and my heart crumples like a coke can

you never ate fusilli nor farfalle nor spaghettini.

you did not like all that italian shite. you liked chocolate eclairs penguin biscuits beef with string in gravy and custard with steamed pudding which is like a fruit cake. a long time ago we wished you would die. you loved tractors and bob-cats. a bob-cat is the australian name for a digger. one winter in scotland you dug a hole in a field with your bob-cat cut off the electricity supply to the entire village burst the mains water pipe. the water froze children skated on it wayward cars skidded into badgers and lambs born in unseasonal snow. your father was a farmer. he gave you your love of tractors. and potatoes. he skimped on other sorts of love. once you gifted a plough to mum. and a socket set. another time a cement mixer. you smoked and drank. grouse mostly. embassy regals. one time you moved a washing machine for a neighbour. you bought old tractors and renovated them sold them in the classifieds. although you could not spell it you were an entrepreneur. your legs went thin. the nutritionist said all you had to do was drink complan. you used to wash your car a lot. the celebrant at your funeral said you would be on your way to heaven in a gleaming vehicle. nobody laughed. you were not religious. i do not believe in heaven. your brother in canada rings me a lot since you died. he told me you were coeliac. it is unrelated to motor neurone disease. you were seventy fucking two. david bowie sixty nine. alan rickman the same. your adam’s apple stopped moving. i realise i too will stop breathing one day. at your funeral your sort-of-wife asked for donations to the disease you didn’t know you had. i don’t know if anyone donated. nine days before you died i visited you at your pebble dashed house, sat beside you on your tan leather couch, watched upside down chaffinches feed on the bird nuts hanging from the hills hoist in your front garden. a hills hoist is australian. in scotland it is a whirly jig. i have been away too long. you tried to make your way to the bathroom on your zimmer frame. you fell in the hall way. i didn’t know how to get you up. i lay beside you on the carpet. you kept apologising. there was nothing to apologise for. the nutritionist was wrong. you died the tuesday after valentine’s day. valentine’s day was on the friday. stephen hawking had motor neurone disease too. his is different to the kind you had. there are four different kinds. yours was diagnosed the day you died. you were already dead. stephen hawkins liked cosmological stuff and the big bang. you liked tractors. when i think of how much you liked tractors, my heart crumples like a coke can.


Ali Whitelock’s and my heart crumples like a coke can is published by Wakefield Press

Cigarettes & Turpentine An Ode to My Artist-Mother

In the photograph, my parents stand opposite each other. I’m tucked into the nook of one of my father’s arms – a tiny bald-headed baby, eyes wide and staring straight ahead at the camera. They are both longhaired. My father is tall in jeans and a billowy shirt; my mother is much shorter, wearing a vest and a lacy Victorian blouse that buttons at her throat and cuffs around her wrists. She has one hand on her hip, one eyebrow slightly raised, lips parted as if about to speak. My parents don’t look at each other or at the camera – both their faces are turned towards me.

Behind them is a large canvas covered in a crowd of painted faces, figures looming over chimneys and cradling tiny houses in their arms. The photo is in black-and-white, but I imagine the colours of the painting are the same rich, earthy tones that characterised my mother’s work during that period: ochre, blood red and brown, blue skies in the background as dark as an oil slick.

Taken by a photographer friend at my parents’ home in Melbourne ahead of an exhibition of my mother’s work at the William Mora galleries sometime in 1990, it is one of the only family portraits I have of the three of us together during the two years after my birth that my parents remained a couple. In most of the photos from my early childhood, I am either alone or with my father, my mother always preferring to be behind the camera rather than in front of it.

My parents separated sometime between my second and my third birthday. I have no memories of them together. Instead, I have artifacts: songs my father wrote about my mother; an angry letter my mother wrote to my father across a primed canvas and later covered over with an oil painting. It now depicts a band of men holding old folk instruments – a drum, a flute, a mandolin – and one man with his head bent over a table, next to a bottle of wine. In the corner, a bare-breasted woman stands in a straw-yellow skirt, holding a red ball. If you look closely, you can still see the outlines of the red-paint letters showing through the dark background. For a long time I was a daughter-historian, trying to excavate my parents’ love and understand the loss of it.

After my parents moved to Sydney – separately – when I was five, I lived predominately with my father until I was 11. During those years, my father was a solid, dependable figure. He had been, among other things, the singer in a visceral, three-piece punk band for roughly ten years on and off by the time he met my mother. A few years after I was born he quit touring so he could sing me to sleep at night and be there when I woke up in the morning. By the time I started school, he had a regular job cutting patterns for stained glass windows and soldering them together with lead. He only played music at home.

My mother remained more elusive. She smoked Marlboro Reds and drove old cars that always broke down. Many of my childhood memories of the weekends I spent with her involve waiting on the side of the road with our dog while she called the NRMA from a payphone to come and tow us home. She wore red lipstick religiously, leaving a kiss print on all the take-away coffee cups left in the cup-holders of her beaten-up cars. She was never on time to pick me up. Her house smelled of cigarettes and turpentine, and I loved her with that special love girls reserve for the women they aspire to be like.

Growing up, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world and I didn’t understand why she hated having her picture taken. Of her wedding to my father, there were only a few candid photos. My uncle was supposed to be the official wedding photographer, but in his nervousness, he forgot to put film in the camera. Sometimes I think my mother may have been secretly glad – on her wedding day she was 25 and pregnant with me, and she also had the mumps. These factors aside, I’ve never known her to be happy with a photo of herself.

Maybe because they were so rare, the few photos I found of my mother, especially from when she was younger, before she was my mother, held a fascination for me. She’s never organised her photographs into an album – instead, she keeps them in wicker baskets or boxes tucked under the bed or inside her wardrobe. On my weekends at her house, I would shuffle through them, tracing the pictures of her like blueprints for the kind of woman I wanted to be.

Painting of a girl wearing a crown by artist Amanda Meares

‘Girl with crown’, 1997, Amanda Meares.

I also looked to my mother’s paintings for clues. Across her body of work are a collection of recurring images: figures wearing crowns, chimneys, houses with red pointed roofs, the red ball, cars, dogs, bridges, a red balloon, guitars. Intimacy between people in her pictures is rare. Her large oil paintings from the 1990s often depicted crowds of people towering over the surroundings that are supposed to contain them. Smaller canvases or watercolours focus on one figure alone, and there’s an introspective quality to these works I have always related to. One of my favourite pictures of hers is a watercolour I found buried in a set of drawers at her house earlier last year. It is a small work on paper depicting a black-haired girl sitting on top of a house on a hill, holding a dog on a leash, while planes fly overhead against a background of chimneys. “It’s me and it’s you,” she said when I showed it to her.

During the time she painted it, we lived in a Sydney suburb recently built out of an industrial wasteland. Planes flew low above the flat-roofed houses. Our home – one of six historic terrace houses on a street of warehouses – was opposite a plastic bag factory. At the end of the street was Sydney Park, a former brickworks and landfill site framed by major highways, now covered over with grass and a reservoir, smokestacks left behind like a crown for the rolling green hills.

There has always been an emotionally autobiographical element to my mother’s paintings. She’ll point to a work and tell me a story about that time in her life – that’s when your uncle moved out of our home and I lived in the country; this is a painting I did when your dad was on tour and I was lonely; that’s a picture of you and me when you were little.

But her work doesn’t just represent her world; it also transfigures it. The images in my mother’s work – industrial, domestic, symbolic – create their own language. In this way, her art acts like memory; it takes her experiences and collapses the specific details, rearranges them, and moves them into a realm of poetic gesture. Like Joan Didion’s notebooks, my mother’s art is her way of keeping in touch with the people she used to be.

I was ten years old when my younger half-brother was born. Five years later, a second brother followed. Although we were born from the same artist-mother, the weight of her two roles shifted after they were arrived. Evidently, raising two young boys with my stepfather is different than being a young, part-time single mother. For the ten years when my mother had a small child at home, she stopped producing the large-scale oil paintings I’d grown up around. She dyed her hair blonde. She bought a practical car. She went out to school assemblies instead of concerts. During this period, her work also changed. Instead of the large, bold and dark oil paintings, her art became more intricate and illustrative. She worried that fumes from turpentine would affect my younger brothers, so she switched to watercolours, acrylics and drawing. Many of her symbols remained the same, but the palette grew lighter – vibrant blues and rich greens, bright reds. For a few years, I hardly saw her paint at all.

I was a teenager then, living with her full-time after my father moved back to Melbourne. Starting to make my own work for the first time, I was going through a self-important phase, when I believed art was the most important thing of all. I felt frustrated that my mother, whose work I loved and admired, was not pursuing a career as an artist. It took me a long time to understand that she makes art for herself – for the sake of her own self-expression and satisfaction – not for validation. This is something I am still learning.

What I also didn’t realise is that this was also a period of stability for my mother, and her early work was a product of pain, of loneliness. Emotional excess whittled into art – this is something she taught me. Make work, she told me repeatedly at different stages of my life, because then you’ll never be lonely. A woman needs to be able to spend time alone and be okay, because that’s what keeps you from settling for less with men.

It is the women in my family who have always carried the line of visual art. From 1984-1987 my mother studied painting at Victoria College in Prahran, Melbourne. Her stepmother, my grandfather’s second wife, had been the head of the printmaking department there after gaining prominence in the Melbourne abstract art movement in the 1970s for her series of “dot-screen” paintings, compositions that featured bright washes of colour overlaid with a grid of screen-printed dots. These works combined the dual forces of abstraction: expressive gesture and geometric patterning.

My maternal grandmother was also a working artist. She supported her three children, of which my mother is the middle, by making jewellery and teaching out of her home studio as a silversmith. She used soft red wax to mould shapes from the natural world – bees and insects, snails, shells, knots of rope—and cast them into wearable pieces of silver and gold.

For these women in my family, art wasn’t “out there” in the external world – it was created in the domestic space, inseparable from everyday life. This is most true of my mother, who still prefers to work in the middle of the house.

Two years ago, my family moved to a bigger place in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville and my mother took out her paints again. A few years earlier, my grandmother had died, and my mother gathered up all of her tools and started making jewellery. She has her easel in the living room now, overlooking the Cooks River. We once lived on the other side of it, back when it was just the two of us, and we walked our dog around the water on the weekends. It is, and is not, the same river – restoration projects in recent years have cleaned it up. And she is, and is not, the same mother.

She paints by the window, looks out over our chickens and orange trees, the neighbours’ olive tree branches, to the bridge over the river, the lights of Sydney Airport beyond. Our dining room table is covered with paintbrushes, my brothers’ homework, pieces of Lego, laundry, orange peels, unopened mail.

The first time I saw her sitting there and working I almost cried. It was an image from my childhood I’d carried around with me for all these years, a memory before memory of my artist-mother. As a small child, I always had trouble sleeping, but she would let me stay up late with her. We’d sit side-by-side in the living room together, painting. She always left her paints out and let me use her good materials – the little coloured squares of her watercolour palettes, the chalky pastels that stained my fingers and were stored in a wooden box with a gold latch, each in a separate compartment like candies in a chocolate box. The only rule was that I had to wash my brush the way she taught me, swishing it in water and wiping it dry on pieces of newspaper.

Painting of two people on a seesaw with an urban backdrop by artist Amanda Meares

‘Seesaw’ painting, 1987, Amanda Meares.

Although I recognise now I have no skill for evoking feeling through visual gesture – it’s like a language I love the sound of but can’t communicate in – childhood was a time I felt free to play without reservation or restriction. I loved to paint back then, in those late hours when we were alone, my mother and me, at work in a kind of serious and introspective play.

I’m sorry I haven’t got dinner ready, she said to me when I came over that day. When I’m working, I forget about food. That’s why it’s hard to paint and have children – you forget to feed them.

I felt exactly the same about the days I spent writing. Though I didn’t inherit my mother’s gift for painting, many people have commented on the kinship between my writing and songs and my mother’s work. Neither of us can figure out exactly what it is, but it seems to carry the same soul.

In recent years, watching my brothers grow up, I’ve started to attribute the creative passions we all share to the way my mother has fostered them. As children, we were never told to put our things away – we were free to pick up and play with anything, at any time. Our house, consequently, was and still is chaos – but it is a creative chaos. I realise now that child-rearing is just another creative act for my mother – that she considers her children as part of her body of work, alongside her paintings, cards, drawings on the backs of envelopes, jewellery hammered by her own hand.

I don’t remember the first time I knew what ‘art’ was, but I do remember my first image of an artist. Art was my mother. It was cigarettes and turpentine and tiny perfume bottles, broken-down cars, paint and ash and pastel, dogs and children and love and loneliness, passion and pain. To this day, the women I admire most are artist-mothers, who are able to create with pleasure and abandon but simultaneously raise children with the selflessness that requires. They live in two worlds, both nurturers and creators.

Family photograph of musician Steve Lucas, artist Amanda Meares and baby Madelaine.

1990: Steve Lucas and Amanda Meares with baby Madelaine, photo by Tamsin O’Neill.

This story originally appeared in Catapult on 21 June, 2017.

Rage Against the State Machine Keep Sydney Open wants in the House

It’s no secret diversity in Sydney’s night culture is disappearing. Even Alan Jones is angry about the closure of The Basement after 45 years of live music. Figures from Liquor & Gaming NSW reveal a net loss of 176 venues since the introduction of 2014 lockout laws. Live performance ticket sales are down 40 per cent. The negatives stack up faster than high-rise developments can steal venue space.

You get the feeling State Government would prefer we stayed at home; stupefied by streaming services and our inability to choose what to order from the only people who have any legitimate reason to be out after dark; the army of underpaid food couriers.

Even the CEOs at the Committee for Sydney are saying, “There is a need in Government to get this to someone who can drive this agenda.”

One man who thinks he can give the kiss of life to Sydney’s nights is Tyson Koh. At 36, Koh is a DJ who has produced ABC’s music program Rage for the last seven years. Now, he’s producing a different kind of rage. Four years ago, Koh founded anti-lockout advocacy group Keep Sydney Open, which has just announced it will run 15-20 candidates in both the lower and upper houses come the next NSW state elections.

There’s little doubt of his commitment and passion, but asking who exactly Tyson Koh is, is to get a slightly guarded answer.

“It’s not so much about who’s running but what do we stand for as a collective. Part of the issue I have with politics is that it’s too personality driven,” Koh says. “I think sometimes we get too caught up in the surface to really focus on what’s being done on our behalf.”

Koh wants to reform what’s holding back our nightlife; inadequate transportation, city lighting, residential planning, law enforcement, tourism, protecting established entertainment precincts. But, for anyone old enough to remember ‘No Monorail’ and ‘No Aircraft Noise’ parties, single platform movements seem limited from their outset. “You can call it a single-issue party,” Koh told Neighbourhood, “but I think a lot of people know that single issue represents so much more.”

Koh thinks that “so much more” is an existential question about what kind of city we want to live in. “It’s what the lockout laws represent… an ever-encroaching nanny state, a loss of civil liberties, an injustice towards young people and arts and creatives,” he said. “There’s a feeling there’s less freedom.”

It could be argued losing freedoms is just part of how affluent societies evolve. In 1903, sociologist Max Weber called the increasing bureaucracy that traps individuals in systems of control an ‘iron cage’. Some of the tightly-regulated bars on Sydney’s cage were exposed at the current NSW Parliamentary inquiry into the music and arts economy.

It’s not just sniffer dogs in nightclubs, it’s police telling venue operators what genres of music they can play, if they can hang a mirror ball from the ceiling. It’s closing down near-empty venues that didn’t licence-scan the undercover cop properly at the door. It’s the director of Sydney’s Fringe Festival saying she had to impose a ‘no dancing’ clause on applications to hold events.

Koh is hardly alone when he says, “NSW is over-regulated.” But don’t we willingly trade away freedoms for increased safety? What about the decrease in violence? The two years following the lockout laws saw marked reductions in violent alcohol-related injuries. St Vincent’s Hospital had a 10 per cent decrease in the kind of facial fractures usually caused by a punch to the face. Koh thinks the report “a red herring”.

“A lot of the stats that come out of St Vincent’s Hospital are really misleading. They put out a statistic about facial fractures but there’s no indication about how any of those facial fractures occurred, it could have been someone falling down the stairs. There was no indication if there was a downward trend outside of that hospital, in other parts of the state.”

He thinks being too concerned with statistics makes us lose sight of making Sydney a vibrant 24-hour city. “The question isn’t whether the lockouts have led to less violence, the question is what other measures can we introduce which will also have the same effect.”

Asked why we should vote for his party, Koh said, “Because we truly care about the city. It’s as simple as that.” With a 2016 Fairfax poll showing three quarters of young people actually support the lockout laws, it will be interesting to see, come election time, how many voters “truly care” to Keep Sydney Open.

Tyson Koh. Photography by Liam Cameron.

Death of a Seaman Maritime incidents on our coast

As the YM Efficiency limped into Port Botany, having lost eighty-three of the containers it was carrying off the New South Wales coast on 1 June, another serious maritime accident was unfolding even closer to Sydney shores.

On Sunday, 3 June, at about 9.30am, an electrical officer aboard the Singapore-flagged OOCL Kuala Lumpur was crushed to death. The incident occurred just 17 kilometres east of Cronulla as the ship was en route to Port Botany.

Most workplace fatalities get at least some mainstream coverage here. In contrast to the overboard containers accident, this fatality of a foreign worker in Australian territory, involved in the transportation of goods for our consumption, has only been reported in industry publications.

Reverend Un Tay, a chaplain with Anglican charity, Mission to Seafarers, has visited the OOCL Kuala Lumpur and spoken to the all Indian crew. Reverend Un Tay also spoke to some members of the crew aboard the YM Efficiency, as authorities investigate the containers mishap. He has given Neighbourhood an account of how each crew is coping.

“For different reasons, the crew on both ships were traumatised, and far from home,” Reverend Tay says. “While investigations were continuing into both accidents we were concerned to ensure the welfare of the crews wasn’t being overlooked.”

The electrician who died on the Kuala Lumpur had been carrying out repairs on the ship’s elevator, according to a spokesperson for the Australian Marine Safety Authority (AMSA). He was reported by the ship’s master to have been crushed between the lift door and shaft. He was 31 years old.

“I spent about 4 or 5 hours on board that Sunday afternoon,” Reverend Tay says. “Initially, they [the crew members] were quite hesitant because they were all shocked, quite traumatised. The chief cook was there because I was in the mess room. We spent almost an hour in silence, but finally he came to me and opened up. All of them were grieving and in shock. The cook said to me no one had touched the lunch he cooked that day.”

Seafarers spend up to twelve months at a time at sea. Reverend Tay says one crew member told him he just wanted to sign off (end his contract early) and go home. “A number of the crew had no SIM card, no way to call anyone,” he says. “We provided them with a global SIM card. It was a relief for them. They could make phone calls, use Facebook, Skype whatever… something they didn’t have access to on board.”

Reverend Tay says the International Transport Workers’ Federation arranged for a professional counsellor to go on board. Neighbourhood asked the ship’s charterer, OOCL, what support, including counselling, it arranged for the captain and crew but it did not respond to that specific question. It said it was working closely with the ship owner and local investigative authorities.

NSW Police have prepared a report for the coroner.

Reverend Tay made two unsuccessful attempts to go aboard the YM Efficiency after it docked at Port Botany. It was understandable, he says, given the captain was no doubt already dealing with a lot, including AMSA investigators wanting to know how scores of containers could end up in the ocean, and some of the contents wash up on our beaches. Waterfront workers, like players in a high-stakes game of Pick Up Sticks, have been going about the delicate task of unloading the remaining containers, which appear about to topple at any moment. On his third attempt, on 13 June, the chaplain encountered an AMSA officer on the gangway who put in a good word for him with the ship’s Second Mate. Soon he was in the messroom talking to some of the Chinese and Taiwanese crew. Reverend Tay speaks five languages, including Mandarin.

Crushed containers on the YM Efficiency. Photography by Reverend Un Tay

Crushed containers on the YM Efficiency. Photography by Reverend Un Tay

He says the crew were restrained, possibly under instructions from the Captain not to say too much. “Also,” he says, “there are cultural elements. Even if there is no fault, if something bad happens, it is a shameful thing.”

Despite having been six weeks at sea and, by then, a whole week in port and provisions running low, no one had been able to go ashore. “I don’t know why, probably because of the investigation,” Reverend Tay says. “But personally I thought it unfair for them. They needed some space, to come out, and unwind.”

Reverend Tay visited the ship again on 20 June and found that the crew have still not been ashore, two weeks after arriving.

An AMSA spokesperson says it has detained the ship as it assesses compliance with the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, and “that could take some time.” However, there is no AMSA direction restricting the crew from going ashore. Ships’ captains generally approve shore leave.

Seafarers are responsible for 99 per cent of imports into Australia. Their perilous existence goes largely unrecognised. Mission to Seafarers Sydney visits ships when in port, offers support and counselling. If and when seafarers are able to go ashore for a few hours, Mission to Seafarers offers free transportation for seafarers into the city and a dry land sanctuary.

It’s been a particularly rough month for seafarers along the New South Wales coast. Earlier this week, on 18 June, a large fire broke out on a bulk carrier at Port Kembla. The ship, Iron Chieftain, was carrying dolomite, used in iron and steel production. Blue Scope steel operates a major steel mill in Port Kembla. About one hundred firefighters attended the blaze. Fortunately, the 22 crew were evacuated and there are no reports of injury.

Update: Neighbourhood’s Ross Duncan reports that around 9pm tonight (Thursday 21.06.18) Reverend Tay has informed him that “eight seafarers from YM Efficiency went ashore earlier, brought into city on MTS bus. Great news.”

Scream Time or Screen Time? To save your child you need first to save yourself

2017. Sydney. Every inner-city street is congested with traffic. A mother is driving her daughters to school. She is feeling claustrophobic in the chaos of the early-morning commute. The kids are yelling at each other. She turns the radio up louder to drown out the noise.

She looks up at a billboard and sees a telecommunications ad. It features a picture of two children in the back seat of a car just like hers. Happy. Content. They both hold smartphones. Written across the poster in big bold letters is: ‘Scream time? Screen time!’


Addicted to Smartphones?

The way we give our kids smartphones and tablets to shut them up is not so different from the days when we freely gave children laudanum to keep them subdued.

Are smartphones something that we can become addicted to, in a clinical sense? Could they ever be as destructive to our mental health as heroin or ice addiction?

According to researchers writing for Computers in Human Behaviour: “Despite the advancements of smartphones, their detrimental effects are becoming ever more apparent. The related addiction phenomena and side effects have become significant social problems. Smartphone addictions
present with direct symptoms of psychological anxiety, communication avoidance, weakening of social adaptations, and withdrawal symptoms that are similar to those of drug or alcohol addiction.”

Their study showed that even children under two can become addicted. But surely while it’s saddening to think that our children are becoming smartphone addicts, it can’t hurt them in the same way ice can. Can it?

The problems go way beyond smartphones. A significant amount of research has been done into the impact of all social-media technology in our lives, particularly those of younger people. Among the more common issues are associations between prolonged use of social media and anxiety. Another study shows links between social media and depression.

Many of us have recognised at some stage that our devices steal our time in certain ways. We feel anxious when we don’t have our phones on us. Then we feel repulsed when we realise hours have drifted by and all we’ve done is stare into them.

A recent study found that even having your smartphone face-down on a table while holding a conversation can have a negative impact.

Another study presents evidence suggesting that smartphones and sleep disturbance can lead to depression. Yet another shows that withdrawal from smartphones can result in depression, anxiety, insomnia, hyperactivity and other behavioural issues. In one study, researchers analysed smartphone use in terms of the eight DSM- 5 criteria for a gambling disorder.

This newfound addiction is affecting us and our relationships in ways we could never have imagined.

But it is our children we should be most concerned about. Perhaps we should tell them to ‘Just Say No’ to smartphones? Regulation is the word here. Some of the studies of smartphone addiction show that parents can take control of their children’s use and manage the potential problems that arise.

How? Certainly not by simply throwing the phones away. Or giving them lectures. Instead, parents need to be exemplars themselves.


Fraying at the Edges

2017. Sydney. I am in Centennial Park. I’ve left work tired and frustrated. The job of CEO of the Ted Noffs Foundation can sometimes take its toll on my family and me. I’ve just heard that the Premier of New South Wales has refused to support pill testing, a vital Harm Reduction strategy that would have saved young lives at music festivals.

A lot had been riding on this moment. It’s cost me years of struggle. And now the struggle must continue.

I drive around the park. My hands gripping and twisting the steering wheel. My anger swelling inside me. I feel like yelling. But what would be the point? My anger is like an internal tidal wave. A washing machine. Churning. Going nowhere.

I pull over by the bicycle track. Kids are playing. Two mothers are discussing yoga. Should I give up? The group I helped assemble to make pill testing happen is fraying at the edges. We know there will be more deaths unless our State and Territory governments find the courage they need. Unless we can all work together.

My anger slowly subsides. And soon enough transforms into a dull boredom. I grab my phone. My fingertip touches the screen lightly, then its impression fades away like a mist.

I get out of the car and walk. My body slouched. My neck craned. My smartphone cradled in my left hand and my right index finger poking at its illuminated screen. The sun goes down behind me. The sky – an Yves Klein blue – melts into pastel orange. The cicadas begin rhythmically chanting. But I have my back to the sky and my head in a grotto of light, amidst the darkening trees.

What am I doing? I’m distracted. Checking email, that’s it. No, nothing there … Oh, hold on, ‘Last update 4.15pm’ – I’ll refresh.

I look up. Someone is walking towards me but I’m blinded by the twilight. I go back to my email. A new message! A moment of anticipation holds my heart in its grip. The subject line says: ‘Hey!’

Excellent! It will be good news! Perhaps a breakthrough with the pill testing? Maybe other good news from work? Perhaps a friend? My finger presses the screen again, and the pixels are squashed against everything else. The light changes, a larger screen opens up and I see the message. The email opens. Spam. I feel cheated on.

Another figure walks past the other way. My eyes strain as they go from darkness to light. I notice the time. It’s the kids’ bedtime in half an hour!

OK. I’ve got to get home. But before I go, I just need to check Twitter. Make sure I haven’t missed anything. I think I have time … Another window opens. Another minute becomes another hour. Time isn’t even near me. I’m protected from it, here in the cocoon of LCD light. I am not time; I belong to eternity. Everything else can wait outside of this sacred space. This moment is sacred – isn’t it? My wife calls to ask where I am. The kids are already asleep.

I recently had coffee with a journalist who told me that she too had decided that she was spending too much time on her phone. She had found some research that suggested turning off the phone’s colours could reduce its addictive properties and she helped me do the same on mine. Since that meeting my phone has been black and white and it has indeed reduced my desire to pick it up as often. Simple tactics like this might not halt the challenges we’ll face in the future with our growing addiction to technology but it may help you in a small way.

You may be left wondering if smartphones are more hazardous to our mental health than ice. After all, there are far more smartphone users out there than ice users. What would happen if all of us called on the government to put as much effort into regulating smartphones and social media as they do into ‘Ice destroys lives’ ads?

This is an edited extract from Addicted – How addiction affects every one of us and what we can do about it by Matt Noffs and Kieran Palmer, Harper Collins, Paperback, $32.99. Research and studies mentioned here are elaborated on, footnoted and referenced at length in the book.

book cover of Matt Noffs and Kieran Palmer's Addicted?

Addicted? by Matt Noffs and Kieran Palmer.

Right Outta Redfern A suburb and its history through one woman’s eyes

“For the first three months I thought ‘My God, what have I done?’” Ronda said. Redfern was rough in 1979, the three-bedroom semi cost $44,000, and the suburb had a bad reputation. The public housing towers were built in the 1960s, and nefarious types prowled the streets. Ronda’s house was broken into, the walls smeared with faeces, and everything of value taken. “You couldn’t go out at night, and as well some days the smell from the hops at Resch’s Brewery was disgusting. You had to close the windows.” Still, 40 years later, Ronda proved a stayer, with two daughters and three grandchildren.

Ronda isn’t very tall but her personality is pure six-footer, and she’s not to be messed with. She can hurl every word in the language at anyone who does the wrong thing. A man turned up in her bedroom one day and she spoke to him with such *#*K*#@ vehemence he fled. I saw a cyclist copping it for not slowing at a crossing. He was told his arse was where his brain should be, and lots more.

Ronda is a Redfern identity, an icon, heart of gold and everyone’s friend. “It’s because I talk to everyone even the junkies and drunks,” she says. “They’re just people.”

Things have been changing, as Redfern property prices skyrocket, and different sorts of people move in. You can go out at night in most streets now. Ronda remembers other times, old times and times not that long ago.

In 2014 Harriet Wran, on ice, was with her junkie boyfriend when he murdered a drug dealer in one of the towers. After that, police patrols and general security were increased, but it’s still not a kindergarten today. There’s a reason the housing blocks are called Suicide Towers. Ronda has seen several “jumpers” on the grass verge. Or had they been murdered?… You just keep walking.

Redfern, like other nearby suburbs, was mainly industrial sites and factories earlier on. The Portuguese, Greek, and Lebanese men worked at places like Wunderlich Tiles, where pressed metal ceilings were made, the Glass Factory, Resch’s, the Printery and more… The women stayed home doing piecework.

“You could hear the whirring of their machines, 24/7,” says Ronda. And through them Ronda learned to love “wog food” – beautiful Greek cakes, spaghetti bolognese, Lebanese dips.

The Resch’s Brewery on Bourke Street closed down 37 years ago, and as the buildings came down armies of rats, grown fat on the grain, fanned out in search of new lodgings. Ronda had them running through her house (and a huge dead one in the kitchen cupboard). Eventually the Council gave everyone rat traps.

There are stories of the characters that lived around Redfern: Champagne Charlie, a polite Asian man, who never asked for money but only for food. One day he was found dead in a gutter, apparently beaten by a gang of youths. Ronda remembers him always wearing a suit, and carrying his cheap champagne wherever he went. Others say he was drunk and dirty.

Then there were the Buddle Boys just a block or two over in Waterloo. They took over the Grosvenor Hotel with their dad, and apparently created mayhem. Danks Street, another few blocks away, was dangerous. “You wouldn’t walk down Danks Street to save your life in those days!” says Ronda.

Then the arty and foody people arrived – Fratelli’s moved in with flash groceries, and a fine restaurant upstairs. Artists and galleries spawned. Soon Danks Street was extremely trendy and chic. Now, Fratelli’s has gone, and the art gallery complex is being demolished to make way for apartments. The Happy Clappers are still there, she says – Hillsong is even busing in young people.

On the corner of Cleveland and Baptist Street is Murder Mall. No one knows how it changed from Methadone Mall to Murder Mall, but Ronda thinks “there probably was a murder; lots of strange people.” A Chinese developer was circling to buy it, but Murder Mall was sold to Wesfarmers (for development) for close to $100 million… the end of an era.

Across the road from the mall are the Mounted Police, the oldest such organisation in the world. And behind them, fronting Bourke Street, is the Evergreen Taoist Church, once the police barracks.

One place in Redfern says it all. Not far from Ronda is the Corrugated Iron house. It was apparently a shearing shed in 1920, and in the 1970s an old man pottered around in his iron shed there. In 1999 came the terrible hail storm, dumping 500,000 tonnes of hail on the inner-city, destroying cars, trees, houses. The shed was wrecked, and the old man never returned. New owners came and went – and one built a marvellous house. The studio at the back, in a nod to history and to please locals, was clad with the recovered iron sheets from the old shed. The house then sold for $2.75 million.

It is now famous: a backdrop for fashion photographers, and an architectural talking point. Not far away is Redfern Park, where Paul Keating gave one of the greatest speeches in Australian history.

Right Outta Redfern. Like Ronda.

‘40,000 Years is Long, Long Time…’ Restoring Redfern’s famous mural

“Redfern has always been in the news for bad things, but I’ve only seen good things,” Raymond Finn says, squinting in the sun as he applies more brush strokes to a brick wall. “Art like this one is a great thing.”

Finn is from near Cooper Pedy, South Australia. He remembers his 1997 arrival in Sydney by train. The ‘40,000 Years’ mural opposite Redfern Station was the first thing he saw. “But you could hardly see it [by then] – the paint was wore down, it was scraped and falling to bits.”

Today Finn is hard at work on its restoration. An estimated 64,000 people a day use the station, passing by Eveleigh Street and ‘The Block’ with all its history. Lifting up his brush, Finn pauses. “The cultural significance of this place to all Aboriginal people, it’s iconic.”

Originally created in 1983, the mural was designed by the artist and filmmaker Carol Ruff. Enlisting a team that included artist Tracey Moffatt and members of the local Eora TAFE college, it has long been a welcoming point for Indigenous peoples coming to the area.

It stretches the length of the railway bridge, its powder blue colours playing backdrop to a litany of Indigenous pride. The Rainbow Serpent bares its fangs at one end, as Aboriginal feet take their first steps onto the Australian continent. At the other, the Redfern All Blacks (winners of the 1979 NSW Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout). There are also the darker moments; a child stands alone in front of a church mission. A symbol of the Stolen Generations.

The mural is named after Murri musician Joe Geia’s lyrics, which sit directly opposite the northern entrance to Redfern Station: “40,000 years is a long, long time… 40,000 still on my mind…”.

“The north entrance to the station used to be the only one,” says local Sydney activist and muralist, Jason Wing, who is part of the restoration project. “[The mural] communicates ease, pride, familiarity – a pride of place.” But after 34 years, the paint was cracking. Words were faded. Low grade tagging, popping like an insistent species of mould.

“It was irresponsible to let the mural decay for 34 years.”

Wing says that at one point even the Rainbow Serpent was in danger of being graffitied. “Some people say that a community member had misinformed others about the Serpent’s head – saying it gave bad luck,” he says. “The Serpent is a larger symbol for the Aboriginal people and no one has the right to vandalise it.”

In 2013, local Desley Haas of the Redfern Station Community Group (RSCG) approached NSW Rail Corp (who own the land and wall on which the mural is painted) about restoring the mural. Since then the City of Sydney has contributed at least $48,000 to the project.

When putting together the restoration team, RSCG has sought to reflect the make-up of the mural’s original creators – including the original artist Ruff, local Indigenous artists, and students from the Eora TAFE under the teaching guidance of Chico Monks. Haas steered the RSCG over the five years it has taken to realise the project.

Jason Wing says that “what differs this time is there’s a sense of actually recreating history or contributing to history and that’s been a common feeling from the artists.

“We’re contributing to something significant, which the first guys painting the mural, I don’t think they would have realised the power and the significance and relevance historically for this mural. And it’s even more important now because of the gentrification of Redfern because you know it shows now that there’s a lack of Aboriginal presence in Redfern whereas this used to be the hub.

“The bit that really gets me is the church mission houses,” he says. “They were painted by Joe Hurst, a pretty well known male Aboriginal artist. I was watching Joe paint that and it was haunting absolutely haunting. It was really spooky actually. And I look at the removal of Aboriginal community and the communities and watching him paint them and it’s like well, is Redfern just the modern day mission?”

Relying on original photos, Richard Lucas – a “master copier”, according to Wing – used a gridding system to map out their approach. Lucas tells me, “One woman walking past said it was a childish work. But I think that’s irrelevant. It’s important to community as a whole and to bring community, locals, original land owners together with this landmark work.”

On the day I visit, Lucas and Finn are working on thick waves of dark colour at the top of the mural. “The stories here connect people to people – and to country,” Finn explains. “This story gives gives us a bridge to the south coast, the north coast and to where I come from.”

Aunty Mona Donnelly, 1983. Courtesy of Carol Ruff.

This Perfect Day Losing Anthony Bourdain

I was in San Miguel when I heard about Anthony Bourdain. A friend had texted me, which allowed me a moment to imagine that his lifestyle had maybe caught up to him. All the years of unabashed hedonism; smoking, drinking, eating everything that crossed his plate. That would have been okay to me, on the scale of how someone has to go.

My father had died that way. He took a drink at the bar and fell down dead of a heart attack. This had been, for him, I liked to imagine, the ideal way to leave. For the bartender who had poured him the beer, not so much. I remember when he turned up at the funeral, looking somehow as if he were responsible when he wasn’t.

The heart, a lonely hunter.

When I found out what had really happened to Bourdain I was so angry. I cried floods of tears that hit me in jags for two days. There was never a person who seemed more like they would live forever than Anthony Bourdain. Greedily I had imagined him globetrotting into his 90s, still firing off crotchety but loving missives as an old man. Perhaps he would have been sitting on a stoop somewhere in Hoi An, slurping a bowl of hot noodles washed down with cold beer, marvelling at the sheer incalculable luck of still being alive in such a beautiful place.

When I’d gone to Vietnam to retrace my father’s steps in the war, Bourdain had been my guide. As someone who’d grown up with the idea of travel being as foreign to me as the world outside my city, I needed one. I needed someone who could tell me how to be. I took his advice as gospel.

Always, he had said, before you go somewhere, read all the novels and watch all the films you can about it. Learn some very basic phrases for where you will be, so you will know how to be polite (Please. Thank you. Excuse, where is the police station?). Never, under any circumstances, refuse food offered to you in a person’s home. Commit to memory any local customs, so you don’t cause some giant offence with your white Western foreign ways. Even if you have no common language, you will probably figure out how to communicate, if you are open. Try everything. If you want to know where the food is good, find the place packed with the most locals, and if something looks good to you, just point to it and smile. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly what it is.

I watched Bourdain obsessively at a terrible moment in my life when I wanted nothing more badly than to escape. I wanted to be reminded that the world still existed outside of the confines of a tiny domestic misery where I had become smaller and smaller and so far away from myself that I had no idea anymore, who I was. I had taken up a habit of leaving an empty piece of luggage by the door, to remind myself of the possibility of leaving. I was raised to be irreligious, but I had always put great faith in totems of their own, private significance.

When it came time to leave the hick little town I’d been living in, where many people were born and died and never ventured even as far as Melbourne, only a train ride away, I thought of Bourdain when he had said, that if you are ever in a position where you can, you should travel. Get up and move, as far as you can. Sleep on floors if you have to. In figuring out how I would restart my life, nowhere felt far enough away from that town. Melbourne was too close. Sydney, where I had been born and lived most of my life, had become a place so expensive that it felt deranged to choose it over any other city in the world that would be cheaper. I had a decent cheque from a job and I cashed it. Then I pared my belongings down to two bags, and I left.

Four years later and I was living in Mexico. The phone buzzing with, “Bourdain. Fuck.”

“To be on television, hell, to write a book, there’s something wrong with you. To get up and say to everyone, Hey, I’ve got something to tell you, I’ve got a story. That’s not normal behaviour,” Bourdain had said of his life, which he also likened to having stolen a very nice car and gotten away with it.

He was clear to never call himself a journalist, I think for not wanting to put himself in the same league as people who covered wars and government corruption and corporate malfeasance and violent crime. That up next to those people, what he did wasn’t “real”. He could barely believe, all the time, that he was paid to do his job. But he was a journalist, and the best kind. All he ever did, in every scene you can watch, was listen. He was not waiting for his opportunity to speak, even though he could rattle off one-liners as they came to him in an endless stream.

He was a great journalist because he was interested, genuinely and deeply, in other people. All his questions were about letting the other person reveal what they wanted to of themselves; to be seen. But this was not done in a manipulative way. Bourdain did not deploy the faux intimacy of the interview as a trap to make his subject say something they didn’t want to, to expose them to a vulnerability on the other end of a power imbalance. Bourdain was a great journalist because his true subject was never really himself, but everyone else, even though he never hid himself and told us, exactly, all the time, what he was feeling. Everyone was equally interesting to him, no matter their social strata. Unless they were an asshole, in which case, they could eat shit.

When you watch any of the dozens of hours of travelogue he left behind, what you’re watching is someone acting like they would with a stranger they just met in a bar, briefly stopping on their journey to wherever it was they were going to next. Just passing through, but wanting to learn all they could before they left.

I just had to change the tense of this last section, because I wrote about Bourdain as if he were still alive.

Obama and Bourdain enjoy a beer in Vietnam.

Obama and Bourdain enjoy a beer in Vietnam. Photography by White House photographer Pete Souza. Source: Flickr/Creative Commons.

While I’ve been away my life has stopped resembling most of my friends’ in any way. I look back and see people I’ve known forever as they’ve marked off all the traditional milestones of adulthood; getting married, having children, making homes. This was not the path for me, it turned out. The road forked and I went the other way.

It has at times been filled with crushing despair and loneliness so deep, where the saddest place I’ve ever been is a motel on the side of some desolate highway, with drip coffee that’s been sitting in the pot for hours. But I have met people and done things and seen places I could never have dreamed of as a child in a home so miserable I thought I would never escape. I’ve hiked across a glacier with an astronaut and swam in the black sea above the Arctic Circle. I’ve been swimming in other much warmer oceans while dozens of dolphins swam beside me and a whale crashed its tail onto the water. I’ve walked hours to isolated waterfalls, accepted rides on the back of motorcycles from men I only just met. I’ve camped out in my car with the boot open onto the Grand Canyon. I’ve been invited into the homes of people I barely knew, whose language I could barely speak. Other times I’ve met fellow travellers and talked into evenings that became dawn where I told stories I’ve never told anyone. I’ve met people who will be in my life now until the day that I die.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I have to decide sometime soon where my home really is. In dark moments I wonder if it wasn’t all one long terrible decision. Then I try to remember that it is only one life that we get on this earth, that it will one day be dead, absorbed by the sun, and that none of us will be coming back. And I remember the miniscule unlikelihood of even being here in the first place, to be alive, and it was all worth it.

All of it was worth it.

Bourdain made the world feel possible to people who were too poor or too broke or too tied to low paying jobs they can never take leave from, just trying to make ends meet. He made it feel possible to take profound, lusty, libidinous joy in the smallest things, like a three-dollar bowl of soup. I try to think of the best way to honour his life, and I think that would be for everyone to adopt his outlook in the small day-to-day of our own lives. Teach yourself a new recipe. Venture to a part of town you’ve never been to. Eat something you’ve never tried before. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Call someone you haven’t for a long time and tell them that you’re thinking about them. Invite someone over for a meal and cook for them. Let them know they can tell you anything.

There’s one scene from Parts Unknown that perfectly sums up Bourdain for me. He is sitting on a beach in Brazil, where he describes his perfect day as doing just that, eating fresh seafood and drinking cold beer. He is telling us this while sucking the sweet flesh out of a crab claw, which inspires a short, impassioned rant about his disdain for people who won’t do anything difficult, who “aren’t willing to work” for even a great reward like a fresh cooked crab. Not even something as simple as cracking open crab shells for themselves. That people refusing to deal with the claw shell by cracking it open with their teeth, were “the beginning of the erosion of our society as we know it.”

He’s joking, but not really. He’s angry at the thought of what we might miss out on if we are intimidated or afraid of what is unfamiliar and let it get the best of us. He is baffled and also verging on despair. Then he looks out over the ocean as the sun sets in the distance, we hear in his voiceover:

“And if your perfect day really did happen, you’d probably let yourself be swept away.”

Anthony Bourdain holds the hand of his 9-year-old daughter as they walk off the yacht and onto Rum Point, Grand Cayman. Photo and caption credit: Trey Ratcliff.

If you or anyone you know are experiencing mental health issues or suicidal feelings contact Lifeline
on 13 11 14 or BeyondBlue 1300 224 636. If it is an emergency please call 000.

2018: A Space Odyssey How Sydney artists are re-entering the inner city

What do you do when gentrification and a property boom have pushed your city’s edgy arts community literally to the edge? Sue the real estate agent who promised you were buying into ‘cosmopolitan living’? At least one organisation is working hard to find innovative ways for artists and performers to remain part of a diverse urban environment. Local government is on board and, surprisingly, even the big developers are into it.

Brand X is a not-for-profit organisation that’s been working for just over a decade to transform underutilised properties, and establish new spaces, for Sydney artists. A current project is on a humble corner in Darlinghurst with a paradoxically rich history.

The East Sydney Community and Arts Centre (ESCAC) might sound like it’s a dismal hall that hosts Twelve Step group meetings and Wednesday night macramé classes, but it’s actually a slick, environmentally sustainable, purpose-built rehearsal, exhibition and performance space. It provides a home for performers and artists, as well as a national and international launch pad for a mix of fringe, alternative, and counter culture works.

A gleaming $10 million redevelopment of the old Heffron Hall on Burton Street, ESCAC is all floor-to-ceiling windows and polished wooden floor, resembling a large, light and breezy yoga studio in a 5-star Balinese resort. It’s a convincing bricks and mortar demonstration of City of Sydney’s commitment to its Cultural Policy, Creative City, which maintains that “Artists and creative workers are essential to a dynamic, diverse and tolerant city, contributing wit, surprise and new perspectives to the urban landscape.”

Brand X is managing the space and overseeing a residency program called Flying Nun which enables new works to be developed, rehearsed and presented at the venue. James Winter is the Director of Brand X and co-ordinator of Flying Nun. He says having a space available for free allows time for ideas to develop more fully, and that a free, fully equipped performance venue makes alternative, independent productions more viable; something that is rarely the case in Sydney.

“We have a very monocultural program of theatre that hits the stages because they’re programmed to subscribers,” Winter says. “Subscribers have money so that’s why we have a lot of white content and middle class content. The problem is voices outside that cannot afford to have new work developed and presented on those stages, and it’s a risk to the house because it’s new.”

Vashti Hughes performs in 'Larry's Odyssey' at ESCAC, Darlinghurst. Photography by Richard Hedger

Vashti Hughes performs in ‘Larry’s Odyssey’ at ESCAC. Photography by Richard Hedger.

ESCAC isn’t necessarily the end of the line for works originating there. “We are able to create a stage for new work to go into development to feed in to the production cycle of Sydney’s performance scene,” says Winter. “Hopefully a producer or programmer will be in the venue and go ‘That would be brilliant in Edinburgh, in Perth, or Adelaide; actually that could be for our 2019 Griffin [Theatre] season.’”

The inaugural six-month season has offered up an eclectic mix which has ranged from a performative work called Gang of She that harnessed drag, disco, theatre and queer histories of decadence and dissent, to a fun, if cheeky (excuse the pun) show for children, The World According to Farts and Other Extraordinary Sounds of the Human Body.

Jaimie and Aspasia Leonarder, aka Jay Katz and Miss Death, have been presenting a series of ‘neo-vaudevillian’ variety nights featuring music, film and performances at ESCAC called The Experiment. “It is giving people not only a place to showcase their talent, but also possibly sell a few things and make some connections with people. I believe that great creative culture is about people meeting each other… At one of our performance evenings we had a lady from Los Angeles who’s doing a very similar thing and trying to set up networks worldwide.”

“The punters’ response has so far been positive,” says Leonarder. “It’s growing and [we just need] a few more venues like this and the MCA’s Art Bar, where people can go to consistently, and there’s somewhere that is a place for ‘the other’, the people who fall a little bit through the net.”

Brand X’s James Winter believes a diverse street is at least two-way, and he encourages the wider community to experience something new and unpredictable. “It might not be to your taste,” he says. “It might be strange and weird and something you don’t feel comfortable with; but it might change your life, or your views on society or yourself.”

While East Sydney Community and Arts Centre is City council owned, there’s a growing trend for private corporations to include creative spaces in major developments, something that’s less surprising once it’s understood they can trade it off for floor space concessions. Nevertheless, it’s part of a new contemporary urban reality. “It’s been a huge movement in Asia for many decades,” says Winter. “A lot of our performers had experiences in Beijing and Shanghai with rehearsal studios on the 17th floor of a residential building.”

Brand X had its origins in a relationship with Frasers Property, the developer of the former brewery site on Broadway. They teamed up again with Brand X taking over a whole floor of Central Park shopping mall and turned it into a cultural space so Frasers could attract a commercial tenant. Brand X is also working with global property developer, TWT, transforming commercial buildings in St Leonards into artist studios, rehearsal spaces, gallery and creative retail for a period before redevelopment.

Photography by David Harrison.

Meanwhile, the City of Sydney has secured the inclusion of a $25 million creative hub in what will be Sydney’s tallest residential tower development, by Greenland Australia, at the old Sydney Water site on Bathurst Street. Greenland will provide 25,000 square meters over 5 storeys for performance rehearsal rooms, film editing suites, and wet/dry studios for visual artists. There’ll also be a live/work apartment made available for a fellowship program. “The development came about as a result of a voluntary planning agreement,” the City says. “[It] granted Greenland floorspace concessions in exchange for public benefit.”

Winter concedes that artists being squeezed out of living and growing cities is an inevitable part of the gentrification cycle. “Even though that’s a grizzly thing to contemplate,” he says, “it is how cities evolve.”

The new East Sydney Community and Arts Centre is perhaps more intimately part of that evolution. The Flying Nun residency program is named in honour of Sisters of Charity nun, Carol Pedersen, who transformed the former Heffron Hall into a vibrant community centre for underprivileged locals. It was also used for two decades by the progressive Metropolitan Community Church.

“So many have called this place home, and they still exist.” Winter says. “The Gay & Lesbian Choir, Bell Shakespeare before they were a major company. Midnight Oil, and Mental As Anything played here. It’s an incredible responsibility. This is an emotional space. We must make sure we honour the spirits that are in the walls and how this community hold this venue very preciously.”

As well as respecting the past, Winter is cautiously optimistic about the future of ESCAC, and the ever-changing narrative of finding space for Sydney’s creative and cultural life. “This is something where you see raw ideas come to life,” he says. “If we can succeed we will have diversity of night time options in culture and entertainment that go way beyond Netflix and way beyond the pub.”


To find out more about Brand X and Flying Nun’s program of events at ESCAC go to www.brandx.org.au

Roads to Nowhere A city besieged by construction

Within the mangle of wire-mesh fencing and low, bright orange hard-plastic barricades housing the long hole along George Street that will someday transform into Sydney Light Rail, there are tools, frequently downed, along with a sparse scattering of workers.

According to news reports, the project has been on a “go-slow” for much of this year due to a dispute between the Spanish-based construction company Acciona and the NSW Government. A $1.1 billion lawsuit brought by Acciona against the NSW Government is now before the courts.

The go-slow is a mixed blessing for those of us who, since October 2015, have been daily dodging our way around the construction on our way to work. In those first months, cheerful, young, often Irish-accented workers wearing helmets and hi-vis coats were on hand to restrain pedestrians in business clothes from death dashes. Ankles have twisted, horns blasted, lights been run, tempers frayed – more than usual for the CBD – in the interim. We’ve put up with it because we are building tomorrow’s Sydney. We must do our bit. That’s life in the big city. We’re not anti-development, we’re just… exhausted.

Before the go-slow, when the banging and drilling and dust and vibrations were at peak production levels, I asked a young pony-tailed barista from the George Street window of a café how she was coping. Making a gun with her thumb and forefinger, she pointed at her temple. If a sound came out when she exhaled with force, I couldn’t hear it.

Fortunately, we are now habituated. Deadline after deadline has blown out, reportedly due to complexities, not predicted, with power and water utilities underground. This, apparently, is a common phenomenon with large transport infrastructure projects all over the world whereby over-optimism and underestimation regarding budgets, time-frames and problems are rife.

So, for now, the mangle and traffic chaos remain in Sydney, although it’s sure quieter out there right now. Still, everyone’s been asking the same question: when will it end? None more so than independent Sydney City Councillor and the co-owner, with her brother Con, of Vivo Café on George Street, Angela Vithoulkas. Vithoulkas tells me income from their business has dropped 30 per cent since the works began. “We are humiliated, economically devastated. We will never recover,” she says.

Vithoulkas has been a key convener of a group of businesses and residents adversely impacted by the light rail project in the CBD. Many have now registered their details to become part of a class action to sue the NSW Government for damages. “We’ve had a lot of legal advice and we’re being courted by several of the major law firms,” she said. She is also behind a new political party representing small business interests. It will target Upper House seats at the next NSW State Election.

Vivo is just one of an estimated 1,500 businesses with shopfronts along the light rail construction route, many with stories of personal stress and commercial loss. Vithoulkas’s goes like this: “My brother and I bought the café 15 years ago. We turned it around to become one of the most awarded businesses in the CBD.” In the early 2000s, Vivo won six awards, including City of Sydney Business Awards for Outstanding Café of the Year and Outstanding Business of the Year. In 2007, Angela also won the Telstra New South Wales 2007 Women’s Business Owner Award. She says the business continued to prosper until October 2015. When the light rail works started, day-trippers, including many older people and mothers and their children who once came to the café, stopped coming. Where Vivo could once be seen from many vantage points, the construction paraphernalia has made it barely visible. Access is another issue. Buses and other vehicles once delivered customers along the route. But it’s a decent walk from anywhere to get there now. “We only get locals. We’ve lost our destination traffic,” Vithoulkas says.

Vithoulkas says George Street, “the spine of the city” has become “a garbage dump and a parking lot”. While Transport for NSW has created a ‘Small Business Assist’ program to help deal with the construction’s financial impact – the State Government says it has provided financial relief to more than 60 businesses affected for longer than expected – Vithoulkas says the criteria for assistance are unclear and the compensation inadequate. “The Government has gone in ill-prepared and unwilling to mitigate what is happening.”

In the arcane world of transportation research, Peter E.D. Love from the Department of Civil Engineering at WA’s Curtin University, alerted me to a theory called Hirschman’s Hiding Hand. It is a “principle that suggests when the public sector decides to undertake a project, the ignorance of future obstacles allows them to rationally choose to undertake it, and once it is underway they will creatively overcome the difficulties that may arise as it is too late to abandon the project.”

This, I realise, is what the whole of Sydney is going through – and not just with Sydney Light Rail.

Edinburgh had a similar experience with its light rail. The Edinburgh Trams project was originally estimated to cost £320 million. The project was finished three years late at a reported construction cost of £776 million. Contractual changes and complexities have led to a revised estimated final cost of over £1 billion. “Projects of this nature are complex and the in-ground services always pose challenges. You see we don’t know where they are,” Love said.

Much of the quarrel with Sydney Light Rail appears to be with the way the project has been handled by government, rather than with the concept itself. Light rails, once finished, have many benefits. According to Love, they typically include comfortable rides for passengers, the aesthetic appeal of well-designed trams, potentially higher passenger capacity per lane per hour in the right conditions, lower noise levels, good integration with pedestrian malls and the fact that it’s politically easier to remove cars from a street if buses are also removed. And the pedestrianisation of main thoroughfares does bring new life to cities.

But few could dispute this project has been disorganised and poorly managed from the beginning. A NSW Auditor-General’s report in 2016 painted a damning portrait. It noted the planning and governance arrangements, “while approved by the NSW Government, skipped important assurance steps. Tight time-frames meant planning was inadequate and normal governance systems were not initially in place.” Crash or crash through, seems to have been the ethos. Meanwhile, some argue, global construction companies routinely underquote for the cost of major infrastructure projects to land the jobs. Once the project is underway, problems arise. Costs and timelines blow out. Everyone starts pointing fingers.

The impact on businesses is only half the story. Walking along Devonshire Street, late on Saturday night, after seeing a play at Belvoir, I am hit by the full horror of what residents are going through. Beautiful Victorian terrace houses along a once iconic strip of restaurants and inner-city chic are now a dress circle for in-ground craters and heavy-duty earth-moving equipment that have killed the street life, even if only temporarily.

Sydney residents whose homes are along the light rail construction route have a whole different world of pain. “There are days when the area around the house is a dust bowl. There’s a big hole and when they’re drilling, the whole house is shaking,” said one resident who did not want to be named. She said three years of noise and dust had left her stressed and anxious. Affected houses were subjected to pre-dilapidation reports, which residents understood would result in reparations for damage caused. “But when cracks in our house got worse we contacted Acciona who said, ‘It’s not because of us’,” said the resident.

She said she was pleased the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Andrew Constance had begun to take an interest in the residents’ plight. Constance recently met with a group of affected business owners and residents at NSW Parliament House. Lisa Prestwidge, who lives on Anzac Parade, was among them. Prestwidge and her daughter, who is doing the HSC this year, have been living with the construction noise for 15 months. “We’ve had three noisy nights this week. Sometimes they turn up at 3am and start working with the compactor which is supposed to be ‘less noisy’ – 83 decibels – than the jackhammer – 85 decibels,” Prestwidge says.

Noise-cancelling headphones and alternative accommodation are among the assistance offered to Prestwidge and her daughter, who have so far spent one night at a hotel. “We can’t wear the headphones to bed and we don’t want to keep having to up stumps all the time,” Prestwidge said. She is now hopeful the Government will assist with double glazing and air conditioning for her unit. This remedy has been offered to some but not all residents.

According to ALTRAC Light Rail’s Stakeholder Relationships Manager Erika Jimenez: “Individual properties are assessed across the light rail alignment and, where required … offered treatments to their properties according to the level of operational noise likely to be experienced.” Jimenez said civil construction of the light rail will be “substantially completed by the end of this year”. She added, “The next phase of works involves systems installation and testing and commissioning.”

While Angela Vithoulkas expects this next phase to take an additional year, any end date will now be too late for her business. She recently learned the lease for Vivo’s premises has not been renewed.

On a wintry afternoon in George Street, near Circular Quay, I come across a couple of construction workers moving a gate across a section of the road to free it up. I ask what it’s like working on the light rail project. “Not us,” they say, as they point to a cavity away from the road. “We’re working on the 55-storey office/retail tower. We’d have finished hours ago if we were on the light rail.” Tensions, the men tell me, sometimes flare up between the different teams of builders, all with competing needs, on the same bit of turf. On so many levels in so many places, we are a city besieged by construction.

A Change of Venue Ethnic clubs, fringe culture and strange alliances

For a brief period around 2016 – 2017, it seemed the most interesting live music happened in a venue gig-goers hadn’t heard of – the Portugal Madeira Club. Tucked away in the hodge-podge of light industry in Marrickville, this newly-discovered venue became a site for a community that had lost its independent warehouse venues to coalesce.

In an article in The Quietus about an underground label showcase at the ethnic club, Kate Hennessey conjures its unlikely charm: “Brown and squat, with overzealous fencing, it could be mistaken for a site of light industry itself. Yet three flags fly from its roof (Australian, Portuguese and the club’s own flag) and along its wall is a series of sun-bleached sketches of women in traditional Portuguese clothes. The art is peculiar, dated and weirdly endearing. Just like the club.”

While cheap Portuguese beers and complimentary fish croquettes were a novelty for the new audiences, alliances between ethnic clubs and underground live music communities have historical precedents in Sydney. There was The Phoenician Club, operated by the Maltese community, where major international acts, such as Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine, played. The Cyprus Club in Stanmore hosted art-punk shows in the late ’80s. In Newcastle, the Croatian Club has been favoured by bands with a DIY ethos.

More broadly, fringe arts and music has always been opportunistic and adept at colonising unusual, often interstitial spaces. In the late 1970s, when inner-city industry began to decline and the workforce that frequented pubs dwindled, the Trade Union Club and the Sussex Hotel welcomed post-punk bands and audiences to fill their rooms. Recalling the repossession of inner-city warehouses by artists, musicians and social experimenters in the early 2000s, artist-duo Clare Healy and Sean Cordeiro have aptly described artists as like fungi – they digest detritus to create something fertile. The same is true of Sydney’s underground music cultures.

Petersham Bowling Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons

Petersham Bowling Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons

Live music is a contentious issue in Sydney. In 2003, the Vanishing Acts report concluded that opportunities for live music in New South Wales had dwindled. In March 2018, a parliamentary inquiry was told that live music has “been harassed almost out of existence” in this city. Yet, a dearth of venues is not the only factor that drives Sydney’s struggling musicians to seek out strange and sometimes fraught alliances. Many venues are unsuitable for underground music, for various reasons. Theatres are too big and expensive for bands that may attract 60 people at most.

Add to that a general dissatisfaction with the business-as-usual operation of venues. “No need to put money into the hands of venues and breweries who only care about sales instead of artistic expression,” Shaun Hemsley, Tenzenmen record label owner and the booker of many DIY shows, explains to me.

As the ownership of pubs becomes concentrated into portfolios of a few multi-million dollar hospitality groups, musicians are also looking beyond the pub venue which has historically supported live music culture.

Frustration with lacklustre events hosted in pubs led music writer and musician, Max Easton, to enquire about hiring the upstairs ballroom of the Portugal Madeira Club, after stumbling across the building on a walk through the backstreets of the inner west.

In Easton’s article (which appears in his self-published journal, Tempered) he describes pub shows with no door charge and guaranteed playing fees for the band, as “deflating experiences” which produce complacent audiences and performers. He is cynical about the asymmetry of profit and power between bands and pubs that “were receiving not just our efforts, but our drinking money, all while overzealous bouncers would study your technique of eating a late-night pie from the neighbouring servo in order to determine whether to permit your re-entry”.

In contrast, the alliance Easton struck with the president of the Portugal Madeira Club felt like “a fair exchange”.

However, the short-lived alliance soon soured. As the club rose in popularity as a venue for all kinds of events, musicians in the underground scene became dismayed by a shift in its management. A hefty booking fee was introduced and larger events seemed to be prioritised over maintaining the relationship with the underground music community.

They also feared that exposing the club to heavy external patronage jeopardised its central mission to serve its ethnic community. A post in May 2017 on Spicy Aussie Underground Music Memes Facebook page, depicting a goose with a sly sidelong glance and the caption ‘When u find a nice inner-west yet to be gentrified ethnic club’ hit this nerve with painful precision.

Petersham Bowling Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons

The Holy Soul performing at the Petersham Bowling Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons

In addition to a fair exchange with musicians, community clubs offer accommodating atmospheres for live music in a city where the atmospheres of social spaces – bars, restaurants, cafes and even pubs – are increasingly finely calibrated and unsuitable for underground music.

In another article about the alliance between the underground music scene and the Portugal Madeira Club in Tempered, Katie Ukleja writes that, practically, the venue offered distance from noise complaints and, importantly, was “ambient with the allure of a clandestine location.”

On a quiet midweek lunch hour, advocate for community arts and volunteer president of the Petersham Bowling Club (PBC), George Catsi, gives me a tour of the space – the downstairs band room, and the single multi-function room upstairs with views over the greens and a sprinkler system watering the new veggie garden beds. The strings of fairy lights strung across the room and wound around the ceiling fan recall amateurly-decorated house parties.

Catsi is aware of the nostalgia of the club for patrons over the age of 30. For this demographic, the PBC “reminds them of something Sydney has lost”, and so the club is “careful about playing around too much” with the existing decor. Catsi is particularly smitten with the purple patterned carpet, and the chairs are an odd bunch, many of them bought from an “Old Chinese restaurant out west somewhere”. Importantly, Catsi believes the aesthetic contributes to a sense of freedom and possibility that the club offers patrons.

Authentic décor partly composes the atmosphere here. It also reflects an overlooked element of the overall vibe, the club’s organisational structure. As the original bowling club crumbled in the 2000s as its elderly member base diminished, community members staged a coup to retain the space, saving it from the board’s resignation to redevelop the site into townhouses and, later, a childcare centre. The upstairs stage, which was once the pokie den, is a symbolic reclamation of space for live music that cannot be divorced from the club’s fascinating backstory. The club’s removal of the members boards which once partially obscured the view of the stage is also symbolic of its dedication to live music, without the friction between the old guard and new audiences.

As with the Portugal Madeira Club, PBC is endearing, at least for many live music audiences. In atmosphere and the organisation of shows, it avoids being prescriptive. The PBC offers musicians a space, some social media marketing and a PA system. Bands organise the door, set the ticket price and keep those takings. Profit from the bar are reinvested into sustaining the club.

Back amid the utilitarian brick facades of industry in Marrickville, at the Marrickville Bowling and Recreation Club, live music and performance coexists alongside announcements for the meat tray raffle. Last year Midnight Oil chose to play a ‘secret’ reunion show at the Marrickville Bowlo. Again, the lack of prescriptive atmosphere or organisation is key. As Chris Scott summarises in an article about bowling clubs and live music, clubs give creative control to independent promoters who take on greater responsibility. Scott argues that “these unique interactions […] see younger people being proactive and becoming creatively involved and engaged”, a wholly different experience to the kind of complacency Easton witnessed at pub shows.

Marrickville Bowling & Recreation Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons.

Dave Graney, Anthony Albanese, and Geroge Catsi at the Petersham Bowling Club. Photography by Lyndal Irons

Understanding why many underground musicians favour non-traditional spaces makes me think that repealing the lockout laws alone could never be a silver bullet for Sydney’s live music scene. When not penning tantrum op-eds about this city’s demise, Sydneysiders might begin to imagine a future that aims higher than the live music landscape that directly preceded these laws.

Examples of interesting non-traditional venues are happening already. Sydney Fringe Festival organisers have pursued temporary use of existing retail spaces for live performance, though this has hit legislative snags. Digital platform, Parlour Gigs, facilitates “beautiful, intimate house concerts” as the website describes, in which musicians are paid a $300 minimum. A testimonial from musician Fraser A Gorman describes these events as “the most pure exchange of music you can have with someone”.

And, for many years now, movements like Reclaim the Streets have created space for live music in the city’s streets and parks. While many of the warehouse venues that populated Marrickville’s industrial area have closed due to their inability to comply with land use regulations, a semi-regular event (respectfully unnamed) still make use of the space between warehouses.

Over the years, fringe musicians and artists have asked whether the nature of what they do is flux, seeking out the scraps and opportunities at the margins to create something beautiful, like the vein of gold plugging the cracks in Japanese wabi sabi pottery. Or perhaps the successful alliances between live music and community clubs has uncovered a desire for venues that enable different kinds of social and aesthetic experiences that is, in fact, more mainstream than a fringe obsession.

The Boat on Dal Lake A letter from Kashmir

For the past ten days, whenever I have wished to go into town, to interview a separatist leader or take in a clash between police and young protesters, I have first had to play the tourist for a moment. From my houseboat in Srinagar’s pellucid Dal Lake, it is a ten-minute shikara, or boat, ride to the road, and each evening, when I’m done, it’s another one back.

It’s this latter constitutional I’ve come to appreciate: the decompression chamber of my day. We navigate the Raj-era houseboats, their colours bleeding almost into the air at this hour, until I disembark at H.B. Veena Palace and order a pot of invariably weak coffee. The Kashmiri mountains loom about us in the half-light, a snow-capped peak occasionally discernible through the cloud.

It has not taken me long to become a member of the family. The city has much to offer the tourist, but its reputation precedes it: there are militants to the south, Friday prayers are a bloodbath, tensions are rising again between Kashmiri society and the Indian military. This part of the world has had a question mark hanging over it for at least the past 70 years, with the past 30 or so especially contentious. Even Google Maps refuses to commit to a border: the region’s a tangle of dashed lines on my phone. As a result, people coming from Ladakh, or heading out that way with treks in mind, tend to stop in here a day or two at most. The houseboat’s owner, Firdous, and I watch them come and go.

We spend our evenings sitting on the balcony of my boat discussing the situation, which I am here to cover, tourist visa be damned. Firdous invites neighbours and friends to come by and we argue into the night about the merits and likelihood of various solutions: greater autonomy within India, annexation by Pakistan, outright independence. The only one of these that seems remotely possible, however distasteful, remains the first. The second is a recipe for nuclear war and the third an outright pipe dream. Sometimes I am impolitic enough to suggest a fourth option: another century of the status quo.

On my final evening, Firdous serves me a farewell dinner: a full roast chicken stuffed with Kashmiri pilau. I have a feeling he’s going to miss me and I know full well that I’m going to miss all this. I have promised him that I’ll be back next year. With my wife? Yes, Firdous, with my wife.

How many promises like these have I made over the past ten years of doing this work? Fifty? A hundred? I have occasionally kept them: I have returned to Istanbul multiple times, to Vietnam once a year. But I have not been back to Chechnya yet, nor to Iraqi Kurdistan, nor indeed to many other places I’ve heard myself say it: I’ll see you next year.

Before you can visit anywhere new, you realise you’ve pledged an itinerary identical to one you’ve already completed. I always mean it at the time, but the world is so large and the years so few, and before you know it your pen is tearing across the page in pursuit of another story. It’s worth stopping and considering the mountains more fully, making sure you take a nice photo of your host. There is always the chance that you won’t come this way again, and that the shikara taking you across to the road might be doing so for the last time.

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