“Campaign Enmore 2017.”
Lanz Priestly’s office has one of the best views in Sydney. Sydney Harbour occupies the foreground; to the left the Coathanger and a massive cruise ship; to the right, the colliding shells of the Opera House.
There are no walls, windows or wi-fi, but it does have natural air-conditioning. Poised above Circular Quay it also has a view of the Sirius Building, which Priestly eyes speculatively from his berth beside the humming Cahill Expressway.
“We’re not necessarily looking at buildings as the solution that we’re gonna put on the table,” Priestly says of his plans for Sydney’s homeless, after their Tent City in Martin Place was shut down by the state government in August.
“There’s a couple of ferries being made redundant, we’re making overtures about those. There are other wasted commercial spaces; car parks, train stations they’re so keen to sell off. But here we are discussing options and we’re looking straight at the Sirius building over there. I could take you there right now and show you entire streets of empty houses that are owned by the state government. There’s all this social housing and no explanation as to why we can’t use it.”
Priestly, dubbed ‘the Mayor of Tent City’ by the Daily Telegraph, is homeless himself; since Tent City was moved he’s chosen the Quay as his chief residence.
He received a lot of negative press after coming to public attention as a self-appointed leader of the homeless. The Australian newspaper published a story revealing his colourful past including violent criminal charges, jail time and allegations raised about his previous employment claims.
If some of his stories can seem far-fetched, the fact remains that he’s become a viable and radically creative advocate for the homeless in an environment that previously held little hope for change. The standoff at Tent City forced the NSW government and Sydney City Council into public dialogue about homelessness that elevated the issue – and Priestly, sometimes known as Priestley – into front page headlines.
While the NSW Government claims a record investment of $1.1 billion to tackle homelessness in its 2017/18 budget, the demand for homelessness services has risen by 30 per cent in the past three years. Rental stress is affecting over 75 per cent of lower income households in NSW, as NGOs scramble to cope. The terrible truth is many families, and older women with unsecure incomes, are only one economic crack away from falling into life on the streets. Mostly people just try to get on with life and hope it won’t ever happen.
Priestly scoffs at the business models of some major homelessness charities, part of what he scornfully calls ‘the poverty industry’. “The organisations involved are too endemically attached to the problem,” he says. “Their vested interest is to grow their businesses.”
He cites CEO sleep-outs designed to convince the heads of large corporates to donate more. “They’re supposed to be pretty hard-nosed businessmen but every year they’re told ‘the problem’s getting worse, so we need more funding’ and every year they buy it. Imagine if they ran their businesses like that.
“We need to hit the existing methodologies on the head,” Priestly says. “We need to say, ‘If the problem’s getting bigger, if we’re not looking for a zero problem solution then your solutions aren’t working.’”
Photography by Dean Sewell / Oculi.
‘The Office’, as Priestly calls the Circular Quay bench he sleeps on, has a power connection so he can charge his phone; the instrument with which he coordinates a not-for-profit 24/7 homelessness survival operation of some influence and reach.
Back in March 2017 I spent my first day with him in the CBD and was astounded by the variety and breadth of his networks, the respect he was accorded by social workers, nuns and police. Today, months later, in the aftermath of the Martin Place occupation, he’s planning further autonomous solutions to a problem that no amount of money, NGOs or government bodies seem able to deal with. His methodologies are challenging perceptions about the nature of homelessness, the way the problem is being handled and even the homeless themselves.
“On the Thursday before we shut Tent City down there were 35 people that got up in the morning and went to work,” he says. “Over three days I counted 58 percent of the people living there worked full time.”
By contrast, the City of Sydney’s (most recent) registry survey for 2015 found that of 516 homeless people surveyed only nine per cent were employed.
But Priestly, a former construction project manager who still does maintenance work and organises teams of rough-sleeping furniture removalists, says the first misconception about the homeless is that they’re shiftless and lazy – the second being that they’re lost and lonely causes.
“In eight months we had over 800 people through Tent City. We had a churn rate of as high as 20 per cent a week, so it wasn’t like people were settling in. A lot of them were people we’d never seen before. And they tend to be the people you get off the streets really quickly.
“They knew exactly where the cracks were that they fell through and guess what? They fixed it up themselves. They didn’t need any input from us. There was food, shelter, somewhere they could leave their things in safety. They had all those things in one place, which frees them up to go and get themselves out of the shit. A lot of those people are coming back to help too.
“The reality is without Tent City or a replacement people simply don’t have anywhere to get these resources and help themselves.”
Priestly maintains that a sense of community was integral to the formation of Tent City and the ongoing activities he oversees. “There’s no committee, but people have shared concerns. I can’t possibly do all the stuff myself. If I put it out there; this is what needs to be done, people put their hands up.
“Even today, I’m sitting here talking but there’s furniture being moved to homes we’ve found [for homeless people]. Two of the guys are couriers, one has a delivery business, they ring me and say where they are and ask what we have that needs picking up that can go to their next destination.
“By the time today’s over, since we shut Tent City down, we’ll have furnished 97 houses, as far north as Woy Woy, out Maroubra way, Campbelltown… On Sunday I did one in St Marys, another one in Revesby today, so it’s all over the place.”
Lanz Priestly en route to Windsor to help at the lunchtime session for Windsor’s homeless, being run by Linda Strickland of Hawkesbury’s Helping Hands. Photography by Dean Sewell / Oculi.
In the wake of Tent City Priestly claims his community has housed 212 people while the Department of Housing found accommodations for about 136, but failed to create the sense of community that sustains viable living arrangements.
Organising community barbecues is one of the communal activities Priestly has instigated to help stabilise rehoused individuals and families. “The BBQs are just one part of it,” he says. “In some of the estates where there are a reasonable number of children we’re looking at breakfast programmes in conjunction with homework assistance for kids that have problems with school work. That’s not hard to put together.”
He cites the example of his own daughter, who he says lived for seven years on the streets alongside him while attending an elite private school. She now has, he says, her own family and manages a medical centre from home in the eastern suburbs.
Priestly is concerned that despite such success stories, any work he does is a temporary fix. “What we’re doing is dealing with (homelessness) after the fact. In order to stop it, we actually have to reach behind and turn off the tap. What we need to be looking at is taking housing out of the commodities basket.
“People would be shocked to hear me quoting Menzies but in his time as [Liberal] Prime Minister he took home ownership from 25 per cent for people over 20 to 75 per cent when he retired as PM and he did that all through social housing. Social housing, in his model, encouraged people to buy and Singapore liked his model so much that they copied it and their model today is one of the best in the world.
“Today I wonder just how different people who are renting are from people who are homeless.
“Most people who are renting don’t know whether they’re gonna be able to stay there for more than six months, whether they’ll have to move house at the whim of their landlord. Last time I did the math I worked out it cost about $4,000 every time you moved.
“The power of the free market puts people in a position where they have to work two full time jobs just to keep themselves housed – that keeps people far too busy to engage in community, too busy to engage in their family. But if we want to fix the things that society finds problematic then we need to do it as a community.
“We need to get over the idea that getting government to do anything will ever work.”
Lanz Priestley in Windsor. Photography by Dean Sewell / Oculi.
Priestly’s ideas may be contentious; he’s accused the NSW government of waging ‘class war’ on the homeless and vowed to defend against it. His latest passion is the Disrupt 2017 movement, which aims to create “media stunts and antics across Australia to expose the corporate profiteers abusing human and animal rights, creating war and destruction across the planet”.
But the facts are on his side. Funnily enough, so is Jenny Smith, CEO of the peak NGO body, Homelessness Australia – at least to an extent. Smith says that amidst wage stagnation and the massive inflation of capital city rents, many low-income earners are paying more than 50 per cent of their income on housing, while one in every 85 Australians are now homeless.
“At the federal level we’re not seeing the leadership that we need,” she told NEIGHBOURHOOD. “While the government is talking about the problem absolutely nothing is being done. There is still no plan and we still haven’t had any additional investment in housing or homelessness from the federal government.”
A Family and Community Services (FACS) spokesperson told NEIGHBOURHOOD that claims that the NSW Government is not invested in reducing homelessness are inaccurate and unfair. In fact, the spokesperson emphasised the agency’s role in attempting to mitigate the problem, which was attributed to “domestic violence, unemployment, mental illness, family breakdown and drug and alcohol abuse”.
But FACS may well have the problem the wrong way round. These markers of social decay may be symptoms of the problem, with the actual root cause being external economic factors. An increase of 35 per cent in homelessness services clients over the past four years in NSW does seem to underscore Smith and Priestly’s observations.
Smith says that only fundamental policy change can shift this intractable issue. “It’s very clear the federal government needs to change its taxation settings in relation to capital gains tax and negative gearing. We treat investors better than we treat people on low incomes.”
She chuckles at the suggestion that autonomous movements can provide a solution. “Things like Tent City are protests and I don’t think anybody is proposing them as a viable alternative, but they bring to the public’s attention the inexorable fact that more and more people every day are finding themselves without a home. Just in the last year nationally 23,000 more came to our services looking for help. We’re turning away hundreds of people every day.”
Priestly, however, maintains NGOs are part of the problem.
“I won’t work with any of the majors.They don’t deliver what they tell the public they deliver.”
He claims that a government funded drop-in centre refused him entry after Tent City, on the grounds that it was undermining their business. “But they shut at three in the afternoon and we were trying to provide all the services they don’t.” Priestly is equally scathing about a religious charity group that set up services in the Inner West as part of a wider scheme to “suck up all the homeless out of the city. Didn’t work then and it’s not going to work now.
“We need something that’s a maximum of a ten-minute walk from the city circle railway stations. That transport link [is] absolutely vital. People who become destabilized and without a roof over their heads, a lot of those people have jobs that could be anywhere. The travel time added for most people to get to work is eliminated if we put it in the city.”
Photography by Dean Sewell / Oculi.
In the meantime, Priestly says there has been “zero meaningful engagement” from Council or government over the fate of the evictees from Tent City. “The level of engagement that we’ve seen is just them trying to ascertain what we’re up to,” he says.
Priestly claims he spoke to Clover Moore in person just prior to the forced eviction of Tent City. “She made a commitment to find [a permanent site for a homelessness community]. No particular building or even a particular location was discussed,” he says of that meeting. “The opportunity to reach that point in those discussions was to a certain extent preempted by Berejiklian bringing in those laws with the speed she brought them in.
“Clover Moore then announced that the council would spend $100,000 and the state government also put up $100,000. In the wider scheme of things, $200,000 that’s catering to 100 people – how does that work? Where was she gonna put it? In a matchbox?”
That promise is yet to be fulfilled, while the homeless camped at Wentworth Park in Glebe were evicted en masse last week. Priestly says that this kind of uncertainty and prevarication is having an immediate impact on rough sleepers.
“There was an almost immediate increase in the number of homeless guys that have been bashed and robbed, including a guy who was hospitalized and nearly killed.
“One of the things I’m seeing is people really run down, just by virtue of having to carry their gear everywhere with them. It’s one of the important unseen things. I‘ve been on at [City of Sydney] Council for fifteen years to establish decent lockers, so that the guys can leave their gear there and go about doing things that enable them to get off the street. Doesn’t exist.”
In the absence of government action, Priestly says he has no option but to carry on with autonomous solutions. “Through social enterprise we’re now starting to see disruptive models emerging,” he says. “People in that space understand the concept of vanishing point models and that we should be setting up structures that have a vanishing point aim.”
He has specific ideas about what form this will take.
“There are people from some religious organisations [the Antiochian Church and Care for Street Kids Australia] I’m quite happy to work with. When we open our new centre there will be groups that helped out at Martin Place that will be part of that.
“The area we’re looking at is parts of Surry Hills that fit the picture. The building configurations there are more what we need. Not that we can’t fit into a skyscraper if we have to. We need outdoor space but it’s not hard to find a few metres of outdoor space in a high rise.”
In the meantime he’s getting on with a rigorous daily schedule.
“At the moment it’s very mundane. It’s about maintaining the guys that are on the street, it’s about getting furniture into houses. We’ve got nine vehicles running around today picking up furniture, taking it from those that don’t want it to people that do.”
Priestly consults his phone, a clear message that it’s time to wind up.
“Well, in two hours nothing’s gone wrong,” he says. “It’s usually people can’t find places, or washing machines can’t fit in buildings… there’s always something.
“At this stage we’re low key. We’re getting a footprint out there and everything we do is crowd sourced, y’know? So there’s an element of the community that is aware of what we’re doing and are supporting it. Let’s see what happens from there.
“My end game is to go fishing,” he says, “problem solved. And I don’t have to do this anymore.”
It only happens occasionally that a work of art truly confronts you. One such experience for me was seeing Ever Is Over All (1997) by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist.
It’s a two screen video projection – on the right-hand side of the screen are shots of red flowers in bloom in a bright green field; on the left-hand side a woman in a bright turquoise dress is seen walking down a city street. As the woman walks in slow motion she carries a long-stemmed flower, not yet in bloom, swinging it side to side.
Then the coup de grâce – the plant’s hard, bulbous head is used to smash the side windows on cars parked in the street. The woman’s expression is pure joy in the face of anarchistic destruction.
A female cop is seen walking up from behind. But instead of arresting the window smasher, she gives her a warm smile and a salute. All of this is accompanied by a languorous soundtrack of a woman’s voice humming over slowed down beats.
This seemed to me to be one of the most preposterous works of art I had ever seen. I told friends about it, wrote about it, laughed at its memory. Back then, I wanted art to say something, and say it clearly. Perhaps I had grown cynical along the way from art school to becoming a nascent critic, but Rist’s work was just too much, too over the top.
Yet I never forgot Ever Is Over All either. It troubled me that I couldn’t resolve the work in a rational way, and in the 20 years since my first exposure to her work I began to treasure the memory of that initial surprise. I thought about the early 20th century modernist art that I had seen in my high school art textbooks and remembered how the ‘shock of the new’ is a real thing – an aesthetic shock that can take years to understand.
Rist’s Mercy Garden Retour Skin, a major installation piece that was included in the Biennale of Sydney in 2014, was a turning point for me in appreciating her work. She had initially made a career in Europe and the US with single screen video works that could be shown on a TV screen or projected in a gallery space. But she began to make larger and larger installations, and Mercy Garden Retour Skin, with its vast multiscreen projections of the sea with human bodies and light awash in the cosmos, had to be viewed from the floor where soft carpet and cushions were laid out. Seeing this piece was akin to graduating from watching an old TV in your lounge room to your first IMAX movie experience with full surround sound.
Rist’s ‘Administrating Eternity’ installation. Copyright Pipilotti Rist, photograph Linda Nylind.
All this came back to me when walking through Sip My Ocean, a massive and intricate career survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (until 18th February, 2017).
To say that Sip My Ocean is an ‘experience’ is an understatement – it’s a full on sensory engagement for the eyes and mind, an ecstatic, hysterical and joyful plunge into Rist’s imaginative universe. Visitors to the MCA’s Level 3 go on a walking adventure tour through a series of rooms, passageways and small niches, where images of space, animals in the field, naked bodies, plants, water and much more are projected onto walls, floors, furniture, even on to bottles of gin, while an entire gallery has been turned into a forest of hanging lights that produces an exquisite experience of light and sound. The exhibition has a soundtrack too – a rendition of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’, performed by a crooning female voice, while a backing track screams out the lyrics.
There are no wall texts and no labels in the galleries, and although there is a room map and a doorstop catalogue, this is not an exhibition about reading, or even about consciously knowing what something is supposed to be ‘about’.
Rist is interested in the experience of vision. She refers to the sun as a giant projector and to our eyes as a kind of sensory recording device. Colour is paramount in her work and features hard blues and greens, often overloaded with filters and solarisation, and points of silver light in darkness like star fields recur in a number of the installations. Where much contemporary video art is about HD clarity, Rist embraces the grain of pixelated images, the play of moving pictures on a variety of surfaces.
There’s a lot of nudity in the works – the human body, naked and unabashed, is shown free of the male gaze: a flaccid penis is seen here and there, like an underwater sea slug, and female nipples float by. The body in Rist’s work is a vessel for existence, not a sexualised identity.
There are dramatic reversals of scale too – in one Baroque installation overflowing with furniture, objects and wall projections, there is a tiny light emanating from the carpet. If you get down on your hands and knees, you will see under the floor a tiny woman, her arms outstretched, either screaming in joy, or for help.
I tried using the room map to work out what I was looking at but in the end just gave in to the thrill of it all.
A previous installation of Rist’s work, ‘Gnade Donau Gnade’. Copyright Pipilotti Rist, photograph by Lisa Rastl.
Without the context of Rist’s other work, I had misread the apparent absurdity of Ever Is Over All as an accident, not an intent.
In Sip My Ocean, we have the opportunity to see all Rist’s art as an ongoing, overflowing and interconnected practice. More than anything else, Rist’s work is about transcendence over the rational. It enters into a state of being that might be called hysterical, but is instead a resistance to the normalising view of everyday existence.
The effect of a work – not its ‘message’ – is probably more valuable in art than anything else, I came to realise. Sure, we can appreciate art that is ‘about’ something, but often vitality is sacrificed for so-called seriousness. There is a joyous kind of feminism here, one that is implicit in the all-encompassing world view of the artist, a sensual and slightly crazy aesthetic of excess. Sip My Ocean is both intentionally funny, and often profound.
Rist’s art doesn’t really need explaining – it simply is, and must be experienced in real life. That her work offers this depth of experience and such an exhilarating sense of the strange is a testament, not to a solipsistic view of the world, but to one that is open to every possibility.
Sip My Ocean is at the MCA until 18 February 2017. Tickets $17/$22. More details here: www.mca.com.au/pipilotti-rist
Seeing Gold Class play at Spunk Records office above the Finbox Café in Thirroul was something of a revelation over two years ago.
The band had not yet released a thing, but all the elements for something great were already locked in: a tight, tense, leaning-forward sound aimed around singer Adam Curley’s arch, angry-withheld-extravagant-internal presence. Standing a metre away from him you could could almost mistake him for someone shy.
The sound and attitude was Joy Division meets The Smiths, and Gold Class have only stepped that classic marriage up a few notches since then. Both It’s You (2015) and their new album Drum (on Barely Dressed Records, and co-produced by The Drones’ Gareth Liddiard) go off like a bomb of pride in your chest.
But it’s live where the band really prove themselves – and any veer into monotone dramas on record transforms into pure muscular romantic thrills.
Curley has that centred, draw-you-in power you get from great front men, and seems to get stronger with the music as a night wears on. He’s written for The Saturday Paper about queer lit, his failed relationship and the influence of James Baldwin on his lyrics for Drum; he’s spoken of wanting this new album to be “defiant and full of skin and trouble and spit and love”.
What you get is the exciting, even urgent sound of a band trying to break free of something in the dark behind them, a kind of protest music about the nature of love.
Gold Class play with the equally mighty Mere Women at the Oxford Arts Factory, 8pm Saturday 18 November. Tickets here: www.moshtix.com.au
It’s a lousy commute. An average of 100,000 cars drive down it every day. There are almost no trees. The only way to take Parramatta Road is with grim determination, hemmed in on all sides by buses, trucks and fleets of snarling motorcycles, past the empty and abandoned shop fronts choked with ‘For Lease’ signs and layers of graffiti, past clusters of wedding dress shops and the blacked out facades of brothels, past the crumbling detritus of industry. You can drive the 20 kilometres of highway a thousand times and learn nothing about it, other than that there is little beauty to be found. And even less with the sun-flare in your eyes if you happen to be driving in the late afternoon.
It begins at the southern edge of Sydney’s central business district, just south of Broadway, and heads in a roughly straight line through Glebe, Camperdown, Annandale, Petersham and Leichhardt, before bearing west through Haberfield and onwards to Ashfield, Croydon, Burwood, Strathfield, Homebush, Auburn, Granville, and finally to Parramatta, which bills itself, in a recent marketing campaign, as “Australia’s next great city”. The road was originally built by convicts over Aboriginal walking paths. By some accounts, it’s Sydney’s oldest.
Parramatta Road has a specific frisson: of dirt, of decay, of the sense of having arrived too late. Talk to the locals, and they’ll tell you that Parramatta Road has always been like this, and in the same breath they’ll tell you that it used to be different — that it used to be livelier and grittier and more vibrant, back when there was a movie theatre attached to the Olympia Milk Bar, back when The Annandale Hotel had bands playing six nights a week. Maybe it’s just nostalgia.
John Halsey, whose framing studio Framemart does a steady trade out of a heritage shopfront, has heard about the state government’s $198 million redevelopment plan, but doesn’t put much stock in it. “The thing is, for the 23 years we’ve been here, they’ve been talking about fixing up Parramatta Road, and nothing’s happened,” he says. While the road hasn’t changed, Halsey has seen a shift in the surrounding suburbs — property prices going up, shops closing, less people renting. It feels a bit dead now, he thinks, so if the government is actually going to follow through on their promise, he’s all for it. “It can only be an improvement, you know?”
So the state government hopes. The Parramatta Road Urban Transformation Program, led by UrbanGrowth NSW, sets out a vision for the corridor to be realised over the next 30 years — streetscape upgrades, new urban plazas and town squares, more walking and cycling paths, and the construction of an estimated 27,000 new homes. Petersham Street will be transformed into a pocket park between Parramatta Road and Queen Street. A dedicated cycling path will be introduced on Pyrmont Bridge Road. Tree planting, improved lighting, and new street furniture will see the city’s most maligned stretch of highway transformed.
Vera Nadile’s speciality coffee business Euroespresso has occupied the same space on Parramatta Road for more than 30 years. She describes UrbanGrowth NSW’s plan as “utopian” and doesn’t mean it as a compliment. “If we’re going to revitalise Parramatta Road, the simplest thing is to revitalise what already exists. We already have footpaths – we need to improve them. We already have shops – we need to help those shops by making the real estate affordable.” She believes that if making Parramatta Road pedestrian- and bike- friendly comes at the expense of drivers being able to park their cars, it will mean the death of speciality stores like hers. “As soon as they put in clearways, a lot of businesses will have to close down.”
Down the road at The Vintage Record, sitting amongst shelves of LPs and 45s, Phil Thomson is sceptical for different reasons. He sees the redevelopment plan as part of a larger trend of homogenising the city. “There used to be a thing in the middle of Sydney called the Broadway squats,” he recalls. “Before the 2000 Olympics, they cleaned out the squats and all the posters got pulled down, all the graffiti got painted over — we called it a white out. In a lot of people’s eyes, the city never recovered from that. They might want to push that redevelopment kind of idea but you’ve got to have a balance — they’ve gone way too far one way in areas around Ultimo, where they haven’t redeveloped, they’ve gentrified, and they’ve pushed out the soul of the city.”
For Thomson, Parramatta Road isn’t the blight that people say it is. “If all people want it shiny and new, then yeah, it’s horrible. But if you don’t look just at the scars, and you look at what else is on Parramatta Road, it’s not really as bad as people make out.”
Certainly, it’s a place where oddities proliferate. Everyone has a theory about Nicholas Fotiou, but no one knows why he keeps the decrepit Olympia Milk Bar open day in, day out, with barely any stock and no lights save for one fluorescent bulb at the back. Equally mysterious is the costume shop with a giant swan mannequin in the window, which doesn’t appear to ever be open. At Recycling Works, an overflowing vintage furniture store, the genial purveyor drinks red wine from a plastic cup and burns endless sticks of incense to mask the smell of his chain-smoking. There’s Jura Books, an anarchist bookshop with a 40-year history, a fencing studio, and a Chinese medicine centre emblazoned with the slogan DON’T TELL ME WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU BECAUSE I WILL FIND OUT AND TELL YOU. It is unlike any other road in Sydney.
The redevelopment promises a more liveable version of Parramatta Road — more green spaces, less traffic, more cycle paths, more homes and an estimated 50,000 new jobs. But in a city where money talks, the feeling amongst the locals is that it will come at the expense of everything that makes the area unique. “Where are the people like me gonna go?” asks Thomson. “That’s a question I don’t have an answer for.”
Dogs sense earthquakes before we do. There’s even an apocryphal story of how dogs in the Andaman Islands off India headed for the hills and saved themselves from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The truth is there are always dogs in a disaster, skirting and scavenging on things you don’t necessarily want to see. Hunger brings out the beast.
But on my last night on Ambae in the Pacific, after the whole island of 12,000 had evacuated as its volcano was erupting, the dogs did something different.
There was just me and a handful of police and officials left at the northeastern provincial headquarters near the Lolowai port. I’d watched landing craft and rusty barges sent from all over Vanuatu come take the Man-Ambae to hastily set up camps in the neighbouring islands over a couple of days, in what was described as a Dunkirk style operation.
It was a hot but orderly affair, rendered strange because there were none of the usual signs of disaster around. The sky shone blue, there was no ash in the air, no menacing rumble. Not even the pungent nose-invading sulphur air I’d found around other volcanoes like Yasur in Tanna. There was danger but it felt very intangible.
Mount Lombenben had moved to Level 4 alert when one of its crater lakes, named Manaro, starting to pour downwards into the burning vents. Volcanologists worried that if the lake completely collapsed and all the water went down, it could mix with gases and lava and explode.
Steam rises from newly active vents in Manaro Lake. Photography by Ben Bohane.
“We had to leave home because ash fall was on our crops and spoiled our water,” said Rosemary, holding her 3-year-old who was gnawing on a navy hardtack biscuit as they waited for a barge out. People were anxious, not knowing how long they’d be away and what would happen to their animals. I could see distress in the old men who’d left their prized pigs behind. Pigs are revered in Vanuatu – a pig tusk is on the national flag.
On the last evening, as I’m uploading photos, a local teacher sings out to join him for kava outside. In the dark, we raised shells of the peppery liquid valium and called out, “Ahwoooo!” (a kind of “Hello ancestors!”). We spat as our gums began to go numb. We were aware of a particular sensation that ensues when a place has been suddenly depopulated.
It is when I am sensing the heaviness of it that we see a pack of dogs approaching. I’m a dog person – but alert to when the flick gets switched to wolf pack.
Instead they come whimpering to me, singing on their hind legs with front paws on my chest. They wrap themselves around my legs in a tenderness that speaks of fear and bewilderment. All their humans have gone. In a few days, hungry, they will start going wild. Those cows I saw tied up, the pigs and chickens who have gone bush… its back to animal kingdom time now as island goes feral. What happens to them? How will they react when the humans return?
Islanders evacuate on landing craft and barges from Lolowai port
in northeast Ambae. Photography by Ben Bohane.
The dogs’ bewilderment and desperate affection lingered with me as I flew out the next day on the last flight. There was no view of the smoking lake. A thick cloud bank covered the entire mountain and went well out to sea, forcing us to fly low. I arrived back home to Port Vila on the day Australian, French and New Zealand Hercs starting landing, with two RAN ships a day away. Australia deployed nearly 400 personnel and provided $3 million as part of Operation Vanuatu Assist, much welcomed by the locals.
This week the Vanuatu government resolved to send everyone home after a month off the island. I wonder how many dogs are waiting at the port.
You won’t find this unnamed beach in the Lonely Planet, but it’s a good one. Wedged between the north-south runway at Kingsford Smith and the M1 to Canberra, it’s protected by dunes and scrub with gently sloping sand out into Botany Bay. There’s no surf lifesaving club, no English backpackers, no ice cream truck. Just a couple of dog walkers, someone having a sneaky durrie and half a dozen horses.
The horses have been trucked in to use the cold water of the ocean to speed up muscle recovery from sessions on the track. They’ve done tests up at the uni to show how it works and no-one can find any evidence, but Gai Waterhouse swears by it, so people do it. Anyway, how many champions have you seen a scientist train?
Horses used to be ridden down to the calm surf at Coogee, to get in a session while the Bunnies and Swans were tucked up in bed. But that’s stopped now. There are no horse-friendly beaches left in the city. It’s another one of those endearing quirks that Sydney has WHS’ed away.
Beach workouts with League or AFL players attract attention. People pull their phones out and there is an occasional Carn the Dogs! But today, the only interest is from one of those over-happy poodle crosses who gets called away before she can even get a sniff.
Maybe it’s the wrong audience, or maybe it’s just that these horses don’t look much like celebrities. All shades of bay. All fit with lean flanks and sprinter’s hindquarters. And although yesterday’s grooming is holding, there’s no silk. No colour. The black paint on their hooves is scuffed. There are no clues that there might be a champion among them.
The horses look around without much interest, there’s nothing to eat and compared to the rowdy crowd at Rosehill, the A380s and Airbuses aren’t worth their attention. The mood is pretty low key. The truckie chucks manure from the float under a convenient bush (no dinky bags and discrete bins here), while the riders fuss with the horses affectionately.
Photography by Matthew Abbott / Oculi
Photography by Matthew Abbott / Oculi
Photography by Matthew Abbott / Oculi
Photography by Matthew Abbott / Oculi
The only person who follows them down to the water is the truckie, who has stripped down to his undies for the occasion. He’s got a little gut and the elastic band announces from his waist: Bonds Bonds Bonds. Before anyone has a chance to chide him, he bounds ahead through the surf and belly flops on a small wave. The riders shake their heads. The horses ignore him.
It takes skill to mount a horse without a saddle and the riders do it elegantly, grabbing a handful of mane and swinging themselves up with an easy, fluid movement. There’s no starter and no stewards to get them organised. It’s just a day at the beach on a bright Sydney morning. The riders are unhurried and the horses are too.
They’re away. The pace is steady as they head out into the bay and one of the horses takes a moment to splash herself, beating the water with her hoof. A furlong from shore the water is deep enough that the horses can’t easily push off from the sand and one by one the riders slip into the ocean so they are hanging upside down like an acrobat under their horses’ necks. Together they plough deeper into the sea.
On land the rider is master and the horse is servant. But in the water with the rider up front like a bowsprit, with their feet on their mount’s chest, they look much more as one; it’s almost intimate. And because their faces are barely ten centimetres apart, it’s a little unclear who is leading who. Yes, the rider has the reins, but only the horse can see where they are going.
There is something touching about watching them together. It takes a minute or two for them to get their confidence and for their timing and tempo to come together. But when it does, it creates a flowing rhythm that is transmitted through the forequarters of the horse to the rider, so it looks like they are dancing out there. Dancing through the dappled water on this fine morning. It’s fragile too; movement is holding them together, buoying them up. So they can’t stop this thing they have started, horse and rider, rider and horse. Gliding, surging through the bay. Gracefully out of their element.
After ten minutes, one of the riders lets go of their reins. The spell is broken. They head for the shore. In a last act of trust, each rider grabs a handful of tail and they’re dragged in until they can touch the bottom.
Up out of the surf the horses screw their eyes and flick their ears to get rid of the salt water. Then, with an air of immense concentration, they lower themselves onto the sand for a roll. Once they’ve got everything scratched, they haul themselves onto their feet grunting. And then they stand there, looking surprised at the world, dusted like doughnuts.
A quick brushdown, horses loaded and it’s back to the stables for the routine of the racing week. The riders and horses go together in the float so it’s just the truckie up front, flashing a grin to the bay as he drives out. And why wouldn’t he? He’s just been paid double time to have a swim with Winx.
Looking at Janice Liley’s tanned face, her white hair pulled back messily, I’m struck by a strong coherence between artist and artistic output.
There’s an underlying sense of restraint to both Liley and her paintings. And yet also, just slightly further back, a concurrent and perhaps judiciously contained sense of unruliness. It’s as if the landscapes which she walks and paints contain a residue of wildness that may also reside somewhere behind her measured, calm exterior.
“My work is not pre-prescribed… I just start with a mark,” she says, seated in the Double Bay gallery Art2Muse where her current exhibition, Coastal Walks, is showing.
“Sometimes it gets a hold of me and takes me in different directions but whilst I’m laying down the marks by intuition, I have a little voice on my shoulder going ‘Hang on a minute, there’s some blue there, I need to balance that with some warmth.’ So it’s not all just intuitive mark making, there’s a lot of thought that goes on at the same time as well.”
It’s this delicate balance between the impulse for unbridled expression and a desire for more formal resolution that, Liley says, drives her work.
Drawing her inspiration from both the Australian and international landscapes through which she regularly walks and hikes, Liley seeks a physical and emotional immersion in landscape that she later allows to find form in painting.
“I’m very much connected with the landscape [but] it’s not so much to paint what I see,” she says, suggesting memory plays a part as well.
“I look at light, how it falls on objects and falls on the ground, the patterns, the textures and the colours and I take that back to the studio. How I felt when I was amongst a particular landscape is very important for me and I try to portray that connectedness, that beauty. We are so connected to the land, there is such an energy there, and I try to capture that.”
Whilst Sydney’s councils and tourist guides lovingly praise our local coastal walks, Liley’s Coastal Walks exhibition is more informed by her original home turf in the Lake District of the north-west of England, East Anglia and Scotland. One piece, however, speaks very directly to Sydney, of her current home suburb of Paddington. It also suggests the possibilities of newer work to come.
“There is such beautiful light that I love here on the coast, that really strong contrast, the sea, the rocks… but they were doing those big burn-offs this winter and one morning I woke up and all of a sudden this image just appeared,” she says.
‘Smokey Monday in Paddo’ has a menace that the Australian bush occasionally pushes to the coast: a raw land that sits out there every day behind our manicured urban lives.
‘Smokey Monday in Paddo’ by Janice Liley.
Liley tells me she’s lived in Australia since 2005 and still has a sense of being an outsider in this landscape. ‘Smokey Monday in Paddo’ does sit apart from the rest of the exhibition, she admits. And while not directly apparent to her in the act of painting it, the end result is a work imbued with a distinctly different sensibility.
“[Maybe that’s a direction] of a new Sydney series, but it wasn’t apparent to me at the time of painting,” she says. “It’s a lot darker, but that just came out. I think Sydney is great – but it is quite harsh and I think we could all be a bit nicer to each other.”
This feeling comes out in the work of its own accord. “The paintings are in control and you have to listen to that,” Liley says. “If you keep asking the questions, the paintings will tell you what they are about and when they’re finished. If you try to control the painting all the time it becomes a mere illustration.
It’s this sense of trying to control something she believes is best left mostly uncontrolled that extends to how the work is eventually completed.
It’s the paintings that ‘let her go’, rather than the other way around.
“There’s a sense of relief when the painting lets me go and I feel I have captured that landscape,” she says. “A sense of wellbeing comes after a little bit of time… when a painting has answered all those formal questions you keep asking it, it sort of gives in, it sort of gives up, and I know it’s done and I am happy.”
Even so, Liley has an opposing reaction too: “You want to push your work all the time and if it is too easy, you want to do something that sends a spanner in the works, because that’s something that makes the work mysterious and edgy, when you see that little bit of a struggle.”
Janice Liley’s Coastal Walks is at Art2Muse, 357 New South Head Road, Double Bay. Phone 0424 809 849. Exhibition dates: 31st October – 13th November 2017. More details here: art2muse.com.au
The yawning gap between the train and Platform 1 at Martin Place freaks me out. It’s dark, deep and dirty. I cross it on my way to work. But, like a child jumping a narrow creek, I pay attention to what’s down below. As well as rubbish, there’s so much room for error. If you slipped or fell, would they be able to stop the peak hour train in time? What’s the emergency protocol?
These questions arise as I breathe through my nose and step down from the carriage, among the alternately distracted, impatient, phone-glued, differently-paced and variously-abled morning commuters.
An elderly woman I know has a fear of public transport. Actually, she’s my mother. Bus rides unbalance her, underground train stations disorient her. Ferries are okay – if she’s with someone with public transport skills. “And it is a skill,” she says. “Like driving.”
Someone she knows feared hand germs and didn’t hold on to the railing on the downward escalator at Kings Cross. They fell. Public transport is like that. A balancing act. Amid the rushing, important choices must be made.
All Sydney Trains escalators have an emergency stop button in the event of a customer falling. Signage has recently been refreshed to make it clear for travellers should they need to activate it. While I hold on to the escalator railing to remain steady, I always wash my hands, on arrival from A to B.
As soon as you enter Kings Cross station, warm, trapped air and junk food carbs fill your nostrils as the escalator, with its big new red emergency stop button, takes you down, to a mini-mall of sushi, donuts, fried rice, Powerball, papers and now-closed ticket counters. It’s here that I first see the poster: “Over 300 people fell between the train and the platform last year … Please mind the gap.” This doesn’t surprise me at all. The poster shows a pair of yellow shoes with eyes on their toes, stepping carefully off a train.
When I contact Transport for NSW, a spokesperson tells me the number of gap falls was actually 330. “Millions of customer journeys are made on public transport each week with the majority completed safely and without incident. Unfortunately, we still see customers slipping, tripping or falling.”
In 2016, more than 5,000 safety related incidents occurred on the NSW public transport network. More than 2,000 of these were caused by customers rushing and falling over, being distracted by their mobile phones and not looking where they were going.
No wonder Transport for NSW recently launched its safety campaign across buses, trains, light rail and ferries to encourage customers to ‘do their bit for a safer trip’. It calls on customers to take care by watching their step, looking up from their mobile phone, paying attention to their surroundings and not rushing. Hypervigilant, I know I’m not their target audience. I always mind the gap.
Suddenly this strikes me: that dark gap between the train and Platform 1 at Martin Place is a liminal space, a psychological symbol for so much more than physical safety. It’s a threshold that divides my two worlds – the private and professional, the free and the tethered. At the day’s end, my evening train on Platform 2 goes to Bondi Junction. First stop Kings Cross. Although I mind it, the gap always seems smaller when I’m on my way home. Unless it’s just my imagination.