The Best Way to Ruin a Walk The grass is greener for Sydney’s public golf courses, but for how long?

For the non-golfing population of Sydney, golf tends to be that green blur out the car window travelling down the M1 or the algal blooms that spread across the city from an aerial vantage.

The 91 courses in the Sydney metropolitan region take up almost as much space as Botany Bay (some 38 square kilometres). For a city in the midst of a population boom, with apartment living emerging as a way of life, this allocation of open green space is not just a question of sporting preference but public good.

Sports-mad as ever, Australians have found the allure of membership to golf clubs particularly easy to resist. Member numbers have trended down since 1998, the year after Greg Norman’s final win on the PGA Tour. Since the Shark’s departure from the winner’s circle, membership has slumped from half a million to around 400,000 committed souls, mostly men, nationally.

Male is safely the universal golfer’s sex. Male and 54-years-old to be precise – emerging from the halcyon age of manly togetherness, prior to our current era of shared parenting and the ever-enthralling working week. Ladies’ day was traditionally Tuesday or Friday. Men played Saturday competitively and Sunday socially. Nowadays, women are finding other things to do with their time and the proportion of females sporting plaid upon the green has gone from roughly a third, at its height in 1970, to one-fifth today.

The decline of civic life, its diabolical rebirth online, and our changing recreational tendencies have made us more likely to squeeze in a run before work or, for some, golf alone.

With player participation rates moribund and land values rising, golf courses – particularly public ones – are caught in the middle of a three-way contest between a population largely unconcerned with golf, developers with eyes for well-located land and the six per cent of us that still play the sport.

Beyond its comedic forays, à la Chevy Chase and Bill Murray in the loutish Harold Ramis caper Caddyshack (1980), the game is generally panned for its association with apoplectic retirees, corporate parvenus and the super-posh. To many sane minds, golf is a stupid thing to spend time and money on.

Jeff Blunden of Golf Business Advisory Services (GBAS) has been advising the industry through uncertain times. He says golf clubs are playing catch-up with a population whose recreational psychology has changed from club-life to recreation on-demand.

“We used to use golf as an escape from the world, now we never want to be disconnected,” Blunden says. “Golf,” he notes, “doesn’t fit well in this changing social environment in which we live”.

The story is quite different for Sydney’s wealthy private golf clubs whose waiting lists overflow with affluent dilettantes. Predictably, it’s the public courses that have been first to feel the pinch of dwindling membership numbers, rising operating costs and meddling councils.

 

Sunset over the lake of a golf course. In the foreground a golfer bends to place his ball. Photography by Matthew Abbott

Photography by Matthew Abbott

Moore Park: the fairway

Bucking the trend is Australia’s first public golf course, Moore Park. Its championship length dominates the less salubrious but historic parklands alongside a newly refurbished driving range. The city’s active masses left with the remainder of the parklands can only look on in bemusement, or disdain. Chronic underfunding and its use as a car park for sporting events threaten the condition of Moore Park just as its popularity as a destination has increased.

The Centennial Parklands, which includes Moore Park and Queens Park, has over 20 million individual visits each year and sees a yearly increase in demand for its fields and facilities of 14 per cent.

As the saying goes, golf is the best way to ruin a walk, or, for that matter, a run, a footy game or any other semi-serious kick-around that requires open green space. It’s an issue not lost on Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who tried in 2015 to negotiate the course being trimmed down to a brisk nine holes, something that would remove its championship-length and have many golfers looking elsewhere. Cr Moore argued, “Across the world, golf courses are slimming down to a modern nine-hole format.”

One of the busiest courses in Australia, Moore Park Golf is a vital source of revenue for the Trust and brings in roughly 25 per cent of its total earnings. It ought to, as the cost of operating the course is substantial compared to other forms of recreation. According to the Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust’s annual report for the 2016-17 financial year, it spent $3.7 million on operational costs for the golf course, well over half the amount the Trust spends on maintenance for the entire Centennial Parklands.

“The reality with golf is that it costs money to operate. It costs money to maintain that green space,” says Blunden, who has seen many clubs mismanage their assets in the short term and lack funds for one-in-twenty-year bills like replacing an irrigation system or clubhouse.

The success of Moore Park as a site of public golf is written into the club’s genesis, which it owes to two lumpen Scottish migrants, Duncan and Charlie McMillan. The nine-hole Moore Park Municipal Golf Links – a barren, sandy links quite unlike the parklands vista of today – was opened in 1913 after the intense lobbying of Sydney City Council by the Scots. Egalitarian from its conception, the course doubled in size in 1922 after the land south of Dacey Avenue was acquired by the City.

As the 21st century rolls towards its third decade, the thousands of apartments amassing in Green Square, Rosebery and Zetland mean the City and many of its constituents could benefit from the course being returned to its original nine-holes.

Showing form, the golfers have won the first round. In May 2017 the Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust released the final Moore Park 2040 master plan and, golfers taking priority, the 18 holes will remain.

 

A sand bunker with houses built directly behind it, and an apartment development in the background. Photography by Matthew Abbott

Photography by Matthew Abbott

Eastlakes: the rhinestone in the rough

Ten minutes’ drive south of Moore Park is another potential public golf flashpoint at Eastlakes Golf Club, situated on the heritage listed Botany wetlands alongside the members-only citadels of Bonnie Doon, The Lakes and The Australian Golf Club. The fading peach coloured clubhouse of Eastlakes, with its misspelled signage, is a long way from the its privileged private neighbours, whose fortified grounds and buildings take their design cues from foreign embassies.

At Eastlakes, Fords and Hyundais line the suburban streets of Daceyville, the nation’s first public housing scheme. At Bonnie Doon and The Australian, it’s Mercs and Maseratis in private parking lots. The entrance to The Lakes is marked by a bronze sculpture of a male golfer, muscles bulging mid-swing, for those who imagine golf as a sort of gentlemanly wood chop meet.

In 2015, the former Botany Bay Council proposed opening up the wetlands at Eastlakes to the general public as parklands in its Botany Bay 2040 Directions Paper. “The Botany wetlands are beautiful,” said then mayor Ben Keneally. “For the last 50 years they have been protected by being locked up inside golf courses and industrial estates. It’s now time to unlock this hidden gem.”

The amalgamation of Botany and Rockdale councils in 2016 means Sydney’s golfers may have dodged that bullet too. If the club can secure a renewed lease from the government landholder, Sydney Water, when the current lease expires in 2025 there will be plenty of rounds left in her yet.

Holding on to a future for public golf at Eastlakes is Alan Seon of the Yarra Bay Golf Club. Yarra Bay is a “social” golf club without a course or a clubhouse, which has played here at Eastlakes since 1952.

“It’s a golf course,” says Seon, aghast at the former council’s proposal. “If you take away the ability of pensioners and young people growing up – who are striving to be Greg Normans – what kind of a society do you end up having?”

Eastlakes is a fine course with several challenging longer holes and some ferocious marshland that consumes thousands of hooked and faded missiles, yearly. The par four sixth forces some daring from a high elevation, angling west towards a narrow fairway almost out of sight, invariably sending you scouring through some eastern banksia scrub with a low iron.

Such confrontations with destiny are the spiritual currency of the game, whether wandering through the rough in a Fibonacci pattern looking for a stray white kernel or raking over a befouled bunker – those zen gardens of human failing.

To lose Eastlakes would be a shame for those, like Alan, enlisted in the service of the game. “Leave the golf courses alone,” he demands, “If they take this away then they should think of making The Australian [Golf Club] available to the general public. Try getting that one through.”

 

Golf course next to a lake, with a raked sand bunker in the foreground. Photography by Matthew Abbott

Photography by Matthew Abbott

Royal Sydney: the citadel

At the other end of the spectrum are the established private clubs with waiting lists, subscription fees in the five-figure territory, strict dress codes and a clearly off-limits quality to their boundary fences. Topping the list is Royal Sydney, with over 2,500 members and an annual revenue of over $33 million.

Unlike other courses on the Sydney ‘sandbelt’, a strip of golfing geography stretching north from Botany Bay, though the wetlands and Centennial Park to Rose Bay, Royal Sydney owns the land it operates on. The club acquired the land in 1916 for £20,000 off the Rose Bay Land Co Ltd, a RSGC member-owned company formed solely to secure the club’s tenure. As a sporting club, it is also exempt from paying land tax on its 58 hectares of prime Sydney real estate.

Royal Sydney has hosted the Australian Open 15 times, most recently in 2016, and boasts tennis courts, a sprawling clubhouse and a fitness centre with a 25-metre swimming pool. Members entering in fitness attire must use the service road entrance rather than the main gate and can be reprimanded for wearing thongs. Those who wish to may enjoy such soporific calendar events as the annual ‘Fathers and Sons’ Dinner’ or ‘Mothers and Daughters’ Lunch’ and digestible guest speakers like the ABC’s Annabel Crabb.

Speaking anonymously, one of its younger members admits, “Royal Sydney is a relatively conservative place,” although he’s never been to a Fathers and Sons’ Dinner or one of the club’s well-attended bridge tournaments.

Its conservatism spilled over into anti-semitism in 1908 with a rule imposed not to admit any further members of the Jewish faith (long since abolished). Amidst the Fairfaxes, Turnbulls, Macarthurs and Rankins of the club’s pre-war member lists are two Jewish brothers S. Levy and H. Levy and their spouses, to whom common opinion gave a rare amnesty.

Despite all the swank and gaiety, Royal Sydney has always been a fantastic course to play and is one of the top three courses in the country. “In the past,” says the member, more avid golfer than social climber, “a lot of people joined golf clubs to socialise with the ‘right’ people. Now, as fewer people play golf regularly – especially during their careers – the social aspect of [Royal Sydney] is less intertwined with career advancement than it was 30 or 40 years ago.”

 

Dusk over a golf course. Cranes loom in the background. Photography by Matthew Abbott

Photography by Matthew Abbott

For public golf, a longer drive

Despite the drift in emphasis from social cohesion to personal recreation – both the highfalutin and commonplace – clubs like Royal Sydney will remain in perpetuity a luxurious stretch of green for the well-off to swing steel.

Their tenure and financial backbone less secure, it is the public courses that are on the chopping block. Alan Seon of the landless and itinerant Yarra Bay Golf Club is plain about the gravity of losing his club’s home turf at Eastlakes. “I think our communities are being chewed up in a nasty way,” he laments, sucking the froth from a well-priced schooner.

“A lot of elderly people cannot afford to pay $10,000 a year or $200 for a round of golf. You have to leave things for the people,” he says, by which he means golfers.

In the midst of a transformative period in the city’s history, Sydney’s golf courses are places of conspicuous quiet. In their stillness rests the beige sense of social harmony and tradition the game has always encouraged and for which it has long been ridiculed.

Greater consumer choice and time-sensitive fitness regimens have undermined the feasibility of the public golf course as a sporting and cultural site. This loss has occurred as Sydney’s private golf clubs continue to prosper, their social purpose remarkably well intact.

As the land squeeze builds momentum across the city and higher densities put pressure on publicly reserved space, the Scots’ ancient game could one day be locked away behind automatic gates or banished deep into the suburbs. For now, the golfing public have 38 square kilometers of landscaped earth to contemplate their next drive.

Who’ll Stop the Rain? After the horrors of Myanmar, Rohingya refugees now face the monsoon season

COX’S BAZAR, BANGLADESH. On a barren hilltop in the Balukhali refugee camp, not far from the border he crossed seven months ago, Muhammad Eleas has a panoramic view of what many consider a disaster waiting to happen. “When the rain comes,” he says, “everyone living here will suffer.”

Mr Eleas, 63, is one of an estimated 700,000 Rohingya refugees to have arrived in Bangladesh since violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority worsened in August last year. There are so many of them in the Kutupalong-Balukhali complex – the “megacamp,” as it is informally known – that it is technically the fourth largest city in the country.

It is a city built on a trauma. Mr Eleas, who lives in Balukhali with his wife and son, fled his home in Buthidaung township as soon as the military arrived with its scorched-earth policy, which the UN has described as ethnic cleansing. “They began slaughtering people and burning down homes. People were rounded up into mass graves and shot,” Mr Eleas says. “We were very lucky to escape.”

Over the next seven days, the Myanmar military pursued his family and others towards the border. He recalls a mad dash across the Naf River, which separates the two countries. “They were shooting at us even as we ran down to the water,” he says. Sitting on the floor of his one-room shack, the earth beneath him cracked and dry, he holds up his fingers to resemble a machine gun.

The human tragedy of the Rohingya crisis has been matched only by the ecological one that has attended it. What used to be densely-forested hill tracts have been clean-shaven and carved into terraces. Makeshift dwellings of bamboo and sheet plastic sit immediately above one another on slopes of silt. All this is likely to turn to mud as soon as the monsoon season arrives. When a brief but heavy downpour occurred last month – a mere taste of what is likely to come – aid workers reported that parts of the camp had become a “quagmire”.

Mr Eleas shows me his personal set-up: an assortment of sandbags set against a cut in the hill that drops off less than a metre from his door. “I need more, but they’ve all been given out and we’ve been told that we’re not going to get any more,” he says. For the time being, the bags are being held in place by a collection of wooden stakes. “But they won’t hold under heavy rain,” he says, bending one back to demonstrate how useless it is. He looks down the hill at the shelters below him. Were his own home to come unmoored in a mudslide, it would take out several others with it.

For Sabekun Nahar and her family, the season poses other threats. Ms Nahar, 27, lives with her husband, Sobbir Ahammed, at the bottom of one of the camp’s many hills. The tale of their flight from Myanmar echoes Mr Eleas’s own, though in their case they had six children, aged between six months and eleven years old, in tow.

“We carried the children for eight days,” Ms Nahar says. “My legs became swollen. The older ones understood what was going on and still have nightmares about it. The younger ones ask when we’re going to go home.”

In addition to mudslides from above, Ms Nahar is also worried about the lack of drainage below. “There is nowhere for the rain to go,” she says. “A lot of people on this level are worried that our homes are going to be washed away by floods. It’s very worrying, because there are a lot of families with small children on this level and floods can bring diseases.”

A higher vantage illustrates the problem. From Balukhali’s road, which runs along a series of high ridges, the blocks into which the camp is divided resemble nothing so much as catchment areas. The shallow ditches that run up and down what passes for streets here do little to inspire confidence. Approximately 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall occurs between June and October. A study carried out by Dhaka University and the UN refugee agency suggests that up to one-third of the settlement area could be flooded.

Mr Ahammed, 30, says there’s little the family can do but wait. “We don’t have the materials we need to prepare,” he says.

While Mr Ahammed is sure there are aid organisations working on the problem, it’s difficult to know for sure. “No one has come to speak to us,” he says, and all information is second or third-hand by the time it reaches them. “It’s difficult to know what’s going on.”

Ms Nahar has an even harder time of it. “I’m a woman,” she says. “We don’t get told anything.”

 

Wide view of makeshift houses built on a tiered hill

Photography by Matthew Clayfield

Preparing for the worst

The camp’s residents may not always be aware of it, but the race to weatherproof their new home has been under way for several months. The UN Refugee Agency has relocated more than 380 families living in flood-prone areas since February and is planning to distribute ‘pre-monsoon’ kits consisting of strong rope, steel pegs and cement sandbags to families in its operational areas by the time the season arrives.

But as the UNHCR’s Caroline Gluck admits: “It will be very challenging to relocate all the ‘at risk’ population given the current circumstances. We are preparing for the worst [and] hoping for the best.”

The problem was and remains the availability of land. When a refugee crisis of this magnitude hits, the immediate priority is to make sure people have places to live, even if that means building on hillsides and floodplains that may become dangerous later on.

“At the start of the influx … families had no choice but to build shelters where they could find empty space,” Ms Gluck says. “Now they are at high risk of losing their shelters – especially if [they live on] slopes of 45 degrees or more.”

Lack of land also makes large-scale relocation difficult: there’s simply not enough space to move people. In February, the Government of Bangladesh promised an additional 500 acres of land for the UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration to develop. The former has already started work on its own 123-acre patch. “Even so,” Ms Gluck says, “this site can only house around 12,000 people.”

As a result, mitigation remains the order of the day. “Slopes are being stabilised, pathways reinforced, drainage improved, new bridges put up, and refugees are being provided with stronger, more waterproof shelter kits,” Ms Gluck says. “Early warning systems are being prepared and many refugees are being trained as safety unit volunteers. Bangladesh – which has vast experience in dealing with cyclone events and preparedness – has also extended its national Cyclone Preparedness Programme to the Rohingya settlements so that refugees can be trained in early warning, search and rescue, and relief.”

Organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières are also ramping up their efforts in anticipation of the rains, with outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera and Hepatitis E of particular concern. But MSF’s emergency coordinator in Cox’s Bazar, Sam Turner,”says that limited infrastructure means that only so much can be done.”

“Access to safe drinking water and sanitation services is already insufficient,” he says. “[These are] often of poor quality and unequally distributed throughout the camp.”

“The situation will be exacerbated by rains and floodwater, which can cause latrines to overflow and contaminate water sources. Standing water across the camp could also serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, a common vector for disease.”

Mr Turner says that MSF has ten health posts, four primary healthcare centres and five inpatient facilities spread throughout the camps, which will bear the brunt of monsoon-related health scares.

It is difficult not to see the situation as one of rolling crises in which short-term solutions pave the way for future problems. “We must be clear that [the monsoon season] is not an isolated issue,” Mr Turner says. “The living conditions in the camps themselves expose the Rohingya to [these problems].” One wonders how aid organisations manage to plan for the long-term while battling a constant stream of pop-up issues.”

“[We need to ensure] long-term funding so that we can continue to provide basics like food, clean water, health facilities and healthcare,” Ms Gluck says. “We need to extend learning facilities for children who currently do not access any schooling, work to decongest the camp, run protection programmes for single mothers and unaccompanied or separated children, and so on.

“We hope that lessons learnt from this monsoon season will inform our planning moving forward.”

 

A Rohingya mother holds her child in a makeshift tent made of bamboo and red sheet plastic

Photography by Matthew Clayfield

The strongest house in Balukhali

Not everyone is content to wait for assistance. A short walk from Ms Nahar’s flood-prone dwelling, past the makeshift school her children attend, Ruhul Amin and a group of men are erecting the bamboo frame of a new home. They’re trying something new, they tell me: tarpaulin walls instead of the usual plastic sheeting. “There aren’t many houses built like this,” Mr Amin says proudly.

He leaves the means by which the tarpaulin has been procured deliberately vague. When asked whether they’ve heard anything about refugees trading aid packages for materials they can’t usually get their hands on – World Food Program packages have been photographed in a number of Cox’s Bazar markets – the men shake their heads in vigorous unison. When it is explained to them they’re not being accused, only asked if they’ve been privy to rumours, one of them admits, a little sheepishly: “I have heard that some people do this thing. But not us!”

Mr Amin, 41, says the house is being built with the monsoon season in mind. “This settlement was built in the dry season and is only suitable for the dry season,” he says. “You can see that this house is above the floodline and isn’t at risk from those on the hills.”

He doesn’t come across as an excitable man – he seems more weary than anything – but brightens considerably when asked about the tarpaulin’s unique properties. “Last night was windier than any night since we arrived,” he says. “Many people’s walls were torn to pieces because the plastic is too thin.” The first of Bangladesh’s two annual cyclone seasons began in earnest in March and will continue until July. The latter takes place between September and December.

“Everything will only get worse with the rains,” Mr Amin says. “Houses will leak. Roofs will collapse. This house will be stronger than the others.”

Strong enough to see out the year? An elderly woman has been listening to our conversation, squatting in a nearby doorway. She begins to laugh, shakes her head, and disappears back into her dwelling. Mr Amin shrugs.

“I’m not sure that any structure in Balukhali will be strong enough for that,” he says.

Car City Blues A letter from New York

Who doesn’t love the Chrysler Building’s tiara? The Ford Foundation Center’s courtyard garden, which turns a takeout lunch into an urban picnic? The old Mobil building still makes a statement with its “crushed can” skin. And there’s the General Motors skyscraper, where, if nothing else, you can nab a computer at 3am from the 24-hour Apple store. None of these eponymous edifices have housed a car or oil company’s corporate headquarters in decades. But endless honking horns and sirens form the soundscape of New York, our streets are clogged daily, every surface cloaked in a grey film from exhaust.

For a city where fewer than 45.5 per cent of households own a car (less than 24.4 per cent in Manhattan), our relationship with automobiles is, well, complicated. The repeated failure to implement congestion pricing, a once per decade occurrence, underscores this quirk of our nature. After much ballyhooing by the Governor, a plan to charge cars US$11.52 and trucks US$25.34 for travel between 60th Street and the Battery during busy hours died a quiet death, smothered during state budget negotiations. Touted as a win-win-win – a revenue raising, atmospheric cleansing, traffic tonic – it went down in Albany as smoothly as a wheat grass shot at a brewers’ picnic, despite some deft attempts to make it palatable to the usual naysayers by lowering existing tolls while raising new ones.

In a final flicker of the Enlightenment, the city’s street grid was devised in 1811 “in such a manner as to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City … [by allowing] a free and abundant circulation of air.”

It didn’t take long for elegant rationalism to run afoul of some very visceral issues. At the peak of our first emissions calamity, the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894, the city was mired in a million pounds of poop per day (with a chaser of 10 million gallons of horse piss). Much like current predictions of sea level elevation, only stinkier, Victorian prognosticators foresaw a city-wide dung pile 30 feet high by 1930. Instead, by 1912 automobiles outnumbered horses and the last equine-powered streetcar ploughed to a halt in 1917.

Cars and modernity seemed like the perfect marriage. A hundred years later the romance is gone. Traffic crawls at 4.7 miles per hour in Midtown Manhattan mocked by the towering deco architecture evoking speed. A double espresso and you’re walking faster.

Even more frustrating than attempting to get somewhere is parking once you do. And not just in the middle of the city, everywhere is the same. Lives have ended over a spot. Then, you must move your car twice a week. It would be easier for me to explain the rules of cricket to a deaf and blind American than for a New York car owner to demystify ‘alternate side parking’. I’ll never understand how people rise at cruel hours to shift their car, double-park it while the gutters are swept, then somehow repark after they’ve commuted to work on the subway. Perhaps massive fines make this magic happen?

The price of freedom, I suppose. The nation’s stated goal is “the pursuit of happiness”, not its actual attainment. Automony’s ultimate symbol is the car. Yet, before our eyes, gas stations are vanishing from all corners of town. Real estate is too valuable, they no longer make commercial sense. As we’ve witnessed before, shit happens, and then somehow, it’s all gone. Is this the harbinger of the end of the car? Will the combustion engine just starve to extinction?

We can only hope so.

Overheard in Eveleigh Lore of a Redfern local

Here’s how you roll in Redfern
First you prepare to share
Before you leave home
you secrete in your pockets
a couple of weighty gold coins
So when you come out of the station
You’ll see Robert waiting there
Sitting on a battered red milk-crate
His plastic cup proffered
His head down reading a book
Sling in your cash and nod your hello
You’ve gained your admission to Eveleigh

Here’s how you play it on Lawson Street
Give another offering to Alan or Lil
then use what’s left to buy an Abercrombie Street coffee
from Shortlist, Tripod or Café Ella
You’ll have your keep-cup with you of course
Otherwise order a three-quarter coffee with no lid
to reduce your plastic footprint
You’ll find Trevor’s memorial seat in the park
Officially Charles Kernan Reserve
but sit here a moment with our Trevor Davies
founding editor of the South Sydney Herald
staunch Labor Party stalwart and all round Redfern legend

Here’s where to wander on Shepherd Street
Go right at Gate 1 of the University
Breathing deep the wafting aroma
of the Melaleuca Quinquenervia
paperbark trees, all in a higgledy line
and you, suspended now on a wood-slatted walkway
a magic, every-culture carpet of student ambition
and when eyes aren’t fixated on the small screens of their phones
some are drawing political messages in chalk
on the concrete of the path
sweating it out in the sports centre
Or lapping the blue of the pool

And now you’re arrived at the Cadigal Green
Where spread before you is a field of suspended sun chairs
floating on long metal spines
rippling curves of hovering comfort
and the books in your bag are calling out to you to sit and read
That beautiful spired building you can see is not a church
but the Old Darlington school
George Allan Mansfield’s 1877 Gothic Revival beauty
And from the blond and red brick walls
leak the gentle sounds of musicians, rehearsing their notes
translating their spirits into staves and quavers
and flitty, lilting trills

We like to go slow in Redfern
To walk round the streets with a smile
To weave in and out of a bicycle lane
to wander and linger a while
We drink gin at Moya’s Gin Palace
Craft beer at the late open Dock
White wine at Arcadia Liquors
Rocinate at The Noble Hops
Our idea of style is graffiti
Our colours are all red and green
We’re home to the bi-week Big Issue
We like to go out and be seen

We want to dream big for Redfern
We fought for years to get a lift at the station
We fought to save the Locomotive workshop
at the Technology Park
When we look up at night we see possums and foxes
flying across the Waterloo sky
And Matavai and Turanga all lit up in rainbow colours
down below they’re digging up 19th century homes
but much further down
Fourty thousand years of sovereignty sits solid in our minds
and in our hearts
and we say it aloud and thank the elders loud and loud and long.

This place is ripe, old school Sydney
My grandparents grew up right here
They met and they married on Redfern Street
And daily I sense that they’re near
This is the home of the first registered female builder in Australia
Ann Glover was her name
And she shared the suburb with Alfred Flack, who had a dye-making business from 1858
Joseph Sawyer took up with a showgirl
but he had to maintain his wife Catherine’s back
the first of a very long line to be forced to cough up support
she inaugurated the Destitute Wives and Children’s Act

So walk round the history of Redfern
And listen for the ghost coaches that stopped at the Tudor Hotel
Or out of the corner of your eye, watch for the
late burning fires at the Eveleigh railway yards
you may see cold, hungry faces reflected in the firelight
or red, chilblain hands rubbed together for warmth
the face of Mum Shirl on a memorial plaque
The broken heart of Ted Kennedy, Catholic priest
still weeping and lowering coffins into the ground
Wander down Regent Street and get a dress made or adjusted by Santina Collezione or buy gelato from Ciccone and Sons
And welcome to Redfern, we’re proud of our Bearded Tit.


Alana Valentine’s Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Life has just been published by Currency Press. Her stage play The Sugar House, set in the Sydney suburb of Pymont, is running at Belvoir Theatre till June 3.

Bilson at Table Eating the Seasons

An oft quoted aphorism of the iconic chef and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier states that as technology evolves so will the art of cooking. While we have had big advances in kitchen equipment the most influential changes have been in the sharing of information on the internet.

Working across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Escoffier was familiar with Italian, English and even Russian cuisines – but his books show no sign of familiarity with what would become the primary source of inspiration for contemporary cuisine, the Zen Buddhist art of kaiseki from Japan.

For me, Zen philosophy is nothing less than a love poem to the rhythm of life. This is an important understanding as globalised influences dominate both the direction and marketing of modern cuisine.

We now, of course, have instant access to new dishes and products from all over the world through the internet, which has caused a welcome diversity in our restaurant menus and domestic foods. We also have world brands with a large commercial presence – McDonald’s, one of the biggest players in the foodservice industry, being the most obvious example.

McDonald’s has had such a huge market influence that you see some of our best-known chefs launching their own brands, pitching to different market sectors. You are able to choose from a basic McDo’s with Coke to a Hamburger of Three-Year-Old Grass Fed Angus Beef with Foie Gras and Pickled Truffles – supported by a wine list that would make James Halliday gasp with anticipation. This marketing division occurs across many sectors.

But the most genuinely progressive change in contemporary cuisine has been the marriage of French and Japanese culture. The aims of these two cuisines are remarkably similar. They both celebrate regional foods.

The Zen aesthetic that forms the boundaries of Japanese kaiseki cooking has been adapted by the French, displaying deeper and more modern expression on the plate. For kaiseki to ‘work’ all the components must be perfectly cooked and displayed. I sometimes fantasise about doing an Australian roast lamb in a kaiseki style but somehow it just doesn’t seem to be a happy marriage!

Japanese chefs have meanwhile adapted French flavours and saucing to make their dishes more empathetic for wine drinkers rather than tea or spirits – as would be the case in more traditional presentations. These changes are the result of wine becoming a beverage of choice with celebratory dinners in Japan. The flavours demanded by dishes in order to present a cohesive palate with wine have necessitated major innovations in Japanese food. As a consequence, these innovations have inspired French chefs so that their food is influenced not only visually but also with a more reductive view of flavours.

In these adaptations the classic base is always discernible to the guests. By example, a Sauce Bordelaise is classically a red wine sauce from the region of Bordeaux, flavoured with eschallot, beef demi-glace and butter, garnished with poached beef marrow and served, perhaps, with a rare fillet steak. A chef may decide to imitate the sauce by reducing some very good red wine with eschallot, garlic, herbs and pepper until it is almost syrupy, straining the base then adding olive oil in the manner of a vinaigrette and serving it with marrow seasoned, poached and laid decoratively along a cut marrow bone resting on a purée of celeriac.

This dish would form a course in a kaiseki style degustation menu and would be at home on both Japanese and French tables. Renowned as the master of sauces, and a great simplifier and moderniser, Auguste Escoffier would be both surprised and pleased today – and likely a leader in such adaptations.

Peter Gilmore, Executive Chef of the Fink Group, displays a strong Japanese aesthetic at Quay Restaurant, the food having a simplicity in display and masterly control of cooking temperatures but without the stronger French flavours of classical saucing. Peter also has restaurants with broader market appeal under his control but the Group is careful not to burden his brand with too broad a palate.

Tetsuya Wakuda would rank as perhaps Australia’s most famous chef on the international stage. His restaurant Waku Ghin, at the Casino in Singapore, outranked and outlived those of his French three-star competitors. The design of the restaurant has a deceptive simplicity, tracking the progression of guests from their arrival to the conclusion of their dinner. Seating only 25 people, there are two sittings offering a degustation of ten courses at a cost of SGD$400. The emphasis here is more Japanese than at his restaurant in Sydney.

Tetsuya’s eponymous establishment in Sydney occupies a very grand space, originally built by Suntory with the budget of a whisky producer unrestricted by the usual poverty of restaurateurs. The degustation is offered at a very reasonable price of $230.

Like many French three-star restaurants with international progeny, Tetsuya aims both restaurants at the same market segment. Any difference between the two could best be explained by the regionality of the produce. It is widely known that Tetsuya began his career in the kitchen working for me at Kinsela’s in the early 1980s. I have always tried to have a strong Japanese presence in the kitchen because of their knife and presentation skills as well as their Zen aesthetics.

My close friend Adam Wynn is the Japanese Consul in Adelaide and we once spent a week together in Japan, me cooking at the Hotel Seiyo Ginza and Adam introducing his wines to the Japanese markets. His agent, Toshio Yasuma, took us to a kaiseki dinner in Kyoto to sample the cooking of Japan’s most influential chef, Yoshihiro Murata, at his restaurant Kikunoi. The restaurant is situated on one of the old canals and has been in his family for three generations. Spanish chef Ferran Adria describes the cuisine as being “born of an intimate communion between the work of man and the gifts of nature.”

Murata-san describes his cooking as “maintaining our deep emotional linkage with the annual shifts in climate, ingrained from ancient times whether cultivating crops or fishing at the coast.”

So when I am asked “What is kaiseki?” I have a very simple answer. “It is eating the seasons.”

Portrait drawing of Tony Bilson by John Olsen

Portrait of Tony Bilson by John Olsen

Read: Kaiseki – The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant

The Man in Chippendale Macca’s Moments in time

Waking Up as Someone Else How Kate Fischer became Tziporah Malkah

It’s a humid morning in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay – overcast, with a bleached sky – and Tziporah Malkah is smoking in her new high rise apartment as she waits for the delivery of a bedframe. The sheets on the mattress belong to the bed she shared in Adelaide with her ex-boyfriend; like a lot of old things in her life, they no longer fit.

Even inside, the light works on her skin. In full makeup after an appearance on Channel 7’s Sunrise and with her hair pulled back in a chignon, Malkah could be a Pre-Raphaelite madonna – her features delicate, symmetrical, underscored by sadness – and then she laughs, a booming tall-girl laugh, and, indicating her translucent nightgown, says, “You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t wear the fuckin’ nightie on TV.”

Only a few months ago Malkah was before an Adelaide court on charges that involved an on-off relationship with her ex, who claimed she had assaulted him in an argument over marijuana and his sick cat. Malkah was also charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She’d admit it was a low point for her. Her lawyer argued she was “a changed person” in the wake of what had happened.

On the basis of her good record and an early guilty plea, no conviction was recorded and Malkah was fined $1,200. When journalists outside the court asked her if she had a problem with police, Malkah still had enough spark to reply, “I’ve got a problem with you.”

Today her face changes constantly – animated by emotion, transformed by shadow – reflecting thoughts she can find difficult to harness or contain. Here in Sydney, she says, everything’s better. Her agent is fielding offers, and she’s even beginning to go out again. “I haven’t had time to miss Adelaide,” she says, blowing smoke, “but I have moments when I break down.”

Walking over to the curtains, she looks down at the still blue waters of the pool.

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Now 44, Malkah, once known as Kate Fischer, is returning to the media after six years spent working as a carer in Melbourne. In combination with her significant weight gain – at its peak, she weighed 118.5kgs – it is this work that has attracted the most condescension from her former cohorts. According to media lore, any ex-fiancé of a billionaire has no business changing, exploring life or existing anywhere other than within the narrow, calibrated space, both physical and psychological, allotted to beautiful women.

Malkah was mocked for her starring role in Sirens in 1994, for leaving James Packer (“In a crushing blow, within 12 months of splitting from Fischer, in October 1999 Packer married Meares”), mocked for moving to Los Angeles in 1998 (“after a handful of attempts at resurrecting her career”), mocked for changing her name in 2008, mocked for her frankness, her artlessness, her sincere commitment to spirituality.

The name Tziporah Malkah embraces her family’s Jewish heritage, despite a more secular upbringing. It’s inspired by her grandmother’s name, Tziporah meaning ‘bird’ or ‘beauty’ in Hebrew, Malkah meaning ‘queen’.

Her 2017 appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! – funny, devoid of vanity, outrageously honest – drew further derision from female journalists, with one writing, “Her weight has made her the target of ridicule on social media, with some criticising her for not wearing a bra in the jungle.” Industry rumour has it that the bed that cracked under her weight on the show was rigged.

“I was the fat chick on the broken bed,” she says, her eyes darkening.

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Malkah’s questing spirit was seen as an embarrassment as it was not paired with a suitably chastened body (no sugar, no fat, no cosmetic surgery). One female journalist wrote that Malkah had “let herself go”; another, that her figure was “a far cry from her modelling days”.

Such comments have rarely been made of male public figures. She was never praised for her discipline, business acumen, financial intelligence or her inspiring resilience. If, as certain women have suggested, her success was, in fact, due to her beauty and her breasts, why is every attractive woman with a full bosom not, as Malkah was before her engagement to James Packer, at the top of her field and earning $750,000 a year?

She was even criticised for accessing the full spectrum of human emotion. When Malkah publicly alluded to family difficulties, she was accused by yet another female journalist of “boundless self-pity”.

Malkah is familiar with such cruelty. At 21, she did as anyone would have done in her position: her beauty was a passport and she used it, both disconcerted and dazzled by its reception. Her beautiful smile and breasts were staples of the social pages. She laughed, teased, played the clown. “I don’t go to parties, my cleavage does,” she joked.

The big names that were part of her story also inspired envy – among them, one-time boyfriend Ben Mendelsohn (whose drug problems in the ’90s drove her “insane with worry”), Kerry Packer (she’d describe the mogul and his son as “complete bogans”), Hugh Grant (with whom she acted in Sirens), and, of course, her mother, the celebrated reporter and now New South Wales Minister for Family and Community Services and Minister for Social Housing, Pru Goward.

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Predictably, Malkah had few girlfriends in the industry. Deborah Thomas, Ardent Leisure’s former CEO who abruptly left the company in 2017 after a blaze of bad publicity, critiqued her in a television interview. “She’s also a big girl,” Thomas, then an editor, said. “It’s the sort of – it’s the sequins and the tartiness.”

Entrepreneur Poppy King confronted Malkah on television about her breasts. “If you put them out there, and if that’s what you’re using to get so much publicity, don’t you have to expect [the degradation]?” Malkah was always gracious in response, if only because she never thought herself worthy of kindness or respect. Even now, she is shy about suggesting that she may have any value beyond her appearance.

“I have two very clever parents and all four grandparents were clever,” she haltingly says, “so even if the smarts jumped a generation, I’m still going to get some clever genes.”

When Malkah was captured, dishevelled, fat and wrapped in a sheet as she picked up the mail in 2016 by a paparazzo, it was the second biggest story of the week; the first was the US presidential debate. Softly and with incredulity, she says, “People wrote to me from Sweden saying, ‘You’re gorgeous! We love you! And, by the way, you’re overdressed for Scandinavia’.”

The intensity of the affection, she quietly says, stunned her.

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

When, at 13, Malkah asked if she could enter Dolly magazine’s Covergirl competition, she thought her mother chose the “ugliest” photograph; Malkah won. Soon afterwards, she came fourth in Elite New York’s global Look of the Year competition (or, as Malkah puts it with characteristic self-disparagement, “Dork of the Year”). Her age, insiders conjecture, was the only factor that stopped her winning. Such remarkable beauty, however, exerts a price.

Crushing her cigarette out, Malkah recalls the night a producer asked her over to watch a movie. He was a friend, she says; she was 16 at the time. “The lights were dim because we were watching The Deer Hunter. He was down one end of the couch and I was at the other; it was dark. He was overweight even then and making snuffling noises but I was watching the movie, enthralled. And suddenly he turns around and goes, ‘Here!’”

Malkah gestures at violent speed and, smearing one palm over her cheek, nose, eyes and mouth, she relives her shock. The level of her distress is disconcerting to witness.

“He’d been masturbating,” she says, her throat thickening with disgust. “At first, I didn’t quite know what it was – I kind of did, but wasn’t sure. And I gasped, shocked. I cried, ‘Gross! You’re gross! That’s disgusting!’ And he said, ‘Kiss me!’ He just kept coming for me. I left. It was only a short walk to the model’s apartment. I remember going home and saying, ‘He just put something on my face!’ One of the older girls – and by ‘older’, I mean 17 or 18 – we were all living together in a bunk room – said, ‘That’s his sperm.’”

Malkah would begin a relationship with a 24-year-old boyfriend who divided his time between Manhattan and Los Angeles. “It didn’t work out and I had an abortion.” Her voice is tired, her face drawn. “I came back to Australia straight afterwards. 16. I was numb. I couldn’t afford an abortion – I didn’t have insurance – so my modelling agency loaned me $5,000. One of the best gynaecologists in New York. I wasn’t going to go to some shop around the corner and get a coat hanger. I paid them back eventually but they had to tell my mother. I still think about it. You know, I would have a 27-year-old child today. But at that age, I was so confused and messed up. I would have been very loving, but the child would have been a mess.”

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Malkah spent the next few years lurching from man to man, from house to house, from continent to continent, both desperate and destabilised in her search for a love she feels she never had. Her cigarette smoulders as she draws in the smoke.

“When I finally returned to Australia, I was so disconnected,” she says, exhaling. “I didn’t know how depressed I was until I couldn’t distract myself anymore – I could no longer distract myself with being beautiful, with buying beautiful clothes, with being famous, with sex, with work, with travel, with money. There was no more hiding.” She pauses to stub her cigarette out in the ashtray. “There were times I thought: If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to kill myself. I actually planned out how I was going to do it – where, when. I just couldn’t take any more, you know? Enough.”

Her expression is grim. “So I had to fucking face myself. I’ve only just started realising, really, how depressed I’ve been. The past six years were hell. I’m like a cute little dog that has been beaten so much that even if you reach out in kindness, I might just fucking bite you.”

A sudden anger overtakes her and she looks up, baring her bottom teeth. “Sometimes I feel so angry! You know all these fucken yoga classes and shit –” she adopts a breathy voice – “‘Breathe out your anger!’ How many men do you see in those classes?! Women are constantly indoctrinated with this don’t-feel-angry shit! If a wrong has been done to you, feel angry. What it’s made me realise is that I like women more now, because it’s made me feel that we’re all in this together.”

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

The aftermath of fame – a depression that lasted for almost a decade – took her by surprise. “I’d taken one beating after another, you know? I just took so many hits for so long.”

As she lights another cigarette and exhales, Malkah addresses me with those penetrating eyes. What began as an exercise in voyeuristic cruelty – the paparazzo, the unwashed bedsheet – is evolving into an unlikely metamorphosis. Television executives are beginning to consider her potential as Australia’s new Oprah: both an obvious and spectacular fit.

And who wouldn’t want to hear what she has to say? Returning from the wars of life, the once broken girl is now an emotionally integrated woman, with all the experience and spiritual gravity that such an evolution entails. Her sudden smile is radiant. “I was asleep on the inside for a long time but knew how to fake it on the outside. I’m able to make associations now because I pull things together. I got woke.”

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Image: Instagram @tziporahmalkahofficial (used with permission)

Braving Town Hall Station Frayed nerves and fire fears

At Sydney’s Town Hall Railway Station, the underground throws up a northerly wind that howls foetid and accurate through every inch of the joint. At the suck of my arriving train’s opening doors, I shut my mouth tight against the bad air. Because this place always feels like it’s crawling with something only penicillin can fix. Or could once.

I alight.

The whistle sounds into the void left by the train and its escaping passengers bound for Menai or Waterfall or somewhere that has to be better than this. Mega adverts sit above the tracks I’ve just ridden in on. I squint at them in the grimy light from behind the platform’s yellow line. A dude in a suit and tie has a voice bubble sprouting a message in Mandarin. A lion in long grass is a lure for South African Airways, telling me to book my African adventure today below the jokey headline: FRESH TOURISTS DELIVERED DAILY FROM AUSTRALIA. I’m offered sponsorship opportunities for a CROSS-BORDER E-COMMERCE EXPO. This year is the fourth one to be held, but I’m the only one taking notice.

From greasy platform to escalator, stair and decoratively tiled concourse, the station’s hot breath blows rude in the face of every commuter in its path. A visit here always has me thinking about the nearest clean washroom. And here’s a tip. From experience I know it’s the one inside the St Andrew’s Cathedral church building. Those toilets are airy and seem seldom used compared to the ones underground.

I tap off and climb the steps to George Street where, despite the reverberating chaos of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s beleaguered light rail project, the bleak atmospherics of Town Hall Station disappear. With natural light and normality restored, I forget what’s going on below. For now.

Crowded platform at Town Hall Station, Sydney

Photography by Dean Sewell

Built between 1928 and 1932, Sydney’s Town Hall Station was one of a group of underground stations developed by the prominent Australian engineer Dr John Jacob Crew Bradfield. Bradfield also oversaw the design and construction of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Some call him its father. A city railway scheme was ruled essential following a 1909 royal commission set up to find solutions to Sydney’s congestion. It’s an irony that can’t be lost today given our 2018 city’s gridlock and ongoing transport nightmares.

At the beginning of last century, Sydney needed a transport service closer to its harbour than Central. Town Hall was a major achievement in railway construction in its day, notes the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage website. Its escalators, balustrades and steel framework columns displayed an “aesthetic of functionality”. It’s a sentiment that still rings true for an online reviewer on Yelp.com who comments: “Town Hall Station is a bit grubby, but it gets the job done.” And I have to concede the writer has a point. If getting from A to B is all that matters, it does pass the test.

Crowd waiting on platform at Town Hall Station, Sydney

Photography by Dean Sewell

I enter Town Hall Station again, this time, from Kent Street where a sign above suggests I “Give blood, get a biscuit.” I pass more signs: Espresso Coffee, Revitalize, Farma, Su Chai Take Away, Student Flights, Book Grocer. I stop at the Book Grocer where you can buy one book for $7 and three for just $20. There’s no shortage of self-help material and cookbooks but there’s some good stuff too. I pick up Little Failure by the Russian-born American writer Gary Shteyngart. I spot Tap Dancing to Work by investment guru Warren Buffett. He supposedly loves his job so much he tap dances to it.

I consider how hard it would be to tap dance to work if you had to pass through Town Hall Station en route to your employer. Call me humourless but could anyone really tap dance to work apart from Warren Buffett, who must surely be the most unlikely candidate to ever experience the symptoms of a place like Town Hall Station?

As the sport of public transit in Sydney goes, the station is extreme. For none more so than the aged and infirm. Another online reviewer on Yelp saw an elderly person “white knuckling their walking stick and clutching the wall with their other hand”. Another queried, “for the love of God”, who designed the damn platforms: “Were they people as thin as supermodels?”

“Platform 3 terrifies me,” said a third.

I understand their sentiments. I first went to Town Hall Station 16 years ago, having started a new job based in North Sydney. Town Hall was where I had to change trains from the Eastern Suburbs line. Struck by its airlessness and claustrophobia-inducing vibe, I couldn’t wait to get out. I urgently resolved to find other ways to get to that workplace. It’s fair to say the station has improved since then. Sydney Trains estimate “around 180,000 customers use the station each day.”

In the media, there are periodic warnings that the station is a potential firetrap. This is despite its upgrade in 2015-16 with new wall and column tiles, flooring, paint scheme, ticket line and concourse glazing. In January this year, Fairfax reported concerns the station’s vulnerability to fire could result in “a catastrophic scenario”.

Connections to retail malls, unprotected structural steel frames on platforms and no smoke exhaust or ventilation systems all contribute to the risk, the Fairfax report said. It referred to a briefing document to a deputy secretary at Transport for NSW that said, “Fire and life safety concerns have been raised for a number of years and need to be addressed before an incident occurs.” I learn that The City of Sydney and Fire and Rescue NSW inspected Town Hall Station in 2016. After the inspection a number of suggestions were made to help improve safety, however no fire enforcement notices were issued.

I recently contacted Sydney Trains to ask for its current assessment of the fire and safety risk at Town Hall Station. Work is being done to improve safety. But there is a good deal more to do and I was not completely reassured by this response from a Sydney Trains spokesperson: “The safety of our customers and staff is always our highest priority. Since 2016 Sydney Trains has been proactively improving fire safety at Town Hall and has upgraded fire detection and alarm systems, replaced the sprinkler system, enhanced lighting and exit signage and installed a smoke exhaust system throughout the concourse.

“We also have an ongoing program to reduce the risk of fire in tunnels such as upgrading tunnel cables using fire-resistant cables, removing rubbish in tunnels, and conducting regular maintenance inspections. All additional fire safety improvement work is on target to be completed within the timeframes previously agreed with City of Sydney. Further work will be completed in the next 12 months.”

Given that old trains – with poor fire-retardancy levels, higher fire loads, poorer detection systems and no internal CCTV – would be the most likely cause of any fire, you can’t blame Town Hall Station itself entirely for the fire risk. In the event of a catastrophe, you just have to hope against it spreading too far through an ill wind and a perfect storm.

People entering and leaving Town Hall Station, Sydney

Photography by Dean Sewell

For now, the odorous humidity of the place remains at the heart of a collective unease human beings seem to have when they enter this decaying six-platform netherworld that’s so central to the functioning of our city. The fact it sits on, or at least near, colonial Sydney’s first burial ground fails to surprise me when I discover it in my research. And that the burial ground was never consecrated, its graves sometimes left open to marauding from pigs, goats and horses, is enough to have even the least superstitious among us reaching for the nearest Ouija board.

On one of the lower platforms I prepare to catch my train to the less clammy climes of Wynyard Station. A woman asks her young daughter: “Can you feel the breeze?” The child stares into space, groans something indecipherable. The northerly gusts around us. There might be a breeze. But it is not cool.

Getting Southerly Busted At North Bondi RSL

It’s Saturday night at Australia’s hippest beach but there are no hipsters to be seen at North Bondi RSL. The empty ocean shines like shiny black ink just 50 metres away but up here at the R’y it’s cover band central, the band crankin’ up the good times.

Oh the regulars are here, propping up the newly-renovated bar at the club, aka Tobruk House, aka The Rats, but there are no muscle-men nor bronze-gilded women, lips trouting and boobs boob-jobbing at their seams; there are no bearded dudes smashing the avo or girls ’gramming their taut exemplified bodies, via yoga and/or kombucha, to the world.

It’s a southerly-busted windy-cool night and the legendary Grant Turnbull is here, 88 years old and the bloke who taught me swimming at Bondi Baths way back before the war (just after the Vietnam War and well before the First Gulf War). Ally Brompton is here, she went to our school up the road, and she and the girls are having a good ol’ catch up and cutting loose on the dance floor when the Get Rich Band plays the right song. There’s John, the manager, or at least I think he’s the manager; he looks and seems like the manager, but maybe he’s just on the RSL committee. He’s always here anyway and he’s always up for a chat.

A group of young local surfers have also found their way in tonight, but they won’t last long. They have that look in their eye that suggests they’re destined for brighter city lights, warming up with a few relatively cheap beers and seemingly enjoying going to the bathroom in pairs.

This is an Australian scene straight out of a thousand RSLs or country clubs or bowling clubs across the land. The chicken parma is in the shape of Australia and the band know that the chords to the near entirety of ‘April Sun in Cuba’ are Asus4 to A and repeat and repeat.

The image of Bondi is one of glitz and glamour, a place where people come to be seen, where masses of Z-list wannabes flock on the weekend, not realising that the true hipsters have long ago moved on to Gordon’s Bay. Bondi Rescue, Bondi Vet, Bondi Sunscreen, Bondi Bottled Water… I even saw an ad today for ‘Bondi Protein’, featuring three fluro clad young women, white-teethed and glowing, heartily enjoying a product that some genius thinks will sell. And it probably will.

But the salt-blasted reality is somewhat different; the old weathered remnants of what was known locally as Scum Valley still often win out. The Bondi Golf and Diggers club further up the hill is a prime example, where a schooner will set you back 5 bucks and you’d be well-advised not to muck around near the snooker tables when the snooker comp is on. These places are populated by the mostly unseen core of an older version of Bondi. Remnant members of families who have been here for decades, keeping their heads down, not wanting to be noticed amid a newer crowd who seem to only actually wish to be noticed.

Meanwhile, tonight at the R’y, where I have been coming to drink since the age of 15 (no ID checks back then), there’s barely anyone under 30, aside from the bar staff, and the band has returned from their break. The opening notes of ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ ring out and they’re like a siren song, the audience simply helpless to resist putting down their glasses of white wine and schooners of beer and their ears dragging them up onto the dance floor, subsequently pulling some massive dance moves.

And it strikes me – these are the moves the absent hipsters would kill to be able to appropriate and take the piss out of. But they ain’t here tonight, and they ain’t likely to be coming next week either.

$40 a Day Are you worth it?

“I could live on 40 bucks a day knowing that the government is supporting me with Newstart looking for employment,” Ms Banks [Julia Banks, federal Liberal MP for Chisholm] told ABC radio.
She denied she was out-of-touch.
– SBS News, 2 May 2018

Could I live on $40 a day?

Possibly. Probably. Maybe for a while. I was unemployed off and on for a couple years at a time when social support was relatively more generous, and I somehow came out the other end of it. After all, humans can sometimes have an amazing capacity to be resourceful and to find their way through even the most impossible of circumstances.

But could I do it, for any length of time and come out intact? Without being broken? Without stretching my relationships and breaking them to the point where they could never be repaired again? Without leaning so heavily on my friends that I had to call in so many friendships and favours that I had none left?

Could I do it without losing, or at least questioning, my own sense of dignity and self-worth? Without having a little piece of myself and my self-confidence and dignity chipped away piece-by-piece, day-by-day?

Could I do it and remain both physically and mentally healthy? Could I keep up a reasonable diet? Could I make it stretch through the last few days of the fortnight without searching down the back of the couch for enough coins for a packet of 2-minute noodles or simply scrounging, or going hungry for a couple of days? I couldn’t do it then and I doubt I could do it now.

Could I do it without thinking that my relative income was a measure of my relative worth? Would I inevitably drift towards thinking I was worth very little? I am not sure. Maybe. Perhaps…

… If I wasn’t socially isolated. If my economic poverty did not inherently throw me into a poverty of community and connection. But too often it does. It has to. You can’t afford to connect in a society where capital is the price of participation in public space.

It is so hard to remain part of a community if you desperately need to take and doubt what, if anything, you might have to give back no matter how much you feel you should and you want to.

If you’re lucky, a strong community can hold you up and build you up through such times. That’s what held me up. I guess that’s why people find God and good works in their desperation. But, really, we should never put that responsibility on the most vulnerable and fragile among us.

That strong community that should hold us up is the one we are all part of. All of us. We should never ask the weakest among us to beg, to starve, to be constantly and desperately needy. To be short enough of what they need that they feel defined by their neediness.

This community, all of us, should offer dignity, support and at least the idea that there is a way out and a leg up. Where you are does not reflect who you are. You should never be so stretched by what you need to get to get by that you can’t even contemplate what you might need and be able to give back.

I am not sure what that’s worth but I’m pretty sure it’s more than $40 a day.

Lunch with Friends Bistro Moncur with McLean Edwards

There are very few balconies in Sydney where a pink waistcoat paired with Prince of Wales check and bowtie neither particularly amuses nor offends. One of those perches overlooks Moncur Street belonging to its eponymous bistro in Woollahra. Nestled at one of the handful of tables on the terrace of the eatery (which turns 25 this month), one can, politely, get away with practically anything.

I’ve collected my luncheon companion with virtually no warning but he is nonetheless resplendent in his obligatory, if typically paint-speckled black suit; it is my wardrobe which has emerged from the 1970s.

Tomorrow I bury my father. An hour ago I privately bade him farewell at an open casket viewing. I need a martini, Dad would have insisted.

I am having lunch with McLean Edwards who met my father, the late art dealer Ray, when the young painter was precisely the age I am now. Son of a former Australian diplomat and extraordinarily well-read, McLean makes a fabulous dining companion one-on-one. Those who know the artist occasionally mistake him for an enfant terrible. His behaviour in public occasionally eccentric. The intensity of his intellect manifests in a frustration which lashes out, somewhat erratically, when confronted with the complacent niceties of society; an awkward trait to possess in a local art world that rewards the obsequious and inoffensive.

McLean was an early acolyte and student of another tortured soul whose personality occasionally bore those hallmarks, Keith Looby. An artist who I maintain is amongst the best the country has produced, Looby is virtually unknown to contemporary art aficionados. McLean’s earliest noted works from the nineties owe a lot to Looby; if not in composition or facial accents then certainly in the drawing talent both possess.

The most heroic period of McLean’s work so far are the big dark narrative pictures from the mid-naughties. This was a boom-time period for him when every investment banker in Sydney seemed to need to buy one – if only as a show of machismo in the face of their wives who insisted on filling their Paddington terraces with big doe-eyed Del Kathryn Barton canvases.

But it is the most recent paintings that I have most liked for a while. Small oil study portraits capturing the perfect essence of their subjects in a few strokes. Sitting across from Edwards I’m reminded of how he always looks like the protagonists in his paintings – today more so than usual. I have earmarked one of the new works on show at Scott Livesey in Melbourne to give to my wife for Christmas. I stumble through a sentence or two trying to talk about the show, to see how it is going, but for once neither of us particularly wants to talk about art.

McLean and I shared many fabulous lunches with my father at Surry Hills’ classic French diner Tabou, long since shuttered. My father and I turned occasionally to Bistro Moncur over the following years as the closest culinary cousin of our former favourite, but I am quite certain he always felt unfaithful; I’m more fickle.

Evan and Ray Hughes in Venice in 1993

Evan and Ray Hughes, Venice 1993. Photography by Annette Hughes

When the waitstaff hover to take an order all they draw from McLean and I is a request for two very dry Tanqueray martinis with olives. Through a fog of exhaustion and grief I haven’t much attention for a menu. I just need to be in the warm embrace of familiar company and am in dire need of a drink. I sense McLean, who is unusually laconic today, understands better than I that conversational voids are de rigeur at such times; he too only recently lost a father. Almost reluctantly, having not eaten properly for a few days, appetite having all but abandoned me, a dozen oysters each are sent for.

We drain our adequately well-put-together drinks and call for their prompt replenishment. Even morose and docile as a pair, we can be challenging to waiters. I say adequately, as this side of the Pacific Ocean it seems unfair to expect the perfectly mixed drink which so effortlessly emerges from the bar of even the crummiest eatery from LA to NYC.

Easting barbecue in a college rib-house in Atlanta with football on the screens and frat boys busily trying to outdo one another with oafishness, I still managed to procure that perfect martini, the oily residue of the contents sliding seductively up and down the sides of the glass. In Sydney one has to hope for something marginally short of rocket fuel. At the Woollahra, however (despite their upstairs bar turning literally to espresso martinis on tap) (no, really) whomever mixes the drinks downstairs at Moncur does one of the best jobs in town.

We’re onto our third by the time the oysters arrive and looking down at the plate I’m not instantly transported to Paris, thankfully. The clunky zinc oyster platters on their stands with their piles of crushed ice have become such a tedious cliché; like the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, these are best and preferably only seen in Paris or New York.

Sometimes it’s nice to eat at a French restaurant and not feel like one is on the set of a Baz Luhrmann film. So I approve of the very simple way my 12 Sydney rocks arrive, clearly opened freshly, with just enough of their water retained by the shucker to let me know where they come from. An oyster which has been freshly opened retains its shape perfectly as it has not dried and still looks like it is a living creature. They’re my favourite things in the world to eat and were my dad’s also. Countless trips to the fish market to cater for his big gallery lunches: “Ten dozen… You can do a better price than that!” would bellow the man who never gave a discount in his life.

Up the stairs of Moncur bound the gallerists Tony and Roslyn Oxley; news of my father’s death has travelled widely in the artistic community and has been covered by all of the major newspapers. Tony looks somewhat aghast to see Ray’s only son out drinking and eating oysters with his playmate McLean Edwards before offering an understanding look of recognition that says: “Where else would one be to remember Ray.” It is that sort of place, Bistro Moncur, where art dealers, ladies who lunch, colourful lawyers and failed Labor politicians can all convivially share a meal and look down their noses at tedious but ubiquitous real estate agents who seem always to be relegated to Siberia down near the kitchen.

It’s sometimes hard to determine whether this restaurant is a rococo caricature or a perfectly pared back oil sketch of Sydney society, but it doesn’t really matter. The food is usually excellent. On this day I don’t feel like their à point sirloin, its salty-rich Café de Paris butter sauce or perfect French fries. Nor do I feel like one of the best, and simplest tomato salads you can order. Their smooth French onion cheese soufflé is not quite as good as Tabou’s was and though I normally would have one on the table alongside the faultless chicken liver mousse, today oysters and martinis are all I need.

McLean will go back to his studio and I will see him at the funeral the next day. He will be admonished for lighting a cigar in the middle of the Art Gallery of NSW during the afternoon service. I have drunk too much and haven’t eaten enough but it’s the fuel to get me through the final preparations for the following morning. Losing a father is hard enough, but losing your favourite lunch partner is a stark everyday example of what it entails. Today oysters and McLean let me know it might not be easy, but life will go on.

Bistro Moncur
116A Queen Street, Woollahra 2025

6 Tanqueray Martinis $120.00
24 Oysters $120.00
Total: $240.00

Pleasure and Pain The medical cannabis debate

Why would any sane Australian go to the US for medical treatment?

For a brief tour of the US health system visit the popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe.com, where about 50 per cent of money raised pays off Americans’ medical debt: lung transplant, $80,000; brain tumor, $43,000; terminal cancer, $36,000. Medicare it is not.

But insanity didn’t drive Danielle Smith from Perth to Los Angeles for treatment. Desperation did. Despite the often farcical nature of the place, the one thing America seems clear-headed about is the path to legalising marijuana: 29 states have medical, 9 states, plus D.C., have gone the whole enchilada with recreational use. With 64 per cent of the population in favour, it’s practically the only thing Americans can agree on.

Pain creates its own compelling logic. Smith has a genetic connective-tissue disorder that triggers joint pain, musculoskeletal pain and neuropathic pain which constantly bothers her face, eyes and arm. Eight invasive spinal procedures – two without anaesthesia, to which she doesn’t respond normally – provided the 36-year-old art director no relief. Doctors resorted to opioids, anticonvulsants and antidepressants to contain her agony. Things got so bad, she Googled “assisted suicide in Scandinavia”.

A friend with an epileptic daughter told Smith about an oil from Colorado containing cannabidiol (CBD) that reduced the girl’s seizures from between 40 to 100 per day to zero.

Although Smith used to shun pot smokers at parties and bought anti-drug hype lock, stock, and barrel, she had nothing left to lose. Medicinal cannabis’s calming effects on Smith’s nerves is the sole effective treatment she’s found. When her supply of CBD oil abruptly ended, she moved to California. Only returning to Australia after a death in the family.

Now a passionate advocate for medical cannabis, Smith’s is wary of the way terminology is used to define and corrupt a more considered conversation by instead perpetuating old stereotypes and stigmas. “Please don’t use the word ‘marijuana’ in the article. It means ‘dirty tobacco’ and was used to demonize the Mexican population when Prohibition came in so has some dark racist connotations. We stick to using the word ‘cannabis’ only.”

 

Despite medical cannabis being legalised in Australia in 2016, it’s only been approved for about 600 patients and those lucky few face a byzantine maze characterised by Dr. Bastian Seidel of the Royal Australian College of GPs as “a complete basket case” with “huge barriers” to participation.

One barrier is cost. If, after waiting months for approval, Smith successfully petitions through her doctor for access, by her calculations, annual treatment will cost $25,000 in Australia versus $3,900 in California. How ridiculous for someone from a country with an enviable national health system and, well, no shortage of world-renowned weed! Enough of it that Federal Health minister, Greg Hunt, believes Australia could be the number one exporter of medical grade ganja.

On April 16, the Greens Party announced a plan to legalise cannabis in Australia: an unbridled upgrade from the current wonky medical mess to full-blown recreational use. Immediately, the media threw a coughing fit.

Clearing the disinformation smokescreen, the Greens are opting for something along Canadian lines, where the government acts as a single wholesaler and the goods are sold in plainly marked brown paper bags, as appetising as stale sausage rolls in an abandoned tuck shop. It’s hard to predict exactly how this will work out; although Canada is the world’s biggest supplier of cannabis, their recreational system won’t be in place until September. To glimpse the future, now, you have to go to California.

On a sunny Friday, I visited the MedMen dispensary in West Hollywood, “the Apple Store of Marijuana.” 4pm, the place was packed. At one of the big wooden tables with rows of iPads to navigate product descriptions, I grabbed a glass jar with a special lid containing a built-in magnifying glass and air vent to inspect buds. But “flower”, as it’s called, is no longer the point. Looking around, it feels like hardly anyone in California smokes. From the sheer variety of oils, edibles and even elegantly packaged suppositories, everyone is vaping, dabbing, nibbling or ingesting it in carefully curated doses some other way, it seems. It’s light years away from what the Aussie media know and understand and that’s why it’s a massive consumer industry now. I was a kid in a candy store until check out. You could practically hear the chorus of “legalise, regulate and tax” as the register chimed.

Can Australia go from zero to 60? Is it even desirable? California took 20 years to transition from medical to full-blown legal – and let’s not forget, federally, ‘marijuana’ is still a Schedule 1 drug in the US, up there with heroin and worse than cocaine, considered highly addictive with no medicinal value. In Australia, scheduling is more nuanced: THC is Schedule 8, a controlled drug, and CBD Schedule 4, available by prescription. If you could find a doctor who can prescribe, that is.

 

To get a sense of California’s journey from medical to legal, I talked with Carlos de la Torre, a founding member of California’s first research-based medical cannabis non-profit collective, Cornerstone. In 11 years, Cornerstone has morphed from a buyers’ club – cultivating, sharing, then selling to each other, in a closed loop of medically certified patients – to a store that will sell to anyone over 21 with valid ID. All thoroughly tested. Where most “street weed” can contain mold, metal, and pesticides, medical can’t, assures de la Torre.

Science has been at the heart of Cornerstone since its beginning, commencing with two PhDs, experts on the human endocannabinoid system, on its advisory board. De la Torre refers to his customers as “patients” without any trace of irony. Over the years, these patients have contributed their experiences to a database. In combination with Cornerstone’s research, overseen by its accredited Institutional Review Board, this provides users valuable insights into the complexities of treating ailments with the ever-expanding cornucopia of cannabis strains and derivative products. The fruit of this methodical approach is evident on Cornerstone’s website where a series of filters – variety; effects (e.g. analgesia, dissociation); greenhouse or sungrown – lead you to suitable strains, described in a poetic blend of wellness-speak and tasting notes: “Mood-lifting and potent full-body relaxation. Wonderful sweet aroma of vanilla cream, cherry and coconut.”

“Since full legalisation, sales are up 40-50 per cent, maybe more. The gold rush is happening.” De la Torre maintains that recreational users come bundled with medical complaints, too. “Stress relief, anxiety, pain management are the big ones.” While business may be booming – LA has something like 185 legal dispensaries and in West Hollywood on-premises licences are in the works – it’s not without complications. The main being the federal Schedule 1 status. “Counter-intuitive and hypocritical, even on their own terms,” vents de la Torre. Practically, it means the Feds treat any use of the banking system as money laundering. “People have figured out how to circumvent that with management companies, but for the most part the big dispensaries are cash businesses.”

There are security issues of dealing with massive quantities of cash, not to mention the hassle of paying everything from rent to employees with paper, and the IRS applies its own set of screws, too. But these nuisances are a minor headache. “No one in California is all that worried, evidenced by the billions of dollars of institution money that’s pouring in.” De la Torre is on the cusp of an incredible transition. “We have a window of five years. Then big companies will have rolled up the small.”

Australia is a littler pond but perhaps with even bigger sharks. As the government puts its toe in the water, loosening regulations around exports, the Cann Group, the country’s first recipient of licences to research and cultivate medical cannabis has seen its stock rise 400 per cent over the past year. Investors such as Ellerston Capital (25 per cent owned by James Packer) may have already made significant profits. Global giants like Canada’s Aurora Cannabis, which owns 22.9 per cent, is sniffing around, according to Australian Financial Review, ready to chomp down the remainder. If you harbour any quaint dreams about a hippie-led commercial cannabis carnival, you should put them in your pipe and smoke them.

 

If Australia is to learn anything from the US it’s that although states’ rights have been instrumental to progress, resolution requires federal action. And for people like Smith, the sooner cannabis is a health issue rather than a criminal one, the better. But the image problem the drug has doesn’t fit our western dualistic thinking. How can something be both good for you and fun at the same time? We can’t imagine a medicine that doesn’t require a spoonful of sugar to make it palatable.

But at the deepest level, western drug policies have little to do with medicine. Historically, they are about race. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, opium became restricted due to its association with Chinese immigrants. Hypocritically, opium consumption was forced on China by British and American “gunboat diplomacy” during the Opium Wars. In the US, cocaine became associated with Blacks and marijuana with Mexicans; drug use in general as a threat to White morality, hence superiority. And there’s still a stigma.

Leveraging the League of Nations, the US anti-narcotics position became de facto global policy. Now, the self-inflicted wound of the pharmaceutically-induced opioid epidemic’s culling of the White population has brought things to a head. Cannabis is increasingly viewed as a salve, even in traditionally red states like Kentucky and Indiana.

Smith chose to go to California not Colorado in part because she preferred sunshine over snow. But in her six months there she rarely got to enjoy it. Weaning herself off prescription drugs pregabalin, then buprenorphine, then duloxetine put her through serial cold turkey – an experience that even as a habitué of unpleasant sensation she found overwhelming.

“If the only side of effect of cannabis is a slight high,” she mused, “I can live with that.” If the national side effects of legalisation are more tax revenue—up to $1.8 billion according to the Greens—for infrastructure, schools and healthcare, a boost to agriculture, plus fewer people in jail, perhaps we can all live with that, too.

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