh orange juice!

Coluzzi was already established across the road and probably did make better coffee (in the days when the coffee in Sydney was actually beautiful). But let’s face it, Coluzzi attracted lycra-clad bicycle wankers, barristers and on-the-run psychiatrists.

For whatever reason The Trop – a hole-in-the-wall across the road from Coluzzi, with two rooms and indifferent spag bol on offer – took off with the local layabouts, the arty types and the small push of people-with-jobs who had just begun moving into the area.

Vince had to sell the joint after three years. That’s when Sergio took over Tropicana and made it jump.

Al fresco on Darlinghurst Road – outside the Tropicana Caffe

Outside the Tropicana Caffe, 1992. Photography by Andrew Taylor/Fairfax Syndication

When I think of The Tropicana I recall it in its earlier incarnation as the former petrol station with the laminex tables. I think of the two crowded rooms full of steam and people from all walks of life grabbing a pastry or some toast, and the less than full-bodied coffee and how, as Sergio pumped the java, the sweat poured off his forehead.

The Tropicana – rooms full of promises. Much of the morning clientele had arrived from the local 12-step meeting and others who nodded off and scratched their faces were on their way to recovery or the big sleep. Nicholas Pounder had a bookshop opposite and was always good for an amusing reminiscence about almost anything, volumes not for the faint hearted and wise advice for impecunious wannabe writers.

Have breakfast at the Tropicana and you’d probably run into Hobart Hughes who always knew where the place to be that night was going to be; or you’d see that Balkan art student that went off with my girlfriend. It was that kind of place.

A painting by Michael Saker hung on the wall there and Michael could always be found there holding court (often with Dr. Nick). Michael’s vivid pictures really summed up the times. So much so he was the star of a very early Tropfest Film Festival entry that almost won the top prize simply by letting him talk and talk and talk.

But most of the time I think of The Tropicana I think of Tropicana Bob. For a time, Bob was ‘partners-in-crime’ with the singer Peter Blakeley who really loved the place, before he sailed for Los Angeles and Ben Frank’s on Sunset. That was the Tropicana Dream – to cross the great water and make it big in show biz. In fact, Peter was so fond of both Tropicana and hire cars that he borrowed Austen Tayshus’s Hertz rent-a-car one time and was so reluctant to return it the comedian took up a permanent spot out the front of the cafe, hoping to catch the runaway choir boy. He sat there like a tennis fan, getting whiplash as the possible cars rolled by.

Peter also had a dispute with his record company. Being a man of no fixed address at the time, the court process server also took a pew there. Being square, as his job requires, the poor man stood out, thumb-like, and Peter would cruise past, probably in Austen Tayshus’s Hertz, and give a wave and smile to Sergio who would smile back and tell the court officer that, no, Peter hadn’t been by.

So, The Trop was filled with people who were gunna … gunnamakeamovie, gunnawriteaplay, gunnabeabigstar. They sat for hours having ‘meetings’ with pals and sharing dreams. The dreams as thick a cloud in the room as the steam from the frothy coffee machine.

I always thought of Peter Blakely’s pal, Bob Eagle as ‘Tropicana Bob’. He defined something about the place along with being so present there. He was always a week away from finishing his screenplay/musical/stage play. It had something to do with Min Min Lights and a spiritual journey in the outback.

Bob was talented enough – he gave his place at NIDA to “George Mad Max” he told us. He did never finish that script though. One day, sitting at the laminex tables, John Polsen, another gunnabeanartist, had this idea to marshal the skills in the room for a film festival of our own – and so the Tropicana Film Festival was staged across the two rooms with a few TV sets, some long VCR cords and a VHS player.

Before too long the hideaway under the Talk of the Town building was suddenly home to the international jet-set. Bob would still come by, but you know, it wasn’t our place our anymore. It got ‘rennavated’ and turned into a proper dining spot and the atmosphere went south. Now it’s been sold to some fancy restaurant-auteur and the coffee will probably be better – but the place won’t be the same again.

Tropicana Caffe, 5am to 11pm every day, www.tropicanacaffe.com

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