The Big Issue Australia #619 – Keanu Reeves by The Big Issue Australia

17 OCT 01 NOV 2019

Ed.

619 04 SEP 2020

18.

JARVIS COCKER

TENET

26.

30.

PAUL KELLY

KEANU

32.

and FONTAINES DC

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Contents

EDITION

619

18 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

‘I Realised We Couldn’t Change the Whole World’ At 16, a nervous and awkward Jarvis Cocker was already making plans for his pop supergroup Pulp – right down to the nitty gritty fashion stuff: “no sequins unless for silly purposes”!

26 FILM

The Secret World of Tenet

12.

The Second Coming of Keanu

Christopher Nolan is back, with his most expansive, expensive and highly anticipated film to date. Tenet protagonist David John Washington tells us to gear up for a mesmerising, mind-bending, genredefying ride.

by Laura Kelly

Bill & Ted, the franchise that made Keanu Reeves a star, is back. To celebrate, we deep-dive into the cult of Keanu and discover a man who truly lives the Bill & Ted credo, “Be excellent to each other.”

THE REGULARS

04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor 06 Streetsheet 08 Hearsay & 20 Questions 11 My Word 20 The Big Picture

24 Ricky 25 Fiona 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews 37 Book Reviews

39 Public Service Announcement 40 Tastes Like Home 43 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

CONTENT WARNING

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this magazine contains an image of a deceased person (p46).

30 BOOKS

The Man, the Music Music journalist, industry stalwart and one-time Paul Kelly manager Stuart Coupe has written the definitive biography of Australia’s favourite gravy maker. We take a look at Paul Kelly: The Man, the Music and the Life in Between.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

Keep Calm & Keanu On

ore than half-way through Stage 4 lockdown here in Melbourne and the cloudy days seem to drift into each other until another week passes. But as I watch the last sunrise of winter break while out on my daily stroll, I feel something like hope on the horizon. Maybe it’s the promise of warmer weather and more time outdoors, of soon being able to see my loved ones face to face again. Or maybe it’s that we have the kind and bodacious Keanu Reeves on the cover, who speaks of gratitude and the long-awaited return of Bill & Ted. Either way, I’m seeking out the silver linings in that morning sky. For starters, I was reminded this week that you can still donate blood. At a time when many of us are trying to find ways to help out during the pandemic, there’s no easier way to save a life than by sitting in a chair. Plus, it’s a safe and legitimate reason to leave the house and grab some much-needed time

out, not to mention a few tasty snacks – which may be why there’s a wee waiting list at some Red Cross Lifeblood donor centres across Melbourne. Yet when I called to check my theory, a Red Cross spokesperson confirmed they’ve also seen cancellation numbers increase across the country. With 31,000 donations needed every week, they’re appealing for more donors to this essential service. Secondly, you’re reading this very magazine! Here at The Big Issue, we’ve been buoyed by your unwavering support – whether it’s stopping for a chat and a mag from a vendor where you can, or sending vendors messages of friendship and support, especially those vendors currently unable to work due to the pandemic restrictions. From this edition onwards, our Women’s Subscription Enterprise is back up and running in Perth and Adelaide, packing subscription magazines with COVID safety measures in place – which is some really good news.

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The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 24 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

Your Say E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

Thank you so much for your magazine. I especially enjoy Meet Your Vendor, Big Picture, PSA, By Lingo! and Click. Oh, and Ricky and Fiona’s columns. And Hearsay. And... Well, basically the whole thing. I wish everyone in Australia would read the magazine. How much better this country might be if everyone could achieve a bit more understanding of others and a bit more perspective on life, and enjoy a bit of good trivia, too. ROWENA BEECHAM HEIDELBERG I VIC

Today I had the pleasure of buying The Big Issue from David at Perth Station. We had a chat and he showed me his article in Ed#615. It was great to meet him and excellent to read the edition and see vendors back out and about. Keep up the amazing work. FIONA PLAIN COMO I WA

Thank you, Rachel T, for your inspiring story of resilience. I was feeling a bit down when I started reading The Big Issue, and your Meet Your Vendor story in Ed#612 had me getting up immediately to write and let you know what a difference your attitude has made to me. ANNE RING COOGEE I NSW

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work. • The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 19 locations around the country. • The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales. • The Big Issue Classroom educates school groups about homelessness. • And The Big Idea challenges university students to develop a new social enterprise. CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT

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Rowena wins a copy of Stuart Coupe’s new biography Paul Kelly: The Man, the Music and the Life in Between. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT JD SPORTS ON ELIZABETH ST, BRISBANE

04 SEP 2020

interview by Melissa Fulton photo by Barry Street

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

Cassie

I’m Brisbane born and bred. School was a bit hard for me because I was in the special education unit the whole time. I didn’t really like school, but I stayed until the end of Year 12. I didn’t get to do much mainstream learning, but I loved doing art. I love art. I do a bit of drawing and painting. I like to paint practically anything I can get my hands on. I go out into King George Square with my sketchbook and just sit there and do drawings. I’m trying to do a sketch of the city hall; it’s a beautiful building. I’ll do it in pencil first and then I’ll go around it in a black felt-tip pen. I transfer it onto tracing paper, then on a canvas, and then I paint it. I’m into music too. I don’t have any favourites, but I’m into my heavy metal: Bullet for My Valentine, Guns N’ Roses, Slipknot… I don’t talk to my family much. It’s a bit of a hard one. I have brothers and sisters – there are six kids all up. But I have kids of my own – I’ve got one kid with my ex, and one kid with my partner Jasen, who also sells The Big Issue. The boy that I have with Jasen is two-and-a-half months, just a newborn. My other boy is four in October. They don’t live with us at the moment. But we do get to see them. They live with my mum and my stepdad, my kids. My mental health has been up and down; I’m having a real bad case of mental health at the moment. Jasen and I are able to support each other though. We just moved into a two-bedroom unit, through government housing. I’ve got a carer now most of the week, too. I first heard about The Big Issue from Jasen. He signed me up. Jasen and I always sell together; we’re always on the same pitch. I’m in a wheelchair, and if I need to take a break or something, he can take over. We get to chat while we’re selling, have a talk and figure out where to go next, stuff like that. The thing I like about selling The Big Issue is meeting new people. It’s a social job. I haven’t been with The Big Issue for very long – almost a year. I was pregnant for most of the time I’ve been selling on pitch. It was an interesting way to sell the mag. People would ask me about it a lot, and it was a nice way to get to know people. Selling The Big Issue is my first job. It helps that I get to work my own hours, and I use the money to pay bills. We get our magazines from The Body Shop. The people there are really lovely – they know me by name now. We have a few friends that are vendors too – Rodney, Jeromy, a few others that I’ve met by selling. We’ve become really good friends, and we hang out outside work. In the future, I’m hoping to get both my kids home. I’m working on it. I’m really looking forward to getting them home.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

RETURN TO VENDOR GA RF IE AD EL AI DE LD , VE ND O R

JIM , OM ER RE GU LA R CU ST

I met Jim when I first started selling The Big Issue in Norwood, and he came up for a chat. He’s got a very good character and he’s very funny. He’s part of the neighbourhood community and everybody knows Jim. He helped me out, because he put in a good word for me with the council, to help secure my pitch. We enjoy just having a good chat and we catch up for coffees. We quite often talk about what’s inside the magazine. I think the best part he likes is the vendor profile and the recipes…but I think his wife does most of the cooking. She is a wonderful lady; I’ve met her too. I sell The Big Issue in Norwood most days – I’ve been here for five years. I took over from Gerry. When I first started here, people had to get to know who I was. It’s like anywhere you start work: people have got to get to know you. Now I feel like I’m part of the extended family here in Norwood. I talk to a lot of the shopkeepers, too, and everybody knows my name – my name’s not hard to miss. I think the best part of having Jim buy The Big Issue is that he is very encouraging. He says that no matter what day it is, sometimes all it takes is for one person to make another person’s day.

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GARFIELD SAYS

JIM SAYS I enjoy buying my edition from Garfield every fortnight. I’ve been buying The Big Issue for so long, I’ve lost track. There’s been Gerry, Daniel, Vernon, now Garfield. Garfield and I have coffee occasionally. I find him an interesting nice bloke. We’ll talk about families – about his kids, about my kids – it just rolls out. I enjoy the relationship as well as the magazine, and I look forward to reading each edition. It keeps me in touch with another part of the world. It was the magazine and the purpose of the magazine that initially attracted me more than anything. The concept of putting people in a position where they can actually generate an income, build up relationships with people. I see the way Garfield’s got networks everywhere. He’s become part of the local area, and people ask him questions if they don’t know where something is, and he’ll usually know the answer. He’s there regularly, people know him, and the way he deals with the customers is good as well – there’s an art to that. Garfield doesn’t seem to get discouraged even when it’s a bit tight sometimes, when it’s a quiet time. He is an institution on this pitch.

PHOTO BY NAT ROGERS

Garfield is an institution in the Norwood community where he sells The Big Issue, says his long-time customer Jim.

The Cycle of Homelessness Cycle of homelessness comes in many shapes and forms From the Indigenous peoples trying to balance share and care with modern ownership and pride From the many lines of war-torn refugees seeking safety from war From the railway stations, city parks, sirens on city streets From the unseen in many lonely rooms, shelters in our Western world

Third Time Lucky This is the third time I’ve been a Big Issue vendor. The Big Issue has been there for me when times are tough. I have been through a lot in life – sickness, losing my wife to cancer, and my daughter and stepdaughter in one fell swoop. I have not seen them in about six years. I have currently been unemployed this time around for two years. I have a Cert 3 in Business Management, Cert 2 and 3 in Hospitality and Cert 3 in Warehousing Operations. I have a forklift licence and my white card. I am 52 years of age and I am

finding it difficult to find full‑time employment – so I decided to become a Big Issue vendor. My motto is “Some days are diamond and some days are dust, I get up each day and do what I must”. RICK EAST PERTH & MURRAY STREET UNDERGROUND I PERTH

Stuck on You I want to say thanks to my customers for sticking by me all these years. I hope you all get through COVID without any problems. MICK B CATHEDRAL OF SAINT STEPHEN I BRISBANE

From the numbers of uniqueness, turned to averages From the tears of a mother’s heart, unable to emotionally, to physically care for the cycle she shared by the sight of her children’s hearts From the rivers that were made to unnaturally flow From the trees that are torn down From the storm surge unguarded by sand dunes From the mountains, to the sea, to you and to me Most of all

The cycle of homelessness takes time in many forms Hopefully we can see money cannot save Only an honest, true-blue helping hand, flaws and all Can maybe one day stop the cycle of homelessness and the spread of disease in our land down under RACHEL T PYRMONT I SYDNEY

Comic Hooked This photo shows a small part of my Harley Quinn collection. Most of it has been paid for with money I have made selling The Big Issue. I am sometimes selling the magazine just to get out of the house, and the money goes towards paying off lay-bys. Thank you to my loyal customers, some of whom bought a magazine off me on my first week back, and most have stayed for a quick five‑minute chat about how I have been, and giving me a run‑down on their lives too. It’s good to feel normal again! SIMON HUNGRY JACK’S I ADELAIDE CBD

04 SEP 2020

Sickness rules, communities destroyed

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

From the My life is better than yours

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

In the years that I cooked at [Buckingham] Palace, the Queen never had pizza.

Former royal chef Darren McGrady on the Queen’s eating habits, which shows that you just can’t believe what you see on TV commercials. Her grandson William was a different story, however: a special chicken tikka masala pizza was concocted for him, combining his love of pizza with his taste for Indian food. THE STANDARD I UK

“I only have to cast my mind back to that night where people, for that small moment in time, became equal. That’s so powerful. Everyone is just there celebrating a victory and it’s one of the great privileges of my life to witness. Even though I am ordinary, it’s an extraordinary story.” Twenty years on, Olympic champion Cathy Freeman reflects on her historic 400m win at the Sydney 2000 Games. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH I AU

“To our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating that artificial intelligence can be used to analyse faces to detect heart disease”. Professor Zhe Zheng on research that might lead to selfies being used to diagnose heart disease. Certain facial features – yellow blobs of cholesterol under the skin, white/grey rings around the cornea, and the rather more common thinning grey hair and wrinkles (d’oh) – are associated with an increased risk of heart disease. SCIENCE DAILY I US

“We will not, we cannot, go back to the way things were. The COVID-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers.” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on what should happen after the pandemic.

viewed by tens of millions of people on the online game Fortnite during the pandemic. GQ I US

“I don’t believe I can be cancelled.” Rapper 50 Cent showing perhaps less of an understanding of the modern media landscape than Travis Scott above. VARIETY I US

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WIRED I US

“Times are weird for people, and they’re trying to figure out what to do. Seeing what’s going on in the world is keeping me motivated. Figuring out ways to make it better, that’s really keeping me motivated. And whether it’s with music, or whether it’s trying to go change stuff in the inner city – I’m just trying to turn it up on all levels.” Rapper Travis Scott, who has worked out what to do – his gigs have been

“Someone popped them into our letterbox on a Friday night and they stayed there until Monday – literally hanging out. One of my staff handed them to me and said there was a note saying they were Gandhi’s glasses.” Andrew Stowe, of East Bristol Auctions, on selling the Indian civil rights leader’s glasses at auction for £260,000 ($471,000). Enough to make your eyes water. BBC I UK

“Our club, and our game, failed some of its people in the past. The damage and hurt in Robert Muir’s story, and those of others, speaks of this.” Collingwood Football Club, in a statement recognising its mistreatment of Indigenous players, in particular Robert Muir, who played for St Kilda in the 70s and 80s, and was repeatedly racially vilified by opponents and spectators throughout his career. THE AGE I AU

“Just because we don’t wear clothes, doesn’t mean we can’t wear masks.” Viviane Tiar, head of France’s nudist federation, on advice for those venturing to the country’s biggest naturist destination, Cap d’Agde, also known as The Naked City, where COVID is four times higher than the surrounding community. VICE I US

20 Questions by Little Red

01 In the US, how many records do

you have to sell for an album to go platinum? 02 Who is Alexander Lukashenko? 03 Who was the first Australian to win

a Grammy, awarded at the 1962 ceremony? 04 Which famous book starts with the

line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”? 05 Which Commonwealth country is

the only one not to have a treaty with its First Nations people? 06 The Pantanal – the world’s largest

tropical wetland area – straddles which three Latin American countries? 07 Is a Pobblebonk a type of bird, tree

or frog?

AFRICA NEWS I DRC

FORBES I US

“I remember our first record because there’s some sad shit on there, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this is kind of depressing that tens of millions of people are relating to this.’” Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder talking about mental health and related topics to activist Lily Cornell Silver, the daughter of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who killed himself in 2017.

“They were about to embalm her, which is most frightening, had she not had her eyes open... They would have begun draining her blood to be very, very frank about it.” Lawyer Geoffrey Fieger on his client, 20-year-old Timesha Beauchamp from Detroit, who was pronounced dead – only to wake up alive in a funeral home. She’s currently being cared for in hospital.

ROLLING STONE I US

INDIA TODAY I IND

FREQUENTLY OVERHEAR TANTALISING TIDBITS? DON’T WASTE THEM ON YOUR FRIENDS SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD AT SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Touko Laaksonen most commonly known by? 09 What is the main ingredient in a

traditional Italian pesto? 10 In the 888 labour movement, what

do the three 8s stand for? 11 British long-distance swimmer

Alison Streeter holds the record for the most times swimming across the English Channel. How many times has she done it: a) 35 b) 43 or c) 56? 12 How many children did Cleopatra

have? 13 Lexico was the original name of

which well-known board game? 14 Who was officially nominated as

the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the US? 15 How many times in the past 75 years

has the VFL/AFL grand final been held anywhere other than the MCG? 16 What is an igneous rock? 17 Which commonly used Latin phrase

translates to “for the good”? 18 In what year did Game of Thrones

premiere? 19 Which Australian sporting team

is the first to embark on an international tour since COVID-19? 20 Where in the human body would

you find a nephron? ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

04 SEP 2020

“The President of Kenya, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, has already opened churches and other areas, so we have decided that no child will sleep without having been circumcised.” Peter Kadenge, a traditional circumciser (there’s another kind?), explains that the group circumcision of teenage boys of the Luhya tribe in the ritual that marks their manhood will go ahead this year, notwithstanding the coronavirus and the inadvisability of large gatherings.

“When your muscles “Muuuuum! Can you say you’re please come and get the happy, you’re spinaches out of the top!” more likely That’s what the yucky green stuff on to see the top of strawberries is made of, right? world around Overheard by Lorin of Fitzroy, Vic. you in a positive way.” Dr Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, of University of South Australia, on a study that confirms the act of smiling stimulates the amygdala and can trick your mind into happiness. Smile – and the whole you smiles with you. EAR2GROUND

08 What name is iconic gay artist

My Word

by Tug Dumbly

catch bits of sport in passing, on screens in medical centre waiting rooms, or queuing to pay for petrol. And what I notice is a blizzard of spitting. There are flecks flying everywhere. I don’t voluntarily watch sport. But in this country you can’t help catching it like, well, like a virus. It’s weird, in the time of corona, the level of on-field spitting. I know this because I recently forced myself to watch a game of rugby league. I did it partly for anthropological research, and partly to try and fool my brother-in-law into thinking I’m a man of the people. And in that game, I saw enough phlegm to fill a skip. The field was treacherous with foamy little patches of footballer mucus, like it had just been crossed by a crab army. I got to wondering if spitting was a tactic encouraged by coaches to slip-up the opposition. But then I got into it and started admiring the style of the spits. It was more interesting than the match. For these spits were no clumsy scatter-gun sprays, but tightly controlled missiles, shot with an insouciance that was thrilling. Spitting is generally not something you want that nice old lady on the street to see. For most public spitters there’s a degree of shameful concealment. But add cameras and a television audience of millions and the picture changes. These majestic creatures were like garden sprinklers. The camera would focus on a sweaty Cro-Magnon head, its brow furrowed in concentration on the next crunch of bone, when phwit! it would eject another tight little wad, sweet as a torpedo pass. It was all just so flowing and unthinking, as natural as opening a twist top with your foreskin after the game. Most of us mortals swallow our spit. It’s already been in our mouth, after all. But maybe in sport spitting’s a tough‑guy thing, a kind of animal kingdom warning, like a blown-up puffer fish: “Don’t fuck with me, eh bro!” I’ve entered the age of the medical check-up, and have twice been to medical centres recently. The first time was to get my eyes tested. My gummy vision was still good enough to see the game on the waiting-room screen. It was American baseball – just the thing to entertain three legally blind Aussie pensioners and a sports-phobic poet. There was a lull in play, and the camera focussed on some jock waiting to bat (think 70s porno moustache). The commentators rattled off his stats and stud pedigree. I didn’t catch his name, but let’s call him Brick Whittler,

of, say, the Amarillo Nutsacks. Brick was chewing gum like a steamtrain, but between every few chews – phwit! – he’d shoot a little gobbet, like a sharply bunted baseball. Chew chew chew – phwit! – chew chew chew – phwit! Seamus Heaney couldn’t compete, and I had to put down my book of his poems to watch Brick’s superior output and style. Patting your head while simultaneously rubbing your tummy had nothing on his cool mechanism: chew chew chew – phwit! Brick’s spits were well executed yet seemed so gloriously automatic, like he didn’t even know he was doing it. I wished the commentators would stop farting on about Brick’s batting average and instead dissect his fine-honed sputum trajectory. I could only shamefully compare my own failed spitting history with the elan of Brick’s beautiful game. I thought of the times I’d attempted a cool spit and misfired, only to end up with a string of slag spider‑webbed from my chin to a big oyster on my T-shirt. Pretty embarrassing, especially on a first date at Bilson’s. My second trip to the medical centre was for an MRI on a frozen shoulder. I didn’t even bother taking Seamus Heaney from my bag. Today it was European football, or what I gormlessly called “soccer” as a kid (how quaint!). It was Utrecht versus Brussels. While the Belgians put the phlegm in Flemish, it was the Utrecht striker Dirk Slotboom who rained supreme, with three exquisite on-camera gobs, and lord knows how many off. He was almost matched by the Utrecht goalie Whim Landers who, awaiting a corner, nailed the goal mouth with a couple of beautiful darts. I was annoyed when they called me in for my MRI. I could see Slotboom was working up a goodie. Maybe spitting’s about context. Budgie smugglers don’t raise a brow at the beach, but in Coles they can look weird. Just so with Big League spitting. Still, maybe spitting could extend to other sports. Women’s netball, for instance. Or basketball, where spit would liven up that polished wooden floor. Or Wimbledon. What a thrill to see Venus Williams hoik one up before the Queen! Spitting could only add zest to a chess game between a couple of wizards. “Checkmate…ahh, hoik-toong!” Extend it beyond sport! Parliament would be a buzz with Tanya Plibersek setting sail a golly into the government benches. And a good spit would have deftly punctuated Seamus Heaney’s poetry readings. Tug Dumbly is an award-winning poet and performer who has worked extensively in radio, schools and live venues. His poetry collection Son Songs is out through Flying Islands Books.

Tug Dumbly chews on one of sport’s most enduring puzzles.

04 SEP 2020

Great Expectorations

The Second Coming ofÂ Keanu by Laura Kelly @laurakaykelly

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Laura Kelly is a Northern Irish journalist, columnist and podcaster. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the director of the Edinburgh International Magazine Festival and is passionate about social justice and music.

to pull this look off. I respond to the indignity by badgering Mum to buy me a jacket just like “dead Ted” from Bogus Journey. The haircut will finally grow out – though, Christ, sometimes it seemed like it never would – but I will never grow out of my love for Keanu. Twenty-seven years later, when Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts hosts the world’s first festival devoted to him, there I am, wearing my Wyld Stallyns T-shirt and losing the feeling in my butt-cheeks as I revel in two full days of back-to-back Keanu action. Of course, the fact that a major arts venue would host a festival dedicated to an actor once dismissed as talentless (my fingers can barely type the blasphemy) shows I’m now far from alone in my devotion. “I don’t think anyone has even been mad at Keanu,” says Megan Mitchell, producer and co-founder of KeanuCon. “He’s an actor that has got an innate likability about him. There’s a connection there. “KeanuCon grew from our desire to bring audiences together around good things. And it just so happens that Keanu is an excellent thing.” Garnering international attention, KeanuCon was the cherry on top of a late-career “Keanuaissance” that has seen the world join my cult. A sample of recent headlines: “Keanu Reeves is too good for this world” (The New Yorker); “Keanu Reeves is the best internet boyfriend” (Time); “13 times Keanu Reeves was the greatest person ever” (Insider). When we left Bill and Ted at the end of Bogus Journey, they’d discovered that it was their destiny to become secular deities to a pastel-coloured futuristic world, in which everyone would be reminded “do not do your homework without wearing headphones”. For one of them at least (and with apologies to the talented Alex Winter), that prediction has come true. Keanu is much more than just an actor – he’s an article of faith. Which is a bit strange when you think about it. Despite working constantly, and leading some of the biggest films of the past 30 years – Point Break, Speed, The Matrix, John Wick – there has been that lingering allegation that he’s (whisper it) actually not that good. YouTube features plenty of compilations of Keanu “acting badly”. It’s a trap, I’d argue, set by a combination of his

PHOTO BY GETTY

HOOOOAA…” In 1989, with one throaty exclamation, a new pop‑culture icon was born. Dishevelled head to the side, with arms held at a bemused distance ever‑ready to whip out his trusty air guitar, Ted “Theodore” Logan was the role it took to blast Keanu Reeves into the stratosphere. Propelled by Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and its bodacious sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Keanu became a household name (“It means cool breeze over the mountains,” sighed legions of fans). The character was the launchpad for a career that’s had its fair share of highs and lows, but as we prepare for Bill and Ted to finally Face the Music in this year’s most surprising sequel, Keanu has never been more beloved. Jump in my phone box, and let’s take a trip back to the beginning – to the world as it existed in the late 80s when we first met time-travelling high-school slackers Bill and Ted. It’s the era before the internet. A time when new ticks of language didn’t travel at broadband speeds. Where fashion existed under thousands of regional rocks, yet to be Instagram-exposed, wriggling to the light. Through the power of the silver screen, Bill and Ted’s look, and sound, spread like wildfire. Their patois – a most atypical invented cocktail of laidback California slang and thesaurus-happy poeticism – was instantly recognisable, and inevitably imitated. Or it certainly seemed inevitable to me. In my first big-screen memory, I’m sitting on the velvet-covered flip-down chair of my local cinema in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It’s 1991, and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is blowing my nine-year-old mind. Under my breath, I’m parroting Ted and trying to absorb everything about this brand-new species of floppy-limbed hero. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, I have seen a bright light and been given words of divine advice: “Be excellent to each other…and party on, dudes.” Within the month, I’ve delivered a 15-minute lecture to my primary school class on How to Speak Like Bill and Ted. Shortly after, I talk the (rightly horrified) hairdresser into cutting my hair to match a photo of Ted. I am, at the time, a bespectacled Northern Irish preteen girl who resolutely has neither the hair nor the cheekbones

04 SEP 2020

Keanu Reeves is more than a most excellent movie star – he’s become a poster-boy for kindness and decency. As he revisits Bill & Ted, the film that made him a household name, writer Laura Kelly explores the making of one totally nice dude.

What gives you a sense of wellbeing and serenity? It’s always nice to open your eyes every morning and see the world – it all seems so simple! That’s why I frequently use an expression that I like very much, and which gives me peace of mind: “I’m happy to be here.” That enormous sense of gratitude is enough for me – I don’t need to surround myself with a lot of objects and possessions to feel that way.

How does your acting career help in terms of grounding you? Working a lot and constantly moving from one film set to another has been important in helping me overcome some of the more painful times in my life. Every film set gives me the feeling that I’m part of a new family and I feel fortunate to be able to have a job that gives me a lot of satisfaction. But I still work at finding more inner strength and wisdom and hopefully looking towards the future with greater optimism.

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Is the struggle to find peace another way of seeking happiness? They’re related... Happiness often belongs to our past and what we constantly try to do is to recapture that feeling and bring it back to the present, rediscover it, and feel like we’re in that moment again. The search for peace or finding happiness is this constant desire on our part. We’re comforted by the fact that we

Do you think Bill & Ted will say something to audiences who are desperately in need for a little comic relief in the wake of the pandemic? I’m hoping that audiences will find some humour and entertainment in the story. The film is about family and friendship and how we are all connected as members of the human race by love and compassion. We want people to come away from this film feeling good about themselves.

Do you recall when you first became enchanted with the movies? I was 12 when films like Serpico and Taxi Driver came out. My acting heroes were Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and they were my inspiration to get into film. I started taking acting classes at school when I was 15 and I’ve been pursuing that dream ever since, really.

Do you still enjoy acting just as much as ever? I really love it, it’s my craft. I hated school, and when I was 15, I went up to my mother and said, “Is it okay if I’m an actor?” She was like, “Sure, whatever you want!” Three weeks later I began acting classes. As for acting itself, well I think of it as kind of like – and I’ve heard Anthony Hopkins say this – you learn about doing it, and it’s like painting, I would imagine. The craft and skill of it, the way that you work the paint, it’s similar to creating a masterpiece on canvas. The more you do it, the more you know it.

extreme beauty and the mistaken belief that Keanu actually is the cheerfully daft Ted. In reality, he is a flexible star, with the ability to harness great comic timing (Bill & Ted, Always Be My Maybe); a zen-like, messianic otherworldliness (The Matrix); awesome action chops (Point Break, Speed); and, on occasion, an understated but affecting pathos. It was this last quality that raised John Wick – a trilogy about a man taking revenge for the killing of his dog – to become the best action series of the last decade, making it Keanu’s biggest commercial hit since The Matrix films. A risk-taking attitude hasn’t always paid off – 47 Ronin is one of the all-time box office bombs – but it’s also given us so much more than you might expect from a 90s pin-up. Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) is a landmark piece of queer cinema. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is Francis Ford Coppola’s take on giallo horror, by way of Hammer. Constantine is a visually spectacular supernatural noir-thriller that was, when it came out in 2005, the best DC adaptation since Tim Burton vacated the Batman director’s seat. Despite being a bona fide movie star, Keanu is remarkably untouched by the decades he’s spent in the Hollywood machine. Unlike his Hollywood contemporaries (Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio), Keanu’s life has never been a soap opera. This is not a man you’ll find on a private yacht, dripping with hot younger women as he sips champagne on the way to his private island (*cough* Leo *cough*). The enigmatic Mr Reeves has revealed only breadcrumbs of information. We do know he was born in Beirut to an English mother, and a Hawaiian‑Chinese father who left when he was three, and who was later convicted for selling heroin. After a period of globe‑trotting – including a spell in Sydney – the family spent most of his childhood in Toronto. He always loved acting, and dropped out of high school before graduating to follow his dream. He’s into motorbikes, dogs and ice hockey. And he really loves his mum, costume designer Patricia Taylor. One of the advantages of having money, he says, was being able to buy her a house. He even walked the red carpet with her at the 2020 Oscars. We also know that he has faced terrible tragedy. His good friend and My Own Private Idaho co-star River Phoenix died from an overdose in 1993. In 1999 he and his girlfriend, Jennifer Syme, lost their child – their daughter Ava was stillborn. The couple broke up shortly after. Two years later, Syme died in a car accident. The sense that Keanu has faced grief with grace and stoicism is certainly part of his appeal. On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert asked him what he thought happens after we die. Keanu’s thoughtful reply? “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” When, in 2010 a paparazzo photographed him sitting on a Central Park bench looking a bit down, the Sad Keanu meme was born. But instead of ripping him to

INTERVIEW BY VIVA PRESS. PHOTOS BY GETTY

The World According to Keanu

know that feeling from the past and sometimes we can only be truly happy by looking back... That’s where nostalgia comes into play.

HE SH OOTS BOTH HA ND S

E HE ’S AN IN DI DR EA M BO AT

S M UM HE TA KE SE HI CA RS TO TH OS

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC IS IN CINEMAS FROM 10 SEPTEMBER.

04 SEP 2020

ITAR RE ADY HE ’S AI R- GU

HE TI M E TR AV EL S

shreds (like, say, Ben Affleck) the internet rushed to declare 15 June “Cheer Up Keanu Day”. In the end, though, it’s neither sympathy nor admiration that is the biggest driver for the Keanuaissance. In an age all too replete with nastiness, pussy-grabbers and jerks, it’s simply his honest‑to‑god decency. There was the time he was filmed giving up his seat on the underground for a woman carrying a big bag. The time his flight to LA had to make an emergency landing and instead of throwing a Hollywood wobbly, he rented a van to drive his fellow passengers to their destination – entertaining them with local facts and country music from his iPhone on the way. The time he bought motorbikes for all the special effects crew on The Matrix Reloaded. The time he was snapped sitting down on the street in LA to talk to a man who was homeless. The anecdotes go on and on. Wherever you turn, it seems people are queueing up to tell you nice things about Keanu. The only person who isn’t is the man himself. Following his sister Kim’s battle with leukaemia back in the 90s, Keanu set up a foundation that has given millions to children’s hospitals and cancer research. But he doesn’t slap his name on the charity. This year’s San Diego Comic-Con – traditionally the launching pad for a slew of big-budget geek movie releases – was a strange one, with the panels of movie stars having to move onto video call, just like all our family quizzes. But Comic-Con@Home, as it became, was rescued by one wholesome presence. A beaming Keanu bounced from enthusing about Constantine on its 15th anniversary to gushing about the new Bill & Ted, which sees the middle-aged buds still trying to unite the world through music. In the midst of these troubled times, the continuing friendship between Keanu and Alex (the real-life Bill) is particularly heart-warming. “I can’t feel or laugh or do anything [that makes me feel] like the way that working on Bill & Ted does, and working with Alex,” said Keanu. “That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world for me.” Thirty years ago, when Bill and Ted told us that they could save the world with rock’n’roll, I believed them. A part of me still does. When I sit down to Face the Music, it will be with hope in my heart. Right now, we’re all being forced to think of our interconnectedness like never before. We make sacrifices for each other – cover our faces to help those more vulnerable than ourselves, or stay at home to protect our community. We could all do a lot worse than channelling Keanu’s kindness, and listening to Bill and Ted’s unforgettable commandment: “Be excellent to each other…and party on, dudes.”

Life Span Love bridges the past and present for Vin Maskell. Vin Maskell is a regular contributor to The Big Issue and the editor of music memoir site StereoStories.com and sport site ScoreboardPressure.com.

am standing on my father’s bridge with my daughter and her two young children. The suspension bridge is 10 metres wide, a crossing for a small murky creek. Rarely flowing, the creek is no pristine babbling brook. But it is the creek I have known since I was a teenager in the 1970s, when my parents built a beach shack here, among the trees and the birds, the echidnas and the kangaroos. On the western side of the bridge is a redgum plaque that bears my father’s name. The plaque and the bridge have been here for 20 years. My daughter Hannah and I take six-year-old Olive and three-year-old Jethro across their great-grandfather’s bridge and along the soft banks of the creek. No snakes in winter. We bend under branches and wend our way until we cross the main road. No traffic at this time of year. A sandy track takes us to the beach, where the low-tide sand and long wide waves open their arms to us.

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Twenty-five years ago my father played with Hannah on this beach, with a kite, bucket and spade, and what Hannah called “the lellow sand”. It was a windy day and because some toddlers cannot resist the call of the water, we flew Hannah’s wet clothes up the string of our kite. Wrapped in her grandfather’s brown jacket, she listened to Dad’s impromptu elocution lesson. “Say ‘yacht’,” said Dad, kneeling on one knee to be at Hannah’s eye level. “Yacht.” “Say yesterday.” “Yes-ter-day.” “Say yellow.” “Lellow.” “Yell-ow.” “Lell-ow.” Father and son smiled, exchanging raised eyebrows in bemusement. We reeled in the kite, dressed Hannah and walked back to the beach house, crossing the busy road.

February 1983. I am standing on my parents’ block of land. There are no birds. No animals. The hills are grey and bare, save for the naked, blackened trees. There is no house. The Ash Wednesday bushfires roared through on a tide of blazing heat. Hardly a week later my father is digging new post holes for a new house. Hannah and I sit on a dune watching her children. Sandcastles at first. Buildings so to speak. Then they write their names, one or two letters back-to-front. Olive draws whales. Jethro, rockets. They are not tempted by the water but I’ve brought a towel just in case. We have no kite. Hannah was 10 years old when Dad died. She and her two younger brothers called him Pop. We head back to the house via the bridge. I start sawing firewood with my father’s orange bowsaw. “Can we help, Poppa?” asks Olive. They take turns to hold onto one end of the bowsaw, while I cut a groove and create a rhythm. Together we feel our way into the wood, the saw crossing between us, back and forth, back and forth. We are only cutting sticks into kindling but I tell the children it’s firewood and they proudly carry their little bundles up to the porch. That evening the fire blazes while they watch Kung Fu Panda. My father was an only child. My mother was one of eight. Together they raised six children, and endured two miscarriages. They retired to the beach house and found a family there for their final years – neighbours, beach walkers, golfers and churchgoers. For decade upon decade the only way to cross the creek was via the main road. The Great Ocean Road can be a never-ending stream of vehicles in summer. So the locals campaigned and eventually a footbridge was to be built a few hundred metres upstream from the beach, from the mouth of the creek. Dad died suddenly, just weeks before the bridge was completed. It was serendipity that the Moggs Creek footbridge was just about to be named. If another local had died around that time, their name may well have been on the redgum plaque. On a drizzly August afternoon in 2000, my young family and my siblings attended the official opening of the bridge, including the unveiling of the plaque. All fathers – and mothers – are bridges of a sort. What is parenting if it is not a series of steps, of crossings, of paths? Of showing the way? Of going back and forth until the firewood is cut, until “lellow” becomes “yellow”, until letters are not written back-to-front? We cross bridges every day, one way or another. What is childhood if it is not a river – or a murky creek – leading to the sea? I am standing on my father’s bridge – my parents’ bridge, ultimately – suspended between water and sky, between the earth and the heavens.

Fatima Measham is a writer and aspiring conservationist in outer west Melbourne. @foomeister

hat about these ones, Dad?” I hand him a couple of books with brightly coloured covers. We are in a shop in Manila packed with textbooks for schoolkids. There are drill books for maths and primers for reading. I point out the bit that deals with formal letters. He peers at the page, his glasses perilously perched. I am standing next to the man who had made it possible for me to write in a whole other language. The fluorescent light suddenly feels too bright. My dad is functionally literate in English. I did not realise until much later that the words on his postcards and telegrams were adopted from his work language: en route, disembark, ETA, port of call. Even now he replies to my texts with “message noted”. We are at the bookshop because the documents he’s meant to write in his evolving industry have become complex, so he’s asked me to come shopping with him. I am an undergrad, at this time, at a prestigious Philippine university – something made possible by his wage. For most of the year, for all my life, my father was at sea. There is not a major port in the world where he hasn’t docked, bearing the raw material that makes nations. Steel, grain, coal. I am the daughter of a mariner. I grew up on an archipelago far west of the Pacific. I do not know how to swim. All you know as a child is what you have. My father was chief mate then captain, contracted to a Norwegian shipping company that moved cargo. I associated him with the things he brought or sent home: souvenir items, all manner of American confectionery, branded fashion. I grew up in the provincial south in the 1980s and these were my portkeys.

04 SEP 2020

Separated by the seas, Fatima Measham’s father brought her the world.

Postcards from China and Japan. Pennants from Hamburg, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay. Delft blue windmills on tiles. Pharaohs on pretend papyrus. A banjo-shaped barometer. A stringed instrument no-one could identify, maybe a qanun. Ornamental knives set in red velvet. Because of my father, or rather his job, I came of age understanding that it was a massive planet and there were different ways of being on it. He gave me the world, yet the world took him away from me. I was fathered in patches, in the gaps between contracts. While it wasn’t always easy to adjust to him being around when he was home, I felt seen in ways that my mum didn’t see, even though she was there all the time. He plied me with rice porridge and protein concoctions when I got sick. He couldn’t recall which album I wanted, so he bought me every one from the boy band I liked. He made a point of packing magazines in his suitcase because he knew I loved reading them. Dad retired recently, long after I moved to Australia. He is finally landbound, yet he remains overseas for me. It feels like most of our relationship has been conducted on the phone. He would ring when he got to the port, using whatever means his bosses could provide locally. A phone card or the landline at an associate agency. In the days before we had our own phone at home, he would ring the landlady who lived nearby, who would send someone to fetch us. Sometimes the line would be clear, but most times it was a battle with the physics of sound. Accounting for lag, shouting into the receiver. The cost of these calls would abbreviate conversation, so it became rote: “Are you well? How is school? What do you need?” In turn we would ask: “What time is it there now? Where are you heading next? When will you be home?” Later, as I got older and started making more consequential decisions, Dad would say: “As long as you’re happy.” I knew he meant it every time. What else could a father say from so far? One way or another, parents leave their mark. The contours of my life that can be attributed to my father are subtle by circumstance. It has taken me decades to sense the ridge and recess of them. He appears in my weakness for novelty, affection for animals, absorption at museums and careless disregard for hierarchies. These are quite distinctly things from Dad. But they also feel like flotsam, floating on the surface of some other childhood I might have had, if the sea had not claimed so much of him. It is a kind of scavenging. Sometimes what I remember of Dad are mental pictures of photos in an album. I only know he had held me as a baby because there is a picture. I clutch now at the ones of him holding my son when he was a baby and as a toddler, as if I could improve on that dearth, knowing that we are missing out twice over. His relationship with this grandchild is long-distance, just as ours has always been. They are having to speak in English.

Oceans Between Us

Letter to My Younger Self

I Realised We Couldn’t Change the Whole World Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker reveals his teen pop-star manifesto, and how it turned out now he’s all fully grown. by Jane Graham The Big Issue UK @janeannie

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’d wanted to be in a group from being really, really young, probably from around eight. I used to watch The Monkees TV show and The Beatles films and that just filled my head with the idea of being in a group. I was a fairly shy kid, so the idea that you could have a band who were a gang and they all lived together was very exciting to me. And eventually, by 16, I’d managed to actually persuade some people to be in a band with me. I recently came across an old school exercise book from when I was 16, so I know exactly what I was focusing on then. It has a plan for the band Pulp – or Arabicus Pulp as we were called at first – and the first thing I talk about is Pulp fashion. It says “most groups have a certain mode of dress which is invariably emulated by their followers” – I’d obviously been reading a dictionary. “The Pulp wardrobe shall consist of duffel coats, preferably blue or black, crew-neck jumpers from C&A” – not sure why, I don’t think we had a sponsorship deal – “garishly coloured T-shirts and sweatshirts, preferably of an abstract design, plain-coloured shirts, thin ties, drainpipe trousers, pointy boots, cheap white baseball boots, Oxfam jackets, preferably with buttonholes, silly socks, hair shortish, no sequins unless for silly purposes.” I don’t know how I came up with these ideas, especially the duffel coats. I mean, they’d be too hot to wear on stage, wouldn’t they? Maybe I was imagining we’d play a lot of outdoor festivals.

04 SEP 2020

TOP: PULP, 1998 BOTTOM: COCKER, 2006 NO DUFFEL COATS IN SIGHT

the fact that my dad had left when I was seven, so I’d never had a male role model. Obviously there are lots of absent fathers and broken homes – that’s not a nice way to put it, but single parents. But what was unusual for me was that he just disappeared. He went to Australia, and nothing was heard of him. There was no contact. It wasn’t like, you know, meet in McDonald’s at the weekend. It was, your dad does not exist anymore. My mum tried to talk about him a bit, but she was not kindly disposed towards him – he never gave her any money, she was just left high and dry, so he wasn’t a popular topic of discussion. I was really curious because I had a vague memory of him and, you know, he was my dad. And when we had an argument and she was really upset, my mum would occasionally say, “You’re just like your father.” I did meet my dad later, when I was in my mid-thirties, but it was just too late for me and maybe too late for him. It was awkward for both of us. There was nothing to really hold on to. So that was a bit of a let-down. Both me and my sister took lessons from what happened with my dad when we had children of our own. We both ended up splitting up with our spouses but we made sure that we were always in touch with our kids and were with them. We made a big thing about that. If I wanted to impress the teenage me, given his Beatles obsession, I’d say, listen, in 40 years’ time you’ll sit next to Paul McCartney and you’ll talk to him for an hour. And you’ll get on with him. When Paul McCartney’s last album came out I hosted a Q&A thing up in Liverpool. I was really nervous about doing that because since I was a kid I’d just thought of him as a mythical figure. That’s happened to me a few times. I got to work with Scott Walker. I interviewed Leonard Cohen, who’d always been such an influence on my songwriting. I don’t agree with that thing that people say, don’t meet your heroes. You’ve got to because then you realise they’re just people like you. There are two moments I’ve been most proud of on a stage. One was playing at Glastonbury 1995 when everybody sang ‘Common People’. That was a crazy moment, when we realised that this fantasy had come true. Then after Pulp got back together in 2011 and we played at Radio City Music Hall in New York, this incredible kind of 30s palace… It felt like those formative dreams I’d had as a kid had probably been premiered in a place like that. It seemed like I was going back to the source of a lot of my early dreams. And for Pulp, it felt like we’d finally got back to where it all came from.

COURTESY OF THE BIG ISSUE UK/BIGISSUE.COM. MAIN PHOTO BY DANIEL COHEN, OTHERS BY GETTY

The next thing after fashion is a section called The Pulp Masterplan. The first bit goes “Category A: music” – a bit formal for a teenager. Then: “Being first and foremost a musical unit, it is fitting that Pulp’s first conquest should be of the music business. The group shall work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly offbeat, pop songs. After gaining a well-known and commercially successful status, the group can then begin to subvert and restructure both the music business and music itself.” So that was the idea. I guess that must have been influenced by being brought up in the punk years, the idea that music wasn’t just a form of entertainment, that it could effect some kind of social change as well. And that’s probably why, when we did make it, it went a bit sour. Because I realised we couldn’t change the whole world. So I got a bit of a downer then. This manifesto idea is the classic thing of locking yourself away in your room and coming up with a way of how you’re going to change the world, then when you’re out in the world, not being able to actually say any words to anybody, especially girls. I was quite awkward. I think I got my first girlfriend when I was 16. I used to have a Saturday job in the fish market, and it sounds a bit silly, but it was like, our eyes met across a filleted cod. That was exciting to me because she wasn’t a girl who went to my school. I did fancy girls at school but it was just too nerve-wracking to talk to them. John Peel was my first real musical compass. I remember one night when I was about 14, just twisting the dial and I randomly came across the John Peel show. I think he was playing an Elvis Costello song. And once I discovered him that was it; the gateway was open. Then when I was 17, Pulp recorded a demo in a friend’s house and I knew John Peel was doing a gig at Sheffield Polytechnic. So I went along and followed him out to the car park like a stalker and gave him this cassette. A while later, when I was at school, my grandma took a phone call from his producer, John Walters. We were offered a Peel session. Well, you can imagine, it just blew my mind. I’d tell my younger self to just chill the fuck out. Calm down – ’cos at that age you think it’s just you who doesn’t know how to do things. And, of course, what I’ve learned in the intervening years is that everybody’s got that feeling of being an imposter or faking it. But I had this very strong feeling when I was young, that I was just completely inept. Maybe it was

series by Kim Kyung-Hoon

The Big Picture

Memories of a Geisha A modern-day pandemic threatens the centuries-old traditions of the Japanese geisha. by Elaine Lies

Mayu adjusts Koikuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kimono before entertaining guests at Asada, a luxury restaurant in Tokyo.

04 SEP 2020

COURTESY OF REUTERS/INSP.NGO

kuko came to the capital to seek her fortune as a geisha in 1964, the year Tokyo first hosted the Olympics. Today she is considered the “big sister” of Tokyo’s Akasaka geisha district. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has made her fear for her centuries-old profession. “There were more than 400 geisha in Akasaka when I came, so many I couldn’t remember their names. But times changed,” Ikuko, now 80, says. “Only 20 remain, and there aren’t enough engagements to take on new apprentices – especially now.” In their beautiful kimonos, stark oshiroi makeup and dramatic shimada hair, the famed geisha of Japan have captivated for centuries. Today, however, they are struggling to survive in the face of coronavirus. Pandemic-induced austerity has slashed expense accounts, and many people remain wary of spending hours in the elegant but intimate rooms where geisha entertain. Though the number of geisha – famed for their witty conversation, beauty and skill at traditional arts such as calligraphy, dancing and playing the three-stringed shamisen – has been falling for years, Ikuko and her colleagues were without work for months due to Japan’s state of emergency. They now operate under social distancing rules. Engagements are few and come with new restrictions: no pouring drinks for customers or touching them even to shake hands, and sitting two metres apart. Masks are hard to wear with their elaborate wigs, so they mostly don’t. “When you sit close, you can talk with feeling – your passion comes through,” Ikuko explains. “When you’re two metres apart, conversation breaks down.” Geisha aren’t the only Japanese artists under threat. Performers of jiutamai, an ancient women’s dance, as well as make-up artists, wig stylists and kimono dressers also worry the coronavirus will further imperil their niche professions. “Our income has been down to zero,” Ikuko says. “I have a bit of wherewithal, but it’s been very hard for the younger ones. The geisha association has helped with rent.” Still, every effort is being made to keep this culture alive. “We arrange things in the largest room possible,” explains Shota Asada, owner of a luxurious restaurant where geisha entertain. While Michiyo Yukawa, an ex-geisha who owns an Akasaka bar and hosts occasional geisha events, thinks geisha may need to adapt to the times so that more ordinary people can appreciate their charm. “They have a special beauty,” she says. “They’ve gone through training other people haven’t. They spend a lot of money on this – and it’s made them special. Having this disappear would be sad.”

Maki, Mayu, Koiku and Ikuko attend a dance class. Ikuko fears the pandemic will prompt some geisha to quit. “How are we going to get through? It’ll take all of our body and soul,” she says.

Maki, Mayu, Koiku and Ikuko perform a dance routine.

Ikuko combs her wig in her living room as she gets ready for work.

04 SEP 2020

Mayu and Ikuko get dressed ahead of a party theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re hosting with other geisha.

Ricky

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There’s a reason grey nomads are the happiest people you’ll ever meet. Contentment is towing a fat-arsed caravan in a giant circle around the continent.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

Land LockDown Under

he word “lockdown” means different things depending on what state you live in. In most states it means a recent past, but as Victoria knows only too well that can change in an instant. In one sense everyone in Australia is currently locked down, or rather locked in. We’re the only country that has banned its citizens from travelling overseas. Even New Zealand with its zerotolerance policy to COVID-19 allows Kiwis to leave, provided they stump up for their hotel quarantine on return. And what could possibly go wrong with hotel quarantine, right? European settlement in Australia has come full circle, then. It started as a giant prison and has returned to its roots. This is annoying not just for frustrated travel writers (sigh) but the whole country. Aussies are mad for international travel. We can’t wait to get out there and be mistaken for Kiwis. Compare this to Americans, who by and large don’t leave their country much. The uncharitable assume this is because Americans are uninterested in discovering new cities and cultures, completely self-absorbed. More likely it’s because they get bugger-all annual leave, and also – this is the clincher, really – everything you could ever want is already in America. It really is the most amazing and diverse country in almost every facet. From palm beaches to snowy mountains, forests to canyons, great train journeys, jaw-dropping feats of engineering and architecture, historical sites, cities buzzing with culture and night-life and the friendliest, most welcoming people you will ever meet anywhere on Earth. Why would Americans want to go anywhere else? I raise America not to ingratiate myself to United States tourism departments (although if you are reading, please feel free to send me a Colorado snowdome and a Yankees cap), but to suggest that our own humble country also has a few things going for it. Now, travelling domestically is the new travelling abroad. State borders are guarded

more heavily than most international ones, and I half expect Queensland to soon announce it will be building a wall (and making NSW and Victoria pay for it). But wherever a door opens, Australians are falling over each other to burst through it. A positive to come out of this crisis is that we are forced to explore our own backyard. Some of us are basically imprisoned in our backyards, so we pay close attention to improving our compost, or planting new trees, or studying the birds that visit. We explore our own states, if we’re allowed. In Melbourne that’s confined to exploring our own suburb – our own 5km roaming radius. We’re learning to appreciate our immediate surroundings, and that can only be a good thing. We might not be America, but there’s a lot going on here. From the crispy baked coast in the north-west to the freezing beaches of Tasmania in the south-east to the spectacularly vast interior, there’s no excuse to be bored. There’s a reason grey nomads are the happiest people you’ll ever meet. Contentment is towing a fat-arsed caravan in a giant circle around the continent, swimming in north Queensland in July, camping in the rainforest, watching the stars come out at Kakadu, jutting along the corrugated Gibb River Road in the Kimberley, stopping at tropical gorges to gaze at rock art thousands of years old, embracing the spirit of the Wandjinas and breathing in that unmistakable but too-seldom-felt human connection to this ancient land – recognising deep in your heart that we’re really just visitors here, tourists actually. There are some things you can’t lock down – the compulsion to learn about ourselves, for instance. Paul Theroux wrote, “Travel is a state of mind.” And that state will always have open borders.

Ricky is a writer, musician and current armchair traveller.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

ast week, crazed with lockdown, I spent half an hour scrolling over a “before and after” image on the Bunnings website. Who knows what I’ll do next to quell the existential void? Certainly not me. Yesterday, in a fit of something, I ate half a kilo of macadamias and downloaded the Happy Pets app, which claims to be able to read your dog or cat’s emotional state using facial recognition. Adorable! It’s been developed by students and grads from the University of Melbourne after they laid a bet at last year’s Splendour in the Grass in the “ideas tent”. God, I miss ideas tents. Does the app work? No, no it does not. Bless. The lion’s share of the work went into teaching the algorithms to distinguish between a chihuahua and a muffin, and the developers have somewhat dropped the ball on cats. They inexplicably focused on breeds which maybe three people own (Egyptian Maus – what?), and lavished zero attention on the meat and three veg of felines, the Domestic Short-hair. I’ve chased my DSH, Harry, around like a pawparazzi, and so far the app has fingered him as a “64 per cent unsettled, 10 per cent sad” Ragdoll. Perhaps because I’ve been sticking my phone in his face, as well as that of my “80 per cent happy, 8 per cent anxious” Border Collie. Sort of hilarious if I were still smoking weed like I was back in the 90s, but what cat owners really need to know is: “Is that expression arrogance or disdain?” And “How likely, expressed as a percentage, is Harry to vomit on the carpet?” Back at Bunnings – because all roads lead there during iso – their website offered a to‑and-fro between a “before” photograph of a well-preserved and archetypal mid‑century house with a lush established garden, and an “after” photograph of the same house murdered, skinned, and its head put on a spike as a warning to others. Mesmerising. The garden was eradicated, replaced with concrete and two scrawny succulents, and the

warm brick walls covered in featureless dark grey render. It’s fashionable, stark, barren and finished off with a cluster of feature poles. The general vibe of this “you can do it!” makeover is lockdown at a maximumsecurity prison. “Go away,” the house says. “Nothing to see here. Nothing grows here. Nothing thrives here.” It’s undoubtedly meant to signify “clean lines” and “efficiency”, but the charm is gone. Actually, it’s not just gone, it’s been consciously excised. Melania Trump has achieved a similar effect with her makeover of the White House’s iconic Rose Garden. It’s logical, tasteful and joyless. I feel for Melania. There are good intentions here – she’s created disability access with pathways, removed 10 crab apple trees that were gorgeous but cast shade over the flower beds, and replaced banks of brilliant tulips with white and pastel roses. The tangle of shapes, shady nooks and explosions of colour are gone, and what’s left is regimented and devoid of mystery and personality; it’s every function centre ever. The soul is gone. Mystery and delight are often the casualties of putting too much elbow into exerting control. Thriving markets and shopping strips are killed by makeovers which favour concrete over history and hubbub. Control and charm are opposites that repel each other. We need them in balance. I get that there’s sweet relief in a plain grey box of a house with no surprises, and that an old house requires energy and upkeep. But there’s more to life than efficiency. Freeways are efficient, but it’s laneways and backstreets we’ve explored during lockdown. Now excuse me. I’m off to photograph my Border Collie.

Fiona is a writer and comedian who delights in mystery.

04 SEP 2020

In Charm’s Way

The lion’s share of the work went into teaching the algorithms to distinguish between a chihuahua and a muffin.

Fiona

The Secret World of Tenet Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi spy thriller is set to reignite cinema‑goers, as its protagonist John David Washington takes us along for a mind-bending ride.

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Film

Tenet

by Michael Sun @mlchaelsun

Michael Sun is a writer who has been published in The Guardian, The Monthly, Vice and more. In 2020, he is the Kill Your Darlings New Critic.

or all the tight-lipped secrecy and security surrounding its rollout, Tenet is a film that is incredibly difficult to spoil. Where would you even start? Maybe with the sheer scale of the movie itself – the British-American director Christopher Nolan’s most expensive (and expansive) project to date, spanning seven countries over a characteristically mammoth 150-minute runtime, and one close shave with apocalyptic doom. You could try to unknot its Byzantine logic, which is driven entirely by “time inversion” – not time travel, as the movie is hasty to stress, but something much twistier, where bullets ricochet backwards into guns by virtue of new metaphysical (read: mind-bending) inventions. Or perhaps you’d just rattle off its eminently memorable cast, combining the now-bona-fide action star John David Washington, a steely Robert Pattinson doing his best lounge lizard impression, and an impossibly glamorous Elizabeth Debicki in a race against an impending nuclear disaster, or, um, something? That something is the Nolan of it all: the intentional rift in understanding between the viewer and a director who’s spent the last two decades making meticulously labyrinthine films – Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014) – that demand repeat viewings. It’s also what drew Washington, who plays the protagonist in Tenet – sorry, The Protagonist, as his character is named – to the project. “There’s never been anything made like this,” he enthuses over a video call from LA.

He’s fully aware of the cliché in that line, but continues anyway with infectious earnestness. “You’re familiar with certain scenes that feel genre‑specific, and then Christopher...totally disrupts it, cuts that cord. You’re in the Christopher Nolan genre.” Here, that genre is a melting pot of old and new: classic 007 tailored suiting with futuristic contraptions that reverse time; spy thriller antics distorted by sci‑fi machinations. “You know what you’re getting yourself into,” says Washington, “but you don’t know what exactly is happening.” The joy in Nolan’s films, of course, lies in cracking that code, figuring out the crux of a film filled with trap doors at every turn. “The fourth time I saw Dunkirk, it was a whole different movie,” Washington says of Nolan’s last effort, a World War II blockbuster where three timelines slip and converge over the course of one tense evacuation. “That’s what’s so much fun about it.” The same temporal wizardry runs rife in Tenet. Except here, Washington had just one chance to take it all in, first reading the screenplay over a “mesmerising” four hours in Nolan’s office. “I thought I understood it,” he says, recalling his first impressions, “and I realised I didn’t, later on that day. But I started to discover things from the outside in: the physicality, the stunt-coordinating, the training, the fighting. All that stuff helped me realise the character more, helped me get an idea of where he could go. From The Protagonist’s point of view, I started to grasp the concept of his relationship to this world, which gave me a way in.” That relationship is a tenuous one. Washington plays The Protagonist as something of a hard-boiled lead: a stony, assured agent for an international intelligence organisation, thrown into the midst of a cold war, who has little time, few details about his mission, and fewer attachments in the world. Even so, he draws from the inherent good of strangers, says Washington. “He’s a character that leads with faith, that believes in humankind and what we’re capable of. This man is willing to risk his life for [those around him], because he believes in them, because he believes that they’ll do the right thing, that they believe in the right things.” For all the logical ambiguity of its plotting,

04 SEP 2020

PHOTO BY LORENZO AGIUS

You know what you’re getting yourself into, but you don’t know what exactly is happening.

Tenet demands trust on multiple levels. From The Protagonist, as he accepts his enigmatic quest; from us, as we submit to the grandest and most fanciful of Nolan’s whims; and from Washington himself, whose audition process consisted of merely a conversation with the director before he was offered the gig a few weeks later. Washington is no stranger to the idiosyncrasies of the film industry – his last name comes from his father Denzel, who he’s still quick to credit as one of his biggest acting inspirations, alongside a shopping list of other greats like De Niro and Brando. Growing up on film sets, it felt like he was always destined to act in movies himself, despite a detour into a professional NFL career along the way. An injury saw the end of his football journey, but

TENET IS OUT NOW.

04 SEP 2020

COFF E T H E ME , H O L D A R T IN I

KI’ S EL IZA BE TH DE BIC AL SO ON BO AR D

with the natural leading-man charisma Washington exudes, it’s no surprise that he ended up in front of the camera a few years later. It just so happened that he was acting for his dream directors: Spike Lee – whose 2018 film BlacKkKlansman he starred in, to much critical acclaim, as a policeman who infiltrates the KKK – and Christopher Nolan. Did he have any trepidations about working with them? “You don’t think about it!” he laughs. “You say yes to Christopher Nolan; you say yes to Spike Lee. What are we doing? Doesn’t matter. If I’m getting the call from those guys…” Even so, Nolan’s flexibility during the shooting surprised him. “I was getting prepared for a machine, a cyborg. I didn’t know if he was going to be human, to be honest; just yes sir, no sir,” he says. “He was the total opposite...a lot of times Chris would say, ‘Just trust your instincts, just throw it away.’” Of course, throwing away lines was easier said than done, especially in a production where every word felt precisely calibrated, vital steps in Tenet’s grand equation. “I love ad-libbing, but I didn’t want to do that, not with Chris. And he was totally cool – in fact, he asked me to do it one time. I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a line that makes it into the film that he did not write. I remember the first time I shouted it out unexpectedly and he started laughing. It really worked, and it became a thing.” Washington won’t say exactly which line he’s referring to – even when I ask again – and he plays coy elsewhere too when referring to specific scenes from Tenet. It’s in good faith, though; he doesn’t want to risk anything for the movie that’s been touted as the saviour of the film industry after the pandemic. Such is the level of anticipation that has been building for the film, in sync with the gradual re-opening of cinemas. “I want people to feel how important the movie theatre-going experience is, how important it is to have theatres opened up safely for our wellbeing, and for our state of mind.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “It’s a form of escapism. It gives people hope. It can inspire people, and there’s so much medicine in these films.”

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Books

Paul Kelly

The Man, the Music A newly released biography of Paul Kelly by former manager and industry stalwart Stuart Coupe sheds new light on one of Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favourite songwriters. by Doug Wallen @wallendoug

Doug Wallen is a freelance writer and editor based in Victoria, and a former Music Editor of The Big Issue.

a biography of Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski and assisting with the memoir of larger-thanlife rocker Tex Perkins. Committed to original research rather than existing interviews, Coupe has written a rigorous life study of Australia’s most singular songwriter. Born in Adelaide in 1955, Kelly knocked around the country with the stubborn dream of becoming a Bob Dylan-style success – something that didn’t happen overnight. In fact, if you only know Kelly as the homegrown heavyweight of song responsible for firmly entrenched tunes like ‘Dumb Things’, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ (written with Kev Carmody) and ‘To Her Door’, it’s surprising to learn just how long it took him to break through. “Paul is so much part of our consciousness that people assume he’s always been there,” Coupe notes. “But you’ve got this guy who does two records that don’t sell. He’s [basically] out of a record deal by the time he comes to Sydney.”

PAUL KELLY: THE MAN, THE MUSIC AND THE LIFE IN BETWEEN IS OUT NOW.

04 SEP 2020

PHOTO BY CYBELE MALINOWSKI/EMI MUSIC

Asked when he first thought of himself as a songwriter, Kelly tells Coupe: ‘When I wrote my first song.’

Kelly’s arrival in Sydney in 1984 is immortalised in ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’, a poetic time capsule of his bus ride from Melbourne. Coupe, who had also found himself managing Hoodoo Gurus around their career-making debut album Stoneage Romeos (1984), admits to knowing nothing about management. Yet Coupe and then partner Yanni Stumbles, who designed the album sleeves for Post and Gossip, co-managed Kelly from 1984 until the couple split up at the end of the 80s. That period saw Kelly’s long‑awaited crossover into the mainstream, thanks to the critical accolades for the largely acoustic Post and then the commercial impact of the full-band statement Gossip. For most fans, the Paul Kelly story starts there, but Post was actually his third album. Kelly so dislikes the first two – 1981’s Talk and 1982’s Manila – that he gained the publishing rights and effectively removed them from the public record. Yet the most illuminating part of Coupe’s book covers that formative pre-fame era where Kelly dwelled in suburban Melbourne share houses with other musicians, discovering cult bands like Television and The Modern Lovers while falling into habitual drug use. Coupe thinks his subject “would prefer to forget” that late-70s and early-80s era – which, indeed, was covered in just a few pages in Kelly’s own memoir. But the author encountered no pushback from Kelly over the inclusion of less flattering details about his personal life, from his ruthless work ethic to his rocky marriages. While he told Coupe that the first 60 pages were “really confronting”, he didn’t take issue with them. “I have a theory that he kind of wanted those days to be documented, but he didn’t want to do it himself,” says Coupe. “But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.” Whatever way, the book remains respectful throughout, even when showing Kelly at his most flawed. “I didn’t want to write a sex-and-drugs book,” Coupe adds. “So I had to constantly [ask] what is pertinent to telling the story, and at what point is it just scurrilous?” Beyond squalid share houses, the book follows Kelly’s youthful travels to Tasmania, Perth and northern Queensland as well as later musical detours into bluegrass and reggae – and recently releasing an album with jazz pianist Paul Grabowsky. Nothing punctures the popular image of Kelly as a bulletproof national treasure like the book’s opening scene, which recounts a disastrous RSL gig in Mittagong, NSW, from 1985. Not only is the gig sparsely attended, but a woman calls the band the worst she’s ever heard before exiting with her friends. Compared to Kelly’s later canonisation, that brief moment sums up the many demoralising setbacks on the way to stardom. That’s where Kelly’s well-known self-determination comes into play. Asked when he first thought of himself as a songwriter, Kelly tells Coupe: “When I wrote my first song.”

ho better than Stuart Coupe to write the definitive biography of Paul Kelly? One of Australia’s most enduring music journalists, Coupe landed Kelly as his very first interview subject in 1976, when Kelly was fronting underground heroes The High Rise Bombers. Coupe later became Kelly’s manager, just before the classic 1985 solo album Post and the next year’s breakthrough double album Gossip with the Coloured Girls. The only trouble was that Kelly had already penned a successful memoir with 2010’s How to Make Gravy, named after his heartbreaking absent-at-Christmas ballad. So Coupe opted to fill in the gaps in Kelly’s account, corralling the perspectives of the songwriter’s many collaborators along the way. Interviewing around 100 subjects, Coupe wound up earning Kelly’s support – and some crucial consultation – for Paul Kelly: The Man, the Music and the Life in Between. “I wanted to give voice to everyone who existed around Paul,” says Coupe by phone from Sydney. “None of these people had talked [at such length before] about being involved in Paul’s world.” Again, Coupe was uncommonly qualified for the assignment. After co-authoring a few survey-style music books in the 1980s and 90s and running the indie record label Laughing Outlaw, Coupe has penned four highprofile music tomes in the past five years – including

Fontaines DC

Music 32

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Fontaines ofÂ Youth Irish rockers Fontaines DC are proving to be the heroes 2020 needs, dropping a second album full of raging, poetic bangers.

by Brodie Lancaster @brodielancaster

Brodie Lancaster is a Melbourne-based writer and critic, and the author of No Way! Okay, Fine.

PHOTO BY POONEH GHANA

ackstage at The Button Factory, a live music venue in Dublin, five university friends sing along to the Irish folk ballad ‘Schoolday’s Over’ as the sound of a raucous crowd builds out front: Come on then Jim, it’s time to go/Time you were working down below/Time to be handling a pick and shovel/You start at the pits today. It’s December 2018, and at this moment, captured in the short documentary Sold for Parts, the five members of punk band Fontaines DC have no idea what’s to come after they step out on stage to a hero’s welcome. Five months later, their debut record, Dogrel, was released to critical praise and they were met with a touring schedule that covered huge venues, cramped stages at SXSW, music festivals and late-night TV appearances. The record was like a clear voice cutting through noise. It melded the sensitivities of its members – Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll – who first bonded over a shared love of poetry at school, along with the grinding sounds of post‑punk and the linked arms and clinked pints of Celtic-punk legends The Pogues. Fontaines DC didn’t know it then, but they were handling their own picks and on their way to the mosh pits, about to work ceaselessly for almost two years. By the end of it, when the pandemic finally forced them to come up for air, they released their second record A Hero’s Death at the end of July. By this point, the dynamic in the band had changed. “When you’re touring so relentlessly, certain parts of your friendship get thrown out because you just become more like colleagues,” Curley, one of the band’s guitarists, tells me over video call from New York City. “Which is a sad thing. But if you have to bear each other every day for like three months at a time, you don’t have anything new to say after a while.” The “group get-togethers about our poetry” fell by the wayside a while back, he says, but the band still have the important stuff in common. “As a group, we have, like, undying ambition,” Curley says with a laugh. “Which kills us sometimes. I don’t know if this is a really Irish thing, but we love working

ourselves to the bone, knowing that the work we’re doing is worthwhile and something that we always wanted.” Only after being exhausted, would Fontaines DC recognise, in retrospect, that they should’ve slowed down earlier. Perhaps a pandemic was the only thing that could’ve forced them to. The enforced pause, however, will be only temporary. “I think when next year hits we’re all aware that it’s probably going to be, like, fucking pedal to the metal.” Back in January, the band were due to hit Australia for the first time, and close out the marathon Dogrel tour with a series of sold-out shows. Then they cancelled and decamped to Ireland to finish the new record. I ask Curley if they cut short the tour because they were fired up with that “undying ambition” to deliver A Hero’s Death. Turns out boredom and an impulse to prove themselves were more motivation: they’d been playing songs from Dogrel for years and wanted new material to work with. “It was mainly just for us to make it an enjoyable thing, so we wouldn’t lose the love for playing live so much that we’d just be like, fuck this and stop,” he says. “Plus, I think it was knowing that the response to Dogrel was so like, ‘Oh, they can do this one thing, this kind of post-punk sound.’ I think we had a chip on our shoulder… We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could write a little bit more expansively than that.” “Expansively” is an understatement. A Hero’s Death covers significant ground, from the optimism of ‘Oh, Such a Spring’ to the menacing, metallic ‘Televised Mind’. The romanticism and desire to become the latest in a long line of Irish poets, which underscored Dogrel’s fierce propulsion and cheeky attitude, have been swapped out for a little more cynicism. It’s about getting what you want and still finding things to be depressed about. The beauty of Dogrel was the unknown, and now Fontaines DC have an idea of what to expect, things are different. But they’re doing their best to not let the noise interfere. “I think the most important thing we wanted to do [on A Hero’s Death] was not let people liking our sounds affect what we wrote,” Curley says defiantly. It’s a noble idea for a band who’d been local heroes long before the rest of the world took notice. A HERO’S DEATH IS OUT NOW.

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

’m sure the kids will probably enjoy Marc Munden’s The Secret Garden, the latest period adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel in which a British orphan is sent to live at her embittered uncle’s estate. This new version’s got nothing on Agnieszka Holland’s heartfelt 1993 film, though – or for a true classic, Fred M Wilcox’s 1949 version with child star Margaret O’Brien. The films are all largely faithful to Burnett’s story: Mary’s parents die in colonial India, where a life of being waited upon has turned her into an entitled brat, stamping her feet and flaring her nostrils – thrilling stuff for those of us whose Charlie and the Chocolate Factory favourite was always Veruca Salt. Her uncle’s English manor, surrounded by mist rising from the moors, is about as eerie as the Lemony Snicket books. There’s even a child hidden in a far wing. Into this foolproof mix of ingredients comes the jaw-dropping garden itself, a secret enclave of thick-growing wildflowers and joyful twittering birds hidden behind a towering stone wall. The 90s film has touches of fantasy – imagine having your own fawn to play with? – but Munden’s version takes this to the extreme, using CGI to turn the garden into the stuff of fluffy dreams, with plants that dramatically change colour and that move and shift in sync with Mary’s moods. But the result is strangely cold. To me, not raised on digital flora, a CGI rose does not smell as sweet. ABB

DIXIE EGERICKX IN THE NEW SECRET GARDEN

THE TRANSLATORS 

Nine translators, one bunker. Such is the set-up of this pulpy polyglot thriller, where a group of linguists are confined to literary lockdown by a profit-mad publisher (played with villainous flair by Lambert Wilson). Tasked with translating the latest work from mysterious bestselling author Oscar Brach for a synchronised worldwide launch, suspicion erupts when the first 10 pages are leaked online. It may sound like the stuff of fiction, but The Translators’ premise has an astounding real-life basis in the underground confinement imposed on the translators of Inferno, Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Director Régis Roinsard treats the whodunnit genre with a respect and enthusiasm that’s hard to resist, and the committed cast manage to ground the material in humanity. Calling to mind the character-based delights of The Rules of the Game as much as the elaborate plot mechanics of an Agatha Christie novel, The Translators is the enjoyable cinematic counterpart to a page-turner, ravenously devoured. JESSICA ELLICOTT SLIM & I

I T TA K E S T W O T O C R E AT E A L E G E N D A FILM BY KRIV STENDERS



Joy McKean may not be a household name like her late husband Slim Dusty, but Slim & I director Kriv Stenders (Red Dog) shines a spotlight on her that’s amply deserved. Alongside sister Heather, Joy (still going strong at 90) was a successful country singer in her own right when she met Dusty. He pursued her, which seems the only time she wasn’t fully in command of her destiny, and together they toured constantly for close to 50 years. Already a performer and a mother (she weeps over putting their kids into boarding school), Joy became their tour manager, and wrote many of Dusty’s biggest hits on the side. Stenders’ documentary uses archival footage, as well as interviews with everyone from musicians Paul Kelly to Chad Morgan, to create a vivid picture of an often-overlooked slice of Australia’s entertainment and social history. The result is part biography, part argument as to why their music still matters. It’s a worthy salute to an unsung star. “AN UPLIFTING AND BEAUTIFULLY-CRAFTED PORTRAIT OF TWO HOMEGROWN MUSIC ICONS. IT WOULD BE

UN-AUSTRALIAN NOT TO SEE IT!”

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RICHARD WILKINS NINE NETWORK

COMING SOON

SCREEN AUSTRALIA AND UNIVERSAL PICTURES PRESENT A KRIV STENDERS FILM IN ASSOCIATION WITH SCREEN QUEENSLAND A PICTURES IN PARADISE AND SLIM DUSTY ENTERPRISES PRODUCTION “SLIM & I” EDITOR KARRYN DE CINQUE DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY EVAN PAPAGEORGIOU JOY MCKEAN GARY PHILLIPS MARK VENNIS KURT ROYAN LAURIE CRITCHLEY BRYCE MENZIES ANNE ARNEMAN GREG ARNEMAN JANE KIRKPATRICK DAVID KIRKPATRICK AND FLORA SMITH PRODUCED BY CHRIS BROWN JAMES ARNEMAN AND ALINE JACQUES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY KRIV STENDERS

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS

Check the Classification

ANTHONY MORRIS

ADAM 

For her intimate, quietly moving debut feature, writer-director Maryam Touzani drew on the memory of a young woman her family once housed. The heavily pregnant woman knocked on the Touzani’s door looking for work, and they felt compelled to invite her to stay until she gave birth, knowing that many unmarried women in Morocco were fated to do so in the streets. In Adam, Nisrin Erradi plays Samia, pregnant and adrift in Casablanca, until being taken in – begrudgingly, cautiously – by the dour Abla (Lubna Azabal, Incendies), a widow who supports herself and her young daughter Warda (Douae Belkhaouda) with the pastries she bakes and sells in the back room of her house. Touzani lingers on moments of physical connection: Warda’s hands tentatively explore their guest’s big taut belly; Samia’s hands guide Abla’s as she corrects her kneading technique, the pair massaging the dough in tandem. With its crackling tactility, the film is warming and empathetic in its portrayal of a makeshift sisterhood. KEVA YORK

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

SHE SHEARS  | SBS ON DEMAND

THE COLLECTION

 | NETFLIX

 | PODCAST

Away is a sci-fi series about space exploration, but its emotional roots are on Earth, care of NASA’s Commander Green (Hilary Swank) who leads a three-year mission to Mars. The 10-part series is incredibly ambitious, flaunting the dazzling visuals of a blockbuster film like 2018’s First Man. Anchored to the experiences and conflicts of its central characters – notably the international space-travelling team – there’s a depth of humanity, via impressive performances. Although the first episode is somewhat mechanised in its world building, hitting expected emotional beats and conflict points, the ensuing episodes flow with great emotional poignance and spectacular stakes. The most striking thematic element is the tyranny of distance, pushing the characters apart and increasing their desire to close it again, speaking strongly to those who are separated during the current global crisis. Away is a grounded, human foray into the sci-fi genre, and an exciting piece of television – one that deserves to be watched on the largest screen in the house. ELLA PACE

“Museums collect objects, and objects tell stories,” says historian Jared Archibald. At the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory – aka MAGNT, where he’s Curator of Territory History – he describes how museums educate and entertain by showing us things we’ve never seen before. The Collection guides listeners backstage at MAGNT, into the dry rooms and freezers typically out of bounds to the public. Here, experts share taxidermy anecdotes about whopper crocs, while touching on ecology and sustainability. Later episodes detail the effects of Cyclone Tracy in the 1970s, and reveal how staff today collaborate with traditional custodians like the Larrakia people to enrich our understanding of the objects on display. Part oral history, part aural treasure hunt, this edutainment specimen was produced for National Science Week in August (as was the South Australian Museum’s similarly themed podcast), but the curious, playful and illuminating series will have an evergreen appeal to lifelong learners across the country. AIMEE KNIGHT

neon light flickers in the window of a bail bonds road-stop. Inside, a lady bounty hunter called Carla smokes and swears and hatches a plan to catch the creep who, for decades now, has conned dozens of American women out of their money, dignity and love. Carla is rough and tumble, ready to rumble, rarely seen without her long-barrel revolver. Never seen without her bluetooth earpiece. She’s one of several captivating characters in Stan’s addictive new docuseries Love Fraud. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady – best known for the Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp (2006) – this is true crime done right. Over four moreish episodes the series unfurls a stranger-than-fiction tale of deception and duplicity, peppered with red flags, web-sleuthing, stakeouts, car chases and karaoke. The thrill of the hunt is off the charts, and the payoff: mind-boggling. Were I a gamblin’ gal, I’d bet the house you’ll be screaming at the screen. Yet Love Fraud never falls prey to sensationalism. It’s not tainted with the tabloid tactics that tar the true crime genre. Rather, by centring the women who’ve survived these emotional, financial and physical violences, the series hands them back some power. What’s more, their insightful interviews spark broader questions about gender, class and age-based concerns harming folks in the US right now. This is a timely excoriation of American machismo, and a hot-blooded reclamation of women’s agency. AK

04 SEP 2020

AWAY

BOUNTY HUNTERS TRACK DOWN THE LOVE FIENDS

Only in New Zealand could sheep shearing flourish into a competitive spectator sport. She Shears focuses on the small community of female shearers gunning for trophies at The Golden Shears. Some competitors, like Jills Angus Burney, are world-record holders, despite the overwhelming majority of shearers being male. Battle-worn Pagan Karauria is the child of a Master Shearer and a Master Wool Handler, giving her extra confidence but also added pressure when it’s her turn to throw huge cumulonimbus clouds of shorn wool before the board of judges. One problem for this short and sweet doco is that its subjects are, by nature, extremely pragmatic interviewees, casually rattling off their back injuries and industry grievances with a sheepish “what-can-ya-do?” smile. And while viewers might not come away with a satisfying answer as to why shearing is apparently so addictive, it’s still awe-inspiring to get glimpses of the athletic “perfection in the pattern” as Jills calls it. Oh my god, this movie should’ve been called Shear Perfection. ELIZA JANSSEN

Music Reviews

Sarah Smith Music Editor

KING OF THE HIGH C S

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

few weeks into Stage 4 lockdown in Melbourne, and all the things that previously put me at ease don’t seem to be working anymore. Earlier in the year I wrote about finding comfort in classic albums, returning to the familiar and the safe. But as the year has rolled on, with all its challenges, I’ve found it harder to work out what I need to listen to. In whatever form it takes, the end result I’m chasing from music, or books, or film right now is escapism; something that doesn’t return me to a place of comfort, but rather transports me to a whole new space. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to my favourite community radio shows – entrusting my mood to someone else has proved the ultimate form of liberation. My sense is that in this current shrunken reality any kind of unpredictability – even something as simple as letting someone else program your music listening – is a good thing. I’m finding joy in the unexpected. Strangely enough, the artist that has most truly moved me recently has been Pavarotti. I just happened to stumble across Ron Howard’s doco about the tenor and in it I discovered the most delightful escape. I’m far from an opera fan, but have found that being taken inside this world of music I knew nothing about is a true delight. It helped, no doubt, that The Maestro was a ridiculously gregarious and joyful human. So for the next few weeks, if things get a bit rough, I’ll be channelling Pav’s Big Tenor Energy. SS

@sarah_smithie

FREEZE, MELT CUT COPY 

Cut Copy’s sixth album finds them at their most subdued and introspective, gliding slowly through meditative electronic suites that may surprise those who only know the Melbourne quartet’s club-courting early work. But what Freeze, Melt lacks in body-moving animation, it more than makes up for in deep emotional immersion. Dan Whitford threads softly pleading romance through nearly every track, from the hopeful declaration in opener ‘Cold Water’ (“I won’t be free from love”) to the sighing lament in ‘Running in the Grass’ (“You cut me down to the bone”). If ‘Like Breaking Glass’ edges into pure synth-pop (think Icehouse or Japan), it’s a stylistic flashback that feels fruitful rather than pat. And as much as Whitford invests these songs with convincing emotion through his singing and lyrics, just as moving are the immaculate, crystalline synthesisers that together provide a serene retreat not unlike Superman’s fabled Fortress of Solitude. As love letters go, these are absolutely exquisite in both texture and feeling – the sound of an experienced band applying cool-headed quality control to the smallest details. DOUG WALLEN

RAGING HEAD TOM LYNGCOLN

UNITY GORDON KOANG

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Tom Lyngcoln has a taste for it now. After his debut solo outing Doming Home (2018), Lyngcoln returns with the full-blooded and gnashing, Raging Head. Where Lyngcoln’s last album was both obsessed with and wracked by nightmares and visions of the mind, here he seems pragmatic and furious about a laundry list of social, political and economic ills that plague his world. White collar crime/ blue collar compromise/some adult themes, he drones on ‘Rated R’, after eviscerating wealth hoarders and Tony Abbott on ‘Trust Fun’ and ‘Tony’ respectively. Raging Head is a more traditional punk affair than his last: barked lyrical refrains, guitar punishing chord progressions and clattering drum-fills a-plenty. Ultimately, it’s a record imbued with even more sorrow than anything Lyngcoln has produced before. Looking at the schoolboy picture of Lyngcoln on the cover, born into a world of existential crisis, income inequality and cynical politics, you’re left thinking: “God, this kid has no idea what he’s in for.”

Gordon Koang is amazing: a blind South Sudanese musician who lands in Australia on tour, seeks asylum and wins a local following while waiting five years for permanent residency. Having performed since his boyhood in Juba, he’s an accomplished showman – his gigs are full of joy and loaded with jams. Koang and his offsider/cousin Paul Biel possess bountiful chops and an ability to bond with their audiences. Unity is Koang’s 11th LP, and his first recorded in Australia. Sung in Thok Nath and English, the album is a plea for universal love and tolerance, touched by Koang’s own experiences. “My dear asylum seekers,” he sings, “we know you are waiting for your permanent protection visas.” The music is bright and ebullient, but there’s real ache, too: in ‘South Sudan’, a lament for a war-torn land; in standout ‘Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial’, a message to a daughter who he’s yet to meet. It’s beautiful, stirring stuff from a musician who now calls Australia home. ANTHONY

NICHOLAS KENNEDY

CAREW

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

THE MOTHER FAULT KATE MILDENHALL

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Lanky and anxious, Hilary Byrd is an ageing librarian from the suburbs of London who has never found romantic love. Scarecrow-like in appearance, he cuts a quirky figure while on holiday in India. When the heat of the plains proves too much for Byrd, he takes comfort in the cooler climate and sleepy vibe of a hilltop village. Staying in a cottage next to the local presbytery, Byrd quietly takes an interest in a young woman he’s begun tutoring. As in her debut novel, 2018’s slim and sparse West, Welsh writer Carys Davies focuses on a small array of disparate characters that are each somehow out of step with their time or place. The Mission House doesn’t have the same impact as Davies’ previous book, though. The ending feels abrupt after so much slow and steady character work, and there’s a disjointed approach to the narrative that can interrupt the novel’s flow. Still, it’s hard to imagine many other writers investing so much time and skill in telling such a miniature, even quaint, story.

Kate Mildenhall’s second novel is set sometime in the future when everyone in Australia is microchipped, with the state monitoring all citizens at all times. (Geolocating seems reasonable when “there are mass evacuations at least three times each summer on the outskirts of every city, tidal floods up the mouth of the river, a wave of eco-terrorism”). Dropped into this dystopian hell beset by climate change disasters are Mim and her two young children. When she discovers that her husband has disappeared while working on a mine site in Indonesia, Mim takes off with children in tow to try to find him. What follows is a fast-paced, passionately written road (and boat) journey that explores some of the big issues of the day, in terms of surveillance and environmental disaster. But the novel is also about the bond of motherhood and the lengths that Mim will go to in order to safeguard her children, and to find out the truth about what happened to her husband.

DOUG WALLEN YOU WERE MADE FOR ME JENNA GUILLAUME 

From Jenna Guillaume, pop culture journalist and the author of What I Like About Me, comes a story full of teen romance tropes with a sweet, progressive edge, and just the right amount of awkward moments. Kate dreams of having her perfect kiss by the end of the year, but unfortunately the world isn’t playing along. Desperate for that kiss, Kate and her best friend Libby decide to create the perfect guy out of clay and common household ingredients to be her boyfriend. Guy, as they call him, throws a confusingly attractive spanner into an already volatile teen cocktail of love triangles, high school grudges and some seriously shirty parents. Guillaume writes through the very authentic voices of Kate and Libby. In diary style, they document their experiment for posterity, quibble about how things “really” happened, and encourage each other to skip through the boring bits. This is a book to give to the kids. Adults beware: Guillaume uses every rom-com trope you can think of (updated to suit today’s social mores), so the cringe-factor is real. RAPHAELLE RACE

THUY ON

THE MISSION HOUSE CARYS DAVIES

04 SEP 2020

know it’s a messy, destabilising time, but publishing houses have not ceased operations and as a result, there are plenty of books being published, so please consider our local authors, especially when many are unable to promote their new titles in real life. Here’s two: Georgia Young’s Loner won the Text Prize last year. It stars Lona, who’s dropped out of uni for reasons unknown to anyone, particularly herself, and who’s trying to make her way in the world. Loner canvasses romance, jobs, friendships and parents via a protagonist who’s socially awkward but wry, funny and witty. Think a grown-up version of Daria, for those who remember the sarcastic animated TV teen of the late 90s. For kids, Maggie Hutchings’ I Saw Pete and Pete Saw Me is a picture book about homelessness. Although most adults ignore Pete, a small boy notices him sitting on the street with his dog. Pete loves to chat and to draw, and the two strike up a friendship. Other people start to notice Pete and offer assistance, but one day he is no longer at his post. Illustrated by Evie Barrow, it’s a lovely tale about empathy, care and paying attention, and as a bonus, $1 from each sale will be donated to The Big Issue. TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

Further into that same park on that same weekend, I saw a woman in white tracksuit pants and a neon pink top rollerskating at some speed. She bent down low as she propelled herself down the hill and then stood again as she approached the corner, raising one leg slightly, feeling the weight shift. She took that corner like we’ve all taken corners, as kids on bikes or skates or boards. She took that corner like she was winning something. She was, at a guess, 50. It was joyful and free and lovely and, to me, she was winning something. You don’t have to be an athlete to feel free, by the way. One of the most freeing, relaxing, joyful feelings life has to offer has to be when you’re the person in the car who isn’t driving or concentrating on where you’re supposed to be going, during summer, with the window down – your hand out the window, dipping and diving into the headwind – like a bird or a dolphin. Indulging an instinct that has to date back to the invention of the car. Sock sliding is pretty great. Steering wheel finger-dancing is slightly diverting,

but dashboard finger-dancing is an off-the-leash, lose-yourself-in-the-music-and-forget-to-go-when-thelights-change activity. Dancing, although obvious, should not be underestimated here. Elderly couples doing a waltz. Old guys at weddings doing solo dancing that mostly involves a gentle shuffle combined with real jazz‑hands pizzazz on the top half to make up for it. Try watching your favourite dancer without smiling. It frees you to watch Beyoncé or Ginger Rogers or whoever it may be, throwing themselves around like gravity is just a suggestion. You know what’s adorable? The distant wave. We humans can’t help ourselves. See someone in the distance you know? Whole conversations have to stop while you (for some reason) whisper “Hello Samantha” at them and wave like one of those over-the-top novelty children’s characters at a theme park. Not to mention if you see someone through a window – the tinkly wave, the straight-up salute. My favourite cafe is full of excellent baristas who, if you pass in a hurry on the way to the post office next door, hurl their arms directly up as though they’re desperate to answer a question in class. There are several more expressions of joy and freedom – from the intimate to the frankly intimidating (there is a woman near me who does the most incredible handstands and then walks home while reading a book). For me though, the best ones usually require more than one person. I was headed back from the park, that same day, cutting down a boring street, when I saw a man leaning against the wall of a house. I wondered if he was unwell, or needed help. Then he lifted his head. He was in the throes of hysterical laughter. Gasping for breath. Leaning over, one arm on the wall. He had headphones in. The person making him laugh didn’t even get to see the result. But I did. Pure joy. Public Service Announcement: do more cartwheels. Slide in your socks. Get the giggles. Be free.

Lorin Clarke is a Melbourne-based writer. The second season of her radio series, The Fitzroy Diaries, is on ABC Radio National and the ABC Listen app now.

was walking in the park on the weekend and I saw a girl doing cartwheel after cartwheel on the grass. She was a fair distance away but watching her somehow created a rhythm in my head: Hey budda bing! Hey budda bing! She kept going. Hey budda bing! She was too far away for me to see her face but it was pretty clear she could not be frowning. I tried to think of a form of physical expression more indicative of what it’s like to feel free and full of joy than a cartwheel. I wasn’t sure I could. Later, I told my kinder-teacher friend about the inherent joy of the cartwheel. He nodded. Children express themselves with their bodies all the time, he said. Much more than adults do. They want another child to notice them so they run up to them and jump, arms out, tongue out, right in front of the kid’s face. They stomp and hit and kick when they’re angry. They throw themselves on the floor when they’ve had enough. Adults, though, have (for the most part) learned to intellectualise this process. Public Service Announcement: life doesn’t have enough cartwheels in it. Do more cartwheels.

04 SEP 2020

Giggle and Hoot

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home Emma Warren

Pyrenees Bubble & Squeak Ingredients

Emma says…

Serves 4

his dish, also known as trinxat, comes from the mountainous principality of Andorra, where the official language is Andorran Catalan. Much like the Irish colcannon, it’s at home in the Catalan winters, where cabbages grow well in altitude after a little frost, and an abundance of local potatoes are there for the taking. Trinxat, meaning chopped, traditionally has three parts to its creation – boiling the potato and cabbage, mashing everything together, then pan frying it with a little help from some pork fat to give a lovely crust. Living in Catalunya for most of my twenties and early thirties while learning to cook professionally saw the busy summer months fly by. Between feeding the tourists, I’d occasionally have spare time to laze about eating tapas and paella between swims. But winter was when I’d really slow down and crave a sense of comfort and family. Discovering this dish took me straight back to my grandmother Marnie’s dinner table at a time when I really yearned for home back in Australia. Her beloved father was of northern German heritage and one of their favourite combinations was cabbage, potato and a smoky cured bacon. We’d go over to Marnie and Grampies’ every day after school. We’d be in our pyjamas ready for dinner when Mum would join us after work. In the wintertime Marnie often served a similar version of this for dinner, but with kransky sausages, corned beef, meatloaf and occasionally pork cutlets or my favourite – Wiener schnitzel. Or when one of us was going through a vegetarian phase, she’d even serve it with a simple fried egg: the runny yolk would self-sauce over the whole plate and soak into the creamy potato and cabbage mashup (without the bacon of course). Marnie would always add parsley and some white pepper at the end to almost everything she cooked. She was quite modern compared to how she’d grown up and very health conscious. She always had a pot of curly parsley growing proudly outside on the kitchen windowsill. Nowadays, living back in Australia, I make this regularly for my family. Not only does it transport me back to my time living and working in Spain, but I also get to continue a tradition of lovingly dishing this up to my own family for some winter warmth.

Place the cabbage and potato in a large stockpot and cover with cold water. Season well with salt and the white peppercorns, then bring to the boil and cook for about 40 minutes, until tender. Drain well and set aside to cool a little. Cut and discard the core from the cabbage and squeeze as much water out of the leaves as possible. Spread the cabbage leaves and potato out on a large clean tea towel and allow to steam dry. Cook the pancetta or speck in a large frying pan over medium heat until crisp. Reduce the heat to as low as it can go and return the cabbage and potato to the pan. Mash using a large potato masher to remove any remaining moisture. Stir through the garlic and olive oil until everything is pasted together – a few lumps and strings of cabbage are okay. Season to taste and serve. Add a little freshly chopped parsley too if you like, just as my grandmother used to.

EMMA WARREN IS THE AUTHOR OF COOKBOOKS ISLAS: FOOD OF THE SPANISH ISLANDS AND THE CATALAN COOKBOOK.

04 SEP 2020

Method

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

PHOTOS BY ROCHELLE EAGLE

½ green cabbage, quartered, dark green outer leaves discarded 500g desiree potatoes, peeled, halved if very large  1 teaspoon white peppercorns 150g piece pancetta or speck, cut into short strips  2 garlic cloves, minced  2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil salt flakes and freshly cracked black pepper

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45

By Lingo! by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com DAD

CLUES 5 letters Active pastime Assurance of manner Chains, fetters Green Italian sauce Sharp tip of a needle 6 letters Advertising bill An individual Chaperone Elder Quick raid 7 letters Important body fuel Quickfire reply

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

Each column, row and 3 x 3 box must contain all numbers 1 to 9.

9 3

C O E N P R

6 7 6 3 5 7 2 9 7 8 5 1

4 5 2 7 6 6 1 8 9 4

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Grease 4 Barracks, 9 Nieces 10 Playbill

12 Matchbox 13 Forget 15 ‘Divine Comedy’ 18 Mobile phones 21 Cluedo 22 Teenager 24 Tattered 25 Gluten 26 Handmade 27 Cradle

DOWN 1 Ganymede 2 Elective 3 Stephen Sondheim 5 Ally 6 Raymond Chandler 7 Clings 8 Salute 11 Conceit 14 Impedes 16 Knighted 17 Estrange 19 Scotch 20 Austen 23 Lead

8 letters Scheme together

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 1 million 2 President of Belarus 3 Dame Joan Sutherland 4 1984 5 Australia 6 Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia 7 Frog 8 Tom of Finland 9 Basil 10 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. 11 b) 43 12 Four 13 Scrabble 14 Kamala Harris 15 Once (at Waverley Park in 1991) 16 A rock formed from cooled and solidified lava or magma 17 Pro bono 18 2011 19 The Australian men’s cricket team 20 The kidney

04 SEP 2020

Using all nine letters provided, can you answer these clues? Every answer must include the central letter. Plus, which word uses all nine letters?

by puzzler.com

Word Builder

We all want to be the centre of our children’s attention, and that’s why it’s no coincidence that the affectionate English term for a father is dad. Similar combinations of two of the easiest sounds for an infant to make (“a” and “d” or “t”) are used to refer to dads across many languages: Welsh tad, Polish tata, classical Latin atta, Turkish ata, Nepali aba and French papa. While the word father can be traced back thousands of years as a shared word across languages, dad and its like emerged time and time again as eager parents waited for their baby’s first word. The first known reference to a dad joke was 1987, and the first reference to dad dancing 1996.

Crossword

by Chris Black

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME. ANSWERS PAGE 43.

Quick Clues ACROSS

10 11

13 14

15 16

DOWN

18 20 22 23 24

Cryptic Clues

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Audition for country musical (6) 4 Republican infiltrated Obama’s camp (8) 9 Family members recreated Scene I (6) 10 Portray Clinton in theatrical promo (8) 12 Safety types strike here? (8) 13 Fail to recall and make time (6) 15 Engineer invoiced me 500 yen for work (6,6) 18 Crowd wild lion and sheep into cells in Florida? (6,6) 21 This party game? (6) 22 Adolescent brewed green tea (8) 24 Treated poorly by time! (8) 25 Muscle and nerves start to show proteins (6) 26 Character from Atwood podcast likely to appear

1 Men aged unexpectedly orbiting unknown

on Etsy? (8) 27 Reclad damaged support (6)

moon (8)

2 Discriminating leader doesn’t appear to be

concerned with elections? (8)

3 King’s hedonism upset composer (7,8) 5 Call your squad, partner (4) 6 Creative type cultivated yonder marchland (7,8) 7 Holds on to fish’n’chips wrapping outside (6) 8 State instrument’s show of respect (6) 11 Once I emptied cabinet outside vanity/Vanity

comes first once I model (7)

14 Frustrates current politician with seed

distribution (7)

16 Invested, like mum was in Kath & Kim (8) 17 Drive away from forest rangers (8) 19 Put a lid on whisky (6) 20 Author of Peanuts beginning to go rogue (6) 23 The French commercial chief (4)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

8 4 3 9 1 6 5 2 7

2 9 5 4 7 3 6 1 8

6 1 7 5 2 8 4 9 3

7 6 1 3 4 2 9 8 5

9 8 4 7 6 5 2 3 1

3 5 2 8 9 1 7 4 6

1 7 8 2 5 4 3 6 9

4 3 9 6 8 7 1 5 2

5 2 6 1 3 9 8 7 4

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Sport Poise Irons Pesto Point 6 Poster Person Escort Senior Sortie 7 Protein Riposte 8 Conspire 9 Inspector

04 SEP 2020

1 Jupiter’s largest moon (8) 2 Optional (8) 3 Broadway composer (7,8) 5 Partner (4) 6 Crime writer (7,8) 7 Sticks (6) 8 Respectful greeting (6) 11 Excessive pride (7) 14 Obstructs (7) 16 Honoured (8) 17 Drive a wedge between (8) 19 Nix (6) 20 English novelist (6) 23 Heavy metal (4)

1 Oily substance (6) 4 Supports (in Australia) (8) 9 Family members (6) 10 Dramatic advertising (8) 12 Small container with striking surface (8) 13 Let slip (6) 15 Celebrated Italian poem (6,6) 18 Portable communication devices (6,6) 21 Murder mystery game (6) 22 Youth of a certain age (8) 24 Old and torn (8) 25 Affecting coeliacs (6) 26 Not produced by machines (8) 27 Cot (6)

Click words by Michael Epis

photo by Photo Archives Office of Tasmania

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

1866

Truganini

y the time Truganini sat for this portrait, the genocide of her people was accomplished. The purpose of this photo was to preserve the memory of a people who the colonisers believed were about to become extinct. Truganini at the time was living on a mission in Oyster Cove, on Tasmania’s south-east coast. She was moved there from exile on Flinders Island, a disastrous settlement where many of her compatriots died.

From Oyster Cove, Truganini looked across the water to Bruny Island: the place of her birth; the place her people had lived for thousands upon thousands of years; the place were Captain Cook landed in 1777; the place where her mother was killed in front of her on the beach one night by sailors; the place from which her two sisters were abducted, stolen, never seen again. Truganini saw a lot in her life, including the loss of language, country, culture and community.

When this photo was taken, Truganini was in her mid-fifties. She had 10 years left to live, mostly in a two-room hut, its windows broken, the roof caved in. She preferred to sleep on the ground in front of the fireplace, letting her dog sleep in the bed, as historian Cassandra Pybus tells in her heartbreaking Truganini. She still wore the necklaces she made from seashells. Eventually there were just two Indigenous people left from the time the English arrived in Tasmania: Truganini and her fourth husband Billy Lanne. He died, and within hours William Crowther, later the premier, removed and stole his skull. Soon after, another thief severed and souvenired his hands and feet. Buried the next day, Billy Lanne’s body was dug up that night by Royal Society graverobbers. Truganini knew all this – and what it boded for her in death. So days later, rowing across to Bruny Island, tears rolling down her face, she asked a favour of her companion, an Anglican minister. “Bury me here; it is the deepest place. Promise me. Promise me.” Truganini died on 8 May 1876. She was buried in Hobart, dug up, and her skeleton displayed in the Tasmanian Museum from 1904 to 1947. A cast of her skeleton was displayed in the Melbourne Museum until 1969. One hundred years after her death, the descendants of Tasmania’s First Nations people honoured her plea, and her ashes were scattered as she wished.

17 APR 2020