The Big Issue Australia #656 – Rosie Batty by The Big Issue Australia

Ed.

656 04 MAR 2022

ROSIE BATTY

IT’S TIME FOR REAL CHANGE

xx.

ZOË KRAVITZ

GLORIA STEINEM and NECTARINE CRUMBLE

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Contents

EDITION

656 18 The Long Revolution More than 50 years on from her landmark Address to the Women of America, Gloria Steinem is still fighting for equality.

28 FILM

Holy Dualities, Batman!

Cover photo Rosie Batty by Nikki Toole, 2017. Commissioned with funds provided by the Circle of Friends 2017 for the National Portrait Gallery, Australia. © Nikki Toole

12.

“Believe in Yourself and What You Deserve” by Anastasia Safioleas

In the wake of the unthinkable loss of her only son, Rosie Batty has tackled domestic violence in this country head-on, speaking her truth and telling her story. To mark this International Women’s Day, we share her Letter to My Younger Self, about the gift of motherhood, the power of self-belief, and why we need real systemic change to stop domestic abuse – now.

THE REGULARS

04 05 06 08 11 20

Ed’s Letter & Your Say Meet Your Vendor Streetsheet Hearsay & 20 Questions My Word The Big Picture

26 27 36 37 38 39

Ricky Fiona Film Reviews Small Screen Reviews Music Reviews Book Reviews

41 44 45 46

Public Service Announcement Puzzles Crossword Click

Zoë Kravitz talks playfulness, power and channelling her inner freak in her turn as Catwoman in The Batman.

42 TASTES LIKE HOME

Nectarine Crumble Tray Bake Sally Wise shares her recipe for a sweet summer pie with a delicious crumbly top – a celebration of seasonal stone fruit.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

Batty the Brave

osie Batty inspires me because of the work she does in domestic violence. She gets up and speaks about her son’s death and her experience. She’s incredibly brave,” writes Suzie, who works in The Big Issue’s Women’s Subscription Enterprise in Melbourne, in a response to our call-out for ideas for our annual International Women’s Day edition. “I know how difficult that is because of my own experience. International Women’s Day is about celebrating brave and incredible women like Rosie Batty.” Indeed. Rosie Batty’s courage and strength in the aftermath of great personal tragedy, the murder of her 11-year-old son Luke at the hands of his father, changed the way we speak about domestic violence in this country. By sharing her story, Rosie gave a voice to many other victim-survivors of family

LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

violence. She gave people confidence to reach out and get support. As the 2015 Australian of the Year, she put domestic violence on the national agenda. She’s helped make a tangible difference. Yet, as she says, we have a way to go. In Australia, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner, and almost 20 people are hospitalised each day for injuries sustained by domestic violence. One in six women, and one in 16 men, have experienced physical abuse from a partner. Family violence is the leading cause of homelessness, especially for women and children. It’s why we need systemic change. It’s why Rosie’s voice is vital. In this edition, she talks to Anastasia Safioleas about her family, the joys of being a mum to Luke, and the importance of reaching the next generation in order to prevent domestic violence and make a real and lasting change.

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The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 25 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

A special coincidence happened when I bought my Summer Fiction (Ed#654) copy of The Big Issue from Savey at Mitcham, in South Australia: a first for me to buy a Big Issue from the vendor featured in Meet Your Vendor. We shared a joke as he was wearing black-rimmed glasses, but he hastened to show me the blue glasses that he was wearing in the photo. Savey’s story is an inspiration. What a special organisation is The Big Issue. Keep up the great work. ALISON HEMER LOWER MITCHAM I SA

I am one of those people who got to know Shane a little over the years in Geelong CBD, and I just read his Streetsheet message ‘So Much Love’ (Ed#654), announcing his retirement. I would be very grateful if you would pass on my very best wishes to Shane and Tanya. I really enjoyed having a chat when I saw Shane to buy The Big Issue. What a courageous thing it is to do, to put yourself out there. And he helped other people do that too. Take care of yourselves. ROS PATERSON GEELONG I VIC

• 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 23 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

Alison wins a copy of Sally Wise’s delicious new cookbook The Comfort Bake. You can check out Sally’s recipe for Nectarine Crumble Tray Bake on page 42. 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 I was born and bred in Richmond, but I’m a Collingwood supporter. My dad was Collingwood, my little brother was Collingwood before he passed away… There are 16 of us. But we don’t know them all, so I just say the ones I know: Jennifer, Colleen, Richard who’s passed away, Mark and myself – and Jan our stepsister, kinda. I loved school. I loved history and sport. Coming up, I got called things like “rational brains”, “scrag” – you name it, I got it, because I wore full uniform, I shined my shoes, and I spent my time in the library studying. I mean, I’m like a sponge: I never stop learning things. If I hear a word I don’t know, I look it up. I read a book a day, books like James Patterson, crime novels. After the HSC, I went into the Army. I’ve always loved the armed forces, always. When we were young, the Americans came in on a ship into Port Melbourne, and I befriended some of the Navy guys. I always liked the Navy, but I preferred the Army because it offered the best opportunities for women in those days. That’s when I ended up in Sydney. It was a good six years in the Army. I was sigs or signals. I loved it. After I left, I did nurse’s aide work in Sydney, and then I came home back to Melbourne. I did childcare work, and I got work as an orderly. Then I did a carpentry, joining, welding, fitting training course for women at TAFE, and from that I did a pre-apprenticeship in carpentry. I enjoyed that. I did a few jobs, but it was really hard in those days as a female, so then I went on and did my Cert II and III in security. I used to work as a security guard at the footy, the cricket, concerts and all that. I was standing at the footy one day, and this guy started chatting, talking footy, and he came back at half-time and said “You don’t know who I am do you? I’m your brother.” It was my little brother Richard; we’d been estranged for ages when the girls got put into one kids’ home, the boys put in another. I have this philosophy that I am what I am because of me. My past has got nothing to do with it. I’m non-binary now, which means I don’t think of myself as female, I don’t think of myself as male, I’m me. It confuses people; they can’t get their heads around it. I started selling The Big Issue in July. I like the freedom, that you pick your hours. And just getting out and about and meeting people, and having fun. I do a lot of volunteering as it keeps my mind active. I work with the Salvos, as well as with Switchboard’s Out and About program. I’ve got the gift to help, as my church told me. It’s good to help.

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04 MAR 2020

interview by Amy Hetherington photo by James Braund

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE OUTSIDE YOUNG AND JACKSON, CORNER FLINDERS AND SWANSTON STS, MELBOURNE

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

Times Like These

Me and My Girls

PROUD DAD GARFIELD WITH KERRAN, JAZZMMYNE AND LEE-ANNE

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

nternational Women’s Day is so important. I am surrounded by lots of females in my family. I have four daughters and two sons. I want my sons to respect their sisters and other women. I am so proud of my girls – they are looking forward to becoming independent. My eldest daughter, who’s 23, is finishing her hairdressing apprenticeship. My second eldest is 21 and finishing her university degree in teaching and is saving for a house. My 19-year-old wants to study childcare education and is waiting to find out if she gets in. I also have a 12-yearold who is in Year 7 this year. I spent Christmas Eve with my girls; we opened presents and had dinner. It meant a lot to me. I respect my female customers and female workers on The Parade; they are the majority of my customers. My girls are proud of me and know I work hard. They help me out a lot. GARFIELD L THE PARADE, NORWOOD I ADELAIDE

Footsteps to a place of shelter For the confusing memories of home linger through the pain Stripping my mind of movement Like a heartbeat slithering away The sounds of light breeze Crisp clear rivers freely flowing Birds and grass softly singing Children’s footsteps innocence free to create without worry Then home fades, reality steps in Horns blaring, voices moving by rhythm of blame Little boxes of pride for all to hide in house so much disarray and control Do not enter my land for I stole it Rips my mind and heart Bangs through my nerves, nowhere to run nowhere to hide Shelter is not home, the trees whispered between the wind For pride is our curse I think back and war our reward to revenge in greed of hate Can’t wait to get back to our little corner for I miss my little red hat In times like these. RACHEL T PYRMONT I SYDNEY

Wonder Women

Positive Uplift

May Days

This International Women’s Day, I want to send a shout-out to the important and wonderful women in my life: my mum, my sister and my daughter. My mum and my twin sister are always there for me. I love them very dearly for what they do for me – especially in the hard times. My mum is very helpful when I am upset. She helps me to pick up the pieces every time, and she has taught me a lot about life in general. My sister inspires me in many ways. I am so proud of her big achievements, particularly in her cycling competitions. I think this is so impressive and inspiring. On our 21st birthday, Mum put on a big party for us. It’s still one of my fondest memories. We had black forest cake, which I excitedly picked up from the bakery in the city. The party was in our backyard and about 20 people came to help us celebrate. Lastly, I would like to say thanks to my daughter. She works very hard and makes me proud. I love her – she is my rock.

I’m new to The Big Issue. I think it’s awesome to have a crack at anything new. It’s a feel-good thing; people like to give. And it gives us a place in society. The Big Issue is really popular; people have a soft spot for it and they like to read it – and even collect them. One man said he has every issue. And one of my customers is a doctor – he buys two mags for the waiting room every fortnight, so the patients have a positive uplift.

The Big Issue calendar photo shoot was a great day. The photographer was a lovely guy, and everyone was trying to make me laugh, which was hilarious. My family are a pretty proud lot and were chuffed I was in it (I’m in May). I’ve tried a new pitch and am loving working in the Claremont Quarter in Perth. The centre manager, Justin, has been so supportive – setting up free ACROD parking for us and making sure we can access the facilities. The Body Shop team are awesome. It’s been a pretty good start to the year!

TALLIS GPO, QUEEN STREET I BRISBANE

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Mind on Fire

JOSIE WSE I ADELAIDE

Here is a pic of some of my artwork that I brought into The Big Issue office to show the Perth staff. They reckon it’s awesome. I sell my art on my Etsy shop – SarahsacksCreations. The orange painting is called Mind on Fire – if you rotate it, you might be able to find a bird. The two I am holding are called Friendship Bracelet and Butterfly Garden. My best friend Rikki actually named the butterfly one! I just love practising art and mainly practise abstract painting.

Move Mountains All ladies are inspirational as they play a huge part in life and society. Many ladies helped nurse wounded soldiers in wars and now they battle beside them. Ladies now play in women’s leagues on their own merits. One voice on its own can make a strong stand, but it takes a team of us sticking together as one and then we can move mountains.

SARAH I FREMANTLE SARAH BRINGS HER ETSY SHOP TO WORK

SPONSORED BY LORD MAYOR’S CHARITABLE FOUNDATION. COMMUNITY PHILANTHROPY MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN GREATER MELBOURNE AND BEYOND.

04 MAR 2022

CINDY C BLACKWOOD, GOODWOOD & ADELAIDE FARMERS’ MARKET I ADELAIDE

BILL CLAREMONT CORNER I PERTH

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

I think I only almost cried once – during the Megan Thee Stallion scene, because I had to twerk and I cannot twerk.

“Lottie just said ‘the core of my apple looks exactly like George Harrison’. I just said ‘stop eating the apple’. I had a look and said ‘oh my God, it’s George’.” By George! Hard-core Beatles fan and record store owner Mark Thorne was bowled over when a vision of the band’s lead guitarist – complete with signature mop top – appeared in his wife’s lunchtime snack. THE SCOTTISH SUN I UK

“We need to seize the opportunity and do it as quickly as possible. I want to be frank: civilisation is feeling a little fragile these days.” SpaceX founder Elon Musk on building capability to establish a self‑sufficient city on Mars. THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

TikTok comedian Sarah Cooper – best known for lip-synching Trump – on the downsides of getting your own Netflix special.

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HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW I US

“I think it’s important to be honest with yourself about what really makes you happy. I’ve chosen myself. I think it’s okay to choose you.” Reality-TV billionaire Kim Kardashian on joining “Team Me” in her forties.

“I’m not really keen on sax, but I think this record needed it. I always find it a bit creepy…” Oasis singer Liam Gallagher gets all saxy on his upcoming album, C’Mon You Know.

VOGUE I US

“We’re still small and scrappy, but we’re not so innocent anymore.” Stu Upson, CEO of USA Pickleball, on the rising popularity of the sport, which is a cross between tennis, pingpong and badminton.

NME I UK

“If I were to jump to the philosophical realm, I would speculate that if the brain did a flashback, it would probably like to remind you of good things, rather than the bad things. But what’s memorable would be different for every person.” Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, on data that suggests life may actually flash before our eyes before we die, after a team of scientists recorded the brainwaves of an 87-year-old epilepsy patient, who suffered a fatal heart attack mid-test.

“We’ve all experienced these same symptoms – coughing, trouble breathing, fever – and here’s a 150-million-year-old dinosaur that likely felt as miserable as we all do when we’re sick.” Cary Woodruff, of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and the University of New Mexico, on evidence that a long-necked herbivorous sauropod dinosaur (they’ve nicknamed her Dolly, for short) suffered a respiratory infection way back in the late Jurassic period.

“Having a bad day? Spare a thought for New Zealand’s Meikayla Moore.” BBC journalist Alistair Coleman on soccer player Meikayla Moore, who scored three goals – left foot, right foot and a header – for the wrong side in a match against the US women’s team.

“We would like to issue a timely reminder that this crop will deliver absolutely no ‘high’ and is similar to agricultural crops such as wheat (which no-one has tried to steal before!).” Tasmania’s Institute of Agriculture with a sobering reminder that hemp won’t get you high, after thick-as thieves nabbed several industrial hemp plants from one of its research farms.

SCIENCE DAILY I US

TWITTER I US

THE MERCURY I AU

NPR I US

BBC I UK

20 Questions by Rachael Wallace

01 Queen Margrethe II recently marked

50 years on the throne of which nation? 02 True or false: Jana Pittman was

the first Australian to compete at both Summer and Winter Olympic Games? 03 Sydney Mardi Gras grew from a

protest march from which year? 04 What precious gem do scientists

believe rains down on the planet of Neptune? 05 The Foo Fighters are playing one

Australian gig, in which city? 06 What does the “QR” in QR codes

stand for? 07 Who is the president of Ukraine? 08 How many periods are there in a

game of ice hockey? 09 Who directed Oscar-nominated film

“I think the area surrounding the eyes is attracting attention as an important part of communication instead of the mouth that is covered by a mask. The marketing battle

JAPAN TODAY I JP

The Power of the Dog? 10 The Jimi Hendrix Experience was

the opening act for which band on their 1967 tour? 11 Which Australian suburb is

colloquially known as Sheep Dunny Cow Dunny? 12 Approximately what percentage of

the Earth’s land surface is made up of desert: a) 29 per cent, b) 33 per cent, c) 41 per cent or d) 25 per cent? 13 Who became the Governor of

“It’s a huge leap forward for the cola category and will redefine cola for years to come.” Pepsi’s Todd Kaplan talking up Nitro Pepsi, which has a widget in it, like a can of Guinness, producing a creamier, smoother soft drink CNN I US

“I’m out here trying to work right now!” US Reporter Myles Harris, telling his biggest fan – his mum – that he can’t talk right now because he’s filming a news report. Harris was mid update when his mum pulled up in the car, calling “Hi baby” and blowing a kiss.

Queensland in November last year? 14 In what 1963 film did Sidney Poitier

become the first African American actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor? 15 What is the red cross on the English

national flag called? 16 Which Australian artist painted The

Curve of the Bridge? 17 What colour is a lutino budgie? 18 Whose bestselling 2015 memoir was

titled Reckoning? 19 What is the collective noun for

clams? 20 Which Australian city’s water

supply was contaminated by Cryptosporidium and Giardia in 1998?

THE GUARDIAN I UK

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ANSWERS ON PAGE 44

04 MAR 2022

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH I AU

is expected to continue as many people feel that masks have benefits other than preventing infections, such as eliminating the need to put on make-up or groom their beards.” The eyes have it: Kenji Arima, of Rikkyo University, on an increased demand for eyebrow treatments and coloured contact lenses during COVID.

“There seems to be selfish Dad: “Have you interest that is heard of The beginning to Beatles?” swamp societies Maddy: “Yeah I’ve everywhere and heard of them, a carelessness they’re like One about people who Direction but for need help. And old people.” this has come around only Tuan of Melbourne, learning in the last few the hard realities from his eight-year-old daughter. years and it is so disappointing. I don’t think it will hold, I really don’t. I believe that we do have a better future and we shall get through these times.” Star Trek great Patrick Stewart on why he’s “disappointed, distressed and fearful” of the world of 2022 – but still remains an optimist in the long-term. EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Katherine Collette @kecollette

hen I first hear of competitive public speaking, I think, Who would want to do that? It’s bad enough having to get up and talk in front of people; imagine being ranked for how terrible you are. I can’t imagine ever attempting it. But a few years after joining a public speaking club, I do exactly that. Round One is the club competition, which hardly anybody enters. Hardly anybody comes to watch either; the audience consists of two other competitors, three judges and the MC. So far as “public speaking” goes, there’s a lot of the speaking, not so much of the public. It’s still nerve-racking, though. I stand at the lectern, hands gripping its sides. I try to imagine the audience naked but it’s more helpful to imagine them asleep. It’s not difficult, given how few people are there. My speech is a tale of adversity and struggle, about how I bravely, naively, attempted building a flat-pack bookshelf. It begins with the question, Do you really need the instructions? and ends with a smattering of applause. Then, an announcement: I’ve won. I receive an enormous trophy. “I don’t know where I’ll put it,” I say. At home, I set it on the mantlepiece, where everyone can see. I take photos and post them on Instagram. After my thrilling victory, I prepare for the next round, recording and watching myself on my phone. I look stiff, awkward; I barely move. I realise I need to work on my delivery. Delivery is important. I understand this doubly when I check the judges’ criteria and find that no points are allocated for content. I take this to mean that it isn’t what you say that matters, it’s how you say it that counts. I consult YouTube to see what other competitors have said and how they’ve said it: The word “love” – hands to heart. The word “we” – arms outstretched. “You can do it” (voice loud), “you just have to try” (barely a whisper). On competition day I feel positive… Until I see the size of the audience. Then I start wondering what I’m doing. Why am I here? I hate public speaking. Is it too late to drop out?

My heart thumps as I walk on stage, and across it, back and forth – part of my effort to increase visual engagement. I gesture a lot too, palms open, fingers pressed together (pointing is frowned upon). A second victory! Amid widespread applause, holding another gargantuan trophy aloft, I think I don’t hate public speaking, I love public speaking. The post‑performance high sustains me to the next round. If more movement helped, surely even more movement will help even more? This time I don’t walk across the stage, I flutter. I hold an invisible hammer, knock in imaginary nails. I’ve got facial expressions! A prolonged pause! I pose a question and when the audience answers, I put my hand to my ear and say, “I can’t hear you!” Weirdly, I don’t win. But the second-place speaker is disqualified for going overtime and I scrape through to the next round. No trophy, just a certificate. Round Four. I’m not obsessed, just very interested in winning – which is how I end up in a speaking coach’s living room. I stand between her TV and kitchen table, pretending to make eye contact – Miming! Pausing! – to an audience that isn’t there. At the end the coach says, somewhat dubiously, “That’s a lot.” I tell her my “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” theory: “It’s very meta. That’s the way the world’s going, all style and no substance.” The coach isn’t convinced. She thinks my speech needs a message. Stories with messages, parables for how to live your life, do well. It never hurts to be inspiring. Like the woman with unruly children who found patience. Or the marathon runner who realised the beauty of standing still. But all I’m talking about is assembling a flat pack, a flat pack I abandoned half-way through. It’s hard to find inspiration in that. However, by the time I reach the semi-finals, I think I’ve managed to hit on something. “How to assemble a flat-pack bookshelf,” I begin. “Step 1: Don’t.” The point is sometimes you need to know your limitations. It doesn’t resonate; I don’t make the grand final. Retrospectively, a better message might have been about continuing to try, because eventually you will succeed. You will end up with a working bookshelf. Or a few impressively sized trophies for your mantle.

Katherine Collette co-hosts The First Time podcast. Her novel about public speaking, The Competition, is out now.

Sometimes you’ve just got to know when to pack it in, writes Katherine Collette. Unless you’re trying to win a public speaking prize.

04 MAR 2022

Let Me Introduce My Shelf

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Letter to My Younger Self

Believe in Yourself and What You Deserve 2015 Australian of the Year Rosie Batty jolted Australia into recognising that family violence could happen to anyone. A tireless advocate for victim-survivors ever since her 11-year‑old son Luke was killed by his father, Batty opens up about the joys of motherhood and why the fight to end Australia’s hidden endemic must involve our young people. by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor

hardest thing for me was when I started to live overseas from the age of about 20, when I first went off to be an au pair in Austria. I was always worried that something would happen to my grandparents. But my grandmother lived for quite a long time. She would always say to me “When are you going to come back to England to live? When are you getting married?” I would get very irritable because it seemed I couldn’t be genuinely happy unless I got married. I was in no rush to be married. And I never did. Neither did my brothers. I can look back now and see that it was the trauma of losing my mum so suddenly that probably prevented us from being able to have a permanent relationship as adults. I always had a fragile sense of self-image. I was always shy with boys initially and unsure of myself. When it comes to a romantic connection, I’m very shy and reserved. I was very cautious about having a real boyfriend and was very, very cautious about entering that kind of romantic relationship, which I didn’t do till I was over 18. It’s sad but if I could go back to a particular time of my life it would be when I was 40 and fell pregnant with Luke. I don’t think I’ve been happier than when I was a mum. I hadn’t planned to have a child – I was so scared of losing something that I love. I have attachment disorders and it was only when I studied trauma and attachment theory that I understood the decisions and choices I’d made subconsciously during

y 16-year-old self was shy and unsure of herself, but friendly and keen to learn to drive and start working. I grew up on a farm in a small English village and I went to a private boarding school [but] I was in a rush. I couldn’t imagine going on to do A-levels and university. I can’t recall, to be honest, why I thought I’d get a job in a bank. I wanted what I thought was a good job that my parents would be proud for me to get. It was considered a secure job and a good step, reputable and respectable. It wasn’t considered unusual for me to leave school at 16. I wanted to be able to earn some money and to buy clothes. I didn’t have a great big wardrobe. I came from a generation where you weren’t overindulged. I lost my mum when I was little, and we didn’t have many clothes. I was dying to earn my own money. The first thing I did with my first month’s salary was I went down to London with my stepmother and, much to her horror, squandered my entire salary on a pair of boots. I felt a bit embarrassed wearing them, actually. I was embarrassed that I’d spent all my money on boots that were a bit on trend for a rural place. After my mum died, Dad was left with three children under the age of six. He was a farmer so that was quite difficult. We would spend a lot of our school holidays with my aunties and uncles and my grandmother; they all lived in the same village about an hour and a half away. Everybody loved my Nana. The

04 MAR 2022

@anast

IF YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED VIOLENCE OR SEXUAL ASSAULT AND REQUIRE IMMEDIATE OR ONGOING ASSISTANCE, CONTACT 1800 RESPECT. FOR CONFIDENTIAL SUPPORT AND INFORMATION, CONTACT SAFE STEPS’ 24/7 FAMILY VIOLENCE RESPONSE LINE ON 1800 015 188.

04 MAR 2022

my life that had prevented me from that commitment of permanent relationships. Part of that also was not wanting children because of the risk of losing a child. It became evident very soon after I fell pregnant that Luke’s father was unbalanced. I had really hoped we would have a relationship but it started to become increasingly evident that he was some weird mixed-up guy. I look back now at behaviours I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with. I was constantly torn, trying to make it work and then realising it was impossible. The joy I had being a mum was often challenged by my relationship with him as the father. I didn’t realise it was violence until I saw a counsellor when [Luke] was about two. I was never able to fully embrace being a mum without the shadow of dealing with the abuse from his father. My role as I saw it was to facilitate a relationship with his father because at that time, I believed I was doing the right thing. It was really challenging… Making sure that Luke had the best of what I could provide for him, that he didn’t go without anything, that he had joy and happiness in his life, that he was well balanced and engaged and a connected little human: that was just always pulled back and sideswiped by this goddamn man who was his father. So when I was about 40 and I had Luke, I was so nurturing and so overly content being his mum. I loved that first year where he was a baby, gurgling and learning to eat and breastfeeding. It was just so special. Having a child is the thing that starts to connect you to your community. So, when I did lose Luke, my greatest disconnect has been in this area because my connections came through creche and kinder and schools. You have a relationship with the mums and their kids; you’re connected through their sports and swimming. Wherever you went you were meeting people and getting to know each other. Then when I lost Luke all those connections went, and it was really difficult. It still is. My one tangible achievement was being instrumental in the Royal Commission [into Family Violence] in Victoria. Just over five years on it’s been a significant and real opportunity for systemic change.

I hadn’t planned to have a child – I was so scared of losing something that I love.

It hasn’t fixed everything but it’s the only thing any government has done that has likely [led] to structural change in responses. And I advocated very strongly for Respectful Relationships in schools. The Victorian State Government again acknowledged that my advocacy contributed to those programs going into over a thousand state schools. That’s a significant opportunity for real change, which I’m delighted about because I think one of the most important things we can do is to create generational attitudinal change. It’s a shame the Federal Government pushed things back because of their conservative views. A lot of the work I’ve been trying to do has been slowed down because of push back and reservations from ultra-conservative and religious groups. Which is just so bloody annoying because it’s the most important area for us – to be able to see generational change. We need to reach young people. I’ve approached my advocacy in my own individual way but I’m sure it’s different because of my generation and the generational gap between Grace Tame and I. That doesn’t mean either is right or wrong. It just demonstrates difference. It’s a great reflection and insight that’s challenged me at times… the lack of apology, of not knowing your place. Just going “Nah, I’m not conforming. This is who I am. And nobody’s going to tell me any different.” If I’ve helped lift the lid on something that has been a dirty secret throughout previous generations and shifted that into a conversation where people are able to learn and understand it more, then that’s a big thing in itself. I realise I haven’t reversed statistics – it’s potentially gotten worse – but as people understand they’re in a violent situation or they’re in an abusive relationship, they have more confidence to reach out to get support and help. Our systemic responses of course have never had bipartisan, long-term, sustainable, sufficient funding. So that is, again, a slog that feels challenging because it’s still a battle to really get political leadership, particularly at a federal level. I would tell my 16-year-old self that you’re enough and don’t settle for less. Believe in yourself and what you deserve. I turned 60 a couple of weeks ago and you think who was I at 16? You have no idea of what tragedy awaits you in life. I would never have had any idea that the only child I would ever have would be murdered. It’s beyond your comprehension to think that could be possible in your life. I didn’t even know about family violence when I was 16. I didn’t know it existed, didn’t know what it looked like. I knew nothing. So how the hell did I find myself experiencing life as I have? I mean, what would you want to say to that 16-year-old girl? Avoid that fuckwit.

Takin’ Care of Business The Big Issue’s Women’s Workforce are a force to be reckoned with, as Melissa Fulton discovers when she joins them on a shift. by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

illustration by XXX

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illustration by Eleonora Arosio

t’s a bright sunshiny morning when I arrive at The Big Issue’s vendor support offices for my shift. Women dressed in Lycra check the laces on their running shoes, rub sunscreen on their faces, chat quietly among themselves as they prepare to get to work. We make chitchat – where to get coffee, the merits of almond milk (Kristel’s off the dairy), Tina asks Lieu about her family. Gemma and Esther, who are both overseeing our shift, hand out maps, cold drinks and the leaflets we’ll be delivering today, which we pack into bright red Big Issue bags. Welcome to the Women’s Workforce. The agenda for the day? A letterbox drop in the suburbs of inner-city Melbourne, alerting residents to construction work in their area – upgrades to the public housing towers. Ever noticed that the majority of Big Issue vendors are men? Well, 12 years ago The Big Issue did too, and saw an urgent need to provide safe, flexible and family-friendly work opportunities for women. While women represent 42 per cent of Australia’s homeless population, women’s homelessness tends to be less visible. Overwhelmingly, domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness among women in this country, and women over 55 are the fastest-growing group to experience homelessness.

In response, The Big Issue launched the Women’s Subscription Enterprise (WSE) back in 2010, employing women experiencing homelessness, marginalisation and disadvantage to pack and send our magazine to subscribers. Demand for no-barrier, inclusive work for women and gender non-conforming people has continued to grow since then, so the WSE has expanded into the Women’s Workforce, and increased the services on offer, employing women for third-party procurement work – jobs like picking and packing, mail house services, data entry, call centre work, event support and, like today, letterbox drops – for government, start-ups, not-for-profits and other businesses, including Australia Post, The Body Shop, Westpac and Melbourne International Jazz Festival. Today we are employed by ICON Developments. Lieu has been employed by the Women’s Workforce since its inception, and she knows a thing or two about how to prepare for a shift. She agrees to show me the ropes, and is patient when I fumble with the handfuls of leaflets she gives me to pack for the day. As we stroll between housing complexes unloading our pamphlets, Lieu opens up. One of the benefits of this type of work is that there’s plenty of time for a chat. “I was a boat person from Vietnam,” she says, “so I know how important it is to feel safe.” Lieu talks about arriving in Australia in 1979, settling in West Melbourne and how for 10 years she owned and operated an Asian grocer in Footscray. She had a family, and when her children were born, she opened a new business with more forgiving hours, so that she had more time to care for and be with them. At one stage, she owned three houses in Melbourne with her partner.

And then one night, with nothing but the clothes on her back, she packed up her children and fled – “For our safety.” At first, Lieu didn’t know where to go, which services to access, who to turn to for help. Her daughter was about to sit her Year 12 exams. “I didn’t feel safe at all. I didn’t want my children to know, but I knew they knew something. They were so scared, but I told them not to worry, we just had to get out the door right now.” They ended up at the sick bay of Southern Cross Station, asking for help. Lieu’s children are grown up now, and she’s proud that she was able to support them through university. But for Lieu, finding the Women’s Workforce was about more than just the money. “The best part of the work is that we’ve always got support,” she reflects. “Any issue – be it personal or family – you can come there and check in with each other and see how you’re going. The Big Issue is really just like family; if you need to ask for help, you just let the staff know and they’ll meet you before or after or during the work. It’s a really caring, supportive environment.” To date, the Women’s Workforce has employed almost 200 women across four states – Victoria, New

For some, it’s a lifeline. “I kept telling myself as soon as I have surgery, I can go back to work. But I thought, sometimes it’s not just the injury, it can be a little broader than that… You’ve gotta heal the mind too.” When I talk to Tina during our lunch break, she’s still glowing with pride after the weekend, when her son got married. “The wedding was fantastic, beautiful,” she says, then describes the dress she bought for the occasion: “It’s a full-length dress, navy blue, with short see-through sleeves.”

It’s given me back my networking and engagement skills, too, because I withdrew for a little bit there.

Tina’s been working with the Women’s Workforce for five years now. Prior to that, she had been out of the workforce for some time. “I was very unwell – my mental health, yeah. But the work with the Women’s Workforce was only for four hours, which was comfortable and manageable, and I got to meet the ladies and have a talk. I’ve made some good friends. It’s a good place, a very friendly and happy environment. “I’m learning people skills, time management skills, organisation skills. Getting up in the morning and making sure I’ve got enough time to get ready and get into work.” As we trundle along the footpaths of Melbourne, our bags getting lighter as we unload these pamphlets, I take in more stories from these women. I understand something that I often forget about work: that it’s about more than just the pay – though that’s important too – it’s about having somewhere to be, having someone to talk to, having people looking out for you and asking how you are. “You might have nothing,” says Lieu. “You might have lost everything. You might not even have a roof over your head, but if you come to The Big Issue, they will give you support and guide you.” FOR MORE ABOUT THE WOMEN’S WORKFORCE, VISIT THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU/OUR-PROGRAMS/SOCIAL-PROCUREMENT.

South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. It pays award wages, and offers shifts of a minimum four hours. These shifts are overseen by a managing supervisor, who can provide support and extra training to the women. Importantly, the shifts are flexible – and aim to accommodate the circumstances the women may be facing. “My first shifts I didn’t show up,” reflects Kristel. “And most jobs wouldn’t ring you back. I must admit, at the start, it was anxiety. I was really bad like that.” Kristel worked in recruitment at Monash University for 14 years. But just six weeks after she resigned from the job, she was in a serious accident. Then COVID arrived, and delayed the surgery she is undertaking as part of her recovery. It’s been a tough time. At one stage she was homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches. But then, her luck changed, and her housing provider connected her with accommodation. About a year ago, she joined the Women’s Workforce. “The Big Issue has been great, just to get my foot in the door somewhere,” she says. “I’ve found that this has just been a good way to ease back into work… It’s given me back my networking and engagement skills, too, because I withdrew for a little bit there.” For many women, the Women’s Workforce works as a stepping stone back into the workforce or study.

04 MAR 2022

KRISTEL, ON THE BIG ISSUE’S WOMEN’S WORKFORCE

The Long Revolution More than 50 years after her landmark speech signalled the ascent of feminism and galvanised women worldwide, Gloria Steinem still has the fire in her belly. by Laura Kelly The Big Issue UK @laurakaykelly

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ex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organising human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.” So said feminist Gloria Steinem more than 50 years ago, in one of the most important speeches of the 20th century. Addressing sexism and misogyny, racism and poverty, the rallying cry of the Address to the Women of America remains the core demand of feminists today: to live in a society “in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned”. On that July day in 1971, Steinem co‑convened a gathering of more than 300 women, including The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, civil rights activist and journalist Myrlie Evers-Williams, activist lawyer politician “Battling Bella” Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. By the end of the weekend, they’d founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) – a ground-breaking organisation to increase women’s participation in political and public life. “This is no simple reform,” Steinem promised. “It really is a revolution.” Five decades on, “it’s been a long, long, long revolution,” Steinem tells The Big Issue on a video call from her office in New York. It’s her current base for a battle she’s still actively

TOP: WITH A PREGNANT PRESIDENT CARTER, 1977 MIDDLE: LEADING A PRO‑CHOICE RALLY, 1986 BOTTOM: MARCHING ON WASHINGTON, 2017

04 MAR 2022

I’ve learned now, if somebody calls me a bitch, to say thank you.

had a hero’s welcome from the hundreds of thousands of people who thronged the streets. “I’ve been thinking about the uses of a long life,” she told the crowds, “and one of them is you remember when things were worse.” So after all these years, is there still the same fire in her belly? “Oh yes, of course. Are you kidding me?! Part of what is great about social justice movements is that you learn. It’s exciting. You have a chosen family of people who share some of the same hopes and values. You laugh at each other’s jokes. You dance. I don’t know why people think a movement is a source of deprivation. It’s not. It’s a gift.” Chief among criticisms of second‑wave feminism – that of Steinem and her contemporaries – is that it failed to address how different forms of oppression – such as race, class, disability and sexuality – intersect. Steinem acknowledges the criticism, and points to such prominent Black activists as Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Florynce Rae Kennedy, alongside whom she often appeared on the lecture circuit – not to mention Shirley Chisholm, whose 1972 presidential campaign has been unjustly forgotten. “Shirley Chisholm took the white‑male-only sign off the White House door all by herself. In 1972. That is extraordinary.” In her much-storied life, Chisholm’s presidential campaign is the moment Steinem says she’s most proud of. Yet the story doesn’t get the attention it deserves. “That’s a problem,” says Steinem. “Even to the extent that we have been part of history, it kind of gets wiped out or underplayed. Shirley Chisholm should have been a bigger part of the coverage of Kamala Harris’ candidacy. I’m not sure I saw it mentioned at all.” Neither Steinem’s team, nor I, could find a full version of the 1971 Address to the Women of America online. It has, Steinem fears, fallen victim to a combination of the general erasure of women’s history, as well as the failure of the women’s movement to recognise themselves as history-makers at the time. I did turn up a clip in which a journalist plays her another clip in which a woman calls Steinem a “real bitch”. “I’ve learned now, if somebody calls me a bitch, to say thank you,” she laughs, “because the reason they’re calling you a bitch is usually something to be proud of.”

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE BIG ISSUE UK, ED #1469, BIGISSUE.COM @BIGISSUE. PHOTOS © ROBYN TWOMEY/REDUX/HEADPRESS AND GETTY

fighting today, at 87. “Our goals were mainly electoral and political,” she continues. “It was a bipartisan effort to see to it that there were more women – hopefully, half women – in both elected and appointed political office.” Did it feel like a revolution? “Not yet. It still doesn’t.” Though the feminist revolt is yet to topple the patriarchy, the NWPC has helped shift the dial on women’s participation in US politics. In 1971, women represented 4.7 per cent of American state legislators; today, they are 31 per cent. “Things have changed enormously in a half century,” Steinem agrees. Still, the most powerful position in America has remained the preserve of men. In 2016, Hillary Clinton came the closest to being America’s first female head of state – only to lose to possibly the most boorish misogynist ever to hold the role. Steinem was a prominent campaigner for Clinton, so it comes as a shock to hear her say, “I never thought that she could win, actually.” Really? “Yes, yes. Of course, we all worked our hearts out anyway, right?” Though Donald Trump was voted out in 2020 – and Kamala Harris sworn in as the first female, first African American and first Indian American vice-president of the United States – the hangover from his administration remains. Trump’s Supreme Court appointments now threaten one of the totemic achievements of American feminists – Roe v Wade. In 1973, the landmark case blocked individual states from banning abortion, thus protecting a pregnant person’s liberty to have an abortion. For Steinem, an attack on bodily autonomy is nothing less than an assault on democracy. “The first step in every hierarchy that I know about is controlling reproduction. And that means controlling women’s bodies,” she warns. “So, democracy also starts there.” The US Supreme Court is expected to rule by October in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, over a Mississippi law that would outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “Oh, fuck them!” exclaims Steinem. “How dare they say that they can make a decision over our bodies? It’s just impossible and wrong.” The day after Trump’s inauguration, at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, Steinem

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series by Bri Hammond

The Big Picture

Riot Pearls Photographer Bri Hammond joins the tide with Melbourne’s self-proclaimed “least-professional feminist water ballet team”– The Clams. by Brodie Lancaster @brodielancaster

Brodie Lancaster is a writer and critic from Melbourne. She is the author of the 2017 memoir No Way! Okay, Fine.

FOR MORE IMAGES FROM BRI HAMMOND, GO TO BRIHAMMOND.COM.

04 MAR 2022

rom the second-wave Ms. magazine crowd to the Riot Grrrls of the 90s, history is filled with groups of women who got together in groups to talk and plot change. Through sharing space and experiences, they found common ground, and great art inevitably followed. Born out of a feminist book club in Melbourne, The Clams are picking up the mantle – and doing it in waist-deep water. A group of non-professional performers, “Melbourne’s least-professional feminist water ballet team” is made up of all manner of women and non-binary people: creative types as well as those who don white collars by day, and white swimming caps by night. Co-founder Francis van Beek, who was a member of Aotearoa’s Wet Hot Beauties troupe before moving to Australia, was drawn to the community spirit of the book club in late 2016. “At the time there was a real groundswell for feminism: Trump had been elected, MeToo was about to take off in a big way. Personally, I joined the book club because I knew I needed to know more about feminist issues. The feeling increased to: I don’t know that this is enough. I want to do something. But what?” The action she and her fellow Clams found was in a mode of “joyful activism” – one rooted in inspiring conversation and lessening stigma. And turning the female gaze on the infamous, often-ogled red one-piece bathing suit in the process. Their hilarious debut show was called Crimson Tide. With tampons crafted out of pool noodles and dozens of metres of red tulle floating around them, The Clams performed a cheeky journey through the phases of the menstrual cycle. “Prior to hiring choreographers Holly Durant and Gabi Barton to work with us, the book club got together and we mapped out our emotions when we menstruate,” van Beek explains. In the show, audiences watch as Clams swim and dance in synchronicity – itself a play on the idea that people who menstruate will eventually synchronise if they spend time together. They embody all the happy, horny, sorrowful, bloated, angry and – eventually – relieved waves that come as we surf the crimson one. Following the success of Crimson Tide, The Clams put their shells together again to conceive of two more shows, which photographer Bri Hammond was on-hand to document. “Better Wetter came next, a show celebrating sex, masturbation and pleasure,” Hammond says. “Then there was Grow Your Own Way, a celebration of body hair and a person’s individual right to choose to keep it or not.” While van Beek is aware of the camp silliness inherent in The Clams, she says the troupe wasn’t expecting the response they first got from audiences. “We were surprised by the amount of laughter; we didn’t realise it was as comedic as it is. I hear anecdotally that people cried while watching us. I can only guess that’s about the community aspect: they can see we’re a group of very normal women and non‑binary people that come together to create something. It’s a rare thing.”

In those clamtastic red bathers

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Like two clams in a shack

Crimson Tide

Making a splash

“We were not so great at reading the same book at the same time, so it became a longstanding joke that we try water ballet instead,” says Francis van Beek

A clamour of Clams at Brighton Beach: “sassy, energetic and body positive”

illustration by Luci Everett

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The Price of Love Anita G looks back to when she was raising her daughter in her mother’s house, and sees the tangled lines of love. Anita G sells The Big Issue in Melbourne.

f things don’t improve, I’m going to end up like Beryl next door. The old dear is watering her plastic tulips and won’t let her white cat outside “in case he gets dirty”.

It’s 1990 and Mother is at it again. “No, Natalie,” she says to my three‑year-old daughter, “you will wear the red dress and not the other one because I say so.” Her house, her rules. We’ve just moved in with her – Natalie and I – to make ends meet. I’m late for work, no time to intervene. Natalie glares at me, her tiny hands clenched into fists. Things didn’t work out at the creche. It broke my heart. Natalie was often left unsupervised. The baby boy in the next bed chewed the corner of his dirty bunny rug and cried all day. Toddlers and older children roamed around, and Natalie often came home with a different virus, or bite marks.

Natalie is becoming distressed and uncontrollable; I take her to a psychologist. “A child can’t have two mothers at odds with each other,” the therapist warns. “Stop this tug‑of‑war. Move out or keep the peace.” I try to imagine what moving into a share house would be like for Natalie. Strangers traipsing in and out all day. Not safe. Must keep my mouth shut and act in Natalie’s best interests. The child has cabin fever. She hasn’t been outside for days. Mum is protesting: she says it’s too cold and windy. I scoop Natalie up without a word and we go rollerblading and kite-flying. Maybe being dysfunctional is in my DNA. When I want to check if I really exist, I look at a photo of my paternal grandparents. They sit at far ends of a park bench; their coats piled high in the middle to protect them from each other. When we return, I read Natalie a story and rock her in my arms. “You are keeping that girl chained to you,” Mother protests. “You need to work and if you’re not careful, she won’t let go.” The woman is looking at Natalie with hungry eyes. In the early days she never got to mother me. With her entire family murdered in the Holocaust in 1944, including my father, she was destitute, so she left me at an orphanage until she could afford to claim me. I picture her lingering outside, desolate, her arms empty. Mother is not trying to take Natalie from me. She is clinging to my infant doppelganger, the one she never got to mother. I decide to back off, no matter how much she provokes me. Peace at any price. Okay, I can do this, except I can’t. The white fury returns every now and then, but I can keep

I tell Natalie to keep experimenting, to take risks. She is getting the message and instructs the cat to take more risks. The cat appears to be listening and disappears for three days, returning ragged and ravenous. “I’m so proud of you, Kitty,” Natalie says. “You dared to run away.” I visit the toy library, remembering that these items must be returned. More things Natalie can’t keep, along with the aborted music and ballet lessons that I can’t afford. Today it’s Natalie’s fourth birthday. My mother baked her a cake with pink icing. Mother is laughing and crying at the same time because she finally got to mother “her” baby. Natalie is looking content. My peace plan seems to be working.

04 MAR 2022

I come home knackered and feel like an interloper. Mother cut Natalie’s hair without telling me and it sticks out in tufts. Things are getting worse. One night, I am trying to give Natalie a drink of water during dinner. “Don’t do that,” Mum yells at me. “No drinking during meals.” “But she is thirsty!” “You don’t know anything!” Before putting her into bed I start taking her jumper off. “It’s too cold, leave it on!” “But Mum, it’s only cold outside. We have the heater going.” “Leave it on.”

it under control. How long can one do this until one disappears? It’s important to keep Natalie grounded, to be terra firma in her life. Without earthquakes. Sometimes I go for a walk by myself to keep some perspective. I pass the coin laundry where people wash their miserable, meagre lives out of their clothes, sprinkling soap powder over them. A snow job. You can’t wash away poverty. I drop into the Chapel Street Mission, where you can get a hot meal and see paintings on the wall by people who suffer from mental illness. Lurid colours, jagged lines, images of anguish for sale, some for only $25. I feel guilty over having unkind thoughts about my mother. To her I owe my love of literature and music, not to mention my very life. I can’t cook a good meal, even from the finest ingredients, while she makes a delicious soup from scraps. Maybe I deserve her criticism. My daughter no longer loves me and feels abandoned. I read books about child rearing; it’s like learning a foreign language. “I” for “Inept”. Are those experts really experts? Where have I gone wrong? I see cold mothers being worshipped by their children. It’s hard to reward Natalie. She hates chocolate and brushes me off when I approach her. I walk on eggshells; you practically hear them crackling. What’s maddening is that my mother can reach her in ways I can’t. It must be magic. As Natalie develops, I feel myself atrophy. I can’t remember what it’s like to be a child. My mother is playful while I’m a boring killjoy. Must stop trying to impress Natalie. She will prefer my mother every time, no matter how hard I try. Perhaps I should stop trying.

I am tethered to poverty. It’s a life sentence. We’re in the depths of a recession, and I must keep working. The only alternative to creche is to let my mother look after Natalie, which she is eager to do. I have misgivings. She is going to steal my baby.

Ricky I modelled my look on Jason Donovan.

To Be Like Jason

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by Ricky French @frenchricky

still remember where I was on the day of Scott and Charlene’s wedding: swimming at the beach at Pukerua Bay near Wellington, where I grew up. It wasn’t the actual day of the wedding of course. While the Australian broadcast of that famous episode of Neighbours was in July 1987, episodes turned up in New Zealand a couple of years later. So I was probably nine or 10 years old when I insisted the family pack up the beach towels early so I could get home to watch the wedding of the century. After 37 years and more than 8800 episodes, it appears the long-running soap is being washed down the drain for good, cancelled – in the traditional, rather than modern sense – by Channel 5 in the UK (who pay a lot of the costs). Oh well. I haven’t watched the wretched show in decades, but for a year or so in my pre-adolescence it was an unedifying obsession. Soaps are addictive, and the dramas and romances of Ramsay Street were like heroin for me. My family mocked me for watching the show (and rightly, too) but I didn’t care. I modelled my look on Jason Donovan, took photos of him to the hairdresser and said: “Make it look like this.” More embarrassingly, I loved his music. It must have been an excruciating period for my family, and I’d like to take this moment to offer my wholehearted apology for everything I put them through. As in the UK, Neighbours was huge in New Zealand. The fictional suburb of Erinsborough was an enchanted land, depicting Australia as a warm, sun-kissed, happy (and entirely white) place. Well, mostly happy. The constant dramas, fights and unlikely love interests that kept the show moving seemed like an exhausting way to live, but it gave my friends and I something to talk about at lunchtime. Some school holidays I would visit my dad in Australia and watch Neighbours at his house. The episodes were light years ahead. Returning

to school in New Zealand, my friends would mob me as I foretold the future like an oracle. I was the keeper of information that was somehow powerful, maybe even dangerous. Incredibly, in 1990 our primary school was visited by two of the stars themselves: Stefan Dennis and Fiona Corke (or Paul and Gail). They were most definitely B-list stars as far as the Neighbours cast goes, but I’m sure I would have lost my shit if Kylie and Jason had walked into our classroom. The actors were in town to open the new mall. That the town couldn’t find New Zealand actors with the same celebrity pull is maybe some indication of how big Neighbours was over there. Or maybe they were just cheaper than getting All Blacks? My obsession didn’t last, thankfully. New Zealand developed its own terrible soap opera, Shortland Street, of which I became a devotee for a short and equally cringeworthy time. But Neighbours wasn’t to slip out of my life so easily. When I moved to Melbourne in my early twenties, I had a job delivering hire equipment to the Neighbours set. I wandered around the almost cartoon construction of Lassiters Hotel, saw the facade of the mechanic’s garage where Charlene used to work. And of course I visited Pin Oak Court in Vermont South, known to millions of people around the world as Ramsay Street. I’m not sure how I feel about Neighbours ending, probably because I didn’t realise it was still on. I feel like I should tune in again, to see if I can get hooked one last time. I did love seeing that lively neighbourhood every evening, a place where stuff was always happening. Maybe I should invite the neighbours round to watch the final episode? I would, except I don’t know their names.

Ricky is a writer and musician who wrote this column Especially for You.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

n the whole I’m pretty happy with the “post-menopause” situation. For one thing, I now inhabit the sweet spot between oestrus and loss of bladder control, so for once in my womanly life I’m free of the obligation to buy extravagantly priced absorbent cotton products. Ka-ching! Also, in a hilarious sidebar, it transpires that oestrus – or menstruation as it’s known in human ladies – is Latin for “frenzy”. Always fun to stumble on another example of the medical profession’s long-running motif of “chicks be cray cray”, as classically evidenced by the etymology of hysteria coming from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. To be fair I was probably frenzy-adjacent when I was still stowing tampons in my handbag. I was frequently weepy and cranky, two of Snow White’s more aggravating companions. The highs and lows recede on the far shore of menopause. Your hormones level out, no longer sloshing like a washing machine with a full load. I also appreciate that my womb no longer makes me lunge at every passing ne’er-do-well with decent cheekbones and a crooked smile. Do not miss. I note, too, that compliments have transitioned from “You’re looking hot” or “beautiful”, to “You look well”. Which is fine. For one thing, right now, wellness cannot be taken for granted. It’s more of a hopeful question, isn’t it? “You’re looking…well?” Also, lol, oestrogen in absentia, I no longer aspire to “hotness”. Fortunate, as I’ve never made bank for my grace, regular features, lingerie range and pulchritude. I’ve just watched recent footage of myself on the beach, mucking about in bathers and goggles, and by jingo I am fashioned entirely of teeth and a half-played game of Pick-up Sticks, held together by middle-aged spread. Physically, I am one kooky looking broad with the wingspan of a pterodactyl, and if I hadn’t been so self-conscious during my formative

years, I could have become an actual clown. Honk honk. Not all cultures greet each other with an assessment of each other’s a) physical appearance and/or b) bangability. It’s not mandatory. Why do we do this? In the West we’re primed to rate everyone on their physical attractiveness. If we can’t reach for “beautiful” or “hot” or (gah) “you’ve lost weight”, we are flummoxed. “You look well” is the refuge of the desperate. Amy Schumer wrote a legendary sketch called ‘Last Fuckable Day’, featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette, and celebrates Louis-Dreyfus’ last day of being considered sexually attractive by Hollywood. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. There are a bunch of over fifties and over sixties in my swimming group, mostly women washed up on the far bank of menopause. None of whom, probably, would objectively be considered still “bangable”. They’re smart and funny, eccentric and kind, experienced and wise. I couldn’t give a toss what they look like. I no longer care what anyone looks like. I know that I used to. What’s truly interesting is self-expression. There was a Pride event in Melbourne recently, queers and allies of all shapes, ages and sizes, in rainbow caftans and mohawks and sequins – a blaze of colour and joy. The word I kept returning to, perhaps primed by Queer Eye, was fabulous. Everyone looked fabulous. My swim group are fabulous too, in our bright retro floral caps. Fabulosity has nothing to do with health or allure. It’s being blazingly yourself. Forget looks. Tell your friends they’re fabulous. Tell your parents, your kids, your partner and your bank manager: “Great to see you, aren’t you fabulous!” Because they are. We all are.

Fiona is an author and comedian who’s absolutely fabulous!

04 MAR 2022

Going Full Meno

I also appreciate that my womb no longer makes me lunge at every passing ne’er-do-well with decent cheekbones and a crooked smile.

Fiona

The Batman

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Playful and powerful, both hero and villain, Zoë Kravitz gets comfy with her inner freak and goes a round of cat and mouse with Batman. Prrrrrrrrr! by Raelee Lancaster @raeleelancaster

Raelee Lancaster is a Wiradjuri/Biripi writer and library assistant based in Brisbane.

PHOTOS COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES, JONATHAN OLLEY™/© DC COMICS

Film

Holy Dualities, Batman!

THE CAT AND THE BAT

on things: to find ways to express what she’s feeling in a subtle way.” This sense of internal conflict between good and bad is prevalent throughout The Batman. “When you try and break down all the individual characteristics of Batman, it’s an incredibly complex character,” Pattinson explains. “[Bruce Wayne] has decided that the only way he can get past the demons of his past is to become this character [Batman] which he truly believes is separate from himself.” Clark agrees, calling Pattinson’s Batman “scary”. “He’s just coming into his own as the vigilante known as ‘The Batman’, but he doesn’t quite yet know what that entity is and what it should represent in society, and he’s not quite sure what these demons inside of him represent. “Ultimately, Bruce is somebody who, because of his loss and because he’s not afraid to die, has never really allowed himself to love or be loved.” One person who Batman has allowed in, however, is Catwoman. Their game of cat-and-mouse is notorious and their tempestuous on/off love affair is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Batman universe. They both have rough exteriors and flaws that end in the two fighting or unravelling – sometimes simultaneously. “They draw so much strength from their own pain,” Pattinson says. “I mean, especially for Bruce, it makes him feel really vulnerable. Even though they’re very strong characters in lots of ways, they’re actually very, very difficult and fragile as well.” Whether or not the romantic relationship between Batman and Catwoman comes to fruition in this film, the flickers of vulnerability humanise these characters. “I think it’s about us feeling out what this is, you

04 MAR 2022

ROBERT PATTINSON RECLUSING AS BRUCE WAYNE

e all love and identify with the villains just as much as we do the heroes in these stories,” says Zoë Kravitz. From Bela Lugosi’s 1931 rendition of Dracula to the fantabulous emancipation of Harley Quinn in 2020’s Birds of Prey, there’s no doubt that villains are a dynamic drawcard in mainstream cinema. The idea that every villain is the hero of their own story, and that every hero is inherently flawed, has become more prevalent in popular culture. The Batman is no exception. Set two years into Bruce Wayne’s tenure as Batman, the gritty crime noir story follows the double life of Gotham City’s vigilante detective and his alter ego as a reclusive billionaire. Played by Robert Pattinson and directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), this fresh take on the Caped Crusader is not the familiar crime-fighting DC superhero of old – at least, not yet – described instead as the “embodiment of vengeance”. While Batman is the film’s title figure, it is his rogues’ gallery that enraptured the cast and crew. “You have John Turturro as this very understated crime boss, Carmine Falcone, and [Paul] Dano as a very intelligent Riddler who’s insanely scary,” says producer Dylan Clark. “You have Selina Kyle, who’s vulnerable yet manipulative, tough. She’s a very contemporary character, but she also feels like she has these archetypal ‘noir-ist’ elements. You’re like, God, who is this woman? She’s amazing.” In The Batman, Selina Kyle – otherwise known as Catwoman, and portrayed by Kravitz – is a mysterious and ferocious cat burglar who wears motorcycle leathers and is “more at home with the city’s strays than its citizens”. This is on-brand for most depictions of Catwoman, who debuted in the spring 1940 issue of Batman #1, and has previously been portrayed on screen by Julie Newmar, Halle Berry and Anne Hathaway, among others. Where Pattinson has been, in his words, a “massive fan” of the Bat-verse since childhood, Kravitz is not a big consumer of superhero movies. “But I think there was something about this world that was just so twisted, and everyone was a freak,” she says. “Oftentimes in my life, I felt like a freak, so I was very attracted to these people.” One of the most intriguing aspects of Catwoman is her ability to exist in the liminal space between hero and villain. Canonically, Catwoman adds a grey area to Batman’s black-and-white worldview, allowing him to step out of the rigid boxes he’s placed himself in. What’s so refreshing is that she never struggles with this duality – an element that Kravitz relished. “You don’t know if she’s good or bad,” Kravitz agrees. “Like a cat, you can never read her. There’s a reason we all love this character so much, and it’s really because of her playfulness and her power and the fact that she is independent and a survivor. It would be such a waste to not approach this character from a deep and complex place,” she says. “It’s such a fun way to work

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PHOTOS BY GETTY, MOVIESTILLSDB

ZOË KRAVITZ ON THE BATMAN

codpiece – is typically fuelled by ideas of strength, power and agency, as linked to masculinity. The same cannot be said for Catwoman, whose get-up is usually gauged for sex appeal. As one of this film’s few women, Kravitz has fielded questions about her potential catsuit, whether it’s difficult to slip on and off – questions loaded with the same sexist voyeurism that has plagued her character for more than 80 years. Though she appeared in Batman #1, “the Cat” wasn’t given the name “Catwoman” until Batman #62 (December 1950), 10 years after her debut. It took another 18 years for Eartha Kitt to become the first Black woman to portray Catwoman, featuring in the final season of William Dozier’s campy Batman (1966-68) television series. At the time, this was seen as a controversial move, and Kitt’s Catwoman was the first not to be framed as Batman’s love interest, since interracial marriage was only legalised in all US states in 1967, and mixed-race relationships were

THE BATMAN IS IN CINEMAS NOW.

LIVES OF CATWOMAN

Julie Newmar (1966)

Lee Meriwether (1966)

Eartha Kitt (1967)

Michelle Pfeiffer (1992)

Halle Berry (2004)

Anne Hathaway (2012)

04 MAR 2022

Oftentimes in my life, I felt like a freak, so I was very attracted to these people.

still largely frowned upon in many parts of the country. Moreover, for perhaps the first time on screen, her storylines became more character driven. And even though she had been a much-loved character for more than half a century, Catwoman didn’t get her own ongoing, standalone comic book series until 1993 – perhaps thanks, in part, to Michelle Pfeiffer’s cheesy yet enchanting portrayal in Batman Returns (1992). For the most part, Catwoman as a sultry, unnamed cat burglar seems like bygone days. Still, tackling the live-action role requires a conscious balancing act between sexualised femme fatale, and feminist and cultural icon. “The idea of her being sexy, that’s a big part of Catwoman for a lot of people,” says Kravitz. “But what I find sexy is somebody comfortable in their own skin, somebody who knows who they are and isn’t afraid.” She adds, “I just wanted to make sure we didn’t fetishise her and create an idea or a victim.” One way that Kravitz held onto the character’s autonomy – while also making Selina Kyle her own – was to ground Catwoman’s more fantastical traits. “I really don’t know how to work any other way,” she explains. “Because of the superhero nature, we see these characters from the outside in. Like, she’s sexy and she has a whip, but if that becomes the basis of who she is, it just doesn’t feel interesting. It doesn’t feel authentic.” The Batman seems to understand that it is standing on the shoulders of giants. While honouring past legacies, it also introduces new perspectives. “Even though it’s been interpreted a multitude of ways, it does feel different,” Pattinson says. “It’s a very different tone. It’s actually kind of jarring when you first start watching it, but I think it’s really interesting and I think people will enjoy it – especially long-term fans.” Kravitz seems similarly happy with the film that she and her fellow cast and crew have created. “The nerves don’t help, right? You have to just focus on what you’re trying to do. “I tried to forget about, you know, the fans and the idea and the pressure and just think about what story am I telling,” she says. “Now, doing press and having an actual release date and all of that, it’s a little scary – and exciting.”

know?” says Kravitz. “Is this a partnership? Is this a friendship? Is it romantic? I really don’t think it’s clear. Just to have someone who we feel connected to enter our lives is a huge deal,” she explains. “Fate, whatever you want to call it, has brought us together. We need something from each other, and I think that those are some of the most interesting situations to watch.” For Pattinson, a lot of Batman’s identity was tied up in his costume. “As soon as you put the costume on, you suddenly feel that you need to have such a solid foundation of the character you’re playing. Otherwise, you feel like an idiot in the costume. You have to really, really believe it.” Public discourse around the batsuit – with its rippling abs and, historically, an obvious

Zoë Kravitz (2022)

Magic Tricks Muso, performer and novelist Jenny Hval talks magic, mundanity and the emotional power of music.

@xexcbr

Angus McGrath is a Sydney-based writer and artist, who also makes music as California Girls.

PHOTO BY JENNY BERGER MYHRE

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Music

Jenny Hval

by Angus McGrath

lassic Objects, the eighth album by Oslo-based Jenny Hval, is a lot like the artist herself: succinct, yet disarmingly easygoing. If you know Hval’s widely acclaimed catalogue as a musician, novelist and performer – really only comparable to Patti Smith in her elevation of music to poetry, and poetry to music – you’d be surprised to hear her talk about being so ordinary. Early on in our conversation, she reflects on a strange phenomenon that she observed during COVID lockdowns. “In Norway, every child was drawing the same picture of a rainbow and writing EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE,” she says. “I actually found it super creepy. On these lockdown walks, which was the only thing you were allowed to do, you’d see the same drawings in every window with [a] child’s handwriting saying it’s all going to be okay, which is a lie. I don’t understand it. I guess it was just this standard, socially distanced message from everyone to everyone else.”

resembling a more sublime Paul Simon, but climaxes with Hval belting the words “just so lonely” over and over again. It’s easy to imagine this becoming the 2022 equivalent of Mitski’s ‘Nobody’, the depressing disco anthem of 2018. The song doesn’t end on such simple catharsis though, disintegrating instead into an electronic drone before dispersing even further to a minute of nature sounds. This may seem opposed to the “easy listening” descriptor, but Hval sees ‘Jupiter’ as striving to achieve the impact of great pop music, describing how she “enjoyed thinking about the chorus of a pop song where you’re no longer trying to tell anything but you just want the listener to feel something, or want them to experience some type of elevation. “That’s what I think a chorus is for. You need to change something in order to experience something different. ‘Jupiter’ wants you to feel elevated, but then also wants you to take off and just float.”

Although she’s realistic, Hval clearly has a belief in the emotional power of music. When asked about magic – prompted by its endless appearance across her work, in songs like 2018’s ‘Spells’ or her 2020 novel about witches, Girls Against God – she seems to have thought about it a lot. “I invest so much in describing encounters with something mystical or magical, but I always fail. As we would say in Norwegian… How is this best translated? I walk around the porridge? Because it’s something very difficult to put into words. “Musical structures can take the words I’m trying to write a little bit closer into that indescribable place, which is very important to me, even if I can’t really explain exactly what it is or why it’s important. I’m always trying to go there, and I always fail, but because I fail, I can keep trying.” She reflects again on the children’s rainbow drawings. “All of this stuff is about asking: how do you face fear? How do you face uncertainty? Do you use a safe image, or do you contrast it by going into an experience of the unknown? I think my album tries to do both. The imagery of very mundane things – places, descriptions, stories that seem quite autobiographical and everyday at home, the ordinary person experience.” Before she logs off, she laughs, recalling the children’s lockdown messages. “Remember, all will be well!” CLASSIC OBJECTS IS OUT 11 MARCH.

Hval is generally associated with swirling synth‑scapes and spoken word, but Classic Objects is oddly smoother and more organic than her earlier work. It’s the sound of a full band, vocals flying over conga grooves and lounge-y keyboards. Its specific, serene rhythms posit it as a cosmic sibling to Aldous Harding’s freaky folk. Despite all the lush musicality, the album actually began as a manuscript for a book. “One day I realised I don’t think I’m doing this for any artistic reason. I’m just doing it to stay normal. It was definitely something I wrote during the pandemic to try to stay alive mentally.” Hval notes that it isn’t an album about COVID – more that her many stories of self-reflection, mundane home life and loneliness are drawn from the period. “I don’t think there’s anything that I’m experiencing as a listener or spectator now where I can forget the pandemic, so I think that I didn’t really try to do or say anything in particular about the pandemic when I was writing except to do whatever seemed to happen in the writing.” The album interrogates moments as broad as Hval’s own birth, urinating blood at a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc, performing in empty Melbourne pubs while living here as a student, and even the failure of art. Hval says she wanted to tell “simple stories”, and the frankness of Classic Objects’ songwriting is complemented by the easygoing elegance of the music. A track like ‘Jupiter’, for example, is chill to the point of

04 MAR 2022

I invest so much in describing encounters with something mystical or magical

Amia Srinivasan

Books 34

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Let’s Talk About Sex Fierce thinker Amia Srinivasan wants contemporary feminism to get critical – and reminds us all that sex is not a sandwich.

by Bec Kavanagh @beckavanagh

Bec Kavanagh is a writer, literary critic and academic whose research focuses on the representation of female bodies in literature. She is the schools manager at the Wheeler Centre.

mia Srinivasan came late to feminism. It wasn’t until her graduate studies that it coalesced with her academic interests, and not until 2014, when she became a university teacher, that she started formally drawing on feminist theory in the classroom. “And it was just a thrilling thing to do,” she reflects via Zoom. “The book very much comes out of the experience of teaching feminist theory. I felt specifically that there were certain things that just weren’t really being said, or that had been said and bore repeating, inflected in contemporary ways.” Srinivasan’s enthusiasm for the potential of feminist theory radiates through The Right to Sex. Her first published collection, the book is an impeccably researched and refreshingly critical take on contemporary feminism and the role of sex in society. Likely stemming from her experiences as a teacher, Srinivasan is curious, rather than didactic, in her essays. In the book’s opening chapter ‘The Conspiracy Against Men’, she probes the “zero-sum logic” of “believe women”, troubling the simplicity of a believe her/don’t believe him way of thinking by

Leading by example, the book’s titular essay, ‘The Right to Sex’, and its companion essay, ‘The Politics of Desire’, both show a willingness to engage in critical discourse. In ‘The Right to Sex’, Srinivasan condemns the entitled and misogynistic thinking of incels – “sex is not a sandwich,” she writes. But she continues where many leave off, exploring desirability, choice and power, asking where our desires are shaped, revealing the public and political forces at work in our so‑called personal sex lives. But although these ideas are challenging and have received plenty of criticism online, there’s a thread of hope, particularly in ‘The Politics of Desire’, where Srinivasan asks “must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (wilfully altering our desires in line with our politics) – or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?” “What I would like especially powerful feminists to feel is a greater circumspection, a greater kind of scepticism, criticality, in relation to their own uses of power,” says Srinivasan when I ask her about the current work of feminism. Power, in this instance, is

specifically coercive state power, of which she is wary. “Anglo American and Australian feminism, historically, has wanted to insist on the righteousness of its cause and therefore the righteousness of its means, and cultivated a certain kind of willing ignorance of what happens when you call, for example, on state power and coercive state power in particular to do your bidding.” She is characteristically complex when unpacking this further, acknowledging the uses of the law alongside its flaws and failures, and reminding feminists that they “need not be saints”, but realists. Part of being a realist might be recognising that there are no easy answers to be found in the book or outside of it. The logic that might be applied flawlessly in one situation could fall apart when transposed onto another. “This is what the humanities are for,” Srinivasan says at one point. We’re talking about the state of universities and the dangers of losing a humanistic university culture, but she might as well be talking about her work, which serves the same purpose. This is what the humanities are for, to foster intelligent public conversation, to question existing power structures, and to agitate for social change. THE RIGHT TO SEX IS OUT NOW. AMIA SRINIVASAN IS APPEARING AT ADELAIDE WRITERS’ WEEK, WHICH RUNS 5-10 MARCH.

04 MAR 2022

asking whose justice is served when “factors other than gender – race, class, religion, immigration status, sexuality – come into play”. It feels, frequently, that she is asking dangerous questions, the kind of questions that expose contradictions and inadequacies where we might prefer not to see them. And it is precisely this kind of fearlessness, this willingness to critique all sides of feminist thought (including those she endorses), and to engage with inconvenient truths that makes Srinivasan so thrilling to read. Since January 2020, Srinivasan has been the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, one of Britain’s most prestigious academic positions, of which she is not only the youngest occupant at 37, but also the first woman and first person of colour. Described in a profile in the Financial Times as “that relatively rare thing…a true generalist”, Srinivasan is formidable. Her writing is confident and articulate and she traverses the terrain of feminism with ease. The essays in the collection run from the nature of desire to the complexities of porn and legislation – no stone is left unturned. She is passionate about public discourse, and the book offers plenty of provocations to encourage a greater criticality in regards to our discourse on sex. “I think there is a worry that people on the left, radical people, should have about the state of public conversation,” she says.

PHOTO BY NINA SUBIN

...there were certain things that just weren’t really being said, or that had been said and bore repeating, inflected in contemporary ways.

Film Reviews

Aimee Knight Film Editor @siraimeknight

hen I studied film at uni back in the mid-2000s, there were very few movies made by women on the curriculum. In fact, the only one I recall analysing was Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), a salt-encrusted crime thriller about the peaks and troughs of masculinity. Sure, we watched a lot of films about women: Psycho, Breathless and Annie Hall all spring to mind as noteworthy works that (varyingly) fit that bill. But the unwavering favour of male auteurs in the syllabus convinced me that lady directors mustn’t really exist. It took years of fervent film fandom for me to realise that this is pure tripe. Feminist publications like Filmme Fatales and Another Gaze expanded my idea of “the canon” beyond IMDb’s Top 100 list, or Steven Jay Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I found filmmakers like Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Cheryl Dunye and Elaine May – now one of my faves. Since I started using Letterboxd (Goodreads for screen people) to track what I’ve watched and who made it, my annual viewing history has reached gender parity. There are plenty of films directed by women hitting our cinemas this month, including Jules Williamson’s comedy Off the Rails, Mia Hansen-Løve’s relationship study Bergman Island, Hungarian melodrama Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time by Lili Horvát, and the Exhibition on Screen documentary Frida Kahlo. I hope you’ll join me in diversifying and decolonising our watchlists, for International Women’s Day and beyond. AK

XXX MIA HANSEN-LØVE DIRECTS XXX MIA WASIKOWSKA

WASH MY SOUL IN THE RIVER’S FLOW 

“Have you ever seen something so exquisite and beautiful?” says Archie Roach about his wife Ruby Hunter in the opening scene of Phillipa Bateman’s documentary. The same could be said about the film itself, which charts the music duo’s creative journey for their 2004 concert Kura Tungar: Songs from the River – a collaboration with Paul Grabowsky’s 22-piece Australian Art Orchestra. A story of hardship and love conveyed through song, the film effortlessly flows between behind-the-scenes rehearsals, candid conversations between Roach and Hunter about the Stolen Generations, and picturesque aerial footage of the Murray River and Hunter’s birthplace, the Ngarrindjeri lands in SA. The music, inspired by the river and the significance of home, is front and centre; the Orchestra’s improvised, jazz-inspired pieces intertwine with Hunter’s bluesy vocals, Roach’s signature dulcet tones and sounds from Country. A film and soundtrack that seeps into your soul and stays with you long after the end credits. VYSHNAVEE WIJEKUMAR MISS MARX

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We all know Karl Marx for his groundbreaking text on labour theory, Das Kapital. But what about Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter? This biopic, directed by Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli (Nico, 1988), traces Eleanor’s life in the years after her father’s death. From 1883-98, Eleanor (Romola Garai, Atonement) struggles with pursuing a life of activism and writing away from her father’s shadow, in a time when most women were relegated to housekeeping duties. When she meets playwright Edward Aveling (Patrick Kennedy, The Queen’s Gambit), her life takes a turn – they travel overseas to promote the socialist cause, and she takes up an interest in his work, becoming one of the foremost literary translators of her time. A crushing betrayal eventually leads to her untimely death. Historically accurate and relevant to modern times, Miss Marx is an evocative portrayal of a woman striving to make her mark within male-dominated spaces, and the risks she takes to campaign for what she most strongly believes in. CHER TAN

ANONYMOUS CLUB 

Early on in Danny Cohen’s intimate documentary, singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett reflects on her current state of mind: “I just turned 30 last year and I feel like I stepped over some kind of line, but I dunno, I’m still…lost.” What follows is not your typical rock biography. Instead Cohen offers a candid and tender look at a young artist struggling to find her place in the world. Barnett rose to prominence in 2015 following the release of her internationally acclaimed debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit. Anonymous Club follows the introverted musician on the gruelling 2018 world tour for her second album. Shot on 16mm film and pairing energetic live performances with quiet moments of introspection, the documentary is loosely narrated by Barnett via a series of sporadic audio diary recordings. The result is an unsentimental yet moving exploration of personal growth, reminding us that the search for purpose is universal. CLARA SANKEY

Small Screen Reviews

Claire Cao Small Screens Editor @clairexinwen

LIFE ON THE OUTSIDE  | 16 MARCH ON SBS + SBS ON DEMAND

HELLBENDER

 | ABC TV + ABC IVIEW

 | SHUDDER

What happens after a fanciful romance finally comes to fruition? In season one of this rom-com series, sparks flew between Jessie (Rose Matafeo) and movie star Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel) after a one-night-stand – culminating in Jessie’s spontaneous decision to stay in London indefinitely. In season two, Jessie and Tom figure out their unlikely, budding relationship – amid funny, sweet and spiralling chaos. Kiwi comedian Matafeo (also the show’s creator and co-writer) infuses this wittier, binge-able version of Notting Hill with crackling energy, as the couple navigate slippery exes, eccentric film directors, and their increasingly clashing lifestyles. The overriding question is less will-they-orwon’t-they, but whether they can overcome relationship teething problems unscathed, despite their undeniable chemistry. The show, in its haste to switch to more serious territory, gets close to torching its charms. Luckily, Matafeo and Alice Snedden’s hearty writing, and the hilariously entertaining ensemble, keep everything lightly zipping over the skittish bumps. DEBBIE ZHOU

Folk horror may be enduring a period of generic bloat, but Hellbender is refreshingly prosaic. The film candidly renders a strained mother-daughter relationship as the latter, homebound in a damp and mossy forest, uncovers her inherited witching powers. Filled with startling moments aplenty, the biggest shock comes from outside the film: Hellbender’s creative team is a closed-loop family affair. The film was directed, written, shot, edited and scored in varying degrees by the family filmmaking unit composed of wife Toby Poser, husband John Adams and daughter Zelda – under the appropriately wry moniker The Adams Family. Toby and Zelda also star, imbuing the drama with an eerie kind of authenticity. This domestic DIY approach lends the goofy, low-budget aesthetic – which occasionally resembles 2008’s Twilight – a very real charm. Throw in some legitimately terrific VFX to offset any shortcomings of such a small-scale film, and there’s much depth to find in Hellbender’s bloody coming-of-age tale. Hemophobes beware! SAMUEL HARRIS

fter bingeing the horror-survival drama Yellowjackets on Prime Video, I’ve been hooked on stories that showcase the terrifying beauty and scale of the wilderness. As an amateur boulderer, I’m particularly fascinated by pro-climbers, who live in constant states of peril. A standout film is this year’s The Last Mountain – which not only portrays the mysteriousness of nature, but also the unknowability of the people around us. The documentary (available on digital download 16 March) follows British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who dies descending the world’s second-highest mountain K2 – and her equally famed son Tom Ballard, who also dies mountaineering, on Nanga Parbat 24 years later. This tragic symmetry is enhanced by director Christopher Terrill’s footage of Ballard’s first trip to Pakistan as a six-year-old, after he requests to see Hargreaves’ “last mountain”. The elegiac weaving of two timelines generates a story about the disorienting nature of grief, as Ballard’s loved ones seek to learn what drove him. Ballard’s serene lack of arrogance is transfixing: “You can’t conquer them,” he says of the mountains. “They were there before us and, after we’re gone, they’ll still be there.” For those seeking more straightforward survival thrills, Netflix’s Against the Ice follows another hazardous journey: Game of Thrones alum Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, who battles Greenland’s mercurial tundras to recover the bodies of a previous ill-fated expedition. As for me, I’ll stick to artificial climbing walls. CC

04 MAR 2022

STARSTRUCK SERIES 2

XXX THE LAST DAYS XXX OF TOM BALLARD

In an Australian-first experiment, four former inmates spend their first 100 days of “freedom” in foster homes across Sydney. Modelled after an American initiative, the gripping three-part documentary follows this test group as they navigate a home outside bars. Presented by SHINE for Kids ambassador Danielle Cormack, the series delves deep into the facts of incarceration and release: most notably, how the lack of structure outside prison sees one in two people become repeat offenders. We’re taken on an intimate, sometimes incursive journey that sheds light on how continued police interventions, the stress of finding employment, and small freedoms such as taking a walk at night, play a role in determining the initiative’s fate. The doco sensitively portrays the fragile crossroads between reoffending and living a life of independence, with profound insight into why personal responsibility is only one factor in determining whether someone ends up back in prison. It answers many questions about state incarceration but, more importantly, makes us question our oppressive systems. RAVEENA GROVER

Music Reviews

Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

XXX THE NAME’S BON, CATE LE BON XXX

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

hree beloved artists often synonymous with sadness and insularity have crafted new albums that look outward, shaking loose misconceptions about their work. On her last album, Reward, Welsh art-pop marvel Cate Le Bon sounded mournful and solitudinous, singing of ‘Sad Nudes’, tatty magazines and lost romance. While her music has always been playful and peculiar, her latest, Pompeii, sounds wonderfully unsteady, dialing up the surrealism and channelling 70s synth‑pop and saxophone‑heavy post-punk. It’s a remarkable, finely pasted collage of fear, fun and divine strangeness. American rock band Big Thief have yet to put out a bad record, and Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is as confounding, ambitious and expansive as its name suggests. The 20-song record is full of fiddles, trip-hop, country rock and, of course, those wrenching, warbling folk songs that Adrianne Lenker does better than most. Lenker’s subject matter here is both microscopic and sweeping: snakes, spuds, moons, apples, ashtrays and the Book of Genesis. It’s a brilliant and ridiculous album that rewards repeat listens. Mitski’s previous records were fuelled by eternal longing and filled with dense, novelistic details, but new album Laurel Hell reaches for something more immediate. The proclamations are more plainspoken, and the sound is synthheavy and indebted to 80s pop. With some of the most accessible songs of her career, Mitski faces unhappiness head-on, without a fantasy to turn to for temporary relief. IT

@itrimboli

I OF THE ERR CHAKRA EFENDI 

Multiplicity, refraction and fracture is the name of the game on Chakra Efendi’s dense, rewarding debut album I of the Err. The cover art provides a clue: the angelic-looking artist cradling a second, luminous version of themselves displayed on an old-school CRT TV. Lo-fi, bedroom pop, IDM, drone, shoegaze and garage rock co-exist across the album, sometimes within the same song. Efendi’s voice, in particular, is made elastic through this process, appearing in mediated forms, both hi-fi and lo-fi. The album’s convoluted recording process was key to this multiplicitous sound – most songs began as voice memos recorded across four different phones before being arranged for a full band, then altered during a lengthy post-production period. Lead single ‘SUV’ opens with gurgling field recordings and an aquatic guitar riff, before accumulating a bevy of live band elements and swirling effects that grow in power. However, at its core, the album remains a highly confessional work – Efendi’s sincerity emanating like radiant lights against fog. MARCUS WHALE

LUCIFER ON THE SOFA SPOON

JULIE’S BOY DALLAS WOODS

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Regularly hailed as one of the most consistent and reliable indie rock bands of the past 20 years, Spoon return with what is their 10th record, Lucifer on the Sofa, a self-proclaimed “return to rock’n’roll”. After 2017’s moody, synth-heavy (and not entirely successful) Hot Thoughts, Lucifer on the Sofa has been pitched as something of a return to the band’s more grounded, pub rock roots. On that front Lucifer is mildly successful – the arch, crisp guitar work here immediately recognisable, with Britt Daniel’s soulful yelp once again being utilised for large, anthemic choruses. But clarity does not equal quality. In many of Spoon’s best records there’s a distinct tension in the way they toe the line between the conventional pleasures of straightforward power-pop and the idiosyncratic asides that threaten to tear each song apart at its seams. This tension is non-existent on Lucifer, and for the first time it seems that Spoon have made the safe, radio-friendly indie-rock record they had previously flirted with but always transcended. LUKE MCCARTHY

Noongar MC Dallas Woods is already established in the Australian hip-hop scene. Since 2018, he has released a succession of buzzy solo singles – with his lyricism praised by Archie Roach. On his debut “mini-LP”, Julie’s Boy (its title a tribute to his mother, an important community presence in East Kimberley), Woods’ magnetism is undeniable. He flexes that unfaltering wordplay, and experiments sonically, traversing G-funk, reggae and EDM. Woods has consistently rapped about the ongoing racism impacting First Nations people. On defiant ‘Colorblind’ – boom-bap with deep turntable cuts – he delivers more truth-telling. Woods calls out the denial and hypocrisy surrounding Australia’s colonial legacy, while extolling his Blakness: “I will not apologise for being the descendant of cultures you tried to wipe out.” It also contains the braggadocios Triple J hit ‘Grime’, where Woods has fun. He tears up the genre with clever punchline after punchline, accurately declaring himself “27 years with the flow of a veteran”. CYCLONE WEHNER

Book Reviews

Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

THE ISLANDS EMILY BRUGMAN

COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW JESSICA AU

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This debut novel about isolation, loneliness and the search for home, is salt-crusted and fresh. Emily Brugman writes with a sense of wonder and simplicity, weaving the story from its setting on the island of Little Rat, where most of the story takes place. It’s one of the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of Western Australia, where Brugman’s family lived and worked between 1959 and 1972. The story follows three generations of the Saari family, one of a small group of Finnish migrants who set up camp on Little Rat in the 1950s. It is an expansive intergenerational narrative, haunted by the ghosts and superstitions of Alva, a lonely matriarchal figure who longs to be seen by her husband. She is a survivor and a ghost, her desires made invisible by her failure to fit in. Deep and permanent scars cut through the Saari family, but this story isn’t a sad one. Instead, it speaks to themes of wonder and impermanence, finding beauty in the lingering, barely there moments. BEC KAVANAGH

Jessica Au’s second novel, Cold Enough for Snow, is the thoughtful and multi-layered winner of the inaugural Novel Prize. The story centres a young woman who, in a moment of personal clarity, insists on an overseas trip with her mother. The two live in different cities and meet in Japan, spending their time playing tourist and chatting about inconsequential things. The daughter’s hope to reconnect with her mother doesn’t quite eventuate, and she spends much of the trip reflecting – on childhood memories, on her time at university, on the few things she does know about her mother. Au’s prose is gentle, wise and often astonishing: she creates an atmosphere dense with what’s left unsaid. She dives into the complex depths of mother-daughter relationships where she examines memory, identity, communication and migration. In Cold Enough for Snow, Au invites her readers to see the world as she does, and the result is tender and joyful. DANIELLE BAGNATO

AUĒ BECKY MANAWATU 

Auē is defined as a cry, a howl – and auē ricochets between generations in Becky Manawatu’s debut. A bestseller and multi-award winner in New Zealand, Auē is a brutal novel of ferocious, damaging love. At its core, it is the story of two orphaned Māori brothers, the elder, Taukiri, leaving eight-year-old Ārama in the care of their aunt and uncle in rural Kaikōura. Legacies of violence and pain unfurl in the brothers’ alternating perspectives, from Ari witnessing the beatings inflicted on Aunty Kat by Uncle Stu, to Taukiri’s seemingly inexorable involvement with gang conflict as he collides with his father’s past. Trauma of so many kinds disquiets this remarkable novel, but Manawatu accomplishes a staggering feat in drawing out tenderness and compassion – including the touching friendship between Ari, neighbour Beth and her dog – against a dizzying kaleidoscope of violence. In Manawatu’s precise prose even the most ruthless acts are imbued with poetry. Auē is a complex and gripping read, exploring identity, race and redemption. DASHA MAIOROVA

GOOD GRACE

04 MAR 2022

very year in March, around the time International Women’s Day rolls around, I wish I lived in Adelaide. What better way to celebrate women and gender non-conforming folk than to engage with their books? And what better place to do that than at Adelaide Writers Week (5-10 March)? Some events to look out for include Briohny Doyle (Echolalia) and Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch) in their conversation Wild Motherhood; Veronica Gorrie talking to her Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-winning memoir Black and Blue, and 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame and journalist Jess Hill (See What You Made Me Do) in conversation with festival director Jo Dyer in The Reckoning – a look at how the fight for justice and respect for women and victims-survivors has shaped the nation. For those of you who are geographically challenged, worry not: a fantastic CURATED DOZEN selection is available to be streamed on a pay-what-you-can basis, and includes events with bestselling author Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees), as well as our books feature subject for the fortnight, Amia Srinivasan, on International Women’s Day itself. And if you’re in Melbourne later this month, get yourself along to Blak & Bright (17-20 March): a four-day First Nations literary showcase covering all genres and featuring a host of stand-out talent, including Alexis Wright, Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko and Nayuka Gorrie. MF

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

Learning netball was fascinating. New rules. Figuring out the things that make someone good at it. Listening to the people watching calling things out. Watching a team dance and pivot their way up and down the court. New board games are like that too. Being taught a new game of cards. Learning Wordle was like that at first. Figuring it out by yourself. Doing the linguistic arithmetic required to get the answer. New shoes are grouse. The feel of them. The bounce of the runners. The shine of the dress shoes. When you go to the beach and the sea has done that thing where it sweeps the sand in front of it and there are kind of sea-froth bubbles in the sand and your bare feet are sinking into it and it’s new and fresh and nobody else has been on it so ha ha ha. Nothing like a blank page. A new project. An unwritten letter. A funny note for a housemate that hasn’t quite formed yet. A creative work that tingles somehow but hasn’t yet taken shape. New toothpaste does nothing for me, but new pencils? Different story. Look at how your handwriting just improved a thousand per cent. How the pencil marks the page. How it feels in your hand. New books are pretty great. Library books, second‑hand books, brand-new books or borrowed books with their own personalised recommendations. Whole worlds about to be discovered. Connections made. You

might laugh, you might cry, you might gaze out the window with a book in your hand – and if there is a better way to sit in a chair, I have yet to discover it. Okay now, time for a quick quiz: you must always what a new book? Fill in the blank. Come on, let’s not always see the same hands. You must always…? Smell a new book, that’s right. Well done. Top of the class. Stuck? Sick of it all? Got some stupid thing you have to finish and you’ve been putting it off? Move your desk somewhere different. Change some things around. New plants are pretty wonderful. A small person I know saved the top of the celery from the fridge and now has a small celery forest growing in an old fridge drawer she found somewhere that had no other use. Imagine that. Making whole lives happen. Little ones that you can watch and nurture and that repay the favour by beaming beautifully at you each day. From an old fridge drawer! Listen to some new music. Mostly, I drive around and around the same block I’ve always driven around, in music land. Recently though, a friend recommended a song and I took the time to listen to it and may I say to the manufacturers of a certain toothpaste: this is how you create a BRAND NEW EXPERIENCE. There were synapses in my brain doing all kinds of things they hadn’t done for a while. Another new thing I tried a while back was yoga. People who do yoga are always calm and together and have ponytails that look like they’ve been swept into place by blushing red robins and so forth. But I? I do not look like that when I do yoga. I giggle and fall over and shake and sweat but that’s because I haven’t done it before, and doing a new thing is making me – slowly, incrementally – slightly less shaky but no less giggly or sweaty. Public Service Announcement: sometimes life can get samey. The tiniest thing can change it up. But not toothpaste. If it’s a brand-new experience you’re after, sniff a book or buy a pencil.

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

bought some toothpaste recently, the packaging of which promised a BRAND NEW BRUSHING EXPERIENCE. Don’t you hate it when brushing your teeth feels like it’s the exact same experience you’ve been having since you got teeth? Same. Surprisingly, the toothpaste didn’t do anything whatsoever to change this. The same week I bought the toothpaste, I went to my first netball game. A family member was playing. Netball is like a foreign language to me, and netball players at school seemed somehow to be a completely different species of human from those of us who (sensibly, in my view) played hockey. But I went along to watch this family member play their first game and here’s the thing… Public Service Announcement: trying something new can be exhilarating.

04 MAR 2022

Old Dogs

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

PHOTOS BY SAMUEL SHELLEY

Tastes Like Home Sally Wise

Nectarine Crumble Tray Bake Ingredients Serves 8-12

For the Pastry 125g very soft salted butter 200g white sugar

2 eggs 300g plain flour 150g self-raising flour 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 1 egg white, lightly whisked

For the Crumble 15g cold salted butter, diced 40g self-raising flour 55g soft brown sugar

Method To make the filling, place the nectarines and sugar into a saucepan with 60ml water, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the fruit is just tender. Stir in the lemon juice. While still simmering, gradually stir in enough cornflour paste to reach a thick custard consistency. Set aside to cool. For the pastry, using a hand whisk mix the butter and sugar together until creamy, then whisk in the two eggs until well combined. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Then, using a large metal spoon, fold them through the egg mixture until well combined. Wrap in plastic wrap and place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to firm up before using. To make the crumble, place the ingredients in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. (Alternatively, this can be achieved by rubbing the ingredients together with your fingers.) Set aside. Preheat the oven to 170°C. Grease a 22 x 35cm slab tin, 8cm deep. Cut one-third from the pastry, cover and set aside. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the remaining pastry to the size of the tin and press into the sides and edges. Brush with some of the whisked egg white to seal. Spread the cooled fruit mixture over this. Roll out the reserved pastry and cut into long strips about 1cm wide. Place these in a lattice pattern over the top of the fruit. Sprinkle the crumble mixture into the spaces between the lattice strips. Bake for 30 minutes, or until it is nicely browned. Leave to stand in the tin for at least 30 minutes before cutting into squares to serve.

Sally says…

y earliest memories of the wonders of baking were in my grandmother’s kitchen. The aroma as you walked in the door spelled “Welcome. Sit down, have a chat and something nice to eat.” It was like you were enjoying a cuddle with food. Her pantry was always stocked with all manner of ingredients so she could whip up something delicious at a moment’s notice. I loved her spirit of hospitality, her enthusiasm for daily baking and her generosity when happily sharing with others. I simply couldn’t wait to get my own kitchen to emulate all that she did. When our own family of six children came along, we would often go for a drive in the country – in summer these would inevitably turn into a fruit hunt. Many farms or country homes had an honesty box at the gate, offering their excess fruit for a minimal price or free of charge. There were innumerable instances when the farmer would come out for a chat. These were the most wonderful times – they taught us all about true passion for produce – its flavour, freshness, colour and texture. We learned about berries, stone fruit, apples and pears, and where to find wild growing treasures such as rosehip, quince and blackberries. We were avid foragers long before it became the fashion. Once home we would experiment with the produce. It was a time of creative mayhem and fun in the kitchen, inviting anyone who came through our door to share a cuppa and enjoy what we had baked that day. This habit is hard to break. To this day, I simply can’t go past a roadside stall. One of my favourite finds is nectarines. I love their flavour, the bite through the crisp red skin that releases exquisite juices that trickle down your chin. It is a celebration of one of the exceptional fruits of summer, the fruit hunts of decades ago, the creative baking with our children and a special tip of the hat and thanks to my Nan, whose passion for cooking and generosity with food became the inspiration for my lifelong love affair with baking. THE COMFORT BAKE BY SALLY WISE IS OUT NOW.

04 MAR 2022

900g nectarines, stones removed and flesh cut into small cubes 60g white sugar 3 teaspoons lemon juice 3 teaspoons cornflour mixed to a paste with 40ml cold water

For the Filling

Puzzles By Lingo! by Lee Murray leemurray.id.au TEST

CLUES 5 letters Blemish Canonised person Hind part of a vessel Make into law Warning noise

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

6 letters Be left Naval Posture Six‑legged invertebrate Take back 7 letters Inevitable Make tidy Metallic poison Mosque tower Water tank 8 letters Gas container

M T

A N E S

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

5 1

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

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Gantries 5 Wallop 9 Resource 10 Oliver 12 Speed date 13 Valid 14 Swat 16 Drawers 19 Headset 21 Pier 24 Medic 25 Cartesian 27 Leeway 28 Doorstep 29 Sporks 30 Calendar

Using all nine letters provided, can you answer these clues? Every answer must include the central letter. Plus, which word uses all 9 letters?

by puzzler.com

DOWN 1 Garish 2 Nasser 3 Round 4 Enchant 6 Alleviate 7 Lovelier 8 Paradise 11 Read 15 Wisecrack 17 Shambles 18 San Diego 20 Tick 21 Pergola 22 Jilted 23 Sniper 26 Eerie

Word Builder

In Ancient Rome, a testum was an earthenware pot used to melt metals. (It was also a slang word for “head” – which eventually became testy “cranky” – but that’s a story for another day.) One of the reasons you might want to melt metal back then was to discover its quality. So, to find out if your metal was any good, you’d give it a go in the testum. After a while, testum had also become a verb: test. By the 1500s, its meaning had expanded again. To test something was now not only to discover the quality of a physical substance, it was also any act of determining the properties or standard of something. This broader meaning is the one we use today. So, as much as we may hate our PCRs and RATs, at least no-one’s dunking us into a fiery cauldron.

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Denmark 2 False. She was the first woman. Paul Narracott was the first Australian to do it 3 1978 4 Diamonds 5 Geelong 6 Quick Response 7 Volodymyr Zelenskyy 8 Three 9 Jane Campion 10 The Monkees 11 Woolloomooloo 12 b) 33 per cent 13 Dr Jeannette Young 14 Lilies of the Field 15 The Cross of St George 16 Grace Cossington Smith 17 Yellow 18 Magda Szubanski 19 A bed 20 Sydney

Crossword

by Chris Black

Quick Clues 4

10 11

mathematician (9)

27 Latitude (6) 28 Threshold (8) 29 Cutlery items (6) 30 Almanac (8)

18 21

DOWN

22 25

Cryptic Clues

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Granite’s fashioned into overhead structures

1 Fishy and flashy? (6) 2 Snares confused Egyptian president (6) 3 Drinks shot (5) 4 Specialist embraces Jackie’s charm (7) 6 Leave tail wagging with temper (9) 7 Played evil role to become more attractive (8) 8 Average ideas turned into utopia (8) 11 Concerning commercial study (4) 15 A sick crew started to gag (9) 17 Quiet walk: initial solution to chaos (8) 18 Wild dingoes surrounded a coastal city (3,5) 20 Check for parasite (4) 21 Playing leapfrog (not loudly) in garden feature (7) 22 BETRAYED: Biden’s not finished with Kennedy (6) 23 Miniature pinscher held up soldier (6) 26 Strange nest reported (5)

(8)

5 Strike barrier at work (6) 9 Core user edited material (8) 10 Green room’s opening for musical (6) 12 See very quickly? (5,4) 13 Carnival idiom somewhat logical (5) 14 Hit squad (4) 16 Artist’s underwear (7) 19 Leading group used in a call centre? (7) 21 Scrutinise podcast platform (4) 24 Doctor’s unfinished Italian house (5) 25 Sort of plane: vehicle manufactured in

a set (9)

27 Heard 7.30 host assess scope (6) 28 Torpedo’s detonated in threshold (8) 29 Ship carrying meat cutlery (6) 30 Landcare provided container of dates? (8)

SUDOKU

WORD BUILDER

04 MAR 2022

5 Stain Saint Stern Enact Siren 6 Remain Marine Stance Insect Recant 7 Certain Smarten Arsenic Minaret Cistern 8 Canister 9 Miscreant

5 4 7 8 9 1 6 3 2

9 6 8 5 2 3 7 4 1

1 Loud (6) 2 Former Egyptian leader (6) 3 Pub order (5) 4 Captivate (7) 6 Take the edge off (9) 7 Nicer (8) 8 Utopia (8) 11 Peruse (4) 15 Witty remark (9) 17 Mess (8) 18 Californian city (3,5) 20 Clock sound (4) 21 Garden feature (7) 22 Spurned (6) 23 Excellent marksman (6) 26 Spooky (5)

3 2 1 7 4 6 8 5 9

6 8 2 4 5 9 3 1 7

Puzzle by websudoku.com

4 3 9 1 7 8 2 6 5

1 7 5 6 3 2 4 9 8

ACROSS

1 Bridge-like structures (8) 5 Whack (6) 9 Asset (8) 10 Victorian orphan (6) 12 Brief romantic engagement (5,4) 13 Sound (5) 14 Hit (4) 16 Underwear (7) 19 Communication device (7) 21 Jetty (4) 24 Military healer (5) 25 Relating to French philosopher and

7 9 6 3 8 5 1 2 4

2 1 4 9 6 7 5 8 3

8 5 3 2 1 4 9 7 6

Click Sojourner Truth Collection/Library of Congress

words by Michael Epis photo by Liljenquist Family

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

1863

ojourner Truth was born around 1797 in New York state. No-one knows exactly when. For Sojourner – or Isabella, as her mother called her – was born into slavery, being the daughter of enslaved people James and Elizabeth “Betsy” Baumfree. She had about 10 siblings, but never met most of them – they’d been sold. She was, however, present the day her brother, about five, and sister, three, were taken away by their new owners, her sister locked

in a box. Her brother tried to hide under a bed. Orphaned at nine, Isabella was sold, and as she told Olive Gilbert, who transcribed her life story, the sale included several sheep. Her new owner spoke an unfamiliar language – English. Isabella spoke the Dutch of her owners. “The war had begun,” she recalled. To wit: “One Sunday morning, in particular, she was told to go to the barn; on going there, she found her master with a bundle of rods,

prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords. When he had tied her hands together before her, he gave her the cruellest whipping she was ever tortured with. He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed – the scars remain to the present day, to testify to the fact.” Isabella was sold again, then again as a teen, to John J Dumont, with whom she passed the next 18 years. Isabella noted events she preferred not to record; others have reported these were rapings by her owner, resulting in one child. Enslaved people were to be freed in New York in 1827; Isabella took her own freedom, forever after saying she did not run away, but walked. When she returned to reclaim her son, he had been sold, illegally, across state lines. She went to court and had him returned – an unprecedented suit by a Black woman against a white man. Many adventures followed, going to New York City, worshipping at a Black church, where she warmed to one fellow congregant, who soon died. Only later did Isabella learn it was her sister, the one in the box. Isabella fell in with religious cranks, one of whom was murdered, over which she was tried – and acquitted. Her son went to sea, never to return. After a vision, she quit New York to wander and lecture – renaming herself Sojourner Truth. Wander she did, for 40 years, meeting two presidents (Lincoln and Grant) while spreading her ideas – of God’s love, slavery’s evil and the equality of men and women. “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?” she said in a famous speech, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Sojourner died in Michigan in 1883. Her story lives on. Gloria Steinem considered calling her Ms. magazine Sojourner – and would have, except it sounded like a travel magazine.

Advertising Feature

LOUD AND PROUD Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation is supporting the LGBTIQ+ community to become more empowered. The Pride March is a sea of sequins, feathers and rainbow flags as it drifts past Melbourne’s new Victorian Pride Centre. The centre hums with activity. The powerful Freedom is Mine photographic exhibition is on display, legendary queer bookshop Hares & Hyenas trades on the ground floor and radio station JOY broadcasts live from the balcony.

for community infrastructure projects such as the Victorian Pride Centre,” says Dr Catherine Brown OAM, CEO of the Foundation. “We hope our work creates a more caring, respectful, inclusive and resilient Melbourne for all people to live safely and without fear of discrimination.”

According to the Pride Centre’s CEO Justine Dalla Riva, “The For Melbourne’s LGBTIQ+ support of the Foundation has communities, this symbolic space been integral in assisting us to is a haven. Yet marginalised people create an exciting, accessible, often struggle to feel safe and multifunction hub that will included. Lord Mayor’s Charitable sustain the LGBTIQ+ community Foundation is hoping to change into the future.” this. As the largest community GiveOUT, whose annual foundation in Australia, through fundraising day addresses the the generous gifts of others, lack of funding for LGBTIQ+ they have been able to support organisations, is also able to organisations like the Pride Centre continue its important work thanks address discrimination and to to support from the Foundation. foster inclusion, understanding “It gives organisations like ours the and respect. resources they need to continue “As the community foundation their services and programs, and for Greater Melbourne, it is meet the growing needs of their important for us to support and community,” says co-founder participate in collective fundraising Ben Giraud.

22 20 ry a u br , Fe ntre Photo: Victorian Pride Ce

Many Coloured Sky’s work with vulnerable LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers and international students will also go on thanks to the Foundation. “These people can face complex, intersecting forms of discrimination,” says Karyn Bosomworth, Program Manager at the Foundation. “Many Coloured Sky helps this community find support and employment.” A sense of safety, belonging and trust are essential for a thriving society. And with your help – through planned giving, a bequest, gift or donation, no matter how big or small – the Foundation can continue to support people and communities across the city. As Dr Brown explains: “By giving to the Foundation you are joining a community who is working to make greater Melbourne an inclusive, more resilient and sustainable city for everyone.”

There are community foundations across Australia. Find your local community foundation by visiting cfaustralia.org.au Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation is Greater Melbourne’s community foundation, you can find us here lmcf.org.au Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation is the trustee for Lord Mayor’s Charitable Fund ABN 63635798473. Donations over $2 to the Fund are tax-deductible.

The Big Issue Australia #656 – Rosie Batty

Articles inside

Public Service Announcement

Click

Music Reviews

Book Reviews

Ed’s Letter & Your Say

Small Screen Reviews

Hearsay & 20 Questions

Ricky

My Word

The Big Picture

Meet Your Vendor

Film Reviews