The Big Issue Australia #637 – Greta Thunberg

Ed.

637 21 MAY 2021

28.

JULIA ZEMIRO

]EXCLUSIVE ] ]INTERVIEW

]NO STEP IS TOO SMALL]

GRETA

ST VINCENT

30.

40.

and RICOTTA GNOCCHI

NO CASH? NO WORRIES!

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NATIONAL OFFICE

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Contents

EDITION

637 28 SMALL SCREENS

Sing! Sing! Sing!

Julia Zemiro doesn’t need to be Celine Dion or Mariah Carey to belt out a ballad, she just wants to get her singalong on – with Miranda Tapsell and you, too!

30 MUSIC

Father Away St Vincent reinvents herself yet again, channelling the glamour and grit of Warhol’s New York in her 70s-inspired sixth solo album.

12.

No Step Is Too Small

by Adrian Lobb

In August 2018, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg started a revolution.

Now, at 18, she’s released a documentary that explores the science of global warming and challenges world leaders, calling for climate action and inspiring hope. contents photo by Getty cover illustration by Matthew Brazier @matthew_brazier

brazierillustration.co.uk

Matthew Brazier is a UK-based illustrator working with magazines and other projects.

THE REGULARS

04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor 06 Streetsheet 08 Hearsay & 20 Questions 11 My Word 18 The Big Picture

22 Letter to My Younger Self 25 Fiona 27 Ricky 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews

37 Book Reviews 39 Public Service Announcement 43 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

40 TASTES LIKE HOME

Ricotta Gnocchi Chef Stefano de Pieri dishes up his delicious take on cucina povera – great food, made simply and cheaply, just like his mumma and nonna taught him.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

You’re the Voice

O

h when the Saints, Go marching in, Oh when the Saints go marching in…”

Sing hallelujah!

Sitting next to my brother, just near the St Kilda cheer squad, it was a joyous sound. Not only was it my first game of footy since the pandemic cancelled the AFL in Melbourne last year, but my team also won – and convincingly – against my brother’s Hawks. Surrounded by 26,000 supporters at Marvel, half of them singing our theme song, I felt a certain comfort I hadn’t realised was missing. That roar of the crowd. A return to normality (even if we were belting out a tune without really knowing it was originally penned as a rousing hymn about the apocalypse!).

There is a special unity in a big public singalong. “When you sing with lots of people, there’s a real buzz that goes through you,” says Julia Zemiro, host of SBS’s Australia’s Biggest

Singalong (page 28), about the return of collective musical moments, from the footy, to live gigs, to parties… …And big birthdays! Here at The Big Issue we will be celebrating our 25th anniversary in June. To mark the milestone, we’re releasing a bumper silver jubilee edition, on sale from your vendor from 4 June. And we’re inviting you to join in the COVID-friendly festivities online with the launch of a special video that celebrates The Big Issue’s community and people. Sign up via thebigissue.org.au/25-years-big or the QR code on page 38, and join in the party.

But back to this very edition: we speak to activist Greta Thunberg, the Swedish schoolgirl who started a global environmental movement. Her lone voice galvanised millions more, inspiring change and optimism for our planet’s future. Every voice counts, she says: “If we are to change everything, we need everyone. No step in the right direction is too small.”

04

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

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

Just got around to reading Ed#634, purchased from our lovely vendor at Watson Shops in Canberra. My heart jumped reading of Jay Daniel Thompson and his cassette tapes.

About 25 years ago I had a bus ride from Queanbeyan to Canberra. I had just had a rare win (as a lawyer) in a case at Queanbeyan Court. I sat up the back of the bus and the speakers were blaring out Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’.

I will never forget it.

CHRISTOPHER RYAN ANOTHER VERY OLD MAN, WATSON I ACT

Amanda Johnson, thank you for the brilliant ‘Dancing By My Shelf’ in Ed#635. Being a Gen Xer myself, I related to every line and could not stop grinning as I recognised myself in this article, dancing in the Coles aisles. Amanda you made my day!

I love every edition, from the first word to the final word. I’ve started subscribing and am thrilled each time I see it in my letterbox. Big shout out to Lorin Clarke as well, her PSAs are a highlight. I want to flick through to it first, but instead delay it to draw out the fuzzy feels I get each time I read it.

JANET CRAWLEY VIA FACEBOOK

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work.

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Christopher wins a copy of Rick Morton’s new book My Year of Living Vulnerably. We interview him on p32.

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

interview by Melissa Fulton photo by Autumn Mooney

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

21 MAY 2021

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE OUTSIDE 7-ELEVEN ON CHURCH STREET, PARRAMATTA, SYDNEY

05

Helen

I was born in Taree. My mum had 10 children. I’ve moved around a bit, haven’t got any family. I’d been in foster care and homes for a long time.

I was a slow learner at school. I couldn’t read or write – it was quite challenging for me. I can’t remember when I left.

I’ve been homeless, living on the streets. It was tough. I lived at Kings Cross for a bit, Central Station. I asked people for money and I’d go to St Vincent de Paul.

The Big Issue is my first job. I was homeless when I first started selling the magazine, and I was working selling the magazine before I went into jail for eight months. When I got out, I went into the city at Christmastime. I saw someone selling the magazine in Glebe and I got a bit curious about it again. I bought a Big Issue from him because it reminded me of when I used to work there, and he told me to sign up again, so I did. I called the number inside the mag and I cried when I talked to Chris at Vendor Support; I’ve known him for a long time, so it was a bit of an emotional phone call.

I love being a part of The Big Issue.

I started selling again on my birthday last year. I was born on 22 April, so I’ve just had my birthday. This year was a good one – we had birthday cake, birthday presents.

I live in Blacktown now. Since I got out of jail, I have 24-hour support for my disability, from people who look after me. Having somewhere to live is fantastic. I’ve got people to take care of me, I’ve got people to hang out with and say hi to. I go to church on Sunday and I’ve got good friends there too.

But no-one’s brave enough to watch horror movies with me! I’m into horror movies.

I like Wolf Creek and I like Freddy Krueger.

They don’t scare me.

I usually sell the magazine once a week.

People are very nice to me, and getting out there and earning money is great. People give me a lot of tips. I don’t have many regular customers, but last week in Parramatta a guy got me a $50 tip. I used the money to buy some clothes, and also some food for my cat Soxie, who is about two years old now. I’ve had her since she was six weeks old. She’s a rescue cat. She loves her food – cat food and biscuits. I’ve just got the one cat, and one of my fighting fish died, so I’ve just got one of those too.

I wanna thank the customers in Parramatta for buying The Big Issue off me. I can’t wait to get my photo done.

I’ve gotta decide what to wear! I got some eyeshadow for my birthday.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

COVID Conditions unbecoming Onslaught of a Virus Insipid in it Duration which lasted like Forever SHARON CNR COLLINS & SWANSTON STS I MELBOURNE

DAVE IS UP AN D AW AY, !UP

Voyage in the Clouds

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

t was Monday morning on 16 November 2020. I got up at 2.40am. It was cool, but it wasn’t freezing. I gave myself 20 minutes to get ready, then headed the five kilometres to the airport. At 3.45am approximately 30 of us boarded the bus, headed to the paddocks. We were going to get on a hot air balloon in Northam, WA. We had a briefing about safety (you know, the dos and don’ts). Don’t drink too much coffee or tea in the morning. There was a bit of organisation in setting up the balloon.

The big fans they use were unbelievable, but they can be dangerous.

When 5am came, we were allowed to get into the balloon. It took off and headed straight towards the trees. I thought to myself This does not look good. But we got above the trees. To get up in the air and watch the sun rise – that was the highlight of the day. The views of the land and the

train line were amazing to see from the air.

I don’t need to rush and do it again, but it’s worth the experience. I felt really relaxed and comfortable up in the hot air balloon.

If you haven’t been in a hot air balloon, it’s best when you have a perfect day – make sure you check the weather ahead.

Once in the hot air balloon it can be very warm, so depending on what month you go you don’t need to wear layers of clothing – but make sure you wear shoes that are enclosed. They advise you not to take any bags or selfie sticks, only phones and cameras are allowed.

The landing was excellent. After packing up the balloon, we headed into town for a champagne breakfast, and the pilot did a toast with a few words. Anyway, if you need some adventure, try hot air ballooning – an experience that you’ll never forget.

DAVID L MYER BRIDGE I PERTH

Bright Spots It was so nice to receive a few postcards from a few of my regular customers recently. They added some positive brightness to a not-so-bright week. They certainly made me feel appreciated. I went into the local NAB last week to pay a bill, and found out that they receive The Big Issue by subscription, and one of the tellers enjoys reading it during his lunch break. They are doing their bit to help the ladies who handle the orders for the subscribers! One of my best sale days in a while occurred a few days ago, last Saturday, when I sold all of the copies of the magazine that I had taken with me that day, and, of course, my purse felt a bit heavier!

I have been selling The Big Issue now for six odd years, and still

enjoy it as much as I did when I first began my enterprise. I rarely find it dull between sales, as it is fun watching all the people go by.

KATHY FIG TREE LANE I BUSSELTON

Best Man Alright!

Recently a lady came up to me and said “I don’t know if you remember me, but you were the best man at my wedding.” She said it was at the registry office on George Street about seven years ago and that they’re still together. I remember that day. A couple walked up to me on my pitch and asked for my help.

They wanted to get married but needed a best man and a witness.

They were from New South Wales and had just moved to Queensland, so they didn’t know anybody.

I got Kev, who was also a vendor, and he agreed to help by being a

witness. We stood beside them as they exchanged their vows.

GREG CNR GEORGE & CHARLOTTE STS I BRISBANE

Dear Aunty Annette Someone who is very dear to me is my Aunty Annette. Every time I see her, she cheers me up. Her happiness spreads – she just has this way of spreading happiness.

We chat on Facebook a lot, sharing photos and day-to-day stories.

Aunty Annette is very supportive.

Once, when I was in trouble, I felt comfortable enough to tell Aunty Annette all about it, but not really anyone else. Then later we met up and she gave me a big hug that cheered me up immediately.

Aunty Annette makes even the rough times turn out okay.

KERRY L WSE I ADELAIDE

Grace Tales

21 MAY 2021

RA CH EL T ME GR AC E T ET S

RACHEL T PYRMONT I SYDNEY ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

07

When I got the phone call from my manager Chris about meeting Grace Tame, I started getting nervous. I said, “What do I wear?”

– I’ve never been concerned about what to wear before in my whole life!

As soon as we met, I said “Hi, I’m Rachel,” and she ignored everyone else and came straight to me, which I thought was really special. She introduced herself, and we just started talking. It was like meeting a friend, we just connected. I thought she’d be really fancy and everything, but she’s a country girl from Tasmania.

Amazing how one little moment can turn hurt and loneliness into heaps of reasons to smile – and not worry how we look.

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

There will be new music this year, that is definite. It’s not a case anymore of it might happen, it will happen.

pets as a short-term solution to loneliness.”

Suzana Talevski, from The Lost Dogs’ Home in Melbourne, on the high number of cat and dog adoptions continuing postlockdown as working from home becomes more permanent.

ABC I AU

“I think there’s just times in life where you should be allowed to feel cocky about something.”

Seven-times Grammy winner and recent British Vogue cover star Billie Eilish on being a wee bit proud of her new song ‘Your Power’ – “my favourite song that I’ve ever written”.

BUZZFEED I AU

ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus reveals the Swedish pop supergroup are set to drop new music for the first time in 40 years. Can you hear the drums?

NME I UK

“First of all, I don’t think I’m a loser…”

Actor Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction) on being nominated for eight Oscars without any wins – a record shared with Peter O’Toole – but still feeling like a winner.

JAPAN TODAY I JN

“We’re seeing more of what we call grey divorces. The stats [show] there’s been a significant increase during COVID especially. We’ve seen seven times more Australian spouses researching separation.”

Kylie Dunjey, executive director and counsellor at Relationships WA, on the rise in late-life divorces after decades of marriage – much like Bill and Melinda Gates.

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

ABC I AU

“It doesn’t hurt if you eat [weevils] and it’s all extra protein. The average person will eat about a quarter of a kilogram of insects in their diet every year anyway!”

Skye Blackburn, entomologist and food scientist, on why having stomach bugs isn’t all bad.

concerned about the volume of US dollars that are being printed and distributed with nothing to back them up.”

Carole Baskin, yes she of Tiger King infamy, on launching her own cryptocurrency $CAT coin, from US$5.

She ain’t kitten around.

ABC I US

BBC I UK

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”

Tesla boss Elon Musk was once a booster of Bitcoin, but now won’t accept the cryptocurrency as payment for his company’s electric cars, because of its environmental impact.

TWITTER I US

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“I’m investigating cryptocurrencies because I am

“The last time the theatre industry opened from a pandemic, Shakespeare was still writing new plays.”

Victoria Bailey, executive director of non-profit ticket-sellers TDF, of the return of the lights on Broadway this September.

“I think it’s possible people’s attitudes have changed, whereas before the pandemic people saw

“It had been unresolved how sharks managed to successfully navigate during migration to targeted locations. This research supports the theory that they use the Earth’s magnetic field to help them find their way; it’s nature’s GPS.” Bryan Keller, from Save Our Seas Foundation, on experiments carried out on sharks that proved how they can, for example, swim from South Africa to Australia and back, without getting lost.

NEW SCIENCE DAILY I US

20 Questions

by Rachael Wallace

01 Which country does singer

Rag’n’Bone Man come from?

02 In what year was the Native Title Act

enacted?

03 Which country became the first

to ban smoking in all indoor workplaces, including restaurants and bars?

04 Who was the last French person to

win a French Open singles title?

05 What was the name of the ship

recently stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal?

06 Who broke into Buckingham Palace

and the Queen’s bedroom in 1982?

07 Hobart surfer Danny Griffiths lost

his surfboard in Tasmania in 2017.

Where did it wash up last March?

08 Who was offered the presidency of

Israel in 1952 but turned it down?

09 What is the most common pub name

in Australia?

10 As of Easter 2021, how many

members of The Traveling Wilburys are still alive?

11 What is the nickname of the

£100,000,000 banknote issued by the Bank of England?

12 Where was actor Isla Fisher born?

13 Who was widely tipped to win the

Best Actor Oscar this year – but didn’t?

14 Where is Roosevelt Island?

15 True or false? The first European

vaccine was created in 1796.

16 Which mammal’s orgasm can last

30-plus minutes?

THE AGE I AU

17 The speed of a computer mouse is

“There is a severe shortage of social and affordable housing, growing levels of housing stress and of course ongoing pandemic challenges. This has created a perfect storm which is causing more people over the age of 55 to be forced into homelessness.”

Mission Australia CEO, James Toomey, on the crisis of affordable housing, with 200,000 people on waiting lists.

“I really didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. It was too orchestrated. It was too coordinated.

People get picked on, but for four months straight for me.”

TV host Ellen DeGeneres, on whether she has been “cancelled” after allegations her set was a toxic workplace. She has announced that next year’s season of her show will be the last.

18 Which city is further north – London

STARTS AT 60 I AU

VARIETY I US

measured using what term?

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

or Berlin?

19 What is the only number in the

English language whose letters appear in alphabetical order?

20 What is the world’s tallest building:

a) One World Trade Center, New York, USA, b) Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen, China, c) Abrāj al-Bait clock towers, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, or d) Burj Khalifa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates?

ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

21 MAY 2021

INSTYLE I US

“[We will be discussing] what happened, what was done, and why we do and say what we do know about our rights, our wishes and our aspiration for keeping land for our people, for securing and keeping our culture and keeping our language.”

Wergala/WambaWamba Elder Eleanor Burke, chair of the newly announced Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, set up by the Victorian government to hear about wrongs committed against First Nations peoples since white settlement.

09

“There’s not enough liquor “Imagine having to pretend in the world for you’re interesting all the time, like our parents do.” you to get me to say something “Yeah, I know, what a drag.” about that.”

Teenagers overheard by Actor Matt Christina, Melbourne.

Damon refusing to comment on his BFF and Good Will Hunting co‑star Ben Affleck’s rumoured reunion with ex-fiancée Jennifer Lopez, reigniting the Bennifer memes from the early 2000s.

EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Marisa Black

I

am lying on the couch, staring out the window at the clouds moving across the sky, when my little girl runs inside: “It’s ready!” She wraps my hand in hers, tells me to close my eyes and leads me out the door into the bright morning light.

A magpie warbles nearby as I step tentatively across the gravel drive.

“Open!” I see the three of them first – their wide eyes, their sun-bleached hair, their salt-crusted limbs. And then my eyes move to the old red Malvern Star bicycle that stands beside them, resurrected from where it has lain dormant in the garage of their grandparents’ house, among the old surfboards and faded wetsuits lined up in size order, representing summers gone and summers yet to come.

The Malvern Star is still draped in cobwebs, rusted by the sea air. As my eyes glide over it, I notice its wheels – too thin – and its gears – clearly broken. But it’s beyond these uncertain parts that my mind drifts – to the potholes I’ll fail to see, the lizard I’ll swerve to avoid, the rusted bolt that will cause the wheel to buckle under my weight…

It has been half a lifetime since I have ridden a bike.

A time well before my eldest was born nine years ago, a time almost forgotten in a land where I didn’t cling to life quite so tightly. But by the grease that covers their hands and their clothes, by the tools that lie scattered by their feet, and by their wide eyes – and even wider smiles – I see all of their hopes and fears are wrapped up in this moment – willing that I will say “Yes”. That, at long last, we will make it to that distant lighthouse.

I step over the flimsy metal frame, hitching my long skirt up a little, and lean forward, gripping the handlebars as I tentatively make my way down the middle of the quiet seaside street, wobbling from side to side between the hydrangeas and tea-trees and red flowering gums, remembering that Einstein once likened life to riding a bike: “To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” I think of the tiredness that has descended this past year, this year where the world stood still, where plans were cancelled, dreams put on hold, life paused, diminished. The sense of inertia.

I pedal towards them. I don’t want to go. I want to slink back inside to the couch and the clouds. But I will go.

I need to find my balance, regain some momentum to propel me onwards, upwards.

At first, we pedal in single formation along the path that runs beside the bay. On one side, the steep dunes covered with gnarly roots, tea-trees and shrubs of muted greens. On the other, the rocky descent to the sand. Children stand on great big islands of seaweed, pointing to mythical sea creatures imagined in the distant dark waters, their shrill voices catching on the wind and carrying like signals of all that is possible.

In the shallows, a toddler runs and retreats, over and over as the waves ebb and flow, laughing at the miracle of this endless untiring playmate. A game of beach cricket pauses, teams dispersing to collapse on towels or run into the ocean. A flock of seagulls descends near a picnic rug, a flurry of squawking, of arched backs, a battle for the one stray chip. And out further, the dark wet-suited bodies of the boardriders waiting, waiting.

We cross the old steam-train line and follow the milky bay the rest of the way. I glance upwards at the sky, a blanket of soft blue reflected in the endless expanse of water. I stream out in front, the sun on my back, my mind full of dreams – my legs pedalling faster, faster past the wattle, the flowering red gums, the stray white butterflies, until I reach the top of the hill. Down, I go. Laughing, now, in spite of myself.

Birds warble overhead. One dives into my path and I veer off course to avoid it, into the gravel. I wobble, my hands furiously trying to steady the bike wavering beneath me, my brain firing off a thousand tiny decisions that flood it with a feeling of fear, yes, but something more – of life.

And in that moment, teetering between momentum and concrete, I realise that if life is like bike riding, with all its potholes and wrong turns and head winds, then by letting fear win, I had not only stopped riding, I had stopped living.

As we pack our bikes back into the garage and unclip our helmets, our ride together seems significant, especially after the year we have had. The start of something I will not relinquish – a small act of defiance against a year that went nowhere.

Marisa Black is a freelance writer.

11

After half a lifetime away, Marisa Black finds herself on a bike – and feels herself coming back to life.

21 MAY 2021

Back on the Bike

12

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

NO S T E P IS TOO

L L A SM

@adey70

PHOTO COURTESY BBC STUDIOS

I

n August 2018 Greta Thunberg took a stand.

One small act of defiance for a 15-year-old Swedish girl became one giant global leap forward for the movement for change. By one simple act of refusal – skipping school and sitting in silence outside the Swedish Parliament with a homemade placard saying “School Strike for the Climate” – Thunberg sparked schoolchildren around the world into action.

She was joined by hundreds of thousands of young people taking their first steps into activism, no longer able to tolerate the failure of a generation of politicians to act fast enough in response to the climate crisis.

“It just spiralled out of control,” Thunberg says, speaking to The Big Issue from her home in Stockholm, her pet dog making its presence felt nearby.

“In one way it feels like it was yesterday. But on the other hand, it feels like it was 10 years ago. It was just so strange that those kinds of things were happening and so hard to grasp.

But I’m almost there now.”

Since then, Thunberg has become one of the most famous people on the planet. Less than four months after her solo protest, she was addressing COP24, the annual UN Climate Change Conference, in Katowice, Poland, something she repeated the following year in Madrid. Of the 29,000 delegates, she was perhaps the smallest, the youngest – but her voice carried the furthest. And it continues to reverberate around the world.

“It’s not something I’ve gotten used to,” says Thunberg, who turned 18 in January. “Because I’ve always been a person who doesn’t say anything and who no-one really listens to. I’ve always been very socially awkward and so on. So to go from that, being almost invisible, to be someone who people actually listen to is a very big change. And it’s hard to adapt to.”

Thunberg is not protective of her platform. Instead, as she does in the new three-part documentary series A Year to Change the World, she is keen to use it to foreground and amplify the voices of scientists warning us of the need to act decisively and act now against climate change.

“That was the very reason I decided to do this in the first place,” she says.

“I wanted us to get beyond the clickbait headlines that people use to gain attention and to focus on the content instead. So if using my platform to lend my voice to science or people who actually need to be heard works, then that was the main purpose of the series.

When you talk to different people and get many perspectives, that really provides the bigger picture.”

The series follows Thunberg on her year away from education, travelling the globe, speaking at events including COP25, and meeting scientists, activists and experts such as Sir David Attenborough. Did seeing more of the world make her even more determined to save it?

“I don’t think you need to be able to see it to want to protect it,” she says. “But it has been an amazing opportunity to have seen it. We talk like it’s not until it’s burning in our own backyards and in our own towns that we act, but that’s not true.

“If we look at the things that are being fuelled by the climate crisis,

21 MAY 2021

by Adrian Lobb The Big Issue UK

13

Despite the panic, the urgency and the scale of the climate crisis, environmentalist Greta Thunberg says there’s still hope.

such as the wildfires in western North America, the evidence is clear that it has connections to the climate crisis.

But that doesn’t mean the people who live there change. I want to raise awareness and say: this is what the science says. You should listen to and act on the science.

“We see the climate crisis as something that will hit us in the future.

And of course, it will. But we forget that countless people are already suffering and dying from its consequences today.

So the climate crisis is already hitting us. We won’t be able to avoid all the consequences of it – that’s already too late – but it’s never too late to do as much as we possibly can. Every fraction of a degree matters and we still have time to avoid the worst consequences.”

Ask Thunberg what needs to change and whether it will be alterations in lifestyle – from what we eat to how we travel – or the science of carbon capture that will best tackle the crisis and the answer comes back the same. Anything that works. Everything that works.

“We tend to single out problems – ‘We need to do this rather than this,’” she says. “But we can’t afford to do that any more. We cannot spend all our time arguing what things are best to do if that means that we don’t have any time left to actually do those things. Right now we need to do everything we possibly can. We need to think holistically and long-term and implement all possible solutions and not focus on comparing them to each other. Because that only takes up time.”

In her new documentary, Thunberg says the only thing that creates hope is action. As calls to arms go, it is both inspired and inspiring.

“We can sit and do nothing and that may feel very hopeless, but as soon as we start taking action, there is hope,” she says. “So that’s the mentality I’m trying to live off. And just imagine if we started to actually take action – I mean, we don’t know what that could lead to.

“We don’t know what social tipping points we could pass. Because we’ve never done it before. We’ve never faced a challenge such as the climate crisis before. So we don’t know what could happen if we took action – and that is also very hopeful.”

We do everything. But maybe the most important thing is to spread awareness and to send a signal to people around you that something is seriously wrong and that we need to change things. Become climate activists. Become an environmental activist. That’s one of the most powerful things you can do to put pressure on people in power.

TEXT COURTESY OF THE BIG ISSUE UK/INSP.NGO

GRETA THUNBERG

There are many things in everyday life you can do. We say we shouldn’t be focusing on individual action, but it is a way to create a social norm or shift social norms. If one person becomes vegan or stops flying, that sends a clear signal to people around them. And that is a part of creating this critical mass of people. If enough people understand the urgency, there are almost no limits to what we can achieve when we start putting pressure on people in power.

GRETA THUNBERG: A YEAR TO CHANGE THE WORLD IS ON ABC IVIEW.

21 MAY 2021

Richard Todd, Big Issue UK vendor: According to David Attenborough, the number of reptiles, fish, birds, mammals and amphibians has fallen 60 per cent in my lifetime. What can we do to express how urgent it is to change our attitudes to nature?

many more things as well, but I will do it in addition to this,” she says.

“I just feel like I want to be able to say that I did everything I possibly could. And that’s what I’m striving to be able to say. But if I try to imagine what my older self would tell myself right now, then it will probably be to take care of yourself and try to enjoy it.

Try to enjoy the ride, I guess. You have to take breaks sometimes and so on. So I’m also trying to do that.”

Thunberg hasn’t done many interviews to promote her doco. But just as she is using her platform to put climate science in the spotlight, she is also, by choosing to speak to The Big Issue, helping address poverty and homelessness. Does she see these two issues as linked – because it’s often people in poverty who are first to be affected and have the fewest choices?

“Of course. All these things are interlinked,” she says. “Being a climate activist or environmental activist is not because you care about trees or flowers.

Of course, we do care about that too, but we are mainly doing this because what we do to nature, nature does to us.

“The climate crisis is a social crisis.

It mostly affects people who already are the most vulnerable. So without having that in mind, without taking that into account, we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis.

“I usually say I try to stay out of politics. But some things are beyond politics, like fundamental human rights. That’s not politics, at least not for me. That’s just common sense. I don’t see it as politics because I see it as something that should be obvious for everyone to care about.”

Asked whether she has a final message for Big Issue readers who wonder what we as individuals can do, Thunberg pauses for a moment.

“Everyone counts. We might think there’s no point in an individual making changes, so we don’t do anything. But the School Strike movement shows that’s not true. Every individual counts. If we are to change everything, we need everyone. No step in the right direction is too small.”

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&A VENDOR Q

But, adds Thunberg, even the growing numbers joining her campaign will not make sufficient change. She calls on media and those with big followings to amplify the voices of climate activists (or become activists).

“If the media started treating the climate crisis like a crisis, that could change everything overnight,” she says.

“Yes we need to do everything we can – all these small-scale actions – and enrol every possible person. But at the same time, not be naive and think things will be enough if only we do this.

Something big needs to come from outside as well.”

What does Thunberg want from media – reporting the science, rallying people behind it, not giving a platform to sceptics?

“It’s all those things,” she says. “But above all it is treating the climate crisis like a crisis. Right now, the media is reporting about climate change, the climate issue and symptoms of the climate crisis like melting glaciers and rising sea levels and wildfires. But that’s not the climate crisis. Those are only symptoms.

“The climate crisis is mostly about time and the amount of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere and about what we do now. We shouldn’t be focusing on vague, hypothetical scenarios in the future but rather what needs to be done now. But just treating it as a crisis – and if that seems vague, take a look at the coronavirus pandemic.

Did we treat that as a crisis? Yes. That shows the media is capable of treating something like a crisis and changing the way they operate.

“As long as the climate crisis is not dominating the news, it sends a signal that maybe it’s not important.

“I don’t just mean more articles about the climate crisis but rather taking it into account in everything.

When a politician says they will build a new road or do anything, always think – okay, what will that mean for the climate? Because the climate crisis is so important.”

Next up for Thunberg: two more years of school, then university. But whatever she does outside of her climate activism, this is already looking like her life’s work. “I will focus on

Drop By Drop Author Alice Robinson dives into the healing and hurt caused by Earth’s most precious resource: water.

Alice Robinson is the author of Anchor Point, longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards in 2015, and The Glad Shout, winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction in 2019. @critrature

illustration by Jessica Singh

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M

y mother’s waters broke six weeks early.

That’s how I came into the world – too soon, too small, a catastrophe.

Whether we are talking about amniotic fluid or human tears or the ocean, water is, of course, a liquid: a substance that, by its very nature, is malleable and relentless, charting a course over and around whatever obstacles are placed in its path.

When I was giving birth to my own first child, my waters refused to break. Labour stalled. Soon, a midwife approached with a hooked instrument to tear the membrane inside me. Pink water gushed out onto my feet, smelling salty and humid, like marshlands in summer. For the first time in its life, my baby, in that instant, was more land mammal than fish.

For much of my young adulthood, Victoria was crushed by drought. Dorothea Mackellar’s infamous “flooding rains” were absent for more than a decade, long enough to facilitate a gradual but grudging acceptance that rain might be a thing of the past.

In the city, we grew accustomed to observing and policing water restrictions, installing timers in our showers and bucketing greywater out onto gardens with desperate fervour. We were all doing our bit to help, weren’t we?

By 2010, I had not personally experienced “proper” rain since childhood. In its absence, even my memories of rain had dimmed. The very idea of it had been rendered mythological, abstract as God. In her diary, Helen Garner describes such a conceptual loss more beautifully than I ever could.

She writes, “In the morning it rains. Ambrose has passed his whole two years of life in drought.

He looks up at the ceiling and says in a surprised voice, ‘Noise!’”

Then it began to pour.

For a brief window, we felt hope.

But by February 2011, large tracts of Victoria and Queensland were under water.

Writing this, I think about how water is one of the few elements that can be both life-giving and also inherently destructive. A person will die after about three days without water, but can survive more than a month without food.

When I was 16 and newly introduced to the Melbourne rave scene, a girl died at a club after drinking too much water. I imagined her brain, a sea sponge, swelling with liquid. We took the pills, but we were all afraid of drinking water after that.

Water works over millennia, drop by drop, to wear away rock, patiently changing the shape of the land. But the opposite of that patient alteration is also possible: a terrifying freight of water rushing in to flatten coastlines, cities, towns.

The first winter I spent with Dan in Elm Cottage – our first proper house, a derelict miner’s cottage in the Macedon Ranges, which had seemed utterly romantic when we bought it for a steal – we learned all we needed to know about water.

That winter, we couldn’t cook proper meals because all our pots and pans were crouched on the floor to catch the rain pouring in through the ceiling. The cottage was centuries old, but we were just 30. We had a baby on the way. We were broke.

When we bought the house, we hadn’t known enough to know that what we saw on the ceiling – layers of discolouration, like strata of soil – was actually a long legacy of leakage.

It was summer when we signed the contract.

We painted blithely over the stains with fresh, white paint and moved in.

I often reflected on the family who had built the cottage in the 1860s. They would have known water, too, having been delivered to our shores by boat. I considered this while installing a large polyester leaf from IKEA over my baby’s cot, so that when it rained inside her room at night, the water wouldn’t wake her.

Looking back from the vantage of my marriage having ended, the miner’s cottage sold, the little babies grown into robust children, the floods and fires coming harder, faster, fiercer all the time, I think of a line in Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home: “Life is only worth living because we think it will get better and we will all get home safely.”

This week, as I was hurrying to cross a busy road with my children, barking at them to hold my hands, Artie turned his little face up to me and said quietly, “I know why we all have to hold hands when we cross the road. It’s so that, if we die, we all die together.”

He’s only five years old!

He still wakes every night, asking for a glass of water. Sometimes I’m less than patient, groggy with sleep. But then I go to the kitchen, where I stand at the sink, listening to the water coming up and up through the pipes to our second‑storey apartment.

In the gloom of early morning, I don’t think of the network of pipes crosshatching the earth beneath our city like hidden veins and arteries.

I just press the glass of water into Artie’s hand until he takes it, and I tell him, “Go back to sleep. Everything is okay.”

Then I lie awake in the dark, desperately willing it to be true.

21 MAY 2021

When my little children returned from their grandparents’ holiday house in Gippsland last summer, they were thrilled by a dramatic new development, the way one is thrilled by catching sight of a car accident: water filters had been installed on all the taps at the house because the water supply tasted too much like smoke to drink.

“You can smell the bushfires in the shower,” Etta told me breathlessly, and I imagined him washing in water rinsed through with the destruction of all those homes and habitats and forests.

In one scene, a character in my first novel, Anchor Point, is asked by someone at a party what they recommend we do to prepare for climate change. “Get your own source of water, and be prepared to defend it,” he says flippantly, only half‑joking, giving voice to my own secret thoughts.

But what if there is no water to defend?

In Bangkok after the Boxing Day tsunami, the metropolis was papered with xeroxed headshots, the thousands of unidentified dead.

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THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR A BUSH HERITAGE AUSTRALIA EVENT

Two years before, on my honeymoon with Dan, we drove around Victoria, too exhausted by the wedding process, shell-shocked even, to do more than drink wine and watch television in a series of rented cabins. But afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Grampians, about the caves we stopped to explore.

Staring mutely at the stain on the ceiling where the smoke from millennia of campfires had risen against rock, I comprehended where we were: at a hearth. It felt wrong then, being there. Trespassing.

When I turned to the handprints painted on the walls, the hair rose on my neck. Ochre and red, the paint showed the outline of hundreds of hands, fingers splayed. Some were tiny: children.

Later, Dan and I made a pact: if things ever went really wrong – if we ever needed to escape the city in a hurry – we would meet there. It seemed a safe place. “Good hiding spots,” I reasoned. “Sustained life for centuries. Plenty of food. Water.” Not that we knew anything about finding such things.

series by Andrew Chapman

Can photographer Andrew Chapman get to the end of the endlessness of the Mallee?

by Ricky French @frenchricky

Ricky French is a Melbourne-based journalist specialising in feature writing and travel.

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The Big Picture

Landscape in the Sky

THE MALLEE: ‘ROAD UNROLLING LIKE A SCUFFED CARPET’ AT THE HALLAMS’ FARM IN HOPETOUN

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THE MALLEE: A JOURNEY THROUGH NORTH-WEST VICTORIA IS OUT NOW.

21 MAY 2021

I

t wasn’t the hard-baked dirt road, unrolling like a scuffed carpet between stubbly fields of wheat, that drew Andrew Chapman’s eye to the rural scene in far northwest Victoria. It wasn’t the squat, silver shearing sheds or the chubby water tanks that made the veteran documentary photographer pull over and unfurl his wide-angle lens one hot afternoon in 2017.

In fact, it wasn’t anything on land that stood out to him in this typical Mallee landscape, where even the eucalypts look stunted and flat. It was the clouds. They put the landscape in the sky.

“When most people think of landscape photography, they think hills, mountains and streams,” says Chapman.

“Well, there’s nothing like that through the Mallee. It’s long paddocks of wheat and sheep and clear blue skies – a two-dimensional landscape.”

The clouds gift the landscape a dramatic third dimension, but they also make you take a second look.

Do they promise rain? It’s not a stretch to say rural Australia lives and dies by the grace of clouds. It was that rollercoaster of joy and despair that Chapman wanted to capture with his contributions to the book, The Mallee: A Journey Through North-West Victoria.

For most Victorians the Mallee exists more as a concept, a place referred to on the nightly weather report, usually in conjunction with the phrase “sheep graziers’ warning”. For the rest of Australia, it doesn’t really exist at all. That could now change.

The book features work by five photographers and looks for stories beyond sheep and wheat, turning the lens to small communities, unearthing generous people, plus the odd historical artefact. At the caravan park at Patchewollock, Chapman stumbled upon an old box trailer that once transported rabbits and hares to the market in Melbourne, its faded old signwriting scorched by 70 summers.

“Eating rabbits has gone out of fashion,” Chapman says, “but it was a regular thing, especially after the Depression. You would eat anything just to survive.”

That will to survive is a theme running through Chapman’s work, as he documents communities reinventing themselves.

“The history of rural Australia is a history of depopulation, right from the 1800s. So I was looking for signs of fresh ideas and regeneration. A lot of people think that the only thing you can do in the Mallee is grow wheat and sheep. But tourism is offering another way.

The Mallee is Victoria’s outback; it’s full of opportunity.”

Speaking of opportunity, no landscape photographer worth their salt can pass by a salt lake without stopping to capture the apocalyptic scene of skeletal, dead trees, branches contorted in mid-stretch like ballet dancers. The technical term is dryland salinity, caused by the build-up of salt in the soil, usually due to rising groundwater tables. The un-technical term is, “Wow…”

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LAMBS, EWES AND THE SILOS AT CURYO

FOOD VAN, DEPRESSION STYLE

DEBBIE ARENTZ AND HER WARES IN MANANGATANG

NEIL “LOGAN” DURIE ENJOYS A BEER AT WYCHEPROOF’S ROYAL MAIL HOTEL

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21 MAY 2021

PATCHEWOLLOCK’S OLD GENERAL STORE

Letter to My Younger Self

I Also Believe in Destiny Nancy Sinatra on following in her famous father’s musical footsteps and forging her own path, boots and all.

by Jane Graham The Big Issue UK @janeannie

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I

I was a pretty upbeat, contented 16-year-old, I followed all the rules.

I loved school. I excelled and I loved it. I didn’t rebel at all. I wore straight skirts, and sweaters and saddle shoes and bobby socks. The shorter skirts came later. Home life was pretty ordinary. I had a brother and a sister and a mother, and my dad would come and go. We were very, very close, all of us. In my high school years, my dad wasn’t as famous or popular as he became later or as he had been prior, in the big band days in the 40s. It was all kind of normal.

I was into all kinds of music when I was a teenager. I composed a lot of music for the school concerts, which we had every year. And I used to go to the record stores all the time. You used to be able to take a record and play it in the store in the booth before you purchased it. And we had dance parties, when we’d put on records. I loved Harry Belafonte and my favourite in the early days was Johnny Mathis. I love him so much. He’s a dear friend. He’s a very kind, generous person.

I was so immersed in music that it was sort of a fait accompli that that’s the way I would go in life. But it was pretty clear from the get-go that I’d

START WALKIN’ 1965-1976 BY NANCY SINATRA IS OUT NOW.

21 MAY 2021

was adorable, but we were just too young. But if you wanted to have sex in those days, and you were a quote “nice” girl, you got married. Stupid.

My family was always very musical, going right back to my grandparents. There was music all the time. These days I don’t listen to my own music very much to tell you the truth, but lately I’ve had to listen because of this new compilation of my songs. Do I hear anything of my father’s voice in my own singing? You know, sometimes I do. Sometimes it comes back at me a little bit, every now and again.

If I could go back in time I would probably take more jobs that were offered me along the way. I was nervous and shy and I didn’t take advantage of opportunities that I had. And that’s very sad. They say what you regret at the end of your life is not what you did, but what you didn’t do. And there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t do. I was offered a TV series where I would have been a mom with a 14-year‑old child. And I said something real smart alec, like I’m too young to have a 14-year‑old child. No, thank you. In actuality, I was not too young but for some reason I had hurt feelings that they would offer me something like that. But I should have done it.

I lacked a certain amount of confidence. I was okay with a certain amount of success but I didn’t feel confident enough to really pursue a big career.

I don’t know why. I think I was just too shy. Maybe it wasn’t the career for me. I’ve always been interested in anthropology. If I’d stayed in school, I might have gotten into that. But I also believe in destiny. I think I was brought here to the planet to contribute something to women. I hope I’ve done that.

If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be with my mother. She was the wisest person I’ve known. I spent every day of the last weeks of her life at her house, bringing her items of comfort and food and just sitting with her, keeping her company. I guess I did what I could. But when she actually took her last breath, I wasn’t in the room.

My sister was there. I had gone to the pharmacy to pick up medication for her and by the time I got back, she was gone. I had said everything I wanted to her. Time and again. I just would like to have been holding her hand as she passed, but I wasn’t.

There were a lot of wonderful days and weeks and months at the desert house [in the San Fernando Valley, California] when I was growing up. If I could re-live any day from my life it would then, around Christmas or Easter time at our family home. My brother and I playing either on the lawn or in the swimming pool. My mom pregnant with my sister, my dad sitting in the sun.

I think it would be that day.

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PHOTOS BY GETTY

TOP: NANCY WITH FRANK JNR AND SNR, 1954 MIDDLE: IN THE YELLOW AND BLACK, 1968 BOTTOM: ON STAGE IN NEW YORK, 2005

have to work hard to get beyond my name. In the end I guess I got lucky. My choice of songs and things, that moved me out of the pattern.

In the beginning I named myself Nancy Nice Lady because of the nature of the music I was doing, which was all bubblegum. And then later, Lee Hazlewood came into my life and he nicknamed me Nasty Jones. He said I could be anybody and make hit records; I didn’t have to be a Sinatra. I could be a Jones.

He had faith in me and he gave me faith in myself. He gave me courage. So instead of bubblegum orchestral music, we went into a more country, funk kind of feel, which suited me much better. He really created that for me, and I’ll be forever grateful.

As well as the way he recorded my voice, Lee surrounded me with great musicians. And we made music that was much more me as a person, that groovy funky rhythm section. There wasn’t an opportunity to do that kind of thing before.

When you work for a record label you do what the producer says. I was signed to Reprise, but I don’t think they wanted to sell me at all. I think I was only there because it was my dad’s label. And they sort of had to tolerate me. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I was that wanted there. My dad stayed out of it. He was very good about that. He knew that the best thing for me would be to be on my own, try by myself, and fall on my face if necessary.

I was manufactured. My look came from London, with hair and makeup from New York. It evolved thanks to Mary Quant and a friend of mine, named Amy Greene. She took me to a salon called Kenneth in New York and I met a lady who coloured my hair blonde. And I loved it, that new persona.

I was grateful for it, because I had been floundering.

It was playful and a little sexy. It was courageous for me to step out like that. I remember in Los Angeles when I was first wearing miniskirts, I would get smart alec comments like, are you going to play tennis today? People in LA didn’t understand the fashion trend – it took people like Jean Shrimpton coming to America to really nail it.

I was pretty innocent, and kind of boring in my early twenties; I was quiet and dull. I didn’t do the glamorous kind of life. The first advice I would give my younger self is not to get married so young.

It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. That’s number one. Don’t do it. Continue your education, it enriches your life. I was married for a few years and then I was divorced. And then I was at sixes and sevens for a while, trying to figure all that out. I really should not have got married then. There was nothing wrong with Tommy [teen idol singer Tommy Sands], he

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

I

f there’s one way to make my partner Greg sad, and believe me, I know them all, take him vintage clothes shopping.

Actually, any clothes-oriented excursion will do.

We walk in, I get absorbed fingering the racks of wonder, he sighs heavily and heads for the door.

He then loiters, a joy sucking cloud of misery just inside my peripheral vision. “Fine,” I say after five minutes. “FINE. We’ll go.”

Now, this happens not because he’s averse to clothes shopping – au contraire – but because, and I cannot emphasise this enough, there are no funky clothes for men. There’s the occasional retro gem, sure, if you’re 12 years old, because that’s the size men grew to back in the day when nutrition was optional, but most vintage shops have a men’s section the size of a bread box. Regular shops stock larger sizes but the clothes are, meh, bland. I’m going to call it: gents’ outfitting in Australia is conservative, drab and designed to cause the gaze to slide off the wearer, functioning in much the same way as graffiti resistant paint.

If you’re a dapper dude like my G.Diddy – and we’re talking someone who wears a red derby hat he bought in New Orleans – it’s a dispiriting business having to choose from the three available menswear sections – business, sports or barbecue-friendly Hawaiian.

It’s not always been thus. Men in the 70s were bold in their dress. Lairy checked suits, architectural collars, burnt orange elephant cord flares, big patterns, high heels, shiny polyester body shirts, sky-blue short shorts and not infrequent testicle separation. Punk was bright and fierce. The 80s had their saturated pastel and fluoro moments. Mainstream, straight, cis-gender Australian men have not always been denied colour and self-expression.

But if you want to style it up now, good luck.

As Greg observed recently, “Men don’t have clothes, they have things they wear.”

I’ve just read Rick Morton’s funny and perceptive memoir The Year of Living

Vulnerably, which is a meditation on toxic masculinity and how to love when it’s been beaten out of you. He writes a fair bit about the horror Australian men have of being thought gay. And how they crush all that is sweet and kind and creative in themselves, for fear of being thought gay. It’s a self-policing prison where any bent for flamboyance, fashun or random fabulousness is censored before our heterosexual protagonist opens his eyes of a morning and reaches for the unremarkable slogan tee or striped shirt and tie.

Ah, it makes me sad. An ex of mine, Evan, a creative soul, cracked it once when I trotted out a line I was fond of 20 years ago. “All women really want,” I said, thinking I was terribly amusing, “is a gay man who’ll shag us.”

I meant it too. When you’re a single woman, a gay best friend is gold. Fun, charismatic, not afraid of sequins and fur, into disco and drama, worships you as a powerful woman, not going to get creepy at the end of the night. Tick! We all fall in love with our gay BFs. It rarely ends well, but it was a self-evident truth that we wish it would, or so I thought.

Evan was furious. “What you’re saying is that straight men aren’t allowed these things.

You’re quarantining us off. Gay men get to look good and smell nice, and wear fur and be outrageous. It’s not fair. How dare you. Why can’t I be those things?”

He was right. How dare we say straight men must be boring? A couple of decades on and queer culture has claimed the fun, interesting, progressive stuff, and mainstream heterosexual men are huddled together wearing hi-vis and smart casual athleisure wear in navy and grey, afraid to move. Oof. Please men, go demand some lurex suits and sharp tailoring. My boyfriend wants to shop.

Writer and comedian Fiona is an especially good vintage.

21 MAY 2021

Fashion A-Gender

I’m going to call it: gents’ outfitting in Australia is conservative, drab and designed to cause the gaze to slide off the wearer.

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Fiona

by Ricky French @frenchricky

C

ould this be the last ever column I write for my son on the eve of his birthday? Everything has a lifespan, and that includes childhood. I first wrote about him when he was five; he’s about to turn 14. Maybe we’ll go another round next year and call it quits. Ten years of Dad’s torturous remarks is surely enough.

Every parent recognises the feeling of loss as another birthday cake is wheeled out. It’s terrifying because the same thing is happening to us, except we’re on the way down even as the numbers climb.

The early teens are all about forging your identity. Long gone are the days where he would dress up in a suit of armour when we took the train to the city. These days his suit of armour is metaphorical. He tries not to draw any attention to himself. Being seen by kids from his school while he rides his bike with me at the park is mortifying. For once, I don’t think the source of the embarrassment is me. Sometimes he can’t even tell why he’s suffocated by anxiety at being noticed living. At this age the grips of self‑consciousness can feel more like shackles.

I put it down to other kids being jerks. He says he’s not bullied and I believe it. He’s too in the background to be noticed, and that’s the way he likes it.

Every superhero needs a costume. His, worn every day, is blue jeans, brown Blundstones, monotonal T-shirt, black puffer vest. Bright colours are a no-no; even Lego seems too bright to demand much attention these days. For a good two or three years his most treasured possession was his Akubra hat, but that’s too conspicuous now. What if someone asks him how many head of cattle he has?

He’s smart, worldly, fascinated by the machinations of government and bureaucracy.

We were at the airport the other week and he was tasked to choose a book from the bookstore.

He chose True Crime and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump. I don’t think

he made it past page 20, but the intent was pure. He’s long worked out the world is run by fools, and that intrigues him.

He still loves kids’ books, but often after he finishes watching 7.30, he’ll retire to the couch with the Guardian Weekly. Other essential reading is the car reviews in the Weekend Australian Magazine. If he can’t be a paramedic when he grows up, his new idea is to be a motoring journalist.

He knows the importance of reading widely, of assessing issues on their merit, of not blindly following one side, but ridiculing – or at least questioning – all.

Still, I wish he would write more, or even some. The curse of screen addiction is not limited to Dad. But through the classroom of YouTube he learns a lot. His specialist subject is electric vehicles. He doesn’t understand why Australia doesn’t offer incentives to promote them. “Why did Dan Andrews put a tax on EVs?” he asked me the other day. “I don’t know,” I replied, adding, “Why does Dan Andrews pulp our native forests at a massive taxpayer-subsidised loss for the benefit of a Japanese-owned paper mill?” There are some things neither the old nor young can answer.

He recently hit a major milestone: he’s now taller than his mother, and wears bigger shoes.

He’s coming after me next, his eyes firmly fixed on my RM Williams boots, I’m sure.

Then there’s the yet undecided matter of his “Szazi” nose, of keen interest among my mum’s side of the family. The distinctive (that’s the nice way of putting it) Hungarian hooter that has run riot through at least three generations only shows its true form when the unlucky owner hits their teens. Like a turkey praying for Christmas, he’s hoping he gets it. I think that’s wonderful. I like to think he wants to be connected to his roots. I like him.

Ricky is a writer, musician and father.

21 MAY 2021

One Last Time

Long gone are the days where he would dress up in a suit of armour.

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Ricky

Julia Zemiro

Small Screens THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

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Sing! Sing! Sing!

If there’s anyone who can get the country to join together for one big singalong, it’s Julia Zemiro – and that’s just what she’s doing.

by Sosefina Fuamoli @sose_carter

Sosefina Fuamoli is a music writer, content producer and publicist based in Melbourne.

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ingalongs: we’ve all probably been a part of at least one at some point in our lives. Whether it be in a pub, at a party, at a live event or, hell, even at the footy, there’s something uniquely stirring about being able to have this experience with a large crowd of strangers.

This sense of unity is one we’ve been particularly craving over the past 12 months. And as live music and gatherings have recommenced around the country, Australians are finding comfort in the things we may have once taken for granted.

On 5 June, SBS is taking this rejuvenated energy and kicking things up a notch, broadcasting a one-of-a-kind TV event – Australia’s Biggest Singalong! Hosted by actor Miranda Tapsell (Top End Wedding) and RocKwiz host Julia Zemiro, the two-hour musical event is the first of its kind for Australian television.

Working with the renowned team behind Pub Choir, who have been staging sessions since their inception in 2017, Australia’s Biggest Singalong! invites the nation to join a group of musicians and vocalists and learn the iconic Aussie anthem ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ by Hunters and Collectors.

“The lovely thing about doing this now is knowing full well that during COVID, one of the things that did shut down very quickly was choirs,” says Zemiro. “We know that people who voluntarily sing in choirs do it because they love it and it makes them feel good.”

Under the guidance of Pub Choir’s co-founder, choirmaster Astrid Jorgensen, viewers will be brought into this national virtual choir and taken through the process, leading to a final performance alongside

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AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST SINGALONG! AIRS ON SATURDAY 5 JUNE ON SBS.

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Hunters and Collectors’ Mark Seymour. You don’t have to be a professional to be involved, though. As Zemiro notes, this event is for everyone.

“The worst thing in the world is anyone who says to someone, ‘You can’t sing.’ It drives me nuts,” she says.

“You wanna say, ‘I can’t sing like Mariah Carey or Celine Dion,’ and it’s like, sure. But who needs to sing like that? We’re talking about being able to say to people, ‘You can make noise now and because you’re joining in with all these other people, it will sound amazing.’ When you sing with lots of people, there’s a real buzz that goes through you.”

The unique singalong will take place in pubs and living rooms around the country. It doesn’t matter where you are, if you want to be involved, you can be. For Zemiro, it’s an encouraging and low-key way to bring people together. We’ve all needed an outlet to express ourselves and let a lot of built-up tension and emotion go. “It’s a chance to get everybody who might still be trapped at home – or just happen to be at home – to watch a live event and learn to do this song,” she says.

“What Astrid does so beautifully with Pub Choir is how she breaks down each part of the song – how she breaks the audience up into different parts, how she finds her men and her women, her sopranos and her tenors. To watch that, in itself, is mastery. Then, when you’re all singing a song that you know, it’s the sound of everyone together,” she says.

“It’s such a stunning show. My beautiful co-host is Miranda Tapsell, who is awesome,” Zemiro adds. “We have had such fun putting it together so I’m doubly excited about being able to work with Miranda again.

We’ll be powering up Australia as Eveready batteries!”

The two actors last graced the small screen together back in 2016, when Zemiro visited Tapsell’s childhood home for an episode of Home Delivery.

SBS has a history of unique event programming, particularly in regards to music. “They’ve done such amazing event TV,” Zemiro says. “Look at the Eurovision coverage – they’ve done so much with that.”

But this show is a particular highlight for Zemiro, who is looking forward not just to getting involved in the creative aspects, but also to the special technological roll-out. To that end, SBS has launched an online platform where you can submit videos of yourself singing ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ for a chance to have your rendition featured in the broadcast.

“It’s about having people come together who don’t have to sound ‘right’. There’s nothing worse than being in a singing class and someone says, ‘It’s not right.’ [This show] is in the spirit of inclusion,” she says. “We know that music really moves people. It’s one of the languages everyone can still agree on and be together in.”

Music

St Vincent

Father Away St Vincent’s new record is a throwback to 70s grit and glamour – while addressing her white-collar criminal father, who’s recently been released from jail.

by Jared Richards @jrdjms

Jared Richards is an arts and music critic who has written for The Guardian, Junkee, Swampland and more.

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nlikely as it seems, we have The Daily Mail to thank for Daddy’s Home, Annie Clark’s seventh album as St Vincent.

In 2016, after a series of high-profile relationships, Clark went from indie-rock darling to tabloid celebrity, so the Mail went digging for dirt – and found that in 2010 Clark’s father was sentenced to 12 years in prison over his involvement in $43 million of stock manipulations.

Now that he’s been released, Clark is reestablishing their relationship. While she never intended to detail that process so explicitly in her music, Daddy’s Home offers a chance to reclaim the story from the scandal.

“That story had been told, but I didn’t get to tell it,” she says. “And I wanted to tell it with humour and compassion, complexity and nuance. But I seriously doubt [I would have written about it otherwise].”

Even putting aside its personal nature, Daddy’s Home remains St Vincent’s sharpest turn yet in a career of transformations.

“Where other records might’ve been like icicles coming from the speakers,” she says, laughing, “this is a lot warmer. This is like,

‘Come on in! Sit on this beat-up plaid chair and roll a cigarette.’ It’s a different palette. Different things to say, different ways to say them.”

That warmth, more than the electric sitar or Clark’s 70s aesthetic (which nods to actress Gena Rowlands, the on-the-brink heroine of many films directed by husband John Cassavetes), separates Daddy’s Home from St Vincent’s earlier work. After releasing two indie-folk albums in the late 2000s – which she now describes, somewhat unfairly, as her “asexual Pollyanna” period – Clark had a breakthrough with Strange Mercy (2011).

Electric and eerie, Strange Mercy toyed with a weary “Benzo-queen” persona hinted at in her early work, matched with claustrophobic guitar solos clawing for breathing room. Next came Love This Giant (2012), a collaboration with David Byrne that cemented her place as a musician’s musician. And with her self-titled album (2014), she became a white‑haired, sadomasochist cult leader before doubling down as a “dominatrix at the mental institution” on Masseduction (2017), a relentless record centred on power, PVC and heartbreak.

Where to go from an album so densely layered that Clark re-released it twice – first as pared-back acoustic renditions, then as club‑ready electronica, overseen by Nina Kraviz? For Daddy’s Home, Clark and co‑producer Jack Antonoff (Lorde, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey) left behind tightly wound electro‑pop in favour of a more laid-back approach and sound.

The album’s landscape of a gritty, 70s New York – Clark describes it as “glamour that’s been up for three days straight’’ – is a homage to both the music she grew up with, thanks to her dad, and the “trying to make the best of it” ethos of the era.

“I don’t necessarily glamorise the past,” she says. “I think people were more or less the same – just with different sets of technology and clothes and some different ideas underpinning society… It was a time when the world was bad, but music was great, which culturally is where we are now.”

Power – who grabs it, and who suffers – is still on Clark’s mind, but the frustration that runs through her music yields to empathy.

Mostly. Album outlier ‘Down’ is a spite-driven track about someone who needs to be cut down to size. That one person aside (“I’m not Mother Teresa here!” she jokes), she wanted to veer away from judgement.

“In some ways, people are grasping for moral certainty, which I understand, because things are scary in the world. So much is

uncertain, and there’s been a big reckoning and shake-up of institutions of power. But I think we can’t lose sight of the fact that people are complicated. People are flawed, but also are capable of change. We can’t just write somebody off. We should be figuring out a more thoughtful way to legislate thoughts and behaviour.”

Daddy’s Home is filled with tributes to the flawed and misunderstood, from her father, insufferable screenwriters and some of Clark’s own heroes. On ‘The Melting of the Sun’, Clark thanks Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Joan Didion and Nina Simone, while closer ‘Candy Darling’ reimagines the death of the Warhol superstar as an angel catching the last uptown train to heaven.

Clark, an awe-inspiring live artist, is eager to perform again, but don’t expect the meticulously choreographed productions of previous tours. “I think what we’ll need is maximum human connection, things that are a bit more grounded. I don’t know if our psyche can handle pure escapism at the moment.”

DADDY’S HOME IS OUT NOW.

After the success of 100 Years of Dirt, Rick Morton has found his next topic, one that has inspired philosophers for millennia: love, love, love.

PHOTO BY PERRY DUFFIN

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Books

Rick Morton

Looking for Love

Emma Sleath is a freelance writer based in Adelaide.

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he hardest thing about any writing is to have a voice,” says Rick Morton, when told that he talks exactly as he comes across on the page.

“It doesn’t have to be the one you speak with, but it has to be something unique to you that makes people want to read...and it just so happens that I’ve never known any other way to write.”

Full of self-deprecation and humour, despite the rather heavyweight material in his book, Morton’s an award‑winning Australian journalist who always wanted to be an author, writing in his own time even when he “didn’t have any plans or way or hope of getting published”.

His first book, the national bestseller 100 Years of Dirt, chronicles an upbringing punctuated by trauma with both heartbreak and humour. It tells the story of Morton’s immediate family – a father from a violent outback farming dynasty going back generations, a mother who fought to bring up her children on the breadline after divorce, and three kids who carried the

I had never met Jasmina but she’d agreed to cuddle me for 45 minutes. scars of intergenerational trauma in very different ways.

Shortly after its release, Morton was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition he describes as “a fancy way of saying one of the people who should have loved me during my childhood didn’t”. According to Morton, the diagnosis was a game changer.

After seven years and an array of psychologists, he finally had a frame of reference for the decades spent struggling with his mental health. He also had the impetus for his latest offering, My Year of Living Vulnerably, a collection of essays exploring love and vulnerability.

Determined to find fresh angles on an old subject (“Love is the oldest topic, right?”), Morton comes at his theme from many vantage points, grouped under various headings: ‘The Self’, ‘Forgiveness’, ‘Animals’, ‘Touch’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Masculinity’, ‘Loneliness’ and ‘Kindness’.

“All of these good things that make life worth living – you know, the stuff that philosophers have been pondering for millennia – they’re all versions of love,” he says.

MY YEAR OF LIVING VULNERABLY IS OUT NOW.

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“[So the book is] really kind of a meditation on all of these things that we might excise from our lives and, in so doing, shut out the different permutations of love.

I wanted to bring that back in my own mind.”

Mixing memoir and personal musings with research and reflections from science, philosophy, art and literature, Morton lays himself bare in pursuit of his goal.

With the memorable opening line “I had never met Jasmina but she’d agreed to cuddle me for 45 minutes”, ‘Touch’ explores the absence of being held. He expertly introduces us to a study of Romania’s neglected orphans, a Japanese robotic seal invented to simulate affection, and a landmark case awarding NDIS funding to a sex worker. Morton clearly enjoys explaining complex ideas and his prose pulses with a furious, relentless curiosity.

“I think if you are curious, not just about yourself and about why you are the way you are, but about the world around you, then life is worth living, just based on that alone,” he says. “I had to be curious to discover how [C-PTSD] works, in my head, in my brain, in my sinew.

But I’ve always been curious about the world around me, and about space, and science and things that have the power to explain our own existence,” says Morton.

“Things are fascinating out there. You just have to come at them with a kind of childlike wonder. It’s a great tragedy that a lot of us are taught, not explicitly, but implicitly, as we get older, that it’s not okay to be childlike in our approach to the world.”

Curiosity, Morton has come to realise, can act as a defence against depression and mental illness. The childlike wonder on show in his writing is perhaps no accident. “Part of me will always be that seven‑year‑old boy and there’s a part of that that is good,” he says. “Yes, that boy was terrified and horrible things happened to him, so you do get stuck emotionally in that place, but there are things that I don’t think I would have held onto were it not for that trauma. I don’t think I would be as childlike or easy to goad into wonder were it not for that.”

Morton describes his writing as mirroring his “madcap train of thought” – always going off on tangents and coming up with weird connections. He is the master of unexpected, offbeat analogies: “hope was like a chicken; it would become airborne briefly, but it was ultimately a ground-dwelling thing”. His favourite writer is Kurt Vonnegut (also quite fond of the absurd) and he is a voracious reader of poetry.

My Year of Living Vulnerably covers an awful lot of ground, but ultimately is not a cure for trauma, nor does it pretend to be. Instead, what it gives us is a multitude of reasons why it’s better to bend than to break.

Taking his wisdom from the principles of structural engineering, Morton writes: “to be unbendable, in the end, is to shatter…vulnerability is a design feature that allows us to confuse the wind”.

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by Emma Sleath

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

GULPILIL, THE GREATEST

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he documentary My Name Is Gulpilil premiered earlier this year at the Adelaide Film Festival, with its star, narrator and producer, David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu, walking the red carpet. This was remarkable in itself as the legendary actor – our greatest? – was told in 2017 that he only had months to live, after being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. Too sick to travel to his

namesake homeland, near Ramingining in Arnhem Land, his last wish: to make one more film.

Director Molly Reynolds (Another Country, 2015) recorded many interviews with her friend at his residence in Murray Bridge, east of Adelaide, where he lives with his carer, Mary.

A natural-born performer, Gulpilil talks directly to camera, in his own words, at his own pace: “This film is about me. This is my story of my story,” he says.

My Name Is Gulpilil is many things. A farewell. A dizzying chronicle of Gulpilil’s extraordinary half-century of life on screen, with clips from Australian classics like Walkabout (1971), when the teenaged Yolngu dancer was “discovered” by Nicolas Roeg, through mesmerising, canonical, paradigm-shifting roles in Storm Boy (1976), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), Crocodile Dundee (1986), The Tracker (2002), Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) and Charlie’s Country (2013). A poetic self-portrait of a man who has spent his life – at great spiritual cost – moving between two worlds, and who has done so much for this country. “This film will remember to generation to generation,” he says proudly. It’s riveting, and deeply humbling, to watch. ABB

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Queer cinema often spotlights the nascent desires of youth – but debut director Filippo Meneghetti is more interested in the long-time veterans of love. French neighbours Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) have secretly been together for 20 years; their relationship is tender and free of conflict, save Madeleine’s guilt over lying to her grown children.

Then tragedy strikes and we’re tipped into thriller territory as Nina goes to farcical lengths to be

by Madeleine’s side. Meneghetti observes his characters through peepholes, mirrors and windows, creating an atmosphere of unease – and, at times, an unfortunate emotional distance. He raises some compelling ideas about the dehumanisation of the elderly, but the film works best during its simpler domestic interludes, where Sukowa and Chevallier’s chemistry shines. The image of Nina and Madeleine dancing barefoot in the apartment encapsulates the unassailable and enduring nature of love, making Nina’s later efforts all the more worth it. CLAIRE CAO I BLAME SOCIETY

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If someone says that you’d make a good murderer, is it a compliment? LA-based filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat thought so, when it happened to her: “Anyone tells you that you’re good at anything, it’s a compliment!”

For her delightfully unhinged debut feature, Horvat turns the camera on herself, “documenting” – often with the help of a selfie stick – her transition from awkward aspiring director to bleached-blonde killer. (There’s only so many meetings with condescending “broducers” that a gal can sit through before starting to lose it.) As ruthless as Promising Young Woman’s avenging angel, as deadpan as the work of comic actor Nathan Fielder, the fictionalised Gillian discovers that her skill set – creativity, resourcefulness, planning ahead – is easily transferable. Co-written by Horvat and Chase Williamson (who also plays her best friend), I Blame Society skewers both “the industry” and the archetype of the uncompromising artist, while taking the verité aesthetic to silly new self-reflexive heights. KEVA YORK

LAPSIS 

An affable sci-fi satire with a sting, this attentiongrabbing debut feature from writer-director Noah Hutton takes place in a Black Mirror-style parallel present, where a global company that sounds a lot like Amazon is getting rich from “cabling” – and our down-on-his-luck everyman Ray (Dean Imperial) is desperate for a fast buck. The film transforms upstate New York into virgin territory for the casual employees, who camp out in the woods and lay down miles of cable, with creepy AI “medallions” barking orders and hyper-competitive incentives driving productivity. Harder, better, faster, stronger!

Clever writing ensures this shady, dystopian world is convincing, despite the low budget, while space is left for characters to bloom, notably the budding friendship between Ray and fellow cabler Anna (Madeline Wise). The result is a neat takedown of corporate greed, with real heart and some welcome wry humour keeping the mood light. Even if the ending bottoms out, there’s still plenty here to chew on. ANNABEL BRADY-BROWN

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

CREAMERIE  | SBS ON DEMAND FROM 25 MAY

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

 | NINTENDO SWITCH, PC

 | PRIME VIDEO

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a singleplayer action-adventure game where you play as an anthropomorphised turnip who seeks to repay his debt to the suspicious Mayor Onion. The player quests to find rare items that further the main story, all while sourcing tools, solving dungeon puzzles, defeating bosses and slowly uncovering the dark and mysterious underbelly of Turnip Boy’s world.

Side quests are solved by obtaining main quest items, tying the characters and the world together. The bulk of characterisation is given to Turnip Boy and Mayor Onion as they’re the characters with whom the player interacts the most. Other characters linger vacuously after interactions with them are complete. The dungeon puzzles and boss fights increase in difficulty as the player progresses, and the quick swapping of tools adds to the challenge. While seemingly innocuous, this game offers an intriguing glimpse into how our world might fare if humans don’t take care. Great for lovers of Stardew Valley, this game is short, bright and fun throughout. RAELEE LANCASTER

The terror of the Antebellum South is both repulsive and engrossing in director Barry Jenkins’ profound series. Born, raised and enslaved on a Georgian plantation is Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), abandoned at birth, and left to comprehend her identity in the most oppressive period of American history.

Seeking her own salvation, she escapes, heading north with her lover Caesar (Aaron Pierre). Pursued by slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), they can only trust each other down the Underground Railroad, which transports slaves to freedom in the north. For every act of persecution, there are moments of warm consolation between victims; occasional joys and fantasies of freedom. Jenkins achieves a lot with intimate close-ups – a single look reaffirms that Cora’s journey isn’t a damned one. At times the series moves into magic realism, shifting to Cora’s lucid perspective. As much about the ugly truth as it is about resilience and enduring spirit, The Underground Railroad leaves an impression, thoughtful without pulling punches. BRUCE KOUSSABA

T

he simple fact that everyone deserves love should go without saying, but shows like ABC TV’s Love on the Spectrum truly take the sentiment to heart. Fortunately, audiences are all the better for it, thanks to this wholesome docuseries that opens its arms to neurodivergent young people searching for connection. Of course, with this quest come the typical highs and lows of romance – at once relatable and surprising, universal and unique – as folks living across the autism spectrum dabble in dating and relationships for the first time.

Full disclosure: I didn’t catch the show’s first season back in 2019, which I’m a tad embarrassed to admit, since it was one of Aunty’s most popular series that year. Then it landed on Netflix internationally last July, and was showered with praise by US critics, who lauded the creative team’s empathetic, character-driven storytelling. I remember feeling a type of come-on-Aussie pride about the local show kicking goals overseas, despite it getting pushed ever further down my watch list (not to mention that basic empathy and respect should be the bare minimum we – meaning critics and viewers alike – expect of shows featuring people with disabilities).

Now having jumped on board for season two, I see that Love on the Spectrum really is exceptional. It captures the frisson of firstdate nerves and existential uncertainty with pure charm, and the hopeful contestants are a delight to spend time with. My only regret is that I didn’t get to this sooner! Well, that and the fact that I’m running out of episodes. AK

21 MAY 2021

TURNIP BOY COMMITS TAX EVASION

BOOK A DATE WITH YOUR TELLY

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What would a world without men look like? In this New Zealand black comedy, it looks like free education, mandatory menstruation leave, a seemingly perpetual health food craze, and a sperm-bank-sourced reproductive lottery. Eight years after a virus has wiped out every male, the world (or, at least, New Zealand) is ruled by a superficially benevolent government called Wellness – think Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale, if The Handmaid’s Tale were for some reason set in a mindfulness retreat. Creamerie follows three dairy farmers (played with wonderful snark

by JJ Fong, Ally Xue and Perlina Lau), who live together despite tenuous familial relations and troublingly diverse political views. Things get interesting when one of the farmers, Jaime (Fong), gets chosen in the reproductive lottery, and a stranger of an unexpected gender shows up on their farm. Though the absurdist dystopia takes a little believing, and the two episodes previewed hurry through the plot without much depth, the quippy disharmony of the main trio makes for an enjoyable ride. VALERIE NG

Music Reviews

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Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

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ho would have thought the pandemic would make even our most dedicated maximalists turn inward?

CHAI are a four-piece girl group from Japan, who over the past few years have garnered a reputation for crafting effusive, joyous songs that straddle the line between pop and punk.

The band released their debut album PINK in 2017, which was stuffed with gloriously over‑the-top odes to loving yourself and indulging in food. Early single ‘N.E.O’ nailed down the group’s formula: exuberant and blunt words of encouragement (“You are so cute nice face/Yeah!”) paired with sugary hooks and bouncing guitars. The sound was a little bit electroclash, a little bit new wave, with plenty of super sweet, undeniable pop thrown in. On stage, they matched these theatrical songs with coordinated dance moves and matching outfits in all shades of pink.

Punk (2019) extended and honed this sound, and ended up being their international breakthrough. But their latest, WINK, sees the band turn down the volume and explore subtler rhythms. That cheekiness is still there of course (there is a song entitled ‘Donuts Mind If I Do’), but instead of being funnelled through supercharged melodies, CHAI’s tales of joy and being carefree take root in tracks that recall Stereolab and smooth R&B. As the band noted in a press release: “A person who winks is a person with a pure heart, who lives with flexibility, who does what they want. A person who winks is a person who is free.” IT

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@itrimboli

A TON OF COLOURS RYAN DOWNEY 

Three years on from debut Running, Melbourne crooner Ryan Downey returns with his sensuous follow‑up A Ton of Colours. With much of the album sung in restrained, tasteful baritone, Downey’s melodic sensibility is perhaps the album’s most distinctive element. His range is evident in the Leonard Cohen-esque whispers, which accentuate the chorus of ‘Sors De Ma Tete’, and the aching demands of ‘Contact’ (“Hold me like you want to be held when it’s over” pleads Downey). This is a finely tuned record. But at times, when the elegance on display gives way to something more guttural, less even-handed, one wonders if perhaps Downey would do well to lean into his more jagged impulses. For an album that so elegantly articulates the desperate, messy nature of human connection, there is very little in the music itself that works to reflect this. It is a beautiful record, often evocative, yet one cannot help but wish it didn’t feel so tightly wound.

LUKE MCCARTHY

DAISY BIG SCARY

MEDIEVAL FEMME FATIMA AL QADIRI

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It’s been a while since the party-in-a-bottle that was Animal (2016), but Big Scary’s follow-up, Daisy, is a change of pace, with the duo crafting a cool and moody dance album that forgoes guitars for much of the record. But it’s not just the rock sound they’ve lost. The album is marked by lost opportunities to go big, weird and beautiful – to embrace new sounds. There are moments of experimentation: brilliant fat bassy groans, and sparkly synths (that converge especially well on ‘Get Out!’), but across Daisy, they feel largely disconnected, like someone has plucked them out at random. Instead, the album is glued together by percussion – the drum beats are unstoppable, and paired with cowbells and chiming cymbals, they shine.

Ultimately, Big Scary’s return feels more like an adventure stopped short by nervousness.

As a result, emotion is replaced by groove, rather than a harmony of both, and what could have been a leap of faith has turned out to be more of a cautious side-step.

For her third studio album, Fatima Al Qadiri reverentially wrests the Middle Ages into a techno-utopian future. Taking inspiration from lovesick classical poems by Arab women (such as the 7th century poet Al-Khansa), the prolific Kuwaiti producer has conceived a highly theatrical suite of experimental electronic music that doubles as a wormhole, collapsing time and space. Medieval pipes and organs are replaced by woozy synths, while ancient lyrics – by angelic virtual choirs, in both Arabic and English – are repeated and stretched like putty, to deranging effect. The stripped-back melodies vanish and reappear throughout the 10-track suite. With its open spaces, ominous drones and celestial pseudoharpsichord, lead track ‘Malaak’ suggests the eerie soundscapes of Al Qadiri’s score for Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019) – another haunted love story – while a song like ‘Qasmuna (Dreaming)’ recasts the poets as modern-day sirens, desperately calling out to the listener, their words suffused with danger, longing and regret. ANNABEL BRADY-BROWN

JENNIFER PARK

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

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TUSSAUD BELINDA LYONS-LEE

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The latest book by Tracey Thorn – best known as one half of the 80s band Everything But the Girl – is a tribute to one of the most significant friendships of her life. Her rock’n’roll friend is Lindy Morrison, whose jagged, energetic drumming was a driving force in the music of The Go-Betweens. The band’s story – one of Sisyphean struggle – has been told many times, but always with a focus on the achievements of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, relegating Morrison to a mere supporting role. Thorn’s book acts as a refutation of these male-centred narratives, highlighting the centrality of Morrison’s playing in The Go-Betweens’ sound. But more than that, it shows us the importance of the pair’s friendship, which helps to keep them both afloat in a brutal and male-dominated industry that constantly downplays their achievements. In the recounting of their first meeting, Morrison is described as seeming “to reflect the light”, and her vitality, integrity and sheer energy come shining through in this book. JACK ROWLAND

A deliciously Gothic historical novel is Belinda Lyons-Lee’s debut offering, a mix of fact and fiction, as she takes the real Madame Tussaud (yes, the one known for her wax figures) and inserts her into an outlandish adventure with a magician and necromancer called Philidor (also based on a real character). Chasing money and success, they accept an offer from an eccentric Duke to work in his maze-filled mansion and create an automaton to his exact specifications, a figure of his long-lost love. Tussaud is evocative of the era: of grimy London streets and charlatans aplenty, but it’s also a pacey read, with a labyrinthine narrative and lots of lies, secrets and subterfuge. It’s fun too, trying to figure out which aspects of the narrative are based on real life and which have been the work of Lyons-Lee’s rich imagination.

Think Shelley and Dickens and Poe and you have an idea of the flavour of this book.

THE ONES WE’RE MEANT TO FIND JOAN HE 

A world on the brink of destruction from climate change. Two sisters separated. A complex story of love, survival and humanity. The Ones We’re Meant to Find is as unsettling as it is beautiful. The story follows Cee, stranded on a deserted island and desperate to find her sister, and Kasey, living in a levitating eco-city and determined to understand her sister’s disappearance.

It has all the hallmarks of great dystopia – interesting characters, extraordinary world building and a low thrum of unease on every page. The themes of environmental destruction, sacrifice and human nature are far from new, but He brings a fresh take and wraps them in a compelling plot you won’t want to stop reading. The first half of the book is quite slow-moving, stilted even. The set-up is worth it though, and these are small complaints about an otherwise brilliantly crafted story. For lovers of sci-fi, dystopia or young adult fiction, this is a must-read. SARAH MOHAMMED

THUY ON

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MY ROCK’N’ROLL FRIEND TRACEY THORN

21 MAY 2021

ne of my favourite subgenres is books about books and the latest one to catch my attention is Reading Like an Australian Writer, edited by Belinda Castles. In it, 26 authors write about the works of other, much admired authors. As Castles says, “All writers begin as readers”, so it makes perfect sense that those who ply the craft can write perceptively about others who do the same. The book is part critical analysis, part love letter. Contributors include Nigel Featherstone on Christos Tsiolkas, Fiona McFarlane on Nam Le, Ashley Hay on Charlotte Wood, Debra Adelaide on Kate Jennings, and Ellen van Neerven on Tara June Winch. If ever there was any doubt about the expanse and quality of Australian literature, even a cursory flick through some of the pages in this book will put to bed such niggling doubts. It’s a collection of essays that draws from the past as well as the recent present, so there’s a historical celebratory element as well. For those curious to find out about some of their favourite authors’ favourite books, Reading Like an Australian Writer will provide answers. Others who are familiar with both the works of the writer and the subject will find it fascinating to do a compare and contrast, to see if they are any obvious or subtle influences or homage. TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

Maybe we should write acknowledgements at the end of the year instead of resolutions at the start of the year?

Here is the cast and crew list that helped hold my year together. Without you all, it would have been a different film entirely. Sometimes there are people in your year who attempt to derail the film and turn it into a horror movie. Those people don’t make the acknowledgements.

It’s the people who helped you who are the real heroes of the acknowledgements page.

People from your past sometimes deserve acknowledgements. That one teacher who encouraged you whom you never forgot: send them an acknowledgement. That friend who taught you something you didn’t realise the importance of until later. Maybe you’ve lost touch. Doesn’t hurt to quietly acknowledge that little act of heroism, even if only to yourself.

People who are nice to you in cafes and restaurants and shops go home from a day of doing nice for people and they’re exhausted. Yes, it’s their job, and maybe you tip them, but even just acknowledging to yourself the effort they’re putting in, and noticing it, and being nice back, can be acknowledgement enough.

Families can be complex ecosystems, but sometimes it’s good to acknowledge some little act by someone in your family where you might otherwise take that thing for granted.

You can put yourself in your acknowledgements.

Notice the things you do that are brave or generous or make life easier on yourself. Notice the friends you help. Notice the decisions you’ve made that were hard.

Formalise it in your mind. Have a little mind ceremony.

Sometimes when things are a bit tough, when things

are just all too much entirely, all someone has to say for you to want to burst into tears is: “Wow, that sounds so hard”, or “Man, you’re going through a lot, hey?” That’s because it’s good to have someone acknowledge whatever is tormenting you rather than trying to define it or solve it or put it in a box. This can be done more subtly, by the way.

It can be done by looking at someone and sliding a cup of tea across the table towards them while they talk to you.

People are usually different from you. Friends, colleagues, family members. That can be annoying. It can be great, though. When you’re dreading small talk, they’re loudly telling a story about something that happened in high school to a room full of people you’ve never met before. When there’s a complaint to be escalated, they’re the person you quietly hand the phone to – and no, you wouldn’t want to be on the other end of that phone, but yes, acknowledgement time: they’re great to have in such an emergency. Maybe you don’t want olives on your pizza? Fine. They’re picking them off and shoving an offensive quantity of olives onto a slice of their pizza. We had a woman in our office once who was very chipper and perky and some people hid from her until 10am but when we needed someone to do an office tour, she was superb.

Acknowledgements aren’t only for your best friends.

Acknowledge the strangers who hold the door of the train.

Acknowledge the careful people you’ll never see, quietly convincing the people in charge to make smarter decisions.

Acknowledge the loud laughers who bring out the quiet laughers.

Acknowledge the discreet stander-uppers who stand up on public transport when they see you looking exhausted and holding a bunch of stuff but they’re kind enough to act as though they’re just standing up because they’re getting off at the next stop. And then they don’t get off at the next stop. Glorious.

Public Service Announcement: hurrying through the acknowledgements is a good way to get to the main story. Sometimes, though, it’s good to remember the little connections and in-jokes that actually keep you moving.

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.

39

W

hen you read a book, do you skip the acknowledgements? After all, they’re just a place to list a whole lot of names of people who helped make a book. I don’t skip the acknowledgements. I love reading acknowledgements.

All the human connections, all the people who helped bring this creative work into the world. The little private jokes – “and with special thanks to Georgie because a duck isn’t always a pigeon” – hint at lives beyond our own, beyond the author, beyond the writing.

Public Service Announcements: acknowledgements are excellent and should be distributed widely in all contexts.

21 MAY 2021

Credit’s Due

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

40

FOOD PHOTO BY ADAM HOBBS, PORTRAIT BY SBS AND CUT 2 PRODUCTIONS

Tastes Like Home Stefano de Pieri

Serves 4 2 cups ricotta, drained ½ cup grated parmesan ¾ cup plain flour 1 egg 1 jar of Stefano’s Preserves Pasta Sauce or home-made pasta sauce

Method Pass the ricotta through a Mouli into a bowl. Add the parmesan, flour and egg to the ricotta and gently mix together. Reverse onto a floured surface. Remove a piece of the dough and roll out with your fingers to 1cm thickness and 1½cm in length.

Bring a small saucepan of water to the boil and test your gnocchi to see that it doesn’t disintegrate when cooked, or fray around the edges too much. If it does, add more flour.

Proceed to roll them all out and place them on a floured tray as you go. This gnocchi can be used fresh or can be frozen. Cook the gnocchi in plenty of salted water, and as they come to the surface scoop them out with a perforated utensil and place them in the heated sauce.

W

henever I’m asked what recipe says home to me, the first net I cast is obviously into my Italian background.

This recipe for ricotta gnocchi is super easy and perfect for the whole family.

It’s a classic example of cucina povera which I really, really love. The philosophy behind it is making great food with simple and available ingredients. Cooking a satisfying and tasty meal doesn’t mean busting the bank. These ingredients are readily accessible and easy to find – flour, eggs and cheese. It’s something my mother would have cooked and reminds me of home.

I learned to cook observing from my mumma and nonna. Every Italian boy will give you exactly the same answer. I had the fortune of living in one of those very large farmhouses in the north. Under the same roof there were three separate families and three separate kitchens.

There was always this comparison about who was doing what. You learn subtle things, like my parents never would have approved of a bean soup which still had the skin of the tomato curled up. We were all peasants and farmers of a low order, yet we became concerned if the skin of the tomato was in the soup.

It was a sign of incompleteness or carelessness.

I grew up on simplicity and flavour, and achieving flavour by any means available to you. There has been a lot of concentration on presentation, which is madness. I’m still anchored to the idea that you can present food as beautifully as you like, but if it doesn’t taste good I’m not interested. You can forgo presentation for flavour, wherever it comes from – even if it’s just a potato and bay leaf.

Cooking still brings me joy even after all these years. When it works, you feel a combination of relief and satisfaction. When the magic happens you feel quite joyous.

AUSTRALIA’S FOOD BOWL WITH STEFANO DE PIERI STARTS THURSDAY 27 MAY ON SBS FOOD.

21 MAY 2021

Ingredients

Stefano says…

41

Ricotta Gnocchi

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45.

By Lingo!

by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com SQUARE

CLUES 5 letters ___ Cavill, Man of Steel actor African carnivore Corrector of pitch Of or relating to the moon Play on your mind 6 letters ___ Bacall, actress Imaginary Iranian capital One who stalks game Samovar, eg (2 words) 7 letters Disinterested Spellbind The “L” of YSL 8 letters Protestant

T

H E

A N U Y R

L

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

1 2 9 8

9

1

4

2 9 1 5

7 9

8

7 4

9 5 7 4

6

4

2

3 8 4 1

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Bridge 4 Vanguard 10 Orphanage 11 Lairs 12 Kerb 13 Altogether 15 Yearned 16 Engine 19 Stoush 21 Let it go 23 Intolerant 25 Solo 27 Lower 28 Odometers 29 On report 30 Sydney

DOWN 1 Brooklyn 2 Important 3 Goat 5 Awesome 6 Golden Gate 7 Amish 8 Desire 9 Ballad 14 Annual trip 17 Not so keen 18 Joyously 20 Harbour 21 London 22 Rialto 24 Tower 26 Sexy

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 England 2 1993 3 Ireland 4 Mary Pierce (2000) 5 Ever Given 6 Michael Fagan 7 Magnetic Island, Queensland 8 Albert Einstein 9 The Royal Hotel 10 Two – Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan 11 Titan 12 Muscat, Oman 13 Chadwick Boseman 14 New York 15 True 16 Domestic pig 17 Mickey 18 Berlin 19 Forty 20 ) Burj Khalifa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

21 MAY 2021

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

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Word Builder

Square came into English in the mid-1200s from Old French esquire, a tool to measure straight lines – no relation to the young man esquire, literally a “shield bearer”, but it is why you might have used a set-square for drawings. By the end of the 1300s it had come to refer to a shape with four straight sides, replacing the Old English feowerscyte “four-sided”.

Esquire is related to the Latin quadrus, which meant square, and was related to quattuor “four”, which gives us words like quadrangle, quadriceps (a fourparted muscle) and quarantine (an Italian word, originally meaning 40 days in isolation).

Four and quattuor share a long-lost ancestor in the Proto-IndoEuropean language, probably something like kwetwer “four”.

Crossword

by Steve Knight

Quick Clues

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

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

16

17

ACROSS

1 Span (6) 4 Forefront (8) 10 Children’s home (9) 11 Dens (4) 12 Edging of pavement or road (4) 13 Completely (10) 15 Longed for (7) 16 Motor (6) 19 Altercation (6) 21 Move on (colloq.) (8) 23 Uncompromising (10) 25 Lone (4) 27 Reduce (5) 28 Instruments in vehicles to measure

distance travelled (9)

29 Formal account of an event, particularly 18

DOWN

21

22 23

24

25 26

27

28

29

30

Cryptic Clues

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Newlywed clutches good spanner (6) 4 Prosegur employee at the forefront (8) 10 Kids home from The Paragon, shirtless and drunk

1 Bishop and castle flanking lowly knight 1ac (8) 2 Key worker I’m left to cover (8) 3 Return thanks after “Pass the butter” (4) 5 Metal tally said to be amazing (7) 6 Elegant dog grooming 1ac (6,4) 7 Christian, famished, ate out (5) 8 Fancy knight swims in Welsh river (6) 9 Song and dance promotion (6) 14 Nun partial to travel once a year (6,4) 17 Invisible clothes ok? Meh (3,2,4) 18 You support Jo and Sally occasionally with Glee

(9)

11 PolAir search reveals hideouts (5) 12 I left biker shaken by the side of the road (4) 13 Totally corrupt, he got caught by change (10) 15 Four Seasons study in retrospect was wanting (7) 16 Diesel took part in drunken gin escapade (6) 19 Barney Rubble from South Sydney originally (6) 21 Move on songbird in Lego cage (3,2,2) 23 Has no time for digging learned differently (10) 25 Drink alone (4) 27 Cut left one in debt (5) 28 Do meteors burn so they show how far travelled?

(9)

29 Sounds like Matisse (with suitcase) got busted

(2,6)

30 & 20dn Chuck Berry hands you 1ac (6,7)

1 American 1ac (8) 2 Major (8) 3 Horned animal (4) 5 Tremendous (7) 6 American 1ac (6,4) 7 Conservative Christians (5) 8 Crave (6) 9 Type of song (6) 14 Yearly travel (6,4) 17 Indifferent (colloq.) (3,2,4) 18 In a very happy manner (8) 20 See 30ac 21 English 1ac (6) 22 Italian 1ac (6) 24 English 1ac (5) 26 Alluring (4)

(8)

20 See 30ac 21 Naked blonde working 1ac (6) 22 Bespoke tailor 1ac (6) 24 He pulls 1ac (5) 26 Hot without parks in Sydney’s outskirts (4)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

6 1 2 8 3 4 7 9 5

7 3 9 2 5 6 1 4 8

4 5 8 1 7 9 3 6 2

3 8 1 4 9 5 6 2 7

2 7 5 6 8 1 9 3 4

9 4 6 3 2 7 5 8 1

1 9 3 7 4 8 2 5 6

5 6 4 9 1 2 8 7 3

8 2 7 5 6 3 4 1 9

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Henry Hyena Tuner Lunar Haunt 6 Lauren Unreal Tehran Hunter Tea urn 7 Neutral Enthral Laurent 8 Lutheran 9 Unearthly

21 MAY 2021

20

45

19

a disciplinary charge (2,6)

30 & 20dn Australian 1ac (6,7)

Click 1976

Les, from Bay City Rollers

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

W

hen Les McKeown, lead singer of the Bay City Rollers, passed away in April, aged 65, hundreds of thousands of people felt the pain.

For the Rollers were astonishingly popular in the 1970s.

Rollermania was every bit as real as Beatlemania. On one day in 1975, when the pride of the tartan were riding high, BBC One organised a Fun Day in Mallory Park, Leicestershire, which included an afternoon performance

by Les (the tallest one, above) and the lads, at a motor track, which had a lake inset, and an island within the lake. Seventy thousand people turned up. Screaming teenage girls ran across the track mid-race and ploughed into the filthy glass-strewn waters to get a closer look at their idols. The day was abandoned when four girls had been hospitalised, and more than 30 treated at the scene.

Proof again that there is no force more powerful on Earth than a horde of hormone-crazed teenage girls.

The music of our youth inscribes itself deeply into the brain, so the obituary TV footage of a young McKeown prompts perfect memories of ‘I Only Wanna Be With You’, ‘Bye Bye Baby’, ‘Give a Little Love’, ‘Remember (Sha-LaLa-La)’, ‘Shang-a-Lang’, ‘Money Honey’ and others. The band is all toothy grins, head-bobbing and hip-shaking.

But behind the smiles was tragedy. “These guys are going to be wrecks when this is all over,” DJ John Peel noted when the band arrived via helicopter on that Fun Day. Within a fortnight McKeown would knock over and kill an elderly woman in his Ford Mustang. A band member was sacked, who then attempted suicide, as perhaps did another, overdosed.

The problem was manager Tam Paton, who introduced his teenage charges to amphetamines. In his memoir, McKeown recalls first meeting Paton. “Now, most people know that it’s part of Scottish tradition to not wear underwear… Yellow stretch flares looked much better without a visible panty line. At the time, I thought I looked the dog’s bollocks. I didnae much care that most people were finding it hard not to look at mine. I didnae know, on stage that night, that one member of the audience in particular was especially drawn to those tight trousers. After the show, Tam Paton came to see me backstage.”

McKeown became an alcoholic, as victims of sexual assault often do. Paton was jailed in 1982 for gross indecency with two teenage boys. McKeown worked through his demons. RIP Les.

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17 APR 2020