The Big Issue Australia #635 – Dr Karl by The Big Issue Australia

Ed.

635 23 APR 2021

16.

CLIMATE ANXIETY

24.

CLAUDIA KARVAN

40.

and CHAR KUEY TEOW

NO CASH? NO WORRIES!

Some Big Issue vendors now offer contactless payments.

NATIONAL OFFICE

Chief Executive Officer Steven Persson Chief Financial Officer Jon Whitehead Chief Operating Officer (Interim) Chris Enright National Communications and Partnerships Manager Steph Say National Operations Manager Jeremy Urquhart EDITORIAL

Editor Amy Hetherington Deputy Editor Melissa Fulton Contributing Editor Michael Epis Contributing Editor Anastasia Safioleas Editorial Coordinator Lorraine Pink Art Direction & Design GOZER (gozer.com.au)

ENQUIRIES

WANT TO BECOME A VENDOR?

Advertising Simone Busija (03) 9663 4533 sbusija@bigissue.org.au Subscriptions (03) 9663 4533 subscribe@bigissue.org.au Editorial (03) 9663 4522 editorial@bigissue.org.au GPO Box 4911 Melbourne Vic 3001 thebigissue.org.au © 2021 Big Issue In Australia Ltd All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. PRINTER

Printgraphics Pty Ltd 14 Hardner Road Mount Waverley Vic 3149 PUBLISHED BY

Big Issue In Australia Ltd (ABN 61 071 598 439) 227 Collins Street Melbourne Vic 3000

PRINCIPAL PARTNERS

Contact the vendor support team in your state. ACT (02) 6181 2801 Supported by Woden Community Service NSW (02) 8332 7200 Chris Campbell NSW, Qld + ACT Operations Manager Qld (07) 3221 3513 Chris Campbell NSW, Qld + ACT Operations Manager SA (08) 8359 3450 Matthew Stedman SA + NT Operations Manager Vic (03) 9602 7600 Gemma Pidutti Vic + Tas Operations Manager WA (08) 9225 7792 Andrew Joske WA Operations Manager

CONTRIBUTORS

MAJOR PARTNERS

Allens Linklaters, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Clayton Utz, Fluor Australia, Government of New South Wales, Government of Western Australia, Herbert Smith Freehills, Macquarie Group, MinterEllison, NAB, Newmont Australia, PwC, Qantas, Realestate.com.au, William Buck MARKETING/MEDIA PARTNERS

Film Editor Annabel Brady-Brown

C2, Carat & Aegis Media, Chocolate Studios, Macquarie Dictionary, Res Publica, Roy Morgan, Town Square

Small Screens Editor Aimee Knight

DISTRIBUTION AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Music Editor Isabella Trimboli

The Big Issue is grateful for all assistance received from our distribution and community partners. A full list of these partners can be found at thebigissue.org.au.

Books Editor Thuy On Cartoonist Andrew Weldon

HELLO@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

@BIGISSUEAUSTRALIA

THE BIG ISSUE AUSTRALIA

@THEBIGISSUE

Can’t access a vendor easily? Become a subscriber! Every Big Issue subscription helps employ women experiencing homelessness and disadvantage through our Women’s Subscription Enterprise. To subscribe THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU or email SUBSCRIBE@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue is a proud member of the INSP, which incorporates 110 street publications like The Big Issue in 35 countries.

Contents

EDITION

635

24 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

I Was Pretty Bookish... Claudia Karvan talks reading Graham Greene novels as a teenager on set, growing up in a Kings Cross nightclub and how it takes two to tango.

30 MUSIC

Roar Talent

12.

We CAN Win the War Against Climate Change!

Hospitalised with COVID, Jaguar Jonze kept on writing, finishing off her new EP Antihero – and releasing virtual colouring books.

by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

Dr Karl explores the science of climate change and delivers some hopeful news – it’s not too late to turn things around and save the planet.

40 TASTES LIKE HOME

Char Kuey Teow

THE REGULARS

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

26 Ricky 27 Fiona 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews 37 Book Reviews

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

cover and contents photo by Mel Koutchavlis cover illustration by Zac Fay The Jacky Winter Group @zac.fay

Zac Fay is an illustrator based in Melbourne, who loves collaborating with individuals and groups that share a common vision for bold and playful illustrations.

For chef Aim Aris, this Malaysian wok-fried noodle classic conjures family memories of hawker stalls.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

Weather Or Not

t was 1985 when I encountered my first “greenie”. I was eight. And so intrigued that I wrote about it in my diary, in between daily reports that included weekly Brownie meetings, a lost tooth, a birthday party for my Cabbage Patch doll, Cabby “short for cabbage” May, an accident on my BMX and my “first-ever computer lesson” at Gladstone Park Primary. “We saw greenies,” I wrote. That was it. Diaries of eight-year-olds tend to be listicles with little in the way of analysis. But the memory still looms large. We’d recently moved with Mum from the bush to the big smoke, my brother and I spending every second weekend back in Gippsland with Dad. We were fishing or hiking or simply hanging in the wilderness, when a small group of smiling people came walking out between the trees, wearing broad‑brimmed hats with mosquito nets and lots of khaki. “Bloody greenies!” Dad

mumbled after they’d walked past. It’s tricky to unpack his response all these years later – perhaps he was thinking of mates who worked locally in logging, at the paper mill and the coal‑fired power stations – but his reaction had me curious for more. Who were these people? We’d learned about the environment at school, about recycling, pollution, solar energy and wildlife conservation. It was the same year the hole in the ozone layer was first reported. A few years earlier, in 1981, a young Dr Karl Kruszelnicki filed his first report on climate change for Triple J. By 1990, climate scientists agreed humans were affecting the planet through greenhouse gas emissions. Now, 40 years after his first report, Dr Karl has written a book on climate change. Here, he tells us it’s not too late; there’s still time to stop global warming. After all, 97 per cent of the world’s population (including my dad, he’d like you to know) believe in the science of climate change. We all know what’s at stake.

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

I used to be a pretty big reader but the last two years were difficult as I was caring for my terminally ill mother. I got out of the habit and stuck with small things to read – my Big Issue subscription was perfect for that. But now I have wanted to start reading books again, so I have been looking back at the past book reviews of the magazines I have kept to guide me on good things to read. The book reviews have been great and have directed me to some wonderful books. Thank you, reviewers! I am very grateful for them and the magazine. KATHY LAWSON PERTH I WA

I have just had the pleasure of buying The Big Issue from Brian who is featured in Streetsheet [Ed#624] today. Congratulations to him and to all vendors. I enjoy the chats and the smiles. ANNE PARNIS GLENELG I SA

I wanted to pass on that I’ve always enjoyed Ricky French’s column. Highlight of the read. Particularly loved the one ages ago about his car and the western suburbs. Haha! MICHAEL MCMANUS VIA INSTAGRAM

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work. • The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 21 locations around the country. • The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales. • The Big Issue Education workshops provide school, tertiary and corporate groups with insights into homelessness and disadvantage, and provide work opportunities for people experiencing marginalisation. CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Kathy, Anne and Michael each win a double pass to see Six Minutes to Midnight, starring Eddie Izzard and Judi Dench. Read our review on p34. 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 Anastasia Safioleas photo by James Braund

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

23 APR 2021

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT CARLISLE STREET, BALACLAVA, MELBOURNE

Greg

I was born in Elwood in Melbourne – and I’m still there. I’m living with a lady friend who I’ve known for 40 years now. We’re very compatible. So close. But we’re not married, just good friends. Her son is at my place as well – I’m his godfather. About 10 years ago, a friend said to me, “I’ve got something to tell you, Greg. You’ve been adopted.” I found it hard to believe until we found out about it at Births, Deaths and Marriages. They’ve got my birth mum’s name and my real name – I was named Greg by my adopted parents. They had passed on when I found out. It was a big shock. I could have brothers and sisters, who knows? I will eventually look for them, when I’m ready. I was bullied at school. And I got bashed by a teacher…yeah, I had a bad time at school. I had a couple of nice teachers to start with, and then this teacher came in. He was no good. He even had a fight with another teacher. Then I went to a special school when I was 13 or 14. I found it a lot easier there. I should’ve gone there in the first place. The specialist school got me my first job when I was 15. I made door frames for seven months until I hit myself on the head with a big blade. It put me off. I’ve worked at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, a bottle yard and at a car wash. You’re not going to believe this, but I had said if I’m going to see that teacher again, I’m going to hit him. I ended up washing his car, would you believe?! But I’ve never hit anyone… I love music. I saw all the bands you could think of in the 60s and 70s: Paul McCartney, John Denver, Suzi Quatro, the Doobie Brothers, the Hollies, the Bee Gees, Manfred Mann, the Kinks. I play music but I don’t play guitar much now. My first band was called Crystal Key. We were a three piece, this is in the early 70s, and we played a few gigs at pubs and places like that. We played all this stuff that was around at the time – Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks. My lady friend got me interested in selling The Big Issue, seven years ago. She thought it would be good for me to be doing something – I hadn’t had a job for quite a few years before that. I’ve met so many lovely people selling The Big Issue. Including celebrities. I’ve met Ken James from Skippy, Magda Szubanski, Judith Lucy, the guitarist from Spiderbait. I have so many regulars, I can talk for hours with them. They are very lovely people. It’s a very good spot in Melbourne. One of the best. I’m 66 and I feel better in my sixties than I did in my twenties. I’m on medication for anxiety and panic attacks. My first panic attack was when I was 12. It was pretty serious. But the medication stops that. It helps a lot. The best thing about selling The Big Issue is the enjoyment I get out of selling, and the money. It goes towards bills and stuff for the house. Thanks to all my customers for buying the magazine. I enjoy the job very much. It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

VENDOR SPOTLIGHT

DEBBIE

Good Things A good thing to do, in my point of view, should be to take it easy Don’t fuss or fight or tease me And for something new to eat or drink Do as long as it’s a good thing Listen to it, dance and sing Poetry that rhymes

The Wings of Eagles

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

do art all the time. I started when I was a young girl. I just love all kinds of art – craft, pottery, embroidery, even silk painting. Art is like therapy; it takes you to another place. And when someone praises you...it makes me emotional! I also like writing poems and stories. I wrote a poem about eagles, then I thought I’d do some drawings of eagles. I decided to paint the eagle and write the poem across it. The eagle is a protector. It protects its children and is strong, just like us mothers. We protect our young and we look out for them. I do that for my daughter even though she’s in care. I still protect her and make sure she is safe and well. It’s what a mother does. It’s a bit hard to read the poem in the photo, so here it is: Eagle Spirit of the Sky Eagles they fly high in the sky Eagles they fly looking for food for their young They fly, protect, they are the spirit of the sky They are strong birds Protect our young, we find food We like our freedom, just like the eagle Spirit of the sky DEBBIE ZUMA CAFFE & ADELAIDE CENTRAL MARKET I ADELAIDE

I’m telling you my poems rhyme They do I’m writing books, peek inside and take a look Insight inspires what I write If I can’t sleep, just write all night STEPHEN M CENTRAL STATION, CREEK ST I BRISBANE

Familiar Faces

Honest to Goodness

Life has changed a lot in this last year. Coronavirus has meant nearly everything has changed in some way. I hated it when it stopped us working. I was miserable! Going back to work was such a relief. It made me feel happy to be back at work. The best part of this, for me, was to see familiar faces again. FRED BUPA DENTAL , GRENFELL ST I ADELAIDE

Thanks heaps to the awesome person (they might be a customer!) who found my Transperth SmartRider and handed it in to the information kiosk. I didn’t even know I’d lost it, and 20 minutes later I had it back. I want to thank them for the honesty and for handing it in to the right place. It’s so good to know there are good people out there. It gives me hope.

A New Friend

STACEY ROYAL PERTH HOSPITAL & VICTORIA PARK PO I PERTH

While on pitch one day I had a gentleman approach me – he came up to me and waved at me and pointed at his ears. I figured out he was deaf. That first interaction was a bit awkward, but over the next few months we communicated using hand gestures. Even though our disabilities are not the same, I can relate to him. A few months after meeting this gentleman I had a whiteboard on pitch, so I offered him the whiteboard and a marker and we were able to have a conversation. I found out the gentleman’s name is Rex. We now always have a conversation, whether it be with hand gestures or with the whiteboard.

A Little Patience It was a very emotional moment when we were told we had to stop working this time last year. I remember the day clearly. I thought this might be the end of the magazine and my time as a Big Issue vendor. The pandemic has seen us in South Australia have two lockdowns

– I like to think of this as “long service leave”. It was really strange coming back from both lockdowns. The last 12 months have been a time of great uncertainty. Not just for me, but for most of the people I talk to. I find people don’t want to hang for a chat as much, or for as long. This is not out of rudeness, but this is one example of how physical distancing has impacted our social interactions and sales. I have found we have to be more patient as there are days with fewer sales, sadly. More people are using the Tap and Go, so that’s a plus. I had wanted to travel this year. I had been planning it for a while, so it was very disappointing when COVID hit. I wanted to go back to see the UK, where I grew up. We are lucky here in Australia and I am thankful for this. VERNON STIRLING & MOUNT BARKER FARMERS’ MARKET I ADELAIDE

LIN DA’S GOT MA IL

GRACE KAMBAH SHOPS I CANBERRA

MICHAEL PRAHRAN MARKETS I MELBOURNE

Lovely People It really touches me that people have gone to the effort of sending me a postcard. I was having a really hard time with the lockdown and being unable to work, but it’s lovely to know people care. Being back selling The Big Issue has been really great. Thanks to the people who appreciate what I do and thank you to The Big Issue as well! LINDA I BALLARAT

23 APR 2021

Receiving postcards from customers really makes me feel appreciated. I feel a lot of gratitude and respect for the people that have taken the time to send these in. I’m humbled that so many people would write in and that the other vendors also are receiving these notes. It has taken many years of experience to be so confident out on pitch and it’s lovely to have that acknowledged. It feels good that customers want to participate in writing the postcards – I think it’s a great idea!

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

Winning Post

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

Gesticulating. I love that word. What are you saying about my gesticles?

Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard, gives an opinion on vaccine passports. Many American businesses, universities and institutions are moving towards insisting on proof of vaccination before a person can be served. THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

“I’m only dolled up like this because I just did the photoshoot. And my fucking phone, the facial recognition thing wouldn’t recognise me. It was like, ‘Where’s the hag who usually opens the phone? Who’s this person?’ I often feel insulted by my own phone, but that was legendary.” Actor Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting) on being rejected by her smart-arse phone. THE GUARDIAN I UK

Journalist Louis Theroux on being all arms and legs and not being able to sit still when the tables are turned and he’s being interviewed. THE GUARDIAN I UK

“Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite high that we may make contact with an alien civilisation. There are some colleagues of mine that believe we should reach out to them. I think that’s a terrible idea.” String theorist and author Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City College New York, on his worry aliens are less ET and more, well, Aliens.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“It’s an amazing win-win situation. It takes tropical forest hundreds of years to grow back. To have [such] tall trees in only two years is really spectacular.” Rebecca Cole, ecologist from the University of Hawaii, on an experiment that found caffeine in coffee pulp – when laid over cleared

land – helped jolt a rainforest back to life four times faster. Trees are just like us! NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC I US

“It’s so easy to accept the argument that psychosis is a fundamentally human thing and say, ‘Forget about mice.’ But right now, we’re failing people with serious psychiatric conditions. The prognosis for psychotic patients has not substantially improved over the past decades.” Adam Kepecs, professor in neuroscience and psychiatry at Washington University, urging research into the human mind be carried out on mice, in order to better understand it – especially its failings. SCIENCE DAILY I US

“On the face of things, requiring proof of vaccination seems a lot like, ‘No shoes, no shirt, no service.’”

“Because of ping-pong diplomacy we changed the world order, and the people of China and the United States started friendly exchanges.” Chinese ping-pong champion Yao Zhenxu, who on 10 April 1971, competed against a US ping-pong team in China – the first Americans to officially enter the country since it went Communist in 1949. TAIPEI TIMES I TW

“Before the pandemic, we forgot that people are people first.” Monica Kang, founder of workplaceculture firm InnovatorsBox, on the blurring of the work/home boundaries during COVID lockdowns prompting employers to pay more attention to the wellbeing of their staff. THE ECONOMIST I US

“Not sure our Founding Fathers ever envisioned a six-four, bald, tattooed, half-Black, halfSamoan, tequila-drinking, pickup truck‑driving, fanny pack-wearing guy joining their club – but if it ever happens it’d be my honour to serve the people.”

20 Questions by Rachael Wallace

01 Where was Prince Philip born? 02 Who bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue

Poles for $1.3 million in 1973? 03 If a friend asked you to give them

the dead horse for their dog’s eye, what would they be asking you for? 04 What animals featured in the

novel Watership Down? 05 Who was named Player of the

Series in the 2020 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup? 06 What was Rihanna’s 2005 debut

studio album called? 07 What crime was Al Capone

convicted of in 1931? 08 Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are

the creations of which Australian author? 09 Which 1957 song was investigated by

the FBI for allegedly obscene lyrics?

“In line with the United States and other allies and partners, the last remaining Australian troops will depart Afghanistan in September 2021.” Prime Minister Scott Morrison, announcing the withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan, after two decades of war.

CNBC I US

Museum? 11 What is the collective noun for

platypuses? 12 Which city has the world’s largest

tram network? 13 How many times was Wallis

Simpson married? 14 True or false? Linda Burney was the

first Indigenous woman elected to the House of Representatives. 15 “Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to

be a bumpy night,” is a quote from which movie? 16 What does HTTP stand for at the

“Oh, that absolutely was not my lowest moment.” Moby, the musician, on the time he got so drunk that he missed his mother’s funeral.

“I ask my friends on the other side of the aisle, do not cancel us tonight. Do not ignore the pain, the history and the reasonableness of this commission.” Texan Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, on moving forward with a bill first introduced into the US House of Representatives in 1989, which would establish a committee to investigate ways of recompensing the descendants of slaves shipped to the United States between 1619 and 1865.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

NPR I US

NINE I AU

10 Where in the world is the Pergamon

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

start of a website address? 17 Which was the first country to build

a bridge for the sole use of squirrels trying to cross a motorway? 18 What is the common name for the

part of the body called the hallux? 19 The television series Family Guy

was created by who? 20 How many official languages does

Zimbabwe have: a) 3, b) 10, c) 16, or d) 18? 23 APR 2021

TWITTER

“Beyond the loss of tens of billions of dollars, the human consequences of the crime were almost incalculable.” Richard C Breeden, who oversaw the fund that returned money to those who were defrauded of billions by Bernie Madoff, on the death of the mastermind of the biggest investment fraud in US history. Madoff has died in jail of natural causes, aged 82.

ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

Wrestler-turnedactor Dwayne “The “Do you have any Rock” Johnson toast that’s less only wants to give aggressive than the people what sourdough?” they want: a poll Overheard by Fiona reported 46 per in Ascot Vale, Vic. cent of respondents would support his run for US President. EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Amanda Johnson

told my sister that my recent online purchases suggested I had entered an early midlife crisis. She kindly held the phone away from her mouth as she erupted into laughter. Composing herself, she informed me there was nothing early about it – I am midlife. I’m embarrassed I didn’t know it, although, in my defence, it’s not just my age that has me purchasing River Phoenix stickers and Degrassi Junior High pencils, it wasn’t even Melbourne’s Stage 4 lockdown. There is a force that has the power to reach inside and touch my emotional sensors in a way that I thought only watching Dead Poets Society at 35,000 feet could do – that force is Coles Radio. Unlike the humiliating memories that infiltrate my brain at three in the morning after I’ve drunk too much, nostalgia seems loving and forgiving of my flaws. From the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), I enjoy returning to my past as I mindlessly scan the biscuit shelves. Last year, emotions were amplified because of lockdown. I know this because I searched for real estate on Norfolk Island, brainstormed my perfect roller derby name (despite never having played the sport) and emailed an old boyfriend. I also glugged milk from the carton – not to combat osteoporosis (though it can’t be too far away), but to prompt a grocery shop, simply because I needed to feel. And sometimes, Coles Radio just gets me. I amble through supermarket aisles as The Waifs’ ‘Take It In’ plays – and memories of summer and my non-airconditioned car warm my body. Suddenly, I am smoking. I have P-plates. I am desperate to be cool. I am dancing in my first northside rental and subscribing to the Astor Theatre mailing list, not because I will ever cross the Yarra to go to the movies, but because I will cover the back of my toilet door in posters to signal to visitors that I am cool. My younger self makes me both cringe and smile and I want to find a young person to be supportive of, and jealous of too.

Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Cecelia’ plays. I unintentionally block fellow shoppers from reaching the toothpaste when I involuntarily stop moving and close my eyes. Despite its original release date being 11 years before my birth, the song transports me to my sometimes magical, sometimes hurtful, early twenties. I long for that time, but wish I’d been better at it. Despite my toilet door, I was never a cool girl. There was just one brief period in the early 2000s when I was confused for one. Drunk on this case of mistaken identity, I was reckless with a boy’s heart. He called me Cecelia because after he got up to wash his face, he came back to bed, and someone had taken his place. In the supermarket my cheeks grow red with guilt. But it dissipates when I realise he’s a grown-up now too. Middle-aged even. His heart wasn’t broken by a cool girl – some idiot was just careless once. I imagine us bumping into each other in the medicine aisle: me with my messy mum-bun and double pram, him with a grey-flecked stubbly beard. I’d reach for the giant tub of Metamucil and smile as if to say, see, not so cool – not then, not now. I am pulled from my reverie by Whitney Houston – ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ plays just as I wander past a freezer full of Viennetta ice cream and I look around as if I’ll find whoever constructed this magical 80s dream. I am shocked that the dessert – the height of sophistication for suburban families in the 80s – still exists. I have the urge to eat kabana and dance in a white singlet. Recently I read that millennials don’t find the love gen Xers have for the 90s endearing. I assumed it was a typo. I hear Pulp’s ‘Common People’ and remember raiding my dad’s wardrobe for flannelette shirts – I leap into the 90s. Nostos and algos. I park my double pram near the dishwashing liquid and google Jarvis Cocker. Discovering his podcast and pining for his voice in my ears once again, I subscribe immediately. And although I am now free to visit more than four destinations post-lockdown, I find myself returning to the comfort and bittersweet wistfulness induced by supermarket radio. Amanda Johnson is a Melbourne-based writer, social worker and community services teacher. Her published essays, profiles and short stories are accessible via amandajohnson.com.au.

The bittersweet symphony of the Weet-Bix aisle has Amanda Johnson yearning for her glory days – and a Viennetta dessert.

23 APR 2021

Dancing By My Shelf

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

PHOTO BY STEVE BACCON/HARPER COLLINS

Dr Karl just loves science to pieces – because it makes our world a better place (clean drinking water, vaccines, etc).

’ve been talking about the Greenhouse Effect for 40 years now. And science has known about it for a lot longer than that. It’s been called the Greenhouse Effect because certain gases – greenhouse gases – work a bit like the glass in a greenhouse. They let the incoming heat from the Sun pass through and hit the Earth’s surface – in other words, they’re transparent to heat from the Sun. But they’re not transparent to outgoing heat from the surface of the planet. So greenhouse gases trap extra heat in the atmosphere – which then warms up. There are different greenhouse gases, and they all absorb different levels of heat. In 2019, the different gases absorbed the following percentages of the total heat trapped:

66%

E CA RB ON DIOXID

(CO2, from burning, agriculture, etc)

16% ME TH AN E

(CH4, from escaping natural gas, agriculture, etc)

12%

CHLORO FLU ORO CAR BON

(from air conditioning, refrigeration, etc) and other gases

NITRO US OXIDE

(N2O, from agriculture, industry)

Now, I don’t want to demonise poor old carbon. This lovely little atom is innocent – it’s built into every single organic chemical and is fundamental to life. It’s what we currently do with carbon that’s the problem. The good news is we can both stop and even reverse climate change. So why haven’t we? The answer is, a massive disinformation campaign by Big Fossil Fuel. Can we fix and reverse it quickly? Yes, remarkably easily.

Whose Carbon Footprint? Now, if you’ve been following the science of climate change, you’ll have come across the term “carbon footprint”. This refers to the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions created by an individual – or product, event, service organisation or country. What you probably don’t know is that the Big Fossil Fuel company BP popularised the term back around 2005. It was a cunning marketing ploy to shift responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from Big Fossil Fuel companies to individuals. The hidden backstory is that the majority of an individual’s carbon footprint is set up by the society they live in. Sure, it’s good for everybody (citizens, companies and governments) to reduce their emissions as much as possible. It’s a feel-good thing that resonates with all branches of society. Unfortunately, however, the actions of individuals can reduce global emissions only slightly. In reality, making significant reductions depends on a major shift at the level of industry

3.3

Installing a smallish 3-kW solar power plant on your roof (in a region with TO NN ES 150-250 days of sunshine each year) saves about 3.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide compared to electricity generated by burning fossil fuels. Going without a car saves 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

.75

TO N N E S

2.5

TON NES

Shifting to an entirely plant-based diet will save about 0.75 tonnes per year.

Washing your clothes in cold water and drying them on a clothesline will each save about 0.25 tonnes per year.

.25

TO NN ES

90 Companies Generate Two‑Thirds of Global Emissions Two-thirds of the world’s carbon dioxide and methane emissions are generated by just 90 major industrial carbon producers. Almost certainly, never before in human history have so few been responsible for so much.

23 APR 2021

by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

and government to move away from emitting greenhouse gases. Per person, the global average carbon footprint is about 5 tonnes. Mind you, for countries such as Australia and the USA, it’s up at about 20-25 tonnes per person – so that means there are vast numbers of people around the world who emit a lot less. (As an aside, if you include all the fossil fuels that Australia exports around the world, our carbon footprint rises to about 70 tonnes per person. Those exports bring Australia’s emissions to about 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, or about 3.6 per cent of global annual emissions. And remember, we’re only 0.3 per cent of the world’s population.) In fact, almost 50 per cent of global greenhouse emissions come from just 10 per cent of the people – the wealthiest 10 per cent. Furthermore, the richest one per cent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as many carbon emissions as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorer half of humanity. So how much can one Australian do? Well, the biggest difference is having one fewer child in the family. Everything else has a much smaller impact:

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has some great news: there’s still time! We can stop and even reverse the Greenhouse Effect.

Obviously, private citizens and responsible corporations can’t make all the changes on their own. Like the Montreal Protocol that successfully banned CFCs, there has to be government action, and different governments will have to work together. But that doesn’t have to take decades. Governments can act quickly if they wish. They’ve certainly done it before. Take the US government and Pearl Harbor, for instance. On 7 December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and, suddenly, the USA and Japan were at war. Until that point, the USA had been neutral, and not a combatant in World War II. Immediately, the USA moved to a “war footing”. Within one month of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it ordered the entire American car industry to stop making civilian vehicles and switch over to military production. Up until that time, the US aircraft industry had produced about 3000 planes in total. But during the following four years, US car manufacturers built about 300,000 planes. This gave them an overwhelming technological advantage. For the Americans, the war was won as much by the machine shop as by the machine gun. As an example of what we humans can do when we put our minds to it, take the American heavy bomber – the B-24 Liberator. This is a huge plane (20 metres by 34 metres) weighing up to 30 tonnes and with a crew capacity of 11. Compared to a car, which had 15,000 separate components, the B-24 had some 500,000 separate components, mostly of high-tech materials. Furthermore, every component had to be manufactured, then assembled

Let’s lower our personal carbon footprints. But we need to recognise that “us” means all of us – individuals, governments and, yes, really big companies.

and fitted in place – to much tighter tolerances than in an automobile. Even so, just one Ford factory alone (Willow Run in Michigan) could pump out these highly complex machines at the rate of not one per month – but one per hour!

How Did They Do That? Step 1: Ford got a few B-24s and carefully broke them down into their 500,000 separate components. Then, more than 200 people spent the best part of a year drafting some 30,000 blueprints – which took up enough space to fill two shipping containers. Step 2: From scratch and on virgin ground, Ford built the largest single‑storey building in the world. It was about a kilometre long and about one‑third of a kilometre across. Step 3: Ford gathered together a huge workforce. More than 40,000 people were involved, including people with dwarfism who had been specially selected for their shorter size, so they could crawl inside certain parts of the plane where a taller person could not. Suddenly, workforce minorities (the short-statured, women and many ethnic groups) were able to get not just skilled work, but also get the same full wage as their white male colleagues. This is what being on a war footing means – the ability to pump out one B-24 Liberator heavy bomber per hour in response to an urgent need.

Shift Climate Change Into Reverse If we were to go on a war(like) footing, we could easily stop, and then reverse, climate change, returning greenhouse gas levels to what they were in the mid‑ to late-20th century. Prevention is better than the cure, however, so the sooner we start, the better and cheaper it will be. Change is always a little messy. But the current and future dangers and costs from climate change are truly horrendous. We have to change. The transitions may be messy – but that will be only for a short time, and the long-term results will be so much better.

EXTRACT FROM DR KARL’S LITTLE BOOK OF CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE ($14.99), PUBLISHED BY ABC BOOKS.

23 APR 2021

What Can We Do?

Let’s zoom in on these companies. Just 20 of them are directly linked to more than one-third of all modern-era greenhouse gas emissions. As Michael Mann, the climate scientist who came up with the famous “Hockey Stick Curve” of Global Warming, said: “The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven-and-a-half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen big companies can continue to make record profits.” The Big Fossil Fuel companies have successfully slowed the transition from fossil fuel to renewables. They have done this for the last three decades. Fossil fuels are the major source of global warming. And yet, we citizens have to live in a world still mostly powered by fossil fuels. According to Dr Benjamin Franta, a physicist who also researches law and the history of science at Stanford Law School, the BP carbon footprint campaign was “one of the most successful, deceptive ‘public relations’ campaigns ever”. So yes, let’s lower our personal carbon footprints. But we need to recognise that “us” means all of us – individuals, governments and, yes, really big companies. And perhaps the biggest change we individuals can make is to switch to a superannuation fund that doesn’t invest in fossil fuel companies. The other thing we can change is who we vote for. With the hole in the ozone layer, as a global community we took quick and decisive action. In 1973, scientists discovered that CFCs could damage the ozone layer. Those scientists won a Nobel Prize. In 1985, data confirmed that ozone depletion was actually happening. Just two years later, in 1987, CFCs were banned. With climate change, in about 1990, scientists confirmed that humans were causing it. Three decades later, we’re still waiting for action from governments and businesses.

The Fire Inside We know fires and floods are devastating – they also have long-term effects on our mental health, which are only now being understood, as are climate grief and anxiety. by Natasha Moldrich

Natasha Moldrich is a freelance writer with a special interest in the community impacts of climate change.

eople went cold last winter – because of the previous summer’s bushfires. “There were many people last year who couldn’t put their woodfires on because they couldn’t stand the smell of the smoke,” says farmer Louise Freckelton, from the tiny NSW town Mount Adrah, which was overcome by the Black Summer bushfires. Fifteen months on from those devastating fires, whose extraordinary intensity speaks to the havoc of super weather events brought on by climate change, many are experiencing post-traumatic stress or recognising its signs – fear, anger and suicidal thoughts. Lifeline continues to receive around 400 calls a day to their Bushfire Recovery Helpline. Freckelton will never forget 28 December 2019 when the Dunns Road fire started, ignited by a lightning strike in nearby

There were many people last year who couldn’t put their woodfires on because they couldn’t stand the smell of the smoke. LOUISE FRECKELTON

pine forests. Arriving at the tail end of a severe three-year drought, the onset of the month‑long blaze was a low blow to her and the local Snowy Valley farming communities. “In one night winds pushed it over 100 kilometres and burned most of the properties of people I know,” she says. Freckelton and her partner David Bray escaped that fire – but weren’t so lucky less than two weeks later, when a combination of 42-degree heat and 60kmp/h winds sent fires ripping through their property. “All our conservation areas and half our grazing pastures burned,” she recalls, her voice breaking with emotion. Over a year later, Freckelton says she’s feeling “pretty good” but confesses going through “huge periods of climate grief”. And it began way before the bushfires.

LIFELINE BUSHFIRE RECOVERY: 13 HELP (13 43 57).

23 APR 2021

Rachel Bowes, Head of Crisis Services and Quality at Lifeline Australia agrees that more people are suffering increasing anxiety from natural disasters linked to climate change, including various mental and psychological symptoms post floods, droughts and bushfires. “It’s been particularly noticeable to us, not only with the bushfires over a year ago but also the two lots of Queensland floods within the last three years,” she says. Bowes is convinced it’s the long-term impact of the disaster’s consequences that have most effect on people’s mental health, such as loss of a home or a livelihood – even if those things are replaced. “These are not events where people have an immediate response and then it goes back to normal. We know people affected now are going to be affected several years ahead.” Catastrophic events are one thing, but the lingering anxiety and even grief brought on by the knowledge of climate change – and the feelings of powerlessness to do much about it – are just as real, particularly among children and young people. Bowes confirms they’ve had a lot of young people make contact with Lifeline over the past year or so, more than usual. “People don’t have any security of how life or the world is going to be in five or 10 years because they see these changes happening. They feel very powerless and out of control. Those two things together are a really difficult combination, and can lead to them feeling quite hopeless,” Bowes says. “Thoughts in our heads can spiral or we think the worst. We internalise them and they don’t resolve. If you talk with someone you trust, then things can shift for you. Find that person who will not overreact, will keep your confidence, and who is not a big advice-giver but just gives you gentle prompts.” Dr Burke points out that taking action – any action, like leaving the car at home, walking to the shops, ringing your local politician – can help manage that anxiety. Louise Freckelton says one of the ways she copes with her climate grief is by staying focused on her property. “The only thing I have any control over is what we do on the property. Even in an environment of climate change I can start to think about planting trees that are more drought tolerant than the ones we have. I can maintain the biodiversity on my own farm.” As Bowes reminds us, “Flood waters recede and the fires are eventually put out and communities gradually rebuild. The personal impacts on people are not always seen but go on for a lot longer.”

illustration by Col McElwaine

“Seeing the country dry out so badly and the three years of drought…the fires just made it more in‑your-face really,” she says. The psychological effects of climate change have long been in focus for Dr Susie Burke, psychologist, climate-change campaigner and author of the Climate Change Empowerment Handbook. “One thing we know about climate change is it increases the intensity and frequency of weather disasters and we’re very vulnerable to that,” she says. Citing the recent double cyclones threatening WA’s coast near Geraldton, Dr Burke says, “We’re seeing different types of extreme weather conditions and we keep getting these unprecedented weather patterns that we’re simply not prepared for.” If you want proof, you only need to read the Bureau of Meteorology’s Special Climate Statements, which show an ever-growing list of significant weather and climate events “unusual in the context of the climatology of the affected region”. Dr Burke cites anecdotal evidence that suggests there are different types of psychosocial and mental health impacts associated with climate change, including depression, post‑traumatic stress disorder and complicated grief. “Psychosocial impacts can have a huge effect on quality of life,” she says. Writer Imogen Kars grew up in Queensland’s tropical Mission Beach, so is no stranger to heat, floods and cyclones. “A big part of my life up north was dealing with weather events. I have memories of my parents driving through high floodwaters because there was no other option to get home. But the most impactful experiences were the two major cyclones, Larry and Yasi,” she says. “Yasi was definitely the worst. I’m even getting a little bit shaky thinking of it. But I don’t mind talking about it. When you share an experience, it becomes less heavy.” Kars remembers on the night of the cyclone she and her younger sister sleeping in their parents’ room when suddenly a huge tree crashed in, narrowly missing them. It was one of many terrifying moments over the next 12 hours. Cyclone Yasi happened a decade ago; only in the last few years has Kars realised how it had affected her psychologically. “Now whenever there’s a cyclone warning, I feel very anxious. I’ve noticed a lot of young people in the area reacting the same way. We collectively realised we each have a lot of trauma from these cyclones,” she says. Similarly, a 2020 UK study by the Environment Agency that found people who experience extreme weather events are 50 per cent more likely to suffer from stress and depression for at least two years afterwards.

t’s 1989 and I’m cycling slowly across a bridge spanning an eight-lane freeway, on my way to save the planet. I’ve spent the last three years campaigning against ozone depletion and global warming for the Australian Conservation Foundation, trying to wrap my un-mathematical brain around the delicate sciences of climatology and oceanography. I’ve learned things about the workings of the circumpolar vortex and the potential loss of island nations I would rather not know. The world has become a different place, full of institutional roadblocks and oblivious over-consuming humans. I’m not sure how to turn those delicate sciences into powerful stories that will nudge people into action. At least one of my campaigning mates has given up on the idea of having children. When he turned 30, he had a vasectomy. “Adding to the population will only make things worse,” he told me. “Why create people you love and condemn them to an uncertain future on an overheating planet?” But I still want a child. Not right now – I’m too young, too busy – but later, definitely. And my child will help to save the planet, just like me. Well, she’ll try. Cycling against the wind I turn my head to the left and see long lines of vehicles stretching eastward to the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The cars are not moving. They’re idling, waiting for the peak-hour crush to dissipate, spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I brake to a standstill on the side of the bridge, stare at the ribbons of cars stretching to the horizon, and it overtakes me at last, the dread I’ve been pushing down for the last three years. It rises from the pit of my gut to my throat and now I’m whimpering. Standing astride a stationary bicycle above the freeway, fingers white‑knuckled on the handlebars, I’m crying, because now I know. I can’t do it. The end of the world is nigh, and it’s my fault because I haven’t done enough, and I can never do enough. I’m too young and too tired and too afraid of the future. I swivel the bike around, scrape away the tears and ride home again as fast as my legs can manage. Three decades later a Swedish schoolgirl is addressing a United Nations summit in New York about climate change. Or rather, climate inaction. The world is still getting warmer and the adults in charge are still dragging their feet. Greta Thunberg is snarling. She’s

lecturing the grown-ups about tipping points, feedback loops, climate justice, betrayal and forgiveness. She wants to cry – I can hear it in her throat – but she won’t. She is a genie released and she is trying to magic up some shame, before it’s too late. I do the maths. She is exactly the age my daughter would have been. And I’m one of the grown-ups she’s lecturing. It’s 2019 and people are debating why fewer Australian women are having children. The Bureau of Statistics reports that the birth rate in the last couple of years hasn’t been this low since the turn of the century. A newspaper opinion writer claims that childless women are “opting for fur-babies” because they’re “scared of lifelong responsibility”. I look up from the newsprint and watch the small black dog chewing on a sock at the end of my bed. Sometimes I call her “baby”, it’s true. But when it comes to parenting, she wasn’t my first choice of species. Maybe the women who the opinion writer is denigrating don’t have as much choice as she thinks they do. According to IVF Australia, infertility affects about one in six couples in this country. And if some women are actively choosing not to have children, maybe there are reasons other than selfishness. According to a recent survey by the Australian Conservation Foundation, a third of Australian women under 30 are reconsidering their plans to have children because they believe climate change has created “an unsafe future”. Maybe it’s not freedom from responsibility these women crave, but freedom from guilt. Or from fear. I knew the future could be unsafe three decades ago, when I was campaigning on global warming for the ACF. But I still wanted a child, more than anything. Three decades ago – two decades ago – one decade ago – there was still time to make the world safer. There was still hope. Sometimes I feel only relief that my quest to become a mother was a failure. I’ve condemned no child of mine to the clean-up job my generation is leaving for the next, and the one after that. I try to tell myself I don’t have to care about those future children. I haven’t smelled their hair after a shampoo bath. I haven’t read them a bedtime story. I don’t know what foods they’ll push to the edge of their plates, saving them till last because they taste the best. But the future tugs on me like a child’s hand, reminding me that I’m attached to this planet, these people, even the ones I’ll never meet. Reminding me what’s at stake.

Sian Prior is the author of Shy: A Memoir. Her second memoir will be published in 2022.

The uncertainty of just how climate change will affect the planet makes having a child even more complex, writes Sian Prior.

23 APR 2021

For All the World

RISING SEA LEVELS DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE THREATEN ISLAND NATION TUVALU

by Greg Foyster @gregfoyster

Greg Foyster is an environment journalist and the author of Changing Gears.

FOR MORE, GO TO GALLAGHER-PHOTO.COM.

23 APR 2021

Photographer Sean Gallagher visited the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu and found a community under threat by climate change.

series by Sean Gallagher

The Big Picture

Beneath the Rising Tide

hen he first heard the bubbling water, photographer Sean Gallagher looked around in confusion. There were no streams or waterfalls nearby. It wasn’t raining – the sky was a beautiful, tropical blue. He was taking a portrait of a family in front of their house in the tiny Pacific island nation Tuvalu, but the ocean was about a hundred metres away. So where was the sound coming from? Then he looked down. Water was seeping up from the ground itself. “You could feel it ever‑so‑slowly rising around your feet,” says Gallagher. “The local family saw I was confused, and they told me the king tides were coming.” Located halfway between Hawaii and Australia, Tuvalu is one of the world’s smallest and lowest‑lying countries, with an average elevation of less than two metres. It’s in line to be the first country claimed by rising sea levels. Water expands as it warms, so climate change is making the annual high tides – known as king tides – higher than before. Waves pound the shore and seawater wells up inland, creating sudden lakes that ruin crops and contaminate groundwater. “You were on dry land, but then within half an hour, you could be wading through a few inches of water,” Gallagher explains. “So it was really quite evident that the impacts of both the king tides and sea level rising at the same time were potentially going to have devastating effects for the people who live there. That particular family told me it was making life much more difficult for them and they were considering leaving the island.” Gallagher, an environmental photographer, spent two weeks in Tuvalu, where his drone shots highlight just how tiny the islands are. He contrasts this aerial perspective with revealing portraits of people going about their daily lives. “By combining these different types of images, I hope to help my audience understand both the issue but also how it’s affecting the people in those communities.” People like Nasaleta Setani. Initially she didn’t believe in climate change but became convinced as the weather turned more erratic. She sleeps in a wooden shack close to a lagoon. For a pillow she uses a float buoy. “It shows how deeply connected the people of Tuvalu are to the ocean,” says Gallagher, “which is why the threat of rising sea levels is so poignant.” The burning of fossil fuels is a major source of the greenhouse gases causing climate change – a fact not lost on the Tuvaluan people. Nevertheless, their spirit and determination remains strong. “They love Tuvalu and they’re proud of their homeland. And they want to do everything they can to save it.”

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

WASTE IS COLLECTED IN THIS ONE LOCATION, JUST METRES FROM THE CENTRAL LAGOON

FONGAFALE ISLAND, HOME TO THE CAPITAL FUNAFUTI

NASALETA SETANI WITH HER NEPHEW

SIAOSI FINIKI, A FARMER AMONG HIS COCONUT TREES

23 APR 2021

WHERE THE PACIFIC OCEAN IS MERE METRES FROM THE LAGOON

Letter to My Younger Self

I Was Pretty Bookish… Claudia Karvan on her secret life as a serial hobbyist, her biggest surprise and refusing to look back. by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor

MAIN PHOTO COURTESY STAN; INSET SHOTS COURTESY NETWORK 10, GETTY AND STAN

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

y parents had a nightclub. They ran an establishment in Victoria Street, Potts Point, which is just one street back from the main strip. From six to 16, that’s where I grew up. Life in Kings Cross was very colourful. It never slept. One night, I think it was my 10th birthday, I had balloons out and stuff and a lovely drunk man knocked on our door… I think he thought he could gatecrash this great-looking party. He was wobbling and cross-eyed and he looked around at all these young girls and he said, “Argh, this is a midget’s party!” He stumbled off down the front path. It was pretty funny. I started acting when I was 10 years old. My parents were involved in the film industry so a lot of their friends and colleagues frequented the nightclub, and that’s how I landed acting gigs. I wasn’t actively pursuing them; it was just circumstantial because they needed cast. As a little girl, being an actor wasn’t part of my dream at all, absolutely not. My parents weren’t stage parents. I wanted to be a horse trainer, or a dog breeder. It literally happened by accident. I just had a natural knack for it, so I just kept getting work. That feeling of wanting to be an actor really kicked in when I was 14, and worked with Judy Davis and Gillian Armstrong on High Tide. That’s when I really saw the intellectual engagement and the creative engagement and the quality of the storytelling – I was really committed from that moment on. It was magical! Judy Davis is very unique, special. I was enamoured, really. When you’re working off a talent like that, you don’t act, you just listen and respond – it becomes a symbiotic thing. I was shooting a film called The Big Steal when I was 16, in Melbourne, with Ben Mendelsohn. It still holds up. It’s a beautiful film.

BUMP IS AVAILABLE NOW ON STAN. KARVAN ALSO STARS IN NEW FILM JUNE AGAIN, OUT 6 MAY.

EC R E T THE S TO P : IN E O F U S IF L H BEN E : W IT M ID D L S O H N , 2 0 0 7 L E MEND UMP, M : IN B B OT TO A R V A N A L S O K W H IC H U C E D A N D P R O D E AT E D C O ‑C R

23 APR 2021

experience as a mother and stepmother had to inform what I did on Bump. I never seriously thought about exploring my career abroad, because I became a stepmother when I was 22, so I was part of an extended family. Also, I love working in Australia. I love the stories we tell. I find when I put on an American accent, I start acting like an American – I lose my compass point. It’s very weird. I just mimic every American actor and it’s hilarious. I lose my personality. I have lots of hobbies. [The actor] Chris Haywood was a family friend, and he gave some really valuable advice about taking up hobbies and interests all the time, because you never know when a skill is required of an actor. At the moment my hobbies are bouldering, life drawing, bush walking, learning Spanish – I’m in my fourth year of learning Spanish so I’m probably at the level of a six- or seven-year-old child – salsa dancing. When I was younger my hobbies were playing guitar, riding a motorcycle. In terms of hobbies that I had to call on that I hadn’t touched on were things like being a virtuoso violinist – I had to do a crash course for that job. Being an aerobatic pilot – I had to do a crash course in that. I started salsa dancing about two years before Dancing With the Stars. I was a big yogi – I still do a lot of yoga – but I’d injured my back, so I was looking for a replacement form of exercise. I stumbled across a salsa festival at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville. I walked in with a couple of girlfriends and we were like, What parallel universe is this? I’ve always loved dancing in a mosh pit to Nirvana but I’d never partner-danced and it’s just this beautiful thing; there’s something extraordinary about it. Like, you can’t do a pivot, you can’t do the rumba or cha-cha-cha or foxtrot or any of those things without another person. It’s hard to talk about my proudest moment without hearing my Dad’s voice in my ear – he’s a Buddhist – and he says pride is not a good thing. But Kelsey Munro, who’s my extraordinary co-creator on Bump and a highly esteemed colleague – in an interview she described me as a gracious leader. And praise coming from someone you really love and respect is always pretty great. I’m really averse to looking back. I don’t think I’d get back to anything I’ve already done. I’m very much about trying to be in the present – I think that’s the key to having some sort of equilibrium. More Buddhist wisdom, I suppose. Thanks Dad!

I would say [to my 16-year-old self], good on you for reading so many books while you’re bored on set. I was really into Graham Greene. I was pretty bookish. I really missed going to school. I went to an all-girls school and I had lots of friends, even though I wasn’t a big joiner-inner. I really appreciated the education in art, English, history, those sorts of subjects. Because I was already out in the workforce, I thought of school as a privileged place to be because it was such a controlled environment and so focused, whereas a film set was far more like the real world. They actually complemented each other really well – I appreciated school when I went there, and I also loved being treated like an adult when I was on a film set. Ben Mendelsohn was a massive role model. His performances, even when he was 18 years old, are knockout. He’s just so mercurial and smart and funny and vulnerable and alpha at the same time. He’s a real unicorn. After that, the influences and the inspiration came from people like the writers and directors. I started working with [The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way producer] John Edwards when I was 27, so it’s a long-term relationship. He was 100 per cent behind my moving into producing work. He was the one who proposed the idea, when The Secret Life of Us was coming to an end for me. I went into Secret Life of Us with a lot of trepidation, actually, which was totally unfounded because it was a great experience with great characters. The tampon scene was one of the real defining scenes of Secret Life of Us. You know – the idea that a girlfriend would tease you because you use an applicator tampon because you don’t want to touch yourself – that was great. It was pioneering. A fantastic scene. I think you have to give the work you do meaning, and it’s not just about earning a living or giving yourself something to do. Joking with some of the writers from Bump – we all feel so safe in there that it feels like therapy – all of us share our innermost secrets. And then from that comes really personal stories about our imaginary characters, beautiful chemistry and layers of detail from all of our collective life experiences. The biggest surprise of my life was how much I enjoyed having a baby. I always thought, even when I was in high school, I would never be a mum. I didn’t see the appeal of motherhood. It didn’t feel like something that I would ever do, and I assumed that I would probably get postnatal depression or something, that I’d be impatient. The biggest surprise was how much love you feel when your child is born. No-one could have prepared me for that. It is the most difficult role to ever take on, but also there’s just so much joy and love that your body has never even felt before. I think that energy and that

Ricky

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Some things are still running like clockwork: the clock, for instance.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

Lockdown Lottery

part from every day of every working week, it’s a rare thing that I find myself at home alone. But it feels different this time. Some things are still running like clockwork: the clock, for instance, marching irrevocably forward. The dog is still here, curled in a ball in the bed she inherited from the cat that preferred to lie on a shoe. The cat though is no more, as foreshadowed in a previous column, pushing up the compost in a backyard grave marked by a cross fashioned from two cricket stumps. The ultimate Aussie backyard memorial, perhaps? But back to my solitary confinement. So strange to have a Saturday alone and not quite at leisure. There’s work to be done, and only me to do it. Last night the rest of the family boarded a plane for a holiday that I was supposed to be on, too. But for my sins in this COVID era I was left locked out of our intended destination. The destination is not important, nor are my sins, otherwise known as having been in a “high-risk area” where I innocuously spent an afternoon buying a pair of shoes nine days ago. Those details aren’t important because, by the time this is published, those places and their COVID history will be exactly that, history. Cases will have been brought under control, a cluster will have broken out somewhere else and new borders will be snapped shut before you can say “boarding in 15 minutes”. There will be another “circuit-breaker lockdown” in one of the capital cities and the television news will show people lined up at supermarkets stocking up on toilet paper. I still haven’t quite understood what the fuss is about lockdowns. Unless you eat at restaurants six nights a week, can someone tell me what exactly your inconvenience is during lockdown? You can still go shopping, still walk the dog, go for a run, even go to work a lot of the time. What else do we leave the house to do? Apart from your favourite cafe

being closed for three days, is “lockdown” really such an impost? Maybe it’s because I work from home. And when I don’t work from home I work from airports and various places far from home. Leaving home and returning home is my natural state of being. I’m always either leaving or returning, packing or unpacking. The in-between bits, where I sit for days on end at home working, is my lockdown, and also my time to unwind, at home alone. Maybe that’s why lockdowns don’t faze me: my life is one recurring lockdown, constantly responding to an urgent outbreak of work, and when the cases are safely quarantined (or filed) I can start travelling and bring home another disease of work that’s sure to trigger another lockdown. It’s a cycle. Still, this unscheduled lockdown is weird. I have an uncanny habit of timing my travels perfectly, normally escaping a hotspot just before lockdown hell descends, leaving a trail of toilet paper queues in my wake, so it’s strange that I’ve landed right in the middle of this one. Not much to do but survey the empty house and make myself useful. New York singer Jeffrey Lewis has a song called ‘Outta Town’, a wry ode to co-dependency where he recounts the conundrums that come when his live-in girlfriend leaves town for the weekend. “Is it Friday or Monday? I’m not sure without you/All the days go by in such a boring blur without you.” It’s true. After three hours of fending for myself while others are having fun, I’m kind of over it. Which is why it’s my pleasure to announce that in the short time we’ve been talking, the state that had shut its borders to the naughty state I was in has opened them again, meaning I’m off to the airport. Just don’t ask me how I do it.

Ricky is a writer, musician and lockdown dodger.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

he seasons are on the turn, and if you have any sense in that streaming service-numbed body of yours that means one thing; time to take up cold-water swimming over winter! Wait, come back! You know you want to! Once you get past the event horizon of “Aaaargh I can’t breathe”, the experience is sublime. And you know I speak truth because every fifth newspaper article for the past 12 months has concerned some crazy brave doofus who just discovered wild-water swimming, has been flinging themselves into the icy brine, and is now addicted and can’t stop proselytising. If it’s not an essay about dealing with grief or depression through sea swims, it’s a feature on Dutchman Wim “The Ice Man” Hof and his cold-water therapy practice. Or it’s a cockle‑warming story about a bunch of carefree elders who meet every day at 6.30am for an ocean swim, and have an adorbs group name like the Cold Codgers or the Ice Ice Babies. Maybe you watched My Octopus Teacher, or read Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence, her memoir about healing and awe attained through ocean swimming in Sydney’s northern beaches. Heck, maybe you follow me on Instagram, and note that every second pic is me on a windswept Melbourne beach grinning like a loon. Be honest. Your interest is piqued. Yes, you resile instinctually from the idea of early-onset hypothermia like a snail from salt, but you’re impressed, intrigued and a bit cold‑water curious. All you need is a nudge, and some hot tips and ruminations that address your concerns. Fortuitously, here I am, bursting with intel gleaned from it being a year since I first looked out at a rapidly cooling bay and thought, Well, here we go, can’t wait to feel awesome. The good news: you will feel awesome. The endorphins are off the charts. Our bodies are designed to respond with delight when we put them under eustress, or positive stress, such as cold-water immersion. So there’s a “high”, but

also a kick-start to our parasympathetic nervous system, our metabolism and to the production of white blood cells. I dig the endorphins, but I marvel at the overwhelming understanding that it’s Doing Me Good. Every time, on a cellular level, my body is shouting “Yippee!” Now is the moment: Pick a sunshiny window and begin now, while your local body of wild water retains some summer warmth. You’ll acclimatise as it cools, then swim once a week to top it up. You’ll still experience 90 seconds of cold-water shock, but like tabloid headlines about a celeb affair, it stops being “shocking”. Screaming’s kind of fun, actually. My swimming group squeal, sing and swear theatrically as we immerse. It helps to let it out, particularly as the water encases your, ahem, sensitive regions. Don’t swim solo. Sure, I swam through winter on my own last year, like a cockamamie rock star, but it was lockdown and illegal to meet up. Hypothermia is a real risk, as are currents and swells. Find a buddy, or join your local gang of crazed enthusiasts. Trust me, they’re there, and they’re a body positive, welcoming delight. Speaking of groups, you MUST join the Outdoor Swimming Society on FB. It’s a British‑based online community of eccentric wild-water nerds, and features inspiring stories and lovely people bobbing about in lakes, lochs, rivers, quarries and dams. There is hot chocolate and warm knitted hats; tales of swimming back to health from depression, illness, trauma and loss; and a dude in Canada who uses a chainsaw to cut the ice for his daily swim in 0.1°C water. It’s a secret society. We’re all mad and friendly. I’ve had many good chats a few hundred metres out to sea. Come on in! The water’s warm, I mean, woohoo, freezing!

Fiona is an ice-cool writer, comedian and swimmer.

23 APR 2021

Breaking the Ice

Yes, you resile instinctually from the idea of early-onset hypothermia like a snail from salt, but you’re impressed, intrigued and a bit cold-water curious.

Fiona

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Moo-vies

First Cow

How Now First Cow Director Kelly Reichardt pioneers a softer, warmer western, where “cowboys” shoot the breeze, darn socks and bake cakes. by Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

The book spans four decades and involves a trip to China – a sprawling plotline that was way beyond Reichardt’s small budgets, and out of sync with her taste for stories that distil big ideas down to their essence. The adaptation adds the cow, the first in the region as the title suggests. It also amalgamates two characters into Cookie’s softly spoken partner-in-crime: the Chinese prospector King-Lu (Orion Lee). Together, they start a profitable trade selling sweet “oily cakes” to men who’ve ventured west to get rich and are nostalgic for a taste of home. If you squint, the goofy scenes of fur trappers breathlessly queuing up for the trendy new food could almost be ripped from contemporary life. (One of the differences is that this fledgling town still has yet to agree upon a currency.) The result is another of Reichardt’s visionary – and revisionary – looks at frontier life, following Meek’s Cutoff (2010), in which a group of white settlers struggle to cross Oregon in 1845. Both films function as anti‑westerns, questioning the country’s founding myths and the seductive mirages of manifest destiny and the open road.

FIRST COW IS IN CINEMAS 29 APRIL.

23 APR 2021

There’s an intimacy in the process that I hope gets across to the audience.

Looking around at their new forest home, King‑Lu tells Cookie, “History isn’t here yet” – words that ring ridiculous to modern ears. As if to silently rebuke him, First Cow firmly establishes the visual presence of the local Chinook peoples, who speak Chinook Wawa – a pidgin trade language that mixes Chinook, French, English, some Salishan and other Indigenous languages. “We were trying to get the last people who speak the language,” Reichardt told one interviewer. Her research also looked at “how long trading had gone on in the area” where “many different tribes lived together forever, for thousands and thousands of years”. The film takes place in “this small amount of time where there’s this overlap and trading happening, and well, we all know how it ends”. All of Reichardt’s films are marked by delicate and surprising observations. First Cow, her seventh feature, is no exception. In contrast to the familiar epics about macho settlers, its tale of an unlikely, possibly romantic partnership between two not-sotough men trying to make their way is warm and gentle. The pair pick blueberries, kindle fires, darn socks and eat squirrel stew. “There’s an intimacy in the process that I hope gets across to the audience,” she says. As well as the titular cow, frontier life here involves other animals, including several dogs. Reichardt is no stranger to working with animals, notably Lucy – the dog who stars opposite Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy (2008), whose tear-jerking performance Reichardt described as “perfect” – as well as the two dozen horses who feature alongside the A-list cast in Certain Women (2016). Despite such past experiences, First Cow was the first time Reichardt had “worked with trained animals – trained dogs – and I really didn’t care for that. They were really like little treat machines! They’re looking for the trainers all the time so they’re not looking for the actors…they never just roll in the mud, or do anything doggy. They’re just, ‘Where’s the treat? Where’s the treat?’” The crew gave up: “We ended up calling in friends’ dogs.” “But Evie, the cow, she really did need some training.” For her grand entrance, she stands aboard a raft that sails down the Columbia River, bringing her to her new home. Considering that cows can’t swim, and don’t habitually travel along bodies of water, getting Evie to be comfortable on the raft was “a major thing”. In another big scene, she nuzzles up to Cookie affectionately. To encourage this, Magaro had a real oat cookie hidden inside his jacket pocket. According to Reichardt, Evie was also a bit of a treat machine. “But she was super sweet, and much loved.”

ny director will tell you the right actor can bring a movie to life. But for the latest drama from singular American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, it was all about finding the right cow. “It was like casting with cow head shots,” she laughs, referring to the process of securing the star of her film First Cow, during its New York Film Festival press conference. She says that Evie, a very pretty two‑year‑old Jersey cow with no prior acting experience, was chosen “because of her eyes”. The film – one of the year’s best – gets heavy mileage out of those big, soulful eyes. They moon up at Cookie, a kindly drifting baker who has wound up in a rough‑and-tumble town in 1820s Oregon, played by Carol’s John Magaro. “We Skyped and I thought he looked like a Courbet painting,” says Reichardt. Each night, Cookie sneaks into the cow’s paddock to ever-so-gently steal her milk while her wealthy English owner sleeps, and the pair quickly form a bond. “The milk was the doorway to finding our way,” says Reichardt. After years trying to adapt her long-time writing partner Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half-Life to the screen, this was the eureka moment that brought the film together.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Music

Jaguar Jonze

Roar Talent Hospitalised with COVID, which also wiped out her American tour, Jaguar Jonze kept working throughout the pandemic, and is ready to go again. by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a VietnameseAustralian writer based in Melbourne.

had a big grief-cry this morning because I realised that today is a year since I’ve come back from New York,” says Deena Lynch. “We were meant to do a US tour and it all crumbled, and then it took us days and days to find a flight to come home. I landed in Sydney one year ago today, and within hours, I felt so ill.” Lynch, who makes music as Jaguar Jonze, was one of the first public figures in Australia to contract COVID-19. Her debut EP, Diamonds and Liquid Gold, dropped while she was in the back of an ambulance in April 2020. Now, weeks away from the release of her second EP Antihero, she’s feeling reflective: “I’m now about to release my second EP, and that is literally exactly a year to date, and I’m in a whole different situation.” The experience of illness and upheaval winds its way into the five-track collection, particularly angular first single ‘DEADALIVE’. “I started writing the first verse of ‘DEADALIVE’

with my bassist, Aiden, while we were stuck in our New York apartment when the world was just dealing with the fact that COVID-19 was now a pandemic,” Lynch says. “The second verse was finished when I was in hospital with COVID-19, so it takes a different meaning of the exact same subject – I was dealing with the effects of COVID-19 in society, and then dealing with it personally.” Illness denied Lynch her ability to sing for months, so she turned to another creative outlet. The artist, who illustrates under the moniker Spectator Jonze, released virtual colouring books during lockdown, and hosted video colouring-in sessions. “In a time that’s really disconnecting, it was a very connecting

hype and then it just dies down. I wanted it to convert over into something more than just a moment of drama.” Lynch released a brooding cover of Britney Spears’ 2003 hit ‘Toxic’ in the weeks following her #MeToo campaign, giving the dancefloor staple a sinister spin. It’s classic Jaguar Jonze, all woozy synths and silky, seductive vocals. It makes sense for Lynch to use a childhood favourite to interrogate the darker parts of life. “Music is a way to have a conversation with myself and my emotions and my feelings and my past and my trauma,” she says. The artist speaks openly about social justice issues, recently sharing her experiences with racism following her COVID-19 diagnosis

to add to the #StopAsianHate conversation on Instagram, and joining the likes of Celeste Barber to pen her thoughts about the importance of March 4 Justice for The Guardian. She says that her experience with #MeToo helped her develop a healthy approach towards activism that leaves room for self-care. “Last year was like a burning of the forest for me, and I’ve had to rebuild that forest in a sustainable way,” she says. “I’ve been able to really slowly learn and grow, and figure out a way where hopefully I can still be a driving force and create change in our society, while making sure that I’m not dissociating and ignoring my own trauma and triggers.” We return to the one-year anniversary of Lynch’s return to Australia. Antihero will be accompanied by a short film, comprising all the EP’s music videos stitched together to create a conceptual narrative – and it’s this that’s making her especially grateful today. “Part of my grief-cry today was that I’m working on my short film draft, and I wrote and designed and art directed this while I was under hospital care, and I got to see it all together today,” she says. “It just hit me that it’s been a year of work and I was in a hospital bed writing this, and now it’s actually happening. I just can’t wait to share it.” ANTIHERO IS RELEASED 26 APRIL.

process for me,” she says. “It broadened my creativity and thought process.” When her voice returned, Lynch tracked the vocals for Antihero under hospital care. “I recorded the whole EP never being in the same room as my band,” she says. “It made me realise the working relationship I have with them is so strong that we were able to just use the beauty of technology to put this body of work together without any hiccups.” The EP continues Lynch’s trajectory of creating idiosyncratic pop music – an intoxicating blend of spaghetti western, electronic and rock sounds. There’s vulnerability and anger in the music as the artist responds to global disruption, as well as another experience that shaped her 2020: last July, Lynch called out a prominent Melbourne music photographer for sexual misconduct; over 100 women contacted her to confide their own negative experiences with the same man. “I want to take that responsibility on because I’m so tired of the fact that there were that many people coming into my inbox, and yet we feel like we’re the only ones,” she says. “I spent so much energy trying to do more than just a story because I didn’t want it to just be a moment of tabloid gossip or

23 APR 2021

The second verse was finished when I was in hospital with COVID-19.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Books

Anwen Crawford

Zine and Not Herd Writer and critic Anwen Crawford takes the road less travelled, down a zine-like path, to memorialise a lost friend and a lost time.

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

hen Sydney journalist Anwen Crawford lost one of her closest friends to cancer in 2010, her natural reaction was to write about it. Though she meditated on her grief in a short column for the literary journal Overland the following year, more substantial attempts proved frustrating at the time. “Of course it didn’t work, because I was so close to it,” says Crawford. “These things had only just happened.” A decade later, she has returned to the subject in book form. No Document is no memoir though, nor strictly essays. It’s a personal reflection on grief and friendship through several different media at once, blending poetry, prose and visual art in a collage‑like form that includes bold flourishes of layout and typography. Embracing the freedom of zines – self‑published works that resist many conventions of mainstream publishing – Crawford set about connecting her strong memories of a touchstone friendship with wider themes of politics, protest and artistic output.

SELF PORTAIT BY ANWEN CRAWFORD

One of the powerful things about the writing I’ve always liked and been affected by in zines has been its intimacy. “Zines are often a genuinely experimental form of writing and also of reading,” she says, “but people who aren’t in the zine world don’t tend to think of them that way.” Crawford’s interest in dealing with personal material through a unique lens (or combination of lenses) came from reading and writing zines for the past 25 years – and her friend, the book’s subject, was equally involved with both zines and visual art. Still, No Document might surprise readers who only know Crawford as a regular music critic for The Monthly, or for her 2015 book devoted to US rock band Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This. Yet it’s short enough to read in a single sitting, with plenty of open space to balance out its intense emotional turns and adventurous hybrid approach. Despite the autobiographical content, Crawford wasn’t worried about meditating on such a close friendship for a wider audience. “One of the powerful things about the writing I’ve always liked and been affected by in zines has been its intimacy,” she says. “That sense that you’re reading something quite direct, and the writer is engaging with you without too much regard for convention.”

NO DOCUMENT IS OUT NOW.

23 APR 2021

@wallendoug

It also helps that the book is largely addressed to her friend – and sometimes to other friends from the shared artistic circle of their youth. That makes it feel more like she is writing for an audience of one. But while the book incorporates personal letters, postcards and notes from years past, Crawford doesn’t see it as diaristic. “Diaries in themselves are a kind of performance,” she says. “Even if you’re only writing for your future self to read, that’s still an audience. To me the important thing is that [the book is] written as an address to someone else, and [at times] several someones, because there are points where the ‘you’ shifts.” Even within that confiding format, Crawford reaches remarkably far over the course of No Document. As in her earlier column for Overland, she connects her friend’s death to the tragic sinking just days before of a boat carrying nearly 100 asylum seekers off the coast of Christmas Island, questioning who is grieved and who isn’t. Crawford also writes about her and her friends’ involvement in anti-capitalist protests before and after 9/11, as well as being caught somewhere between the generational divide of Gen X and millennial as a teenager in the late 90s. The tension between preservation and erasure is another recurring theme in the book – “I change tense, and travel back across your death’s border” – as is language itself as an imperfect tool. Beyond her decades of experience around zines, Crawford continues to draw influence from her years at Sydney College of the Arts, where she studied photography, and New York’s Columbia University, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts in poetry not long after her friend’s passing. As for other works that defy the usual A-to-B method of linear storytelling, she cites Claudia Rankine’s 2004 book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as a “very zine-like” example of a poem/prose hybrid that’s slowly becoming more prevalent in the literary world. Crawford also cites the collage-style novels of David Markson, who utilises repetition and fragments to explore melancholy themes of artistic failure. Between those two figures, Crawford notes that what she calls “the stanzaic, fragmentary form” has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As for her own work, she still writes often for The Monthly and has written about music and other arts for The New Yorker and other publications. She recently curated an eight-week film series with fellow critic Luke Goodsell at the Art Gallery of NSW, centred on fictional films about pop music. She’ll also introduce the series’ closing film, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005), in late May. And she still makes zines – including one the day before our interview. As for No Document, it taught her about not pushing herself to write something before the time was right. “It took a long time to be able to do it,” she says. “The passage of time is part of it, and I had to learn that myself.”

by Doug Wallen

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

pening in cinemas this week are two very different films about women battling their demons. Land is the directorial debut by actor Robin Wright (House of Cards), who also stars in the film. Her bereaved, bull-headed widow Edee throws her mobile into the trash in the opening minutes, and then sets about retreating from society, into the snowy Wyoming mountains, to grieve. The story is clunky and too familiar – landing somewhere between Nomadland and Into the Wild. But it’s told oh-so gently, with a bright score and a streak of sentimentalism that’ll leave you either rolling your eyes, or sobbing into your popcorn. Far more ambitious is The United States vs Billie Holiday. Singer Andra Day’s understated, gravelly voiced performance as the legendary jazz performer has already scooped up awards. But there’s something upsettingly grotesque about Lee Daniels’ biopic, which rubs its face in Holiday’s pain, focusing on her traumatic childhood, her drug addiction, her jail time and way too many bad men. After all that, little space is left for her artistry to shine though. The film orbits the success of ‘Strange Fruit’ – the sorrowful song that confronted Americans with the reality of lynchings – a song that Holiday made forever her own, despite attempts to censor her. “It reminds them that they’re killing us,” she tells an interviewer. And yet, the music remains bizarrely powerless here. The real Billie Holiday is nowhere to be seen. ABB

ANDRA DAY IS LADY DAY

SUPERNOVA 

This languid, gentle road movie, centres Sam (Colin Firth) and his partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a novelist living with early onset dementia who wants anything but to become a passenger in his own life. Tusker is wry, pragmatic and generally lighthearted about his situation – whether in defiance or resignation, it is hard to tell. Tucci is wonderfully cast, quickly able to convey Tusker’s vivacity so that we can appreciate the pain of his light fading. He’s complemented nicely by Firth, who juggles love, fear, heartbreak and frustration at once. Rather than turning Tusker’s dementia into an overwrought melodrama, Supernova treats it as an everyday part of life – which, for so many people, it is. The film recognises the emotional weight of the situation yet refuses to wallow in sorrow, making for a more respectful, three-dimensional portrait. But, despite its strengths, Supernova doesn’t seem to amount to much. For a film so concerned with memory, it’s somewhat forgettable. IVANA BREHAS SIX MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU



With World War II looming, a British boarding school for Nazi leaders’ daughters doesn’t seem like a good prospect for long-term employment. Worse, the teacher whom Thomas Miller (Eddie Izzard) is replacing has vanished in mysterious circumstances, and when the body washes up during a school beach swim session, he knows something’s up. But it turns out he knew all along: he’s a British spy, sent to thwart plans to smuggle the girls back to Germany. Despite being “based on true events” (the school was real), this rapidly develops into a rip-roaring adventure with Miller a murder suspect on the run in the wilds of southern England. Some promising angles are underexplored (the students barely rate a handful of scenes), but a propulsive plot covers many flaws and solid casting makes up for the rest. Judi Dench as the Nazi-sympathiser headmistress and Carla Juri as the conflicted sports teacher are especially good; Jim Broadbent as the feisty local bus driver deserves his own action spin-off. ANTHONY MORRIS

THE GODMOTHER 

Iconic actress Isabelle Huppert delivers another radiant performance in this amusing but ultimately disappointing crime-comedy from Jean-Paul Salomé. Based on the award-winning novel by Hannelore Cayre, Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, an Arabic-to-French translator for the Paris narcotics squad. Debt is accruing around her: she can’t pay her rent, nor support her mother. When an opportunity arises, she seizes it, transforming practically overnight into a drug baron (in a slightly problematic hijab disguise). Salomé reaches for pathos and restraint when one wishes he’d chase absurdity instead – the film is full of missed comedic potential. It’s a shame because the best moments are those that embrace ridiculousness: Huppert hauling bags of hash into her modest Honda, or singing along to French grime. Still, there’s plenty of delight to be found in this affectionate portrait of a woman once drifting through life, finding freedom and empowerment through self‑reinvention. ISABELLA TRIMBOLI

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

MADE FOR LOVE  | STAN

BLACK ART: IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT

 | NETFLIX

 | FOXTEL ON DEMAND

Young adult confusion is real because, at some point, nearly every series on a streaming service became the same show. The checklist: a slick-yet-dull young cast, hidden superpowers, excessive world building and a laborious backstory. Shadow and Bone ticks all the boxes and blends into the TV wallpaper. Based on author Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, the fantasy series is set in a war-torn world where rival nations battle for power. In the fight is a magical army called the “Grisha”, with powers reminiscent of the rings from Captain Planet. Quicker than you can shout “VIND!”, lowly soldier Alina (newcomer Jessica Mei Li) discovers she’s got a gift that could save her country. In a world full of unique people, she’s more special than the rest – here we go again. The special abilities and political plays of Shadow and Bone are tedious, but the glossy visual effects are hypnotic enough to override the bland bits. The storyline focusing on a gang of crooks navigating the criminal underworld ends up being a better mini-show within an overstuffed one. CAMERON WILLIAMS

The history of African-American art mirrors that of its people: it is a struggle for basic recognition. With this humdrum documentary, director Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI) goes some way toward bringing a forgotten chapter in the history of American visual art to the forefront. In 1976, artist and scholar David Driskell curated the major exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art, planting seeds of identity and influence for multiple generations of Black artists. Pollard flatly examines the exhibition through a series of interviews with art historians, curators, collectors and many artists who have taken inspiration from the show, including presidential portraitists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, and one of Time’s 100 most influential people, Kerry James Marshall. But the encyclopaedic conversations mean that Black Art never stops moving for long enough to breathe in the work of its subjects – artworks that are better witnessed than talked over. Regardless, Pollard sheds light on the enduring impact of Driskell’s exhibit on the state of Black art. BRUCE KOUSSABA

okémon Snap is a first-person shooter that eschews pump-action rifles for an instamatic camera. Absent are the turn-based battles of the more popular Pokémon games – though I’d say that strategic thinking here is just as crucial – as your all-terrain vehicle cruises through jungles, caves and volcanoes on a rail-locked safari. Your mission? To attract wild Pikachus and Jigglypuffs close enough to snap them in their natural habitats. Your happy snaps are then appraised for such low-bar merits as getting the little mates in frame. Released on Nintendo 64 in 1999, Pokémon Snap looks like it was rendered by a microwave, but its gentle joys and benign gameplay make it one of my all-time favourite titles. (My brother and I still quote Professor Oak’s assessment, “You were close!”) Naturally, I’m over the moon about its imminent reboot, New Pokémon Snap, due out on Switch from 30 April. When Satoshi Tajiri created the Poké-verse back in the mid-90s, he wanted the games to emulate his childhood love of bug-catching – an increasingly tricky hobby, since Tokyo’s urban sprawl had been swallowing up natural space since the 70s. In recent years, Pokémon Go has nudged budding trainers back out into the real world, where pocket monsters occupy city streets and national parks alike via augmented reality. What I love about Snap, though, is that you don’t trap wild creatures in magical spheres, nor flog them to the point of exhaustion in a dogfight. This light-footed game says, “Take only photos,” and the poignant ephemerality is very effective. AK

23 APR 2021

SHADOW AND BONE

YOU’LL CRACKLE AND POP

Cristin Milioti is really cornering the market for “woman trapped in terrible situation” roles: first Black Mirror, then Palm Springs, now Made for Love. This time, she plays Hazel, on the run from her abusive technocrat husband Byron (Billy Magnussen, Maniac), CEO of the not-so-subtly named fictional tech corporation Gogol. The catch: he’s microchipped her brain, and can see her every move. Made for Love presents a speculative fiction: an experience of digital surveillance not far removed from our own lives. Magnussen’s performance reveals Byron to be a deeply insecure, ego-driven man. Described in the show as “a narcissist who can’t function in the real world”, his aim in life is to contain and control everything, including Hazel. There’s a dark absurdity to the situation, brought out by the comedic strengths of both Milioti and Magnussen – as well as Ray Romano as Hazel’s father – though it’s rarely a laugh-out-loud show. Hazel’s experience of abuse always feels a little too real, a little too possible, for it to ever really seem funny. IVANA BREHAS

Music Reviews

Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

othing captures the rubbishness of modern life quite like the lyrics “Do everything/Feel nothing”, a repeated mantra sung on ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, off New Long Leg, the debut album by London post-punk band Dry Cleaning. Lead singer Florence Shaw doesn’t really sing; she delivers melancholic spoken-word over jagged guitars. Her lyrics slide from the banal to freakish, pitching themselves somewhere between the songwriting of Blur’s Damon Albarn and The Fall’s Mark E Smith. But where Smith delivered his cleaved cries of cruelty with a vitriolic sneer, spraying spit on the mic, Shaw’s voice rarely moves beyond a despondent yet deeply pleasurable monotone. New Long Leg is a twisty album about crap food (“oven chips”, “big jar of mayonnaise”, “uneaten sausages”), television (“Eyes drift to the TV/Mostly uncles and fathers/Mostly eating nuts, seeds and berries/What do you think your parents feel?/That nod that says, ‘I’ve seen things’”) and sheer boredom. There’s also plenty of sardonic truisms (“Never talk about your ex, never, never, never, never, never slag them off because then they know, then they know” she warns on ‘Leafy’). These stream-of-consciousness observations perfectly capture our cracked attention spans, brains permanently mangled by the internet. The band was formed in 2017 by Tom Dowse, Nick Buxton and Lewis Maynard. Shaw joined six months later, turning up to band practice with Michael Bernard Loggins’ Fears of Your Life to read out over their songs. In 2019, they had their breakthrough with two EPs, in particular the track ‘Magic of Meghan’, an ode to the Duchess of Sussex. IT

FO R IN A S P IN A N IN G D RY C L E

@itrimboli

CALIFORNIAN SOIL LONDON GRAMMAR 

London Grammar revived classic Bristolian trip-hop with their ultra-sleek debut If You Wait (2013) and returned with Truth Is a Beautiful Thing (2017), balladry even more dramatic. Their scenic third album, Californian Soil, draws on the mythic allure of America’s west coast – its romance, freedom and possibility – to explore fame’s dark, constricting realities. Frontwoman Hannah Reid directly addresses her encounters with misogyny, channelling Laurel Canyon-era Joni Mitchell in ‘I Need the Night’, a zeitgeist torch song for self. Californian Soil is spare, but it retains that old atmosphere. ‘Lord It’s a Feeling’ is a celestial trance epic in which Reid disconcertingly narrates the casual cruelty of a toxic relationship. Notably, the band delves further into post-rock on the title track and ‘America’. Despite that, and the album’s general sparseness, London Grammar still provide the festival anthems, with the heady ‘Baby It’s You’ a hypnotic collaboration with deep house DJ and producer George FitzGerald. CYCLONE WEHNER

SWEEP IT INTO SPACE DINOSAUR JR

CIVILISATION II KERO KERO BONITO





Band reformations can be a volatile thing. Unlike their 80s and 90s alternative peers who held it together for a number of festival runs before imploding again, Dinosaur Jr have managed to conjure consistent tinnitus‑administering tours, solo album explorations and a steady supply of full‑length records that never veer south of decent. Which is surprising, considering the residual antipathy between songwriters J Mascis and Lou Barlow. Sweep It Into Space too is decent, stamped with hallmarks of gentle lyrical introspection paired with grip-itand-rip-it guitar lines. The one-two pop punch of Barlow’s ‘Garden’ and Mascis’ ‘Hide Another Round’ is a joyous crescendo, with mooring supplied by drummer Murph’s tireless resolve. Aided by co-producer Kurt Vile, classic rock admiration mostly generates potency through its tone and melody. Even when it doesn’t wholly work, there’s still pleasure to be found in overindulgent riffs and noodling. Dinosaur Jr’s intra-band dysfunction yields a solid outing without nudging any benchmarks.

Kero Kero Bonito have come a long way since their bizarro bubblegum origins. Over seven years, we’ve glimpsed their evolution from ultra-cheery rhymes about flamingos and trampolines to their most recent full-length release, Time ’n’ Place (2018), a manic descent into memories distorted by malaise. Somewhere along the line, the weight of existence became too heavy, splintering their video-game synths and kitschy allusions with a deepened disillusionment in a world hurtling towards its end. If Civilisation I, their 2019 EP, feels apocalyptic in this way – warning of fires and floods and raptures – then its sequel, the three-track Civilisation II, stories the experience of living in an apocalypse that’s already here. It’s bookended by despondence – as in the mythical trapped protagonist in ‘The Princess and the Clock’, or the capitalist cycle satirised in seven-minute epic ‘Well Rested’. But there are smaller joys, too, as Kero Kero Bonito remind us on ‘21/04/20’: a flower in bloom, a moonlit sky, a cool breeze. Everything won’t be okay, but we can pretend.

LACHLAN KANONIUK

MICHAEL SUN

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

FROM WHERE I FELL SUSAN JOHNSON



For the unnamed narrator of Friends and Dark Shapes, Sydney is a jarring melange of the familiar and the alien, a contrast between the city’s veneer of cheerful prosperity and the ugliness that can trouble any immigrant. The book follows four friends in their early thirties in their share house in the inner-city suburb of Redfern. All second-generation kids, they emerged from university into a world where they navigate racism, sex politics, a consistently insecure job market and the inevitable tragedies of life. Bedford has perfectly rendered the mind of the new millennial adult. In vivid vignettes she contrasts their love of wealth and their self-conscious complicity in the exploitation that wealth propagates. Through unease and dark absences, she sketches their concern with balance between the rights of the individual and those of the communities around them, their clear awareness of hidden stories and secret pain, their weariness with caring. Bedford has captured a moment in time perfectly. RAPHAELLE RACE

An emailing error means that Sydneysider Pamela ends up writing to a woman in New York, Chris, instead of her ex-husband in Paris. Despite the difference in their personalities – Pamela is bubbly and verbose, Chris laconic and reserved – the two women keep up an online communication that lasts for a good year. Written entirely in this epistolary form, Susan Johnson’s latest novel is a joy to read, an exploration of an unexpected and unlikely friendship between strangers on opposites sides of the globe. Their daily preoccupations, the griefs they hold dear and the challenges they face are duly exchanged, at first cautiously, and then as trust grows, more freely. Marriage (or its absence), children (or their absence), work, colleagues, ageing, neighbours, death and all manner of matters are canvassed between the two of them. From Where I Fell is about the beauty and fragility of human connection. Little by little, by being privy to their intimate exchanges, the reader, too, becomes close to Pamela and Chris. THUY ON

A MILLION THINGS EMILY SPURR 

In the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, 10-year-old Rae is thrust into a nightmare. Alone and unable to accept the reality of what has occurred, she keeps her mother’s “disappearance” a secret and attempts to go about life as normal. Slowly, she begins a friendship with an elderly neighbour, Lettie, a compulsive hoarder who has some secrets of her own. The debut novel of Melbourne-based Emily Spurr explores the impact of grief and trauma on a child who is outwardly tough but in desperate need of help. Vivid, sensory detail immerses the reader in Rae’s chaotic inner world, but the book is let down by dialogue that at times seems more suited to an adult than a child. A Million Things certainly tackles some dark themes, offset by Rae’s relationship with the prickly, eccentric Lettie, which provides humour and hope as together they discover that the only way out is through. Overall, a powerful and challenging read from a new writer to watch. EMMA SLEATH

FRIENDS AND DARK SHAPES KAVITA BEDFORD

23 APR 2021

t’s been a frustrating few months with regards to sexual politics in this country, so this new book by former MP Kate Ellis, Sex, Lies and Question Time, couldn’t come at a better moment. Subtitled “Why the successes and struggles of women in Australia’s parliament matter to us all”, the book explores Ellis’ 15 years as a politician, and looks in particular at the toxic culture women have had to endure. Politics is never an easy game, but her insider exposé, which spans a number of issues, and surveys the sexist obstacles and attacks that women specifically face in the workplace. Ellis has also woven comments into her narrative from women on all sides of the political spectrum (including Julia Gillard, Natasha Stott Despoja and Julie Bishop). Their daily realities are canvassed, with both ugly and rewarding aspects covered. Topics include ‘Slut shaming’, ‘She’s wearing what?’, ‘The politics of motherhood’ and ‘Why it’s worth it’. Her book is meant to be an eye-opener but Ellis is not about dissuading future parliamentarians. As she says: “I want to see more women in politics and I also want politics to be better for them. But not just for those women, for everybody. Our federal parliament sets the tone for the nation.” TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

Homesickness, in a broad sense, is a kind of nostalgia for a place that made you feel like you belonged. The other day, I walked past two children (maybe 11 years old) playing one of those clap-clap-switch hands-spin around-type-of games that comes with a chant. They sang “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack…” and I knew all the words to the chant. All dressed in black, black, black, I thought to myself. Now, where that data has been stored on my mental hard drive, and what other data it has replaced, I shudder to think. But there it was, bursting fully formed into my consciousness and there, in the street, rushing to an appointment, I felt a small pang of homesickness. Homesick for a place I haven’t been to in a long time – my primary school, which I could drive to if I wanted, but that’s not the point, is it? Maybe you get homesick when you crunch a eucalyptus leaf and hold it in the cave of your hand to breathe it in. Maybe you get homesick at work, missing the cup you drink your tea from, or the way the light falls on your couch in the mornings. I sometimes get homesick for the feeling of being a kid reading a book. If you were a bookworm when you were a kid, you’ll know what I mean. Even if you read as an adult, chances are you don’t read with a torch under the covers. I can picture my secret torch tent – the covers blue, the occasional glimpse of white sheet,

the way the torchlight made a little circle of brightness in the centre of the page. I hardly ever read in the car anymore either, or with my feet up on the furniture, or splayed out across the floor and absently patting a dog, my brain tired in the way only a reading marathon can make it. Maybe you aren’t homesick for your past at all, but for the home you imagine, a little villa somewhere maybe, where all the locals know your name and you (for some reason) learn piano. Perhaps you’re homesick for the sense of belonging you had once in a place you went to only fleetingly. There’s a camp site I can picture as if it were yesterday. One night, at that camp site, as a teenager, my friends and I laughed and talked for so long by the fire that when I woke up my foot was in the fire, gently toasting me through my boot (NB: good hiking boots are important). It was a lovely night. I don’t remember a single other thing about that trip, including where it was, but the feeling of wellbeing we all had – the feeling that we had each other – has kept the scene pristine in my memory. Being homesick is a sad feeling though, raw and nagging and miserable. Like you’re meant to be in a place and it’s just wrong that you aren’t, like if someone cut one of the figures out of a McCubbin painting with scissors. Feeling a bit bereft is not fun. Sometimes, it’s helpful to notice the things you might miss about the place you’re in right now. I didn’t know the camping scene would stay in my memory bank. I didn’t know I’d always remember the words to ‘Miss Mary Mack’. What will I miss from this scene I’m in, right now? How about you? Public Service Announcement: homesickness is the act of treasuring a place in which you belong. Look around you. Maybe that place is here. Maybe it isn’t. But it could be in the cup you drink your tea from, or the gumleaf in your pocket.

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.

ver the last year or so, there would have been some very homesick Australians around the world. Perhaps you were one of them. Maybe you still are. I remember asking adults when I was kid, “What’s home to you?” When you think of home, what do you think of? That adults flippantly moved houses and shipped off overseas with no fidelity to their childhood home or teddy bear just seemed like further proof of the degradation of values and priorities that occurred when humans grew (tragically in my view) to adult size. To me, home was always going to be the home of my childhood. In a way, it still is. Public Service Announcement: sometimes it’s nice to be homesick.

23 APR 2021

Homesick True Blues

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home Aim Aris

Char Kuey Teow Ingredients Serves 2, generously

Prepare the rice noodles according to the packet instructions. Loosen the strands so they do not clump together and break when you stir-fry them. Set aside. Make sure you have all your ingredients prepped and within reach before you start cooking as the process will be super quick. Heat a wok over high heat until it becomes a bit smoky. Add the oil, immediately followed by the garlic and chilli paste and give it a quick stir. Add the lap cheong and stir briefly, then add the prawns and stir with a spatula for 1 minute or just until they turn pink. We do not want them fully cooked yet. Push the ingredients to the side of the wok and add the rice noodles followed by the soy sauces and the oyster sauce. Stir fry until some of the noodles get a little charred – this will take less than 1 minute. Push the ingredients to the side of the wok again and crack in the eggs. Let them cook undisturbed for about 20 seconds, then break the yolks and quickly mix everything together. Add the bean sprouts and garlic chives and stir for 30‑40 seconds. Serve immediately.

alaysians live for their food, and family time is always centred around food. For every occasion, be it religious, cultural or just a simple social gathering, food is more than just a reason for a get-together. It also represents one’s heritage and even one’s memory. Growing up, my late father was a foodie or kaki makan. He was the first person to introduce me to good flavours. Although I am biased, he was indeed a really great cook and most of the time his dishes were even better than my mum’s. He taught me how to cook using my senses rather than simply following the recipes, and would tell me stories of the dishes we were cooking together. Because food has always been at the centre of our family, every family highlight revolved around good food. “Don’t be stingy when it comes to hosting and eating. We live to eat, not the other way around.” He was always laughing when he uttered this to us and to this day, I live by these words. Pretty sure I am not alone on this, either. Ask any true Malaysian: anything cooked over high heat and in a wok is easily a favourite classic. While there are many good foods that are cooked using this method, a personal favourite of mine is definitely the char kuey teow or stir-fried flat rice noodles. Cooked in a wok, the mouth-watering aroma of wok hei or “breath of wok” from the char kuey teow transports me back to when my father used to take us to our favourite char kuey teow stall for supper. When the night was cooler and the air filled with the smell and sounds of the hawker cooking for his patrons, the whole family would sit down on plastic stools around a crooked table waiting patiently for our plates of char kuey teow. That moment – eating together with the whole family – was pure joy for me and something that I cherished. I miss it now that I am away from home. PENANG LOCAL BY AIM ARIS AND AHMAD SALIM IS OUT NOW.

23 APR 2021

Method

Aim says…

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

FOOD PHOTO BY GEORGIA GOLD

500g fresh kuey teow (flat rice noodles) 80ml (⅓ cup) vegetable oil 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 tablespoon Malaysian dried chilli paste 1 lap cheong (Chinese sausage), sliced diagonally 8-10 large banana prawns, peeled and deveined, tails intact 2 tablespoons light soy sauce 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce 1 tablespoon oyster sauce 2 eggs (preferably duck eggs) 180g (2 cups) bean sprouts, washed and drained 2 small handfuls of garlic chives, cut into 2.5cm lengths

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45.

By Lingo! by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com KRIOL

CLUES 5 letters Arrange in a row Dangles Male monarchs Sikh title or surname Sound of a bell 6 letters Congealing Entreating Holds on, grips Hurting Tying up (shoes) 7 letters Cutting Exchanging for money Missing, absent Pursuing Quivering 8 letters Appearing discordant Taking it too easy

S N A

Sudoku

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

9 7

C G K I

by websudoku.com

1 9

4 3 8 1 7 3 9 4 5 5 2 3 8 1 2 9 9 6 4 2

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Arsenal 5 Escapee 9 Reinvited 10

Shred 11 Asunder 12 Rubdown 13 Glum 14 Bluebottle 16 Bipartisan 19 Less 21 Racquet 22 Rundown 24 Inane 25 Naval crew 26 Erected 27 Larceny

DOWN 1 Aorta 2 Stimulus package 3 Nevada 4 Lateral 5 Endorse 6 Cash book 7 Par for the course 8 Endangers 13 Gabardine 15 Argument 17 Intoned 18 Arrival 20 Angler 23 No way

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Corfu, Greece 2 National Gallery of Australia 3 The tomato sauce for their meat pie 4 Rabbits 5 Beth Mooney 6 Music of the Sun 7 Tax evasion 8 May Gibbs 9 ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen 10 Berlin, Germany 11 A puddle 12 Melbourne 13 Three 14 True – she won the seat of Barton at the 2016 election 15 All About Eve 16 Hypertext Transfer Protocol 17 USA 18 The big toe 19 Seth MacFarlane 20 c) 16

23 APR 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

Word Builder

Kriol is a language spoken by around 20,000 people in Australia, and it is the second most common language in the Northern Territory. Kriol is a localisation of Creole, a type of language that comes about when an outside language is abruptly brought into an area, usually through colonisation. This term was first used for the Creole people of Louisiana, USA, in the 1790s; their language was a combination of French and several African languages spoken by the enslaved population. By the 1880s Creole referred to any language that arose in this way, including Bislama in Vanuatu, Krio in Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Australian Kriol draws on English as well as Indigenous languages from across Australia.

by Steve Knight

Quick Clues

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

14 15

DOWN

19 20

Cryptic Clues DOWN

1 Guns car, missing start before switching lanes (7) 5 Runs case by no.1 runner? (7) 9 Vet in dire trouble called for again (9) 10 She had covered Republican scrap (5) 11 Rent from gutted apartments is lower (7) 12 Bud, worn out, gets massage (7) 13 Chewy holds laptop down (4) 14 Man o’ war’s raw courage (10) 16 A spirit cocktail during Prohibition common

1 Bloodline from Aboriginal leader should be on

between parties? (10)

cadet ceremony (7) 27 Pinching Marc’s bottom, nearly smacked around (7)

1 Major artery (5) 2 Targeted government expenditure (8,7) 3 US state (6) 4 Sideways (7) 5 Back (7) 6 Financial journal (4,4) 7 Normal (3,3,3,6) 8 Risks (9) 13 Cotton material (9) 15 Verbal dispute (8) 17 Chanted (7) 18 Emergence (7) 20 Fisherman (6) 23 Forget it (2,3)

Solutions

ACROSS

19 Grace topless? Not any more (4) 21 Squash equipment and make noise in audition (7) 22 Exhausted brief (7) 24 Crazy son turned out to be just foolish (5) 25 I left Carnival cruising east with sailors (5,4) 26 Put up with revolutionary characters during

ACROSS

1 Store of weapons (7) 5 Fugitive (7) 9 Asked again (9) 10 Tatter (5) 11 Apart (7) 12 Massage (7) 13 Downcast (4) 14 Portuguese man-o’-war (10) 16 Supported by rival political parties (10) 19 Fewer (4) 21 Tennis equipment (7) 22 Analysis (7) 24 Stupid (5) 25 Group of commissioned sailors (9) 26 Built (7) 27 Theft (7)

record (5)

2 I’m stuck, as plague unravels government

support (8,7)

3 Harry Vanda embracing Easybeats leader’s

better state? (6)

4 Informal goodbye to Alan on the side (7) 5 Back end with headless horse (7) 6 Spooner hit Doctor Ledger (4,4) 7 In Rocky, superhero factor is predictable (3,3,3,6) 8 Risks from bug in terminals (9) 13 Tailor bargained to get cotton material (9) 15 Barney Miller ultimately stops waving gun at

me (8)

17 Chanted love for queen when buried (7) 18 Mark discovered opponent is coming (7) 20 Fisher and Paykel ending in resentment (6) 23 Radiohead leaving Oslo to forget it (2,3)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

4 3 7 1 9 6 2 5 8

5 1 8 3 2 4 7 9 6

2 6 9 8 7 5 4 3 1

9 4 6 2 3 8 1 7 5

7 2 5 9 6 1 3 8 4

3 8 1 5 4 7 9 6 2

8 7 3 4 5 2 6 1 9

1 9 2 6 8 3 5 4 7

6 5 4 7 1 9 8 2 3

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Align Hangs Kings Singh Clang 6 Caking Asking Clings Aching Lacing 7 Hacking Cashing Lacking Chasing Shaking 8 Clashing Slacking 9 Shackling

23 APR 2021

Crossword

Click AUGUST, 1967

Carnaby St, London

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

ome readers might be surprised to see Great Britons referring to the Bee Gees as “ours”, when of course everyone knows they’re Australian. They are both – in 1958 a family of five‑pound Poms including Barry Gibb and his younger twin brothers Maurice and Robin migrated. The family settled in Redcliffe, on Moreton Bay, Brisbane. The three boys had sung on stage in England; here they performed at the Redcliffe Speedway, singing between car races over the PA from the flatbed of a truck. They impressed local DJ Bill Gates, who contacted speedway manager Bill Goode. The boys were signed up, as The BGs, which referenced the initials of the two managers, Barry Gibb and also his mother, Barbara. Only later was it supposed to mean the Brothers Gibb. The Gibbs were active for years, on radio, recording and performing, well enough known to have a TV show on the ABC, but big hits eluded them. They persuaded their parents that to succeed they must return to England. A week into their return voyage, the just‑released ‘Spicks and Specks’ roared up the Australian charts. That looked like bad luck; it wasn’t. In England they were signed almost immediately in 1967 by Robert

Stigwood, the superstar manager who produced Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and managed Eric Clapton. Within months of docking the Bee Gees had a hit in England and America, with ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’. They were sold as an English band – and many thought they were the Beatles, undercover, with “BG” meaning Beatles Group. For the next few years they were as inescapable as the Beatles – ‘To Love Somebody’, ‘Massachusetts’, ‘Words’, ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You’, ‘I Started a Joke’, ‘Lonely Days’, ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ were time-defining songs – so ever-present that to escape their mega fame, the burden of their past, the boys were advised to skip town, go to Florida, have fun, do something different, maybe make some dance music… Weirdly, the Bee Gees who were to be deported were not Gibbs. They were drummer Colin Petersen and guitarist Vincent Melouney, Australians both. Fans protested after Britain’s Home Office refused to renew their work visas. It worked – but the pair left the band within a year or so. More weirdly, in Florida Barry Gibb would later move into 461 Ocean Boulevard, Miami, the house on the cover of the Eric Clapton album of the same name. Gibb still resides in Miami, the last Bee Gee staying alive.

17 APR 2020