Unmarked Tracks: September A monthly Australian music column

“Driver, let me tell you a secret.
A secret in the shape of a song”
– The Triffids, ‘Suntrapper’ (1987)

10. Louis Tillett & the Art of Darkness, Factory Theatre Marrickville, Friday 29 September

Louis Tillett returns for an all-too-rare show, touted as a 3-hour extravaganza with a 10-piece band, and with a new website that offers his music direct for whatever you’re prepared to pay. Tillett got his start with punk-inspired garage-rockers The Wet Taxis, though their origins as electronic experimentalists reveal broader interests. His music morphed into a dark blend of jazz, soul and R&B in sideline ventures like Paris Green – a loose improvisational combo that became a Newtown institution – and on his own superlative solo records like Ego Tripping At the Gates of Hell, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this November. Louis’s catalogue has a glowering but lyrical intensity, moving from moody minimal sketches on underrated albums like Midnight Rain to storming brass-fuelled epics like ‘Sailor’s Dream’ and ‘Condemned to Live’. Listen and read lots more on Louis’s site.

A Linocut portrait of Louis Tillett, by artist Lucy Child.

Louis Tillett, Linocut portrait. Image credit: Lucy Child.

 

9. Clan Analogue 25th Anniversary LP, Co-Ordinate: Collaborate Beyond the Algorithm

Starting in Sydney in 1992 but now a national endeavour with global connections, the work of Clan Analogue – Australia’s longest-running electronic music and arts collective – attests to two core values: a truly D.I.Y. spirit, and a forward-looking commitment to innovation, even when cannibalising the past for instruments and materials. For their 25th anniversary and 50th record release, the Clan invited 50 electronic artists to participate in the Co-Ordinate project, each collaborating with someone they’d never met before, in ways that explicitly contradicted their usual creative approach. This connected with the theme of the project, ‘Beyond the Algorithm’, which challenges the data-led herding of social media users with common interests into echo chambers of shared values, ultimately increasing conformity and group-think. The results on Co-Ordinate are hypnotic and eclectic, skipping across genre.

Clan Analogue, 'Co-Ordinate' album cover. The cover is a white square with bent blue lines across the middle, and red dots interspersed along those lines.

 

8. Beaches, Second of Spring LP (Chapter Music)

Melbourne’s psych-rock quintet Beaches are back with a remarkable third album to follow up 2013’s stunning She Beats. Second of Spring is a rare beast for this country: a double album of new original material, probably the first from an Australian female-led outfit since 2020 from electronic duo B(if)tek back at the start of the century (a highpoint of Clan Analogue’s discography btw). The stylistic sprawl of the 17 tracks achieves the paradoxical accomplishment of sounding like the best bits of lots of different bands and records without being overly derivative, stale or uninventive. That ‘Arrow’ reminds of Curve, ‘Mutual Decision’ of Fripp & Eno, or that ‘Grey Colours’ could be an outtake from The Cure’s Disintegration makes them no less enjoyable. There’s always been some pop sparkle mixed in with Beaches’ krautrock homages and instrumental wig-outs but they’ve added a large dollop of 4AD-style goth drama and twinkling shoegaze atmospherics to Second of Spring and the outcomes are very persuasive.

All five members of the beaches (all women) stand looking at the camera. A transparent rainbow overlays the image.

Beaches.

 

7. Chapter Music: Guy Blackman and Ben O’Connor

Beaches’ records are released by Chapter Music, one of the country’s best independent labels, which like Clan Analogue is also celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Guy Blackman, label founder, and his partner in life and work, Ben O’ Connor, are not just patrons but genuine fans of Australian music; as eager to share the musical treasures they unearth or create as they are to support the efforts of so many others. Guy was invited to make a mixtape of Australian sounds this month for Noise In My Head on 3RRR FM and he responded with a set of rare synth-pop and post-punk, much of it set free from obscure cassettes and private press vinyl. I’d planned to feature Guy’s mixtape in this month’s column, and then I also read Ben’s open letter cogently explaining how the Same Sex Marriage survey is hurting ordinary gay Australians like him and Guy, so I thought that should be here too.

Left, Guy and Ben stand next to each other. Right, a young Guy and Ben sit together on a couch, with Ben turned towards Guy and smiling.

Guy and Ben, now and then.

 

6. 45th Anniversary of Allison MacCallum, ‘It’s Time’ (RCA, 1972)

Go back 45 years in time and the nation was embroiled in a different but still-divisive political campaign: the 1972 general election. Allison MacCallum was a Sydney singer who’d left a progressive soul band, Freshwater, for a solo career, hitting the top 20 in April 1972 with her debut single, ‘Superman’, written by Vanda & Young. She had a handful more hit singles that same year but the song she’s best remembered for was a complete flop, at least in sales terms. For while her rendition of ‘It’s Time’ – the Labor Party’s election campaign song – can at least partly claim responsibility for helping to elect Gough Whitlam and end 27 years of conservative rule, it didn’t trouble the charts in any state, perhaps because radio staffers or chart compilers didn’t want to support the ALP, or maybe because listeners were able to get their fill of the song from the ALP campaign’s saturation advertising across every channel.

 

5. Vale Charlie Tolnay (Grong Grong, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat)

The passing of guitarist Charlie Tolnay in Adelaide was announced mid-month with scant details, just that he’d had a brief and unexpected illness. Tolnay was a founding member of pioneering garage noise outfits Grong Grong and King Snake Roost, much revered by the likes of Jello Biafra, Jon Spencer and Mudhoney, and later an integral part of outfits like Lubricated Goat and Bushpig. Never as lauded as contemporaries like Rowland S. Howard or Kim Salmon, Tolnay’s technique was an unusual and unrelenting one, combining dirty blues, free jazz, and post-punk to sound like he was strangling multiple guitars at once. Trouser Press called his playing “thug-jazz” which sounds about right. He refused to get naked like his other bandmates during Lubricated Goat’s infamous performance of ‘In The Raw’ on ABC TV’s Blah Blah Blah, so we are forever spared YouTube footage of his “big hairy arse”, as he put it; instead try this incendiary clip of Grong Grong’s first ever gig.

 

4. The Sand Pebbles Pleasure Maps LP (Kasumuen) & The Woodland Hunters Let’s Fall Apart LP (Bandcamp)

The shared element for both of these bands is guitarist/singer Andrew Tanner, ex-Seven Stories, who you might remember from their 1990 album, Judges and Bagmen. The Sand Pebbles LP, their sixth, came out a few weeks back and is a strong contender for local album of the year, melding electronics and psych-rock with aplomb, revealing more nuances with every play. The vinyl LP is a thing of beauty, but damn it the CD features a stellar cover of ‘Oh Sweet Nuthin’ – decisions, decisions. The Woodland Hunters’ just-released Let’s Fall Apart has a ragged, country rock sound that has more in common with Crazy Horse or the Stones, rather than the Neu or Velvets’ records that inform their sister band. What both have in spades though are memorable songs with a delightful tendency to stretch out over time, with twisting guitar solos and extended instrumental passages that swagger into the stratosphere.

The Sand Pebbles album cover for Pleasure Maps.

 

3. 50th Anniversary of Mick Bower leaving The Masters Apprentices

Back in September 1967, while The Masters Apprentices were enjoying another national top 10 hit with their psychedelic pop smash, ‘Living in A Child’s Dream’, the pressures of stardom had begun to take their toll. Mick Bower, guitarist and chief songwriter, had been exhibiting signs of exhaustion, culminating in a full-fledged nervous breakdown on tour in Hobart. After a catatonic performance, unable to move or play his instrument, he was sent home to convalesce. The band had to rethink their direction and go on without him. “We almost called it a day,” singer Jim Keays told me in 2012, “Mick was an amazing songwriter, the only person who was writing stuff like Mick then was Ray Davies.” Half a century on and things have come full circle, with Bower now back playing with some of the original band, paying tribute to the Masters’ songbook and their fallen comrade Keays, who passed in 2014.

 

2. Fallon Cush – Morning LP and launch at LazyBones, Marrickville on Friday 20 October

This Sydney band have released a handful of discs in the last six years, with 2016’s Bee in Your Bonnet the best of the bunch and the one you could fairly mention in the same breath as influences and precursors like The Jayhawks or Tom Petty. New album Morning is stronger still, and keeps to the point with just nine noteworthy songs in 34 minutes. The guitars ring out like Roger McGuinn in a belltower. The production is crisp but seasoned, with warm layers of keyboards and vocal harmony. Bandleader Steve Smith has a bright open voice with a slightly nasal twang, sounding a bit like George Harrison, if George liked singing You Am I songs in the back of Perry Keyes’ taxi cab. Morning is aptly named because it’s the kind of upbeat and melodic listen that’s easy to digest early in the day. Could it use a bit more piss and vinegar in the brew? Maybe, but then that’d make it a different record entirely.

 

1. Vale John French

I didn’t know legendary recording engineer and producer John French, who sadly died mid-month aged 75, but there’s a common theme being heard from those who did. You could start a conversation with him about some music, any music, from Australia’s distant pop past and he’d invariably say, “Yes, that’s one of my mine”, before regaling you with personal details of the session. Take a look at his Discogs listing, which while extensive is still riddled with gaps. French was chief engineer at Melbourne’s TCS Studios alongside colleague John Sayers, at a time when many recordings had no producer except the band, so the engineer shouldered more of the load. Let’s end this month’s column with a tribute to John French, a cheeky extra list of 10 crucial Australian LPs he helped bring to life, or at least made sound a hell of a lot better.

10) Not Drowning Waving – Claim (1988)
9) Weddings, Parties, Anything – Scorn of the Women (1987)
8) Billy Green – Stone soundtrack (1974)
7) Aztecs – Live at Sunbury (1972)
6) Coloured Balls – Summer Jam (1973)
5) Madder Lake – Stillpoint (1973)
4) The Dingoes – The Dingoes (1973)
3) Company Caine – Product of a Broken Reality (1971)
2) Various – Morning of the Earth soundtrack (1972)
1) Skyhooks – Living in the Seventies (1975)

It The kids are not alright

Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård) terrorises kids in the small American town of Derry by envisioning their fears and then feasting on their flesh in It. Posters of missing children stack up walls but the adults ignore what’s happening, and the town thrives regardless of the tragedy in its midst. Director, Andy Muschietti (Mama), taps into the American tradition of failing to protect the innocent in his adaptation of Stephen King’s chilling novel that turned clowns into nightmare fuel.

And the book is still the best bet if you want to forego weeks of sleep. Muschietti’s film; not so much. The opening scene with Pennywise appearing in a sewer for its first kill is strong. Skarsgård is excellent playing the clown like a shark ready to roll its eyes back at the smell of blood in the water; his teeth are too sharp to be human.

But It becomes prey to a formula of delivering scares: creep, creep, pause… here’s Pennywise! You can set a stopwatch to the film’s game of peek-a-boo.

It blurs the line between what’s real or a vision created by the monster. It’s reminiscent of the paranoia of being awake or asleep in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it lacks the inventiveness of Wes Craven’s film. Muschietti manages to only glance the skin but he never gets under it. A lot of the edge is taken off by an overuse of digital effects in key moments that make horrifying creations look more like Play-Doh left in the sun too long.

The more time you spend with the kids, who call themselves ‘the losers’, the more you realise It is a good film about friendship and growing up trapped in a mediocre haunted house. Most of this is down to perfect casting – expect to see these kid actors popping up everywhere soon. Finn Wolfhard (recognisable from Stranger Things) is fun as the fast-talking goofball of the group and Jack Dylan Grazer is great as a neurotic naysayer always reaching for his puffer.

Five of 'the losers' stand in a doorway, looking into a red-lit room.

The losers. Image: Warner Bros.

Each of the loser’s fears is related to the pre-pubescent dread of a dark world waiting to twist them into adulthood. The strength of It is how they face their fears united, especially when it’s clear the adults are failing these kids. Muschietti evokes the sense of dread that surrounds American tragedies like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, an incident that failed to get a nation to act on gun control. The town of Derry, Maine, is far more terrifying than anything the clown can conjure. Encounters with trusted members of the community are chilling; the pharmacist is a sleeze, older residents look away from violence and parents are predators. Muschietti’s camera lingers of street signs, local businesses, houses and amenities; idyllic looking, but it’s a facade. Derry is a bear trap laying silent to snare the town’s youth.

Unable to rely on their parents, the losers realise they are stronger together while Pennywise works to divide and devour them. It functions best like another King adaptation, Stand By Me, but instead of going looking for a dead body, the corpse comes to the kids dressed like a clown and ready for a feast. With a big heart it’s a shame It can only muster an impersonation of an cuckoo clock on the horror front.

Another Side A conversation with Tanya Plibersek about rock ‘n’ roll, democracy and family car trips

Tanya Plibersek in blue suede shoes. Walking fast.

I‘m run-walking along Crown Street, Surry Hills, to keep up with her.

“What about voter disengagement in democracies?” I ask. At which point an apparently engaged voter stops dead in the street to smile at her. Plibersek flies by, flashes him a big smile back and says hello.

It’s an ironic micro-moment that plays into Plibersek’s, frankly, at times, Pollyanna-ish world view. But it doesn’t change the fact that in the 2016 federal election, Australia had its biggest no show of voters since 1922. Despite compulsory voting. More than 1.4 million eligible Australians failed to vote.

In recent elections in the US and France, millions of people declined to vote, prompting some, citing the twin shocks of Trump and Brexit, to call a collapse of faith in western democracies. “Burning down the house,” is how an American friend describes the US political scene. “Chemo for Washington,” says another.

But Plibersek, who’s been the Labor member for the federal seat of Sydney since 1998, is reluctant to accept that global pessimism about democracy affects Australia.

“I’m not seeing it,” she says. It’s possible there’s a spring in her step due to the Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten being at the top of the morning news. He’s reported as having “changed the rhetoric” on tax reform. Optimism is in the air and Plibersek won’t have it otherwise on this sunny Sydney Friday.

Only in a follow up phone conversation, a couple of weeks later, when I push the point further does she grudgingly concede that Australia is potentially subject to the forces that brought about Brexit and Trump. And that the number of Australians not turning up to vote in elections is concerning. But it’s not a discussion she livens to. And she crafts her words to dampen, not inflame it.

“I don’t think we’re immune to the Trump and Brexit response – that people are worried about politics-as-usual and they want to see some change. But I certainly don’t think we’ve got the same sense of cynicism and disaffection that you see in some other countries,” she says.

And here I sense her conundrum in an environment where the political classes in general have had voters, coaxed by simplistic media, rolling their eyes and tuning out. How, when the polls for Labor are so favourable (though not for Shorten as preferred Prime Minister), to be a credible alternative government without trash-talking the nation’s political establishment of which Plibersek and her party are undeniably a part?

Plibersek tells me she holds regular meet and greet opportunities with constituents that attract up to 200 people each time. “People are very engaged,” she insists. Watch her in jeans, unflanked by minders, in one-on-one conversations with shoppers at the Kings Cross market on a Saturday and it’s hard to disagree with her view that Australian democracy is not broken.

Plibersek won two thirds of the two candidate preferred vote at the 2016 federal poll, resisting an ambitious push from the Greens. The second time we speak, I suggest that Plibersek’s electorate may be more engaged than many, causing a disconnect between her perception of voter engagement and the overall reality.

She counters: “I engage with a lot of young people who are politically active and very politically committed and they do a lot of their activism online. And they are encouraging a lot of other young people to get involved in the kind of world they want to live in.”

Yet, as even Plibersek knows, it ain’t all roses. Her narrative is one that focuses in on a couple of big headline problems then quickly gets to solutions: Trust us, we can fix it is the subtext.

“We have in Australia, the highest rates of inequality we’ve seen for 75 years. We’ve seen stagnant wages growth. But despite those two things, we’re still not as bad as the United States. We haven’t seen the massive destruction of the middle and working classes in Australia that we’ve seen in the US. But if we don’t address inequality in this country, we will be. So, a big part of the answer is to make sure ordinary people working hard all day get a decent day’s pay. And that we have some security in our industrial relations system so that people are not just relying on the gig economy in the way that the world is increasingly trending. Because I think that does drive feelings of insecurity that are not good for our society, our economy or our democracy.”

But she rejects the anti-economic-globalisation rhetoric espoused by international leaders on both sides of politics, including the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the US President Donald Trump. “I just don’t think it’s as simple as that. The idea that globalisation is bad is not how the Labor Party sees it. Australia is a trading nation and we rely on exporting our goods and increasingly our services to the rest of the world and that’s a good thing. [But] the benefits of our prosperity need to be shared with the people who are creating the wealth and that’s the working people of Australia.”

 

When we first meet, Plibersek, the daughter of migrant Slovenian farmers, greets me wearing a navy suit at her Surry Hills office. She worries I must be cold sitting near the sensor doors that flick open and shut. She offers me a cup of tea to warm me up. Standing in what’s arguably the most citified seat in Australia, and despite the corporate suit, there’s something kind-of-country about Plibersek. And I suspect that’s a plus.

I ask her how the population-dense inner metropolitan seat of Sydney, which covers 44 square kilometres of the city’s prime land and iconic sights, has changed since she won it. “The big change is that people used to move out to the suburbs when they had their second child. But that’s happening less. People are used to living in smaller spaces as they have their family.”

It’s a change that resulted in generational tension recently when a skate park for teenagers proposed for Rushcutters Bay was nixed at Woollahra Council following a backlash from locals supported by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The site in question is in Turnbull’s Wentworth electorate but it’s also close to many of Plibersek’s constituents. Writing as the Member for Wentworth, Turnbull argued that “hard surfaces and concrete structures” were not sympathetic to how the Rushcutters Bay park was currently used. (Disclosure: I signed a petition opposing the skate park, which later, once better informed, I regretted.)

Plibersek, a mother of three who is married to high flying NSW public servant Michael Coutts-Trotter, was incensed by the snub to the politically idealistic teenagers who lobbied Woollahra Council for the skate park.

“I was disappointed in the Prime Minister. I couldn’t understand why he would get involved in denying young people an opportunity to get outside and exercise. Yet he can’t manage to rouse himself to oppose the sell-off of the [Sydney] GPO and any of these other huge issues that affect our common heritage.”

She says we should want our teenagers to maintain an active lifestyle. “Instead, we keep saying: ‘You’re not allowed in the shopping centres because people are frightened of you. [Or] in the park because we don’t like the skateboards or the scooters’ – and then we criticise them for being addicted to their devices.”

Still, I point out to Plibersek: there are a lot of old timers in our area who walk in Rushcutters Bay Park to get their exercise and who may fear the noise and speed of skateboarding teenagers. “You can negotiate on the things that would make it more pleasant for people of all ages,” says Plibersek.

“I suppose there are moments when there is a bit of tension. But people live in the city because they love diversity. It’s a more human city when you see people from all stages of life living together.”

 

Tanya Plibersek in Surry Hills, Sydney. Photography by Andrew Cowen

 

Plibersek speaks of her older brothers, Ray and Phillip, often. They were her protectors, guides and mentors who’d occasionally sneak her into a pub gig when she was underage in the days when you still could. That Phillip was tragically murdered in 1997 is unspoken this day. He was the one who first told her she was smart and had a responsibility to do something useful.

That her brothers got Plibersek hooked on the music of Nick Cave early seems prophetic in light of the grief that would come. She seems to feel a sisterly warmth for the broody punk prince whose Murder Ballads and ‘The Ship Song’ she loves.

At school, she says: “All my friends were listening to KISS and Abba and I was listening to great Australian bands like The Triffids and the Go-Betweens.” Did that make her the cool one? I ask. “No, I was the loser,” she emphasizes. “Everyone else would be playing Abba and I’d be…” She stops mid-sentence to say she’s not being “snooty”. She likes Abba too, has them on her Spotify.

All that was before she was elected to Parliament. She is now Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party. It’s a Labor Party still overcoming the scars of its last self-harming years in office – but now emboldened by the Coalition incumbents falling into the same traps of disunity that destroyed the Rudd and Gillard governments.

You don’t have to Google deeply to find speculation about Plibersek having the potential to become Australia’s second female prime minister. I joke to her about a friend’s fantasy of sipping champagne and listening to Nick Cave with her if she ever does get the top job. “It’d be peppermint tea. But you’re on the right track with the music,” she says.

It turns out we both went to see Cave perform at the International Convention Centre in Sydney early this year. “It’s such a big venue. But Nick Cave has the ability to make every person there feel like the show is just for them. And I also felt really sad for him because not so long ago he lost his son.”

Just then the compassionate nurturer gives way to the feminist and change agent in Plibersek as she rails against the paucity of women’s toilets at the venue. She led a rebellion to “just go into the men’s with a bunch of other women” but they were stopped by security guards.

 

Things amp up when Plibersek gets going on “the absolute monstrosity that is WestConnex that will disgorge (she later uses the word ‘vomit’) an extra 60,000 cars into the southern part of my electorate.” Plibersek says people bought apartments in Alexandria and Erskineville, having been told by successive state governments they wanted these areas to be less car-reliant.

She gets a lot of feedback about stress in the inner city – more people, more cars, traffic gridlock. “Most people who live in the inner city are OK with density as long as the amenity is good. But you can’t keep putting more people into a city and telling them they shouldn’t be using cars but then not improving the public transport.”

Her media advisor Dan Doran tells me there’s only time for a couple more questions. I ask Plibersek her favourite place in her electorate. “I love walking from the Boy Charlton Pool through the Botanic Gardens past Lady Macquarie’s chair.” But there’s a second favourite: Lord Howe Island, in some historic quirk, is also part of the electorate of Sydney. Its mail goes through the Sydney GPO. She’s been there about ten times – three for work but the rest for family holidays “obviously paid for myself”. She describes Lord Howe Island as “peerless”, adding “It’s like the 1950s, no mobile phone service, no internet to the house. You really relax. People talk to each other.”

Warming to the simple things is a big part of Plibersek, who loves road trips with the family. Recently she introduced Carly Simon’s 1970s hit song, ‘You’re So Vain’, to her three children, Anna, Joseph and Louis.

“When we go on road trips together we take turns playing songs. They love that song.” Six-year-old Louis Coutts-Trotter had his own interpretation of the line: I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee. He thought ‘clouds’ were ‘clowns’. “So, now we all sing, clowns in my coffee,” says Plibersek, enjoying the family talk.

It’s only well after we meet that I realise 2017 is a big anniversary for Plibersek. It marks 20 years since the official beginning of her political career – her preselection for the seat of Sydney. That this happened just a few weeks after her brother Phillip died is a matter of indescribably painful timing. On the threshold of that career defining achievement, she was suddenly in the funk of grief. Somehow, she stepped forward.

Two decades have passed since then and Plibersek, now a prominent and well-seasoned career politician, is briskly pacing towards another federal election. It’s due on or before 19 May, 2019. There are, she says, stark differences between the Coalition and Labor: trickle-down economics for the former and addressing inequality for the latter.

“I don’t know whether you characterise those as Right and Left affiliations. But they are certainly very important differences. And I think most people know, more or less, which side they are on.”

Marginalia Shaun Prescott’s ‘The Town’

In his debut novel, The Town, Shaun Prescott uses rural Australia as his blank canvas. His narrator arrives in an unnamed, featureless town in the Central West of New South Wales, with the intention of writing a book – already titled The Disappearing Towns of the Central West. The narrator’s ‘book’ is an attempt to find a larger meaning in the disappearance of these towns – to pluck art out of oblivion.

Instead, what the narrator finds is a series of pointless repeating motions: a publican opens each day, and serves no customers; a bus driver has no passengers, but drives the route daily, waiting at each stop for exactly ten seconds. It’s the monotony of the mundane, made pointedly ridiculous: “The people in the town lived as if they would never die, but they were not heroic or foolish like in books and music. They were only there.”

Nothing arrives to shake the townspeople out of their monotony – which is to say, something does arrive, but it doesn’t wake the sleepwalkers. The town ambles on, and remains featureless. The Town’s metafictional plot, such as it is, threatens to do the same. Its language is its landscape and you are soon part of a strange, wandering struggle for meaning that becomes essential to you.

French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term ‘non-place’ to refer to spaces where human beings meet but remain disconnected – think an airport terminal, or a shopping mall. ‘The town’ is a non-place, and in this social void the narrator’s own neuroses are magnified: “At times when it was impossible to avoid coming into direct contact with Rob we would talk about our plans for the weekend, even if it was Tuesday.”

Like the publican and the bus driver, the narrator soon becomes trapped in his own pointless task of writing a book. What began as an act of self-assertion – a bid to leave a permanent mark, his name on the cover of a book – becomes something much more like survival. Not writing a book, the narrator says, “would render my whole existence pointless”.

The Town is a book about annihilation: not the explosive, memorable kind, but its exact opposite – the annihilation that comes from fading away. When Donald Horne wrote his nation-defining work The Lucky Country back in 1964 he was concerned with the increasing homogeneity of culture across Australia. Horne saw that outback Australian towns were becoming cultural figments: “the mythic landscapes of the writers and painters”.

Shaun Prescott comes at this idea from a different angle: his concern is the effect that homogeneity has on the soul. The narrator strives and fails and strives again to complete his book, the task continuous and circuitous and desperate. Is anonymity the same thing as oblivion?

Gerald Murnane’s 1982 masterpiece, The Plains, seems another obvious reference point for Prescott’s work in The Town. The Plains depicted an infinity of emptiness, an almost brutal brightness where some kind of mystery resided and resisted being defined.

Reading The Town, I was reminded of sign I saw in a front garden in Hay, a town of 3,000 in the Riverina. In bold letters it proclaimed: “On this exact spot, in 1936, nothing happened.” I can’t remember the name of street where I saw the sign, and nor can I remember what year I saw it.

The Town’s narrator is neurotic, perhaps; or maybe he’s just more conscious than the rest of us of the meaninglessness of most of ordinary life, and is rightly disturbed at those left lost in the margins.

 

The Town by Shaun Prescott, Brow Books, 256 pp, RRP$29.99.

Book cover of Shaun Prescott's 'The Town'. The cover is brown, with a green orb of light on the front.

Shaun Prescott’s ‘The Town’. Image: supplied.

Finding Another Register Albert Namatjira’s copyright

In 1957, famously, the distinguished Aboriginal water colour painter, Albert Namatjira, was the first of his people ever to be granted Australian citizenship – except that he wasn’t. Not only was he not the first, he wasn’t granted citizenship either. It is a comfortable myth, beloved of White Australia.

What actually happened was that his name, and that of his wife Rubina, were removed from the Register of the 15,711 wards of the state in the Northern Territory. The Register was an apartheid-style list of all ‘full-bloods’, which the authorities kept as a way of monitoring the indigenous population and also as a form of social control.

Names had been removed from the list before; for example, that of Adolf Inkamala, Albert’s nephew, a promising painter of the Hermannsburg School, who switched careers and found some success as a cattle rancher. His name was taken off the Register in 1955, apparently because the government wanted to do business with him. Specifically, they wanted to buy some bullocks off him. Which, of course, raises the question as to why Namatjira’s name was similarly removed.

There is evidence that Albert did not want it to happen. In the lead up to the publication of the 1957 Register, he consulted a lawyer to see if he could avert the coming excision. One reason for this was that, if he wasn’t on the Register, bizarrely, he needed official permission to visit his own tribal lands. But such legal recourse would have been possible for him only if he had the rights of a white person; which, of course, he did not—until he and Rubina had their names removed from the Register.

There was no official notification of his change of status. A friend, Alan Wauchope, read about it in the newspaper and came down to his camp at Morris Soak, outside of Alice Springs, and told him. It is alleged by some that, the very same day, officials of the Northern Territory government also came to Morris Soak, and took Albert into town to buy him celebratory drinks at the pub. It might have happened. Alcohol, which he could now legally drink, would very quickly lead to his downfall: because, illegally, he shared some rum with someone who was still on the Register.

Albert and another painter, his uncle Henoch Raberaba, had taken a taxi from Alice Springs to Hermannsburg. Albert had a bottle with him. The cabbie told the court that Henoch kept asking Albert for a drink, and Albert kept on refusing. But the taxi stopped twice during the journey, so that Albert could go into the bushes; once Albert left the bottle, capped, on the front seat, and the other time left it, uncapped, standing at the side of the road; it was on these occasions that Henoch drank, and that was what the court deemed to have constituted sharing. Albert got six months hard labour for that.

More crucially than the right to drink, perhaps, Albert’s removal from the Register meant he could enter into binding legal agreements; and this led, even more quickly, to the licensing of his copyright to a commercial entity. And that may, in fact, have been the reason why it was done. It may well have been a strategy, by people in the Northern Territory government, to allow access to the economic benefits exploitation of his copyright might bring. They were supported by those who, exasperated by what they saw as Albert’s profligate ways, thought that such a deal would be for his own good.

Albert signed the copyright agreement with Legend Press, whose then owner was John Brackenreg (1905-1986), a Perth-born former artist and gallery owner in Artarmon in Sydney. Legend Press still own Namatjira’s copyright. The legalities are complex, and most people who involve themselves in the issue point to the 1983 variation upon the 1957 agreement as the crucial transaction. This was when, they say, the Northern Territory government sold, for $8,500, Namatjira’s copyright to Legend Press.

It wasn’t. It was the 1957 deal that was decisive and it is this deal which, as a lawyer once told me, simultaneously offered Albert a regular, small income, and gave away his only major asset. The 1957 agreement was an assignment of copyright in all present and future paintings whereinunder Legend Press had the right to print and otherwise reproduce such paintings in consideration of a royalty of 12.5 % on nett sales. The fee for this assignment was ten pounds, a fraction of what Albert might receive, at that stage of his career, for a single painting. There was no term to the agreement. In other words, it was in perpetuity.

 

Albert Namatjira died in 1959. The following year, the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory took over the administration of his estate. Legend Press continued to pay the royalty, from time to time, to the Public Trustee, which in turn remitted those funds to Namatjira’s wife Rubina; or, after her own death in 1974, to members of their immediate family.

The copyright had, effectively, already gone. What the 1983 agreement did was get rid of the royalty too. It was to commute future liability for royalties via a lump sum, to be paid by Legend Press to the Public Trustee, representing the agreed present value of such future royalties. It was estimated, then, in 1983, that $8,500.00 was all that any future Namatjira royalties might amount to. Even at the time, this was a derisory claim.

The current campaign by Big hArt and others, including the founding of the Namatjira Legacy Trust to raise money with which to purchase back Namatjira’s copyright from Legend Press, focuses upon the 1983 transaction and appears to believe that, if enough pressure is put upon Legend Press, they will, for a consideration, or otherwise, transfer the rights back to the Namatjira family.

I don’t wish to sound negative but I do wonder if this strategy will work. There is no real incentive for Legend Press to surrender an asset they can continue to own until 2029—70 years after the artist’s death. I support the Big hArt campaign, and I hope that it succeeds; but I also think that there is an urgent need to look again, in detail, at what happened both in 1957 and in 1983: because there is at least a chance that from such an examination, a legal case might be brought which, without the need for Legend Press’s consent, would return Namatjira’s copyright to where it belongs.

It might be a mistake to assume that Legend Press’s motivations are solely financial, too. For the last decade and a half they have consistently refused to allow any works in the two biggest collections of Namatjira paintings, those in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and those in the Araluen Centre in Alice Springs, to be reproduced, thereby foregoing whatever licensing fees might otherwise have been due.

They do so, they say, because they are ‘in dispute’ with those institutions. I do not know the nature of these disputes. I do know that there are works in both collections, largely unknown, that if known would broaden and deepen current notions of what Albert Namatjira achieved as an artist. But, currently, only those who take the trouble to visit those institutions, and are able to view works in the stock rooms as well as those on show, may see these paintings.

I went to the NGA last weekend to see the Darling Collection: forty-five Namatjira works collected over the entire period of his working life. The one that remains in mind is of a great red bluff in the James Range, with slender ghost gums attending and a rocky line of purple hills beyond, wherein ancestral faces may be seen. There is water pooling in the foreground and, unusually, human traces inscribed on the landscape: a meticulously painted fence line, separating the viewer, and by implication the artist too, from the bluff and from the range beyond. The metaphorical inference is clear enough.

When Namatjira heard he had been taken off the Register, Alan Wauchope thought he seemed ‘constrained’. He asked him if, now that he was legally entitled, he might try again to buy some land in town upon which to build a house. Wauchope continues: He got up and walked to the open side of the bough fence and looked around at the encampments of his friends and relations for a long time before answering. ‘What’s the use? We’re better off out here. I don’t think they’ll try and kick us out of here.’ He was wrong. They did.

 

Wednesday 6 September, 7.00pm: Big hArt’s Namatjira Project, a feature length documentary, has its Sydney premiere at the Palace Cinema in Paddington. http://www.palacecinemas.com.au/events/namatjira-project-qa-event/

Saturday 9 September, 2.30-3.00pm: Talk Contemporary – artist Tony Albert speaks with producer Sophia Marinos about the Namatjira Project.
https://sydneycontemporary.com.au/program-2017/tony-albert-colour-theory/

NOTE: Talk Contemporary is part of Sydney Contemporary, 7-10 September, at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street (cnr. Codrington Street), Eveleigh. Phone 02. 8571 9099.

Please go here to enjoy a special ticketing offer from Sydney Contemporary in conjunction with NEIGHBOURHOOD (offer ends 11.30am Wednesday 5 September): https://sydneycontemporary.com.au/neighbourhood/

Jack Moffitt The Preatures

 

 

 

Watch our profile of Izzi Manfredi here. The Preatures’s new album, Girlhood, came out on August 11.

Unmarked Tracks: August A monthly Australian music column

“Out beyond the haze, seaside holiday houses lay quiet as a grave.
Tombs of dreams past, wealth gone to waste.
The Australian dream is fading, stolen anyway”.
– Jen Cloher, ‘Regional Echo’

10. Jen Cloher – Jen Cloher, (2017, Milk! Records) & live at Oxford Arts Factory, 25 August

When Jen Cloher self-titled her fourth album and popped a naked portrait of herself on the front cover, there’s a fair chance she wanted listeners to understand that this music is personal and exposing. Yes, bouts of loneliness and introspection are shared – Exile in I-ville, so to speak – in forthright lyrics about Cloher’s childhood, career, and relationship (with wife Courtney Barnett, here on guitar), but her songs transcend self-analysis by remaining engaged with the state of the nation. “Hansonites” and “the feral right” are taken to task, but so are “privileged white” indie rock fans and “pussy” music critics, not so much with rancour as the same unflinching matter-of-factness she directs inward as well as out. The band’s music sounds deceptively simple – as assured with a Velvets-y rhythmic chug (‘Analysis Paralysis’) as swaggering rock (‘Strong Woman’) or wry lullaby (‘Dark Art’) – but surprises with appealing textures like slightly-wonky guitar solos or keyboard bursts from guests like Kurt Vile, Dan Luscombe and co-producer Greg Walker (Machine Translations). References to Jen’s musical inspirations abound, from Drones to Triffids to Dirty Three. Provocative, incisive and compulsively re-playable, this no-nonsense album earns every success it will no doubt garner.

 

9. The Allah Las, Reverberation Radio – Australian edition, mix # 273

It’s interesting to hear how music aficionados from overseas respond to Australian music, whether it’s Henry Rollins collecting new local independent bands or Paul Major from Endless Boogie celebrating Australian prog and psych. When LA garage-rockers The Allah Las visited us a couple of months back they compiled a mix of their favourite musical rarities from this neck of the woods and it’s still available to play or download from their Reverberation Radio website if you hurry (they make a lot of mixes, so scroll to find #273). Some of the band worked at famed LA record store, Amoeba, so they know their stuff, with choices that stray into expert territory like the impossibly-rare ‘Wordless Song’ by ’70s Sydney soul diva, Justine, or ‘Monster Planet’ from Steve Maxwell Von Broad, later of Aussie synth pioneers, Cybotron, alongside gems from CW Stoneking, Joe Geia, Blekbala Mujik, and the inimitable John Sangster. The sunlit mood of this mix will be a perfect companion as winter concedes to spring.

Blue-green album cover, with the word 'Justine' written at the top of the image, and a sketch of a woman below it

 

8. Australia Ensemble – The Sound of Pictures live at UNSW, 16 September

There’ll be two intriguing Australian works played at the Australia Ensemble’s The Sound of Pictures concert next month, alongside Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, and other famed international composers of film music: Andrew Ford, presenter of Radio National’s The Music Show, will offer Scherzo Perpetuo for string quartet, as well as host the event; and Felicity Wilcox sees the premiere of her new piece, Vivre Sa Vie-Composer’s Cut, for clarinet, piano, flute and percussion. This completely new score will be performed live to a screened adaptation of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 cinema classic, Vivre Sa Vie, starring Anna Karina in one of her most luminous yet tragic roles. Wilcox received special permission directly from Godard to adapt his work and create this live score, and she’ll give a free talk with Paul Stanhope about her composition and the film before the concert.

The words 'Vivre Sa Vie: Film En Douze Tableaux' appear over a close up, black and white image of a woman's face in profile.

 

7. The Playboys – 50th Anniversary of ‘Black Sheep RIP/Sad’ 7” (Immediate/Sunshine)

When Normie Rowe was called up for national service in 1967, it didn’t just call time on his pop career – a career that had seen him move to the UK to work with some of the best in the business, including producer Giorgio Gomelsky (Julie Driscoll) and session men Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones – but also that of his backing band, The Playboys, who had followed him to London and begun to make their own in-roads into the UK scene. Signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, The (Australian) Playboys, as they were known there, recorded just one single: A-Side ‘Black Sheep RIP’, a loping fuzz-tinged rewrite of the nursery rhyme, has its merits but it’s the flipside, ‘Sad’, a memorable original by bassist Colin Peacock with psychoactive guitar and commanding harmonies, that ensures this is one of the most in-demand artefacts of the freakbeat era. ‘Sad’ was also released in Australia, fifty years ago this month on the Sunshine label, and has been much compiled since, notably on the Nuggets 2 boxed set. Though The Playboys split in the wake of Normie’s news, they soon reformed as the ambitious but ultimately unlucky Procession, but that’s another story.

 

6. No Fixed Address & Coloured Stone – live at 107 Projects, Redfern, 31 August

Irrepressible reggae rebels, No Fixed Address join with their friends, ARIA award-winning Coloured Stone for a reunion concert that’ll have Redfern up and dancing. Both bands started in South Australia, forming at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) in Adelaide, with No Fixed Address winning acclaim for their appearance in the quasi-documentary film classic, Wrong Side of the Road, and touring with acts like The Clash and Peter Tosh, while Coloured Stone recorded some of the catchiest local singles of the ’80, like ‘Black Boy’ and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’, and a handful of much-loved LPs. We’ve needed to hear these songs again, and they’ll be played by the lion’s share of the original line-ups of these landmark bands. You’ll kick yourself if you missed a ticket though as this show sold out very quickly.

 

5. Samuel McEwen’s comics – Paul Kelly, The Go-Betweens, Split and more

When Samuel McEwen’s not making music with bands like the S-Bends and the Soggy Ear Boys, he’s writing and drawing about it in his zine, Split, and in the number of mini-comics he creates to celebrate his favourite Australian musicians, like Paul Kelly, The Drones, The Go-Betweens, and Royal Headache. There’s something nobly low-key about his work; the histories or performances of the bands he loves are simply presented, with little drama or excessive adulation. His gig-going and band-admiring is captured in unassuming comic strips that reinforce the everyday nature of adoring and playing music. Sam’s comics are available for sale and you can follow him on Instagram, @samcewen95.

The Drones' comic strip excerpt

 

4. Fags in the Fast Lane – Sydney Underground Film Festival, Factory Theatre, 16 September

If your tastes veer to the oddball and the transgressive, tickets and day passes are on-sale now for the 2017 Sydney Underground Film Festival next month. There’s loads in the program to interest music-lovers, with documentaries about The Orb, L7, Sleaford Mods and The Melvins and a stomach-churning horror film from Flying Lotus, but one film stands out as a rock ‘n’ roll bacchanalia of hyperreal camp: Fags in the Fast Lane, a mondo-queero road movie directed by Melbourne’s Josh ‘Sinbad’ Collins, featuring cult icons like Kitten Natividad (ex-muse of Russ Meyer), The Mummies, El Vez (the Mexican Elvis), and King Khan. Tex Perkins provides the narration (“I needed to reclaim my gay icon status”, he says) and his pal Raul Sanchez, ex-Magic Dirt, wrote and compiled the riotous soundtrack.

 

3. Kellie Lloyd – Fragile States EP and Screamfeeder – Kitten Licks LP (Bandcamp)

The new release of the first solo material in five years from Brisbane’s Kellie Lloyd aligns with the anniversary of one of her best-loved records, Screamfeeder’s Kitten Licks album, which turns 21 this month. Fragile States is aptly-named, for the most part a pensive suite of meditative recordings, graced with piano, cello and guitar, but with a couple of moody Screamfeeder-esque rockers to remind you why her contribution to this underrated band was such a crucial one. Kitten Licks remains a superlative set of snarling pop gems like ‘Dart’ and ‘Static’, brimming with dynamism and melody. Kellie’s new EP and the entire Screamfeeder catalogue is available on Bandcamp, including many rarities and the odd freebie.

Album cover, with drooping pink flowers fading into a pink and orange background.

 

2. Cam Butler – Find Your Love (Bandcamp)

I first came across Cam Butler in his art-rock instrumental band Silver Ray, then later working alongside Ron Peno in The Superstitions. An exceptional guitarist, Butler has a passion for combining the nuanced subtleties of orchestration with the rawer qualities of electric guitar and a rock rhythm section. His 2008 album Dark Times (Symphony #3) has been a constant companion, perhaps the closest thing Australia’s produced to the lush but occasionally jagged soundscapes of later Talk Talk, and coincidentally that album has just reached the 10th anniversary of its recording, but it’s his new record Find Your Love that Butler considers his most successful attempt at realising the hybrid sound he’s aiming for. With a 14-piece string section alongside his band, Butler achieves an evocative blend here, sometimes cinematic, often jazzy. Songs like ‘Have Mercy’, ‘Together [Again]’ and the title-track are standouts but the LP achieves a cohesion that rewards repeated listening in full.

Album cover, showing Cam Butler in a white shirt and black suit, facing the camera.

 

1. Vale Simon Holmes & the 30th Anniversary of The Hummingbirds’ ‘Alimony’ 7” (Phantom)

July ended on a sour note with the passing of Simon Holmes and August kept right on sucking when esteemed producer and engineer Tony Cohen died too, both much too young. As guitarist and co-songwriter of The Hummingbirds, Holmes created many memorable records, never afraid of letting a little noise or grit into their perfect pop mix. That he died in the 30th anniversary month of the band’s debut release, ‘Alimony’, was a sad coincidence. But Holmes lived a fuller life and contributed to a lot more music than just The Hummingbirds: in bands like Fragile and The Aerial Maps; as producer of Custard, Died Pretty, and The Fauves; and working at shops/labels like Phantom, Half a Cow, and Enthusiasms. He loved to share his favourite records and songs, and to help his friends make their own music, and its’s that generosity of spirit that should be remembered and celebrated.

Pop-Up Architects and Pollinator Pets Honey bees are turning our homes into hives

On the lookout for a secure location close to a food supply, two successive swarms of honey bees have made their home in our upstairs bedroom wall. We have learnt extraordinary things about their habits and cycle of search, colonisation, hive building and decease; how they can sniff out a past hive, sacrifice some of the swarm to mop up poison, and secure the site to build anew. Once they are gone, obliging wax moths move in to feed on their hive and breed grubs which creep out from the sill and disrupt stories at bedtime.

After numerous treatments we gradually learnt to live with a slow honey seep through the floor in an inconspicuous place. But when the cold weather came and we could no longer close the kitchen window because it was too gummed up with honey, it was the last straw. Pest controller and passionate beekeeper, Wally, came to investigate, waxing with enthusiasm about their life and style.

Somewhat reminiscent of one of the Ghostbusters in his monogrammed bomber jacket, he used a thermal imaging tool to locate the remains of the colonies by the small difference in temperature they created across the wall. “They are beautiful creatures,” he said. Then (thinking like a bee) as he looked out the window at a riot of tallowwood gum blossom: “There’s so much food, no wonder they liked it here!”

Now the weep holes where the light and the bees got in are sealed.

Most people have not heard of this phenomenon, but a quick search yields extraordinary images of poltergeist-like curtains of honey slowly falling from uncovered ceilings and machinic black folds of comb packed efficiently into secret spaces. A builder told me he had salvaged six kilograms of honey from a ceiling he was working on. “It was delicious!”

One elderly gent surrendered an entire room in his home to the bees, but the family called Wally the pest controller when their grandfather had to vacate. The swarm was rescued with a vacuum and happily rehomed in a custom-built hive.

I can’t help feeling there’s an analogy here about the invention and sagacity of the homeless, always on the lookout for a safe hide that’s close to resources, leading a contingent life until they are spotted and relocated or water-cannoned outta there.

If you find a swarm of ‘feral’ honey bees or native bees has taken up occupancy in your home, you can engage a service to capture and re-house them, including Beekeeper Sydney, and The Urban Beehive. By doing this you would be helping to conserve populations under threat by building resistance to the menace of the Varroa destructor mite from which Australia is still (but only just) free.

In 2015 the NSW Department of Primary Industries reported that honey bees contribute an estimated $36 million to the state economy each year, while pollination services that underpin agricultural productivity are worth an estimated $4-6 billion per year. Native stingless bees are important in pollination and a promising alternative to the heavy reliance on honey bees by agriculture. So-called ‘wild pollinators’ are used to pollinate diverse crops, from Queensland to Griffith.

A new network of bee and pollination specialists convened by researcher Dr Megan Halcroft in 2016 is “thinking like a hive” to share knowledge from science and the extensive ‘grey literature’ available from non-academic and community sources. The aim is to develop strategies to strengthen bee populations and deploy native bees more widely. “Beekeeping is a well-organised field of recreational and commercial practitioners with a high community interest,” says Dr Halcroft, “and as such has access to a trove of valuable knowledge from which to generate solutions.”

Chris King of Dulwich Hill, who has kept native bees for a number of years, says they make great pets: “They don’t sting and they don’t have to be fed and they can entertain you. They cluster at their door in the morning ready to forage when it gets to 19 degrees, then they are coming and going from the hive through the day in their hundreds.”

Interestingly, native bees can be social or ‘solitary’. For the loners, homes are more difficult to find, and so people with space are encouraged to build or host an apartment-like ‘bee hotel’ structure. We know there is a blind spot to the diversity of human need for secure shelter and housing – and novel exemplars may be closer to hand than we thought.

The Other Boat People An international labour force we never hear about, but can’t live without

John Derecho hasn’t been home for four months, and it will be the end of this year before he’s briefly reunited with family and friends in the Philippines. The cheeky-faced but quietly spoken 23-year-old is an ordinary seaman, working out a nine-month contract aboard the oil tanker, Stena Paris.

With the ship docked at Port Botany, he’s scored a few hours shore leave on a sunny June afternoon, caught a free minibus to the one place where he knows he’ll be welcome in a foreign city. Here, at the foot of The Rocks, he can buy a SIM card, access free wi-fi, play pool or table tennis. Above all, he can get away from the ship where he works eight hours a day, every day, painting, chipping rust, standing watch.

Derecho is one of about 1.6 million seafarers worldwide. Without them we wouldn’t be driving Hyundais and Mazdas, wearing Uniqlo or H&M clothes, sitting on IKEA sofas watching Samsung and Sony TVs while eating French cheeses, sipping Italian wine, or checking email on iPads.

99 per cent of everything imported into Australia comes on a ship. Australia’s sea exports exceed $200 billion. We expect our clothes not to be produced in sweatshops, and like to feel good about consuming Fair Trade coffee and chocolate. But we rarely think about seafarers, a vital link in the supply chain that sustains our lives and lifestyles.

Seafarers work hard, away from home, for up to a year at time, confined to a clanging, humming world made of steel and primed with grease; risking pirate attacks on the open seas and bullying on board, abandonment in foreign ports with no money to get home. Stress, isolation and fatigue prey upon their mental health.

It’s not necessarily all bad though. John Derecho says his ship is well run and he gets along with everyone on board. But he echoes the refrain of many seafarers. “I’m making internet, Facebook, just to erase my loneliness,” he says. “Then when we are in port like here, we go ashore, just to refresh ourselves.”

Like many tough jobs, money is the main attraction. Derecho earns US$1200 a month, about three times the average Filipino family income. He hopes to start a small business by the time he’s 30. “It’s OK for now,” he says. “I’m young and single.”

The possibilities are perhaps more narrow for Alvin Papel. The 34-year-old sits across the room from his Filipino compatriot, charging his phone. His neat clothes and tidy haircut suggest civil servant more than seafarer. But he’s in port after a two week haul from Mauritius on the container vessel, ER Vancouver. Papel has a wife and two young teenage children. He’s been away for four months and won’t see them before November. As a shipboard electrician, he makes about four times what he could earn at home.

Alvin Papel, seafarer on the MV ER Vancouver. The ship was docked in Sydney and sailing in the evening. Photography by Tom Williams

There’s a gym on the Vancouver, a recreation room, limited internet access when at sea. “We need these things to fight the loneliness,” he says. “The working environment is the hardest thing. Good weather or bad we need to work. Seven days a week.”

In 2015 the ER Vancouver was reportedly attacked by seven knife-wielding men in the Straits of Malacca. In 2016 there were 191 reported piracy and armed robbery attacks on the world’s seas. That’s not the only thing that can go wrong in the wet and wild. Last year, the world’s seventh largest shipping company, Hanjin, collapsed, leaving scores of ships, hundreds of seafarers and US$14 billion of cargo stranded at sea.

Faster turnaround times in port mean getting ashore can be a precious luxury these days. And the only bolthole on dry land for weary sailors such as Derecho and Papel for a few hours on this Sunday afternoon is provided by a charity.

The Mission to Seafarers (MTS) has a rich history, offering succour to seafarers around the world. The Sydney branch provides transportation from Port Botany into the Mission centre on Hickson Road, Millers Point. It’s open 363 days a year, hosting an average of 25 international seafarers a day.

Shipping companies leave it to seafarers to fend for themselves when they go ashore. They provide some support for organisations like MTS but it is dwindling, according to Shane Hobday, a retired Port Authority of NSW executive, and serving MTS board member. “Our contributions from them have dropped from $100,000 ten years ago now to $10,000 a year,” Hobday says.

John Derecho takes a stroll around to the Opera House. Alvin Papel stays around the MTS centre. He doesn’t like to venture out into the city in case he’s tempted to spend money. Both will return to Port Botany and their ships this evening. They will sleep on board, as they do every night of their nine-month stints. The Stena Paris heads back to Singapore in the morning. The ER Vancouver will sail down to Melbourne, around to Adelaide, Fremantle, then to Europe.

Asked to nominate his favourite part of the world, Papel shrugs, smiles apologetically, as if to say he doesn’t have an answer. The message though is clear – while he travels the world, apart from its vast oceans and tranquil harbours, he sees very little of it.

View from a container ship docked in Port Botany, Sydney. Photography by Tom Williams
The container ship MSC Carolina setting sail from Port Botany, Sydney. Photography by Tom Williams

 

Sydney landlubbers likewise see little of what goes on at Port Botany, the second largest container port in Australia, about 15 kilometers from the CBD. The vast, 276 hectare complex hugs the northern Botany Bay shore.

Only beyond the tight security, high up on the bridge of a ship, can you really begin to take it all in; comprehend the mighty scale of it. Container ships, oil tankers and bulk liquid carriers, row upon row; more than a thousand vessel visits a year. Fields of multicoloured containers – like steely Van Goghs – over two million moving through the port annually. Rust and mustard coloured gantry cranes. From here you can also almost reach out and touch the procession of planes coming in low over the bay to land at Kingsford Smith Airport. It’s the restless epicentre of the ceaseless movement of goods and people in and out of this metropolis.

And it’s a precarious climb up the swaying gangway of the MSC Carolina, a 275-meter long container ship, seven floors above deck and four below. Up on the bridge is the 66-year-old, white-haired, clear-eyed and never married captain, Miljorad Pravilovic. When what goes on out here is closed to the public, and tales of dodgy ships are legion, it’s refreshing to find Captain Pravilovic so welcoming. He has nothing to hide, is happy for us to wander about and chat to the crew. He even puts on lunch.

Below deck, the engine control room is impressively high-tech but grey and windowless as a Cold War bunker. There’s a wall calendar featuring an image of a bare-breasted woman. Somehow it doesn’t seem ‘wrong’, just unexpected, but then in keeping with a long seafarer tradition. Only about one to three per cent of seafarers are women and, despite its name, there are none on the Carolina.

Dusko Miljenovic, 34, from Montenegro, sits at a communal table, sips espresso and draws heavily on another cigarette. As a first engineer, an officer, he does better than the lowlier ratings. He’s on a six month contract, bringing in €8,000 a month.

“One hand this is nice job,” he says. “Second hand, very hard job. You are not with family. You are not with friends. This is special calling in life.”

Dusko Miljenovic, first engineer aboard the container ship MSC Carolina, docked at Port Botany, Sydney before sailing in the evening. Photography by Tom Williams

Miljenovic has a baby daughter and another child due in January. He hopes to be home for the birth. It’s a good ship, he says. For now, it marks the boundaries of his world, and those on board are his family. “We have Indonesia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro,” he says, referring to the mix of crew nationalities. “We live together. We live one life and we are together all time.”

On deck, crew members – Indonesians and one Madagascan – are busy in grey overalls, yellow safety helmets and hi-vis vests, scrambling up ladders, getting the ship ready to sail in less than an hour. Mission to Seafarers’ chaplain, Reverend Un Tay, moves among them, bantering, asking how they are.

Chaplain visits are important for seafarers who can’t go ashore. It might involve anything from helping contact a union about claims of wages underpayment to getting some action to fix an on-board washing machine that hasn’t worked for a month.

The Malaysian-born Reverend Tay speaks six languages, an asset that helps build trust and understanding, the always smiling, effervescent pastor says.

“The need of seafarers comes first,” he says, “not so much trying to preach to them or convert them. Regardless of ethnicity, religion or educational background or rank aboard the vessel we welcome them with open arms. Being human, sometimes they need a pair of ears, someone to listen to the bottled up emotions.”

 

The mental health of seafarers is a growing concern.

“We can see anxiety levels have increased tremendously, in terms of workload, their salary, family issues,” says Reverend Tay. “And if they face some challenge from officers such as bullying it makes life even more miserable. Often the crew members are reluctant to openly share for fear of being ostracised, or not hired again.”

Reverend Un Tay, born in Malaysia, a chaplain with Mission to Seafarers in Sydney. Photography by Tom WIlliams

One study showed seafarers had the second highest suicide rate amongst all professions. A leading marine insurer recently noted an increase in mental health and suicide-related claims.

Dean Summers is the national co-ordinator of the International Transport Workers Federation, a former seafarer, and now swims the world’s oceans to raise funds for seafarer welfare. “We support an organisation called Hunterlink,” Summers says, “servicing international seafarers in every port in the country, so they have access to highest quality mental health professionals immediately. Last year 1,000 seafarers contacted Hunterlink.”

Shipowners don’t provide seafarers with access to mental health services in Australia. But Shipping Australia Limited, which represents the companies, says it’s a member of the Seafarers Welfare Council which is looking closely at mental health, and will support its initiatives.

There’s been a significant improvement in the quality of ships visiting our ports since the 1992 Ships of Shame Report identified serious problems with some foreign vessels coming to Australia. “Instances of poor shipping and poor treatment of seafarers have dropped off over time,” Dean Summers says. “That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.”

Earlier this year, an inquest found the deaths of two Filipino crew on the Sage Sagittarius, a ship that visits Australia, resulted from foul play by a person unknown. The NSW deputy coroner noted there was a culture of bullying and harassment on board and the captain had been selling guns to his crew.

The incident drew unwelcome attention to ‘Flag of Convenience’ (FOC) ships – vessels not registered in the country of ownership but in places such as Panama, or even landlocked Mongolia. Many FOC ships are reputable, but the system attracts criticism for facilitating tax avoidance, and sometimes less than scrupulous safety and labour conditions.

And there’s a fierce debate about ships with foreign crews now being allowed to operate Australian coastal routes.

“There are almost no Australian ships working the coast,” says Dean Summers. “Maybe a dozen ships wringing wet… every bit of goods and services we carry around our own coast from one port to another has been hived off to FOC.”

Shipping Australia thinks that’s a good thing and wants the rules relaxed further. The union claims it leaves seafarers vulnerable to exploitation and even poses a national security risk.

The NSW Fair Work Ombudsman is taking action against a Panamanian-flagged oil tanker working our coast, the MT Turmoil, for allegedly underpaying its mostly Indian and Filipino crew by a total of $255,000.

In a submission to a Senate Inquiry, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection said “…there are features of the [FOC] system that organised crime syndicates and terrorist groups may seek to exploit.”

Shipping Australia insists isolated incidents such as the Sage Sagittarius or the Turmoil don’t evidence a systemic problem. It argues allowing foreign vessels to work the coast leads to efficiencies, jobs and less dependence on road transport. Shipping Australia’s spokesperson, Melwyn Noronha, has also worked in maritime security and believes concerns about national security threats tend to be ill-informed or exaggerated. “Yes, we need to be vigilant,” he says. “[But] I haven’t seen any case where the maritime security in ports had to be raised because we had a certain type of ship come in.”

Nemanja Bulajic, second mate, born in Montenegro, aboard the container ship MSC Carolina. Photography by Tom Williams
Dragan Popovic aboard the Container Ship MSC Carolina. Photography by Tom Williams
Bertrand Razanaka, from Madagaskar, OS (ordinary seaman) aboard the container ship MSC Carolina. Photography by Tom Williams

 

It’s almost 4.30pm and the MSC Carolina is about to sail. A golden twilight glow begins to settle over Port Botany. It is hopeful in its beauty but somehow also invokes a mood of longing and loss. On deck, an Indonesian seaman chats about his life. And then he says, “Do you have anything for me?”

It’s not clear at first what he means.

“One magazine, something like that?”

The irony is inescapable. His ship has the capacity to carry almost 6,000 containers full of stuff. And he’s asking if we have anything for him.

When told ‘sorry, we don’t’, he continues to gaze hopefully for a moment, glances towards the Botany Bay heads. Then he turns away and gets back to work.

Burning Down the House A Letter from Melbourne

As soon as I got out of my car, I could smell the acrid stench of burning plastic.

Welcome to Dallas, Victoria.

A suburb of Melbourne, Dallas is just 18 kilometres from Federation Square. It stretches out beyond Broadmeadows at the end of the Upfield train line in Melbourne’s north. On some measures it is one of the most disadvantaged places in Victoria.

The community is a mix of poor white working class and Turkish immigrant. The housing stock is run down. Amenities are few. The shopping centre has a a big IGA, a grocer, several falafel joints and a Turkish bookstore. The day I was there, a group of old men were gathered outside, smoking and chatting.

Dallas has jobs: there are factories and plants everywhere. The rent is low by Melbourne standards. But it also has high levels of unemployment and poverty. It has a very different feel from the conspicuous consumption on display in Brunswick, just a few stops down the Upfield line. There are no funky bars, but the palatial Coolaroo Hotel boasts a bistro, an enormous pokies room, and is open until 4am.

Dallas is a reminder that in the less buzzy reaches of our major cities, waste recycling and industrial facilities nestle side-by-side with the only kind of housing poorer Australians can afford.

On July 13, a fire broke out at the Coolaroo plant of the waste firm SKM Recycling in Maffra Street. Although fire crews got there in minutes, the blaze was already well out of control. The fire was vast, fuelled by the huge mounds of garbage and recyclables piled in the yards. At the height of the conflagration, flames leaped 30 metres into the sky and more than 100 houses from surrounding streets had to be evacuated. One resident told journalists it was “as big as a sports field and as high as a factory.” It burned for eleven days.

Dallas got lucky: no-one was seriously hurt, although there were hospital presentations for asthma. The potential health impacts of smoke inhalation are serious, with the fire releasing a toxic brew of aromatic hydrocarbons and tiny particulates. Hundreds of fish died at Jack Roper Reserve in the wake of the fire, after water used to fight the fire seeped into the local water table.

Fires at SKM are nothing new. There were two fires in a week at the plant in February this year, and another in June, releasing high-level hazardous smoke. This month’s fire was the biggest. The plant was partially destroyed and millions of dollars of damage was done. In addition to the fires, the company was recently fined more than $200,000 after a worker lost a hand in a horrifying accident at the Coolaroo plant. So far, there has been no compensation to the residents of Dallas. However, a class action is underway; the first meeting was held on July 26 at the Coolaroo Hotel.

Both the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Environmental Protection Agency are meanwhile investigating. SKM is also conducting an investigation and has apologised for the public impact.

Down a long driveway into the middle of a huge industrial lot, I could see the extent of the damage. From a mound of congealed concrete, I got high enough to look over a landscape of burnt waste. Huge piles of rubbish still smouldered. Several fire hoses rained down water. Men in high vis patrolled the outskirts with walkie talkies. It was a suburban disaster zone, 18km from the centre of Melbourne.

Swan Lake: Loch na hEala An interview with the choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan

“Like children turn over rocks to see what’s underneath,” says choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, “I’ve always had that desire to know what’s going on with somebody, what’s behind. Again, it brings you back to this balletic thing of the veneer. What’s behind the veneer? What’s really going on with you? And once you get into that kind of territory you start to meet story, these fantastic stories that need to be told about what has happened.”

Swan Lake Loch na hEala at Sydney Opera House

Keegan-Dolan shares many stories in the brief time he speaks to me through a crackling phone line from the Irish seaside. Stories about family, about friends, about the magical and the mundane “butting up against one another.” One moment he is telling me about the hilarity that arises from sharing a rehearsal space with a vocational education centre, where confused locals would bumble into a naked warm-up exercise while looking for the library. Then, in the same breath, he is reflecting on the lonely boat journey his grandmother had to make from Manhattan back to Ireland by herself after falling pregnant out of wedlock.

To an outsider these stories might seem irrelevant. We’re supposed to be chatting about his latest ballet production, Loch na hEala, a reimagining of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake. But for Keegan-Dolan the story of Swan Lake was but a “skeleton” on which to weave a myriad of different stories. It was “like dropping sodium bicarbonate into water and watching the bubbles.”

His Loch na hEala isn’t so much an interpretation of Swan Lake as a total reimagining, a new and radically Gaelic attempt to mythically penetrate the conditions of the present through the barest outlines of a classic work. As the choreographer implies, it is turning the rock over to see what is underneath. Tchaikovsky’s score is usurped with Irish-Nordic folk music by the trio Slow Moving Clouds, who’ve worked with the likes of Sigur Ros and established a serious reputation for their avant-garde combination of traditional music, hypnotic minimalism and penetrating experimental approaches. The traditional narrative of a young woman turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer is replaced with the story of four sisters who are turned into birds after witnessing a terrible crime. Their ‘prince’ is Jimmy; unemployed, depressed and living on a council estate.

One might assume this reimagining comes from a fierce love of the original ballet; a desire to explore its questions and feelings in detail. After all, Keegan-Dolan has an impressive resume of previous reimaginings; Giselle (2003) and The Rite of Spring (2009), to name a few.

“To be really upfront with you, I’m not a fan of classical ballet,” he says. “I don’t like the superficial nature of the theatrical engagement and the way the stories generally get told. I’m more interested in organic, natural, simple, beautiful things. You know, I find ballet a little bit, ah, a little bit tough, a little bit cruel… My issue with classical ballet, I guess, is I don’t believe them, I don’t think it’s truth.” So what truth, then, does Keegan-Dolan hope his own production offers against this perceived tide of cruelty and callousness? The plot of the ballet – as many a reviewer has salivated over – ranges from everything from abuse in the Catholic Church to suicidal impulses to political corruption.

Swan Lake Loch na hEala at Sydney Opera House
Swan Lake Loch na hEala at Sydney Opera House

 

“When I explore mental illness or abuse of children or corruption it’s coming from the place of wanting to break through the lies that we get pedalled, the bullshit we get forced to accept. Actually, life is wonderful and life is complicated. It’s dark and it’s light.”

Keegan-Dolan is the first to admit he is no psychologist, but a desire to help console those in the grips of “mental torture” runs throughout his musings. Having spent a significant amount of time visiting a close friend hospitalized for depression, he became fascinated with the causes of depression, and the role theatre and dance plays in alleviating it.

“I thought, mental illness happens in the head, in the mind, you know, in a certain part of the mind, in a neurotic part of the mind. Dancing is mostly, nearly entirely in the body, so you know, when I dance, I have a little daughter, she’s six and she said to me yesterday, I was dancing for her and she said ‘oh god daddy you look so happy when you’re dancing’ and I think, you know, it always takes me out of my head, it gets me in connection with music, with the people I’m dancing with, with energy, pure and simple. And I think there is a connection.”

And so what does Keegan-Dolan feel his own responsibility in this debate is? When we turn over the stones of the stories of depression and abuse, of melancholy and neglect, that he weaves throughout his piece, what are we going to find? What is behind the veneer?

Keegan-Dolan sounds almost sheepish when he says, “Everyone has got stuff going on, everyone is pretty complicated, everyone has sadness in their lives… I feel like one of my jobs through being a storyteller, through working with dance and the theatre, is to share that idea, that it’s okay, that we’re all kind of dealing with the same stuff and it’s okay, that someone will walk out of the theatre and go ‘it’s okay!’ I feel like that’s my job, to kind of lighten the load, you know?”

‘Swan Lake’ / ‘Loch na hEala’ appears at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 30 August – 2 September. Details here. 

Turning an Unsavoury Tide: the Billion Oyster Project A Letter from New York

Before New York became the financial capital of the world, it was the oyster capital. When Europeans arrived, New York was home to 350 square miles of oyster beds – almost half the world’s oysters. Pearl Street was named by the Dutch for the mountains of mollusk shells that had accumulated from centuries of Lenape Indians contentedly feasting on them.

Once, on a visit to the city, my father rode the Circle Line. He didn’t see a single oyster reef from its deck. He didn’t see Pearl Street, the original shore line of Manhattan, either. It’s 300 yards inland. In true New York style, that intervening distance was filled with trash and transformed into prime real estate. He did, however, spy a dead body bobbing in the lifeless wake of the boat.

The waters aren’t as perilous as when my father visited a few decades ago. Back then, if you fell in and were lucky enough to be rescued by hazmat suit-wearing paramedics, they would promptly pump you full of medication, stuff you into a contaminated materials bag, scoot you off to an isolation ward, and hope for the best.

Now, the long-distance swimming association, New York Open Water, hosts eleven events annually, including several ’round Manhattan races. But a doctor friend of mine who participates still prophylactically doses himself with an antibiotic cocktail before taking the plunge – just in case.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation lists dioxins/furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metals (mercury, cadmium, lead) and pesticides (dieldrin, chlordane) as “the principal chemicals of concern”. Not to mention occasional radioactivity from the Indian Point power plant, which shuts down regularly to fix leaks that are always of “no concern”.

New Yorkers consume oysters by the boatload – half a million per week. Although they haven’t come from New York harbour in over a hundred years, their shells are ending up on its bottom. And that’s a good thing. A Who’s Who of over 50 restaurants are donating used shells to cultivate new oyster beds in the harbor as part of the far-sighted Billion Oyster Project.

Recycled shells provide the perfect surface for oyster larvae to grow on; a single old shell can foster 20 new oysters. So far, the Billion Oyster Project has restored 20 million oysters to the harbor, each one hard at work filtering over 50 gallons of water every 24 hours, something they can do for 12 years.

That leaves 980,000,000 to go before achieving the project’s 2035 goal. A daunting task, but plenty of help is at hand. The project has amassed an army of volunteers, including 3,000 students from more than 50 schools, with the New York Harbor School on Governors Island playing the pivotal role of running a hatchery to “spat” the recycled shells with Eastern oyster larvae and nurseries to cultivate them. Once in the harbor, other schools monitor the bivalves’ health at dozens of restoration stations dotting the shores of the boroughs. When mature, fully-formed clumps are transported to reef renewal sites to do what adults do (which for some Eastern oysters can involve a little gender swapping now and then) and eventually become self-sustaining.

This optimistic thinking is founded on the 1972 Clean Water Act, which regulated pollution discharges into the nation’s waters, and falls under the watchful eye of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is now run by Scott Pruitt, a man who dismisses climate change and has a mandate to shred the agency to “tidbits”. Eastern oysters, when irritated, produce tiny pearls. Let’s hope the Billion Oyster Project isn’t casting them before swine.

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