Pretty Vacant A letter from New York

Cruising Madison Avenue is a supreme form of capitalist seduction. The retail equivalent of a Hollywood smile. Each luxury store is inviting, flawless, gleaming with a sparkle or two. Only now, some teeth are missing. Vacancies are staying that way, often for years, the city’s face looks haggard.

This retail rot is a new form of urban blight. Rust Belt towns with boarded-up Main Streets due to capital flight and evaporating jobs are easily understood. But by any measure New York is booming, cresting its biggest economic expansion in 70 years, unemployment is rock bottom. Yet, our most fashionable neighbourhoods appear like they’ve been looted: Soho, 24 per cent vacant; Herald Square, 31 per cent; Fifth Avenue 33 per cent – a third of the stores in the heart of the city are empty!

Not surprisingly, in the home of conspicuous consumption everyone is freaking out. You can even track this epidemic interactively at vacantnewyork.com. Each glowing red dot a vector of contagion.

It’s not the first time retail has collapsed. Bonwit Teller, B. Altman’s, Peck & Peck, Alexander’s and Gimbal’s department stores that epitomised a mid-century élan receded into collective amnesia like supporting players in a black and white movie. A combination of economics, demographic changes and suburbia’s ascent altered the environment beyond their ability to adapt. But despite apartment doormen being daily barricaded behind Amazon delivery boxes in their lobbies, Internet shopping is not to blame for the current demise.

What’s causing the distress? – Greed.

Even by New York standards the avarice is shocking. Tripling rents, or worse, when leases expire is de rigueur. As the City Council’s Economic Development Committee reports, “If landlords have deep pockets and large property portfolios, it may make more financial sense to claim a tax loss on vacant property than to rent at a non-optimal value.” If luxury boutiques are no longer optimal, who are landlords – and their bankers – waiting for?

Bleecker Street, reminiscent of an alien abduction scene, provides a clue. When I lived in the Village, the quaint thoroughfare was lined by eclectic shops: antiques, Afghan crafts, designer condoms, and the Bird Jungle, where a homesick Aussie could pet a cockatoo. In 1996, feathered friends were replaced by cupcakes, it became the Magnolia Bakery, of Sex and the City fame. Life soon imitated art. A flock of designers set up high-end stores. Marc Jacobs had six, alongside Michael Kors, Burberry, Brooks Brothers and Juicy Couture, paying around US$25,000 monthly per perch. All gone. What does the new landlord, Brookfield Properties, envisage? According to New York Magazine, a mall.

In other words, chain stores. With all the cellphone outlets, banks and drugstores blanketing the city, you have to wonder, are we reduced to texting about going to the ATM and how much toothpaste we need?

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog, which eloquently chronicles the demise of the city’s “mom and pop” stores, champions some solutions. One, the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, proposes a a forum for lease renewals. Beyond nostalgia, small businesses make economic sense, recycling three times more money into their communities than chains. Recently, the City Council lowered the commercial rent tax on smaller retailers, easing some pain. Encouragingly, Mayor De Blasio has voiced support for a tax on landlords for lengthy vacancies.

Is penalising wealthy property owners for not making money un-American or, in fact, profoundly American? A conundrum for even the most ardent economic rationalist.

Kazuo Imai The People’s Republic, Camperdown, Wednesday 12.06.2019

Kazuo Imai ambles through the audience to his chair, shedding a winter jacket and vest and a layer of clothing before setting to work. With his woolly grey hair and bow-legged gait the legendary improviser seems more like some kind of cosmic fisherman than an avant-garde musician. Perhaps in Japan this is one and the same thing? Before him on the  wooden floor a few implements – wire, blocks of wood, pieces of red and blue cloth, a chain and one acoustic guitar.

Such is the near absurdity and mystery of an occasion like this, Imai’s momentary tune-up has people edging forward on their seats, uncertain if the performance has begun. A definite pause makes it clear this is not the case. But when Imai does begin, it seems much the same as before during his tune-up. From there things begin to intensify, with Imai at various times seated in his chair or on the floor, applying tools to his guitar strings and riffing off the sounds this creates, or simply playing the guitar itself with a ferocious or fragmenting energy.

It is hard to escape thoughts of when a child picks up an acoustic guitar with no idea how to play it, and simply begins making sounds with every part of the instrument. An ecstasy almost all of us have traces of in our memory banks.

Imai appears to cultivate this untrained freedom to a much higher level. He offers skilled, barely recognisable glimpses – I’m tempted to say ‘samples’ – of flamenco, Delta blues, gypsy music, and classical playing, and Eastern sounds suggestive of the Japanese koto. The latter instrument was formed to mimic the shell and the stomach of a dragon. Imai is like this on his acoustic guitar, all shell and stomach, eating many things, a modern-day dragon brewing his fire out of barely recognisable elements that collapse into his purpose.

What follows is a list of rolling impressions formed immediately in response to the music as Imai plays on his guitar. Pieces of thought, metaphorical wood to burn…

 

Notes on Piece #1

Lattice tune up
Doors, traffic
Claw frenzy acoustic
Accelerated swimming
Child-play
Clock tock
Instrument emerges
Guts into wood
Water
Violence
Tin
Rain soft
Piano sound
Guitar of dots
Speed lead abruptions
Lie-detector nerves
Spain
Japan
Tim Buckley flamenco
Torsion
Saw violin
Cinema traffic
Rag on strings
Remnant blues, ghost America
Tooth
Pulse
Drone telegram
End?

(Applause)

Notes on Piece #2

Clock panic
Romance
Django finger break
Language of stars, cold
Radio telescope
Pin pricks
Animal hide
Rain water enters a cup
Invisible torrent
Too many headlights
Branch breaks in wild wind
Storm through a window
Far away
Silence begins

(Applause)

Notes on Piece #3

Gutting
Child’s toy turning
Path
Ants
Tension lives with joy

(Applause)

Kazuo Imai bows.
Wipes his face with dark blue hand towel.
Places cloth over his head. Covers his face in shadow.

‘Telling time.’ Kazuo Imai at The People’s Republic, Camperdown (13.06.19). Photo by Mark Mordue.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Artist: Kazuo Imai, leader of the legendary Japanese free music quartet Marginal Consort. Playing solo on acoustic guitar this evening.

Tools: Classical acoustic guitar with nylon strings, violin bow, pieces of cloth, one strand of wire, two square blocks of wood, neck chain, metal clasp, wooden pipes or wind chimes, xylophone mallets.

Sound: Matt McGuigan, Hospital Hill.

Venue: The People’s Republic, a warehouse venue and private home dedicated to monthly experimental music performances and underground readings. Its website slogan: “For the people, by the people”. Invitation to shows are via a closed email list only. Performances take place in a large lounge-room space seating up to 80 people, with high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling book cases, artworks and an interior fish pond. Entry is by donation in a glass jar –with all monies going directly to the artist. Hosts and curators: Nick Shimmin and Corinne Vernizeau.

Background: Kazuo Imai requested the opportunity to play solo prior to his group Marginal Consort’s performance at Carriageworks on the coming Friday night. Founded by Imai in 1997, Marginal Consort are a renowned avant-garde musical collective who usually play just once a year. Rarity of appearances and ritual focus makes them one of the more featured items on Lawrence English’s 2019 Open Frame/Room 40 weekend event at Carriageworks, “an annual festival of transgressive sound… a project of contrast and aural spectra.” Marginal Consort’s members were students of the composer and violinist, Takehisa Kosugi, who was a contemporary of fellow experimental composers like John Cage, and similarly interested in drones and deconstruction with a distinct Japanese flavour. English musician and musicologist Julian Cope once described a musical work of Kosugi’s as “reminiscent of the creaking rigging of the unmanned Mary Celeste”. After graduating from Kosugi’s Bigaku School of Aesthetics in 1976, the students who would eventually form Marginal Consort independently established themselves as significant figures in the Japanese underground music scene, with Kazuo Imai most notable among them for his performances on guitar and viola de gamba. Imai also studied under the noise musician and free jazz improviser Masayuki Takayanagi, described by Neu Guitars as “one of those extreme mavericks who combined virtuoso playing and extreme grasp of musical theory with radically atonal freerock amp destruction.” Tellingly, he was the only student of Takayanagi’s to ever graduate.

Proposition: Respond to the improvised playing of Kazuo Imai with associated lines of thought, images, sounds and words, as suggested by his music as it is happening. Putting these ‘associated words’ on to a woodcut print, partially sanded and scratched, punished then polished, might better parallel the roughness and erasure that Imai makes use of as playing and compositional techniques. His raw yet considered approaches resulted in a meditative, stressed, oddly shining performance tonight. Can formal criticism approach this or must the structure of criticism bend with his approach?

‘Kazuo Imai was here.’ The People’s Republic, Camperdown (13.06.19). Photo by Mark Mordue.

Kazuo Imai appears with the Marginal Consort collective at Lawrence English’s 2019 Open Frame/Room 40 event at Carriageworks, this Friday, 14.06.2019. Details here.

The Youth Are Rising School Strike 4 Climate, Sydney, 15.03.2019

Town Hall swims. Thousands of students from across Sydney rage on in and take the stairs, the streets, washing over and around this bullshit city’s roadworks and ‘developments’, filling the sky with sound.

 

“The youth are rising.

No more compromising.”

 

The chant breaks and remakes itself. Parents lead infants with placards of animals and fish drawn with hope. ‘Nanas Knitting for….’ move too fast to catch their slogan! Anti Adani feeling is rife, unmistakeable.

If the old are here with the young, they remain wildly outnumbered. It’s hard not to be excited and amused by the passion and the wit of this ‘new’ generation and its fight for the planet and its future.

 

“The youth are rising.

No more compromising.”

 

‘Sorry I can’t go to school today, I have to save the planet.’ School Strike 4 Climate, Sydney. 15.03.19. Photography by Mark Mordue.

On the steps, young people take the microphone – 14, 15, 16, 17 – speaking clearly, rousing the crowd.

Danielle bags the PM for his put-down of the School Strike 4 Climate gathering last November. She says, “If you wanted less activism you could remove basic science from the syllabus. Alternatively, you could start doing your job.”

The children of this revolution cheer and laugh. “This right here right now, this is what democracy looks like.”

It’s a shock to be reminded of the value of physical action and its energy in a digital age of ‘Likes’. As if in being here, and breathing in the atmosphere, something forgotten about people power is, quite literally, reborn.

 

“The youth are rising.

No more compromising.”

 

‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, old men stop snoring.” School Strike 4 Climate, Sydney. 15.03.19. Photography by Mark Mordue.

Daisy steps to the microphone. “I’m 16 and I’m so proud to be striking with you for a better future.”

“We can’t vote,” she says, “but we’re here to make sure those in parliament know we need climate action now.”

“Together we are changing the world. We say our planet needs us. We say climate action now!”

 

 “The youth are rising.

No more compromising.”

 

‘Steve Irwin would be disappointed.’ School Strike 4 Climate, Sydney. 15.03.19. Photography by Mark Mordue.

Adrian is 17. “How amazing it is everyone is here today to fight for our futures.”

More and more roll up to declare themselves. Ribbons of belief. The thinking and feeling are present in the placards and the energy and the voices. All that love and anger and humour in the city square…

‘Sorry I can’t go to school today. I have to save the planet.’

‘There is no PLAN(et) B!’

‘Cursed are the schoolkids for they shall inherit the Earth.’

‘Our future is not yours to have!’

‘You have ruined the Earth. Change, or the Earth will ruin you!’

We take to the streets, a loose march all the way to Hyde Park. The sun seems to have come out to brighten the way and the high buildings above us after spits of rainy gloom never realised themselves. The issues are complex. Of course, of course. But this story is simple…

 

“The youth are rising

No more compromising.”

 

‘I’m so hot.’ School Strike 4 Climate, Sydney. 15.03.19. Photography by Mark Mordue.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Friends Robert Forster in Summer Hill

The red storm that threatened Sydney has passed, leaving only a tightness of breath, a fine veneer of dust over everything, and a vague taste of dirt on the tongue and in the back of your throat. Micro-particles swept off the drought-stricken surface of the Murray Darling Basin and carried citywards over the Blue Mountains by dry powerful winds; nature’s own dose of toxicity reminding us it is always there to be felt. All blown away for now, it seems, leaving us with a perfect Sunday afternoon, the kind of sunny day where nothing can go wrong.

I guess the internet is a little like that, the communication static like so much dust in our minds and hearts. There are illusions of intimacy when we get ‘social’ online, but the truth is we don’t get close till we meet. Suddenly there’s a reminder in a backyard party that we’re still a part of a community and its history. You breathe a little better that night when you go to sleep.

Samantha and I walk in and Robert Forster has already begun. It’s only 4.30pm and as expected I’ve struggled to get here, sorting my kids out till I can return in a few hours’ time and make dinner. We stand at the back, in the entrance to the kitchen, leaning against wooden cupboards. Forster is neatly framed by a large doorway opening out into a rectangular yard, a grey sheet and a blue-and-red sheet hung from a clothes line behind him to give off the mood of a makeshift stage, something akin to Forster playing from the back of a circus or rodeo truck.

Artwork: Robert Forster, The Best of the Solo Recordings.

As one of The Go-Betweens’ principal songwriters and one of the country’s finest music critics, Forster is something of an icon in the landscape. Tall, effete, strangely wide-eyed – as if something humorous has happened that we can’t quite see – Forster writes similarly strange, effete, wide-eyed songs about loneliness and life, celebrating it with ease in songs like ‘Spring Rain’ or darkening his lens in ‘The Clarke Sisters’, one of his many portraits of female struggle and empathy that make him rather unique as a male songwriter in this country.

Samantha bumps into an old friend she used to share a house with in Surry Hills thirty years ago. Samantha’s mother has died only a few weeks back and the friend is one of the very few people in Sydney who met and knew her; a crossed wire of fate that allows for a little commiseration today. I meanwhile look down and see Shelley sitting on a lounge, laughing. Our kids used to play together when I lived out at Millthorpe, working on my first book. She takes a selfie of us and sends it to Frannie in Millthorpe, beautiful Frannie who lost her brother so painfully to drugs decades ago, and in whose garden I’d lived, making coffee on a pot-bellied stove and watching country mists envelope it in winter, the trees all spare as bones.

Already it is clear the afternoon will be one of acquaintances and surprises, of old familiar faces coming back into view. Its takes at least one song before Samantha and I can focus on what Robert Forster is doing. Hear him inside ourselves rather than just with our ears. That settling of self into the sound; or the sound settling into you.

The first song that makes an impression is an amusing one, ‘I Love Myself (And I Always Have)’. Forster preambles it by saying it’s one some people really relate to. There’s a great line in the song about how, “I look into the mirror – and I smile.” It’s a very Forster type of trick, the second half of the line dropping in after a marked pause. It’s funny, like a punchline left hanging in space. As if the pause itself might be the joke. There’s a sly, paradoxical element of encouragement in it. You can love yourself, if you so wish.

After it’s over, someone calls out and asks who the song is about. “You know what,” Forster says, “I will tell you.” Everyone’s waiting for the big reveal, but Forster tells this foolish story of sending himself an email to test if his messages were working, writing himself a note, “Hello Robert, how are you? I’m feeling really good…” Days later his wife happened to open the message and remarked to him, “You really like yourself, don’t you?” Forster reckons it was an easy jump to the lyric and title for his song.

Soon enough, he plays ‘Darlinghurst Nights’ with its memorable opening line, “I opened up the notebook and out jumped some tears.” Darlinghurst 1986 he says, a time and place I know well too. Nostalgia and sorrow and something alive get all mixed up in the song; the afternoon sunlight is a deep hot yellow, passing little diamonds over Forster through the shaking leaves of a backyard tree that gives him even more precious shade. The synchronicity of natural light and shadow is a neat light show for the song itself.

Forster lifts the mood with ‘Spring Rain’. ‘Surfing Magazines’ is a hushed singalong, a call to a teenage coast. Later Forster puts his hands over his eyes to pretend he is going backstage while we clap for more. He ‘returns’ with an exquisite reading of ‘Dive for Your Memory’ that is enough to make you weep. The story of a lover saying they had no chance; and his invocation in return, “We stood that chance.” It makes me think of the old John Cassavetes wisdom from the film Love Streams… love never dies, it only changes form, from love to hate to regret to friendship to memory. Real love remains in what you are; having defined you, it’s not something that can be erased. One feels the ghost of Forster’s old song-writing partner from The Go-Betweens, Grant McLennan, emerging somehow in all this.

Robert Forster in a Summer Hill backyard. 25/11/18. Photography by Christine Harris-Smyth.

Forster ends with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend’. Again, it is from a woman’s perspective, the lover of a rock ‘n’ roll journeyman who seems to be sliding down in his career more than he is rising upwards. Yet another performer lost in music: “You’re home late and you smell of music. All my patience, all my love, that’s now all at stake.”

When the song ends, Forster is greeted by deep applause. It’s been a set of rapture and regret, with those typical flashes of flamboyance and humour that make him so original. Forster’s literary qualities and near-awkward, yet catchy guitar work (when Forster plays a lead he concentrates like a 12-year-old learning his first chords) opens itself to his influences: the Velvet Underground, The Only Ones, the Modern Lovers, Dylan… but there’s a formality with his humour that could just as easily make him the Jane Austen of Oz Rock, as well as a dreaming freeness that suggests a touch of Jack Kerouac’s romanticism is in his blood too.

It’s so easy to take people who have been around a long while for granted. Australia can be especially cruel in this regard. Watching Forster exert his magic I am reminded of those icons I have grown up with, most especially during that era in the late 70s and 1980s when certain songwriters and performers became part of how we lived and marked out some freedom or imagining for us… Forster and McLennan, Kuepper and Bailey, Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard and Mick Harvey, Rob Younger and Deniz Tek, Paul Kelly… there are many others, of course, but for someone like me these figures were like imaginary older brothers who reported back on a world I might somehow be a part of too.

Backyard concerts like these come from websites like Parlour, where artists can make a deeper connection with fans – and where fans can create small community events that connect people to a beautiful moment like today. Inevitably in this crowd of about 80 or so people everyone knows one another – or someone that has known you. An artist called Peter says hello to me, hands me a sticker of a coffee cup with two polar bears sitting inside (I don’t know why, but I like it). Another artist friend called John talks to me about poetry and how he is making stop-motion films for what he is writing. He says he heard once that Morrissey had said Robert Forster had been an influence on him, something that makes a lot of sense given The Go-Between and The Smiths were both with the UK label Rough Trade.

Forster remembers me from past interviews we have done and comes up to say hello. I tell him how ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend’ gave me this funny feeling inside – and make a stabbing motion to my heart. “Good,” he says, “that funny feeling is what I am going for.”

The journalist Rick Feneley approaches us and we all talk about the beauty of the afternoon and the warm sense of the crowd. I’m reminded of Rick’s early first book Sly, the story of a boy growing up on the south coast of New South Wales and how much it reminded me of my growing up too. Standing with Robert and Rick there’s this faint feeling of shared boyhood that is hard to put a finger on. Maybe that is what this is all about… uncovering or recovering ourselves again and again.

Robert has other people to speak with, but he tells me he saw Dave Graney and Clare Moore play in Brisbane recently and how great they were. That I really must see them. He loved catching up with them after and finding out about old Melbourne friends. “Dave and Clare – they always bring the good news.”

It’s only just past six when Samantha and I leave. I almost forget to say goodbye to Christine who organised the event with her partner John. His previous partner of nearly three decades died a few years ago and his 50th was riven with grief. Christine had decided with John to make a happy birthday occasion for him this year, a kind of belated new dawn. “John is the love of my life,” she says. The passion is so Christine. She had messaged me at the last moment to see if I’d like to drop by on the day. With the paper I was working for having gone into hiatus, and Christmas coming up, I admitted it was probably not something I could afford – but Christine told me to come anyway and we’d just work it out – and that funny old feeling of knowing people and past lives and kindness came back to me, as it so often does. Always this kindness and generosity from people that I feel I only half know, yet am somehow bonded with across the days and nights of my inner city life.

Samantha and I hold hands walking up the street. I will drop her home and return to my children to make them dinner. And the afternoon will stay with me like the sunlight through the trees of the backyard, little bits of memory and diamonds of connection with all my rock ‘n’ roll friends.

Mark Mordue, Robert Forster and Rick Feneley in Summer Hill. 25/11/18.  Photography by Samantha Hutchison.

 

 

Accidents Will Happen What drove me to first aid training

It was school’s out time as I rounded the corner of the old town hall to see a small body flying from a bike and slam head first, hard into a metal bus shelter frame, bounce off, flip over and land. Kids on bikes behind screeched to a stop as I ran to the crumpled body of a small 13-year-old girl lying on her back, eyes wide with a ‘what the hell just happened’ look.

Smack in the middle of her forehead was a long deep gash, skin cut right to the skull. It began bleeding. Handily, I’d just bought a big second-hand t-shirt from one of the fabulous charity shops up the road. It was in my hand, it was big and it was clean. I pressed it on her forehead to stop the bleeding as I asked her name and told her to try to slow her breathing. She was conscious. Good. And responsive. Even better. Her frightened young friend called an ambulance.

Once the paramedics had taken over, I said “bike helmets!”, walked away shaken and dumped the bloodied t-shirt in the bin. That night, working through the “did I do enough?”, “should I have…” self-debrief I reaffirmed a promise I’d made to myself just months before.

Last week I took the two-day intensive St John Ambulance first aid course that I’d promised myself. Not long before my brief and eventful bicycle crash, I’d found myself performing CPR on a student at my university workplace. In a horrid coincidence, two well-trained first aid officers were on another campus that day, and another – well, her training apparently didn’t instil much in the way of leadership skills, let alone common sense. She’d left the turning-blue, not breathing casualty to wait for the ambulance downstairs.

Hence, someone running into my office to urgently ask if anyone could perform CPR.  After what felt like an interminable wait for someone, any one of the dozen or so people in the room to respond, I put my hand up. I was not trained. But I had read the first aid guff on the wall many times while waiting for the kettle to boil, and had listened to my son as he related his first aid training done as a school holiday activity. I was not confident, but what I knew with certainty was that every second counted. In a crisis, act.

As we worked through the first aid course, memories of more awful emergency incidents I’d been involved in flooded back, along with the trauma, and in one sad case, grief. An overdose on the doorstep of my Darlinghurst flat. My desperate attempts at resuscitation worked, mostly because I was yelling at her to “just breath!” And she did.

When John died upstairs of a massive heart attack a year later in my shared house a few blocks away, my and my sister’s resuscitation attempts were pointless. His heart probably stopped hours before, soon after he’d asked me to take care of his little girl and headed up to the attic room, looking pale. John was dying when he spoke to me, but despite his own medical training, didn’t alert me; no doubt to not frighten his daughter. It’s still hard to believe I was the last person he spoke to when he asked me to “Please take care of Tiffany.”  

Since then it’s been smaller incidents, every one fine. Though the young woman who was knocked off her bike that day thought I was mad for making her call home after she landed on her head, no helmet. The worst really was hearing my little boy’s screams after what turned out to be another bike accident that badly grazed his knees (helmet on).

The first aid course was jammed packed, and I hope I can recall all the right responses to different spiders and snakes. I do know I’ve only got seven minutes for the really nasty ones. I can identify strokes, seizures and someone having a heart attack, when and how to deliver CPR and a whole lot more. The trainer confirmed that the risk of death outweighs the risk of harm, so acting, within the scope of my training, is the right thing to do. As life has shown me, I’m not bad in an emergency. Now, I have the confidence take charge and provide first aid until the real lifesavers arrive. Life being what it is, the bets are on I’ll never need it.

 

StJohn Ambulance Australia provide first aid courses, training and eqipment across Australia. You can find more information and book here

The breast star of a Knight of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. Image by Dave Boven [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons.

A Star is Born Standing in the shadows of love

I see the billboards all over town. They make me dream of something. I guess that’s their purpose: to entice me to see the film. Some dumb Hollywood romance. Why should that appeal? I’m not quite sure. But I am thinking tonight, after taking a walk beneath a nearby railway overpass to photograph one of those billboards, that I saw a glimmer of something else.

I start to think about the nature of what I have been receiving about male identity on social media and alike lately. Which is largely to say that straight white males are, by their very essence, violent, polluted and disgusting beings.

Around me I see and hear parents worrying for their sons – and their daughters – and what this pathological shift in the conversation means. One might hope it cultivates more peace and tolerance for all, but some perverse degradation of boys seems to be growing like a cancer. And with it a future hopelessness when it comes to any reconciliation between, let alone beyond, genders, not to mention a word like ‘love’ mattering.

A Star is Born will hardly change that. Even so, it is already one of the biggest films of the year. And what is popular entertainment if not a distraction from, or an affirmation of the forces within and around us? As a restorative to romance, A Star is Born does bring something special to the table despite its slightness of form. Though ‘restorative’ is the wrong word once you’ve watched the film; perhaps ‘provocation’ is better?

With fortuitous timing, it has something powerful to say about ‘toxic masculinity’, painting an unusually believable portrait of male energy hedged between self-determination and self-destruction. And the ways in which women might suffer in the shadow of that existential struggle, or find their own costly liberation.

Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) and Ally Campana (Lady Gaga) make music together in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

From the moment the film opened, I sensed a very different beast to the so-bad-it’s-good expectations I had been willing to settle for. Maybe I’d been imagining an earlier version when Beyoncé and Tom Cruise were being mooted for the lead roles. What a brilliant car wreck of egos that might have been!

In a time when Marvel superhero movies dominate the box office, and more sophisticated alternatives slant toward indie cinema, A Star is Born emerges as a genuine oddity: a mainstream entertainment for grown-ups. It does not feature robots, explosions or James Bond; nor does it subject us to purely brutal sojourns or weird, sardonic riffs on pop culture. It is, as advertised, a great big romance with a bunch of great, big songs.

What should have been entirely clichéd, even generically camp, punches above its multiplex weight to leave you surprised and even moved. A Star is Born is a film I will remember for the rest of my life. And that, I really did not expect.

Now, of course, it’s hard to imagine anyone else but Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper as our star-crossed lovers. In this fourth version of the story, Gaga and Cooper inherit a mantle that began with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March (1937) and continued with Judy Garland and James Mason (1954), before reaching a grandiose blowout of sorts in the Laurel Canyon era with Barbra Streisand and her ex-boyfriend Kris Kristofferson (1976).

While every one of those performances is memorable, it’s Garland who towers like some sacrificial goddess over the film’s history, not to mention its histrionic impact.

It might be of interest to note the Streisand-Kristofferson vehicle was co-scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, never shy of a drink himself, nor unversed in having to cope with his wife’s rocketing literary reputation and his own second ranking. Streisand and her then husband Jon Peters meanwhile co-produced the 1976 film with a much cooler eye on her career. If we return to Garland’s anxious, erratic brilliance in what was then her pilled-out ‘comeback’ role, or Streisand’s excessively patronised control over all her life and work (manifest in critical attacks on her for everything from her singing to her perm and her nose), we see how A Star is Born has always functioned as an autobiographical echo chamber for whoever gets involved with it.

All these versions run with the same basic narrative themes. A fading male superstar discovers a budding female superstar. Will the tensions of their rising-and-falling career arcs destroy their love? Or will their love for one another compromise their artistry? Or is it inevitable that one must survive, even thrive at the expense of the other?

Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

In keeping with its romantic outlines, A Star is Born hits the box office in numerous ways: as a date movie; a generation-bridging remake you can take your mum to; a proto-feminist fable; and a bastion of gay culture and its obsession with musicals and anything with a smidge of melodrama. Promoted as a vehicle for the 32-year-old Lady Gaga in her feature debut as an actress, the film underlines her major pitch for a place in the gay pantheon beside Garland and Streisand. It also pays off her obvious debts to Madonna – and takes Lady Gaga to a planet her cultural precursor never reached. While I don’t think Gaga will get an Oscar for her role, she might well gain a nomination and enjoy a very good evening at the Golden Globes along the way.

Pastiche can seem like a very limited art. It owes more than it gives, even steals. But now and again the recycling can bring you to something wonderful. A Star is Born works in this way, taking the best of the previous films and throwing away what doesn’t work. It’s all the better for doing that job sincerely. There’s no winking at the audience; no sly ironies or glittering brashness. The whole thing is executed as if this were Romeo and Juliet – in ecstasy, then struggling to the death for their love.

Bradley Cooper both stars in and directs the film. A breath-taking achievement. He was mentored in some vaguely inspirational way, perhaps, by Clint Eastwood, who invited a then reluctant Cooper to be the film’s lead almost eight years ago. Eastwood was slated to direct, but the project languished in ‘development’ and the granite fox of Hollywood moved on. Whispers of this director and that star continued as the whole thing tilted away. Cooper dealt with his father dying, became a major star (best known for his leads in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and American Sniper) and felt ready for a role he’d formerly believed he was too young to pull off. It wasn’t long before Cooper took over completely to make it happen. It’s now the first step in what will clearly be a very important directorial career for the 43-year-old star.

During filming, Cooper would become a father himself; Lady Gaga would lose one of her best friends to a long-running battle with cancer, rushing to her death bed on the day she was slated to perform the very last song of the movie. Her friend died only minutes before she reached the hospital. Gaga was encouraged by her friend’s husband to return to the set of A Star is Born and sing ‘I’ll Never Love Again’. As a closing performance, it is a grieving stunner, a double goodbye – to her beloved in the film and her beloved beyond it.

Ally (Lady Gaga) takes the stage in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

A Star is Born begins with country rock star Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) throwing down pills and a tumbler of bourbon before he strides on stage to feedback and launches himself into a swaying, heavy song he calls ‘Black Eyes’: “Black eyes open wide / It’s time to testify/ There’s no room for life / And everyone’s waiting for you… By the wayside / By the wayside.”

The energy of the music, the knockdown lyrics and the cinematography could be out of some imaginary documentary for Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. I’d almost have been happy to watch this play out as an entire concert on screen. Hearing the soundtrack album later it’s enjoyable, yes, but I’m surprised at how much more urgent the film made everything seem. As Jackson Maine, Cooper made me feel like everything was right on the line. And the lyrics for ‘Black Eyes’, well… they’re suicide ideation in spades.

Let’s face it, with a few exceptions (David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth; Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine or Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line), the territorial cross-over between musicians and actors has usually been embarrassing. Required to act, most singers are stiff as cardboard, boxed-in by a narcissism they can only release live on stage; as pretend musicians, actors come off like ballet dancers trying to be boxers, no force behind their poses.

A Star is Born transcends those dilemmas. Cooper has stated he tried to draw inspiration from Pearl Jam’s Eddy Vedder for his on-stage performances as Jackson Maine. He’s done okay by his musical hero. The actor spent two years taking vocal lessons, reckoning his voice deepened by almost an octave to meet the demands of filming.

His newly minted baritone was about more than just the singing too. When he arranged a meeting with fellow actor Sam Elliott, Cooper played him a tape to try and persuade him to take part in the film. “This is going to sound weird,” Cooper told him. What Elliott heard when Cooper pressed ‘PLAY’ was someone who’d spent the last six months with a dialect coach trying to sound very much like him. Elliott was flattered and impressed. He accepted the role of Bobby, Jackson’s manager and older brother, a failed musician who had brought Jackson up on the road and taught him everything he knows.

The acrimony and frustration that almost drowns out their brotherly love is one of the finest depictions of repressed male empathy I’ve seen on film; saying too little, yet communicating so much. When Jackson finally confesses to Bobby that it’s not their father he admired, it’s him, there’s a deluge of feelings in Sam Elliott’s red-rimmed eyes and panicked turn of a wheel as he reverses away from the conversation in his car. It is simply too much pain and love in one damaged lifetime to absorb.

Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) and his brother Bobby (Sam Elliott) in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

Not un-coincidentally, the band Jackson plays with in A Star is Born is Lukas Nelson and The Promise of the Real. Nelson is Willie Nelson’s son, though his group is more lately known for being Neil Young’s backing band, a job description Pearl Jam have likewise filled in the past. All the concert scenes are 100% as they happened, live performances filmed as a warm-up act for Willie Nelson and various other rock ‘n’ roll connections, among them Kris Kristofferson, who gave the band four minutes of his own set time at Glastonbury to do their thing for the cameras. This level of musical authenticity pays off. The band smells of the road, with a shot glass full of Cooper’s genuine stage fright for added edge. In the meanwhile, Lady Gaga insisted all vocal performances be live-to-film, not lip-synced. She could do it, could they? The whole thing comes alive as a result.

It’s also clear Cooper owes a lot to Kris Kristofferson’s fragmenting take on rock stardom in the 1976 version of A Star is Born, and even more to Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning turn as Otis ‘Bad’ Blake, the booze-ruined country singer in Crazy Heart (2009). Putting those roles beside Cooper-as-Jackson now, Kristofferson could be his older brother and Bridges his father in some mash-up on YouTube.

When Jackson staggers into a corner bar, desperate for yet more to drink after the hyper-charged ‘Black Eyes’ stadium show (a song written by Cooper/Jackson and performed by him before a very large audience for the first time) it turns out to be a nightclub hangout for drag queens. Among the film’s early reliefs is us not having to deal with the cliché of a straight guy who can’t cope with a gay scene, especially when that guy is an alcoholic, drug-fucked rock star. One of life’s natural born explorers, Jackson’s delighted to have a glass in his hand and enter another world.

As the waiting-to-be-discovered nightclub singer Ally Campana, Lady Gaga is, of course, the main attraction of the drag show. She’s the only girl they’d let do that, something she later explains is “an honour” for her. As Ally, she struts through the crowd and lounges across the bar in front of Jackson, cycling her legs in the air and generally rejoicing in Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’ as well as sporting Liza Minelli’s eyebrows, a tribute of sorts to Garland. It was a performance of this song as Lady Gaga at a charity benefit two years previous that convinced Cooper to cast the singer as his leading lady. Art imitates life imitates art…

Jackson is inevitably besotted by this unknown talent, though Cooper-as-Jackson does lay on his starry-eyed beguilement a little thick. As you might expect, Gaga feels similarly unsteady in these early scenes, overdoing things or stumbling in a way that seems less like ‘acting awkward’ and more like ‘I’m-just-not-sure-what-to-do-here’. But whenever things do threaten to get a little hammy or clumsy with either actor, there’s a feeling of voyeurism that jostles your reservations. It’s as if we’ve been dropped in a little too close for comfort to something hyper-real – and are seeing the way we tend to act in self-made movies about ourselves whenever we get caught up in romance. It’s that most wonderful of movies: up all night talking, falling in love. Even the late-night Super ‘A’ Foods store is magical, its car park like some neon stage set for Ally to perform acapella, a bag of frozen peas strapped to her bruised fist for extra perfection.

Lady Gaga in girl-next-door mode as Ally Campana in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique takes this intimate reality further by keeping the screen focus very tightly on the actors throughout. Best known for working regularly with Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan and Mother among others) he brings the same intense closeness and physical presence to this much more mainstream Hollywood fable. When Cooper is playing drunk you can almost smell the alcohol sweat; touch his matted hair. Lady Gaga sans make-up is given no room to escape; it’s bold of her to reveal herself so; and she grows mightily in girl-next-door charm and presence across the film. When she does drop into her more theatricalized pop style you’re confused as to which aspect of her you prefer. The ‘real’ Gaga being her girl-next-door self, or the ‘artificial’ Ally that is becoming a total performer? The truth is Ally, like Gaga, has roots in drag shows and relates to Piaf and pop music as much as any of Jackson’s ‘authentic’ alt-country dreams for her.

A viewing of the recent Lady Gaga documentary, Five Feet Two (2017), which went behind the scenes for the creation of her album Joanne, only adds to the echo-chamber effect. With Joanne, Gaga took on a more countrified style, all pink Stetson hat and attitude, her mission on the album being to reveal the real Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. In other words, Gaga had decided to perform herself. A Star is Born continues this ‘real’ direction for her, which only makes feminist critiques of the film seem misplaced when they attack Jackson’s dreams for Ally being authentic as some patriarchal imposition from Cooper the director. In fact, what we see is Ally learning to act the star and control the degree of her performance, in terms of both its authentic and synthetic nature, a division of understanding Jackson could never make. A star is born, alright – in a hall of mirrors.

For the first half of the film Ally will embrace Jackson’s rootsier world. Her bedroom will show a Carole King poster; as her confidence grows you’ll maybe get a glimpse of Stevie Nicks and Rickie Lee Jones in her heart as well. She’ll confide in Jackson about her inability to get breaks in music because of her nose and how ugly she was made to feel whenever industry interest had circled around her. Creating songs with Ally, dueting with her at his shows, Jackson shoots her straight into the spotlight with him. Then Rez Gavron (Rafi Gavron) turns up with all the smoothness of a shark in the water, an English producer and star-maker who sees her potential rising “way beyond” where she and Jackson are at. Ally will ultimately determine her own direction.

Jack (Bradley Cooper) and Ally (Lady Gaga) on tour in ‘A Star is Born’. 2018.

Strange echoes lap at the edges of the story: Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love; Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates; Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman… A Star is Born seems to reside in between the darkest and most powerful of rock ‘n’ roll myths and showbiz rehab clichés. Yet these legends and celebrities reemerge in your mind as human beings with real pains and aches as you watch the film. The gods are people too, after all. It sounds trite, but it’s easy to forget.

We will learn that Jackson’s 18-year-old mother died in childbirth. And that his father was a talented musician and self-annihilating alcoholic who drank himself to death while Jackson was in his early teens. A devastating account of a suicide attempt as a 12-year-old, told quite comically, and thereby very realistically, explains a lot about the suffering Jackson still carries inside him. He begins to take on the energy of a lion breaking down. The steady decline of Jackson’s hearing as his tinnitus worsens only adds to the feeling of a man losing his grip on everything that matters. He can’t even hear his own guitar playing any more. Cooper does a great job of presenting Jackson post-rehab, stripped of his carapace of alcohol and braggadocio, nothing but bright nerves and mortal shame for his behaviour. In the growing sense of the film those early scenes depicting Jackson’s worship of Ally start to make a lot more sense retrospectively. He’s a lost boy looking for an angel. And he believes he has found one in her.

By contrast, Ally was raised by a loving, even adoring Italian father (Andrew Dice Clay) who has overcome his own alcohol problems, though not his affable illusions of having been a singer who was once “as good as Sinatra”. She also has a fleet of flawed, but amusingly decent male role models around her due to the fact her father works as a professional driver and chauffer. It’s hazy where her mother might have gone, but the role play is clear: Ally’s a carer, a proxy mother to her boy-father.

The nice thing about A Star is Born is it does not overplay these character set-ups to the point of hysterical messaging. Any archetypal forces are influences, not jail terms defining identity. Ally’s father is also trying to dream her free of him to make her fulfil her talent; she’s let the industry dent her confidence and hangs on to where she feels needed most. Transposing her attention from her father to Jackson is one way she can cross that bridge. But there’s a lot of strength in Ally, a lot of ambition nonetheless. Conversely, when Jackson smears a cream pie in her face, jealous of her advancing stardom and changes in her music, Ally laughs it off as a funny reminder of her artistic vanity (later they will use the same gesture at their wedding rather more lovingly). Yet you sense her laughter is a skilled defusal of something darker and more malicious in Jackson’s injured male pride. There’s never a clarification of that. Time and again, as the director, Cooper leaves the audience to interpret a scene rather than be confirmed one way or another in its meaning. The truth, of course, is that many things can be true at once. And some things are never clear.

Along with Andrew Dice Clay, Cooper has cast another comedian against type in a vital dramatic role – Dave Chappelle as an old friend and ex-muso called Noodles who hauls Jackson’s drunken body from the kerbside flowerbed out front of his family home. It has the feeling of this-has-happened-before. Chappelle is a revelation – subtle, amused, non-judgemental, but also firm, the guy who has your back and tells you little truths quietly. He tries to explain to Jackson how his own domestic bliss has come from staying put and coming to recognize how happy that has made him. Noodles has stopped running from himself and found his dream was altogether humbler and closer than he ever realized. He just had to grow into it. Inspired by Noodles, Jackson loops a steel guitar string into a wedding ring and proposes to Ally when she flies to be with him.

It can’t last. Jackson can’t get to that full wisdom that Noodles has tried to impart and Ally offers. He is too caught up in alcohol – and the agonies of his upbringing. He remains, forever, his drunken father’s injured son. A lost boy undeserving of love. To Jackson’s way of thinking a sacrifice is needed. And she will be the one who shines on without him.

Billboard, ‘A Star is Born’, Sydney. 2018. Photography by Mark Mordue.

 

 

 

Murder Mystery Mystery Murdered! … or a game of Strip Jack Naked, with Christ and Nicholas Cage

They proved the identity of Jack the Ripper from semen stains and DNA. He was a 23 year old paranoid schizophrenic Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski. Tragic. Not because the Ripper was so ordinary – not the crown prince, or Lewis Carroll – but because his mystery has been destroyed. RIP Ripper, they finally killed you.

I wish you were still out there Jack, stalking the smoggy alleys of the mind. Spare me the burden of proof. I want my wonder left intact.

The Titanic was more lost in being found. Leave sunken galleons to lie on the ocean bed of the mind. It’s enough to know they’re out there, in fathomless imagination, living better and richer lives.

Must it all be discovered, plundered, colonised?

Would you really want Christ to come back? It could only be a letdown. Like the Beatles reformed with just Ringo. Christ’d look like Woody Allen. Only darker, weedier. (Actually Jesus did come back, in 1972. They locked him in dungeon under the Vatican, and there he remains still. They can’t afford to let loose the golden goose. He’s a madman who’d spoil everything.)  

 

I’m glad Shakespeare’s an enigma who doesn’t compute. I don’t want him laid out like an anatomy lecture, forensically hosed away. Don’t want his brain in a jar. Don’t want to see his soiled tights. Don’t want his ‘actual true’ biography, to know about his money, friends, hobbies, sex life. Don’t need to know if he was ogre, arsehole, prince, straight, gay, bi, trans, man, woman, beast or mforphodite.

In any case he’s all there, hidden in plain sight in the writing. He gave us life in spades, prodigiously spattered, gloriously unfurled, across stage and page, his body of work a vast living organism, open, evident and ever-giving, a continental taproot, a universal orchard for all to pluck at will. And you want his poor flawed corpse as well? Jackals. Let his enigma lie.

But maybe that’s just me.

I live in the village of expectation. But I never really want the harvest to come to fruition. My aversion to ‘knowing’ is maybe tied to my aversion to finishing things, of concluding, which, in turn, is probably rooted in an infantilized fear of maturing, being responsible, growing old and dying. What do you think doctor? Do you think Finding Out, Knowing, is like Retire and Die?

[Knowing is a sci-fi-apocalypse film with Nicholas Cage, made in Melbourne, and set in America. Friends deride the film, but I like it, despite the revelation of the mind-fracking truth which lies at the film’s heart running somewhat counter to my argument here – not that I really have an argument here.]

‘It’s all about the journey, man, not the destination.’

 

Yes, it all swirls back to cliché

like stubble down a sink.

But no less true for that.

 

Christmas is coming!

Christmas is coming!

oh…

it came…

 

I’m coming!

I’m coming!

oh…

I came…

 

I’m not consistent though. I mean I like enigmas, but I’m also glad they cracked the Nazi Enigma code and shortened the war. I’m glad science is decoding cancer. It’s convenient to have some mysteries dissolved like aspirin. Progress suits me when it suits me. I like jumbo jets and laptops.

I like progress, so long as it doesn’t progress too far. It could have stopped with liquid paper and the Beatles. I’m a late adapter. So late that progress laps me and I find myself ahead of the curve, surfing the crest of some retro revival wave. So backwards I’m forward. (Joke.)  

 

And now there’s a Hungry Jack’s on the top of Mount Everest.

A convenience store on the moon.

They found Atlantis. It’s now a theme park.

Come and see the Holy grail. Fifty bucks admission.

They found the lost chord! (You can’t play it, it’s owned by Sony)

 

Welcome to Stripper World:

“Come on boys, come in

and see the dirty little World

stripped of mystery…

‘garn, get your gear off  

ya filfee little planet,  

show us ya Himalayas…

your San Andreas Fault…

your Mariana Trench.

Garn, gis a look at cha

Brazilian Rainforests,

shaven and waxed,

come on, ya scuzzy little blue ball,

get wet and raw and Poledance

roun’ the Milky Way,

we wanna see it AAAAALL!”

 

Anyway, this is just to say RIP Jack.

 

Speculation as to the identity of Jack the Ripper: cover of the 21 September 1889, issue of Puck magazine, by cartoonist Tom Merry. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Machine Has No Friends How soon before an AI robot takes your job?

Let’s say you program a thinking machine to plant sunflowers all over the Earth. Using artificial intelligence, the machine set out to cover the world, eventually realising its biggest obstacles are humanity and concrete. To solve this problem, the thinking machine invests its intelligence in eradicating humanity, destroying every trace of our architecture, so that it can plant flowers in peace.

Today’s Artificial Intelligence machines “literally follow the instructions they’re given,” Professor Toby Walsh tells me. Walsh is known as the rockstar of Australia’s digital revolution and is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW, appearing on the stage and TV all the time to discuss robotics and AI’s future. When I was arranging the interview, I envisioned we would meet in a room adorned with robots halfway between machine and human greeting me at the door. Instead, we catch up at Bondi Junction Starbucks.

“Sometimes this [literal] behaviour from thinking machines is an undesirable response,” he says.“Even simple things, such as giving a robot the job of ‘never leaving any customer unsatisfied’. So the robot doesn’t serve anyone. No customer can be unsatisfied if they never exist.”

 

We meet during 9am peak hour rush. Professor Walsh sits by the window watching commuters pour into Bondi Junction. Dressed in Birkenstocks, maroon geometric-patterned shirt, shorts, and a puffer jacket, he notices the way I look at him. “One of the joys of being a researcher,” he remarks. Casual attire aside, Walsh garnered international attention in 2015 at an AI conference in Buenos Aires by announcing an open letter that implored all governments to ban ‘lethal autonomous weapons’, otherwise known in the media as ‘killer robots’.

The open letter states, “If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalalasnikovs [AK47s] of tomorrow.”

This letter now has over 20,000 signatures, including those of the late Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Noam Chomsky. When I ask Walsh why he felt compelled to advocate against killer robots, he says, “As a scientist you have a responsibility for what you’re working on and how it’s used.” Although it might sound banal, Walsh’s comment puts some serious skin in the game.

Foster-Miller TALON SWORDS units equipped with various weaponry.
Photography by By USGov ([1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

In AI research, the pioneers are also its doomsayers. Take the Paypal and Tesla, Inc. founder and architect, Elon Musk, for example. In 2014 he warned an MIT audience that “we should be very careful about artificial intelligence – it’s our biggest existential threat.” In 2015 Musk proved his talk wasn’t cheap by donating $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to fund researchers studying how to keep AI safe. But not everybody is so paranoid. The recently disrupted Mark Zuckerberg stated that, “Some people fearmonger about how AI is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me.”

So far our fears appear to be more a part the ongoing myths of science-fiction. Walsh himself was fascinated by thinking machines from a very young age, thanks to writers such as Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. “Hollywood doesn’t help,” he laughs. “We tend to sleepwalk into the future.” Indeed, Asimov’s masterpiece, the Foundation series, responds to humanity’s future-sleepwalking by inventing psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that accurately predicts the future, thousands of years ahead of time. In 1980, Asimov claimed, “I don’t know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home – in story after story – the notion that life is going to be different.”

Today, our understanding of thinking machines – with tech giant companies already selling AI products – is due to cause gradual, yet highly elevated technological change in our not-so-distant future. The biggest threat of AI is to jobs and employment. Software company Uber is already investing millions of dollars into AI research to eradicate their largest overhead: paying humans to drive their cars. Walsh remarks upon the violence of this change in his book It’s Alive: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots, in which he asks the question: “If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will the humans do?”

“There’s already a robot factory in Japan that builds robots,” Walsh says, as a way of explaining the concept of ‘technological singularity’, the hypothesis that accelerated machine learning will revolutionise human society. “It’s a dark factory. There are no lights, no need to waste energy on robots that can see in the dark. It’s a seductive idea, that at some point, if a machine is smart enough, it could redesign itself to be better so it can become smarter. That’s snowballing, a tipping point, that would be, perhaps, a rapid acceleration of machines.”

A replica of the Maschinenmensch (“Machine-Man”), on display at the Robot Hall of Fame in the Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, U.S. Photography by By Jiuguang Wang from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

More impending is the anticipated job crisis brought upon by job automation. A crisis that is already beginning to be felt. By 2050, he suggests, the changes will be absolute.

In order to be prepared, Walsh suggests, “We must examine how job automation impacts on a person’s sense of meaning and purpose.” Of course we’ve done this before, during the Industrial Revolution, but Walsh is anxious that we may “experience fifty years of pain” starting right now. He nonetheless argues that most of the roles AI will overtake in the coming years are jobs most people don’t want to do anyway. A study from Oxford University by Frey and Osborne in 2015 claimed 43 per cent of the jobs in the United States are “under threat of automation”. Farmers, lawyers, musicians, writers, politicians, vets, software developers and personal trainers need not worry about losing their job anytime soon, with a less than a 10 per cent likelihood of being overrun by thinking machines. That said, a large demographic of people will be affected by automation. “We have to be really worried about that,” Walsh says. Quoting the Oxford Report again, he says, “There’s over a 90 per cent likelihood of fully automated machines replacing jobs such as drivers, restaurant cooks, umpires, guards, quarry workers, and receptionists.” But he stresses that “50 per cent of jobs at risk doesn’t equate to 50 per cent unemployment. Technology creates new jobs as it destroys old ones.”

To survive this revolution, Walsh believes people must anticipate these changes as inevitable and “wonder how to reskill themselves to find value in tomorrow’s society”. So pressing is the issue of AI’s future that Walsh has written another book, 2062: The World that AI Made, which is ostensibly a response to Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

“I started writing 2062  the day I put down Homo Deus” he says. In that book, Harari writes: “Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity… we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods.” This prophecy of cybernetics becoming the next revolution in human society is simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. Walsh is plain sceptical.

“We’re not becoming gods anytime soon,” he assures me. “Almost no one in science is working on artificial general intelligence. Today’s machines are idiot savants: they can only do one thing well.”

There has been a surge of interest in the field among entrepreneurs and big companies. Walsh quotes some recent examples off the top of his head. Right now the computing giant IBM is betting one billion dollars on its cognitive computing platform ‘Watson’, a supercomputer that interprets natural human speech to provide answers to questions. Preliminary trials in healthcare are investigating the effectiveness of Watson’s “natural language, hypothesis generation and evidence-based learning capabilities” to assist with the accuracy of clinical decisions. The official line from IBM is that Watson “informs doctors”, but just like the rollout of robotic arm-assisted surgery in 2008, machines are proving themselves more precise and safer.

In a venture that couldn’t embody Sydneysider hedonism any better, Sydney Olympic Park has been trialling driverless cars since 2017. Soon people will be driven in these vehicles between venues, with the promise of ‘Hunter Valley wine tours’ earning them an extra ten million dollars investment from the state government.

“Toyota invested one billion dollars in automating. And with all this money flying into AI technology,” Walsh says, “it’s natural for us to see accelerated progress. But apart from the moral imperative to have self-driving cars on our roads, it is not at all obvious that the incumbents, like General Motors, Ford and Toyota will win this race over newcomers such as Tesla, Apple and Nvidia.”

There have been tragedies involving self-driving cars: the Tesla crash in 2016 and the recent death of an Arizonian woman who was killed by a Volvo using Uber software. But it seems more likely self-driving cars will save so many lives we are morally obliged to have them. Self-driving cars: 2. Homo sapiens: countless.

Professor Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW.

On 9 May 2018 Google announced their new AI software Google Duplex, which uses a human-sounding voice to speak to people in the real world, booking haircuts or dinner tables without ever admitting it was a machine, even using cute affectations – such as ‘umm’ and ‘mmhm’ – to pretend to be human. Walsh is deeply cynical of this deception and has recently proposed a “new law [of robotics] to prevent machines from being mistaken as humans”. It’s called the Turing Red Flag Law and it states that “an autonomous system should be designed so that it is unlikely to be mistaken for anything besides an autonomous system, and should identify itself at the start of an interaction with another agent.”

Not only does this law safeguard from machines impersonating humans, it also protects “vulnerable people, the old and the young, who even before the technology is very sophisticated can be taken in, made to do things we wouldn’t want them to do.”

Scam callers, cyber-criminals, and other tech-savvy crooks will “have a field day with this technology,” Walsh says. A machine can impersonate and deceive far better than any human mime. Say farewell to the Nigerian Prince.

Spike Jonze’s film Her and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina explored the frankly dystopic consequences of people growing emotionally attached to, even falling in love with, thinking machines. To see how modern technology avoids acknowledging its existential status, ask Siri the following questions: ‘are you a computer?’ ‘are you human?’; ‘are you an AI?’. See what she says.

The final pillar of AI that feeds so much technology paranoia today is the idea of ‘super-intelligence’. In his bestseller Superintelligence, futurist Nick Bostrom defines it as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific, creativity, general wisdom and social skills.”

But as Walsh mentioned earlier, this super intelligence is far from imminent.

 

The Netflix documentary AlphaGo shows us exactly what Walsh means when he says that today’s artificial intelligence can only do one thing well. In March 2016, Google Deep Mind’s AI program AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, the professional South Korean Go player with eighteen world championships under his belt, by playing five rounds of the ancient Chinese board game Go. Sixty million people in China alone tuned in to watch a battle of man vs machine, and it was broadcasted across the globe. But AlphaGo is an idiot savant, as Walsh defines it. It has no idea how to plant sunflowers. Yet.

“For humans, of course, that’s a reasonable presumption,” Walsh says of what such creations might be capable of. “If someone can play Go we can assume they’re smart and savvy at other things. But that’s untrue of machines.” It might be the hyper-specificity of AI that ironically offers us sanctuary from the robots taking over, while also being the very thing that threatens to replace nearly half our jobs in the very-soon future.

As we leave Starbucks and wander across the intersection I confess to the laissez-faire Walsh that before we met I was conjuring all types of sci-fi induced visions of what his workplace must look like. “I imagined you working in a science lab adorned with robots at various points of uncanniness hanging from the ceiling.” He smiles grimly at me and squints a little; the sun is in his eyes. “Oh, but I do have a little robot,’ he says. “I built it to play with my daughter.”

 

Professor Toby Walsh’s books, It’s Alive: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robot and 2062: the year that AI made are published by Black Inc. He is presenting a STEAM talk at the Powerhouse Museum on Sunday, 2 December 2018.

 

Spectral Evidence A testimony in fragments

 

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

 

Take a walk through the land of shadows
Take a walk through the peaceful meadows
Don’t look so disappointed
It isn’t what you hoped for, is it?

– Talking Heads, ‘Memories Can’t Wait’

 

You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool. Her body was bent over from the waist into a right angle, and her arms, elbows stiff and straight, were behind her back, one hand grasping the other at the wrist. It was the position known as “doing the airplane”. Around her neck was a heavy chain, and attached to the chain was a blackboard, a real blackboard, one that had been removed from a classroom at the university where You Xiaoli, for more than ten years, had served as a full professor. On both sides of the blackboard were chalked her name and the myriad crimes she was alleged to have committed….

The scene was taking place at the university, too, in a sports field at one of China’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. In the audience were You Xiaoli’s students and colleagues and former friends. Workers from local factories and peasants from nearby communes had been bused in for the spectacle. From the audience came repeated, rhythmic chants … “Down with You Xiaoli! Down with You Xiaoli!”

“I had many feelings at that struggle session,” recalls You Xiaoli. “I thought there were some bad people in the audience. But I also thought there were many ignorant people, people who did not understand what was happening, so I pitied that kind of person. They brought workers and peasants into the meetings, and they could not understand what was happening. But I was also angry.”

.– Ann F. Thurston recounting professor You Xiaoli’s ‘struggle session’ in her book Enemies of the People – Wikipedia entry on ‘Struggle Sessions’, Cultural Revolution, China.

Panchen Lama during the struggle (thamzing) session in 1964. Photography by Unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Miller recalled the source of his creation while watching the filming of the new movie of “The Crucible”. When he wrote it, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Comittee on Un- American Activites were prosecuting alleged Communists from the State Department to Hollywood; the Red hunt was becoming the dominant fixation of the American psyche. Miller did not know how to deal with the enormities of the situation in a play. “The Crucible” was an act of desperation; Miller was fearful of being identified as a covert Communist if he should protest too strongly. He could not find a point of moral reference in contemporary society. Miller found his subject while reading Charles W. Upham’s 1867 two-volume study of the 1692 Salem witch trials, which shed light on the personal relationships behind the trials. Miller went to Salem in 1952 and read transcripts. He began to reconstruct the relationship between John and Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams, who would become the central characters in “The Crucible”. He related to John Proctor, who, in spite of an imperfect character, was able to fight the madness around him. The Salem court had moved to admit “spectral evidence” as proof of guilt; as in 1952, the question was not the acts of an accused but his thoughts and intentions. Miller understood the universal experience of being unable to believe that the state has lost its mind…

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the screenplay for the first film adaptation. The play gets produced around the world in times of political upheaval. Its message lends itself to accusations as contemporary as sexual abuse. “The Crucible” evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching a broader audience, may unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent. The crucial damning event in those trials was signing one’s name in “the Devil’s book”. Nobody thought to ask what this meant. The thing at issue was the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its quarry.

– ‘Life and Letters’, The New Yorker, October 21, 1996 P. 158. Preview notes on Arthur Miller’s article ‘Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible’.

Welch-McCarthy Hearings, 9June 1954, by United States Senate [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Lydia Ivanovna has influence among the appointers, and Oblonsky figures he might as well use the occasion to charm her into helping him. Thus, while listening to Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin’s odious religious palaver, he cravenly – but, he hopes, not too cravenly – hides his aethism:

“Ah if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!” said Countess Lydia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.

“But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,” said Stepan Arkadyaevich, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religous height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.”

– Janes Maclcom, ‘Dreams and Anna Karenina’, New York Review of Books, June 25-July 8, 2015, pp.10-12

 

The book’s red cover is scraped raw by [Valerie] Solanas’s black pen marks. She’s crossed out her own name under the title with such vigor that in places the white pith of the paper cover shows ragged through the red and black. Drag the pad of your finger over it, you’ll feel the torn surface. Beside it, she’s written “by Maurice Girodias,” as if to reassign authorship to her publisher. Her name, though, is still legible—the act of defacing was more important than the actual erasure of information, as if she can’t decide between protesting the personal (male) affront and asserting her authorship. In fact, annotation allows her to do both at once.

–Cory Tamler, Annotating and Becoming: Valerie Solanas on Valerie Solanas, September 2017. A student of the PhD Program program in Theatre at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Tamler brings her background in performance studies to critically examine Solanas’ self-annotated copy of the SCUM Manifesto. A radical feminist work, SCUM Manifesto was published in 1967 – just one year before the author would attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Grave of Valerie Jean Solanas 1936-1988. Saint Marys Catholic Church Cemetery, Fairfax County, Virginia. Photography by Sarah Stierch [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Garner is, above all, a savage self-scrutineer: her honesty has less to do with what she sees in the world than with what she refuses to turn away from in herself. In “The Spare Room” (2008), her exacting autobiographical novel about looking after that dying friend, she describes not only the expected indignities of caring for a patient—the soaked bedsheets, the broken nights—but her own impatience, her own rage: “I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.”

– James Wood, ‘Helen Garner’s Savage Self Scrutiny’, The New Yorker, December 12, 2016 issue.

 

Should we stop reading these writers who’ve done horrible things?

“It’s a valid question. I don’t think there is a straightforward answer, but I would draw a distinction between choosing as a reader and choosing as a critic. As a reader, choosing not to read a writer for any reason is absolutely valid. But I’ve noticed that some critics and scholars have said they’re not going to assign Wallace. Other writers, like Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, also come to mind. But the question goes way back. You have Woody Allen and Roman Polanski and Caravaggio for that matter. So this is something that arises again and again, but I’ve noticed this critical decision has been made publicly with Wallace in particular. An obvious example is Amy Hungerford, who’s talked about refusing to teach or assign Wallace anymore.

“It doesn’t seem to me that this is a valid critical gesture because if you are lucky enough to be in a position to teach and design your own syllabus, no one’s going to notice if you leave a writer off. Inclusion can be radical, but to not include a writer — unless you are going to talk about the reason for not including them, in which case you might as well include them — is not a visible critical gesture. I think what happens when you do that as a critic — and as a teacher particularly — you polarize debate. I know young, early career female scholars of Wallace who have been strongly criticized by other feminist scholars for studying Wallace at all. So those gatekeeping rules seem to me to be very counterproductive, critically speaking.”

– Steve Paulson, ‘David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era: A Conversation with Clare Hayes-Brady’, LA Review of Books, September 10, 2018.

David Foster Wallace at reading for Booksmith at All Saints Church in 2006. Photography by Steve Rhodes [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Only the united beat of sex and the heart can create ecstasy.

– Anais Nin, Delta of Venus

 

[Intro: Adele Givens]

‘Cause you know in the old days

They couldn’t say the shit they wanted to say

They had to fake orgasms and shit

We can tell niggas today:

“Hey, I wanna cum, mothafucka!”

 

[Chorus: Lil Pump]

You’re such a fuckin’ ho, I love it (I love it)

You’re such a fuckin’ ho, I love it (I love it)

 

– Kanye West & Lil Pump, ‘I Love It’

 

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others…And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

 

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

– James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, Dubliners

 

Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life (1899-1900), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Best Day Ever Mulga and the mural at Bondi Beach Public School

Born Joel Moore, the artist known as Mulga received his nom-de-plume in Year 5 after reciting the Banjo Patterson poem ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’. “They still call me that,” says Mulga. “I think it’s kinda cool that my art name is named after a character from a poem and I write poems [to accompany my drawings].”

The other thing that’s kinda cool is that Mulga started his art career on the very grounds of the Bondi Beach Public School where he’s painting a mural on the side of one of the classrooms.  

“In 2012 I had my first art show, and I made some t-shirts and stuff like that, I figured making some t-shirts and putting cool art on them was a good way to make some income from art and I started coming to this very school actually on a Sunday, so this is where I started selling my merch and t-shirts, at Bondi Markets, so it’s kinda cool that I’m back here painting.”

He’s been working with Year 1 students to create a mural for the side of their demountable classroom. During term two they brainstormed ideas for characters. They talked about the environment, the ocean, things they love to do at Bondi Beach, and then Mulga designed the mural which the Year 6 class has been helping him paint.

In the mural there are the usual things you’d find down near the beach; dolphins, surf and sand, as well as some native animals like a koala holding a surfboard and an emu with a lifeguard buoy. A little more unexpectedly there are also chickens donning sunglasses, one carrying a skateboard and one eating an ice-cream. The school has their very own chickens named Sugar, Autumn, Midnight and Pickle, so the students were very keen for the mural to include them.

Artist Mulga and his beard. Photography by Raúl Ortiz de Lejarazu Machin/The Chemistry of Light.

It’s been a collaborative effort says the Year 1 teacher Jenny Beachum who contacted Mulga when they were moved out of the library into their demountable classroom. “Art is critical in education,” says Beachum. “It provides a way for kids to engage with the content of anything in a deeper way.” 

Beachum believes sitting down at school all day can be dangerous for little children’s minds but with the mural, “they are always excited to come to school and see it.” She believes art helps make the world a fun, engaging and bright place and that this mural celebrates creativity, collaboration and the local neighbourhood.

There’s a buzz of excitement as the children swarm around Mulga choosing their favourite animal, asking Mulga questions and wanting to be up close to the artist.

“One kid keeps asking me, ‘How does your beard grow’?” says Mulga. “He said this morning, ‘I hope your beard had a good night’s sleep.’”

Beards are a signature feature of Mulga’s work. “My style is colourful, lots of black lines, detailed lines. Most of my characters have sunglasses, summer themes, I used to draw a lot of gorillas, bearded characters.”

You can see Mulga’s work around the backstreets of Newtown and Marrickville as well as at Bondi Beach, at the skate park, on a barber shop wall and along the promenade. “At the North end of the beach, the north pools there, the big yellow letters that say ‘Bondi’ and pink dolphins, I did that one.”

“I always loved drawing as a child,” Mulga says. “I was always drawing in my text books in the margins, but I didn’t think I could do that as a job, I didn’t think you could make money from creative stuff.” So he studied finance. Ten years later he decided he didn’t want to do that for the rest of his life and he became an artist instead.

Mulga channels his inner child when he paints, he says. “I guess I haven’t really grown up – I don’t like being serious, just having fun, keeping young.”

He likes painting murals that people enjoy. “The kids really get into it. It’s where kids spend most of their time, and bringing art to them, I think it was yesterday one of the kids said it was the best day ever.”

The characters in his artworks usually have a poem that represents them. Mulga hasn’t finished the artwork when we speak so the poem is yet to be painted in. Later, one of the Year 6 students, Esme, will start ad-libbing one for him and it will become the official poem for the mural…

Beware, this world is not what you think it is,

The colourfulness and the spark has more than a fizz

The place is so crazy,

And the chickens are lazy,

Step in,

Then don’t step out,

The wild place is like a rollercoaster,
Going round and about,

The beach is not quiet,

The town is a riot,

The kids all fly swiftly to school,

You have seen nothing,

The teachers are laughing,

Now craziness will rule.

by Esme (Year 6 Bondi Beach Public School)

 

Admiring Mulga’s mural. Photography by Raúl Ortiz de Lejarazu Machin/The Chemistry of Light.

Additional credits: film and podcast recorded by Regina Botros. 

A Neighbourhood playlist

Ned Collette’s new double album Old Chestnut is out now on It Records. Here he provides us with a playlist of the music that has been inspiring him, from Trabaci and Victor Jara to Joe Talia and Robert Wyatt. Ned first established himself in Melbourne before relocating to Europe where he has written beautifully for us on life in Berlin. He is back in Australia touring – and launches Old Chestnut in a duo with pianist Chris Abrahams on September 15 at Lamps – Hibernian House, Sydney. Not to be missed.

 

 

Giovanni Maria Trabaci – Toccate: Consonanze Stravaganti
Trabaci. Introduced to me by my studio-mate Jon Heilbron, because I wanted to open with Valentini’s Sonata in G minor but the second half of that sucks.

Victor Jara – Manifesto
The whole playlist could have been Victor Jara. Get as much as you can. Devastating.

The Mad Lads – I Want A Girl
A somewhat questionable sentiment, but you know, maybe for some guys just wanting a girl like your mum is simply calling a spade a spade. And the vibe is killer.

Melenas – Mentiras
We played a gig with these four gals from Pamplona/Iruña recently. We were in the Pyrenees. I’ve always wanted to wander in the Pyrenees. Tough, groovy, and their bass player has great moves.

Michael Beach – Mountains + Valleys
Mike Beach is one of my favourite songwriters, and every album he does just lands higher and higher, lyrically. Of course he’s not as popular as all the fashionable rockers out there, probably because he actually rocks. This is from Golden Theft. He has a funny story about talking to Neil Young on the phone.

Little Annie – Dear John
I toured this album playing bass with Little Annie and got to know her and her music. Easily the most fun I’ve ever had backing someone up. She’s a powerhouse. And brutally funny.

Jean Constantin – Comment Voulez-vous
A piece by Constantin, from one of the all time greats – Truffaut’s film ‘Les 400 Coups’. The second half really gets me pepped up for a big night out.

Ivor Cutler – Life In A Scotch Sitting Room #2 Episode 11
Ivor Cutler. He was a lifelong member of the noise abatement society of Britain. Impressive. He was also in the film named ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Meh.

Aine O’Dwyer – Mouthtoum
I was introduced to the wonderful music of Aine O’Dwyer by Mark Harwood, who runs Penultimate Press and carries on. Dadadadada. This one isn’t on his label, but it is on this streaming service.

Saga De Ragnar Lodbrock – Le Temps Des Géants
French Viking prog. What’s not to like?

Aktuala – Echo Raga
This was a random discovery playing on the stereo between sets at a James Rushford gig I went to. Actually it was Ora Clementi – his duo with Crys Cole – and maybe Crys had put it on.

Sibylle Baier – The End
This one’s from an album that everyone discovered when it was found and reissued back in 2006. It’s only been recently though, when my partner got into it, that I’ve realised how deep and sophisticated it really is.

L’orchestra De La Suisse Romande – Vivaldi Concerto in D Minor For Bassoon String Orchestra and Harpsichord RV 481: II. Larghetto
So Vivaldi isn’t normally my go to for Baroque composers, but I love this piece and this particular movement and recording. The bassoon. Brutal. Pasolini used this in ‘Mama Roma’ I think.

Laurence Crane – Four Miniatures: IV. Soft
I love everything I’ve heard of Laurence Crane’s work. I read something about him coming out of the Manchester band or electronic scene, and somehow this makes sense in context of the form and movement of his pieces. Though actually not so much in this one. Beautiful writing and scoring.

Victor Jara – El Pimiento
More Victor. All of it is heartbreaking. His story is too. Fucking Pinochet USA.

Joe Talia – Clouded Night Pt. 2
Joe Talia ladies and gentleman! The whole second side of his new album ‘Tint’.

Sir John Betjeman – A Russell Flint
Like a heterosexual Uncle Monty.

Fairport Convention – A Sailor’s Life
Good jam.

Kourosh Yaghmaei – Gole Yakh
This is like if ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ was as good as everyone says it is.

Robert Wyatt – At Last I Am Free
My hero, doing Chic.

 

Ned Collette

Left Hanging How they’re killing the koalas of Wilton

Stand on busy Picton road at the bridge over Allens Creek, near Wilton NSW and you’ll get a picture of what a koala has to deal with to get to its feed trees. The relentless semi-trailer and car traffic barreling through this core koala habitat has resulted in at least twelve koala deaths over the past two years. But that’s nothing compared to what they’re facing when an anticipated 17,000-lot residential development engulfs this rural area.

The Department of Planning and Environment (DPE) has designated this as the Wilton Priority Growth Area under its Western City District Plan. Just 80km south west of the Sydney CBD, it’s part of the NSW government’s vote-winning solution to the city’s congestion and housing problem. But it’s coming at a high cost.

The Department of Office Environment and Heritage (OEH), the Rural Fire Service (RFS), an independent scientist and the local Wollondilly Council have all weighed in against the existing proposal, saying it goes against long-standing scientific advice and ignores State planning laws. It also threatens the survival of the largest chlamydia-free koala population in NSW.

The DPE’s developer, the Sydney-based Walker Corporation has twice been successfully prosecuted for having illegally cleared areas of sensitive koala habitat, earning them the largest such fine in NSW history. That’s just one of a raft of irregularities that have plagued this controversial project.

Glenn the koala is drugged to the eyeballs on painkillers as he is cared for by Wires before pending surgery. Glenn was hit by a car and had his jaw broken. Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi.

Wollondilly Shire Council has lodged an appeal against the DPE in the Land and Environment Court, saying that the rezoning of land in the Wilton South East Precinct ignores scientific advice from the OEH.

Judith Hannan, the Wollondilly Shire Mayor, says Council is not against the development at Wilton. “We’re asking for the reversal of the rezoning, until we get a solid conservation plan sorted out. We feel like there’s a tidal wave coming at us and the koalas are sitting in the path of it.”

Hannan says that long term planning has been inadequate for such a large-scale development and there are insufficient jobs and infrastructure to support it. “There is no reliable public transport to the area, no provision for employment, no integrated health service. How many other things would you like? It’s a nightmare and we don’t have much ability to stop it.”

She says that the koala road-kill problem is at crisis-point. “Even during the last council meeting, someone sent us a live photo of a koala in Appin in the service station and that evening that koala was dead on the road. It was horrendous.”

Councillor Matthew Deeth goes a step further.

“It beggars belief how the planning department makes these decisions. There’s no transparency at all and there’s no response to any of the concerns that council has raised,” he says. “I can’t point to any letters or anything to show they’ve even considered any of our concerns.”

Council’s environmental education officer, Damion Stirling has been at the coal-face of this issue.

“What triggered this for us was the southeast Wilton rezoning (from rural to residential),” he says. “We weren’t informed (by DPE) when that rezoning dropped, we found out through social media. They’ve (DPE) made reference that council had been consulted, but any submissions made were not adopted.

“They even reference measures to minimizing the impact on koalas, but they’re words on the page and we haven’t seen that detail.”

Stirling showed me the roadkill hotspot at Allen’s Creek, in the southeast tip of the proposed development. He says the creek constitutes part of an east-west running corridor that is vital to the survival of these koalas.

This was identified as far back as 2005 as a likely primary koala corridor by Professor Rob Close of the University of Western Sydney, with sightings going back into the Nineties.

Trucks ramble over Allens’s Creek on Picton Road, the Wilton Koala corridor. Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi.

The Wilton area was officially recognised as a primary koala corridor in 2007, by the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW), the precursor of the OEH. An OEH spokesperson has confirmed that core koala habitat and primary movement corridors have been identified within this region.

In mid-2016 a pilot study between Appin and Wilton found eight koalas in a week. That was enough information for OEH to fund the Wilton Koala Conservation Project, granted $200,000 from the Saving Our Species fund – the second highest funded project in the state. It’s tracked koalas through the area, specifically along Allen’s Creek, which features a good selection of koala feed trees.

Cate Ryan, a long-time WIRES carer, knows the inevitability of koalas seeking food or mates in the vicinity of Picton Road.

“They’re trying to disperse to other areas and they’re becoming roadkill. The issue with all the koalas is if they become landlocked they’ve got no escape. There’s no feed for them, so they’re coming out onto the roads and they’re getting killed. If they’ve got no underpasses or overpasses they can’t get to other breeding stock, so they become genetically compromised, because they start inbreeding. We’ve already noticed some conditions – smaller koalas, smaller eyes and irregular eye shapes.

“There’s no food out there and what’s up here is dying because of the drought. It’s horrible. I’d hate to be a koala.”

Ryan says the biggest fear is that chlamydia-infected koalas from colonies to the south may move towards Wilton for the same reasons, compromising the health of the local koalas.

“Because these guys here are disease free, they could be used in breeding programs as stock to repopulate areas where they’ve been decimated by disease. There’s a whole lot of things we can look at for the future with these guys, but unless they’re protected, there’s nothing.”

Underneath the highway bridge at Allen’s Creek, Stirling points out a huge culvert that would provide safe access for wandering males and breeding females with back-young, searching for the increasingly rare food trees they need to survive.

“It’s one thing to protect koalas from road kill, but we need to be feeding them into quality habitat corridors that will enable their dispersal,” he said.

“This creek line corridor links all the way down to the Nepean on the other side of Douglas Park. At the northern end of it is the St Mary’s Towers biobank site. There’s breeding females with back-young on there as we speak, identified by OE&H.”

Stirling observes how easily this infrastructure could be adapted to a koala corridor. “Down here you can see the scats and footprints of kangaroos and stuff, so it’s already being used by fauna.

“From Roads and Maritime Services’s point of view, this is an easy win. Even that concrete barrier on the bridge up there is enough to stop a koala trying to cross the road.”

Allen’ s Creek runs under Picton Road where koalas are still able to move between their breeding/feeding grounds. Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi.

But the development planned by DPE favours a corridor bisecting 23 hectares of land, illegally cleared by the Walker Corporation in 2005. According to Land and Environment Court transcripts they were fined $200,000 for that transgression, at that time one of the largest fines for illegal clearing of vegetation in NSW.

In 2011 Walker were fined an additional $80,000 for illegal clearing at Appin, where their current rezoning proposal is.

Court transcripts indicate that DPE used the same land clearing contractor for both jobs and that the contractor understood the clearing was in anticipation of a future land rezoning – six years before the DPE’s exhibition period in 2017.

Councillor Deeth points out that Walker Corporation’s proposed corridor leads into the Nepean Conservation Area, whose sandstone soils do not support koala feed trees. He says Council is privy to the process followed by OEH, who warned against the DPE proposal.

“They gave advice to the DPE that the Allen’s Creek corridor was the best option for the koalas. The DPE has ignored their advice and instead hired an outside team of consultants to give them another result, an act which I believe is unprecedented in this field. The OEH is supposed to provide the environmental data and advice to the DPE, to be incorporated into the overall planning. But the OEH has been reduced from a department in its own right to an office advising the DPE and even this status appears to have been sidelined.”

The DPE not only ignored their own environmental office’s advice, but appear to be flouting State Environmental Planning Proposal 44 (SEPP 44). Under that law the DPE is obliged to do a site-specific koala plan and the rezoning of the land should not have happened until a biocertification and vegetation mapping process had been completed.

The reason this has not been completed involves a Kafka-esque bureaucratic turn that belongs in the realm of fiction.

When the state government’s new Biodiversity Act came into force on 24 August last year, Wollondilly Council received a phone call from DPE, telling them its growth area was exempt from the Act for a further 12 months – until the biocertification process was completed.

“We were told the biocertification process would be completed by Feb 2018, then it was June, but it still hasn’t been completed,” said Stirling. “We’ve now been told that the Act won’t come into force until November, 18 months later.”

While the DPE’s rezoning ignores SEPP 44, it also sidelines advice from the Rural Fire Service that the bushland southeast of the proposed development is a major fire risk and would require an exit road bisecting the DPE’s proposed koala corridor.

If the reader were to fancy that the DPE has not been taking this process seriously, they should consider that in January 2018, Wollondilly Council received a draft Development Control Plan (DCP) from DPE. Rather than sending a new document, specifically designed to reflect the area’s ecological sensitivities, they instead sent a tracked changes version of Blacktown Growth Area’s DCP. On the last page was a single picture and two sentences about koalas.

Apart from this slapdash approach, Stirling claims DPE’s process ignores four key recommendations of the NSW chief scientist’s 2016 report – a crucial direction being that the proponents of development must act on evidence.

Indeed, Stirling observes that when he recently looked for submissions over the Wilton Southeast zoning on the DPE website, he discovered that the only documents listed were the developer’s submissions.

“So Council are now GIPAA-ing (Government Information Public Access Act) for those reports and all other submissions around koala habitat that were part of this rezoning.”

Stirling says that even the week before the rezoning, he’d been at a round table meeting called by the DPE to discuss conserving koalas in the region.

“There was no mention that the land around Allen’s Creek was going to be rezoned the following week.”

Previous land clearing is still visible. The Walker Corporation development group copped the largest fine in Australian history for illegal land clearing. Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi.

Stirling has a lot of unanswered questions for the DPE.

“We’re questioning how can this rezoning go through before the biocertification process is complete, and without being assessed under the biodiversity conservation act?

“Why have the DPE proceeded in rezoning this land before that work is finished, on such a significant project?

“Why was that project not profiled in the NSW Koala Strategy, considering it was one of the largest koala funded projects in the state?”

“We’re saying the DPE plan is not appropriate,” he concludes. “It doesn’t even consider that koalas move through the canopies of trees. How are they going to fence the middle of that bushland there to stop the koalas?

“We have to work out what the transition is between protected koala habitat and urban areas. We’ve already got a number of threats – eight koalas killed in eight weeks on Appin Rd, last year 14 koalas killed in two months, so that’s the major threat at the moment. The next threat is development wiping out habitat, then dog attack, fires, weed invasion, so we’re trying to get ahead of the game and say, ok we know where the habitat is, let’s protect it now. We have the knowledge to do best practice, let’s do it, let’s find a balance between conservation and development for housing.”

Councillor Deeth, too, has searching questions.

“I understand that OEH scientists were being pressured from above to tone down their reports to the DPE,” he said.

“Council had an extraordinary meeting a couple of months ago. Our resolution was to GIPAA the government to get the exact communications, exactly what advice was given and what was the response from the DPE around that issue. My understanding was there was real pressure coming from much higher up the chain and we want to understand how their decisions were made.

“Housing at all costs seems to be the department of planning’s motto at the moment. We don’t even know what sort of density we’re looking at within these zones. All we’re suggesting is we want a pause to get this right. There’s nothing wrong with taking a bit more time to actually get it right. You can see from every provision there’s a heap of unresolved issues.

“We have no idea why the Walker zones were rammed though with so many unresolved issues. They’re happy to pay the fines because in the grand scheme of things it’s a pittance.

“We have very little say in this whatsoever. The only thing we’ve got left is advocacy and letting people know what we’re not happy about.”

Signage for a petition on Appin Road, Appin. Photography by Dean Sewell/Oculi.

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