Don’t Harsh My Buzz The man who loves mosquitoes

Dr. Cameron Webb stands in the thick mangroves of Olympic Park, holding a mosquito trap to his ear. “There are probably ten different species of mosquito in here,” says the University of Sydney Medical Entomologist, adding that there are 300 different types in Australia and 60 in the greater Sydney area alone. “Listen,” he says, proffering the trap so that the sound of the tiny creatures is audible. Webb explains that they are singing love songs to attract each other.

For some mosquitoes, “the male and female sing to each other in harmonies with their wing beat frequencies before they mate,” Webb says. However, even though mosquitoes use sound in this way, female mosquitoes aren’t always responsive to it. “That’s why your smartphone app that purports to using sound [by emitting a high-pitched frequency to supposedly mimic predators] doesn’t work.”

Webb has been studying these insects for over two decades, and considers them seriously misunderstood. “Mosquitoes aren’t a flying dirty syringe that transfer droplets of blood,” he says, describing them instead as “fascinating creatures who are sometimes incredibly beautiful”.

He argues that “scientists are really good at working out how to kill mosquitoes,” but not enough research has been done in other areas. Webb’s love for the insect has led him and his team to discover a secret inside the typically unlovable bugs – they could hold the key to fighting some of the diseases they threaten to infect us with.

Dr. Cameron Webb holds his mosquito trap to the camera. There are at least ten different species inside.

Dr. Webb. Photography by Nick Gascoine

In 2007 Webb and his team “discovered a virus in local mosquitoes called the Parramatta River virus”. He stresses they are in the early stages of research, before he explains that this virus “doesn’t make humans sick. But when mosquitoes are infected with it, we believe it might block their ability to transmit other viruses to humans, almost like a vaccine.”

This would potentially solve the health risks mosquitoes carry, such as the deadly viruses of dengue and malaria. It could also mean an answer to the severely debilitating Ross River virus, of which roughly 5,000 cases are reported annually in Australia.

Yet due to climate change, the mosquito itself may be threatened. “People think that climate change will only mean more mosquitoes, but… when it comes to sea level rise, we might lose [them].” The insects are specific to the habitats they breed in; areas ranging from back yards to storm water drains, and wetlands. Mangroves and saltwater marshes are those that will be most affected by rising tides. Another factor is urbanisation. “We’ve built right up to the edge of our waterways with hard physical structures and these habitats can’t find somewhere else to be established.”

Webb considers time is of the essence. If mosquitoes disappear much else may change. He explains that a range of animals eat the insect including reptiles, small birds and mammals such as the Microbat, “a super cute little animal that eats insects”. Although Webb says that the mosquito is not the primary food source for most of these animals, they are eating enough to conclude “they probably play an important part during some component of their life cycle.” If mosquito numbers plummet, these animals will also suffer.

Although Webb has been bitten numerous times over the years, he considers himself lucky – and not just because he has never been infected with a mosquito borne virus. His love for the summer pest remains intact. Few people are aware that it is only ever the female mosquito that transmits disease. “Only the female bites,” Webb explains, as they need the nutrients found in blood to develop their eggs.

“I’ve never met someone who hasn’t got a question or comment to make about mosquitoes,” he says. “I’m never short of a conversation.”

Marrickville or Mirvacville? A development that could shape where our city is going

On a Wednesday afternoon, vans, tow trucks, freight trucks, food delivery trucks, cars, and utes rumble along Carrington Road. A long line of traffic quickly builds as soon as one reverses into one of the industrial precinct’s many warehouses and factories to load or unload cargo.

Cyclists ride along the separated cycleway, while workers in high-vis and young creatives in paint-splattered or clay-covered clothing – some rocking fluro-pink hair – walk past stacks of abandoned palettes, discarded furniture, piles of cardboard boxes, and graffiti-covered walls on their way to get a coffee. The ibises which live in the row of thirteen, ten-plus metre high Canary Island Palms on the road’s eastern edge fly from saw-toothed rooftop to saw-toothed rooftop, and down to one of the many garbage bins on street level to scavenge for food.

Walking through the precinct, located in South Marrickville beside the Cooks River, I’m struck by its mixture of neoclassical, art-deco, modernist, and postmodern buildings which date back to the early 20th century. One of the largest buildings is number 10 Carrington Road. An automotive factory for General Motors until 1931, it now contains numerous work and studio spaces which are available for lease.

Nikolaus Teply runs his antique furniture restoration business out of one of these spaces on the ground floor. Propped up on two sawhorses in the middle of the room when I visit is a 17th century rosewood table-top which he is in the process of re-polishing.

He is deeply philosophical about his work. “As a furniture restorer, you’re not just dealing with bits of wood – you’re dealing with people’s memories,” he says. “You’re restoring a piece of furniture’s sentimental and cultural value.”

Carrington Road, Tepley says, is “one of the last light industrial areas in the inner west”. According to an August 2017 report called Made in Marrickville, completed by researchers from numerous universities across Australia, it is home to 223 enterprises – ranging from micro to commercial – which generate an estimated 1,800 full-time jobs.

These enterprises are as diverse in size as they are in trade-type. Nestled in between food wholesalers, mechanics, and smash repairs are ceramicists, woodworkers, painters, film set designers, prop specialists, costume designers, and photographers. The Sydney Opera House, Sydney Theatre Company, Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year, and Vivid Festival are just a few of their notable clients. This, says the Made in Marrickville report, makes the precinct a “a vital cog in Sydney’s functioning as a global city”. Nikolaus Tepley phrases it slightly differently when he describes the area as cheap, grungy, and “full of weird and wonderful people”.

It may not be any of those things, however, for very much longer.

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Population forecasts indicate that by 2036, an extra 40,000 people will live in Sydney’s inner west. Preparations for this influx of new residents have already commenced – especially in Marrickville. Median house and apartment prices in Marrickville have increased by 10 per cent in the last six months, having soared over the last five years by over 80 per cent and nearly 50 per cent respectively. Real estate agents and investors refer to the suburb as ‘the New Paddington’ and Domain says it is “one of the Sydney suburbs set to see big changes in 2018”.

Off-the-plan sales are now happening for a 39-apartment complex on Marrickville Road and a 38-apartment complex on Arthur Street. Construction is also imminent on Mirvac’s 220-plus apartment complex, lovingly named ‘Marrick & Co’, on the site of the derelict Marrickville Hospital.

This last project, which will include a new library and community hub, public park, and a landscaped common, is a collaborative effort of Mirvac and the Inner West Council. And while it has been praised for its internationally recognised standards of environmental and social sustainability, Scott MacArthur, president of the Marrickville Heritage Society, criticises it for failing to preserve more of the site’s existing heritage. “Three Victorian villas were demolished for the carpark and flats,” he tells NEIGHBOURHOOD.

These developments, however, are minuscule, mere stepping stones for what might lay ahead in Marrickville.

In May 2017, Mirvac and the NVT Group – the landowner of much of Carrington Road – submitted a preliminary planning proposal to the Inner West Council. They requested the 7.8 hectare precinct be rezoned to allow for the construction of 20 new buildings ranging in height from two storeys to 28 storeys (though Council estimates a permitted maximum of 105 metres in height could actually accommodate up to 35 storeys). Many of the existing business premises would be demolished and 2,616 residential units and 17,300 square metres of retail and commercial space added – at an estimated cost of $1.3 billion.

To contextualise all of this, the tallest towers would be nearly double the height of the tallest towers at Wolli Creek – once a thriving industrial area but now one of Sydney’s densest suburbs where some residents can literally touch the neighbouring apartment block from their balcony.

When Tepley first heard about the proposal, he thought it “absurd”. So too did many of the 350 locals who crowded into Marrickville Town Hall for a public meeting in October 2017. Addressing the crowd, federal MP, Anthony Albanese, described Mirvac’s and NVT Group’s proposal as “absolutely disastrous” while Inner West Council Mayor, Darcy Byrne, said “the proponent seems to have confused south Marrickville with downtown Hong Kong.”

A month earlier, Council wrote to Mirvac and NVT Group detailing a list of major concerns about the proposal and requesting they provide more information before a decision was made. Among Council’s concerns was the loss of employment and industrial and creative space; the lack of open space and extra community infrastructure such as parkland, hospitals, and childcare centres; and the fact that the precinct sits on land which the 2013 ‘Marrickville Valley Flood Study’, commissioned by the then-Marrickville Council, classified as “high-hazard” – a classification which would likely see residents paying huge insurance premiums.

Council also expressed concern about how already seriously congested roads in and around the precinct would handle so much extra traffic, and about how the proposal would breach existing airspace building height restrictions. This would likely force Sydney Airport to change its flight paths, seriously affecting nearby suburbs.

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Mirvac is now working on a revised planning proposal for the site. Toby Long, Mirvac’s general manager for residential development in NSW, tells NEIGHBOURHOOD the company is seeking “to create a world’s best practice urban renewal community for the East Carrington Road site” which will include “a range of public benefits such as public open space, revitalised heritage precinct, affordable creative space, affordable housing, improved connections to transport, and stormwater infrastructure upgrades to address material local flooding issues.”

Long says a deadline for resubmission “has not yet been finalised”. He says the company has “received constructive feedback on the original Preliminary Proposal” and will “continue to work closely with Council to ensure the best outcome for the site that benefits the local community.”

As Scott MacArthur points out, however, existing state planning laws – specifically what’s known as the ‘Gateway Process’ – mean Mirvac can, should negotiations with council continue to prove problematic, “walk away at any time and get the state government to intervene on its behalf”.

Which the state government would likely do, given it is driving an associated redevelopment of the entire Marrickville station area as part of the ‘Sydenham to Bankstown Urban Renewal Corridor Strategy’ – a strategy developed in conjunction with the construction of the south-west Metro train line. As currently formulated, the redevelopment will see numerous single-dwelling areas around Illawarra Road rezoned to medium, medium high-rise, and high-rise housing up to twelve storeys high.

These changes will provide an expected 6,000 extra dwellings by 2036 and will, according to the NSW government, create a “diverse and vibrant community focused around a reinvigorated Illawarra Road.”

The Inner West Council disagrees, citing similar concerns as for the Carrington Road proposal. They are now calling on the NSW government to scrap the ‘Urban Renewal Corridor Strategy’. The state Labor opposition has promised it will do just that if elected at the next state election.

Like MacArthur, Kelsie Dadd worries that Marrickville will become unrecognisable should these plans go ahead. A resident of the suburb since 1993, she is now a spokesperson for Save Marrickville – a local action group campaigning against Mirvac’s and the state government’s redevelopment plans.

Dadd rejects any suggestion that she is “anti-development”. She knows there is going to be an increase in population in Marrickville and the inner west, and acknowledges there is a need for new residential developments. But she believes that they should not replace industrial lands, be sympathetic with heritage and the environment, and be accompanied by extensive new community infrastructure. “If the government and developers could design tasteful, respectful developments, then that would be okay,” she says. “But it just seems like they’re out to make a lot of money.”

Tepley echoes this sentiment. Referring specifically to the Carrington Road proposal, he says, “The government and the developers aren’t considering the value of what’s already here. They just look at it and say, ‘Well, it’s all industrial. Let’s bulldoze it all and put apartments in’.”

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Photography by Daniel Mulheran

Hundreds of locals – young and old – are gathered in the sun outside Marrickville Town Hall on a hot Saturday afternoon in late February for a protest organised by Save Marrickville. They yell chants like “Community not developers!” and hold placards with messages such as “35 STOREYS – IS THIS A JOKE?” and “MARRICKVILLE NOT MIRVACVILLE”.

Under police watch, they march along the footpath of Marrickville Road. They pass Greek and Vietnamese restaurants, boutique cafes, two dollar shops, fabric outlets, the Lazybones live music bar, and Mirvac’s Marrickville sales office – which just happens to be closed today – before arriving at the Alex Trevallion Plaza beside the historic post office building where a stage and PA system is set up. As they wait for speeches to begin, they continue chanting, wiping sweat from their faces.

Dadd takes the microphone first. “Marrickville is our suburb,” she says. “Marrickville is our home. And for many of us, it’s our workplace. It’s not a developer’s playground!” The cheers and applause of the crowd blends with the roar of an aeroplane overhead.

She continues. “When developers come knocking, tell them, ‘Don’t mess with Marrickville!’”

Inner West Council mayor, Darcy Byrne, and Greens councillor, Colin Hesse, also give rallying speeches opposing the current development plans. So too does Linda Burney, the Federal Labor MP for Barton and a long-term resident. “This area is precious,” she says. “This area is something we will all come together for because it is such an important part of Sydney.”

Later that evening, I climb onto the roof of my home behind Enmore Park. I can see out over all of Marrickville. It’s a flat sea of historic one and two-storey houses with terracotta-tiled roofs, as well as large but low-lying warehouses and factories. The tallest architectural features in sight are the spire of St Clement’s Church and the square tower of St Brigid’s Church up on Marrickville Road.

Turning to the south, I can see the cranes and apartment towers of Wolli Creek. Am I, I wonder, looking at Marrickville’s – and perhaps Sydney’s – future?

For more, see ‘The Sydenham Dilemma’

Supernatural Force Next Door with Stellar Leuna

Something has gone awry with the girls in Stellar Leuna’s illustrations.

Looking towards unfamiliar horizons, calling out into the foreboding darkness, full of schemes to run away from home into the arms of tattooed girlfriends. Their eyes are lit up with fear and defiance, sensing a threat beyond the pines. They’re misunderstood and rambunctious, haunted, and wary of authority. Every popular moral panic held toward young girls is vividly brought to life on paper, captured in the mistrustful expressions of these teenagers. Some of them are Leuna too: her younger self anyway.

“There’s a lot of nervous anxiety that inspires my work… it’s what lead me to be an artist in the first place, because I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. I remember always wanting to run away as a teen,” she admits. “So if I didn’t draw, what the hell else would I have done with that energy?”

It’s an outsiderism that feels deeply rooted in personal experience. Growing up in deep Sydney suburbia, under the eye of “traditionally Asian [Hong Kong-Chinese] parents with traditional values”, her fantasies took shape in the form of breaking away from expectations and sliding into danger. Experiences birthed an illustrative style of black and white that strikes a balance between the pulpy graphic designs you see on old-school hardcore-punk t-shirts and the sketches from comic books. Equal parts Jennifer’s Body and Death Proof, they carry a certain punkish temper that escapes immediate comprehension. Yet still the comparisons come.

'All Hallows Eve' by Stellar Leuna

'Doppelgänger' by Stellar Leuna

'Fatal' by Stellar Leuna

'Devil's Music' by Stellar Leuna

“A lot of people say it reminds them of [Raymond] Pettibon’s stuff… people who don’t read comics but are aware of hardcore punk , that’s the first thing they compare it to… people from all walks of life compare it to different things, like those who are vaguely aware of Frank Miller will be like, ‘It reminds me of Sin City!’”

For that reason she was stunned when approached by Prada to collaborate for their S/S 18 ready-to-wear comic book inspired collection, where they transmogrified her art into a Betty and Veronica inspired milieu. Metal and sub-culture has long been poached by fashion houses for a quick aesthetic, something Stellar is suspicious of, but this interpretation was welcomed. “Working with them never seemed like something that could be possible…. when I got the email I actually laughed out loud.”

My first exposure to her designs was a few years ago on a tote for a Riot Grrrl festival; her illustrations seemed naturally counter-cultural. That her work could be so quickly adapted to one of the biggest European fashion houses speaks of its ability to communicate – a trait she emphasises by depicting the dress of the girls as “generically as possible”. These blank slates are the every girl. The only real fashion influence in her drawings come from herself and her daily uniform. “I don’t consciously try to work fashion into my drawings,” she says. “[I do that] so if you look at it ten years later you don’t think it’s a relic of the time. I’m conscious about clothing in that sense only.”

When I first meet her, it’s a peaceful, sunny day, but she’s wearing the look: black shirt, black boots and black pants. We’re in a less travelled part of Marrickville. We walk past an especially large oval, overlook a river and briefly talk, then head back to her apartment block. As we walk she talks about her escape from the northern beaches to the inner west of Sydney. She seems unsure of how to accept admiration from her followers – but she’s “tickled” that so many people identify with the character and stories in her art. She is frequently approached by women who think the drawings look like them.

Photography by Dakota Gordon

Once home, she shows me her working space, shared with her equally counter-cultural boyfriend. Their influences overlap. The faded photo of Danzig lovingly sticky-taped next to a computer could belong to either of them. Robert Mapplethorpe postcards are pinned alongside lithographs of the Italian masters, and on the other side of the room sit a collection of comic and anime figurines.

You can put two and two together – the emphasis on negative space and clearly defined silhouettes take form from the classics, but the monotone nature of the prints are totally modern. There’s enough Patti Smith adoration present in the room to learn that girls who dress like boys have absolutely bled into Leuna’s vision. It’s strangely sobering to be in her place, and when we kneel on the floor pouring over books, it’s in quiet appreciation.

When I discover the Sailor Moon figurines, still pristine in their packages on the bottom rung of a storage shelf, we are both reverential – for millennial babies, our first exposure to the undeniably Japanese, hyper-feminine magical girl series was nothing less than life-altering. They prioritised female friendship and emotional affluence, showing how secrecy and power influenced even the most ordinary looking of schoolgirls. In those stories girlhood was the most connective, supernatural force possible. Although there’s a more sinister feeling that hangs in the air around Leuna’s girls, you get the feeling they too could flip the switch at any moment and spark a change.

Henry Rollins: Something and Nothing Ghosts in the Machine

When I met Henry Rollins in 1993 he had big problems. Big deal. He already had quite the rep – Tom Cruise planted inside The Hulk’s body, an All-American boy ever-ready for violent combustion. Instead of that combustion, Rollins quoted Nietzsche and John Coltrane, hung out with Nick Cave and Sonic Youth, expanding his heavyweight music career with a publishing wing that dug out the real hard core, great and terrifying moral writers like Hugh Selby Jnr, the author behind Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream.

Rollins: he was something and he was nothing to me.

Prior to meeting him I was not a fan. He just seemed like some pumped-up dope who printed book after book of his journals. A walking bunch of tattooed muscles with angry eyebrows. My real ‘beef’ was his music with Black Flag, lauded by many but to my ears mono-rock ranting. American punk? No thanks. Reputedly he was the leader of a new ‘straight edge’ movement, someone who took no drugs or drink. I’d seen him doing push-ups in his shorts before he went on stage one night. My friends and I were off our dials and laughing. This wasn’t poetry, that wasn’t danger, it was sexually-frustrated aerobics.

What changed my mind? The Rollins Band album, The End of Silence. Triple heavy with a dose of free jazz slowing it down to molten. It was as if he had found a spectrum for rage and loneliness and honesty I could not imagine. An opening song like ‘Low Self Opinion’ hit me like a punch in the face. Manifesto rock for saving yourself. What a blast.

So, Rollins arrives in Australia – not for his music (damn) but for his first ever ‘talking tour’. He is going to get on stage and speak about whatever, improvising stories about his life and opinions. On stage he is surprisingly funny and amenable as well as powerful. Every night is totally different, but he has one big story that unravels and grows. I only discover its seed when we first catch up.

A few weeks previous his best friend Joe Cole was shot to death right in front of him as they returned home with a takeaway dinner. The Rollins I meet is not much more than a gun blast himself. He has so much anger and hurt he can’t place it anywhere. Literature and music have given his past rage a place and purpose, but this new pain is more than he can locate. We walk through Surry Hills towards a café for our interview, a pale skinny rock journalist making small talk, an underground rock star shattered by tragedy. And though neither of us bonds we communicate like some big mistake meant to happen. Henry Rollins, trust is hard. But yeah, we met. It was just like you sang it too: “Unable to express the pain of our distress.”

See below for Mark Mordue’ original interview with Henry Rollins in 1993.

Rollins, shirtless, on stage and in the rain

Rollins says his idea of perfect happiness is when “I’m in the middle of something. When I’m in motion. When I am an active verb.” Photography by Pelle Sten

The Bright Stuff

Henry’s Rollins and his music of ascent

Can you remember the last time you were really scared? Henry Rollins shifts in his seat, and his whole body seems to ripple with the answer as if he’s making a threat. “Yeah, I remember the last time I was scared. December 19th, when a guy had a gun to my head. And then two minutes later he shot my friend and blew his face all over my front porch five feet away from me. That was pretty scary.”

In his book, Pissing in the Gene Pool, Henry Rollins calls honesty “the isolation machine.” Spend some time with him and you begin to get that honesty, an honesty so intense, so physically, absolutely there it’s exhausting and ultimately distancing. Henry Rollins prefers his own company to most human beings and despises “cop-outs” like drugs and alcohol. Rollins lives the ecstasies and agonies of solitude, working out on weights or meditating, reading Nietzsche and Hugh Selby Jr and listening to Coltrane or Hendrix. The only other time he’s happy is when he’s on stage with the Rollins Band, a maelstrom he finds joy in because “it’s like a f*cking war zone.”

On most of his books and records he is simply credited as ‘Rollins’ – no Christian name, no soggy, false familiarity, no waste of breath on an unwanted consonant or vowel. Just one word. Rollins. Suggesting something hard and moving from the self-proclaimed “part-animal”, “part-machine.”

The man who lost his face and life was Joe Cole, Rollin’s best friend and working partner. “We were like brothers,” says the ultra-intense Rollins. Cole and Rollins were bailed up on their way home from a grocery store on a vaguely happy night in Venice, LA.

Less than a month later Rollins is in Australia, trying to work off his grief on a national tour of “readings” to promote his recent book, One From None. “Readings” though, hardly accommodates Rollins’ free-raving performances of some 90 minutes or more. In three shows he never repeats a single phrase or tale, while also negating expectations that his monologues might only evoke violent descents into Rollins’ private vision of diseased America.

Instead, Rollins is comical, self-effacing, boyish, a silver-lined cloud. The weight of his stories, from the war veteran father who bullied and disciplined him with anthem singing, flag saluting and racism, to the step brother who sexually assaulted him, remains a submerged force. He wants to be liked. The isolation machine cries out for affection – but it’s deceptive; you’re closer to him in a room of 1000 people than sitting with him over a coffee.

Each Rollins show in Sydney goes deeper into his private history, till the last when he relates, over half an hour, just how Cole was murdered and how it felt, standing with his hands above his head inside the front door of his house, hearing gunshots and entering some eerie suspended place in time where his only thought was “gunshots sound strange in this room. That’s all I kept thinking over and over.” And then he ran. By the story’s end a few people have actually fainted, and many are crying.

At his best, Rollins is a stormtrooper into the American heart of darkness, with a battlemap etched in personal struggles to exist and confess his contempt, compromises and loathing. At his worst, Rollins is a dead end, all sound and fury signifying nothing, whose writing slumps into puerile toilet-wall ranting and that typically American extravagance, the confessional as a form of debased therapy. Ask the 32-year-old Rollins about his family and he’ll tell you. “My mum and dad were divorced right after Kennedy got killed and my dad remarried this horrible woman. She already had a kid from a previous marriage, a really psychotic guy. He sexually assaulted me.” Do you hate him? “No. Don’t even think of him at all. Haven’t seen him since I was about 16. Don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. Couldn’t give a f*ck.”

Rollins says his idea of perfect happiness is when “I’m in the middle of something. When I’m in motion. When I am an active verb.” He claims his favourite word is “Destroy. It is total. Powerful. Sexual. Chuck D from Public Enemy had a great quote, ‘When I work, I destroy.’ Wish I’d said that first.” The trait he deplores most in other people? “Weakness.” The trait he deplores in himself? “Weakness.”

Extremity, commitment, intensity… Rollins is a purist who first made his mark singing out-front of the now mythical LA hardcore act, Black Flag. Since their early-80s heyday as the supremely brutal entity on the West Coast punk scene, Rollins has tightened his musical focus, flexing the muscles of anger and subversion with military precision in the Rollins Band.

The last album by the Rollins Band, The End of Silence, marked his first release on the corporately well-connected Imago Records. One From None is out, with another book, Black Coffee Blues, soon to follow on the publishing company he started with Joe Cole, 2.13.61 (Rollins’ birthdate). Writers like Nick Cave (“in the last picture ever taken of Joe Cole alive”), Alan Vega (of Suicide) and Hugh Selby Jr (“easily one of the best friends I have”) are all putting their work out on 2.13.61. Last year’s spoken-word tour was recorded and has now been released on Imago/2.13.61 as The Boxed Life.

“Yeah, things are looking great,” observes Rollins. “It’s been kinda hard in the last month to deal with all that because the facts are I’m getting real popular here and there, I got a great new record and I’ve got money in the bank for the first time in my life. I’m making money. I got my book company happening. I’m writing good stuff. And the only drag is my main inspiration for doing all this stuff is dead. And I’m not trying to be selfish. It’s just that I feel guilty when good things happen now because I lived and my friend died. That’s been a hard thing to get used to.”

Photography by Jon Iraundegi

The long shadow of Joe Cole looms over everything. No doubt there will be a book dedicated to his memory – just about all Rollin’s books seem to be dedicated to the memory of someone or other. Cole had worked with Rollins ever since he was a roadie for Black Flag. They were on the verge of success. But American dreams don’t shape up that way, least of all in the territories Rollins inhabits, like his now-former home in Venice, LA.

“See, In America,” Rollins explains, “if some guy gives you shit on the street, like ‘Hey man, where the f*ck did you get that haircut?’ you don’t ever go, ‘F*ck you.’ You don’t do that. Because the guy’ll go, ‘Oh yeah…'” Rollins forms his two fingers into the imaginary barrel of a gun, pushes it to his head and says “BOOM!” After the silence has cleared, he continues, “Everyone is cocked and loaded these days. F*cking people get shot in traffic accidents. Our road manager’s girlfriend’s brother got wasted at a stop light. A guy opened up with a f*cking Uzi right in the car next to him.”

“Every once in a while I think of moving, I mean, I moved to California to join Black Flag and I stayed there because I like the fact that I’m not near the town where I was born [Washington DC – America’s murder capital]. And I like that. I don’t want to f*cking live and walk on the streets I grew up on. I don’t want to walk down the street and go, ‘Man I stood here 30 years ago.’ I hate that kind of sh*t! It’s like going backwards. And to leave home and become the person that I became was a lot of pain. Now I’m starting to think that California is just… I don’t want to grow old in that city. I just think it’s for losers. Los Angeles sucks. And California’s f*cked too.

“But once you’ve been Americanised you have the stink of America on you. You never come back all the way. Living like I have in the last ten years, there’s a certain amount of paranoia which kinda gets ingrained in you. If you’re a sensitive person, the world gets harder and harder to live in. The climate of the world, in all the cities I’ve been in, is becoming more hostile. I just think that the powers that be are very cruel. They don’t give a f*ck. The rich are rich and the poor are poor. In America the distribution of wealth is obscene. I mean, the poor are really poor, and the rich are like… Bruce Willis! It’s horrible.

“Like the guy who wasted my friend. He’s just as f*cked up as everyone else. He’s just another victim of America. I don’t think the guy who killed Joe is a bad guy. He’s probably just another f*cked up guy filled with rage in a sh*thole. It takes a lot of rage to go out and shoot someone in the street. I’m not saying I want to move in with this guy or buy him lunch. But in a way I can’t hate him and not hate myself too.”

Rollins expresses a furious essence when he says, “I deal with my rage. I was raised with a lot of violence, a lot of intimidation, a lot of humiliation. And I had to reinvent myself. I had to become someone I could respect because I didn’t used to be that kind of person. I would pit myself up against a lot of physical and mental tests, trying to strengthen myself. Now I can live in my skin and stand myself. I wasn’t always able to stand myself.”

That skin is an icon trail through Rollins’ life, a tattoo-covered physique so tensely developed you’d expect to hear his last decade was spent in gaol rather than rock & roll. “LIFE IS PAIN, I WANT TO BE INSANE” is the slogan around two skulls on his biceps, above and below the four solid black bars that served as Black Flag’s logo. There are many others, but the Rollins piece de resistance is a blazing, huge sun across his back with a mutant tarot face at its centre and the words “SEARCH AND DESTROY” carved across his shoulder blades.

Yet in spite of looking like your worst Cape Fear nightmare, people do like to confront Rollins. When asked about this, something crestfallen opens Rollins’ steely gaze. It’s a shock to encounter a handsomeness beneath the hooded looks that is fresh, All-American and not too far from Tom Cruise in its boyish classicism.

“That’s true. People do challenge me. I don’t always understand why because they don’t really know it, but I’m on their side. I’m not doing this to go, ‘I’m better than you.’ I’m not dropping the gauntlet down, not even close. I want to be a friend. Sometimes I feel very ancient. Some of the things I’ve been through… Like if you make your living in front of people for many years, and you have thousands of people who tell you that they love you, that they love what you do… Lots of girls telling you they’re in love with you or obsessed with you or whatever, and you go through a lot of these instances. It’s just…

“I can’t describe what it’s like to be in front of a bunch of adoring people every night for 12 years. After that, it does something to you. It alters your DNA. At this point there’s nothing some women can say to make me fall over backwards. There’s nothing you can say that will scare me. I’m not trying to come on as a tough guy or anything but after what I’ve been through, you can kill me but you can’t scare me. The more you’d try and scare me, the more thick I would become.”

Something in me would like to shake his cage, but I can’t help but feel he is shaking by himself within it. Certainly, he knows “depression. It’s a hard rock to crawl out from under. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. I’ve always had a big problem with depression. That’s why I do what I do. I’m trying to balance out all the things that want to drag me down the drain.”

Don’t you feel your subjects have become a part of your problem? That what you keep looking at keeps on attracting you?

“I’ve thought about that a lot. It makes me think of a line I’ve read out of Nietzsche, and for years I never understood it. And then one morning I got up and had… understanding of it. I’m sure you’ve heard it. ‘He who looks into the abyss, finds the abyss looks into him.’ I have an understanding of it now – you can explore this emptiness and sadness and all of a sudden you are empty and sad. Well, the things I write and talk and sing about, I guess, in one way or another, I’m obsessed with. It’s my life. But I’m always looking to grow, to ascend. I’m not into a backwards, downwards thing. I’m, into a forward and upward thing. I’m getting stronger and brighter as I go.”

Perfume Genius Factory Theatre, Marrickville 2.03.18

The shamanic queen sets his feet and curls back into the thrumming blast of his band, curving in slow time until he hangs, unnaturally, suspended in sound. This taut, arched freak is Mike Hadreas, a lean, slight creature of Washington State who is the singer, dancer, lyricist and soul of Perfume Genius.

His trance holds through the transmogrifying glamour-hammer of ‘Otherside’, the set’s opener, and then as the song fades Hadreas returns to earth and the cheers of so many queers and others here at Marrickville’s Factory Theatre.

The mere humans onstage with him include three nondescript musicians and a lights guy, all of whom I had assumed pre-show were just roadies, albeit not of the production-line kind. Instead, the Genius’ roadies seemed a shy bunch of graduate maths students with water bottles who barely wrung a peep from the instruments as they were setting up. But after shuffling offstage they shuffled back on as the band.

One of them, heavy-set cardiganed keyboardist Alan Wyfells, met Hadreas – now his boyfriend – in rehab, so perhaps it’s prudent to keep a lid on the supernova factor. Seattle and its surrounds, after all, can be a killer of a place for musicians to orbit: very prematurely came the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Kristen Pfaff, Chris Cornell, Mia Zapata, Layne Staley, Darius Minwalla, Stefanie Sargent, Andrew Wood, along with a host of lesser knowns.

The dark gorgeousness of America’s rainy, rippling, Pacific Northwest is the kiss within grunge, the intoxicating intimacy that lubricates the pain and the scouring guitars.

Scrap the rock but keep the kiss: Perfume Genius.

It’s a band spawned from Hadreas’ dirty, initiatory wounds: his broken family; his abused, alcoholic mother; his debilitating Crohn’s disease; his estrangement and brutalisation as an effeminate gay boy – he was once hospitalised after a carload of thugs pulled up and beat the shit out of him – and his eventual slide into addiction.

Yet in music Hadreas remade – rebirthed – himself.

Perfume Genius, Factory Theatre. Photography by Clare Hawley

And now this shamanic queen tours the globe, tonight reigning from high on a throne of sound, sliding along and around it to lock into slow twists and squats and baboonish presentations of arse as a crowd thick with devotees sways mesmerised.

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,” writes Oscar Wilde, and Hadreas, dressed as he is in oversized pantaloons and an undersized waistcoat, manages both. At least he does for those stretches of the show in which he keeps open that door – that sonic portal – to the remote and strange.

When he does, through shrill Dionysian stomps like ‘Grid’ (“A diamond/Swallowed and shit/And swallowed again”), I am travelling, too: clear-fired through the mess of our shitty limits to the redemptive mess thereafter where our obliteration shimmers in the gloom.

Hadreas has said that some listeners mistakenly assume the screeching in the recorded version of ‘Grid’ is not him but instead the voice of fellow shamanic Greek-American, Diamanda Galas, a matter he’d like to set straight as he’s proud of his own vocal mania.

Hadreas flatters himself.

His powers, welcome as they are, are low hills compared to the unsurvivable peaks Galas carves from the air in such works as “Defixiones: Will and Testament”. When Galas unleashed that sublime monstrosity at the Sydney Opera House in 2005 a woman to my rear fled in distress while another to the right wept inconsolably.

The differences are many, but at their heart is commitment. Galas, who also emerged from a chaos of drugs and estrangement, doesn’t just wield a sword; she becomes a sword: razor-edged and berserk. Hadreas, meanwhile, flitters between states. He draws us towards other realms in such slamming declarations of power as ‘Queen’ (“No family is safe when I sashay”), percussive zapfests like ‘Longpig’, and 1950s meets 1980s laments like ‘Fool’ (“I’m bleeding out”).

But his distracting tastes for run of the mill, generically sensitive piano ballads like ‘Alan’ and bloodlessly elaborate productions as ‘Slip Away’ plonk us back in the land of this-is-just-a-show. There’s no threat, no fear, no orgasm to that music – no death.

Shamanism is described by the eminent Romanian religious scholar, Mircea Eliade, as “archaic techniques of ecstasy”, techniques which can include music and dance but only when the fear and the awe are faced and ridden – committed to – instead of toyed with. It is for good reason that Galas splits her career into twin-tracks of concerts: the brutally ecstatic song cycles have their own nights, utterly separate from her more conventional outings as saloon-piano demoness.

Here in Marrickville, however, Hadreas is divided within the one show, and thus so am I.

The situation is not helped by the Factory Theatre’s muddy sound quality (the band and crowd alike seriously deserve better), but it is aided by Hadreas’ charisma.

If only he can divest himself of what he likes, what he finds comfortable, to deliver himself completely to the gods’ dangerous call. Then, if Hadreas survives, we might truly stand blinded in the rays of the sun queen.

Into the Wild Artistic Director Eamon Flack’s vision for Belvoir

From its earlier incarnation as the Nimrod Theatre right through its glory years as director Neil Armfield’s home base, the Belvoir theatre has been a cultural weather vane, a genuine dream space that has bridged Sydney’s alternative theatre with the mainstream.

Now into his third year as the company’s Artistic Director, 38-year-old Eamon Flack is aware of Belvoir’s grand mix of risk and tradition. “It’s got a history of being… ‘loose’ is not the word, but ‘bold’,” Flack says. “That’s built into the company’s DNA. And not so much just adventures of form, but adventures of content. Not just the how, but what stories are being told.” Of course, he admits, you get lead back “very quickly” to aesthetics and style, “but it’s about not starting with that. That quickly leads to a self-interested theatre.” And Flack wants to engage on a much bigger and broader social level than that kind of indulgence.

“Physically it’s a very beautiful theatre,” he notes. “350 seats. You sit around the stage as a group. There’s something about the community a show can build here.” He laughs a little. “Everything is slightly run down. And held together with sticky tape. But that’s an added quality. There is magic in the way we can actually open a show or pull it together at all!”

Flack relates all this to his own peripatetic upbringing. Born in Singapore, raised in Darwin, then Cootamundra, the Gold Coast… the list goes on. You lose track of where he left one place and returned to another. Flack’s father was an aircraft mechanic, his mother a special education teacher. One of four boys, Flack thinks he inherited his father’s restlessness and his mother’s teacherly ways: “A restless bleeding heart.”

Those shifts in culture and geography influenced his sense of “being okay with mess and situations you don’t understand. And learning to sit inside that. To see that different things are possible. To appreciate things that are kinda open – and a bit wild.” It also gave him, he says, “a sense of patience”. And patience is needed as much as daring if you want wild things to grow.

Eamon Flack looks on as an actor reads through the script

Flack during a rehearsal for ‘The Rover’

Soon he will be directing Sami in Paradise for Belvoir. It’s adapted from a 1928 play by Nikolai Erdman called The Suicide. Despite the grim title of the originating work it’s actually a Russian farce “taking the absurd logic of the Russian Revolution in order to create comic ridiculousness”. Flack transposes the Stalinist spike to a contemporary setting, a displaced persons’ camp. That could sound worthy but Flack says what he loves in the play is “the madcap and exuberant nature of it. I think theatre can do that like no other art form can.”

“Comedy is underrated,” he says. “It’s a great way to disarm, to smuggle in incisive critiques, especially when we seem to have these immovable situations. Australia has this weird panic about asylum seekers. It’s such a knotty, pent-up, uptight society really. Any way we have to release those things we should go for. Nice bourgeois entertainment it is not. Real comedy and tragedy can mix together.”

Absurdism and surreal edges underline much of Flack’s work as a director, as well as a desire to create works that engage with the moment and bring pressure to bear – from the unreal and strange outlines of theatre – back on to the ‘real’ world. Again, though, Flack returns to the physical space of Belvoir as an imperative that connects the stage with the audience. Towards the end of the year Judy Davis will direct husband Colin Friels along with Pamela Rabe and Toby Schmitz in August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. Flack is dubious about relating it to Sami in Paradise to articulate any homogenous artistic vision behind the year, “but they do have this robust person-to-person wildness. And that really works well at Belvoir.” He shrugs a little. “Interior, gentle plays – they feel like the volume is turned down way too low on that stage.” Random by Zahra Newman, in an encore season in the smaller Downstairs Theatre, is yet another example of this Belvoir energy; a study of violence and its impact on a family that Flack calls “virtuosic” and “formidable”.

Flack has also opened the Downstairs Theatre “to independent artists for the first time in seven years.” He calls the approach for this new and independent 25A season “a flat-pack production model” where practitioners will basically access the space for nothing. “It just means the artists are free of the financial burden.” Making 25A a real hothouse for new and innovative artists. Greater Sunrise, about an aid worker in East Timor, and The Readers, based on the real-life experiences of two electricity meter readers and coping with a low-income life when you’re young in Sydney, make for a very strong start.

Looking across this year – from Judy Davis directing to Zahra Newman’s solo show, from actors like Genevieve Lemon in A Taste of Honey to Kate Mulvany in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People – the Belvoir stage seems dominated by female titans. It was not an especially conscious thing, Flack admits. “But I will say this for the public record, the women acting now in Australia are just more interesting than the men. Especially that generation of women actors in their 30s… I don’t know why that is.”

Flack can live with that question. And a few more to come.

GSI: Grime Scene Investigation Forensic cleaners have to deal with the messy nature of death every day

In a small Annandale park on a mild summer evening a kid kicks a soccer ball against a mural painted wall; planes groan and skim low overhead. A woman in her forties, dressed in loose-fitting black, talks about her work.

“I say to one of the girls who works for me, ‘We have to play the game, Identify that Stain, Identify that Smell. Here, I put something on my finger.’”

No, her workmate says back to her, I don’t want to play that game.

“Unattended deaths [where people die alone and aren’t found for days, or weeks] is the most common clean we do,” says Gabrielle Simpson. “We scale one to ten how bad the smell is because we have to capture what it is when we start and reduce it to fairly low or not at all. As soon as we’re done the family need to come in to find documents, wills, funeral arrangement wishes. Family can spend a fair bit of time there and you don’t want them interacting with that smell.”

Simpson runs a Sydney-based forensic cleaning company called Clean Queens. Like a crack special forces team, the ‘queens’ move in when police remove the crime scene tape, scrub away the blood and brain splatter, the fingerprint dust; erasing all signs that something very bad happened in the place. They also clean up after suicides and fatal drug overdoses, wade into domestic squalor and clear some space in the homes of compulsive hoarders. As well as private homes, the workplace includes police and prison cells, public housing, aged care facilities, budget hotel rooms. They’re on call 24/7.

The question is why anyone would want to do any of this for a living.

A gig checking stolen cars for syringes lead Simpson to meeting a Melbourne forensic cleaner. “I thought, wow, I want to do this!” she says. “Everything’s just so different. Every day is different. It’s very gratifying work, helping people in need when you know they wouldn’t be able to do it themselves.”

A toughness rides shotgun to her kind heart. “The hardest thing about this job is getting paid.” she says. “Once I had someone that owed me money and I rang Mick Gatto. He called me back, helped me get paid.”

It’s been a typically busy and varied week. “Take Monday,” Simpson says, “two of my staff had to go and clean a police vehicle. Then there was a community housing [job], an elderly man had passed away. That involved removing all the items not needed, leaving furniture, crockery, pots and pans for the new tenant.

“My sister and I started a gunshot suicide on the south coast and came back to Sydney to look at another property that was an unattended death. Then I went to a retirement village where a beautiful old lady fell and hit her head during the night and there was a lot of blood over the carpet. That’s an average day.”

There have been a couple of male Clean Queens but the crew is usually, and currently, all female. “Because women make better cleaners,” says Simpson. “They have an eye for detail. And a lot of common sense.”

It’s hard work, the Clean Queens website page warns prospective employees; in unusual, restricted areas, in uncomfortable protective gear (body suits, gloves, boots, respirators). The odours can stay with you for days. “We have to keep up our Hep A and Hep B and tetanus shots. Biggest risk for me though is tripping over a vacuum cleaner.” Simpson says, laughing.

She speaks highly of all her team but singles out one, Bec, for special mention. “She is gorgeous… One day she’ll be holidaying in a glamorous resort and next day she and I are sitting in a department of housing place with someone who’s got Hep C, is diabetic, alcoholic, their living conditions are really poor and she’ll be very calmly going through their mail, sorting out things, covered in cobwebs and cockroaches running all over her.”

The main thing it takes to become a Clean Queen, apart from a strong stomach, is compassion, according to Simpson.

“You can’t be judgmental,” she says. “We go into places and we hear the neighbours saying ‘Oh, how could they live like that?’ Ok, let’s see, there’s been huge trauma in their life, they’ve turned to substance abuse or they’ve kept it a secret that they have health issues. You don’t judge people. Some people have had it luckier than others.”

Despite the underworld she and her team have moved within for almost two decades, Simpson doesn’t think Sydney is any darker these days. But she’s noticed some things have changed. “Domestic violence has increased.” she says. “And… unattended deaths. People are living longer, living alone, and dying alone.”

It’s a chilling reminder to keep an eye on our neighbours.

The kid finally picks up his soccer ball and wanders off. The procession of planes continues on landing approach. Simpson offers me a lift to Broadway. On the way to her white van, she says: “Oh, I hope it doesn’t still smell from the south coast job.”

Catching the bus, for once, seems appealing. But I gird my loins, open the passenger door, and strap myself in. Reassuringly, the only lingering reek is of cigarettes.

Down the Hatch The Bourbon Hotel

I didn’t go out to Mardi Gras with a single speck of glitter upon me, but I came home dressed in it. I’m still finding it on my skin; in every crease, every head shake. Even a blowing of the nose has revealed a little sparkle.

I’m sat in a green velvet chair at the dim bar of The Bourbon Hotel, recovering from last night’s joyful 40th anniversary of the violent, momentous first. A plastic bag tumbleweeds its way above the street outside. The glitter of a true Sydney night still clings to my body, but it left Kings Cross some years ago.

At this stage it’s almost hack to lament the death of the Cross. There’s a name for it – compassion fatigue – a phenomenon where after enough time or exposure, the emotional response to a crisis fades away to nothing. It’s why fundraising concerts have to happen quickly and why we in Sydney are unlikely to cry over famine in a country in Africa, or political killings in Eastern Europe. These are just things that happen, we shrug. That’s the world. Poverty starves, Putin remains, and the Cross is finally dead.

The Bourbon Hotel used to be the Bourbon and Beefsteak, but it died. Then it came back – not a great resurrection by any means, but at least a bar was open. Now it’s dying again. They want to shove in apartments, make it look like the architectural representation of numb grief. Every Sydney venue seems to have gone through waves like this over the last two decades, but I really don’t think Kings Cross will ever see high tide again.

Who could have foreseen that one punch would change a city? In death that boy was turned into an idea, no longer a person. Thomas Kelly was the symbol those who wanted to destroy the Cross had been waiting for. It was vile how they used him. Those of us who wanted to save the home we’d chosen were pitted against the loving memory of a teenage boy who died.

How many more teenage boys have died because they never had a Kings Cross in their world? Because they never knew Darlinghurst Road, a quick walk from Oxford Street, all the safer at night for the crowds around them? And the dazzling lights and the anything-goes and the glitter that clung to the bodies of the boys, and the girls, and the beautiful people of every gender in between? All different in similar ways, and nothing like the folk back home in Queensland.

These days it’s so quiet here that if the wind is in your favour, the cicada buzz of Max’s Village Tattoo will accompany you across the road, all the way to The Bourbon’s doors.

Ricky Ponting copped a black eye here in the late ’90s, and that still makes me chuckle. When I was young I would drink here for hours with a man who didn’t love me, but for just one night he was kind enough to pretend. We were later dragged out by our collars over the matter of a shattered schooner glass. We both found it hilarious, which made the security guy mad. The drag queen he’d once mistakenly hit on found it hilarious as well, which made him even madder. Men like that just can’t handle not being in on a gag.

They have two-for-one cocktails here on Sundays, and they’re a godsend for a hangover.

We fell out of touch – my fault, of course – but I heard he got engaged. Footy season starts this week, thank god.

A Family Escape How the RSPCA ‘Safe Beds for Pets’ program helps victims of domestic violence

It’s amazing how much of life is tied up in having a home, or even just in having a house. A house is more than a roof over our heads. It’s the smell of fresh sheets or a doorstep worn smooth by foot traffic. It’s your children’s heights etched into a door frame and BluTac stains under pictures on the walls. It’s comfort and familiarity and safety.

It’s also a legal necessity. Being house-less means you don’t have an address to register when applying for non-essential medical treatment in public hospitals. It means wading through layers of bureaucracy to secure Centrelink payments, mail, and job applications. Being house-less means you can’t invite friends over for a meal. And for the one in four Australian women who have experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner, having a safe place to call your own can be the difference between being able to keep a beloved family pet safe, or having to leave them behind in the hands of an abuser.

In 2004 the RSPCA launched the ‘Safe Beds for Pets’ program in an attempt to combat the alarming trend of abusers using pets as bargaining chips to prevent their partners from leaving the relationship or lure them back after they have left. The service works by allowing people fleeing domestic violence to leave their pets at an RSPCA shelter while they search for pet-friendly accommodation. In July last year, Safe Beds for Pets joined forces with homelessness charity Dignity, and together the two organisations now provide crisis accommodation to people with pets.

Sandra Ma is the Community Program Senior Manager of the Safe Beds for Pets program, and explains how one of the most important aspects of the program is “that [the clients] feel like they probably can leave. I’ve had a lot of just anecdotal responses saying that until they realised that there was a safe place for their animals, they stayed in the situation because they knew that if they left, their animal would be in harm’s way. So they stay in the situation to protect their pets. Knowing that there is somewhere safe for their animals to go allows them to also leave the situation and take that step.

“I’ve had people tell me before ‘Oh, I didn’t bring up the pets until [the domestic violence shelter] asked because I just figured why would they care? Why would they bother with a pet when there’s everything else going on?’ So I think just recognising that that is potentially stopping someone from accessing services and reaching out is important.”

Image: supplied.

A combination of strained resources and a lack of awareness about the issue means Dignity is the only crisis accommodation charity in Australia that accepts pets onsite. But Suzanne Hopman, CEO of Dignity, insists it is vital that more domestic violence shelters start taking notice of the issue. “We find that even if [the women] leave violent situations and have left the pets behind the trauma can continue and it can be used as a tool for continued violence against women. We’ve had examples of women where the perpetrators have threatened to kill or torture the pet and then send photos to the children… so if they’re able to have their pets around them that can be really important to that healing process.”

Sandre Ma agrees. “Many of our clients do have children and sometimes quite young children who have had these animals as their emotional support through those violent situations. You know, the kids being able to hug that dog when mummy and daddy are screaming in the background… [it is important to] not lose that support.”

Recent statistics suggest it takes an average of seven attempts for a woman to permanently leave an abusive relationship. The RSPCA-Dignity partnership helps survivors of domestic violence deal with everything that comes after. Rebuilding your life after fleeing domestic violence can be a lonely task. Often pets provide the kind of unspoken understanding essential for processing trauma that may be too painful or complicated to articulate. As Hopman says, “Until people’s basic needs are met, until they are able to feel safe, they have something to eat and feel welcomed they [can’t] start to begin the healing process and begin looking towards the future.”

Ma recalls one woman who used the Safe Beds service to keep her dogs safe from her abusive husband while she focussed on finding crisis accommodation for herself and her teenage son. “[She] described to me that because of the anxiety and the fact that she always thought that she was walking on eggshells around her partner, she used to pick at her fingernails to the point where she actually pulled out her own nails from anxiety. And whenever she would pick at her nails this little dog, he would actually go over and put his mouth over her hands to stop her from doing that… She didn’t teach him that, he just recognised that she was sad and got her to stop.”

RSPCA Community Domestic Violence Program (commonly known as ‘Safe Beds for Pets), phone (02) 9782 4408, Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm.

Dignity Ltd, phone 1300 332 334. Email admin@dignity.org.au

A Bridge Too Far A Letter from Hong Kong

Late last year, a documentary I’m working on took me back to Hong Kong. I grew up here, and it’s changing fast – a fact that hit me when a friend suggested I visit a series of art installations titled Canton Express. The works came from the Pearl River Delta region (now, one of the most urbanised areas of China) and were showcased at the M+ Pavilion in West Kowloon, just a ferry ride across the harbour from Hong Kong’s CBD.

Both sides of the harbour are unrecognisable from my childhood Hong Kong. Although Caucasian, I ‘belonged’ until my early 20s – my cultural identity is infused with this place. Behind me, on Hong Kong Island, the skyscrapers of the city compete for space against a backdrop of rocky hills. The pink and faded yellow apartment blocks of Wan Chai stretch into the sky. In front of me, on the shore of Victoria Harbour, lies something that is now rare – a stretch of open land, laid with grass.

Entering the gallery space, I’m already expecting politically charged works from mainland Chinese artists. I walk into a room covered in photocopied pages of translated French literary works. This installation, created by Chen Tong and Lu Yi, is a reflection on the importance of independent booksellers and what they offer to Chinese culture.

I can’t help but think this ironic, considering the 2015 ‘disappearance’ of five staff members from Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books – an outlet known for selling politically sensitive literature. Months later the staff members ‘re-appeared’ in custody and the store’s founder released a statement saying he had been abducted – a violation of Hong Kong’s freedom of speech legislation which came into effect after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China from Britain.

I continue through the exhibition to find ‘Hotbed’ by Li Yinlin. One of his displayed videos depicts people playing tug-of-war with a rope made from cut-up pages of a book of Hong Kong’s basic law. The next artwork is a cage-like structure built from wire. Below it is a mound of gravel. The friend I am with, a Hong Kong-born-Chinese doctor, gives me his interpretation. “After the Cultural Revolution, China built hundreds of new cities in an attempt to move its rural people and urbanise the nation.” He explains that although these cities have been instrumental in improving the economic growth of the country and standard of living, “the rate of change is too fast. Many of these cities remain empty and hollow – we now call them ‘ghost cities’.”

There’s more than one ghost in this gallery. None of these artists have directly referenced one of the most obvious signals of change – the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge. This 15.9 billion dollar project, due to open soon, is huge in every way. It will open up economic opportunities for the region and will span 55 kilometres, physically linking Hong Kong to the mainland. And the moment it does, Hong Kong will become part of China – its ‘mother’ country – in a way it never has before. The cultural and psychological ramifications will be irreversible.

The Hong Kong I grew up in is changing, has changed. Its harbour is shrinking. Throughout the city, areas of land that were once green and open are stuffed with flashy buildings. The sounds of the city – once predominantly Cantonese – have change to Putonghua, the tongue of mainland China. My breath here is shorter, thickened with smog.

Solid Air Rayyane Tabet and the secret history of the Opera House

Rayyane Tabet, one of the stars of the 21st Biennale, has placed himself in the most obvious and overwhelming of locations. The Sydney Opera House and, more specifically, the Utzon Room, reputedly the only space completed to the visionary architect’s original specifications.

It’s hard to know what to call Tabet’s work: a performance monologue, an installation of found objects, an historical detective story, a love letter, a séance?

Entitled Dear Mr Utzon it is all those things. Truths gathered in fragments. A collection of objects drawn from around the Opera House and associated archives that tell us something new about a building we think we know.

Tabet himself is something of a human collage, born in Lebanon, educated at the American University in Beirut and now resident in the USA. Trained in architecture, he completed degrees in cultural studies at institutions in New York and San Diego, focusing on post-conceptual art and minimalist traditions. One can see these influences in his sculptures and installations, though Tabet admits, “I failed my theory classes because I preferred fiction. I love short stories. Their intense descriptions of a scene, place or character and how that conjures up a form in your imagination.”

The truth is that although much of Tabet’s work is sculptural and installation based, “it has been about showing the sensibility between an object and a story” and “creating environments where stories can be shared”. After refusing the Biennale’s initial invitation, he found himself seduced by the taken-for-granted objects and submerged stories within the Opera House.

One of the more startling involved the 1960 murder of an 8-year-old Bondi boy called Graeme Thorne. Kidnapped after his parents won one of the early lotteries used to fund the building, he was suffocated by his abductor. Tabet explains “this was the first conviction to make use of forensic science in Australia”.

Sydney Biennale artists Oliver Beer and Rayyane Tabet at the Opera House. Photography by Anna Kucera

Sydney Biennale artists Oliver Beer and Rayyane Tabet (right) at the Opera House. Photography by Anna Kucera

We drift to talking about the writers and short stories that Tabet admires. Ryszard Kapuscinski and his myth-making non-fiction. Paul Auster’s uneasy games of identity and confession, where protagonists find the familiar breaking down. The meta story-telling of Roberto Bolaño with its grit and darkness. The essays of Alexander Kluge that take on a fictive tone. Classic works like James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and its mood of predestination and sorrow.

By 1966, architect Jorn Utzon was being dismissed and, as Tabet puts it, “being sent into exile”. His extraordinary designs for the internal structure of the Opera House would be overridden by more clumsy politics and practicalities. For such an organically brilliant design this was a real disaster, one that would plague the Opera House for decades to come with the common complaint that it was the best-looking worst-sounding opera and music venue in the world. Utzon himself suffered too as great artists do when a major work is blighted and frustrated.

In some strange overlap of mutual biographies, Tabet says he found out about another frustrated Utzon plan. “His first project after the Opera House was meant to be a theatre that was to be built inside a cave in Lebanon. Not many people know about this. The cave was narrow, hard to get into. So this theatre was to be built as a procession of pieces, modular elements brought in one by one. The idea was that all you then needed was to put a fire at the centre and have people gather round and tell their stories.” It never happened.

Tabet felt an obligation to complete a story of some kind sown into such events. He noticed a tapestry by Le Corbusier, now hanging at the Opera House, in a photo that originally showed it in Jorn Utzon’s home in Denmark. He was fascinated to discover correspondence between Le Corbusier, then a legend, and the young, relatively unknown Utzon. With Utzon, in a mix of admiration and assertiveness, sending off letters to one of his architectural masters importuning him to advise and contribute in the way that Utzon wanted. And Le Corbusier responding to the young genius.

“Next April is the 100th anniversary of Utzon’s birth,” Tabet says. “It was reading the letters, the strength of his voice, when I realized I wanted to write a letter to him and tell him these stories that I was discovering.”

In writing Dear Mr Utzon, Tabet began to understand that all of this was, for him, “about how failure is as necessary as success”. He meanwhile denies that he is by nature a nostalgic artist himself, always digging into the past through objects. “It’s more a way to understand the conditions that I find myself in today. Grand historical narratives are usually written through grand historical events. They can seem impenetrable. But there are these moments where you can insert yourself back into history – and make it your own.”

“So, in a way I can find that I exist within this building,” he says, laughing lightly. “At the same time even its own maker cannot find himself within it.”

Tabet believes the Opera House has “many personal, tragic moments that make the building more brittle and complicated, more tragic in a Greek way”. In piecing together newspapers, lamps, furniture, paintings, leaflets, he presents us with an archeological ghost story, shadows cast on a white cave wall.

Rayyane Tabet, Dear Mr Utzon, Sydney Opera House. Monday 19 March (4pm & 7pm); Tuesday 20 March (1pm, 4pm & 7pm)

In Defence of Thinking Ann Mossop and the UNSW Centre for Ideas

You’ve been lied to.

I mean, of course you have. We live in a world of power, and truth is often an impediment to its raw exercise. There’s a reason why tyrants burn books – to the most cynical and the least principled, an unthinking public is a blank canvas. Onto this canvas, they (the tyrants, the salesmen, the virtuous-but-ignorant), can paint any narrative they wish. Think Scientology. Think Donald Trump. Think Facebook.

At a time of painful transition for the media industry, Ann Mossop – formerly of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and recently appointed head of the University of NSW’s new Centre for Ideas – believes that it is universities which have an increasingly important role as forums of public expertise. Mossop has curated a series of talks on the areas where this knowledge is sorely needed: technology, inequality, and truth itself.

Franklin Foer was the editor of the New Republic when the publication was bought by a Facebook co-founder and transformed it into a “vertically integrated digital-media company”. Foer was eventually fired and two-thirds of his staff quit in protest. Unsurprisingly, Foer has some views about technology. In his recent book, World Without Mind, he urges the public to see tech companies how they see themselves, as engineers; and he argues that in the same way the industrial revolution automated physical processes, so too is the digital revolution automating mental processes.

Mossop knows that technology is an issue esoteric to most, and frightening in its complexity: “Which one do you have to worry about? That the iPhone is rotting your child’s brain, or that the robots will take your jobs, or any of the potential doomsday scenarios – there’s an awful lot to think about.” Foer gives us a framework to begin that thinking.

Ann Mossop, head of UNSW’s new Centre for Ideas

Andres Serrano’s exhibition, The art of homelessness, gives us truth in the form of photography. Serrano’s portraits of homeless around New York and Brussels are blown up to giant proportions, so large that it’s not possible to turn away. The artist is known for transgression: along with Mapplethorpe, Serrano was a major figure in the fight to save the U.S.’s National Endowment of the Arts from defunding in the ’80s, and his work Piss Christ (1987) has never stopped attracting controversy.

But Serrano’s homelessness exhibition will be controversial only if you think it’s a faux pas to talk about those who are fuel (and then refuse) of the engine of wealth. The issue is dire: homelessness in NSW jumped by 37 per cent between 2011 and 2016. (In a previous Centre for Ideas event on democracy, A.C. Grayling argued that it is inequality – and the resentment that it breeds – that is the better explanation for the rise of demagogues, who create scapegoats to explain this unfairness. Populism is the wrong word; the right word is manipulation.)

Michael Sandel is a philosopher so popular that his course at Harvard was turned into a TV show – he has been called “a philosopher with the global profile of a rock star.” His political philosophy is a model of clarity, and his event on ‘truth’ will offer a rigorous defence of the value of seeing the world clearly.

In his earlier work Sandel parsed the difference between outright lies (which impermissibly coerce or manipulate the listener) and white lies, which, if told with the right intention, are acceptable. He illustrates his point with the question, ‘would Kant have defended Bill Clinton?’ While Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was still wrong because Clinton intended to deceive, it was at least better than an outright lie. In the very act of crafting an evasion Clinton showed respect for truth, “however oblique”.

It’s clear that Sandel will disapprove of Trump’s intentional, outright lies, but the question remains: how can and should we act in the face of such blatant deceptions? Mossop is glowing about Sandel: “He’s really doing this work of bringing ideas to life, and bringing an audience with him, and that is really special.”

You can see the connections within Mossop’s curation. Truth is essential if we’re to address problems like inequality, and these problems need to be addressed if democracy is to function the way it should. At the same time, these public searches for truth often occur on the internet, where they’re hampered by hidden algorithms for groupthink, bullying opinions, and constant distractions. We need a more even playing field if the best ideas are to prevail.

Mossop wants to germinate these ideas in the forums she is organising with UNSW. “Nobody wants to tell people what to think, but what we want to do is create an environment where we can bring those conversations to a broader audience.”

22 March: Andres Serrano – The art of homelessness, Paddington RSL

24 March: Michael Sandel – What’s become of truth?, Carriageworks

24 March: Franklin Foer – World without mind, Carriageworks

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In Defence of Thinking Ann Mossop and the UNSW Centre for Ideas

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