Retro

RETRO

20 Years of Community Arts in Bankstown

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RETRO

20 Years of Community Arts in Bankstown

 

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Retro: Twenty Years of Community Arts in Bankstown Published by BYDS, PO Box 577 Bankstown NSW 1885, Bankstown Arts Centre: 5 Olympic Pde, Bankstown, telephone: (02) 9793 8324, website: www.byds.org.au No part of this publication may be published without the written permission of the publisher. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher.

ISBN – 978-0-9853202-3-2 Copyright 2013 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BYDS and its Director would like to thank the Australia Council for funding this project and for supporting BYDS since its establishment in 1991.

BYDS and its Director also acknowledge its core funding body, Arts NSW and its primary partner, Bankstown City Council.

Thank you to Roslyn Oades for compiling and designing this publication. Thank you to the Westside Publications Editorial Team: Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Felicity Castagna, Caitlin Doyle-Markwick, Samantha Hogg, Mariam Chehab and Filip Stempien. Thank you to BYDS Resident Photographers Bill Reda and Chris Atkins and Westside Publications Illustrator Tin Phan. Thank you also to Retro Project Administrator, Jane Worsley, and BYDS Indigenous Arts Officer, Tim Bishop.

Thank you to all the additional funding bodies, organisations and institutions who have supported and aided this organisation since 1991 and throughout the creation of this publication.

Finally BYDS and its Director would like to acknowledge and thank all the artists, writers, illustrators, photographers, performers, dancers, musicians, academics, arts workers, youth workers and councillors who have defined and created the artistic culture of the Bankstown Community through this organisation over twenty years.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this publication may contain images of people who have died.

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Produced by BYDS

EDITORIAL TEAM:

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Roslyn Oades Felicity Castagna Samantha Hogg Mariam Chehab Caitlin Doyle-Markwick Filip Stempien DESIGN & LAYOUT: Roslyn Oades

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Fiona Winning ...................................................................................................................................................................................7 Introduction by Tim Carroll ................................................................................................................................................................................11 PART 1: ORAL HISTORY .....................................................................................................................................................................................17 Multicultural Bankstown: a backward glance by Rosie Block ..........................................................................................................19 PART 2: WESTSIDE PUBLICATIONS ............................................................................................................................................................23 Westside Magazine to Westside Publications by Michael Mohammed Ahmad ....................................................................25 Writing Western Sydney by Professor Ivor Indyk ..................................................................................................................................28 Hearing Voices by Lachlan Brown ....................................................................................................................................................................33 PART 3: PERFORMANCE & EVENTS ...........................................................................................................................................................39 Risk it for the Biscuit: a lesson in survival by TJ Eckleberg ..................................................................................................................40 Suburban Masala by Vandana Ram ...................................................................................................................................................................43 Acts of Courage: A Trilogy by Roslyn Oades ...........................................................................................................................................46 Pillow Fights & Giant Dances by Janie Gibson ........................................................................................................................................50 Bankstown Hip hop lyrics by Munkimuk .....................................................................................................................................................54 PART 4: VISUAL ARTS ............................................................................................................................................................................................57 Contemporarti Artists Collective ...............................................................................................................................................................58 Namescape ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................61 The Beginnings in the Beginning by Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang ...........................................................................................62 WestEye & Other Creative Adventures by Bill Reda ..........................................................................................................................64 Toyz 2 Kingz Aerosol Art Project ...................................................................................................................................................................66 7

PART 5: INDIGENOUS ARTS ..............................................................................................................................................................................67 Aboriginal Arts Program by Uncle Harry Allie ..........................................................................................................................................68 Reflections on the Koori Youth Forum by Jaleesa Donovan ............................................................................................................70 PART 6: MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS ...................................................................................................................................................73 BYDS Partnerships .....................................................................................................................................................................................................76 Sir Joseph Banks High A reflection by Joyce Conte .................................................................................................................................80 No Time for Tears: A Playwright Reflects by Sala Abrahim ...................................................................................................................83 BYDS TIMELINE 1991 – 2011 ..............................................................................................................................................................................85

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FOREWORD

by Fiona Winning

“The face of Bankstown would be very different and in no way as rich as it now is, were it not for the scores of artistic interventions that BYDS has provided us.”

Helen Westwood, former Mayor of Bankstown

Every suburb, every region, needs a Tim Carroll and a Bankstown Youth Development Service (BYDS). A visionary worker in a resilient organisation setting down roots, nurturing deep connections and collaborations within and between communities and generations – over time creating real change.

When I did a project with BYDS briefly in 2009, many years since working in Western Sydney, I was struck by the profound impact of BYDS’ sustained work within the local community since 1991.

BYDS has instigated an extraordinary array of innovative projects across all art forms. This work has touched the lives of thousands of young people and their families, raised a new generation of contemporary artists and arts workers and radically influenced the culture in Bankstown where community cultural development is a tangible presence.

BYDS’ work is material, experiential and life-changing. It can be seen on walls, bus shelters, in publications and at ephemeral performances in public places. It is experienced daily by members of the community who engage with these locally produced works around their neighbourhood. It’s most keenly felt by the many participating individuals – as skills are developed, confidence built and connectivity brokered.

Tim Carroll has led the organisation since its inception. He’s a remarkable practitioner, facilitator, mentor and cultural activist. He’s inventive and ambitious – for the provision of a multitude of opportunities for the young people he works with. He engages them as participants and producers, as artists and facilitators in skills development, production and presentation of arts projects of all kinds. He recognises that young people need to collaborate with each other and on occasion with mature and older artists and members of community to build a sense of connection and continuity.

New Generations of Artists, Cultural Workers & Active Citizens BYDS creates an environment where artists and communities are invited to take artistic risks – demonstrating over and over again the power of the arts in facilitating social exchange and real change – in a suburb vilified by the media as a hotspot of disadvantage, ethnic tension and violence.

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Thousands of young people have performed, published or produced contemporary artworks voicing their own experiences and opinions. In the process they have built intercultural and intergenerational friendships and networks and developed understanding and empathy about others.

Hundreds of young people have engaged in multiple projects with BYDS, embarking on significant artistic journeys that have led to professional work as photographers, writers, performers, performance makers, video artists and cultural producers.

Ten or more of these young people work professionally at BYDS at any one time, mentoring the next generation of participants and in the process learning programming and organisational skills that will equip them for their next job in the cultural sector.

The work practice Tim has developed among the BYDS team values enthusiasm, intuition and unflinching trust of any young person who comes through the doors – always erring on the side of generosity. It is this work culture that has built long-term trust, loyalty and sustained engagement with so many young people around Bankstown and Western Sydney.

Most significantly, BYDS has fostered new generations of culturally and linguistically diverse artists who are effectively trained on the job in community cultural development. This length of contact, these connections extending over two decades – allows real change and innovation to occur.

Across & Between: Artforms, Platforms, Communities & Generations The team at BYDS are always dreaming, thinking and working inter-culturally, inter-generationally and across artforms and platforms to present contemporary art. There are no hierarchies of worthiness or fashion. BYDS initiates and produces quality arts projects in all forms of contemporary and traditional art practice across and between: hip hop, spray art, dance, music, photography, writing, theatre, video, installation, visual and media art forms.

The process begins by listening to the influences and preoccupations of individuals and communities, brainstorming concepts and helping artists and communities to imagine ambitious but achievable outcomes – from web based animation projects to community festivals, and from verbatim theatre events to an Indigenous dance ensemble. BYDS connects people with other artists, organisations and resources to make sure the project has the people, the networks and the resources to realise the work. Then they step back, ready to lend a producing hand at any moment but never hovering. This allows people to experiment, take risks, and build connections, knowledge and confidence and to own the results of their work.

This commitment to process is always balanced by BYDS’ philosophy that projects must be distinctive and committed to excellent artistic and production values.

“From little things, big things grow” Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s song could well be speaking of BYDS’ work in Bankstown over the last two decades. Many individuals have asked critical questions of themselves and their communities through BYDS’ arts 10

projects. Many communities have taken up opportunities to express who they are, and who they are not, to broader audiences than they could otherwise have imagined. Attitudes and lives have been changed.

Twenty years ago there was very little contemporary arts being produced in Bankstown. Now it’s home to several festival events, nationally recognised initiatives, artists and companies, and most recently a new arts centre.

BYDS’ leadership has laid the foundations for this remarkable change. They built a culture of socially engaged arts practice from the ground up, winning local support from diverse individuals, organisations, communities and Council. They connected with regional, state-based and national organisations and now present work by Bankstown artists and communities in high profile contexts including Sydney Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival, Australian Museum and Powerhouse Museum. Their processes and work has been celebrated, documented and theorised nationally.

On the home front, their advocacy has been instrumental in attracting financial and physical resources to build up infrastructure that is made available to local communities. This includes encouraging nationally significant community engaged Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) and Citymoon (contemporary Vietnamese Australian Theatre Company) to move to Bankstown in 1997. With more activity and professional practice in the local area, communities are offered relevant arts experiences and young artists are exposed to a broader scope of practice and possibility.

BYDS has since worked with UTP and Bankstown Council to attract NSW Government and Federal Infrastructure money to develop the new arts centre that opened in February 2011. This in turn has the potential to elevate cultural work in Bankstown to new levels of visibility and engagement.

Legacy Artists and cultural workers are not made over the course of one or two projects or years. They emerge after sustained training and practice and this is BYDS’ most powerful legacy – successive generations of Bankstown artists who make great contemporary art by bringing their diverse perspectives, skills and tools to their work.

At the heart of all BYDS’ work – whether a project created in direct response to an urgent social eruption or an ongoing writers’ group or a theatre event for national audiences – is the development of confident, empowered communities and individuals.

This book celebrates BYDS’ twenty years of work – of the inimitable Tim Carroll alongside the artists, collaborators, cultural workers and community members who have built something along the way. We hear directly from local collaborators of all kinds about the legacy BYDS has left and continues to nurture. We hope you enjoy these ‘insider’ stories.

Fiona Winning is an independent writer and producer. Previously, she was Director of the Performance Space in Sydney, Artistic Director of Playworks – the women performance writers network and Artistic Director of Death Defying Theatre (now Urban Theatre Projects). Fiona was recently appointed the new head of programming at Sydney Festival.

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INTRODUCTION

by Tim Carroll BYDS Artistic Director (1991- present)

Reflections on twenty years The first thing that I would have to write here is that trying to reflect on twenty years is very difficult. There are so many people, so many projects, so many places and so many images associated with the work that we have done in Bankstown since the 23rd of June 1991 that I am filled with confusion as to how to possibly prioritise and honour everyone that needs to be honoured.

I have a very good memory and sometimes shock people when I can name the people who are in a particular project photo or video even twenty years on. I have a treasure trove of images, reports, acquittals, letters, publications and videos that I can draw upon to help me reflect. These things are a mixed blessing.

Since beginning this retrospective with my oldest collaborator, Roslyn Oades, many people have asked me what were the ‘best’ projects that I have been involved in. There is no easy answer. What criteria would I use?

The Bankstown Oral History Project was the very first project that I instigated at BYDS and in some ways it was the ‘best’. It involved literally hundreds of people, four languages other than English, it crossed generations smoothly, people learned about other people’s cultures and histories and a number of artistic ‘by-products’ manifested as a direct result of the project taking place. It also cemented the kind of relationship that I was to have with the communities of Bankstown from that point on. I was a curious stranger at the time and came with enthusiastic humility to find out as much as possible about the new populations that I was now working amongst. I brought as part of this package lots of high school kids and supportive teachers who were as eager as I was to find out aspects of the life histories of people born and bred in the area and also those who had travelled from other lands to make Bankstown their home. Through the process of interviewing, transcribing, collecting photos and documents and utilising the other than English language skills of young people living in the area, we collected many, many stories.

We edited and re-packaged them and made them accessible to a larger audience for the first time. We were the active agent that enabled other people an opportunity to glimpse into the lives of their neighbours, engendering empathy and greater understanding. In many ways this is also the very basis and foundation of community arts as we have practiced it at BYDS: it is all about stories.

The photo (opposite) says a great deal about this. Two boys from Birrong Boys High, one of Chinese descent, one of Arabic, interview an older Anglo-Australian lady who grew up in the area. At the conclusion of the interview she confided in me that she had never had a conversation with a person of migrant background before and 13

was grateful to me for the opportunity.

I understood then that there needed to be a context for people to get to know each other: it doesn’t just happen. The boys likewise, learned things about her and the area in which they lived that they could never have known otherwise. In the photo I am actively ensuring that the tape is recording at a suitable level, that the microphone is being held correctly and that the questions set were all asked. That has been my job, to facilitate and ensure a quality outcome.

Over the years BYDS has organised and assisted in hundreds of events, small and large: I remember hip hop ‘interventions’ in the Old Town Plaza with NOMISe and Shannon performing for White Ribbon Day and members of HYBRID FORMZ busting serious moves with new group routines – a PA system set up with electricity from Uncle Sam’s shop and Johnny Tran on decks. I remember the original Bankstown Bites, in which BYDS was commissioned to create six hours of entertainment by Michelle McGregor McKenzie. A prime mover stage was parked in the Plaza and I was able to let loose with every incredible act that existed in the Bankstown area. And how could I forget NAIDOC, where we were eventually able to provide ninety per cent home-grown entertainment – pretty handy that Casey Donovan and Shannon Williams both come from 14

the area! In addition we had employed Darren Compton and Peta Strachan to train a bunch of little guys and girls to perform for the assembled crowd.

All BYDS projects had a public outcome. We insisted on high production values. A participant had to be able to demonstrate that they had benefited or gained skills or knowledge through being involved in a BYDS project and be proud of the outcome whether it be a book, a dance piece, a mural or a drawing. We did gigs at the Powerhouse Museum, Australian Museum, Sydney NAIDOC, Yabun Festival, Bondi Pavilion and Martin Place.

We have continued to do gigs in the Old Town Plaza and have extended our world to Centro Bankstown, which began with the launch of Westside Jr. Vol 1: Your Mum on Mothers’ Day 2009.

Our events and projects have been ongoing and become stronger every year: Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s annual Sydney Writers’ Festival productions, our White Ribbon Day campaigns, our Youth Week competitions and concerts, not to mention Roslyn Oades’ theatre trilogy, Fast Cars & Tractor Engines, with Urban Theatre Projects, Stories of Love & Hate, at the Sydney Theatre Company and her third and final piece, I’m Your Man, at Belvoir Theatre for the 2012 Sydney Festival.

One of the earliest art forms BYDS invested in was hip hop. In 1992, Death Defying Theatre (DDT) jumped on what was happening in Sydney’s west and produced Hip Hopera. Khaled Sabsabi did the sound for the show and began a series of local workshops at Hackett House in Bankstown. Some months later at the Casula event, I approached a very young Shannon Williams who was sitting on the edge of the stage. I said, ‘Oh my god, Sammy.

How are you? I didn’t know you could rap!’

Shannon replied, ‘My name is not Sammy. I’m Shannon, who are you, man?’

I explained to him that I thought that he was an Iraqi student that I had taught at Bonnyrigg High School.

Shannon laughed and said, ‘I’m Aboriginal, man.’

After Hip Hopera, I also encountered Mark Ross (AKA Monkey Mark/AKA Munkimuk) at Bankstown Square.

Mark and I became friends. As he later stated, ‘You taught me that I could get paid for what I loved doing.’ I met Shannon again too, and the other members of South West Syndicate (SWS). It was soon revealed that most of the members came from the Bankstown area and I was keen for them to be involved with BYDS. SWS performed to great acclaim at the second Bankstown Community Festival. I remember a Lebanese grandma holding her grandson’s hand and laughing when she heard the word, ‘Yallah!’ as a lyric. It was probably the first time that the word had ever been uttered in a public forum in Australia. The locals related strongly to the music and responded with great love.

Another DDT project, Danger, again utilised the musical skills of SWS, especially Mark Ross, who wrote a number of songs for the accompanying CD and show. Maria Mitar MC’d the show. There were also performances 15

by Ebony Williams, Leo Tanoi and a host of other Western Sydney artists associated with DDT. Over the ensuing years, Mark and Shannon ran workshops at many schools and organisations with BYDS, starred in a gig at an early Sydney Writers’ Festival event and also went off freelancing to film Hip Hop up Top and Desert Rap with Triple J’s Tony Collins. Accompanied by a young Morganics, Mark and Shannon also got to hang out with ‘real’ desert and NT Aboriginal people and met Warren Williams and other Aboriginal music and cultural stars.

A workshop that stands out was at Yagoona Public School where we had over thirty Year 4 kids all performing hip hop dance. I have video of kids linked by hands doing the spaghetti arms move with Mark and Shannon coordinating the show. There is another shot of this dear little girl in a hijab doing crazy legs.

In 2003, UTP had created a show called Mechanix. As part of the community engagement they did a community callout for singers, rappers, dancers and musicians. A young man who called himself NOMISe popped up who wanted to record a song. He did not want to perform in the show but was finally persuaded by Liberty Kerr. After that and the success of his celebratory song, accompanied by Sarah Vongmany, he had tasted adulation and loved it. Over the next few months, NOMISe began to work more and more at BYDS, helping me out with lots of things and taking to some project management jobs very well. He was shaping up as a good community arts worker and was utilising all of the resources at BYDS to further his place as a Palestinian-Australian rapper.

I can’t truthfully write about hip hop in Bankstown without a big shout out to HYBRID FORMZ. Khai Ngo and his brother Benny, Tony Ngo, Martin and Denis, Tas Reposian; who later ended up in Justice Crew, were all hugely talented, ambitious boys who loved to dance. They organised Super Round Box 1, 2 and 3 which attracted judges and performers from the US and New Zealand who saw them fight their way into the finals with a blistering series of hard fought battles. To this day hip hop and break dance classes are still conducted at the Bankstown PCYC and Wednesday nights at the Bankstown Arts Centre. Benny Ngo in particular has been a stalwart and has my admiration for his determination and community spirit and for the sheer number of kids that he has taught.

Another artist that appeared on the scene around the same time as Shannon and NOMISe was Peter Polites.

His quick wit and broad knowledge of world politics made him an important advocate for many global issues on a local level, including race, gender and gay rights. Peter instigated some amazing projects at BYDS, including Yiayia’s Journey, HybridGraf and Arts Cars, and he still works closely with our organisation as a local artist, writer and community arts worker.

In 2005 Shannon became our inaugural Indigenous Youth Arts Officer. As well as mentoring and sourcing young Indigenous people from the area, which became an integral goal of BYDS, he got to use his hip hop skills at different times. He did some great/weird shows at a local primary school for NAIDOC Day and on one occasion he rapped for four hundred kids from over fifty different language backgrounds. And the kids would always listen.

Shannon has that kind of magnetism.

With all of Shannon’s talent I finally suggested that he apply to Arts NSW for funds to record his album. In many ways that became the defining feature of the year for BYDS and Shannon. The launch was held at Bankstown Town Hall and the Live at the Wireless team from Triple J came out to record it. BYDS was behind him all the way.

Through our Indigenous Arts program we have been able to build a strong and trusting relationship with the Aboriginal community in the Bankstown area, particularly through our succession of charismatic and talented Indigenous Arts Officers.

One of the great testaments to BYDS’ work has been to include and collaborate with the unique and incredibly 16

diverse communities of the Bankstown area. BYDS has had a particularly special relationship with Bankstown’s African community and this began in April 2003. I was rehearsing in a UTP outdoor show, Mechanix, when a lady walking past with her family approached me. She asked what we were doing and I told her. She told me that her name was Perpetua Ekechukwu and that she was a dancer.

Her daughters also performed traditional ‘African’ dance.

My interest was piqued and I showed her where my office was, adding, ‘Maybe we can work together?’

I successfully applied for a BCC community grant and Perpetua was employed to conduct ‘The African Research Project’ which sought to create a ‘snapshot’ of Africanbackground people living in the area: where they were from, whether they had come as refugees or migrants, what languages they spoke and what ‘ethnic’ background they were. More particularly, we focussed on the artistic and cultural needs of the people that we surveyed.

In keeping with the BYDS ethos that all projects should result in a ‘public outcome’ we decided to launch the report at the first African Festival of Cultures. The Festival was a huge hit and attracted a capacity audience for the smaller theatre space at Bankstown Town Hall.

The second African Festival of Cultures saw the manifestation of The Choir Project as a public outcome.

This time we took over the large auditorium (1000 seats) at Bankstown Town Hall and the event was preceded by an African soccer tournament. As Linda Marr said, sometimes the aesthetic of an African choir is to make sure that you are heard – so a loud voice can sometimes be judged better than a ‘good’ voice. The twenty-strong choir was very loud.

BYDS kept up connection with the Igbo community in particular, as well as making strong connections with the Bahr El Ghazal community from Southern Sudan through Zachariah Mowat.

One day a man arrived at BYDS who wanted me to help him produce a play that he had written. I asked him a few questions and he told me that he was a Sudanese journalist whose play, No Time for Tears, had been performed in New Zealand with a Maori group of actors. A short time after we secured funding to employ a director to reproduce Sala’s play. Her name was Effie Nkrumah.

Effie assembled a dynamic cast of Africans who wanted to perform. Like many community projects it included people who had performed before and others who just really wanted to. The play was performed twice at the Old Bankstown Theatre. The project introduced Effie’s skills to a wide group of artists and producers and gave her a

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special place here at BYDS. Sala too has gone on to become a respected and much loved figure at BYDS, writing yet another play which was to be performed in 2012 by the Abhinay School of Performing Arts in Carlton.

I approached Effie again in 2010 to direct a play of her choice. After a trip to Ghana she decided to create an amalgamated play utilising The Slaves and Women of Kumbi by Ghanaian playwright Mohammad Ibn Abdallah, mixed with two poems by Maya Angelou. Now this young woman had hit her straps. Artistic Director of UTP, Alicia Talbot, described the production, which was held at Hackett House and was produced by Peter Polites, as something truly special: ‘With twelve community members in one show, Effie blended traditional and contemporary African texts with traditional and contemporary forms of dance. The piece transported me to another world and I felt as if I was witnessing a rare moment in the telling and retelling of stories. The jam packed audience cheering loudly, seemed to be thinking the same thing.’

These are only some of the stories, projects, experiences and memories I have as the Director of BYDS over the past twenty years. In the following pages you will get an insight into the many many more relationships, projects and events BYDS has developed with the Bankstown community. This includes a comprehensive insight into the literary empire BYDS has built with Michael Mohammed Ahmad, who I met when he was only thirteen, and renowned literary editor, Professor Ivor Indyk. You will read about the performance projects we’ve produced from some of Australia’s best performance and theatre-makers and you will read about our contributions to oral history from oral historian, Rosie Block. You will get a chance to check out some lyrics by Mark Ross, and some reflections by Bankstown’s most talented young photographer, Bill Reda; one of our longest collaborating school teachers, Joyce Conte; and of course, one of our dearest and most trusted Bankstown Elders, Uncle Harry Allie. To conclude, our BYDS team have gone through the books, the newspaper clippings, the posters, the publications, and the pictures – through the years, to give you a comprehensive timeline of BYDS’ work and a summary of our most meaningful relationships throughout two decades.

My twenty years at BYDS has been a fun and satisfying journey that I am most grateful for. I feel very lucky to have had this great working life.

Thank you.

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PART 1: Oral History

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Multicultural Bankstown: a backward glance

by Rosie Block Oral Historian

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came to live in Sydney in 1978 and thought that Circular Quay was the centre of the city – with a passing wave of the hand to Parramatta. I am indebted to Tim Carroll who invited me in 1992 to the launching of his wonderful publication, Recollections: The Bankstown Oral History Project – A Multicultural Perspective, to be launched at Bankstown Library. After the launching of this impressive ‘multicultural perspective’ I went into the neighbouring shopping mall, Bankstown Square, and realised that I had not understood at all where the ‘centre’ of Sydney was as I watched the busy scene with the different aspects and costumes of the crowds of people. I was looking at the heart of multicultural Australia and the interviews were my introduction.

Tim Carroll, the mover and shaker at the head of BYDS was naturally familiar with the scene. He has a unique view of the world. By nature he is enthusiastic, non-judgemental, creative and innovative and he brings out everybody’s best. It was his brilliant idea to have the school students interview their parents and other seniors in the diverse communities that make up Bankstown. Some were conducted in their own languages, especially Macedonian. After completion of the project his next move was to phone the Mitchell Library where the oral history program had been established and was in its first year of operation. ‘Would I like the Recollections Oral History Project to be deposited with the Library?’ Would I ever! The Library did not collect local histories then or now, but this was a large pioneer endeavour within a community and furthermore, the interviews were conducted by youngsters. Professional photographs of the interviewees had been commissioned and these accompanied the recordings. It was a very important ‘first’.

I shall not forget that slim vibrant young man, accompanied on one occasion by his baby son, who brought these treasures to the Library where they occupy an honoured place. This, however, was not the final moment for oral history in Bankstown. Tim went on to commission more projects and these publications now reside in the Bankstown Library beside the first.

In the introduction to Recollections, Tim pays tribute firstly to the ‘seniors’, many of whom were immigrants and other native Australians who had lived for some time in the Bankstown area and seen many changes there. The interviewees came from countries which included Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Macedonia, Lebanon, Vietnam, China and Egypt. Maria Lynn from the Ukraine reflects the experience of many who struggled with English. She describes travelling from Bonegilla to see her husband who was working in Sydney. ‘I came to see him by train. It was a very bad journey and my son was sick. People said to me, “Where’s your husband?” I did not understand and said, “Husband, what husband?” “Are you married?” they said and I said, “Yes, I am Maria …”’

Cath Worthington, Australian born and resident in Bankstown from 1977, recounts fond memories of the 21

changes there and pays warm tribute to her neighbours from other countries. ‘I’d love to be here in the year 2000 and see what it will be like then.’ I hope she got her wish. Ho Thi Rut talks about his schooling in Vietnam. ‘As a child I went to school two times a day. I went to the equivalent of Year 6 but didn’t complete my final exams because I didn’t have the identification required … When I was young I wanted life to be easy, have food and clothes and live comfortably. But that wasn’t so. Now here in Australia I’ve got it all.’

All recount their pleasure in seeing their children and grandchildren married and comfortable and they also, like Ho Thi Rut, honour their new country and the chances they were given here. Atanasa Stojanovski, from a farming family in Macedonia, states firmly, ‘Australia is pretty good. It has helped me and my husband a lot. I’ve thrown my bones down here and I’ve worked hard to get what I’ve got so I’m staying.’

I began with the launch and celebration of this first oral history project at Bankstown Library where the atmosphere was one of great excitement and the students and their interviewees were delighted to meet again. The students were not necessarily from the same background as those they interviewed and at the launching all were aware that they had gained major and of course, surprising insights into the different lives of their interviewees.

Since 1992, other innovative oral history based projects have followed – including a very impressive series of plays. Tim and Roslyn Oades with UTP combined to produce a fascinating performance of ‘headphoneverbatim theatre’ based on the interviews already recorded. They introduced a unique form of this dramatisation of oral history by having young actors sporting headsets and voicing the lines they were hearing through the headphones. Each played various voices and characters, but all the time holding the tension of the spoken word of the character they represented at that moment. In this fashion wonderful stories were recounted a piece at a time.

The actors (miraculously it seemed) never lost the strand of the individual narratives to the great satisfaction of the audience. Their first experiment was entitled Fast Cars & Tractor Engines and was presented to great acclaim at the International Oral History Association Conference held in Sydney in 2006. The international audience sat, as had earlier audiences in the Bankstown area, entranced, waiting to hear what happened next. Following this, Tim and the ‘team’ have participated in many oral history conferences where they share generously how they came to transfer oral history to performance.

As a postscript, in 2008 Ros, with the support of BYDS, created a second headphone-verbatim theatre production, Stories of Love & Hate, also based on interviews, this time in relation to the Cronulla Riots of December 2005. The team was then invited to repeat their successful show as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2011 Education Season.

Over the many years from 1992 to date there must be hundreds of Bankstown residents, young and old, who bless the decision that led Tim Carroll to ‘throw his bones down’ to the recording of their stories, now an important oral history preserved and available forever. What’s more, the archive and its attendant celebrations continue. What a record!

Rosemary Block, Inaugural Curator of Oral History, State Library of New South Wales

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Vico Thai, Michael Mohammed Ahmad & Katia Molino in Fast Cars & Tractor Engines, Bankstown RSL, 2005

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PART 2: Westside Publications

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Westside Magazine to Westside Publications

by Michael Mohammed Ahmad Westside Publications Chief Editor

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estside Publications is devoted to sourcing writing from Western Sydney and writing about Western Sydney.

The original Westside Magazine was first published in 1998 as a direct response to a front page Daily Telegraph article titled ‘Dial A-Gun’. The subheading of the article stated that a ‘gang says it’s easier than buying pizza’. The article featured an image of young men of Middle Eastern appearance flashing ‘gang signs’ and covering their faces with their hoods and hats. It was later revealed that the photographer who took the photo had not stumbled upon a gang but rather a group of kids from Punchbowl Boys High School who where asked to pose as ‘gangsters’ for the photo.

As a response to the devastating attention this article drew to the youth of Bankstown, Tim Carroll and Roslyn Oades wanted to embark on a literary project that would positively showcase ‘writing and art by young people from the Bankstown area’ – as was the subheading of the original Westside Magazine. This new anthology was eighty pages, printed on a beautiful gloss finish in aubergine and recognised the works of over one hundred artists from the local area, most of whom came from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. It was perhaps the only positive representation of young people from the Bankstown area in a publication that year.

In 1999 Roslyn and Tim produced their second Westside Magazine, Westside 2, and this once again sought to highlight the writing and artwork of young people from the Bankstown area. In 2000, Roslyn began producing the third edition of Westside, and this was specific in being devoted to highlighting the poetry and photography of young people from Bankstown. In 2001, the fourth and final edition of the original Westside Magazine was produced, this with the same goal as each that preceded it.

Westside Magazine made a valuable contribution to the attitudes of many young people from the Bankstown area. I would know. My story, called ‘A Fable’s Fable’, was printed in the first edition. It was my first published work and I was twelve years old. I mentioned it any time I wrote a resumé, a bio or was having a conversation about my greatest achievements.

By 2006 I’d developed a healthy and ongoing relationship with BYDS, most of which was based on popping my head into the office to have a chat with Tim Carroll or Peter Polites. During one of these conversations, and during my first year of university (completing an Arts Degree at UWS), I asked Tim Carroll, ‘What ever happened to that magazine you guys used to produce called Westside?’

Tim informed me that there was no longer anybody to take on the demanding responsibility and workload of compiling an anthology of this kind. It so happened that I was interested in becoming an editor and publisher after finishing university and I saw this as an excellent opportunity to build some skills in the profession. I bit my lip, shrugged and asked, ‘Can I do it?’

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Throughout 2006 and 2007, on a voluntary basis, I developed two new anthologies for BYDS under the title of Westside. These publications mainly highlighted the work of my friends, as I had not yet built many contacts and networks in the community and not yet sourced many writers. The goal of the anthologies was to once again highlight the work of young artists and writers from the Bankstown area, but I tried some new things too. I wanted each edition to be more than just ‘cool stuff from Bankstown’. I wanted them to tackle certain cultural, socioeconomic and political issues. Thus I gave each edition a centralised theme. Westside 06 considered the current climax of globalisation and exploitation and Westside 07 highlighted stories and artworks that related to heroes and villains.

In 2008, Westside was ready to grow. Tim Carroll was finally able, through a program grant from the Australia Council, to employ me three days a week to source young writers from Western Sydney and to produce an anthology which highlighted their literary talents. In this same year, my relationship with one of Australia’s most renowned editors, Professor Ivor Indyk (Giramondo Publishing), was also beginning to intensify. I had been meeting with Ivor once a fortnight in Fairfield as part of a new Western Sydney writers’ group.

Ivor had recognised that Westside was an outlet for the writers’ group and he had been keen to build up a stable of writers and writing from Western Sydney for some time. He wanted me, and the writers I was sourcing, to not only produce work by the community, but also work about the community. When I asked ‘why should we?’ he said, ‘Well no one else is going to do it.’

With the support of BYDS as the driving organisation, and Ivor as a mentor and patron, Westside could transform from a magazine into a literary program. We relocated the fortnightly writers’ group to BYDS and began to invite new writers to join. This grew into an ensemble that now operated as the Westside Writers’ Group. The Group would consult with Ivor and I to develop new writing each fortnight, but would also be utilised to facilitate writing workshops across Western Sydney and to work professionally in performances and readings for different literary events, usually in association with the Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF). The growing number of writers I had sourced also inspired me to divide the annual Westside publication in two: Westside Jr., which was devoted to highlighting the work of young writers from Western Sydney, and Westside New Series, which was devoted to 28

highlighting the work of professional and established writers from Western Sydney. Although I maintained a new and original theme for each anthology, the emphasis of every publication I produced since 2008 was the same: writing about Western Sydney – the people, the places and the soul of Australia’s most diverse, but also most misrepresented, communities.

Through writing workshops and long-term residencies in various high schools, Westside Publications has sourced over five thousand young writers and artists from Western Sydney and published over one thousand individual works. This has included special editions and initiatives of Westside that were devoted to recognising the works of young Indigenous writers and young refugee writers who lived in the Western Sydney region. The Westside Writers’ Group had grown to an ensemble of over fifty writers. The members had worked in productions such as Alleyway Honour (SWF, 2009), which attracted a full house and received front-page publicity in the local papers; and Inside the Westside Writers’ Group (SWF, 2010), which attracted another full house and was aired on the TVS book show, Shelf Life. By this time, Westside Publications had also produced nine anthologies, including revised and updated editions of Westside 06 – 08, Westside New Series Vol 1: Fill Your Bucket, Westside Jr. Volumes 1 – 3 and the BCC Youth Week Writing Competition Showcases. Westside Publications also maintained an online presence, first through ‘The Lonely Page’, which regularly highlighted new work from local writers, and then through the Westside Library, in which every Westside edition since 2006 could be accessed and read for free as digital E-Readers directly off the BYDS website.

As a result of the Westside Publications initiative, there now exists a literary culture for Western Sydney and about Western Sydney that will thrive in many forms for decades to come. It is an honour to be so closely connected to such an important movement.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad was Chief Editor of Westside Publications from September 2005 – February 2013. He is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney.

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Writing Western Sydney

by Professor Ivor Indyk

W

hen the Writing & Society Research Group was created at the University of Western Sydney in 2006, I saw it as essential that we should put our expertise in literature and the publishing of literature at the service of young writers in Western Sydney. But where to start? A lot of government money had been put into developing the visual and performing arts in the region, but there had been very little support for literature, presumably because art and theatre had a broad appeal, across the different cultural groupings, while the appeal of literature, because of its dependence on language, must necessarily be more confined.

What we called ‘The Western Sydney Writing Project’ began with a workshop for young writers organised with Claudia Chidiac at the Powerhouse Youth Theatre in Fairfield. It met on a regular basis through the first part of 2007. Its members were Anita Maglicic, Louise Lamella, Andy Ko, Tamar Chnorhokian, Nukte Ogun and Mohammed Ahmad. They were a wonderful group, each bringing their own distinctive cultural background to their discussion of writing, but they drove me to despair sometimes, especially in the early days, since they didn’t appear to do any writing. Shyness must have had something to do with it, and perhaps an uncertainty about what ‘writing’ might be if it was essentially imaginative, and not connected to a practical purpose, like journalism or advertising or teaching. But there was also a more obvious difficulty: how to write compellingly about the everyday life of the region in a way which brought out its interest, given that to prejudiced observers from outside, accustomed to stories of crime and violence in the media, what the region appeared to offer was a kind of low life, backward, primitive, tribal, threatening, or simply undistinguished.

Mohammed soon filled me in on two other facts about writing in Western Sydney which I hadn’t thought of from my own privileged position as an academic. First, precisely because theatre had been relatively well served in the west, writing was best considered as something you performed. Many of the young writers had come up through theatre groups, and for them writing and performance were two aspects of the same activity. This was an eye-opener: nearly all the published literary authors I had dealt with were pretty hopeless as performers. And second, Mohammed told me, if you want us to think of ourselves as writers, you need to pay us. Fair enough! The traditional line about romantic genius obviously wasn’t going to cut much ice, if you didn’t have the privilege of being claimed by the tradition. It’s true, writing is a job, like any other, and it ought to have a payable prospect.

The great achievement of that first workshop was, appropriately, a performance by its six members, at the Museum of Sydney, in June 2007, as part of the SWF. They read their own writing; it was writing which drew on their own experiences; it was a sign of things to come.

Later that year, with the PYT premises in Fairfield closing for renovation, Mohammed suggested the workshop 30

move to BYDS. Now the issues and principles which I described above would really be tested and put to work. I still have Tim and Mohammed’s original proposal for our collaboration.

Bankstown Youth Development Service (BYDS) would like to partner with the University of Western Sydney and Giramondo Publishing in a writing and research initiative that will facilitate and develop writing for people from Bankstown and Western Sydney and create outlets for recognition of the work developed.

Funding will first provide a wage for local writer Michael Mohammed Ahmad to research and then coordinate and facilitate workshops in all forms of writing.

Funding for the initiative will further assist in sourcing new writers from the plethora of high schools in the Bankstown Local Government and surrounding area.

Funding will also aid the publication of BYDS’ Westside, which will identify the quality writing produced through workshops and other talented writers in the region.

Funding will finally help in organising and participating in events that will recognise and showcase the writing and development of writing skills created through this initiative.

After much hard work on applications, the funding did come: from the Australia Council, Arts NSW, Bankstown Council and the Writing & Society Research Group. But while organisations provide funding, it is individuals who make it happen. Through Mohammed’s initiatives, the workshop for young Western Sydney writers now took place within a larger context, which included not only performances, and publication opportunities in Westside and HEAT, but writing classes for children in schools, and experience in editing and magazine production. Soon there was a whole economy at work, which allowed the writers themselves to participate in a range of literary activities which developed their skills, while at the same time reaching out into the broader community. Membership of the writing workshop changed as writers came and went, but its literary character and commitment remained constant.

Peter Polites, Lachlan Brown, Fiona Wright, Rebecca Landon, Lina Jabbir, Susie Ahmad, Samantha Hogg, Luke Carman, Arda Barut, Felicity Castagna, and of course Mohammed himself, brought range, accomplishment, provocation, critical acumen, and writing which could take your breath away. We met regularly in the upstairs common room in the old BYDS offices opposite Bankstown station, with its assortment of sunken couches, office chairs, cushions and beanbags. Mohammed ensured there was felafel, watermelon, pickled vegetables, grapes on the table. No one pulled their punches. Criticism was offered and accepted. Praise too: when the writing worked, everyone shared in the excitement.

Westside changed its design and its content – became two Westsides, senior and junior, to accommodate the wealth of writing now being produced from the writers in the workshop, and those at school. There were launches, and readings. Workshop members performed in the 2008 SWF, harbourside, in the Bangarra Mezzanine; then again in the 2009 festival, under the masterly direction of Roslyn Oades, at the Bankstown Town Hall, in the aptly titled Alleyway Honour: A Night of Performing Writing from the Soul of Bankstown. The title, which was also carried by that year’s issue of Westside really summed up the workshop’s ethos: what was at stake was a sense of honour and dignity that was prepared to fight for recognition. Then at the 2010 SWF, what could easily have been taken for 31

an act of folly, but worked so well because we all knew and respected each other – a completely unscripted public performance of the workshop itself, instigated by Mohammed, and presented upstairs in the rehearsal space next to the BYDS offices, just as if it were an ordinary meeting, only now there were one hundred people watching.

This event must have been unique in the annals of the SWF – perhaps of any festival – and represented a polar extreme to the endlessly repeated performances of the pre-packaged and marketed authors who normally make up the festival casts.

Time passes, we’re all a few years older now. Some of our members have books, or will have soon; some have won fellowships or scholarships and are working for their doctorates; some have gained funding and gone on to develop other projects. It’s probably too early to look back and say that what we experienced there was an important moment in the cultural life of our city – but I’m sure it was.

Ivor Indyk is founding editor and publisher of HEAT magazine and the award-winning Giramondo book imprint, and Whitlam Professor in Writing and Society at the University of Western Sydney. A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf, and essays on many aspects of Australian literature, art, architecture and literary publishing. http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_society Westside Writers' Group, photos by Richard Birch

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Peter Polities, Alleyway Honour Performance, Sydney Writers’ Festival 2009. Photo by Bill Reda

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Dorothy Kamal reading her work at the launch of Deep Suburbia. Photo by Bill Reda

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Hearing Voices: Thoughts on the Refugee Action Support Program (2009) and the ConnectEd Artist in Residence Program (2010)

by Lachlan Brown

S

tanley is silent. He places his hands on the table. He rests his head on his hands. He doesn’t respond to questions beyond a nod or shake of the head. Somehow, during the next half hour, he will write of his life in the Congo for the first time. He will write of the whole village running. He will write of a pregnant woman being shot. As he reads his account to the other students his voice will barely reach the walls of the demountable building. Outside kids will be swearing and sweating and skidding on the asphalt, kicking one another across brown ovals in the forty-degree heat. But in this room Stanley’s listeners will weep. Some will nod because they know too well that there are certain images you can’t erase from your mind. A few months later Stanley will be writing and performing plays about his life in an African refugee camp. He will join the debating team. He will speak on a panel at a book launch and confidently answer questions from the floor. Two years later he will win a Refugee Week Award from the council for his contribution to the community. When interviewed he will say that he wants to work in the humanitarian field to ‘help young people who cannot speak for themselves’.

When Eric Brace from the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) approached BYDS to take part in the Refugee Action Support (RAS) program I’m not sure that anyone knew where the collaboration would lead. One-off drama and creative writing workshops looked tricky. How would facilitators establish trust, encourage self-expression and mentor young writers in a single afternoon? But the spectacular success of the initiative showed the brilliance of Brace’s intuition, the wisdom of BYDS’ Director Tim Carroll and the skill of Michael Mohammed Ahmad who oversaw the logistics of what took place. The RAS workshops lead to a remarkable publication, edited by Ahmad, launched at the National Young Writers’ Festival in Newcastle. A documentary of the process was shown during Refugee Week in Blacktown and later at film festivals across Australia. Stories were read on community radio stations and the ABC’s Radio National. Copies of the journal even made their way to Tennant Creek where they were read by Indigenous students.

As one reads through Westside Jr. Vol. 2: Violence it is clear to see that this is a work which contains some of the most politically urgent yet fascinatingly diverse writing to emerge from young people in contemporary Australia. There are works that are self-conscious about the act of writing. They acknowledge a disjunction between experience and language not only because English is the second language for these students, but also because of the harrowing subject matter in the pieces. The journal includes firsthand experiences of war, the deaths 35

of loved ones, beheadings, mutilation, infanticide, the discovery of dead bodies in backyards, natural disasters, the fear of being murdered and the experience of displacement. In a one line piece a student expresses their frustration:

I am comfuse. I crack my scalp. Nothing to work out. Anger! Anger! Anger!

Similarly an untitled poem reads: War an immoral world.

Blood of Ocean Ruin Ruin Ruin.

However, if the majority of the pieces in the volume give a very clear account of certain traumatic experiences or events, there are a few which are quite sophisticated in the way they deal with the theme of violence. Some use third person narration and focalise experiences through characters. Others attempt to write the stories of friends in the first person. One piece includes a baby demon who accidentally drowns a baby lion.

At the end of the work the student has written, ‘Sorry. Not about violence.’ Another chilling story adopts the persona of a sadist who is abused by bullies and an alcoholic father. The narrator then speaks about harming the weak: ‘Children, old people, animals …’ Here the clipped sentences, the immediacy of the present tense and the disturbing voice all indicate a series of creative choices that work together effectively. This is breathtaking in a work completed in half an hour by a student whose first language is not English.

Mohammed Ahmad’s bold and controversial editing decisions also make for moments of surprise in the volume. For example, the decision to include struck-through passages offers an unsettling insight into the process of writing about trauma. So, for example, in one piece the student has crossed out certain words, searching for the right way to express what he has experienced: HELP! I was sitting under a tree, waiting for someone to pick me up from the rain of river of blood war’s blood bombs.

This speaks volumes about the inability to pour certain experiences into the tiny vessels of the English language.

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Perhaps some of the most inspiring works in the journal make certain plays for identity through writing itself. In one poem, an older Afghan teen writes about the proud history of his country, before lamenting at the appearance of the Taliban and the Americans appearing as ‘the two snake[s]’ on a mission of destruction. Out of this mission comes violence and disconnection, but this also gives birth to the complex identity of the speaker, arising, as it were, from the labour pains of his country: There came the war and violence.

There came the separation of child and mother.

There came ME out of Afghanistan, my beloved mother.

Another piece in the collection is also driven by a similarly pressing concern with identity, opening with a poignant line from a Tamil author, ‘This is not a story or it is not a poem. It’s just some lines of my country, a telling of a boy.’ Once more there is a remarkable intertwining of country and identity here, an awareness that one’s individual status is tied up with the fate of one’s people.

Indeed as Australia becomes home to increasing numbers of refugees, more and more stories like this will be shared. So when students ‘hear the voices of bombs’ it is vital that we hear their voices. Or when a student is confronted by an ‘ARMY TANK’ we must ensure that this testimony confronts others. Publications like this one therefore provide a kind of place for the creative voices of those who have been displaced.

It is another BYDS program that takes us beyond the one-off workshop, instead focusing on the process of writing, editing and re-writing with groups of students across school terms. The ConnectEd Artist in Residence Program allowed two artists (myself and Mohammed Ahmad) to mentor students at Sir Joseph Banks High School and Bankstown Senior College in 2010 for ten weeks at a time, a length that was highly unusual for any school writing workshop. Sometimes in the rush toward assessment, editing is given scant attention. These writing workshops, however, allowed us to offer students advice and help them put it into practice. The students ranged from Year 7 to Year 11. Their works were included in Westside Jr. Vol. 3: Deep Suburbia.

The writing residency work is ground-breaking in the development of a literary culture in Western Sydney.

Hence this collection is important, not only as a record of the experiences of young people in a multicultural community, but also as an example of the stylish and technically innovative writing that an area can produce. We see this, I think, in the collection’s three broad areas of concern: Firstly, many pieces are marked by the authenticity of their voices, their frankness and openness. For example, the breathless ‘I Write to Remember’ or the frustration of ‘Girls These Days’ by anonymous young writers both offer compelling voices that will not find literary utterance in any other setting. So there are no stories about vampires here, bolstered by overblown promises of fidelity and thickets of adjectives. Instead you may get narrators noticing small things, like a speeding ticket stuffed underneath a chair, or the feet of a toddler on cold tiles. Then there are the moving voices of students like Soghra Foladi as she documents the struggles of refugees working within and against English as a second-language and the ‘nonstopproblem’ that this entails.

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However, this is not to say that these pieces are naïve, or that one can necessarily draw a direct line from each work to the ‘real’ voice of its author. These are also crafted and edited works which use self-aware and playful strategies of composition. Thus Tala Agafili and Jessica Kava present coded paragraphs with switched nouns, interrogating and undermining one of the most basic elements of the contract of language. Peta Murphy’s astonishing collection picks up the debris of suburban living, training its gaze on certain beautiful moments and yet simultaneously undercutting others with hard-eyed and amusing irony. This is creative writing at its most interesting. And it demonstrates that the ConnectEd residency writing offers not only a vital expression of fresh literary voices, but also a record of the fascinatingly complex ways that young people can use language across Western Sydney.

Secondly, within the writing, the theme of positioning comes up again and again in significant ways. Phoebe Turuva’s pieces, for example, cast a wonderfully astute eye over the stratified society of a school bus, as well as a student who attempts to reinvent themselves over the holidays. Other works are acutely aware of the playground, mapping the first days of school with the sense of categorisation that this experience so often entails. Of course many of these texts are about being positioned: within a school system, within a hybridised or globalised ethnic identity, within certain relational and familial difficulties, ‘Torn between two worlds’ as Susanna Lewantiua describes it. And then there are also texts of overt positioning: Lina Nguyen’s writing of a life, for instance; or ‘Ten Honest Things About Ty’ in which Ty T presents a kind of manifesto of being in a chiasm (itself a vectored, positional form). Here it is interesting to see how writing can give students the agency to engage in the positioning and self-fashioning that stems from such creative uses of language.

Thirdly, and perhaps most noticeably, this is a collection that is marked by its detailed attention to place. On the one hand these pieces are rooted in the areas around Bankstown and the specific images of one of Australia’s most diverse and stimulating urban environments. So we are taken from Paul Keating Park and the shops in Centro Bankstown, through the schoolyard of Sir Joseph Banks High, past hospitals and libraries, front yards and storefronts. Importantly, this landscape is presented through the fresh eyes of students who notice those details that others might miss: a modified Subaru flooring it down Stacey Street (Filip Stempien), or the smell of the food court in the shopping centre (Jai Kisseh-Lloyd). Yet on the other hand this is also a remarkably international collection, which ranges across the Pacific, winding through the Middle East and even reaching Europe. ‘Travelized 38

Waleed’ by Waleed Quader exemplifies this sense of constant migration or even nomadism as it tracks the young narrator’s journeys through five cities in two months. ‘Is this it, is this the last pit stop?’ Quader’s narrator asks on his arrival in Sydney.

Indeed this question of home is something that arises again and again across the creative pieces that BYDS publishes. Where is home for the migrant? Where is home for the refugee? Where is home for a second generation Australian, visiting their parents’ country? What does home look like in Western Sydney? BYDS has kept these questions at the forefront of an artistic conversation that must continue. And, as the RAS workshops and ConnectEd programs show, there are generations of new voices calling for our attention with the urgency of their stories and the distinctiveness of their creative utterance. They are voices that must be heard far beyond the walls of demountable classrooms.

Elements of this reflection have been adapted from Brown, L. Afterword: The ConnectEd Writing Residency in Westside Jr. Vol. 2: Deep Suburbia, Bankstown: BYDS, 2011 and Brown, L. ‘All the Village was Running: Some Voices from Young Refugees in Western Sydney’, Sydney University Press, 2011. Lachlan grew up in Macquarie Fields and attended the University of Sydney where he completed a PhD on the poetry of Kevin Hart. Lachlan’s poems have appeared in journals including Southerly, HEAT, Mascara and Total Cardboard. Lachlan lectures at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.

RAS photos by Bill Reda

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PART 3: Performance & Events

41

Risk it for the Biscuit: a lesson in survival

by TJ Eckleberg

A

school quadrangle, night time. Some crazy stage contraption gleams in the middle of the playground – a huge metal eight-metre ramp leading to what looks strangely like a boxing ring. Behind it, where boys from Birrong normally eat their recess, trees are lit red and blue. Projectors throw the faces onto the brickwork of C Block, school chairs are reassembled into theatre seats and laid out to afford a view of the stage … if indeed that’s what it is. A boxing ring? It’s five by five metres square …

Two giant Bunraku puppets emerge from a hazy rock and roll wrestling darkness, a hodge-podge of silver air conditioning duct – flailing arms and legs. Operated by a team of five boys, the puppets bobble and sway, struggling to walk, gesture and look in the right direction. They make their way triumphantly to centre stage – towering three metres high, improbable behemoths in the middle of a suburban high school.

The MC Stephen Kourouche introduces us to the problem – two boys, both angry, outraged, and a missing biscuit. Or maybe it was a biscuit that should have been missing? Someone should have given someone something. Someone was a cheapskate, someone should’ve bought their own, someone’s mum … And so it goes. This is how these things start.

Risk it for the Biscuit played out over about an hour and was the result of months of wrangling more than fifty boys from a tough south-west school. We begged for exemptions from classes, cajoled boys to stay back during lunchtime or afterschool had finished, tried to work out how to keep them generating and responding to the issue of why we fight, kept them exploring the question of what makes us violent – rather than getting distracted and running around in circles … or worse still – punching one another.

There were break dancing robots courtesy of Monkey Mark and Brothablack; junk percussion created with the skillful eye of Reza Achman; gorgeous video interviews by Fadle El Harris; puppets worked and trained by Scott Wright from Erth; acting coaching by Nico Lothouris; staging and production by the inimitable Simon Wise and awesome rock ‘n’ roll effects, sound and lights by Felix. And of course in the middle of it all – if I recall correctly even in the middle of one of the Bunraku puppets – was Tim Carroll – quietly orchestrating, encouraging, inspiring.

And of course … wrangling.

Okay. So there were disasters, mistakes and flubbed lines. Okay, the power did go out three times during the show but by night’s end, when puppets had exploded; when we were met with the inevitable results of violence; by the time fireworks flew from quadrangle roof, we all knew we’d seen something unique, something transformative.

Young men talking about actual moments of violence, young men contemplating what it means to hurt one 42

Poster Design by Fadle El Harris

another, what it means to hurt. Young men talking candidly of their fears, the fears of those around them, their feelings of being trapped in a cycle beyond their control.

It was a gorgeous success. A moment where defeats and daily grind gave way to a new vision of Birrong Boys High School – a moment John Fox from Welfare State International would say ‘left a patina of magic’ over the everyday space in which it was staged. Never again would audience, the boys involved, or facilitators walk into that quadrangle without that memory. A memory affirming this was more than a school yard – it was a sacred space where young men talked honestly about what haunted them and young men performed hilariously and courageously in front of their peers, friends and family.

In typical BYDS fashion money was stretched to a second show a year later – and SURVIVOR 3001 took Risk it … to its logical conclusion, giving performers time to develop and opening space for further conversation. While the budget wasn’t as grand, the set by Sam James was elegant, the costumes designed by Dane Hallet – a Birrong 43

Boys student who was assisted in the realisation by Roslyn Oades – were awesome, and Morganics leant his expert rapping and dramatic flair to the occasion. There were dragons, more arguments, spectacular effects.

But the performance was overshadowed by a more dramatic and distressing event. Just a few weeks before the performance, Omar El Chami Batch, a Birrong Boys student, was shot and killed at Bankstown station – an innocent victim of an unfathomable argument. In the middle of a project about violence, in the midst of creating something peaceful from the often traumatic lives of these boys, the school looked set to explode.

The following week, I watched one of the more remarkable things of my life. As rumour swept the school over Omar’s death, as friends talked of reprisal, as racial anger and division shook through the school – I watched from the staffroom as a few boys – among them the brightest and funniest heroes of Risk it…, Mohommad and Bassel, walked from clump of angry boys to clump of angry boys and calmed them down. Each time talking and listening, sad and angry themselves, knowing anger wouldn’t undo the tragedy, knowing there was no joy to be found in more shooting. I knew what they were saying, because I could hear them shouting across the quad.

A few years ago I was leaving a pub in Bondi to walk home. As I made my way to the door a bouncer stepped into my path and pushed me in the chest. I found myself explaining I was on my way home … and wait a minute, I only had two beers, what’s the problem? The bouncer grinned ear to ear and gave me a hug. Moustapha was a rogue Year 9 boy who made the Risk it… team shake their heads and quake with fear. When he wasn’t throwing things out of the windows, he was jumping out of them. In fact, he was one of the easiest young men I could get on the project, because no teacher wanted him in class. He told me about his wife, his kids, his house. And of course, he reminded me – remember? Remember those crazy puppets? Remember what we did together?

I remember him grinning, holding his puppet high. I remember his smile, his joy – even in the face of injustice and tragedy. I remember his sense he had achieved something, told a story, made a difference.

Of course I remember.

TJ Eckleberg is a freelance arts consultant, director and music producer. He was Artistic Director of Shopfront Contemporary Arts and Performance from 2003-2010, and an English and Drama teacher (Mr Nicholas!) at Birrong Boys High School from 1993 – 2001.

He currently lives in Berlin, Germany. You can follow his adventures at www.tjeckleberg.com

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Suburban Masala

by Vandana Ram

S

uburban Masala was a contemporary performance devised and performed by young people from the diverse Indian communities in Sydney in 2002. It was a first of its kind community collaborative project that attempted to engage with the Indian community in Australia, and looked at what it meant to be an Indian and Australian at the same time.

The project was instigated when a young arts worker, Cicily Ponnor, of Indian background approached BYDS as a way of establishing contact with other artists from Indian backgrounds in Western Sydney. Tim Carroll suggested a mentorship with myself as another artist of Indian origin, but with extensive community cultural development (CCD) experience.

Through many conversations and in consultation with other CCD workers and artists from a number of fields, our shared desire to create the first high quality contemporary theatre piece devised by young Indians from Sydney was formulated. We also had a great interest to work across traditional art forms and Indian popular cultural forms such as ‘Bollywood’ and Bhangra music/dance to create a unique and innovative performance piece.

BYDS was an integral part of this process, providing a nurturing platform for dialogue, networking and administrative support to bring the project forward. The BYDS management committee were approached to auspice the project and gladly offered their backing.

With a grant from the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council, the project began

by Cicily and myself contacting potential participants through specific language-based and cultural organisations, university student associations, and through specific websites and radio programs (such as Masala Mix on 2SER), accessed by young South Asians. The project took off and soon fourteen weeks of workshops and rehearsals involved over twenty participants, many of who were final HSC students excited enough to come along over many weekends.

Our workshops were held either at BYDS in Hackett House or at UTS in the city. For all of the participants this was their first venture into self-devised performance making and exploring their own life experience.

Workshops were conducted by experienced professionals from both Indian and non-Indian backgrounds (Katia Molina, Chum Ehelepola, Reza Achman and Bobby Singh), and allowed participants to develop skills in percussion, dance and performance making. Performance styles ranged from traditional Indian movement, to Bollywood and contemporary street styles, fusing beat box, Bhangra and hip hop with classical Indian musical forms.

Hand in hand with this skills development were discussions with the participants about the particular issues that impacted on their lives growing up in Australia. These discussions lead to the development of specific stories around themes of parental expectations, life choices, arranged marriage, the influence of religion, language, and concepts of identity, migration and belonging. A discussion about the difficulty of wearing the traditional saree to contemporary 45

social events developed into the comic ‘Saree Technical Manual’ scene, and high level outcomes expected from the HSC morphed into a routine called ‘Masala Playschool’, where the ‘good little Indian boy turned bad!’

The final stage structured, refined and edited the more than twenty individual works devised throughout the workshop period, culminating in a performance season for the Indian and wider community. Participants from Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India and Australia developed skills in performance making, to present a vibrant and highly energised show telling their personal stories of growing up between cultures and being part of Sameer Malik & Tresa Ponnor in rehearsals the Indian Diaspora.

As Cicily observed at the time, ‘The tensions in the Indian community in Australia exist to an extent among the younger generation but haven’t surfaced in a performance project. The emerging young Indian community is headstrong and knows what it wants.

We’re opening up new worlds not only for ourselves and our parents but also for other communities that might have prejudices. This project is a celebration of Indian culture and identity.’

The project had an amazing outcome because it brought kids together from such different regions, diasporas and suburbs with one aim, to get them to talk about their experiences, and tell their stories in a contemporary medium … something that never happened before.

As Puja, one of the participants states: ‘I have found the Suburban Masala experience to be of a very different and unique nature. It focuses more on personal and individual stories and relates these to a wider audience. This generally gives us more confidence in ourselves as well as in our culture, which we as young Indians are trying very hard to maintain.’

The outcome was a fantastic theatre performance, which held three sold-out shows at Sidetrack Theatre, Marrickville, Sydney in December 2002. It allowed for moments of joy and celebration, poignancy as well as a number of belly laughs. Suburban Masala was enthusiastically received by audiences; by young Indian-Australians who felt a sense of engagement and identification with these contemporary stories; by Indian parents who discovered insights into the experiences of young people; and by the general community who recognised the similarities as well as the differences of another culture’s experience.

I truly believe it was a very special coming together for a number of us, finding a common platform to connect with each other and creating bonds that still remain strong.

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Suburban Masala was a much-needed project for the growing and diverse Indian community in Western Sydney and BYDS was critical to making this come to fruition. It set a precedent for contemporary artistic development within a community-based context, as it questioned issues of cultural maintenance, identity, stereotyping and belonging. The Indians of Sydney had never before got together to conceive, design and create a show about themselves.

It also led to a further collaboration between myself and Cicily with UTP and brought back many of the participants to devise another larger scale performance titled india@oz.sangam, which was performed at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre in 2003, also exploring diverse Indian identities in contemporary Australia.

Many of the original participants are continuing to develop their artistic practice including Tresa Ponnor, Anjali Roberts, Lux and Ahil Ratnamohan, drawing these artists into the broader cultural industry and into new collaborations.

Vandana Ram is an artist of Indian origin. Over the last twenty years she has been actively involved in Community Cultural Development based arts projects initiating and coordinating a vast range of cross-cultural projects in the Western Sydney region.

As an individual artist her body of work explores questions of identity, memory and migration. She is currently the Bankstown Arts Centre Director.

 

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Acts of Courage: A Trilogy

by Roslyn Oades

I

first stumbled upon BYDS in 1992 as a young emerging artist growing up in the Bankstown area. Since that fateful day I have collaborated with BYDS on more than thirty community-engaged art projects – including oral history projects, drama projects, literary publications, films, photographic workshops and visual art installations. On a personal level, the most significant body of work I’ve embarked on has been the creation of a trilogy of headphone-verbatim theatre projects on the theme, Acts of Courage, a subject close to my heart.

As a theatre-maker I utilise an unusual verbatim technique I refer to as headphone-verbatim or audio scripting.

Headphone-verbatim is a paperless scripting technique, featuring the faithful reproduction of speech patterns. In performance, my actors wear headphones via which they are fed a carefully crafted audio-script. They speak along to this recorded material as accurately as possible, reproducing the actual words and speech mannerism of another human being. Our aim in performance is to preserve the vocal print of a recorded interview with fidelity – even if the actor is of a contrasting age, gender or cultural background to the original speaker. The accent, the exact timing, every stumble, cough and breath is reproduced with precision, like a musician following a score. I like to describe it as an anti-acting technique – the actor’s task is to say exactly what they hear without interpretation.

And the effect, when it’s really working, is like watching an actor channel the original interviewee.

I have found the integrity of this unusual documentary form to be an invaluable tool for exploring sensitive or contentious social content. The headphoneverbatim trilogy aims to magnify candid, personal stories from within a specific community as a means of exploring broader social and political tensions.

In 2001 while in London, I was part of a performance ensemble, under the direction of Mark Wing-Davey, credited with 48

pioneering the headphone-verbatim form (commonly referred to as Recorded Delivery by my UK colleagues). On my return from London in late 2002 all excited about headphone-verbatim and its possibilities I headed into BYDS for a chat with Tim Carroll. After a thirty-minute brainstorm, in which Tim also filled me in on his latest oral history project, BYDS had seeded my first headphone-verbatim project! Fast Cars & Tractor Engines was directly inspired by the 2001 Bankstown Oral History Project. At Tim’s instigation, we presented a thirteen-minute version of Fast Cars at a night of short performances organised by Urban Theatre Projects.

UTP saw great potential in our idea and subsequently took Fast Cars & Tractor Engines under their wing, surrounded us with a team of professionals and assisted in the development of a full-length professional show in 2005.

In constructing the material for Fast Cars I decided to focus in on the theme of courage. This theme came directly from the publication. Our favourite stories from the oral history project were those of ordinary people doing extraordinary things – essentially the survival stories, especially those told with great humour. I found the theme of courage particularly resonant in the context of the post 9/11 ‘be alert but not alarmed’ campaign around at the time, which had fostered a new suspicion of our neighbours in Australia. I felt we’d become an increasingly frightened community and craved insights and stories from people who weren’t afraid to fight for what they believed.

Having identified our favourite Bankstown characters, and having met a few extras via Tim’s immense community network, I set about collecting interviews. As opposed to the formal one-on-one interviews that had been conducted for the oral history publication, I arranged to interview subjects in their home environments over a casual cup of tea. During the process I became particularly interested in the dynamic of group interviews – mothers with daughters, couples, friends, etc. I fell in love with those conversations where people finish each other’s sentences and those explosive moments where everyone starts talking at once (as well as the awkward silences). I also enjoyed including anyone who happened to pass through the room while I was recording.

Over the next few months I drank a lot of tea and had a lot of great chats. Largely thanks to Tim’s introductions, I was welcomed with openness, warmth and cakes galore. I laughed and I cried with people – but mostly I laughed, a lot. We ended up with some amazing stories as well as some beautiful silly moments. Some of the stories were literally 49

about dodging punches and bullets (such as the Vietnamese officer who became an ‘accidental hero’ on his first day in the war); others were domestic fights against change or abuse (such as the elderly woman who devised clever strategies to deal with her ‘dickhead’ husband). Some were youthful confessions of first love versus protective parents (such as the three African teenagers who were outraged their parents wouldn’t let them date – even though their parents were pregnant by their age). All the stories were inspiring, if not at times confronting as cultures and ideologies collided.

From over thirty hours of audio recordings the end product on stage contained eight carefully interwoven stories, involving sixteen community members, performed by three actors. The characters’ cultural backgrounds included: Lebanese, German, Samoan, English, Aboriginal, Vietnamese and African, and ranged in age from fifteen to eighty-three years old – quite a challenge for our talented actors. Fast Cars was critically acclaimed and later picked up for a Sydney tour. Tim and I were very proud of where our initial experiments led us.

The success of Fast Cars & Tractor Engines presented the opportunity to produce a second show on the theme of courage. Stories of Love & Hate (UTP in association with BYDS, 2008) was made in response to the 2005 Cronulla Riots, an event which had a significant impact on Bankstown’s Middle Eastern Australian community. While I was shocked at the size and intensity of ‘the riots’ (5000 Anglo-Australians wrapped in flags yelling 'Fuck off Lebs'), I also found it difficult to comprehend amid the accompanying media hype and social outrage. Searching beyond the stereotypes, I embarked on an interview process with the people who were there, specifically, residents of the Sutherland Shire and Bankstown areas – the two localities at the heart of the conflict. My approach on this project was to explore hate through a conversation on love – or perhaps, more accurately, to look at hate from the angle of people protecting what they love. I interviewed sixty-five passionate, open people and my first question was always: What is the love of your life? Through mapping this relationship between love and hate I hoped to create genuine 50

empathy with and insight into the thoughts of those directly affected by the riots and reveal a candid view of the conflicting emotional issues at its core.

The premiere season of Stories of Love & Hate ran for a week in the Sutherland Shire and a week in Bankstown bringing the stories back to the community at the heart of its conception. The show was very well received and later remounted by the Sydney Theatre Company as part of their 2011 Education Season. As a direct result of Stories of Love & Hate’s success I was approached by Annette Madden from Belvoir Theatre who offered to commission and support the creation of my next show.

The third work in the series, I’m Your Man (2012), explores the theme of courage in a very literal manner. Set in a boxing gym, this intensely physical project has been created in collaboration with Australia’s professional boxing community and examines notions of masculinity and the psychology of respect. I’m Your Man follows Billy Dib, a talented young boxer from Lakemba, on his quest for a world title. Along the way the audience meets some of the extraordinary personalities that hang around in boxing gyms: past legends, up-and-coming hopefuls and failed contenders whose lives have been irreversibly changed by the fight game.

On the back of a successful creative development (hosted at BYDS in the new Bankstown Arts Centre), I’m Your Man was - Jason Blake, Sydney Morning Herald programmed for a premiere season at Belvoir Theatre as part of the 2012 Sydney Festival. As a team we were particularly proud to be bringing this Bankstown-inspired story to the main stage – a voice rarely heard in this context.

The journey of making my headphone-verbatim trilogy and the inspiring creative team who brought the projects to realisation (including long-term collaborators Tim Carroll, Mohammed Ahmad, Katia Molino, Bob Scott, Neil Simpson, Fadle El Harris and of course UTP) was a profound and life-changing experience, both in terms of my artistic confidence and professional development. These days I string together a living as a professional freelance theatre-maker, with opportunities to work alongside talented artists across the country. Although no longer ‘young’, ‘local’ or emerging’ I remain very grateful to the energetic hub of artists at BYDS and the impact this big-hearted community has had on my life. The creative ecology at BYDS is something rare and precious. May it keep on spinning.

“You seldom see theatre (verbatim or otherwise) as vivid and warm as this.”

Roslyn Oades is a freelance theatre-maker, voice artist, performer and community artist currently living in Melbourne. She grew up in the Bankstown area and has been collaborating with Tim and the BYDS team on all manner of inspiring community-based arts projects since 1992. www.roslynoades.com

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Pillow Fights & Giant Dances

by Janie Gibson

T

he first day I came to Bankstown I was inspired. It was a hot kind of day and I was catching the train with my friend, Teik Kim Pok. At the last minute he had asked me to perform with him doing some street theatre at a festival in Bankstown. I had heard of UTP, but up until that point I had not much impression at all of the Bankstown area or its people. I had been living in Sydney for about two-and-a-half years at that point and had not spent much time out west.

When I arrived off the train, I remember the bright colours of the plaza. The sky was blue and the market square was full of people, eating nice smelling foods, I think there was a Korean dance troupe performing. That day I experienced many incredible performances by local cultural groups. It was a part of Sydney and Australia that I had never experienced before. So many people of different cultures and backgrounds living in such close proximity. I had an impulse to somehow spend more time in this place, to be a part of it and learn more about the work that BYDS did. That day, after meeting Tim for the first time, I told him I would like to volunteer or work at BYDS. He asked me to send him an email, I did, and then a few weeks later I got a call …

My work with BYDS has been as an actor, workshop leader and facilitator of performance projects.

Forum Theatre I began working with BYDS as an actor and was invited to join the U-Play Forum Theatre Ensemble in 2007. During this year we toured extensively to schools in the South-West Sydney area presenting forum theatre performances.

These interactive workshops encouraged students to discover new approaches to conflict resolution, focusing on the issues of racism, bullying and sexual harassment within the school context. I still vividly remember, in my first days of performing the form, the words of a puny Year 7 student disarming his massive adult-sized bully with the simple question: ‘Why are you picking on me? I’m human, you’re human.’

Street Theatre and Gaudy During 2008, I ran weekly workshops in drama and improvisation with local young performers and then we devised street theatre under the name of Gaudy. The most successful of these performances was the Pillow Wars, which we performed in the Bankstown Plaza and then in Martin Place. We inhabited these regions, disguised as office workers 52

Pillow Wars, Martin Place, photo by Bill Reda

and proceeded to have choreographed pillow fights and then moments of urban sleeping. The most beautiful of these images I remember is seeing our group of five ‘business people’ sleeping in the middle of Martin Place during a weekday lunchtime. The stillness of the sleeping workers held such a contrast to the walking pace of the city people. It offered the poignant and political message: ‘We can’t work anymore! We have just decided to sleep!’

With the Gaudy ensemble, I also developed a longer outdoor performance in collaboration with puppeteer/ theatre-maker, Clare Briton, called Civil Twilight. In the school holidays we devised a short outdoor performance work, using a beautiful giant puppet that Clare had made, a set of cardboard boxes and the wonderful Mr Suman playing tabla. The photos from this performance look beautiful (thank you Bill Reda).

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Giant Dance One day I said to Tim, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to make a giant choreographed dance in the plaza,’ and he quickly told me that that is in fact one of his wildest dreams. ‘So let’s do it!’ we said and then came the process of working out how exactly to do something like this. Tim suggested we involve several of the local performance groups that work in the area. I pulled together an ensemble of eight core participants, rehearsing every Saturday afternoon for six weeks. We got in touch with a selection of five local dance groups – The Greek Older Women’s Network, Castaúuelas Flamenco girls from the Gigi School of Spanish Dance, Thelma and three other ex-champ ballroom dancers, dancers from the Miss Africa Australia beauty pageant, HYBRID FORMZ break dance crew and Ahilan Ratnamohan footballer/dancer extraordinaire. Finding inspiration in the song, ‘Holy Chord’, composed by my flatmate at the time, Tim Derricort, I proceeded to pull all of these groups and styles together in a giant choreographed dance.

As part of a Bankstown Festival, we performed the work in the middle of a newly built and yet to be used road that sped through the middle of the plaza. I remember afterwards Tim crying and this made me feel, Okay good, this project worked.

Janie Gibson trained with Polish ensemble theatre company Teatr Piesn Kozla in Wroclaw, Poland (MA Acting). She has worked with BYDS since 2007 as an actor, workshop tutor and facilitator of performance projects. With UTP Janie performed in Stories of Love & Hate by Roslyn Oades, completed a Spark Mentorship with Alicia Talbot and developed a project through the Intersections program. Janie is a founding member of theatre collective, Whale Chorus.

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“When I was fourteen-years-old, my friend Morgan and I were inspired by surrounding suburbs to organise a small concert to showcase local bands in our area. As you can imagine, we had no idea, nor experience with running events. With a bit of luck, Morgan dug up some contacts, which led to the generous Tim Carroll and Bankstown Youth Development Service.We explained our goals and asked Tim for some kind of guidance. I remember he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, Yeah, we can do that, without any hesitation. It was comforting, relieving and super exciting.” – Stono Caves, Coordinator of Gravitate Gravitate Concert, photo by Bill Reda

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Bankstown Hip hop lyrics by Munkimuk

In the 80s people were thinking I was a crazy fool Ridiculed pupil, wear my tracksuit to school But the kids were always standing in the doorways Watching as I’m spinning on my back in the hallways Punchbowl to Redfern, graff making heads turn Looking for the next earn, running till your legs burn Back in the days when I didn’t have a proper plan Hanging with my mates in the back of a copper van Not a chance, from teenager till twenty Life was kind of empty, I was smoking plenty With my mates, and polish off a whole bottle Back in the days, back before I was a role model Back in the days, back before I was rational Or jumping on planes and playing gigs international Actual fact, I didn’t think that was possible Never had a dream to follow only obstacles Learnt how to play guitar, instruments and music Bought some cheap recording gear and learnt how to use it Making beats and rhymes and never ending drama Entertaining train station dwellers in the plaza Had a chance to sign a record deal in 91 But dumb Munk give the middle finger to the bums Made my own group with my mates that was around me But wherever trouble was, it tracked me down and found me 56

One day a car pulled over as I’m walking down the highway Peacefender in the driver seat, I stuck my head in sideways ‘I been looking for ya man, so let me tell ya what These shows are coming up, your crew can show em what youse got’ So we rocked up to a place in the plaza, up the stairs Punchbowl boys were there, so cool we took a chair Then agreed to play three songs, no stopping us In 1995 this show called Hip Hopera And showed them what we got, we blew up the spot Rocked the damn place, Casula and the Rocks Then the bloke from up the stairs, from BYDS, his name was Tim Told us we could earn money doing what we did Workshops teaching raps and dance and playing gigs At festivals and school visits working with the kids And this, brought us national attention Travelling round the country, too many towns to mention So I went from a young punk, that’ll abuse ya To working in studios as a muso and producer Freestyle raps, Scribble Jam, rocking many stages In Europe and in Canada and many different places Awards and recognition, on tele and in the papers An award-winning radio show that goes all around the nation At the PCYC, these kids are still breaking 25 years later with apparent legendary status Thanks!!!!

Munk aka Munkimuk is a veteran award-winning and internationally acclaimed music producer and artist that has played thousands of shows all over Australia and internationally. He also hosts a weekly radio show heard on over one hundred stations across Australia.

A proud Jardwadjali man, Munk works as a role model in Aboriginal communities around the nation.

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Bankstown 2200 One of BYDS’ earliest video drama projects was a comic soap opera called Bankstown 2200. Loosely based on Beverly Hills 90210, a popular American teen series at the time, Bankstown 2200 followed the lives of a group of broke Bankstown flatmates. The series was coordinated by Madelein Aroney and starred Andrew Ma, Mustafa Hussein, Binh Truong and Bassam Hafzah.

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PART 4: Visual Arts

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CONTEMPORARTI Artists Collective (1993-98) In 1993 BYDS enlisted local artist Roslyn Oades to compile a comprehensive database of contemporary artists living in the Canterbury Bankstown area. As a direct outcome of this process an artists collective called Contemporarti was formed. The collective went on to stage several group art exhibitions in empty shops within the Bankstown Old Town Plaza as well as performance nights, happenings and community art projects. Curators included Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang, Anna Bazzi and Roslyn Oades.

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Earth Eggs by Roslyn Oades

Installation works, Enough exhibition

Domestic Violence Machine by Tim Carroll

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Contemporarti curator Caroline Dang; sketch by Adnan Barzanji & mixed-media installation by Helen Pynor, Enough exhibition

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Namescape Artist My Le Thi paints a series of small canvases and then invites members of the Bankstown community (ages 2 – 70) to choose one and paint something about their name onto it. The result is a large wall of beautiful canvases displayed in Hackett House.

Above: Artist, My Le Thi with participants in Bankstown Plaza Right: Tim Carroll assists with the installation

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Finishing Art Education degree at COFA. Later the same year in 1993, a meeting for local artists was organised by Roslyn/Tim. I had recognised Roslyn and another artist at the meeting, Anna Bazzi who were both COFA graduates.

First community art project, working with Roslyn in Cabramatta.

Outdoor group exhibition in front of MCA (no connection). Part of Sydney Festival. Re-exhibited large sculptures from COFA.

Final exhibition at COFA. Preoccupation with issues of cultural identity, marginalisation, otherness becomes evident in artwork, readings, political awareness. Came out of university an angry young woman.

Moved into a large studio with about 10 other artists in Newtown. Andrew Ma whom I got to know through BYDS helped me First exhibition of move artists from Bankstown

region. The premise was an unused bank in the centre of Bankstown Old Town Plaza.

My mud installation on the walls caused a stir amongst the older artists in the exhibition.

‘Fragments of Origin’, Blaxland Gallery, an exhibition with Asian Women Artist Group creates some attention. First performance and artist talk.

Tim asks for my involvement in a new art project working with refugees and survivors of trauma. Felt overwhelmed, initially questioning notions of tokenism. These feelings soon mingle with gathered experiences from the project. The project becomes multimedia including use of video, performance and visual arts. Other artists become involved with TIP (The Installation Project). Anna Bazzi joins the project and assists with Luis on video. Sisters, Maddy and Antoinette have experience in theatre.

Another vacant shopfront in central Bankstown was the working and exhibiting space. A performance was staged with Tim, Maddy and Antoinette, Anna and I. It was a difficult project with many strong opinions combined with moving personal stories. It was the first time that I recalled my memories as a refugee to others.

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‘From the Pit’, group exhibition. COFA Gallery with Gordon Hookey and Michelle Perrett whom I had shared a studio during the last 2 years at COFA. Group exhibition at The Performance Space, ‘Untitled 95. I understood this was a turning point in my artistic development.

Move out of Newtown studio and into a smaller shared studio nearby with two other artists working at MCA also. My large sculptures are moved home to newly built garage/storage room.

The Museum of Contemporary Ar Sydney, 1991. I had started planning after art school. Began voluntary wo with plans of securing a job at the

‘UNFRAMED’ is the second grou Contemporarti, which is the nam formed contemporary artist group Regular meetings and plans co Contemporarti to continue havin exhibition each year. It is now clea members in the gathering were. We dedicated group of young artists wh the meetings through BYDS. The s again is staged at a vacant shop in B is a small fund which we decided space by covering the entire carpe gravel rocks During the preparation an elderly local came into the venu could do her banking here, not eve was happening. This incident is tel arts were received and understood

FRAMED, a project with teenagers of Asian backgrounds focusing on stereotypes, gangs, prejudice.

This was an important project as it opened up issues that I had been looking into.

‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ was a project which tried to bring forward discussions with young people about racism drawing on the current political situation in Australia e.g. Pauline Hansen. Discussions lead to script writing towards a video performance which took on a satirical reference to the classic film from 1967 with the same name.

rt opens in g my future ork in 1992 museum.

up exhibition for me to the newly p of Bankstown. ontinue for ng one annual ar who the active e become a small ho took control of second exhibition Bankstown. There to re-invent the eted floor with of the exhibition, ue asking if she en noticing what lling of how the d in Bankstown.

Associated with a new group of Asian Women Artists’ Group (AWAG). Group have regular meetings and starts thinking about an exhibition in Sydney.

Employed at MCA as gallery attendant and as museum educator. This position continues throughout the time working as a community artist/artist.

‘”Home is Where the Heart is (wherever that is). An exhibition and forum focusing on notions of home and belong. This subject was close to my heart and it was good to know that there were others who were also interested in issues of cultural identity.

Contemporarti also staged various happenings and activities in Bankstown and branched out into Campsie. A popular event was evenings at Bankstown Library where we were given access to the projection room. There we would show films made by the artists and have live performances. The first of a series film we premiered was called, ‘LOVE in the Library’. Roslyn, Anna, and I collaborated together and had other enthusiasts who willing to participate in our projects.

In between all these activities Roslyn, Anna and I form a close friendship and we start a group outside of BYDS, called ARC. We make cards, mosaic ornaments and sell them at markets on weekends.

The Beginnings in the Beginning

by Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang migrated to Australia from Vietnam as a refugee with her family in 1978. After forging the beginnings of her artistic career she again migrated to another country, Norway, in mid 2007. Her artistic practice has focused on concepts of change and permanency by using aspects of the surrounding environment as a tool. Caroline was a Contemporarti artist & curator at BYDS (1993-98). www.artistlink.info

1997, PERSPECTA: Between Art & Nature, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. This was a major show and made me feel like I was doing something right.

‘Midnight Sun’, first national exhibition of Vietnamese/Australia n artist at NGV. This was my first visit to Melbourne and it changed the course of my life.

A year after Midnight Sun, I received an artist in Residency at Footscray Community Arts Centre and lived in Victoria for 7 tears.

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WestEye & Other Creative Adventures

by Bill Reda Resident Photographer

I

t was a stormy October afternoon in 2006 when I first walked up the long wooden flight of stairs, not knowing that I would be back up there for many years to come. An old friend, Morgan Graham, needed a techie for a local concert she was organising, Gravitate, which was the first of my many endeavours with BYDS. I remember walking into the meeting room and being greeted by a really enthusiastic man with little hair. This man would not only become my boss, but a dear friend, mentor and father figure too. I sat down, too shy to make eye contact with anyone but a dog called Bootsy – I would photograph him for the cover of Westside Jr. years later. Why was Bootsy there? I still don’t know.

It wasn’t long before I did my Year 10 work placement at BYDS and began doing odd tech jobs for BYDS’ events. At the time I thought it was because I was talented, but in retrospect, I realise BYDS was giving me a go.

Working under the pretence of a sound and lighting technician, I began to learn a lot more about Bankstown – and community life in general. It was because of this initial year working with BYDS that I learned a lot, not only about various artistic mediums, but also CCD, Indigenous affairs, women’s rights and how they related to Bankstown’s cultural life. More importantly, BYDS taught me the many ways in which we could work with the arts to make an impact on these social issues.

BYDS has also had a profound effect on my artistic development. In fact, BYDS could almost single-handedly be credited for getting me to where I am now. Realising I enjoyed taking photos at events more than doing the tech for them, Tim actively sought out a digital SLR camera and signed me up to a local photography project, Bankstown Now! From there, he organised for me to work for Bankstown City Council on a project called A Special Place in Bankstown, which led to my first exhibition and gave me enormous confidence to pursue what I was fast realising to be my passion in life.

I have since had four exhibitions, been published in a number of publications (many of which have been through Mohammed Ahmad’s inspiring Westside series), won a handful of awards and have travelled to new frontiers on corporate assignments. I have also kept with the BYDS ethos of giving back and have passed on my skills in a series of workshops and courses both in a paid and volunteer capacity in and around Western Sydney. This has slowly begun to develop as a photography collective called, WestEye, modelled on Mohammed’s Westside. None of this would have at all been possible had it not been for BYDS.

Bill Reda has documented over one hundred CCD projects across Western Sydney and has also worked as an architectural photographer around Sydney and Melbourne. He is currently completing his Bachelor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales.

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67 photos by Bill Reda

Toyz 2 Kingz Aerosol Art Project Toyz 2 Kingz are two young men (‘Dise’ and ‘Woes’) from Bankstown who have been creating aerosol-based art for more than ten years. They have run a series of workshops at BYDS assisting young people to develop their skills and generate designs – which have gone on to feature on the back wall of Hackett House.

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PART 5: Indigenous Arts

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Aboriginal Arts Program

by Uncle Harry Allie Bankstown Indigenous Elder

M

y name is Harry Allie. I am recognised as an Elder by the Indigenous community within the local Bankstown area after having lived here for twenty-eight years. I currently hold the position of Chairperson to the Bankstown City Council’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Committee and I work for the Department of Families, Housing and Community Services and Indigenous Affairs at the Sydney Indigenous Coordination Centre.

I have had the opportunity to work with Tim Carroll and to see firsthand the work of BYDS with the local Indigenous community of Bankstown over many years. Tim’s leadership has resulted in BYDS being active collaborators across a swathe of projects, not only with the youth in our community but involving our Elders in ensuring that Aboriginal Culture, Heritage, Stories and Protocols are not lost.

BYDS has worked tirelessly over a fifteen-year period to mentor and support young Indigenous artists and arts workers such as Shannon Williams and more recently Neil Trindall and Jaleesa Donovan, to name just a few – to offer them every opportunity to reach their full potential in this fast moving world.

BYDS supports each National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) Week by working with us to showcase our culture to the wider Bankstown community. BYDS involves the wider local Indigenous community as well as working with all local schools to ensure that local young people have the opportunity to participate and perform at that event.

Projects such as Different Shades of Black and a series of intergenerational interviews between young Aboriginal people and elders, school visits for Sorry Day, Reconciliation Week have all made a significant local impact, putting our people and issues centre stage. I attended the innovative and inclusive Koori Youth Forum event in July 2008, which attracted seventy-seven young Indigenous people from primary and high schools in the area. This day-long forum enabled me to observe Neil Trindall’s first major project as BYDS’ new Indigenous Arts Officer take shape in a very professional manner.

The young participants at the forum created a ‘wish list’ of activities that they wanted to see happen in the area.

This list of prioritised activities has since become the work plan for future programs which to date has resulted in establishing an excellent local Aboriginal dance group led initially by choreographer Peta Strachan, and now being taught by Darren Compton, as well as a collection of oral histories and cultural excursions bringing Elders and young local people together, coordinated by Jaleesa Donovan.

Tim and his team at BYDS take every opportunity to respond to the identified needs of the wider community and seek partnerships and funding to service these needs with innovation and respect.

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Clockwise from top left: Different Shades of Black video project; Shannon Williams addressing school kids; Neil Trindell with local kids in the Koori Mail; Darren Compton conducting a dance workshop at the 2010 Koori Youth Forum.

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Reflections on the Koori Youth Forum

by Jaleesa Donovan

I

was eighteen when I worked on my first project at BYDS in 2008, working for 2 – 3 months on the second Koori Youth Forum. I returned to BYDS in 2009 and worked there for two more years as the Indigenous Oral History Project Coordinator. I had the opportunity to build a relationship with Bankstown’s Indigenous Elders and record their personal stories to share with the younger Indigenous population in Bankstown.

One of the most successful projects I had the chance to coordinate was BYDS’ third Koori Youth Forum.

The forum was a full day of workshops at Bankstown Town Hall that included writing, dance, drama and art. The purpose of the forum was to bring together young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students of Bankstown – to inspire, encourage and support their learning through arts and culture. Relationship to culture is important for Aboriginal youth because it is an integral part of our identity as Indigenous Australians and an integral part of our connection to our ancestors, land and our country.

Cathy Craigie facilitated a drama workshop for the duration of the forum with help from our intern, Aaron Galea. This workshop enabled students to bring out their creative sides and use drama to speak their mind with their actions and their language.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad ran a writing workshop that focused on themes of cultural and historical identity and the experience of growing up in Western Sydney. A selection of the work produced on the day was published in the 2011 publication, Westside Jr. Vol. 3: Deep Suburbia.

Indigenous dancer Darren Compton was also involved in the day, and ran a series of dance and hip hop workshops that were a hit with every participant. It was wonderful to have a young male performer of Indigenous background involved in the forum as a way of inspiring many of our talented youth.

During lunch we invited a couple of players from the Canterbury Bulldogs to join us. The two players, Michael Lett and Jonathan Wright, had lunch with the students and gave them the opportunity to ask questions and get some autographs and photos. The students really enjoyed the visit because it was planned as a surprise and they look up to their mob in sport. Michael and Jonathan were great with the students and the students were on a high for the rest of the afternoon, most of them going home wearing Bulldogs hats and backpacks that the players kindly gave to them.

The 2008 third Koori Youth Forum was very successful from my perspective and the success was also measured from the student and teacher feedback received at the end of the day. Working at BYDS has not only allowed me to understand the importance of using arts and culture for youth development; it has allowed me to see the positive influence these projects have on young Indigenous people. I have been able to see their growth following their participation through our programs.

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Top: Syndey Morning Herald article, 2012; Above: Jaleesa consults with Lola Simmons for the Indigenous Oral History Project; Right: Bankstown Indigenous Elder, Uncle Col.

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Koori Radio Project Local Indigenous students from Years 9 – 10 participate in BYDS’ Koori Radio Holiday Training Program.

Facilitated by Jaleesa Donavan.

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PART 6: Meaningful Relationships

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BYDS Partnerships In addition to the many creative individuals who’ve made their mark over the years, BYDS has also formed significant relationships with various organisations. Many of these partnerships were formed through working on projects together and have developed into friendships that have lasted for two decades. Some that have stood the test of time include:

Bankstown City Council Since ‘Project Phoenix’ under Mayor Mark Fitzgibbon in 1995, BYDS’ relationship with Bankstown City Council just got better and better: Dianne Lawrence, Tatjana Domazet, Gary Starr, Tony Smith, Raquel Ricafort, Margaret Southwell, Justine Foo, Sharon Nelson, Gerry Beasley, Luke Nichols, Rowan Morrison, Chris Hudson are just some of the amazing people to come through Council who BYDS has worked with. The two mayors to follow Fitzgibbon, Helen Westwood and then Tania Mihailuk were also profound supporters of and believers in BYDS. Our organisation has developed many projects with their support and has even gained Helen Westwood as a member of the BYDS management committee. Bankstown City Council continues to support BYDS – today our organisation is a happy tenant of BCC at the beautiful Bankstown Arts Centre: a true partnership.

The Muslim Women’s Association BYDS’ first encountered the Muslim Women’s Association in 1991 after attempting to include a group of Arabic women in BYDS’ first oral history project. Since that time BYDS has had an ongoing friendship with the MWA and in particular, manager Wafa Zaim, who along with Tim Carroll, sits on the Bankstown White Ribbon Day Committee. Maha Abdo Krayem from the MWA is also a respected and loved associate of BYDS. She officially launched the BYDS anthology, Westside Jr. Vol. 1: Your Mum on Mothers’ Day, 2009.

Corner Youth Health Service This is an important local institution funded through NSW Health. BYDS’ primary relationship with the organisation has been through Sekneh Beckett, a local psychologist whose ideas and studies into Islam and sexuality have been ground-breaking and gutsy. Most recently BYDS partnered with Sekneh and Adelaide’s Dulwich Centre on a project that utilised narrative therapy theories to identify resilience amongst young Muslim people living in Australia.

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Bankstown Women’s Health Service (BWHS) BYDS has worked closely with BWHS, a relationship that was mostly formulated with Sue McClelland. Given the focus that BWHS has regarding domestic violence, BYDS was a suitable organisation to form a relationship with.

A series of forum theatre shows were developed, based around mobile phone texting and ‘sexting’, helping young people to work out what is and is not appropriate. Sue McClelland and Tim Carroll have also been on the White Ribbon Day Committee together for many years.

Bankstown Community Resource Group (BCRG) BCRG was one of the original organisations that BYDS was set up with at Hackett House in 1993. Rebecca Galea (CEO) and Tim Carroll ran the Bankstown Festival together for many years and Tim also joined the BCRG management committee some years later. The staff are bright, innovative and happy to take on challenges that unfold in their pursuit of a fairer world for people who are disadvantaged through race, education or birth.

Sir Joseph Banks High School This is a school in Revesby. From the very beginning SJBHS had ‘discovered’ a number of students who were keen to write, to perform and to engage with the community at every level, and they were led to BYDS. Julie and Marie Kanaan were two students that came to work a great deal with BYDS across many different projects. In turn BYDS worked more and more with the school and its principal at the time, Mark Piddington. Throughout the years however, it has been drama teacher, Joyce Conte that bonded BYDS and SJBHS. Joyce introduced actors and artists to BYDS that influenced the organisation and the Bankstown community greatly, including students such as Mustafa Hussein, Brodie Wilson, Vico Thai, Aaron Galea, Andrew Ma and Mohammed Bazzi. As of 2008, BYDS also generated a complex literary relationship with SJBHS, running a series of residencies with and producing a series of publications by students from the school. This included one of BYDS’ most memorable anthologies, Westside Jr. Vol. 3: Deep Suburbia, which was turned into a Sydney Theatre Company play in 2011.

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The University of Western Sydney UWS has been an ongoing ally of BYDS. In the 90s BYDS worked with Michael Keighery on a number of visual arts based projects. One of his students did an internship at BYDS whilst we surveyed the groups who frequented the Old Town Plaza. Today BYDS’ primary relationship with UWS is through the Writing and Society Research Centre.

Professor Ivor Indyk and his relationship with the Westside Writers’ Group has carved a path through Sydney culture that earned BYDS a UWS Partnership Award in 2010. Professor Indyk has launched books for BYDS and operated as the patron of Westside Publications. He has assisted in applying for funds from Copyright Agency Limited and has been responsible for giving BYDS funds from UWS every year to support all Westside Publications initiatives.

Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) BYDS’ relationship with UTP has been one of the most profound partnerships in our organisation’s history. Tim Carroll first joined the board of UTP after seeing Hip Hopera and is today their longest serving board member.

Since the decision to move from Casula to Bankstown, UTP and BYDS have been together a long time. With Alicia Talbot as Artistic Director, UTP set up in Hackett House and became BYDS’ neighbour. BYDS’ original verbatim experiment, Fast Cars & Tractor Engines was produced professionally with UTP and this also lead to the creation of a second headphone-verbatim theatre production by UTP in association with BYDS, Stories of Love & Hate. UTP is still across the hall from BYDS, now based in the Bankstown Arts Centre.

Citymoon Theatre Citymoon was the Vietnamese Australian Theatre Company.

Bruce Keller and Binh Ta created Citymoon Theatre soon after Binh defected to Australia from Vietnam whilst on tour here for a festival in the early nineties. Their collaboration and creation of a series of dynamic ensembles was influential in many ways for Australian theatre, particularly community theatre. Bruce’s idea of celebrating the ordinary, his love of Vietnamese culture and beautiful aesthetic led to some wonderful shows. He loved the walkabout style of show and had a young ensemble led at times by the young Khoa Do with Patrick Abboud, Tresa and Cicily Ponnor and a host of other artists from SouthWest Sydney. Citymoon was invited by BYDS to neighbour with us at Hackett House in 2003. BYDS would auspice all of Citymoon’s projects and collaborated with the company on many Vietnamese community arts based works.

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The Greek Older Women’s Network Voula Kerr runs the Greek Older Women’s Network and is the beating heart of Greek culture in Bankstown.

For fifteen years her and her ‘ladies’ have performed Greek dances from the many islands that make up Greece.

They have been involved in two oral history projects with BYDS including the ground-breaking, Yiayia’s Journey by lina Kastoumis. The women meet every week for talks, for exercise, for excursions and for socialising. They run an event every year for breast cancer on Pink Ribbon Day and have performed, in their homemade embroidered outfits, at many BYDS events, including two beautiful dances at Tim Carroll’s twenty-year celebration concert, A Long Journey with Friends, and Janie Gibson’s Giant Dance.

Ethnic Day Care The Ethnic Day Care Centre was part of community health and provided respite care for people with older relatives to care for. It quickly became a mainstay of BYDS’ commitment to older people from migrant backgrounds. They had a Polish, Vietnamese, Arabic and Chinese Frail Seniors Group. This had people of varying health that the day care looked after for fours hours once a week. BYDS did a lot of its early oral history interviews at the day care with its people, many who have died. Hien Tran ran the Ethnic Day Care Centre during the pinnacle of its relationship with BYDS. 81

Sir Joseph Banks High A reflection by Joyce Conte Drama teacher

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Filmmaker, Johnny Tran

n 1991, Tim first spoke to our students at a school assembly about the exciting new opportunities opening up at BYDS. His passion and commitment to the importance of enriching the lives of young people through the Arts was evident then and is still as strong today, thus forming a creative relationship between our school community and BYDS that continues to grow. I am proud to say that Tim has become an invaluable colleague on a professional level and a valued friend and mentor on a personal level.

Tim’s vision and forward thinking have provided the opportunity for Arts to become a part of the everyday lives of a majority. Throughout association over the last twenty years with BYDS, the school community has been involved in a diverse and exciting range of projects initiated by Tim’s leadership and management. Some of these projects include, BB and the Kids, artists in schools literacy projects, Westside Magazine writing workshops, art workshops and projects, youth theatre projects, film projects, Johnny Tran film productions, dance projects, an intergenerational oral history project, White Ribbon Day projects, Harmony Day projects, a choir project, and forum theatre and cultural projects. All of the projects have had a strong emphasis on providing young people with the opportunity to explore community and cultural concerns in an artistic and creative way.

Tim is a constant visitor to our school, attending community and cultural functions and supporting our own cultural and community projects. We always seek and value his perspective and input. If anything happens in the Bankstown Community, both positive and negative, Tim and I speak and find ways to support individuals or groups of kids impacted by the event. Like for example, the recent tragic stabbing of the young man, Brandon at Bankstown Station.

We have been lucky enough to have some students to go on to work with BYDS, including Mustafa Hussein, Andrew Ma, Julie Kanaan, Marie Kanaan, Brodie Wilson, Vico Thai, Aaron Galea, Samantha Hogg, Ramsey Ibrihim, Baide Simpson, Sean Stanley, Ravin Lotomau, Jasmine Khouri, Chloe Murray, Patron Taumai, Maverick, Mahdi, Renaly and we currently have Year 10 and 11 students and junior students involved with several BYDS projects both at school and at BYDS. Many of our students appreciate the valuable resource that BYDS provides,

from a drop-in centre, a rehearsal space, a creative forum, through to a future place of employment for some.

Several students have continued their artistic and personal relationship with BYDS beyond school. The ongoing support, nurturing and inspiration provided by BYDS has allowed training and employment, preparing them for professional positions in the Arts community, such as youth work, art, writing, acting and teaching.

In 2007 Mohammed came to Sir Joseph Banks High School to do a two-hour writing workshop and my drama teacher, Ms Conte, recommended I go. The story I wrote in the workshop was published that year in Westside 08: Loneliness and the Cure Thereof. I’d forgotten all about the workshop and my story, when Tim came to the school to help with a new Indigenous mural. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was to get in contact with Mohammed and to write more for them. Without BYDS, I would have given up on writing and all things creative.

I was told that writing wouldn’t get me anywhere in life. BYDS proved this wrong and I’m beyond grateful, now working at BYDS as an editor and writer in residence.

Samantha Hogg, former student, currently employed as Westside Publications Sub Editor

The fact that many of these young people continue their connection with BYDS is a credit to Tim’s philosophy of giving back to the community. Tim’s ability to connect and communicate with young people has allowed him to instigate and develop projects and workshops that reflect the ideas and concerns of the Bankstown Community. His body of work in this area is truly an innovative contribution to extending the range and scope of community cultural development.

I still remember the first time I went to meet Tim at BYDS to go to lunch in Bankstown. As we walked down the stairs and into Bankstown Plaza the image of the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever where John Travolta struts down the street, owning the neighbourhood, flashed into my mind. I could hear the soundtrack, Stayin’ Alive, as the community acknowledged Tim in a warm and Former student, Brodie Wilson, leading a BYDS hip hop workshop respectful manner, greeting him, smiling at him, stopping to talk, running out of shops to give him food, etc. I christened him ‘The King of Bankstown’.

Recently I went to meet him for lunch again and it was the same – The King of Bankstown still reigns. Long Live The King!

Joyce Conte has taught Drama at Sir Joseph Banks High School for over twenty years, where she is a highly respected and much loved educator. In 2012 she was presented a Regional Arts Award for Staff Excellence.

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No Time for Tears: A Playwright Reflects

by Sala Abrahim

HASSAN:

Well Doctor, how nice to see you. I hope you have enjoyed our hospitality.

You are somebody special so we like to give you special treatment.

DR. OSMAN: You have a great sense of humour. You lock up a human being in a cell, violate

all his human rights and subject him to abuse and torture, and you call that

special treatment. God damn it.

HASSAN:

Calm down, calm down, Doctor … My dear Doctor, I did not order my boys to do this to you. I have been ordered by my superiors to rough you up a little bit. You have to understand that in our profession orders are orders.

DR. OSMAN: So you will obey orders even if they ask you to murder, rape or torture women?

HASSAN:

Absolutely. You have to realise that we are at war with the enemies of the revolution and every revolution has got its victims. So many atrocities have been committed in wars. We don’t claim to be angels, we too have our failings but our cause is just and noble. That makes us different.

An excerpt from No Time for Tears (Act 3, Sc. 4) by Sala Abrahim. The premiere production of No Time for Tears was directed by Effie Nkrumah and produced by BYDS at the Bankstown Arts Centre in 2009.

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s an emerging writer from an African background, my association and work with BYDS began in October 2008. I had a play script ready, No Time for Tears, which deals with the issue of human rights violations, namely the issue of torture. Being new to the Bankstown area I didn’t know who to talk to or where to go regarding the script. Fortunately, I met a Nigerian friend who took me to BYDS. After a brief introduction, I felt I had come to the right place. Tim Carroll, Director of BYDS, was enthusiastic, empathic and supportive. I left a copy of the script for him to read and he phoned me the next day to discuss the possibility of staging the play. Tim enlisted the support of Effie Nkrumah, an accomplished theatre actor and director, and we developed a plan to get the project off the ground. We put out a call for actors from the African community and we had a couple of auditions, which produced a number of talented young actors. BYDS provided us with a space for rehearsals and we worked on the 85

play from February to July 2009 until we produced our first performance at Bankstown Arts Centre Theatre. We had a second performance in August 2009. Both performances were successful and received positive comments from the audience.

When I started writing No Time for Tears it coincided with the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998. A significant milestone in the history of humanity I might say.

Whilst reading the relevant information on the subject I found out that torture is not a new phenomenon – it goes back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. It was a legal procedure for obtaining confessions from suspected criminals. Early Greek and Roman law permitted the torture of slaves, foreigners and people who were considered dishonourable. During AD 200-300s, torture was extended to other classes of people and became routine. Perhaps the most shocking episodes of torture in the 20th century occurred in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouges’ rule, 1974 – 1979. David Chandler, an Australian academic wrote an excellent book, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (University of California Press, 2000). S-21 was a detention and torture centre in which thousands of political prisoners were tortured and killed, including women and children. Persons at S-21 were dehumanised from the moment they arrived at the facility. In No Time for Tears I wanted to show that the human spirit is unbreakable and that some courageous individuals can endure suffering and torture to defend their ideals and dreams of freedom. You can kill a person but you will never be able to kill ideas and ideals. Dr. Osman, the major character in the play died under torture defending his ideals and refusing to betray his mates.

I have often been described as an emerging writer but I think I’m a writer in transition. I’m making the transition from the world of journalism to theatre script writing. As a journalist you are concerned about facts and making sure they are correct and that you have explored all angles before writing the story, trying to avoid extrapolation and hyperbole. Theatre script writing is challenging – it requires a lot of imagination. You have to imagine situations, say things that have never been said before, create characters and give them a life of their own, see how they interact and express themselves. Writing No Time for Tears was a big challenge for me. I had to see torture from the perspective of the victim as well as the perpetrator and imagine how they both feel and react in a face-to-face encounter, and what they would say to each other. On the other hand, there is that strange world where the rules of humanity and proper social conduct do not exist. I wanted to get a glimpse of that world in order to see the tension, frustration and all the human emotions and it wasn’t easy. As a writer in transition I believe there is a long way to go and that the world does not need walls but bridges.

Sala Abrahim is a political scientist, freelance journalist and playwright in transition. His short stories include Finding the Circle and the prize-winning The Two Who Ruled the World (BBC, 1999), a comic story about sugar and tea. Sala is interested in writing about the human condition, focusing on commonalities rather than difference. In 2012 he was a member of the Playwriting Australia Salon for Emerging Writers.

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BYDS TIMELINE 1991 – 2011

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20 Years of Community Arts in Bankstown

1991 June 23: Tim Carroll begins work as the new Bankstown Community Arts Officer at BYDS.

1992 Bankstown Festivals: Organised in 1992 by a small collective of community workers from BCRG, BYDS, BAMN. Recollections: The starting point for BYDS’ first oral history project, which involves training local high school students to interview and record senior citizens. Seniors from the following language groups are interviewed: Arabic, Macedonian, Polish, Vietnamese, Greek and English. The transcripts are edited and published as Recollections: The Bankstown Oral History Project – A Multicultural Perspective.

1993 International Popular Theatre Exchange: Students from Bass High participate in an international drama project with Anne Round.

Bankstown Video Project: Refugees in a video project funded by WAAS. Coordinated by Nueva Imagen.

Youth Matters: A publication showcasing the writing outcomes from the 1992 Youth Week Writing Competition. Compiled and illustrated by Roslyn Oades.

Youth Arts and Skills Festival Circus Classes: Participants include young people from Bass Hill, Sir Joseph Banks, Punchbowl Boys and St Felix Catholic high schools. Coordinated by Brigid Kitchin, Louise Lammers and Graham Kelleher.

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Youth Arts and Skills Festival Video: Louise Foley, video tutor from Art Resistance, works with eight Indochinese girls from Chester Hill High School to create a video titled, Bankstown City Dreaming.

Recollections: Director Anne Round devises a play with local high school students based on stories from Recollections – The Bankstown Oral History Project.

Contemporarti Artists Collective: BYDS enlists local artist Roslyn Oades to compile a comprehensive database of contemporary artists living in the Canterbury Bankstown area. A direct outcome of this database is the formation of an artist collective called ‘Contemporarti’. The collective goes on to stage several group art exhibitions in empty shops within the Bankstown Old Town Plaza as well as performance nights, happenings and community art projects. The first exhibition is called Seeing Things.

1994 Year of the Family Mural in Bankstown Plaza: A public mural that examines the theme of family in the Bankstown community. Coordinated by Roslyn Oades & Caroline Dang.

Youth Arts and Skills Festival: BYDS runs a series of video-writing workshops with local young people.

T.I.P. (The Installation Project): A visual arts project involving both refugees and artists, resulting in a mixed media installation of colourful cardboard boxes, ceramic pottery, video work, photography and drawings in a vacant shopfront. Coordinated by Anna Bazzi, Luis Aguilar & Caroline Dang.

The Conquering of the Wall and Other Women’s Stories: An oral history project that involves a series of writing workshops with young women from local schools. The writing produced by the young women is published, based on interviews they have conducted with aunties, mothers, grandmothers and neighbours. Coordinated by Marisa Cano.

Giant Puppet workshops: Coordinated by Maddy Slabacu.

Bankstown 2200: The initiation of a new local soap opera series. Coordinated by Madelein Aroney.

UnFramed – Contemporarti Exhibition: Art exhibition at Bankstown Old Town Plaza.

Fragments of Origins – Contemporarti: Exhibition at The Blaxland Gallery, Sydney.

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1995 Australia Street, Bass Hill: A series of interviews with families who live in Australia St, Bass Hill as part of a project in partnership with the University of Technology, Sydney. Coordinated by Tim Carroll.

Planet Exopat: A video project. Coordinated by Anna Bazzi & Contemporarti.

Bankstown Young Woman’s Writing Workshops: Facilitated by Marisa Cano.

1996 Three Magic Creatures: A theatre and puppetry project. Coordinated by Antoniette Slabacu.

Enough: A visual art exhibition exploring the theme of violence. Five artists are employed to produce artworks, which comprise of paintings, video installations, sculpture, installation and mechanical and video combination. The artworks are installed in the Schwarkopf building in the Bankstown Old Town Plaza.

Anti-Violence Video and Short Drama Project: A series of workshops with young men from East Hills Boys High School.

Music Video Clip Project: Four local bands produce music videos. Clips included hip hop band, SWS; grunge band, Meaneither; and heavy rock/grunge band, Bunsen. Project coordinated by Roslyn Oades & Fadle El Harris.

Home is Where the Heart is Wherever that is: Exhibition of four local artists, exploring ideas of home, particularly from the perspective of people born overseas. Coordinated by Tim Caroll & Caroline Dang.

FRAMED (Part 1): An exhibition involving a series of papier-mâché frames and a poster created by young people with artist, Haikam Sihapanyaxay. The project explores Indochinese young people’s response to the media.

FRAMED (Part 2): A series of workshops with young people of Indochinese background resulting in a video project called, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Coordinated by Caroline Dang & Roslyn Oades.

Carnivale Concert: A concert held at Bankstown RSL Club featuring SWS, World of Grimm, Suzie Estafan, May Wang and Arabic Girls Performing Group.

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Call it Black: After two years of regular writing workshops with Marisa Cano, the local young womens’ writers’ group produce their own publication.

Wasted: A series of workshops with a designer, director, video artist, hip hop musician and actors resulting in the creation of a show based around violence in the Bankstown area. Coordinated by Maddy & Antoniette Slabacu.

Love in the Library – the love project: A Contemporarti event staged by a collective of local artists at Bankstown Library – a night of videos, slides, Super 8 movies and performance. Facilitated by Tim Carroll & Caroline Dang.

1997 Heritage Sites Video Project: The beginning of a digital video project documenting heritage sites of the greatest importance in the Bankstown LGA. Coordinator: Adam Newcombe.

Off the Wall – Contemporarti: An exhibition featuring local artists from diverse backgrounds. Curated

by Caroline Dang.

1998 Please Explain: A publication produced by a small team of young people highlighting the skills of local young writers – especially those from non-English speaking backgrounds. Coordinated by Tim Carroll.

Westside Magazine: The first edition of a new magazine series, edited by Roslyn Oades and Tim Carroll.

A showcase of writing, art and photography by young people from the Bankstown area in response to negative media reports about Bankstown.

1999 Federation Fund: Project funded by the Centenary Federation through Daryl Melham’s office to create a social history / oral history investigation into settlement patterns in Bankstown and other areas in the Bankstown locality. Facilitated by Mary Anne Hamilton & Sue Pedley.

Mobile Phonies: Thirty young people attend weekly drama workshops run by Roslyn Oades and Binh Ta (Citymoon). The group create a show called Mobile Phonies, which is presented at the Bankstown Library and later invited by UTP to be performed as part of Subtopia, a major site-specific performance.

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Westside 2: The second edition of Westside Magazine, once again showcasing the work of young writers, visual artists and photographers from Bankstown. Edited by Roslyn Oades.

2000 Are You Listening to Me?: A theatre project with a Bankstown-based youth theatre group examining various aspects of communication among young people using mobile phones. Facilitated by Claudia Chidiac & Cicily Ponnor with Zayaan Jappie, Steve Kourouche & Thi Thi. Supported by UTP. Risk it for the Biscuit: A show with over forty students from Birrong Boys High School which included giant puppets, breakdancing, fireworks and acting with a great cast of facilitators: Scott Wright, Nico Lathouris, Morgan Lewis, Shannon Williams, Monkey Mark Ross & Fadle El Harris.

Westside 3: The third instalment in Roslyn Oades’ Westside series. This edition focuses on poetry and photography. Edited by Roslyn Oades.

2001 Bankstown Girls High Samoan Choir: Acapella workshops by Tony Backhouse with young women of predominantly Samoan background.

Survivor 3001: A follow-up project to Risk it for the Biscuit, which focuses on the future, and teams Birrong Boys High School students up with students from Birrong Girls High School. Coordinated by Andrew Nicholas & Tim Carroll.

Banners for Bankstown: A design project that results in the creation of banners for various sites in Bankstown. Theresa Bui & Michelle Nguyen working with Stuart Slough, Placebo Cultures.

Trouble at the Message Centre: Following on directly from Are You Listening to Me?, Trouble at the Message Centre is formed during a series of workshops that are put together with young local actors. Coordinated

by Deborah Pollard in partnership with UTP. Bankstown Festival: The first Bankstown festival, taking place in December 2001. Coordinated by Rebecca Galea & Tim Carroll.

Westside 4: The final edition in the original Westside series. This instalment features writing and visual art by young people from the Bankstown area. Edited by Roslyn Oades.

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2002 Bankstown Oral History Project: Instigated in 2001, this oral history project results in a publication, performance and a series of photographs as well as a set of professionally recorded interviews with locals from a diverse range of ages, localities and cultural backgrounds. Coordinated by Tim Carroll.

2003 Studio Al Fun: As part of the Premier’s Department Crime Prevention Strategy, BYDS coordinates the Studio Al Fun cultural program for the partnership with Arabic speaking communities. Coordinated by Rahab Charida & Tim Carroll.

Family Affairs: This project grows directly from Studio Al Fun and results in a full night’s entertainment at the Bankstown Town Hall Theatre.

Koori Youth Forum: Over forty-five Indigenous youth from the Bankstown Local Government Area come together to participate in a day of community arts engagement with local Indigenous leaders.

Coordinated by Shannon Williams.

Community Safety: A series of forum theatre workshops and performances around the themes of harassment, bullying and racism with students from Sefton High School and Punchbowl Boys High School. Facilitated by Cicily Ponnor & Claudia Chidiac.

Arabic Youth Poster Project: A series of posters developed by local artists based on the theme, ‘How to Depict Arabic Young People as Normal’. The posters are created over three workshops with local multimedia artist Fadle El Harris. Coordinated in partnership with the Corner Youth Health Service.

2004 NOMISe TV: Hosted by local hip hop artist NOMISe, the series airs on Channel 31 and is viewed by thousands of people in the Bankstown and surrounding areas.

Arab Young Women’s Dance Program: Fifteen young women of Arabic background participate in a series of hip hop workshops funded by the Department of Sport and Recreation. Facilitated by Ellena Lykourezos.

Outreach Video Project: Workshops aimed to engage local young people ‘at risk’ to produce a video.

Coordinated by Peter Polites.

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Beirut to Baghdad: A thirty-minute performance combining drama, traditional Arabic instruments and hip hop. Launched in conjunction with the Powerhouse Museum’s Beirut to Baghdad project. Coordinated

by NOMISe. 11 Parts of Feeling: A theatre project based on a poem by Nguyen Quang Thieu that arises out of an ongoing relationship with Citymoon Theatre. Dedicated to the memory of Bruce Keller.

Mosaic / Fusion: A registry of young people from Vietnamese background who run workshops examining issues of cultural diversity resulting in a web portal. Facilitated by Thu Trang Tran.

2005 Hip Hop,Traditional Dance & Singing Workshops: Facilitated by NOMISe, Perpetua Ekechukwu & Linda Marr.

Bling: Workshops that culminate into a fantastic performance by twelve local young people on Level 7 of the Greenfield Pde car park. Facilitated by James Winter.

HYBRIDGRAF: A visual arts project with young people that combines graffiti with traditional art such as oil painting. This manifests as BYDS’ first animated film. Facilitated by Peter Polites.

Fast Cars & Tractor Engines: Directly inspired by the 2001 Bankstown Oral History Project, Fast Cars & Tractor Engines is co-produced with UTP – the first of Roslyn Oades’ headphone-verbatim theatre trilogy. Created & directed by Roslyn Oades.

2006 REELTOWN: Rebecca Semaan sources local Super 8 and 8 millimetre movies and digitises them, creating an accessible and unique archive for the Bankstown community.

Indigenous Youth Arts Project: East Hills Girls High School students are engaged in a photo and video project as well as dance workshops as part of NAIDOC Week celebrations. ATSI students produce a video titled, Different Shades of Black. Facilitated by Shannon Williams.

Gravitate Youth Music Festival: A music event held at Bankstown Town Hall for the kids created by the kids.

The festival runs over seven hours and features eight bands. Gravitate coordinated by Morgan Graham, Stono Caves, Yvette Jules, Tamara Levot & Samantha Wells.

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Cupcake screens at the Brian Brown Film Festival: A short film about the bizarre behaviour of ‘cupcaking’. Cupcake is a finalist in the Revesby Workers Club Short Film Competition in partnership with Brian Brown. Directed & created by Johnny Tran. Sponsored by BYDS. Art Cars: An exhibition of ‘hotted-up’ cars in the Old Town Plaza – An idea developed by Peter Polites and BCC Cultural Development Officer, Chris Hudson after marvelling at the magnificent and artfully airbrushed cars being driven in the area. Facilitated by lina Kastoumis.

Bondo: Sierra Leone Community Education: A project aimed at educating the Sierra Leone community in Australia about the dangers and legal / human rights aspects of female genital mutilation. Young women participate in video workshops and devise and perform in a play before their community.

Facilitated by Juliana Nkrumah, Johnny Tran & Rebecca Semaan.

Westside Publications: Michael Mohammed Ahmad revives Westside Magazine, establishing it as BYDS’ official literary program, Westside Publications. The program branches out into serial and theme-based publications, school residency projects, performing writing events and ongoing Sydney Writers’ Festival productions. The goal of Westside Publications is to produce writing from Western Sydney and writing about Western Sydney. Coordinated, facilitated & edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Westside 06: Globalisation and Exploitation: The first edition in the new series of Westside. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad & launched by local politician, Daryl Melham.

Fast Cars & Tractor Engines – Sydney Tour: Performing Lines & UTP tour Fast Cars & Tractor Engines to Campbelltown Arts Centre, Parramatta Riverside & BankstownTown Hall. Created & directed by Roslyn Oades.

2007 The Pizza: Filmmaker Johnny Tran and scriptwriter Michael Mohammed Ahmad become Bankstown’s first successful applicants to receive funding from the NSW FTO Young Filmmakers Fund. The funding is to produce a short film about a fight that breaks out in a Lebanese-Australian family over a pizza.

Sponsored by BYDS. Westside 07: Heroes and Villains: The second edition of Ahmad’s new series of Westside. Officially launched by Chris Womersley at Bankstown Library.

Yiayia’s Journey – Oral History Project: A publication about the patchwork of local Greek women’s migration memories and experiences beautifully illustrated by Petros Hovaghimian. Instigated by Peter Polites & produced by lina Kastoumis with older Greek women from Bankstown.

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2008 Super Round Box – Breakdance & Hip Hop: BYDS partners with Super Round Box through filming and lending of editing gear as well as advice and general support. Coordinated by Kai Ngo. Toyz 2 Kingz Aerosol Art Project: A series of workshops by Dise and Woes resulting in the generation of a design based on the 1970s Wacky Races cartoon for the exterior back wall of Hackett House and the ‘CHLAMYDIA’ mural during Sexual Health Week. The workshops run over three weeks, where young local people are given the opportunity to develop their skills whilst learning about sexual health issues. Produced by Chris Atkins and Rod Fuentes. Coordinated by Kate Worsley.

Stories of Love & Hate: Created in response to the 2005 Cronulla Riots, this project involves a two-year interview process with community members from Bankstown and Sutherland Shire. Created & directed

by Roslyn Oades. Produced by UTP in association with BYDS. Gaudy Performance Ensemble: An experimental performance ensemble consisting of seven local young people.They perform street theatre works for the Martin Place Pillow Wars, the Bankstown Bites Festival and Arts On The Streets Newtown. Facilitated by Janie Gibson.

Loneliness & the Cure Thereof: The third edition in Ahmad’s new series of Westside. Officially launched by Professor Ivor Indyk and Bankstown Mayor, Tania Mihailuk at the Bankstown Town Hall for the 2008 SWF. Westside @ the Wharf: The Westside Writers’ Group perform their writing from Westside 08 at the Bangarra Mezzanine, Walsh Bay for the 2008 SWF. Directed by Roslyn Oades. Created by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Second Koori Youth Forum: Over ninety students of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander background and fifteen Indigenous facilitators come together for a day of workshops and project planning for future Indigenous arts programs. Coordinated by Neil Trindall.

Civil Twilight: An outdoor theatre performance/puppetry installation. Devised by Janie Gibson & Clare Britton in collaboration with the Gaudy ensemble.

Giant Dance at Bankstown’s BestFest Festival: A project that brings together dancers from all over Bankstown including: ballroom dancers, the Older Greek Women’s Network, Miss Africa Australia and Castaúuelas Flamenco. Curated & facilitated by Janie Gibson.

Sacred Space Project: Local women from diverse cultures and religions meet to share a common interest in getting to know about each other’s religion or spiritual practice. Facilitated by Belinda Nolan.

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Namescape: Artist My Le Thi paints a series of small canvases and then invites members of the Bankstown community (ages 2 – 70) to choose one and paint something about their name onto it. The result is a collection of canvases displayed in Hackett House.

TalkBack!: A project for young artists (14 – 25 years) to explore issues, ideas or stories they care about.

The participants are mentored by experienced artists and learn new skills in video, audio, web design or animation. Concept & facilitation by Jane Stratton.

White Ribbon Day Performances: A series of events, workshops and dances are run and performed by men and boys from Bankstown on November 25th to speak out against violence towards women.

Facilitated by Tim Carroll.

2009 No Time for Tears: A play by local writer Sala Abrahim based on his experiences as a journalist in Sudan is produced. The play is directed by Effie Nkrumah and performed at the Bankstown Arts Centre.

Shock to the System Workshops: The Think+DO Tank conducts a series of in-school consultations in a project called Shock to the System, designed to educate young people about how local political decisions are made and how to ensure their views are heard. Facilitated by Jane Stratton.

Alleyway Honour: A night of performing writing from the soul of Bankstown by five members of the Westside Writers’ Group for the SWF. Held at the Bankstown Town Hall to an audience of three hundred. Director of Writing: Ivor Indyk. Director of Performance: Roslyn Oades. Created by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Koori Radio Training Project: Local Indigenous students from Years 9 – 10 participate in BYDS’ Koori Radio Holiday Training Program. Facilitated by Jaleesa Donovan.

Digital Photography Workshops: Facilitated by Bill Reda & Jane Stratton.

Indigenous Oral History Project: Jaleesa Donovan begins to interview Aboriginal Elders from Western Sydney. The project will culminate into an online and printed publication.

Aboriginal Dance Project: BYDS Indigenous Youth Arts Officer, Neil Trindall runs Aboriginal dance workshops with local students who perform at a number of local events including Bankstown NAIDOC Day at Paul Keating Park.

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Westside Jr. & Westside Journal: To accommodate the growing number of local writers and varying skills, Westside Publications divides Westside Magazine into two annual publications, Westside Jr. for young writers from Western Sydney, and Westside New Series, a journal for professional and established writers from Western Sydney.

Westside Jr.Vol. 1:Your Mum: The first junior edition of Westside with the theme, motherhood, is officially launched by Bankstown Mayor, Tania Mihailuk and manager of the Muslim Women’s Association, Maha Abdo Krayem. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Westside New Series: Vol.1: Fill Your Bucket: The first publication dedicated to recognising the work of established Western Sydney writers and artists. Officially launched by Prime Minister’s Award winner, Evelyn Juers at Bankstown Town Hall. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Refugee Action Support Program: The Westside Writers’ Group and BYDS actors facilitate forum theatre and writing workshops for refugee students in seven schools throughout Western Sydney.

Funded by ALNF. Coordinated & facilitated by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

2010 Live it Now: A publication showcasing the winners of the BCC Youth Week Writing Competition. Winners judged by Westside Publications editors and Community Development Officer for Youth, Justine Foo. Publication edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad & Felicity Castagna.

RAS Documentary: The Refugee Action Support program is filmed by Filmmotion and developed into a documentary called RAS. This is launched at Max Webber Library, Blacktown during Refugee Week.

Launch & documentary produced by BYDS in association with ALNF. Stop Homophobia at UWS: At 1pm lunchtime, BYDS’ actors hit the UWS Parramatta cafeteria with a frightening performance involving a fight between a group of men sparked by discrimination towards homosexuals in front of a random crowd. A Q&A follows focusing on the issues raised. Directed & facilitated by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Indigenous Dance Project: NAISDA trained dancer, Darren Compton teaches students from Padstow North and East Hills Primary contemporary Indigenous dance, which they perform at the Bankstown NAIDOC celebrations. Coordinated by Neil Trindall.

The Slaves: A performance of The Slaves, a play that deals with themes of colonisation, imperialism and racism

by Ghanaian writer Mohammed Ibn Abdallah. Coordinated by Peter Polites. Directed by Effie Nkrumah.

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Inside the Westside Writers’ Group: An audience of eighty people are invited to experience the work and critical process of the Westside Writers’ Group workshops. Each of the writers reads their work to the group and audience and engages in critical feedback from the facilitator, Professor Ivor Indyk and special guest, Miles Franklin Award winner, Alexis Wright. Created by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

White Ribbon Day Performances: Forum theatre workshops are facilitated at Tempe High School around the theme of domestic violence and a performance is organised by BYDS in the Bankstown City Plaza by local young men to raise awareness about the White Ribbon Day campaign. Coordinated

by Tim Carroll.

Third Koori Youth Forum: Local students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds are invited to participate in the third Indigenous Youth Forum, an arts and cultural activities program that enables young Indigenous people from Western Sydney to engage in dialogue about their cultural history and identity. Facilitated by Jaleesa Donovan.

Westside Jr. Vol. 2: Violence: The second edition of Westside Jr. is complete, predominantly recognising stories about violence by young refugees from the RAS program. BYDS launches the publication at the National Young Writers’ Festival, taking refugee contributors and BYDS staff to Newcastle for the event.

Project coordinated by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Publication edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Artist in Schools Residency Program: Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Lachlan Brown begin the first BYDS residency program, spending two terms in Sir Joseph Banks High School and Bankstown Senior College to help students develop creative writing for a publication.

Multicultural Mental Health Australia Conference: BYDS artists Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Roslyn Oades work with members of Multicultural Mental Health Australia to develop a forum theatre performance about transcultural approaches to supporting mental illness. This is performed at the Sydney Convention Centre.

2011 Youth Week Events: BYDS artists Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Felicity Castagna judge the annual Bankstown Youth Week Writing Competition and produce a publication for the winners. BYDS also produces a performance event at the Bankstown Arts Centre with local young musicians, dancers and writers called OWN IT. Stories of Love & Hate – Sydney Theatre Company: Stories of Love & Hate is remounted at STC as part of their education season. A headphone-verbatim play created & directed by Roslyn Oades (UTP/BYDS).

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Alleyway Honour Returns: Westside Publications presents Alleyway Honour for Playwriting Australia at Riverside Theatres Parramatta as part of the 2011 program.

NAIDOC Day: Tim Carroll and BYDS’ Indigenous Arts Officer, Tim Bishop assist BCC with Bankstown’s annual NAIDOC celebrations at Paul Keating Park. Tim Bishop mentors and choreographs a dance performance with a group of young Indigenous boys.

Artstart Youth Arts & Skills Festival: BYDS coordinates the South-Western Sydney program. A number of arts projects are funded by BYDS across the region that result in a youth arts festival at the Bankstown Arts Centre. Facilitated by Stono Caves.

I’m Your Man: The third headphone-verbatim play created by Roslyn Oades with the support of BYDS. This final part in a trilogy on Acts of Courage is set in the world of professional boxing. Season premiers at Belvoir Theatre as part of the 2012 Sydney Festival.

Launch into Deep Suburbia: BYDS launches their third edition of Westside Jr., Deep Suburbia, at the new Bankstown Arts Centre for the SWF. This publication showcases the work of local young writers who have completed residencies with Westside writers throughout 2010. Selected writers perform their work as part of the event and Professor Ivor Indyk officially launches the publication.

The Deep End: lina Kastoumis mentors young and emerging artists over a six-month period. This results in a night of short performances and video works showcased at the Bankstown Arts Centre.

Long Sentences: Michael Mohammed Ahmad works as a writer in residence for three months with Year 10 students at Canterbury Girls High School and co-facilitator, Peta Murphy. The writing is developed into a show called Long Sentences where students perform their work, which explores experiences with social networking.

Deep Suburbia: Sydney Theatre Company’s Resident Director, Stefo Nantsou develops Westside Jr. Vol. 3 into a theatre performance at the Bankstown Arts Centre. A two-night season is performed to full houses that include writers from the book and their families. Produced by BYDS in association with the STC. Three Novelettes: After twelve months of working with young writers Dorothy Kamal, Khadija Mossavi and Isabella Whitcher, Westside Publications produces and publishes a collection of three novelettes by three girls from the Bankstown area under twelve years old each. Facilitated by Michael Mohammed Ahmad & Felicity Castagna. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

RETRO Project: BYDS receives Australia Council funding to create a retrospective project reflecting on the last twenty years of community arts practice under the artistic direction of Tim Carroll.

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