The Melbourne Review July 2013

THE Melbourne

REVIEW Issue 21 July 2013

melbournereview.com.au

UNSETTLED Brooklyn-based Australian artist Ian Strange examines the abandoned spaces of American suburbia

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LIFE’S RICH TAPESTRY

RITE OF SPRING

PEACE, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

Wendy Cavenett profiles new Scienceworks Director, Dr. Nurin Veis

The MSO celebrates the centenary of Stravinsky’s ballet with a troika of Russian masterpieces

Alexandra Aulich surveys the Winter Masterpieces exhibition at Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre

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4 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

WELCOME

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Suzanne Fraser celebrates both the new RMIT Design Hub and its current star attraction, Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck

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DOLLAR UP, DOLLAR DOWN

ROSE BOYS

GASTROINTESTINAL HEALTH

Stephen Koukoulas looks at the fiscal road ahead to the federal election

Brian Matthews’ new introduction to the Peter Rose classic

Professor Avni Sali on ten billion ways to inner wellbeing

PUBLISHER The Melbourne Review Pty Ltd Level 13, 200 Queen Street, Melbourne Vic 3000 Phone (03) 8648 6482 Fax (03) 8648 6480

INSIDE

DISCLAIMER Opinions published in this paper are not necessarily those of the editor nor the publisher.

All material subject to copyright.

Audited average monthly circulation: 64,856 (Oct 11 – March 12)

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THE MELBOURNE

LONG LIVE THE KING!

FARM VIGANO

Wendy Cavenett meets Geoffrey Rush ahead of a career survey at the Arts Centre

Lou Pardi visits a rural Italian treasure at South Morang

REVIEW

Profile

06

Politics

08

Business

10

Health & Research

14

Columnists

16

Books

18

Fashion

20

Performing Arts

22

Visual Arts

30

Food.Wine.Coffee

37

FORM

41

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WELCOME CONTRIBUTORS

OUR COVER Ian Strange Lake Road 2012 Archival Digital Print from SUBURBAN Collection of the Artist, New York

Patrick Allington

Andrea Frost

Kirsten Rann

Alexandra Aulich

Byron George

Kate Roffey

Marguerite Brown

Dave Graney

Avni Sali

Wendy Cavenett

Phil Kakulas

Christopher Sanders

William Charles

Stephen Koukoulas

Margaret Simons

Clare Cousins

Robert Larocca

David Sornig

Jennifer Cunich

Tali Lavi

Shirley Stott Despoja

Helen Dinmore

Brian Matthews

Peter Tregear

Alexander Downer

Lou Pardi

Evelyn Tsitas

Suzanne Fraser

Nigel Randall

See page 36.

This publication is printed on 100% Australian made Norstar, containing 20% recycled fibre. All wood fibre used in this paper originates from sustainably managed forest resources or waste resources.

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6 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

PROFILE

NURIN VEIS Manager, Scienceworks

BY WENDY CAVENETT

“

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Dr Nurin Veis, quoting Shakespeare. Her cheerful, rolling voice resonates in the small, bright room that overlooks the industrial façade of the Spotswood Pumping Station. In the far distance, there’s the unmistakeable grey sweep of Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge, its cargo of cars and trucks streaming by, left to right, right to left, offering moments of cinematic wonder.

But back to Shakespeare… Veis is laughing now – as she often does, and I am scrambling to keep up with this whirlwind of intellect and humour. “You know, Horatio! There’s more on heaven and earth than a scientist is really able to nail down.” We’re talking about mystery and scientific processes, about life and our relationship to death. Hamlet’s psychology, at this early hour, seems a perfect intellectual overlap, the perfect theatrical allusion.

Not surprisingly, Veis later admits her best subject at high school was English Literature, and when she studied her science degree at Monash University, she was the only science student who was part of the Shakespeare Society. “I loved it, I loved it all!” she says with such vigour that we both start laughing, hard.

Luckily, she was able to study one Humanities subject in her first year, and she chose Russian Studies. She learned some Russian language, some Russian history, and ate Russian Literature alive!

Such is the wonderful world of Veis, a child of an Albanian father and a mother from that most exotic, faraway place, Istanbul. There are so many stories here – of economic hardship, of a revolution, of finding love and settling in a new country. Then there’s a business, and a family follows. As part of this story, Veis is born and raised in Croydon, 27 km east of Melbourne’s CBD. She attends school nearby and develops a curiosity for anatomical workings. Her favourite childhood book is the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body by Martin L. Keen. She keeps it safely under her bed and reads it incessantly. She finds “all those illustrations intriguing”. She asks many questions: How do bodies work?

What is a heart? Where is the mind? She is intuitively drawn to science.

“I’ve always had this fascination with… it’s not the forbidden, but of the hidden,” she says,

“of what’s not seen. For me, scientists always make some sense of the natural world. They are intrigued about trying to understand it, but in some senses, they’re trying to fathom the unfathomable.”

Veis is staring at the scene outside the window. I think she is looking at the bridge.

Scienceworks is located in Spotswood, and there’s something decidedly Jeffrey Smartesque about the view from where we sit: it’s an appealing contemporary urban landscape, with a beauty that contrasts human endeavour with those unmistakable Australian vistas.

Today, the vast sky – covered in pale, wintry white clouds – is a magnificent backdrop to the steely, cable-stayed bridge that links inner city Melbourne to the western suburbs.

Veis, who was appointed manager of Scienceworks in April, says her medical research background (in biochemistry, immunology and cell biology) and her passion for storytelling informs her work practice. She believes the role of the museum is to “contextualise and to inspire”. She says she wants the museum experience to make people’s lives “richer”, to open up a few “locked doors” that will bring science to life.

“I am a science storyteller, a science communicator,” she says, and she likes these stories to be “anchored in history” and “brought to life” with the arts. Scientist-artist

collaborations interest her greatly, as do the possibilities of other multi-disciplinary museum projects. Local business is already involved.

She mentions electric cars and more. In the future: artist residencies, more interactivity (especially multimedia-based technology), and more imaginative programming for the site’s Planetarium. She believes Think Ahead, a new exhibition scheduled for December, will reflect some of these aspirations.

“I’ve always found that aesthetically, science is a very beautiful world,” she says. “It’s a very visual realm. I also find areas of nature that some people find really distasteful – like decay and rotting and ageing – fascinating. I don’t find it unpleasant or nasty at all. I think it’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, it’s all quite beautiful. So I find it’s not just intellectually very beautiful, it’s aesthetically and physically intriguing and fascinating as well.” I ask her where this almost alchemical attachment to anatomy and the intricacies of science originated.

Veis says she remembers growing up on the large family property in Croydon, and how her father, a determined entrepreneur, made his living exporting rabbit meat. She says rabbits were trapped from all around South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. In the middle of the night, huge trucks would bring the trapped rabbits to what were essentially abattoirs on the property. As a child, Veis was often asked to fetch her father for lunch or dinner. She would

“I’ve always found that aesthetically, science is a very beautiful world... It’s a very visual realm. I also find areas of nature that some people find really distasteful – like decay and rotting and ageing – fascinating.” invariably “slip on a bit of kidney or a bit of rabbit gut – there was always something”, but she never found it disgusting. It was a “little bit smelly” but those anatomical bits and pieces always captivated her.

After high school, she attended university.

These were heady times for the young science and arts enthusiast. In 1981, she graduated with a BSc (Hon), and in 1986, she completed her PhD in Biochemistry. She worked at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and the Department of Medicine at Melbourne University. She married an artist and before too long, they were living in New York. Veis worked in medical research; she met diplomats, musicians, artists, and playwrights. These were highly talented people,

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PROFILE altruistic motives or was it really just a personal challenge?

In the end, it was about fulfilment as much as talent; Veis resigned from her research position and decided to study film. She wanted to make science documentaries, tell stories to large audiences. She spent hours in the editing room – she wanted to understand how stories were made and told. “I love talking with people,” she says, “because I love everything about them – their psychology, their behaviour.

And I love human anatomy. They’re areas that are really intriguing to me.” Later, when we’re discussing ideas about the human condition, about measures of success and those flashes of true contentment, she says, “hopefully what I do is in some way inspiring, that by making available these other worlds in science and technology people are able to find their own fulfilment.”

By the late 1990s, Veis and her husband had returned to Melbourne. She was pregnant and by 1998, seeking work. At that time Museum Victoria was developing content for its mind and body gallery. David Penington (President, Museum Victoria, 1994-2002) wanted someone with a “hardcore science” background. He was impressed with Veis’s CV, and offered her a three-month, short-term contract. “My position there lasted 15 years!” she says. “My husband couldn’t stop laughing and laughing. He knew it was the perfect job for me.”

she says – “they were very good at what they did”. Invariably, people wanted to know about her profession. “I was asked some of the most interesting questions about medical research at dinner parties in New York,” she says. “Some of the questions were quite confronting.”

Was she doing medical research with great

As senior curator of medicine at Museum Victoria, she helped develop many exhibitions including the groundbreaking The Human Body and The Mind: Enter the Labyrinth, often cited for setting the benchmark for sensory and exploratory exhibitions in the museum space. Over the years, she has established herself as one of the world’s leading curators of human biology and medicine, whose deep understanding of museum ethics and best

practice is reflected in all aspects of her work.

She has extensive experience in the ethical display of human remains and has played a major role in establishing guidelines for the “ethical display of artworks by people who have experience of mental illness and trauma”.

Outside, the sun is high in the sky. In the distance, several short bursts of a ship’s horn sound. “I am finding the older I get,” she says, before saying goodbye, “the more open my mind is to different perspectives on what we’re made up of, and what our long term journey here is.”

Veis says her vision for Scienceworks is for it to “grow and evolve as the science cultural centre of the West”, offering meaningful science and technology-driven experiences for people of all ages.

Whatever your viewpoint, the evolution of the human species is endlessly fascinating.

museumvictoria.com.au/scienceworks

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8 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

POLITICS we must keep in mind however, is if we choose this option, the most likely funding source will be taxpayer dollars, and this raises the question of prioritisation of public spend.

Perhaps, however, with a little more lateral thinking, there is an alternative. Take Barangaroo in Sydney for example. Barangaroo is a $6 billion, 22 hectare urban regeneration project between the western edge of the CBD and the shores of Sydney harbour. In 2003, the NSW Government set the vision to transform this former container port into one of the Asia Pacific’s foremost financial and professional services employment hubs.

Barangaroo is made up of three redevelopment areas: • Barangaroo South, a major new business, tourism, residential and retail precinct opening onto a public waterfront promenade; • Barangaroo Central, a cultural and civic area focused on recreation, relaxation, events, festivals, entertainment and leisure activities; and • Headland Park, six hectares of publicly accessible parkland with picnic areas, bush walks, tidal pools, and a new cultural centre.

FEDERATION SQUARE EAST Reclaiming paradise by decking over a parking lot?

BY KATE ROFFEY

F

ederation Square East (FSE) is back on the agenda as the Napthine Government calls on interested parties to submit ideas for development options for the site.

The question is not so much whether or not this three hectare central city site should be developed – it is more a question of when, and how.

The FSE site, which currently comprises rail yards and a car park, is one of the few major sites still undeveloped around the CBD. Situated between Federation Square and Batman Avenue, the site is strategically important to Melbourne given its proximity to the CBD, and its direct link to the Olympic Park sports precinct, the MCG, the Southbank arts precinct, Flinders Street Station and the Yarra River.

Since at least 2006, when the Bracks Government spent around $1 million on engineering, feasibility and design reports,

successive Victorian Governments have investigated opportunities to develop this site.

Before any development decisions are made however, there are a number of key issues that must be considered.

Firstly, development of the site will be expensive as it requires a ‘deck’ over the existing Jolimont rail yard. Estimated to cost around $300 million, this ‘deck’ is so costly because of the engineering and logistical difficulties associated with building over a major rail activity area.

The second challenge is to balance the competing interests of public amenity with potential residential or office block developments that may be required as leverage if private investors are expected to contribute to development costs.

There is no doubt private investors would find the location of FSE very attractive, and

whilst the opportunity to build residential or office towers on the site may appeal to the developer, it may not appeal to the public.

Hence, some tough decisions must be made.

If public amenity is the key priority, then Chicago’s Millennium Park is potentially the exemplar to which we might look. Millennium Park, a 10 hectare urban regeneration project built over rail yards and car parks near the Lake Michigan shoreline of the Chicago CBD, features a music pavilion similar to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, amazing sculptures such as Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor and Crown Fountain, an interactive video sculpture, and the 2.5 acre Lurie Garden.

Millennium Park has received awards for its accessibility and green design and there is no doubt any city in the world would be happy to have this public park as its centrepiece.

The upside for this development is that it is a public park, free from high rise office blocks and residential buildings. In the absence of opportunities for private investors to leverage funding from the development of saleable or leasable office or residential titles on site however, this public amenity option came with a US$475 million price tag, which was borne by the taxpayer and private donors.

This is not to say the Park and its amenity was not a wise investment. Given the choice, I suspect Melbournians would also overwhelmingly support the creation of beautiful open parkland on the FSE site, free from high rise developments blocking our views of, and access to, the riverfront. What

What is of particular interest is that Headland Park is being delivered at no cost to taxpayers, but instead is being funded via payments from the development of the Barangaroo South commercial precinct.

In an innovative funding agreement, in exchange for rights and 99-year leases to develop particular sites within Barangaroo South, Lend Lease makes regular development payments to the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

Since March 2010, these payments, which fund the development of the public park areas, have totalled $206.4 million.

In exchange for innovatively blending these commercial, residential and public amenity areas together, the Barangaroo project is expected to be delivered at no cost to taxpayers.

In essence, the trade-off for providing free public parklands for the people was planned commercial and residential high-rise in certain areas of the site.

There will no doubt be an excellent array of workable commercial and financial solutions put forward to support the potential redevelopment of the FSE site. The question is how willing are we, as the people who work and live in the city, to accept a blend of uses on this site as a trade-off for some much needed private investment?

» Kate Roffey is Chief Executive Officer, Committee for Melbourne melbourne.org.au

The Melbourne Review July 2013 9

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POLITICS

Arab Seasons

BY ALEXANDER DOWNER

T

he London Times recently proclaimed the Arab Spring had failed. It’s a bold and sorry claim.

The Arab Spring offered so much hope. For generations, Arab economies have been performing woefully compared with their neighbours in Europe. Even oil rich Saudi Arabia, with around 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves, has a GDP of barely more than half Australia’s. The Arab model of autocratic leadership and centralised control of the economy had failed.

We often forget that the Middle East as we know it today was designed by the British and French during the First World War and that design was incorporated into international law in 1920 in the Treaty of Sevres and three years later the Treaty of Lausanne.

These treaties dismantled the Ottoman structure of the Middle East and replaced it with a number of individual countries under British and French influence. So the British and the French drew the maps and the revolution in Egypt led by Gamel Abdel Nasser established a political and economic paradigm which

dominated much of the Arab world until the Iraq war in 2003.

Two years ago it seemed the old Nasser model of centralised economic control under a dictatorship was dying in the face of a public revolt. The Arab street was as much driven by economics as politics. They objected to high unemployment, particularly youth unemployment. Even graduates struggled to find jobs. And for populations battling to make ends meet, the crony capitalism of rich mates of leaders wallowing in wealth born out of government mandated monopolies and oligopolies, was obscene.

So the Arab Spring was about economic fairness and frustration as much as it was about political freedom. But now it all seems to have gone horribly wrong. The Western media and some Western politicians had compared the Arab Spring with the revolutions which overthrew Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. What we have ended up with is the collapse or near collapse of the nation states created in the 1920s.

For a start, there’s Egypt, by far the most populous Arab state. The elected president turned out to be two things: divisive and incompetent. Under his brief rule, the economy deteriorated, the murder rate tripled and secularism was attacked by a conservative Islamist. The place became a shambles, so much so that a massive 22 million people signed a petition demanding the elected president’s immediate resignation. That’s a quarter of the total population. Many of these people were secular, democracy-loving liberals.

The army did the job in the end and now the dream of Egypt becoming a successful democracy has gone.

Libya isn’t much better. Qaddafi was only overthrown with Western intervention and now the country has descended into bitter rivalries between warlords and tribes. In Syria there is a bloody sectarian civil war where both sides are being backed by outsiders – Assad by the Iranians and the Russians and the rebels by the Gulf states and the West. In Bahrain, a sectarian revolt by the majority Shia population was put down forcefully by the Sunni government with the help of the Saudis.

So there we have it. A revolution throughout the Arab world which has left minorities such as Christians more vulnerable than they were, has left women more threatened by Islamists

who want to downgrade their status and the economies of the region are stuck in the reverse gear. On the face of it it’s a pretty poor scene.

Add to that the inability of the West to sort it out.

Well, it might not be as bad as it first appears.

Remember, during the era of dictatorship the only organised opposition was the Islamists – groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Once the tools of dictatorial oppression were taken away, the public was inevitably going to turn to the opposition.

On the way to full blown democracy, the Arab world will pass through the Islamist phase. But my guess is that the average voter will realise that Islamists aren’t going to deliver to them the things they really want. Things we all enjoy like iPads and DVDs, supermarkets and cheap transport, clean homes with sewage and, above all, steady, well paid jobs. They will gradually realise those things can only be delivered over time by the liberal secularists.

I don’t want to sound too deterministic or too optimistic but my guess is that left to their own devices, Arabs will work out that a democratic, liberal society which embraces tolerance and diversity is the only solution to their postOttoman torpor. The Arab Spring might be looking decidedly wintery at the moment but all winters pass and spring returns.

Get away for the weekend…

With a range of VIP Packages available, stay overnight in historic Bendigo and enjoy all the 2013 Bendigo Writers Festival has to offer.

MALCOLM FRASER Friday, August 9, 6.15 – 7.30pm • The Capital

Gathering in the creative heartland of Central Victoria, the festival will be opened by Former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

Writers include Max Allen, Denise Scott, James Boyce, David Bridie, James Button, Richard Cornish, Robin De Crespigny, Dennis Glover, Shane Howard, Sal Kimber, Anna Krien, Lisa McCune, Alice Pung, Tony Wilson and more participating in panel discussions, story telling, performances and special events.

There are weekend passes and day passes as well as special events that are ticketed individually.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was at the centre of the most controversial event in Australian political history. Now in his 80s, Mr Fraser campaigns tirelessly for human rights. He will be joined on stage by his official biographer, Margaret Simons.

Presented by La Trobe University Bendigo Campus

SENSATION! Saturday, August 10, from 4pm • La Trobe Visual Arts Centre Wine writer Max Allen and food writer Richard Cornish join forces to present a taste-seminar to tempt us. 90 minutes of mix-and-match experiences.

WRITE ON SONG Saturday, August 10, from 7pm • The Capital

Tickets: 03 5434 6100 Packages: 1800 813 153 www.bendigowritersfestival.com.au PRESENTED BY

David Bridie, Shane Howard, Charles Jenkins, Sal Kimber, Lucie Thorne, and Geoffrey Williams, will talk about the power of words and their passion for song.

Presented by Bendigo TAFE.

90 minutes from Melbourne Airport, 90–120 minutes from Melbourne via V/Line.

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10 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

BUSINESS Building a better business through good compliance

BY MICHAEL BROWNE

W

Dollar Up, Dollar Down

BY STEPHEN KOUKOULAS

T

he most important near-term issue that Treasurer Chris Bowen will have to deal with in his new role is to change the perception in the electorate that the Labor Party are inferior economic managers to the Coalition.

The recent gap between the parties on the question of which side of politics is the better economic manager is around 15 to 20 points in favour of the Coalition.

As a bright and punchy operator, Mr Bowen should be able to close that gap and in doing so bring the economy to front of centre of the upcoming election campaign. If he succeeds at recasting the economic debate, it will no doubt improve Labor’s standing in the polls and give it a rough hope of winning the election as people give credit to the government for some first class economic fundamentals.

From one perspective, Mr Bowen’s job will be easy. The hard facts on the economy remain positive with economic growth continuing; there is a decent pace of job creation, low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation, rising wealth, ongoing increases in real wages, the tripe-A credit rating, international trade surpluses and a stunningly low level of government debt.

Any government in Australia’s past, or future for that matter, would be delighted to have these broad economic parameters

occurring under their watch, a point Mr Bowen will need to emphasise at every opportunity.

From a different angle, Mr Bowen has a tough job and he will have to confront the effective but factually deficient spin that the Coalition invent with each bit of news on the economy.

The recent trends in the Australian dollar are a case in point.

Back in February, when the Australian dollar was trading over US$1.03, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey said, “The current high value of the dollar continues to be of concern to Australian businesses.” He went on, “there is no doubt that the high Australian dollar is impeding the competitiveness of Australian exporters and making life difficult for Australian producers who compete with imported products.”

Mr Hockey was correct – the high Australian dollar was a concern and a problem for the economy and was a factor behind the revenue shortfall for the government and was it was eating away at the pace of economic growth.

Move forward to July and the Australian dollar has depreciated towards US$0.90, which most economists, including at the Reserve Bank of Australia, are welcoming. But

ith the end of the financial year behind us, many businesses are now focusing on compliance matters such as balancing the books and reviewing statutory obligations. These tasks are generally seen as a necessary cost of doing business but maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at compliance and see how it can help your business to be more effective.

not Mr Hockey who now thinks the lower dollar is having an “immediate negative impact” on business confidence and will push up business costs as import prices rise.

According to analysis from Mr Hockey, the strong Australian dollar was bad news in February, while the weaker or lower Australian dollar is bad news in July.

The hypocrisy of this position is the sort of misinformation that Treasurer Bowen must confront head-on if he is to elevate the economic debate to a more considered level and with it, present the picture that the economy is doing well, it has been well managed and continues to run smoothly.

Mr Bowen could also quantify the savings to households and business from low interest rates. These amount to approximately $70 billion a year compared with the level of rates around five years ago. He could note that for more than a decade, wages growth has exceeded the rate of inflation which has boosted real wages and makes a mockery of concerns about cost of living pressures. Mr Bowen could point to the fact that Labor is one of the lowest taxing governments in history and as such, is leaving money in the accounts of the private sector.

It will be tough to change perceptions on economic management in such a short time before the election, but armed with the facts, Mr Bowen has a great opportunity to lift Labor’s standing on the question of who is the better economic manager.

» Stephen Koukoulas is Managing Director of Market Economics. He writes a daily column for Business Spectator. marketeconomics.com.au

Often year end tends to coincide with finalising budgets, staff reviews, strategic plans and bank reviews. The compliance function can play an important part in each of these. Leading up to the end of financial year and the start of the new financial year is a good time to make plans and assess how the business performed, as well as where it might be heading through refining budgets and projections.

Whilst strategic planning doesn’t at a first glance revolve around financial performance, the process has as a key outcome improving the overall business result. Year end numbers provide a sound base for reviewing the strategic plan to ensure it remains relevant and based upon actual financial performance.

Staff is another key component of all businesses, so using the results of the past financial year and projections for next year in reviews is beneficial. Overall actual financial performance provides a helpful starting point for review conversations around performance and expectations for the year ahead.

For most privately owned businesses, banks tend to conduct their reviews in the September/October period. Using the year end process to prepare for the bank meeting can save time and make for a more productive outcome, including why budgets provided to the bank were achieved or missed as well as ensuring that the facilities that you have in place are appropriate. Being on top of these aspects can enable you to position properly the conversation with your bank.

Clearly understanding what needs to be disclosed in the financial accounts is important.

Privately owned business generally has a desire to keep financial matters private, so ensuring you only disclose what is required in the financial accounts requires careful consideration. Reducing the disclosure of

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BUSINESS

Eligible companies can claim up to $300,000 as a carry-back offset. If this measure is applicable, what impact will it have on your business and its cashflow?”

Whilst on cashflow, remember that for the financial year ending June 30, 2014, there is a rise in the super guarantee contribution from nine percent to 9.25 percent. Businesses need to ensure they have costed this item and are prepared for the impact on their bottom line.

Try and see the necessity of compliance as an opportunity to position your business for the year ahead. Start early and the results will speak for themselves. sensitive information in financial accounts is often achievable, whilst still being fully compliant.

Finally, no discussion about year end is complete without considering income tax. The Australian Tax Office is becoming more vigilant, so ensuring you understand

obligations early and with adequate time to address the issues is vital.

Understanding changes to the tax laws that impact your business is crucial. For example, for the first time, at year end on June 30, 2013, there is the ability for losses made by eligible companies to not just to be carried forward but

also carried back. Under this rule companies will be allowed to offset a tax loss from a current year against taxable income from the previous year. Eligible companies can claim up to $300,000 as a carry-back offset. If this measure is applicable, what impact will it have on your business and its cashflow?

» Michael Browne is a Partner at PwC pwc.com.au

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EXTRACT

EXTREME DAYS Standfirst here

BY BRIAN MATTHEWS

R

ose Boys begins on 22 August 2000 in ‘an upstairs study in Adelaide’, not far from St Peter’s Cathedral, where for the moment the bells are ‘blessedly still’. Further down the road from St Peter’s, and in sound of the bells when they are in full voice, is the Adelaide Oval, perhaps the most beautiful of Australia’s cricket grounds, and the venue for a Sheffield Shield match between South Australia and Victoria in January 1973. Forced to follow on after being 205 runs behind on the first innings, Victoria was rescued by an opening partnership of 217 between Paul Sheahan and Robert Rose, who batted for five hours to make a ‘dogged’ 94.

Reading through family records in the silence

of that upstairs study, Peter Rose relives scenes from his boyhood with his brother, Robert, and their parents, Elsie and Bob (one of Collingwood’s greatest footballers); but it seems there is no escaping a truth that is as insistent as the cathedral bells when the hour turns. Too quickly, brutally, a random choice opens his brother’s scrapbook ‘at a front-page story drawn from the Melbourne Herald of 15 February 1974’—‘rose paralysed in car roll’, runs the headline. The Australian that same day is unequivocal: ‘cricket, football star is paralysed’.

No matter what diversions the scrapbook turns up—a riotous wake after the Magpies’ legendary 1970 Grand Final defeat; the

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moods of coach Jock McHale; Bob and Elsie’s courtship and marriage; flashing scenes of young Robert, the brilliant batsman and mercurial footballer—the merciless narrative to which Peter Rose has tentatively, fearfully committed himself will out. About to turn away from the scrapbook’s intolerable reminders, the pasted-in clipping about the ‘transformation’ wrought by ‘a driving accident—just another of our crashes—and a second or two in time’, Rose is brought back into the unremitting penumbra of memory, the unreachable silence of the dead and, above all, the unanswered questions the dead leave in their wake.

And so the first chapter, ‘Scrapbooks’, a skirmishing with the past—now intense and tight-lipped, now genial and indulgent— becomes a magnificent prelude to confronting again the pain that awaited the Rose boys and all their family when Robert’s Volkswagen spun off the road near Bacchus Marsh on St Valentine’s Day in 1974.

What exactly is the message of Robert Rose?

One year after his death, twenty-six years after just another of our crashes, knowing the effect it had on his family and friends, and thousands of others who hardly knew him, I want to go back there, I want to examine my brother’s life and reanimate him…Here, in my Adelaide eyrie, with my documents and my pent cathedral bells, I want to examine his achievement, what he symbolised, what he gave and what he withheld, what he divulged and what he never said, as a son,

as a brother, as a husband, as a mate, above all as a tragic victim of that ‘second or two in time’.

And so I hold on to the outsize scrapbook for a while longer. It is time to listen to my brother whose message, laconic but self-evident to many in his life, I somehow never fully heeded…

Again I turn to the handsome lad, the vaunted youth, the rage recruit, and will him to speak to me.

Like all fine, evocative prose, Rose’s splendid re-creation of the place and mood in which he set out on his memoir journey has echoes of, and is intensified by, other voices seeking the same truths: his fellow poet Kenneth Slessor, for example, who, willing the dead to speak to him, hears only ‘five bells coldly ringing out… the bumpkin calculus of Time’.

Rose Boys is the story of Robert Rose’s transformation from a quintessentially Australian sporting life of brilliance, promise and sheer physical energy to the confined and cribbed world of the quadriplegic. More broadly, it is the wrenching account of a family living for a quarter of a century in the sometimes tightening, sometimes loosening, never absent grip of catastrophe.

The book begins unannounced, in a brief prologue that moves with the pace and fractured logic of a dream: ‘Electric afternoon.

Hiding from humanity, I drift through burnt spears and withered grass. My walk is soothing but fraught with snakes and goannas. They

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EXTRACT Rose Boys is relentless: when you think it can’t get worse for Peter and his parents and their circle, it does. When you think Robert can suffer no more, that torture upon torture must kill him, he endures, suffering before the gaze of his loyal, loving, helpless family. The telling of this story is so right that it is easy to overlook the nature of the task Rose set himself.

No feelings are spared here—not the reader’s, not his own—least of all his own.

and thirty drafts’, a hard-won serenity, the pitilessly even-handed but reconciling equilibrium of art.

Peter Rose

rustle in the flammable scrub, reminding me that anything can happen to a solitary. In the distance a minor cemetery catches the sun…A woman appears, frantic and dishevelled…’

The prologue ends inconclusively, when a small boy with ‘uncanny vision’ ‘takes pity’ on the wavering intruder and speaks to him. This dream—inchoate, compelling—resurfaces at the end of the book in the form of Peter Rose’s splendid poem ‘I Recognise My Brother in a Dream’. From the remorseless heat of the trials that Robert and the family had endured there issued at long last, shaped and graspable, the product of ‘seven years

In contrast to the disorienting dream and the richly allusive poem, the main narrative between the two is spare and tense: ‘Robert was lying on his back, looking rather beautiful. His head was shaved. They had already drilled holes in his skull and inserted calipers attached to eightpound weights.

Robert’s head was pulled back, immovable.

There was a tube in his mouth. Mum kissed him. His first words to her were, “I’m in trouble.”’

Artless on the surface—telling it how it was, you might say—this tremendously moving moment is unerringly timed from word to word, sentence to sentence, to deliver the hammer blows of disaster without breaking up under their force. Like Nick Adams in Hemingway’s story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, who keeps panic at bay with a succession of small, deliberated tasks, Peter Rose, scarcely knowing what to feel or think, controls surges of panic and grief within tight, unadorned prose. It was just about the only way he could write it.

The book’s trajectory is a descent that ravages and cauterises the Roses, strong though they are, and threatens all bulwarks, structures and props. Disintegration flickers through the story with increasing certainty, and that sense of pervasive illness which afflicts tragic households becomes a sub-theme in Rose’s memoir. ‘The extreme days had begun,’ he writes in his journal, ‘days of futility, days of grief’, days of ‘volatile, ungovernable’ emotions.

‘No one was in good shape’ and at times, he says, conceding how graphically the image of Robert’s broken body commanded their thoughts and imaginations, ‘it felt as if we were all crippled.’

They had been gathered into what Susan Sontag called ‘the night-side of life…a more onerous citizenship…in the kingdom of the sick’. They would return at last from this drawnout crepuscular gloom incalculably altered, damaged, but glimpsing a hard renewal.

For himself, Rose looks down for the last time on his brother with ‘a pang of something that would never fully dissipate—incompletion, incomprehension, rich regret…’ There seems to be no resolution available to him. Even his lastminute attempt to see the Collingwood team honour Robert is foiled by rain and confusion.

Yet this story of fractured lives, unassuageable grief and nowhere-to-turn desperation becomes, in Rose’s hands, a triumph. Though seeming, in retrospect, unrelieved—I read it at a sitting when it was first published, in 2001, and its images and episodes ghosted round me for days—the story of Robert Rose’s tragedy is both ennobled and lightened by a context that calamity cannot diminish. Friends, children and extended family populate and colour the

Artless on the surface— telling it how it was, you might say—this tremendously moving moment is unerringly timed from word to word, sentence to sentence, to deliver the hammer blows of disaster without breaking up under their force.”

‘shifting text’: Bob’s parents, Bert and Millie, with ‘one cow but no fence’; Uncle Rusty, ‘a wheat-farming bachelor with a roll-your-own cough’; and the Rose family’s Nyah West home, in Elizabeth Street, ‘named after one of the little princesses but commonly known as Blowfly Flat’.

And there is Peter Rose himself, ironic, witty, ‘Thicko’ to his equally witty and ironic brother. His account effortlessly ranges across past and present, and is variously enriched by glimpses of Melbourne’s football culture, his emerging sexuality, his discovery of the depth of his fraternal love, his growth as a poet and his affection for Robert’s daughter, Salli.

Through it all there is the selfless devotion of Elsie, devastated but indomitable, resilient; and Bob, a wonderful human being, unassuming, dogged, loving. And there is Robert Rose, whose inspiring courage, lost promise, shattered body and tortured soul this great book unflinchingly documents, celebrates and gently lays to rest.

» Rose Boys by Peter Rose, with a new introduction by Brian Matthews, is out now from Text Classics, RRP $12.95. textpublishing.com.au

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14 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

HEALTH

GASTROINTESTINAL HEALTH Ten billion ways to wellness

BY PROFESSOR AVNI SALI

A

healthy gut is an important but often overlooked area of health maintenance and disease prevention. While good nutrition is critical to good health, the body’s ability to absorb nutrients is also vital, and healthy gut flora plays a significant role in nutrient uptake.

Gastrointestinal (GI) issues are on the rise, particularly in Western populations and poor diets, stress, the use or overuse of antibiotics and other medications, and various diseases are all considered contributing factors to a range of GI issues. Significant research has been conducted into the role and function of the GI lining, good versus bad bacterial balance, various food sensitivities and the role of digestive enzymes, specifically pancreatic enzymes and stomach acid. Increasingly the role of complementary therapies is being recognised for not only the management of symptoms, but also in the restoration of the GI system to optimal functioning.

As babies we are born with sterile GI tracts and feeding, ideally through breast milk, helps us build healthy colonies of bacteria. There are between 400-500 different species of bacteria in the diverse ecosystem within the human body. We have trillions of bacteria inside our bodies; in fact there are more bacteria in the body than cells. Intestinal microflora makes a significant contribution not only to the healthy functioning of the GI tract, but also to various

other metabolic activities, including immune function, cholesterol metabolism and hormone metabolism.

Fermented dairy products such as yoghurts and other soured milk products have been consumed for hundreds of years in the belief that they provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition. Specific research was being conducted in the early 20th century and references are made to health and fermented products in early Roman literature and the Old Testament of the Bible. Fermented food and beverage products have a long history of use and account for 40 percent of human food supply worldwide.

The GI tract is segmented into upper, middle and lower sections. The upper GI is the area from the mouth to where the stomach exits, the middle GI the small intestine, and the lower GI the large bowel/colon to anus. While GI issues may be located in a particular area of the GI tract, the system is an interrelated one and flow-on effects are often experienced. This means that a disturbance in stomach acid can potentially create symptoms further on, for example influencing the types of microbes in the intestine.

The GI tract produces dozens of different enzymes, the secretion of which is controlled by both hormonal and neural signalling, as well as

the type of food present in the gut. After about 40-50 years of age, the body’s production of digestive enzymes and stomach acid decrease, which may influence GI function.

TYPES OF GI DISORDERS Beyond indigestion/dyspepsia and heartburn, there are many types of GI disorders. Some common GI disorders include infections such as gastroenteritis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), food intolerances, gall bladder disease, ulcerative colitis and other inflammatory bowel conditions such as Crohn’s disease, digestive tract cancers, peptic ulcers, piles (haemorrhoids), and bowel disturbances such as constipation and diarrhoea. IBS is the most common disorder and the Irritable Bowel Information and Support Association estimates that one in five Australian adults have IBS at some stage in life.

IBS is defined as a functional disorder of the large intestine with no evidence of a structural defect. Symptoms include abdominal cramping, diarrhea/constipation (often both), spasmodic pain in the bowel, nausea, bloating, flatulence, hypersecretion of colonic mucus, fatigue, malnutrition and varying degrees of anxiety or depression. It can also be linked to back pain, menstrual difficulties, headaches and restless leg syndrome.

KEY INTERVENTIONS FROM AN INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVE Lifestyle modification is an important component of managing GI disorders. It is a useful adjunct to mainstream medicine and pharmacological support and, in many cases, lifestyle modification – with appropriate complementary therapies – may also provide a suitable management plan that reduces or eliminates the need for long term prescription medications.

Probiotics, prebiotics and synbiotics Probiotics are live microorganisms in fermented foods or supplements that promote good health by establishing an overall improved balance in the intestinal microflora. They

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are proven to enhance intestinal immunity as well as many other body mechanisms as previously mentioned. Common probiotics are Lactobacillus, Bifido bacterium and Saccharomyces boulardii.

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HEALTH Prebiotics are not absorbed in the small intestine but are fermented in the large bowel.

They can stimulate the growth of existing healthy flora in the GI tract, and can also be taken in conjunction with probiotics to enhance their effectiveness. The combination of prebiotics and probiotics is called synbiotics and is a rapidly growing area of research in gut flora supplementation.

Taking probiotics Adding fermented foods to the diet (yoghurt, soured milks, kefir, fermented vegetables such as sauerkraut and kim chi) can be beneficial, and can be combined with prebiotic foods as listed above. Supplementation, be that in capsules, powder or tablets, can provide a more concentrated load of viable bacteria and may be more effective in producing a therapeutic effect. The ideal time to take a probiotic is first thing in the morning on an empty stomach or last thing at night. At other times acid in the stomach can easily destroy the microbes in the probiotic, resulting in only small numbers reaching the large intestine where they have their major influence on health.

Recommended doses need to be based on the specific strains of bacteria that have been identified for specific conditions, and this may also be dependent on individual gut profiles. A healthcare professional can provide important guidance on how much to take, what and when. There are excellent general probiotic supplements available and ideally these should be at least 10 billion CFUs (colony forming unit, which is a measure of the number of microbes).

Healthy bacteria need continual replenishment either via dietary or supplemented probiotics.

Herbal medicines and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Prebiotics are food ingredients that stimulate the growth and activity of one or more species of bacteria in the bowel. Some prebiotic foods include the onion family, honey, artichokes, soy, wheat, barley, oats, almonds, pistachios and bananas.

Peppermint oil can be taken in a special form (enteric capsule), which delivers the oil directly to the intestine. Research has proven it has antispasmodic action in the large bowel and the intestines and has anti-viral properties. It is thought to work by improving the rhythmic contractions of the intestinal tract and relieving spasms. The after dinner mint has its origins

in the use of peppermint oil for GI support.

Other dietary and lifestyle changes

A complex herbal preparation called Iberogast has a long history of use in Europe and is now available in Australia. Some of its ingredients include Iberis amara, chamomile, caraway seeds, peppermint leaves, liquorice root, lemon balm leaves and St Mary’s thistle.

The combination acts on both the GI system and the nervous system and research has proven it can provide significant improvements, particularly for IBS symptoms.

Get plenty of vitamin D/sunlight, quality fibre, omega-3 healthy oils, eliminate trigger foods from the diet (often spicy, fatty or sugary foods or those that typically cause food allergies or food intolerances), and avoid alcohol and smoking.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) including acupuncture can be useful. An Australian study demonstrated strong scientific support for the use of TCM in the treatment of IBS. Acupuncture is effective in the treatment of nausea and vomiting and studies have shown it can improve gastric emptying time and acid secretion.

Stress management and meditation, psychotherapy/counselling and hypnosis Digestion is facilitated by a relaxed state.

The digestive tract has its own nervous system (called the enteric nervous system) that is interconnected with the central nervous system – emotional stress exacts a heavy toll on the digestive tract. The thought, sight and smell of food provide signals to the body to increase various gut secretions. Research has shown anxiety to be predictive of a high degree of food-related symptoms in IBS. Sleep disorders, fatigue, anger and depression may also factor.

Psychological therapies including cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnotherapy have been shown to be effective for functional gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome in adults and children. These therapies should be considered for patients with chronic symptoms especially if symptoms are clearly exacerbated by stress or emotional symptoms.

Exercise Lack of exercise is considered a contributor to the development of IBS. Many find a daily walk markedly reduces symptoms.

The gut is a powerful indicator of general health and it is important to understand how well it is functioning. There are times when symptoms necessitate a visit to your health professional.

Signs to be on the lookout for include any sudden, unexplained change in bowel habits or in the appearance of stools, blood in the stool, unexplained weight loss, alternate constipation and diarrhoea, repeated vomiting or vomiting blood, and abdominal or rectal pain.

Everything we eat has the power to help us or harm us. The gut is more than just the place our food is digested. It is a powerhouse of healthy bacteria that support immune functioning, nutrient uptake and a range of vital body processes. In fact twothirds of the body’s total immune system cells are located within the GI tract!

Integrative Medicine provides us with an individualised approach to GI health. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for GI disorders and the right balance of a range of integrative therapies is often a turning point in treatment.

Taking good care of the gut is taking good care of overall health.

Bibliography Kotsirilos V, Vitetta L, Sali A (2011), A guide to evidence-based integrative and complementary medicine, Elsevier, Sydney.

» Professor Avni Sali is Founding Director of the National Institute of Integrative Medicine (NIIM). He oversees the facilitation of the practice of Integrative Medicine at the NIIM Clinic in Hawthorn, as well as the promotion of education and research. niim.com.au

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16 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

COLUMNISTS IRREGULAR WRITINGS Magical Mic Conway

BY DAVE GRANEY

I

did a show at the Butterfly Club in June. It’s a small theatre showroom that used to inhabit a Victorian house in South Melbourne and has now flown into town. There are several bars across several levels. A bit of a carnival fantasy world, all sense of direction is lost as soon as you enter the building. The building is full of all sorts of bric-a-brac – books and stuffed animals and old 78 record players, as well as board games and posters of everybody from Schwarzenegger to George V. A great joint.

My show was an experiment in early opening.

A 6pm start and I was greatly heartened by the public’s appreciation of the idea. Big, sophisticated cities need early entertainment options! Screw all that dumb diehard rock’n’roll bullshit! Go to a show and then walk outside at 8pm to decide what to do next? A game of squash? Whyever not?

A sauna? Yes please! Dinner and a late movie?

Thought you’d never ask!

During my run there I espied a performer of interest to me who was coming down from Sydney to do a rare Melbourne show. It was Mic Conway who, decades ago, entered the straying public consciousness as the long haired but deep voiced singer of The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. A true troupe of freakish brothers from the wilder depths and shores of underground Melbourne music and performance. They crossed boundaries and all manner of manners as to what an act could be doing and saying. Not that I ever saw them perform – just a mere glimpse of them destroying the joint that was the TV show Countdown one Sunday evening.

I once read a book about the legendary star Louise Brooks and she talked about how it was a shame no film ever really captured the comic genius of W.C. Fields because they didn’t show his whole body. She had worked with him a lot on the stage and said he was comic in the totality of his movement. His face and his voice

were funny but the whole package was the best.

He moved funny.

Mic Conway has this. He came out with his accompanist, Rob “Daddy Long Legs” Long, on electric guitar and began the show. He used no microphone – his voice is classic, rich and deep and sonorous. His clothes are perfectly dusty and the collar all skew-whiff and drunk. A cummerbund, a funny hat to begin. His side of the stage was like a shop and he kept diving into the pile of props and bags to bring out another marvel. We laughed from beginning to end. He does magic tricks and tells the corniest of gags and lays it all out with the ease and timing of an absolute confidence man.

He played a parlour sized steel guitar with Hawaiian dancers painted on the back and a ukulele. He put a harmonica rack around his neck which included a kazoo, several whistles, a couple of bird calls, and a jug as well as the harmonica. No turn was unstoned.

Mic drew on songs from Bing Crosby’s early repertoire, Tom Lehrer and Marlene Dietrich.

He touched on songs from his Matchbox past with “My Canary Has Circles Under His Eyes”, explaining it was a song from the 20s when people gave marijuana to their pet birds!

The whole show was a display of skills in every area. Then there was the innate charisma and persona of the performer. It has struck me several times, seeing a player in front of a crowd where they have a sense of him or her in their minds before a word is uttered or a note is played. The performer is already there, walking across their minds. He had us moving with him from the beginning.

Mic moved through all these songs and changes.

He has an easy smile and world weary, hooded eyes.

A light, knowing touch on every note. No heavy trips here. Sometimes he looked like the oldest entertainer in vaudeville, other times, he was a timeless hero from the youth of the known world.

He was there with all this stuff before AC/DC and before Cold Chisel. Probably playing in the same joints. He seriously has the blues. I mean that as the highest compliment. He seemed surprised but delighted this hammy stuff still worked. He liked it!, nobody else was supposed to! He smiled easily, like Nick Cave, from a long way away.

He played the room in a supersized, classic, pre-electric mode. If you ever see him posterized as to an upcoming visit – see him! @davegraney

SIX SQUARE METRES The Family Shrubbery

BY MARGARET SIMONS

I

have a weird extended family, a cherished side effect of a life that has not gone to plan. I have four adult stepchildren, two teenage children of my own, two ex-partners and two step grandchildren. Then there is the ex girlfriend of one of my ex-stepsons.

She, too, is family.

It is not so much a family tree as a family shrubbery.

For people in their 20s and early 30s, settling down is a sometime thing. So it is that quite often some subset of the shrubbery will be moving furniture from one home to another.

Tables, chairs, fridges, washing machines and baby clothes circulate between us, travelling around the suburbs as need requires.

In this constant movement my house and garden is a fixed point – a place where items

LONGNECK The Fat Man in History

BY PATRICK ALLINGTON

W

hen I heard that the Australian artist Jeffrey Smart had died, my thoughts turned to a fat man dressed in a blue-grey suit. In Smart’s famous 1962 painting ‘Cahill Expressway’, this unnamed man stands on the cusp of an empty road that leads into a dark, sinister tunnel. Above and beyond the man (he’s not privy to the vista) another road arcs up towards a lifeless landscape of building and lightpoles – and on to a monument upon which a figure reaches out and up, as if singing to the sky or beholding the wasteland of suburbia. I’m

are stored or dropped. It helps that I have a loft.

Yesterday I was standing with stepson number two in the no-man’s land of the back lane that divides my backyard from the McDonalds restaurant. We were, once again, loading stuff on a rented ute.

There was a pause while we waited for my ex partner to arrive and help. Standing in the weak winter sunshine, among the fallen leaves and discarded hamburger wrappings, I found myself pointing out the plants I have squeezed into a little box of dirt against the McDonalds fence. I had narrowly avoided destroying them as we clumsily backed the ute.

I showed him the miraculous happy wanderer, the subject of a previous column in this series. Then I pointed out its companions.

guessing it’s not supposed to, but for some reason ‘Cahill Expressway’ always makes me feel happy.

Smart was, he said, all about “putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places” … with people, fat or otherwise, employed to deliver scale. And, sure, there’s something both gorgeous and utterly frightening about the arrangement of lines and curves in ‘Cahill Expressway’.

But it is Smart’s blue-suited man who has always fascinated me. Peter Garrett-bald but less fit, he looks, at a distance, a touch surly – or perhaps he’s one of those people with inadvertently sour features. His front leg angles as if he’s holding a yoga position, strong but calm. His hand is shoved into a jacket pocket, or so I’d always thought: it turns out that the whole arm is missing, and sleeve pinned. According to Smart, “I gave him one arm in the Cahill Expressway picture because I happened to be thinking

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COLUMNISTS “That is parsley, and that is coriander, and that is a passionfruit vine,” I said.

He did a double-take. “Passionfruit grows on a VINE?” he said.

“Yes.” “How?” “Well, it flowers, and then it sets fruit.”

“But isn’t it too heavy? How does it stay up?”

He was truly astonished.

“Just like a cucumber of any other vine.”

Another double-take. “Cucumbers grow on a VINE?” So I showed him the wiry tendrils the passionfruit vine throws around the trellis.

It has grown astonishingly well – more than a metre over winter. Soon it will help screen the view of the McDonalds drive through and the illuminated menu.

Its tendrils are like green springs, winding multiple times in perfect coils to lock the plant tight against its support.

My stepson brushed his finger against the tendrils. “How does it know where to put them?” he said quietly. He is a vehement atheist, so I did not attempt an answer. Not that I had one.

There were some tendrils, a lighter green than those locked around the trellis, that were reaching out in to the lane. “They don’t all know where to go,” I said, pulling out the spiral of an unanchored example, and letting it snap back on itself.

He found a tendril that was less than completely regular in its spiral grip on the trellis. “Well,” he said, in tones of satisfaction.

“It stuffed that one up.”

We had a little longer to wait, and he took a look at my compost bin. The worms had climbed through a layer of dead leaves to feed on the latest bin of kitchen waste. There was a cluster of them nestled in an eggshell, feeding on the remains of the white. We contemplated them quietly, our heads bowed together.

Then my ex arrived, and we packed up the back of the ute and drove out of the lane and around the suburb, delivering stuff to its latest home. @margaretsimons

how unnerving the shape of a coat looks with one empty sleeve tucked into the pocket.”

Smart’s fat man is fascinating because he’s the only person in plain sight … perhaps the only human being left on earth. He’s fascinating because, as Smart once said, “Man has made prisons for himself in every city; and for the ordinary person escape is very difficult.” He’s fascinating because I don’t know what the hell he’s thinking – and I desperately want to know.

‘Cahill Expressway’ adorns the cover of Peter Carey’s debut collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History. For me, Smart and Carey remain inseparable. I imagine a cocksure young Carey – decades before he wrote True History of the Kelly Gang – studying ‘Cahill Expressway’ and then furiously writing his short story about a household of anti-revolutionary fat men who band together (sort of) to make ends meet while plotting to blow up – or eat – a political monument.

THIRD AGE Don’t ask me to tick boxes

BY SHIRLEY STOTT DESPOJA

S

omeone told me recently that “the old are the new black.”

So there you have it. We are the fashionable new source for statisticians, for thesis-writers, and for whoever else wants our personal information. We old people are the means of getting younger people grants and contracts. We are not useful in ourselves, but what box we tick is interesting to those who know nothing about what it’s like to be old (and, indeed, may not care), but see us as a new field of research.

And I say to them, go ask your granny.

(When did you last have a good talk with her about what she wants to talk about, eh?) If you want to know what it’s like to be old, how it feels, what are the special needs, then come and ask me, or my friends.

Make an appointment, to which I may or may not agree. Bring evidence to show that my identity and information will be secure. Don’t just front up with some printed questions or send me an email with question boxes to be filled in.

If you want me to answer questions devised by someone I don’t know, then how much is my information worth? Information is valuable. Let us old pensioners gain some financial benefit from giving it up. My message to my peers is: Never be flattered by someone you don’t know asking personal questions. They are making something out of it, so why shouldn’t you?

“Oh, it’s worth heaps,” I am told. “It’s the means of finding out what old people need for the future, what sort of nursing homes and that sort of thing. Oh, and whether you are obese and how we can stop that.”

It’s my duty then?

I don’t actually think that Carey wrote his story while staring at ‘Cahill Expressway’. In fact, in 1977 he told an interviewer that it was inspired by “a tribe called the Sirono in Bolivia or somewhere”. But even now, as I stare at my copy of The Fat Man in History, the painting jammed into the front cover’s bottom half, its colours faded and sunned, I feel as if the three of us – Smart, Carey and me – are in cahoots, in joint possession of secret knowledge about how people survive (or don’t) and resist (or don’t) and grow (or don’t).

I don’t know what art aficionados see when they look at a Smart canvas, but I see unsettling, thrilling stories. For years, I’ve wanted to write my own short story inspired by ‘Cahill Expressway’ (as a rule, writers spend a heap of time planning to write all sorts of stuff). As far back as 1989, Helen Daniel stole my idea (before I’d even had time to think of it) when she invited a bunch of

Possibly you heard the loud explosion that was my response to that.

I went to my nice GP. Reception asked me to answer some questions for the doctor for a survey first. I did not object because then I wouldn’t have known what the questions were, would I? I knew I could refuse. But perhaps some of the old people strewn about the waiting room did not like to deny expectations. I thought it was rough asking people questions even before they had a chance to say what was wrong with them that brought them to the doctor’s.

As it happened the questions were about my weight and height, neither of which I actually know these days, so I made a guess.

Guesses are not exactly useful for research, are they? Pity. It took me back to the old days (80s) when I fought and won against the then Bureau of Census and Statistics. With a clever lawyer, I might add. That institution wanted to know an awful lot about me over a period of months under threat of heavy, accumulative fines; all the while knowing, as everyone does, that information gained under compulsion is often useless. One of the questions was about

Australian writers to pen stories in response to ‘Cahill Expressway’. I own a copy of the book she curated. But even though I hear it’s very good, I’ve never been able to talk myself into reading it.

Now is the right time for me to write my story – as a homage, however off the point, to Jeffrey Smart, prodder of imaginations. I have no idea what it’s going to be about, but in the meantime I’m standing my ground: no matter what Smart says, not matter that he painted the picture, my fat man’s arm is intact and his hand is firmly in his pocket. I don’t know why yet.

Maybe he’s got a half-eaten tuna sandwich in there. Maybe he’s cut a hole in his pocket, and another in his business shirt, because he likes to be able to stroke his skin. I don’t think he’s a bad man … not all bad, at least. Neither do I think he’s trapped in a desolate world — he just hasn’t found the way out. Or in. @PatrAllington

whether I had wheezes in my chest. What insolence. I gave them a flea in their ear. But whether you do likewise is up to you. Check out the fines and your resources before being brave.

Nothing has changed much, except that now any little upstart researcher thinks she or he can tell me that it is my duty to the future hordes of the elderly to cough up. I intend to charge by the hour. And I don’t promise to tell the truth. Don’t ask me to tick boxes.

I heard last month that an old persons’ home offered patients colouring-in books. You would give even a chimp some decent paint to play with, wouldn’t you? Where is the box about nursing homes into which I can squeeze my despair about that?

There is none, of course. People who want you to tick boxes don’t want to know actual things in our experience of life, like despair and sorrow and pain and loss and fear. They will decide what they want to hear and you will tick to confirm their prejudices. Improved lives for the old are not going to come from this, but from understanding hearts and listening ears.

Most of all, from old people properly employed to share their information.

18 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

BOOKS

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY Ron Rash / Text Publishing

BY DAVID SORNIG

Ron Rash’s fiction doesn’t ever really stray far from familiar places: the geography, linguistic rhythms and history of the Appalachian Mountains are glimpsed here again in his latest collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, through the narrow lens of the short story.

While Rash’s geography is limited, his stories suggest a microcosmic version of universal experience. The stories are populated by characters who struggle with hurt and mistrust, who are bewildered by their own and others’ stupidity and ignorance, but just the same they are graced by unexpected forgiveness, by love and some kind of karmic justice.

While the collection is sectioned off into three formal parts, suggesting there might be an underlying dramatic structure, there aren’t any sore-thumb clues pointing to what that drama’s logic might be. The real

drama is in the stories themselves. Rash is a master at imagining dread in the midst of the real.

Those who come from outside in this part of the world are treated with sometimes justifiable scorn and suspicion. In ‘The Magic Bus’ it’s the 60s and 16-year-old farm girl Sabra is tempted toward the false dreamlife of a couple of passing hippies, and in ‘A Servant of History’ Wilson, a representative of the English Folk Dance and Ballad Society, makes the dire mistake of wallowing in his painfully hilarious fantasy of the region as a dead archaeological site. When Wilson asks his guide his name, the man answers ‘I a go ba rafe.’ Wilson hears this as Iago Barafe, hearing only the literary romanticism he wants to hear.

Rash’s thesis over and again is that it’s folly to presume that all you need to know is only you think you know.

While outsiders have a tough time getting out, it’s no easier for the insiders. ‘The Trusty’ tries to make off from a prison chain gang with the aid of a seemingly guileless young bride, and in ‘Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven,’ Jody tries to rescue his once once-golden girlfriend Lauren from the meth house she’s tangled in.

What people most want to escape is poverty, the drudgery of the everyday. For more than one character the hope is for financial aid to get out into college, but even that might not be enough. Everyone wants some change of fortune, some passage into a more complete life, and some find it in unexpected ways.

‘Cherokee’ teeters through gamblers luck and ‘Something Rich and Strange’ swallows its dread whole when a girl drowns and the diver sent down to recover her body finds a kind of beauty in it that he wants to preserve.

Even when he is at his most gothic, as in ‘The Dowry’, with its jaw-dropping sacrificial gesture of Civil War reconciliation, Rash sits firmly in the realist camp. But for all that, there’s never any doubt that these are people cut from words, who live in the situational drama of story. The only thing Rash might be accused of is being over-earnest in his working at authenticity.

DEAR LUCY

TRANSACTIONS

Julie Sarkissian / Hodder & Stoughton

Ali Alizadeh / UQP

BY TALI LAVI

BY HELEN DINMORE

Sometimes debut novels usher themselves in unassumingly; glimmering with promise but tentative in their ambition. From the outset Dear Lucy unapologetically positions itself as beguilingly and threateningly other. Although narrated by three characters, Lucy, her pregnant friend Samantha and the owner of the chicken farm to which the girls have been sent - the formidable, God-fearing Missus - it is Lucy herself upon whom the force of the story’s telling, its strange and poetic voice, balances. Illiterate and lacking the `right words’ to express herself, her limitations and literalism allow her to perceive of the world, particularly the natural one, as brimming with unacknowledged sentience.

Julie Sarkissian constructs a modern fable which is not so much moralistic as highly ambiguous when it comes to its hero and denouement. Comparisons have been made between its unconventional narrator and that of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but a closer kinship exists between Lucy and Steinbeck’s Lennie from Of Mice and Men; both are naïfs who value fidelity, and their place in the world teeters dangerously on the acceptance of others.

This collection of linked short stories by Melbourne-based poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh, ranges widely in its attempt to portray a world in moral crisis at the mercy of economic forces.

In settings as diverse as Liberia, Christchurch and Amsterdam, Alizadeh dips into the lives of sex workers, aid workers, businessmen, prison guards and writers, whose dealings with one another are defined – for the weak – by the imperatives of survival and safety, and – for the powerful – by the freedom to exploit.

This is no love letter to humanity. Transactions is most interesting for the questions it raises about how the political works in fiction. In this uneven collection, Alizadeh frequently eschews the form’s more subtle, persuasive powers in favour of excoriating satire and grim polemic, but in so doing he risks alienating readers who value fiction’s humanising power. It’s a worthy experiment, but perhaps an ineffective call-toarms; amid the noisy urgency, Transactions offers little in the way of hope. The only alternative future here is post-apocalyptic, and justice – visited by a vigilante assassin – is vengeful rather than redemptive.

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THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 19

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BOOKS

THE DIVINE COMEDY Clive James (trans.) / Picador Poetry

BY WILLIAM CHARLES

THE ILLUSION THE UNKNOWNS OF SEPARATENESS Gabriel Roth / Text Publishing Simon van Booy / Text Publishing

BY TALI LAVI

BY DAVID SORNIG

I was troubled all the way through Simon van Booy’s brisk second novel, The Illusion of Separateness. It’s not that it’s a bad book. In fact the reasons to admire it are many, not least the surprises it delivers as it elegantly overlaps and connects the lives of its characters: the damaged and mysterious Mr. Hugo whose memory is erased with half his head in World War II, and the benevolent American millionaire John Bray whose own experiences in the war give him an appreciation of life and love that he can never surpass. There are plenty more connections – family, colleagues, carers, neighbours, each one a filament in a web-like text that lays flat the illusion of the degrees of separation. What worries me is that the pattern of coincidence is apparent only because of its arrangement. It’s beguiling, but only shallowly so. The pattern convinces us only of what we already know. Still, it’s hard not to admire any writer who knows how to make love and violence belong together; he has Bray fall to earth from a fatally-damaged B-24 toward almost certain death forming ‘a ladder with the syllables of his wife’s name’.

Eric Muller, a 20-something computer geek who approaches life as if it is a programme to be repaired, its holes and inconsistencies to be worked through until it approaches a user-friendly state, has just become a dot.com millionaire. His hyper-consciousness is traced back to his early teenage self and a disastrous attempt to achieve a system of classification amongst his female classmates.

The Unknowns’s setting is San Francisco 2002 and unlike other post-September 11 novels, this one doesn’t deal with the event itself, instead employing the aftermath and its states of unreality to interrogate truth and subjectivity. The title echoes a Donald Rumsfeld quote, but also references Eric’s absolutism and its reverberations for his newfound romance with Maya. Roth’s hero veers between being frail with vulnerabilities to verging on the detestable. As a teenager, Eric is entertaining and his tormented ruminations endearing - `If Michelle Kessel humiliates you in the forest, does she make a sound?’ - but his internal dialogue when older can be exasperating in its narcissism.

Whilst sometimes this is a deliberate device, at other times it’s evidently not.

Inevitably, given the illness ravaging his body, there is a sense of wistfulness surrounding Clive James’ new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. For it is a life’s work; the culmination of a half-century journey of deep reading that, wedded to the poetic brilliance that was always James’ greatest gift, sees him equipped to take on this mind-bending – yet not quite Sisyphean – task. Others would quail before the enterprise, much like Dante himself as he entered the pit of Hell. Yet the sorrow is mainly ours, seeing the calibre of poet we are losing; for James and his readers this is a thrilling zenith.

Given a prose translation was never an option for a lifelong poet, the major technical challenge James faced was how to render the terza rima of the original, while at the same time allowing himself the audacious liberty (for Dante scholars) of incorporating copious explanatory footnotes into his verse.

James triumphs by assuming a quatrain form throughout, giving us a flowing text that simultaneously explains almost without us noticing. It is a masterstroke – one is not drawn away from the action to be bogged down in the obscure folds of internecine Florentine politics or medieval theological theory and counter-theory. Even so, the argument of the poem being what it is, there are times one strays into oddities of metaphysical pointscoring or a local Guelph v Ghibelline spat, but that is the case with any translation. Footnotes are – dare one say it in this age of endless and immediately digestible information flow – a hindrance; whether that was James’ motive or not to remove them, he has done the reader a great service.

Quite apart from the religious discussions and the treatise on love and exile, James’ translation highlights the eminence of

Dante as an early medieval scientist, seeking through his verse to explain the world, the stars, the angle and course of the sun, the temperaments of our earthly geology. What is apparent in this new translation is both the bitterness the poet Dante must have held for many of his fractious, infighting and often treacherous contemporaries – that saltiness of others’ bread, those endless stairs of exile of which he is warned by Beatrice in Paradise – assigning them to fates literally worse than death; but also, reading now in this most atheistic of times, how angry and unforgiving this God of Dante’s is. What a cranky old man, severe in his recriminations, implacable in his hatreds, adamantine in his eternal judgments. And yet, and yet… The Divine Comedy is nothing if not a hymn to the transformative power of love, as the poet ascends with Beatrice towards the face of God, and Love, becoming, finally, speechless in the radiance.

If this is Clive James’ final dispatch, he could have sent us none so monumental. He is now our guide, with Virgil and Beatrice, through the underworld and up into brightest Heaven; at the same time he attaches his name to the great legends of western cultural song: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton. Hard to imagine he’d mind the company.

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20 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FASHION

THIS CHARMING MAN Amouage releases Beloved Man

BY WILLIAM CHARLES

N

ew Amouage fragrances are of interest not just for the product itself, but for the backstory brought to the project by Creative Director Christopher Chong. While there is no such thing as a ‘conventional’ way in to the role of Parfumeur, Chong’s story has seen him arrive by way of comparative literature, modelling, fashion, and the worlds of opera and design.

Not only this; Chong is also heavily involved in the marketing, PR, design and production of the Amouage range – a diverse load to carry, but one on which he thrives as roving international ambassador for the brand.

Chong stresses the eclectic nature of his professional and personal background is of clear benefit to his current role. “It certainly makes the process behind creating the fragrances much more interesting,” he tells The Melbourne Review, “with an added dimension that fuses cultures with smell.

I love connecting a fragment of a story, a remnant of something, the phasing of a musical composition or a sentence of a conversation I had or overheard. All these fragments help me to make the fragrance come alive with a soul. Without a soul, a fragrance is purely ingredients focused. It is important to inject a part of me into the fragrance.”

preSentS

A NIGHT OF FASHION AT THE ART GALLERY with

The very global nature of his role means constantly being able to assess his choices – and their wide range of inspirations. The global experience, he says, forces him to see behind the ingredients.

“Of course ingredients and accord building are vital to creating a perfume. Since I haven’t been trained to create perfumes or been to perfume school I focus more on the philosophical and psychoanalytical aspects that fragrances evoke. My creations are like dialogues I form with the people who wear them. You may love them immediately or not.

No matter which direction it goes my goal is to interact with the wearer through the perfumes.”

The journey of a scent begins, says Chong, with a feeling. Perhaps even an intuition, something that resonates with fragments from his personal journey. Fragments such as film scenes, an aria, an image, a fleeting memory.

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“As you can tell from my work,” he goes on, “I like to work in a cinematic and epic way – full of uncertainties and drama. If we take Beloved Man for instance – it begins with the film Somewhere in Time. I am fascinated with the concept of how love is brought together and separated by that one dimension, that is both poetic and scientific. Like the film, Beloved Man travels back in time to find that one true love. Whereas in my version he first sees, in current time, an elegantly dressed silver-haired woman on the ferry in Venice looking pensively and reminiscing with a faint smile. This image of the woman came from one of my memories in Venice many years ago; I was on the ferry to the Lido and saw that woman. That image has never left me. It was so poignant and vivid.

I buried that image in my mind and hoped I would be able to tell the story. Now, here I am resurrecting that memory into a perfume.”

And music, Chong insists, shares the same structure as perfume. “We talk about notes, accords, structures, phasing and compositions in both discipline. I believe if one tries one can notate perfume like music. Obviously it will be a subjective interpretation. I often feel like a conductor creating music with a small chamber orchestra.”

The Amouage label is moving away from its “Middle Eastern” associations, and becoming a pan-global brand that is about luxury, rather than cultural specificity. “Just because Amouage started and came from the Middle East a lot of people labelled us as Arabic fragrances, regardless of what I have created every year,” Chong comments.

“It’s amusing because I am a Hong Kongborn Chinese brought up in New York and living in London. I have no idea how to create an Arabic fragrance! I have always used my life experiences and journeys, and mutate them with my interpretations of Arabia as reference points. Amouage has never placed too much importance or focus on one cultural identity.

“Amouage and I only want to create fine perfumes with heart and stories to tell. It’s that simple. Beloved Man is a subtle fragrance with a classic structure that has been re-defined for the modern man who wants to smell profound and is not afraid of telling his love story.”

» Of limited availability and sold through stores such as Harrods in London, Tsum in Russia, Lane Crawford in Hong Kong and Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Beloved Man is available in Australia through David Jones Melbourne and exclusively online through libertineparfumerie.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 21

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FASHION

Walter Van Beirendonck and the RMIT Design Hub

BY SUZANNE FRASER

D

ream the World Awake. This is the title of the first international exhibition to open at RMIT’s new centre of creativity, and Melbourne’s latest architectural bauble, the Design Hub. It is a title that seems to allow for two potential avenues of interpretation: firstly, that an individual can conjure a dream of the world whilst in a state of complete consciousness and, secondly, that the world can be conjured into a state of consciousness through the act of dreaming.

The former assumes that the world is in need of reinvention, while the latter supposes that the world is asleep. Both versions align neatly with the frenetic creative practice displayed in this exhibition: that of renegade Belgian fashion designer, Walter Van Beirendonck.

The exhibition traces Van Beirendonck’s career across three decades, inviting the visitor to not only view pieces from his collections, but to immerse themselves in his entire creative existence. Art (including pieces loaned from Antwerp and locally from Australia), pop culture artefacts, and ethnographic objects – which together constitute the designer’s ‘wonder wall’ – are displayed alongside a hundred outfits from across his career.

After graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1980, Van Beirendonck became part of a group of avantgarde designers who also graduated from the Academy that year known together as the ‘Antwerp Six’.

As part of this collective, Van Beirendonck’s tendency towards stylistic innovation and out-

Speaking to RMIT associate professor Robyn Healy on the topic of Walter Van Beirendonck’s practice, the suitability of showing this exhibition at the new Design Hub becomes clear. According to Healy, in this exhibition – which was first shown in Antwerp in 2011 – we see the designer “thinking about the nature of fashion” and “opening up what design does”.

Similarly, in establishing the Design Hub on Melbourne’s Victoria Street, Healy and her colleagues at RMIT, along with architect Sean Godsell, issued a general call to arms for cross-disciplinary practice and outsideof-the-box thinking. Within the walls of the Design Hub, students and practitioners are directed to consider what something does and how it does it, and how else it may be done, partly facilitated through an ongoing series of innovative design exhibitions.

Sean Godsell’s design of the building itself applies this ambition to the outside walls of the box-like structure, which comprise sixteen thousand circular glass cells, a quarter of which rotate on an axis. Whether or not this glass ‘skin’ has a green tinge (being environmentally friendly, that is) has been a point of some debate since the building first opened in late 2012. Nevertheless, what is certain is that the new building offers a striking and elegant interjection to the architectural landscape of Melbourne. We might then be led to consider Sean Godsell’s own wonder wall: the artefacts, art, and pop culture that influenced him in designing this structure.

Which leads us back to the current exhibition and the cross-disciplinary nature of the Design Hub itself. As Robyn Healy queries, “what might happen when architecture students view this exhibition?” Perhaps the future face of our urban landscape is tucked away in Van Beirendonck’s wonder wall.

The opening month of the exhibition in Melbourne is also a busy one for the designer, having just released his collection for spring/

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Mondino

Wonder Walls

and-out boundary-breaking gained a global reputation. Brash colours and distinct forms are combined in his designs with a penchant for gender manipulation and charming dark humour.

Walter Van Beirendonck (detail), 1996.

summer 2014 in Paris at the end of June. His continuing achievements as a ‘small practice’ designer will doubtless provide inspiration for Melbourne’s throng of young designers, displaying tangible evidence of a sustainable business model in the creative sector. More than that, Van Beirendonck’s refusal to blindly adhere to entrenched rules will surely be instructive for emerging designers who visit the exhibition, not to mention very enjoyable for the rest of us.

One example of this rule-breaking can be seen in the designer’s nonconformist approach to the social limitations placed on fashion, such as the system of gender-specific collections.

Indeed he often includes women’s silhouettes in his menswear collections. As he states, “I do like to try and push the boundaries of men’s fashion, and that’s why I question conditioned thinking… I push away this limitation and

despite my strong urge to keep an aesthetic balance, I push every collection.”

To view this maverick practice in the flesh, you need only step into the disc-covered building on the corner of Swanston and Victoria Streets between mid July and early October, or attend one of the public programs running alongside the exhibition. This is also a great excuse to have a look around the building thousands of us pass by everyday on the tram; and see how the walls look from the inside.

» Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream The World Awake shows at the RMIT Design Hub until October 5. designhub.rmit.edu.au

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22 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

Photo: Lucas Dawson

PERFORMING ARTS

SPRING REAWAKENINGS

BY PETER TREGEAR

2

013 is a bumper year for musical anniversaries, and thus for music programmers. The marketing dividend that anniversaries provide can make all the difference to a worthy, but otherwise risky creative project. A case in point is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. This has helped Opera Australia buttress the case for its first Ring Cycle in Melbourne, as well as running a mini Verdi festival in Sydney.

One hundred years ago the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris witnessed a birth of an altogether different kind when, on May 29, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring received its notorious premiere. While the work was almost immediately adopted by orchestras as concert repertoire, the anniversary has nevertheless provided an excuse for a worldwide renewal of critical attention as well as numerous additional performances.

Like his two earlier ballets, The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), The Rite had been the result of a commission by Sergei Diaghilev

for his Ballets Russes Company. Certainly, the influences of these earlier ballets, and of music by his Russian forbears Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov are clear enough if one chooses to hear them, but the score is ultimately unlike anything that preceded it.

The experimental qualities of these earlier works were brought to such an extreme that they led to radical rethinking of harmony, a radical rethinking of orchestral texture, and – above all – a radical rethinking of rhythm.

Gone was a reliance on the musical forms and syntax that had propelled the instrumental music of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Beethoven. Here, instead, was a score propelled by repetition, accumulation, and recurrence of musical patterns. The audience in 1913 was at once astonished and scandalised; the first performance of The Rite also was something of a riot.

Today we might reason that such a radical shift in thinking about how music worked was eminently justified by the brutal subject matter of the ballet in which, as Stravinsky himself put it, ‘sage elders, seated in a circle’

watch a young girl ‘dance herself to death to propitiate the God of Spring.’ This evocation of a pre-modern rite was, however, also a very modern one. The pounding rhythms paved the way for composers to engage with the sonic as well as aesthetic realities of modern society in ways hitherto unknown but which have since become familiar. For many of Stravinsky’s contemporaries, indeed, the ritualised violence of The Rite of Spring was an ominous prelude to the onset of war on an industrial scale that was soon to erupt across Europe. Certainly, the music has lost none of its capacity to shock.

Under the enterprising baton of its Artistic Director Fabian Russell, the Monash University Academy Orchestra gave a performance of The Rite on the day of the anniversary. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, has chosen to wait until the onset of spring in Melbourne before itself acknowledging the anniversary. It is doing so, however, in spectacular fashion by presenting all three of Stravinsky’s early ballets over a week in the comparatively intimate surrounds of the Melbourne Recital Centre, culminating in a performance of The Rite on August 13.

Each concert includes other works, mostly also by Russian composers. The first, on August 7, however, opens with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Composed in 1894, it too was to become a scandalous ballet in the hands of Diaghilev and it too was soon hailed as a score that heralded a new way of thinking about how orchestral music could

sound. Works by Tchaikovsky are included in two of the concerts, which is also appropriate given it was the example he left with Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker that convinced Stravinsky that ballet could be a creative pursuit worthy of the highest artistic effort.

The conductor for these concerts is the 29-year-old Venezuelan Diego Matheuz who is commencing a three-year appointment as Principal Guest Conductor of the MSO. Matheuz is another protégé of El Sistema, the enviable state-funded initiative that supports some 125 youth orchestras in impoverished communities and the instrumental training programmes that make them possible. Elements of the El Sistema programme have now spread to Australia – it would be a spring worth celebrating indeed if such musical opportunities were also to be open to our own youth regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances.

» Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s The Russian Festival: Celebrating the Rite of Spring; Diego Matheuz, conductor. » Performances at Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, on Wednesday 7 August at 8pm; Saturday 10 August at 8pm; Tuesday 13 August at 8pm.

Bookings: 03 9929 9600 mso.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 23

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PERFORMING ARTS

Proximity: the Neuro-Self

BY NINA BERTOK

T

raditionally an unlikely pairing, science and art come together in Australian Dance Theatre’s remarkable production Proximity, which creates an experimental fusion of dance and live videography. Critically acclaimed following its debut at the 2012 Adelaide Festival – and, more recently, during a European tour earlier this year – the production sees artistic director and choreographer Garry Stewart join creative forces with French video engineer Thomas Pachoud in a performance that explores the way our brains neurologically perceive the world around us.

“The idea is about the invisible connection between people and how we are almost a part of one another, as well as the world around us,” Stewart explains. “It’s because our neurological system extends out into the world in terms of the things that we touch and perceive. So, essentially, it’s a representation of our selves

situated in the world around us and how we see and perceive our connections to each other; it’s about relationships. It affects the visual realm so it’s an interesting portrayal of the visual and perceptive role. There is a constant dialogue between dancers and what’s happening on the screens, so the audience can see this unified perception of it all from where they are sitting and watching.”

Inspired somewhat by Stewart’s previous work, the 2010 production Be Your Self (staged at the 2010 Adelaide Festival), Proximity sees the choreographer once again touch on the historical ideas about the self – both singular and unified. Based on extensive dialogue between Stewart and a neuroscience professor at the Flinders Medical Centre, Be Your Self had delved deep into how one’s sense of ‘self’ is constructed through biology. In 2013, Proximity emerges as an extension of that theme.

“When we are in contact with another person or object, our neurological maps incorporate them into our body scheme to give us information about their mass, volume, texture and velocity,” Stewart says. “One of the greatest challenges in making Proximity has been to discover ways in which these complex ideas could be manifested through live video manipulation. Thankfully, we have had the ingenious Thomas Pachoud to do this. Thomas is a young video engineer and computer programmer who came to work with me on what was essentially an artistic blind date. He spent several months creating

a palette of sublime video effects that form the fundamental materials of Proximity in a seamless relationship with the dancers.”

» Australian Dance Theatre’s Proximity shows at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, from August 15 to 18. artscentremelbourne.com.au adt.org.au

24 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

PERFORMING ARTS

Long live the king!

The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush

BY WENDY CAVENETT

In 2009, Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote of the “moribund majesty”, King Berenger: “This has to be the liveliest death on record.” And what a death it was.

Geoffrey Rush as Eugene Ionesco’s lead in the rarely performed absurdist drama, Exit The King, embodied more timeless truths Rush’s characters often epitomise, for within Berenger’s jaunty protestations about his impending death, we see in him ourselves

literally hanging on for dear life. As Ionesco once wrote, “we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die”.

For more than four decades, Rush, who discovered he was a character actor in his early 20s, has made us think, laugh, and wriggle uncomfortably in our seats, illuminating our lives with his distinct interpretation of some of theatre’s greatest players. Who can forget his Lady Bracknell (The Importance of Being Earnest), his Berenger, his Lear’s Fool, or his clowning, chaotic brilliance as Poprishchin (Diary of a Madman)?

In film, too, the man who once thought he was “heading towards a career in astronomy”

Photo: Hugh Hartshorne

T

he Arts Centre Melbourne presents The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush, an exhibition of costumes and artefacts celebrating the life and times of our much-loved, character actor.

says he’s happy with the diversity of roles.

He mentions his fondness for David Helfgott (Shine), the “cunning rogue”, Barbossa (Pirates of the Caribbean film series), the “ratty little Elizabethan stinkbug”, Sir Francis Walsingham (the Elizabeth films) and “the very interesting, and completely obscure”, Lionel Logue (The King’s Speech).

Today, Rush is discussing his latest project, The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush, an exhibition that uses costume, photography, moving image and many items from Rush’s personal collection, to honour and celebrate his career through some of the many characters he has played on stage and screen.

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA & HORACIO FERRER

MARIA BUENOS AIRES

DE

21 - 24 August 2013 Melbourne Recital Centre Tickets from $45 | 03 9699 3333 victorianopera.com.au

Rush, 62, says working on the exhibition was like seeing his life flashing before his eyes “without having to do the dying bit”. He laughs a rich, hearty laugh. “I said I don’t want it to feel like a tomb. I want it to be entertaining on some level – more like a sideshow than a museum or gallery.” Such was his trepidation, Rush said to Neil Armfield before he delivered the opening night speech: “Keep it very anecdotal. I don’t want it to feel like a eulogy. I’m still here.”

Rush says he’s blessed to have the services of Melbourne-based designer, Anna Cordingley, who has, he says, created a “rather boisterous space”. The exhibition team that also includes curator, Margaret Marshall and project manager, Sarah Caldwell, has worked closely with Rush, developing six fundamental themes of characters: Clowns, Fools and Ratbags; Antagonists; Dames and Dandies; Harried Men; Fantastical; and Famous, Infamous and Forgotten. Highlighting the transformative effect of the costume, and Rush’s own creative relationship with character, these themes offer audiences a unique chance to engage with an important part of Australia’s performing

arts history in a way that explores identity, performance and the literary canon.

“I’m hoping that the bigger theme that might emerge as a subtext,” Rush says, “is that it’s not only my story – I’m one sentence in a bigger Australian story from those early days of subsidised theatre, through the rebirth of the Australian film industry in a very minor way for me, and then becoming much more part of it in the 1990s.

“And now, theatrically, being part of a movement where people are starting to take our theatre seriously. You know, we took Exit The King, the subsidised Malthouse Belvoir production, into the crazy, wild, commercial arena of Broadway to great success, with I think, a very… there’s an Australian vaudeville energy that we brought to a French Romanian absurdist play that is uniquely our own, and I’m very pleased that we were able to achieve something like that.”

Highlights of the exhibition include costumes worn by Rush as Barbossa, the Marquis de Sade (Quills), Philip Henslowe (Shakespeare In Love), Poprishchin, Lady Bracknell and King Berenger. The exhibition also features two smaller sections – ‘Introduction’, which focuses on Rush’s childhood influences and his theatrical years in high school and university, and the ‘Triple crown of acting’, celebrating his Oscar, Emmy and Tony Award wins.

» The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush shows at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Gallery 1, until October 27. artscentremelbourne.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 25

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PERFORMING ARTS

BY SUZANNE FRASER

I

n anticipation of the upcoming exhibition at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, artists Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano’s new digital installation, a work-in-progress website, was created to document the developing stages of their creative project.

Here records of the artists’ visual encounters with the subterranean backroom environment of the Arts Centre complex – which forms the subject of the installation – are divided into four categories: air, light, concrete, and colour.

It is interesting to consider that, of these four forms, only one is conclusively associated with a manufactured presence: concrete. Air in particular is ordinarily associated with that which is naturally occurring. Yet in the world of Hidden Spaces, Ready Stages, Gabriella and Silvana Mangano breathe only circulated air, their life-giving atmosphere propelled around a dystopian ecosystem by pipes, vents and fans.

The current exhibition comprises a video,

The Manganos were initially approached to make the work as the first recipients of the new Digital Arts Residency at the Arts Centre; they see the award as a way of amalgamating the local visual and performing arts communities. According to Silvana Mangano, “It extends what is contemporary art to the regular audience at the Arts Centre,” and “broadens the audience” by additionally attracting visual art enthusiasts to the complex.

In addition to being given the opportunity to create a new site-specific work, the artists were also offered studio space in the Arts Centre itself. Thus, by occupying the building not only through their art but also in their artistic

execution and everyday lives, they developed what they characterise as a “rhythm with the building”. Moreover, in selecting a space in which to exhibit the work, they chose not a plush or neatly white-walled room, but “an exhibition space that is quite raw; like the underground areas, there is a lot of concrete,” says Gabriella. In this respect the space at Riverhouse mimics the environment in the artists’ work, only insofar as the work existed as a “play” in advance of the space existing as its “stage”. The experience for the viewer will certainly be as immersive as OH&S will allow.

Since classical times, artists and philosophers have been telling us through their works that the world is a stage. Gabriella and Silvana Mangano continue this conversation in our digitally-centred era, striving to extend our understanding and enjoyment of the performance environments around us (both fictional and factual). This exhibition also gives the visitor an insight into the machinery of performance at Melbourne’s Arts Centre.

» Gabriella and Silvana Mangano’s digital installation Hidden Spaces, Ready Stages shows at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, from July 27 to August 4.

Image courtesy of the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Hidden Spaces

sound and light installation – exhibited on-site in Riverhouse next to Hamer Hall – in which the artists, who are sisters, explore the engine rooms of the Arts Centre complex. The video also features a performance component, which was acted by the artists in the readymade industrial spaces that lie largely unnoticed below the building’s performance venues. The degree of contrast between the bright and luxurious spaces upstairs and the shadowy, concreted tunnels provides a surprisingly provocative commentary on how we navigate our society and in what areas (of a building) we customarily exist. The readymade sets (machinery, control and pipe rooms) used by the Manganos to stage their performances are also contrasted with the strictly constructed stages in the theatres above stairs.

Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano. Hidden Spaces, Ready Stages (Production Still) 2013.

Cinematography: Tim Metherall under the direction of

artscentremelbourne.com.au

Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano.

A song cycle from the words

Returning from a sold out season at 2012 Melbourne Festival

of Paul Kelly, W.B. Yeats, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Judith Wright,

Conversations with Ghosts

Les Murray and Kenneth Slessor, which meditates on time, mortality, friendship and love.

Wed 4 September, 8PM Elisabeth Murdoch Hall

Paul Kelly Vocals and guitar

Melbourne Recital Centre

Genevieve Lacey Recorders

$80 Full/$55 Conc Phone: 9699 3333

James Ledger Electronics

Melbournerecital.com.au

ANAM Musicians

Composition of Conversations With Ghosts supported by

26 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

PERFORMING ARTS / WORDS & MUSIC M AG G I E G E R R A N D P R E S E N TS

T H E L E G E N D R E T U R N S F O R H E R F I R ST AU ST R A L I A N TO U R I N M O R E T H A N 2 0 Y E A R S “Baez remains a true icon of the music world – a powerful, tender and strident performance” T E L E G R A P H ( U K ) 2 01 2

WITH SPECIAL GUEST

Kate Fagan

8 & 9 AUGUST • ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL BOOKINGS 1300 182 183 artscentremelbourne.com.au ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE AND MAGGIE GERRAND PRESENT

‘ The world’s ultimate cabaret artist’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

‘ Subtle, textured and brilliant’

Three Dead Passengers Dave Graney and Stephen Cummings

BY PHIL KAKULAS

I

t’s the sort of tragedy you might read about in the papers every other week; a fatal car accident on a country road. ‘Three Dead Passengers’, runs the headline, ‘In A Stolen Second Hand Ford’. Except this time, it’s no headline but rather the title and opening gambit of a song by Dave Graney and Stephen Cummings, two of Australia’s most eloquent and individual musical artists. Their one-off collaboration from the early 90s draws us in to the hardboiled world of three disparate characters united by a common fate.

Three dead passengers, a stolen second hand Ford Outside of Keith near the border Wrapped around a tree, thrown across the road Tyres spinning like a Ferris wheel at the Easter show Taking its cues from crime fiction, the song begins with the story’s end. Fragments of the narrative lie scattered throughout the verses like so much broken glass, offering us clues but no real understanding of the chain of events that led to the trio’s demise.

They were last seen makin’ to drag a Holden at the lights Laughing like fools as they reversed into the night

NEW YORK TIMES

UTE LEMPER sings the love poems of Pablo Neruda and the best of cabaret from Berlin to Broadway

18 SEPTEMBER | ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL BOOKINGS 1300 182 183 ARTSCENTREMELBOURNE.COM.AU

The three deceased characters are sketched out quickly with a few deft strokes: There’s the cigar smoking boxing fan, the 70s groover in white flares and a girl into Serge Gainsbourg and collecting model guillotines. All were wearing gloves and ‘wraparound mirror shades’. For Graney these small affectations were symbolic of something much greater.

“I was wanting to write a song about teens and the stuff they fling back at the phoney world they are confronted with,” he explains. “In the song there are three strangely dressed corpses by the side of the road. They dressed to put on the world. The car was used, and stolen.

Nobody owned anything. It was all a fiction.”

Three Dead Passengers draws on Graney’s experiences growing up in Mt Gambier, near the VIC/SA border. From his adopted city of London, where he and his group The Moodists spent much of the 80s, the south east of Australia had become ‘exotic and dreamy’ subject matter for his work.

The triple fatality, however, was a historical event. “I thought I made it up,” Graney says, “but my brother told me it was real. When we were teens a troupe of speedway hustlers called The French Hell Drivers came to the Borderline speedway. Next day there were a few accidents as all the teens tried to replicate the tricks. Was one major, a multiple death accident, I think…”

Returning to Australia in the late 80s, Graney found himself at a low point. “I was feeling very much at a dead-end, in the doldrums,” he says. “I thought I was pretty much washed up as a performer.” Ex-Sports singer and solo artist, Stephen Cummings, offered him advice and encouragement and the two made plans to collaborate. For Cummings, “It was probably as much about how I could be of help to Dave… as about songwriting.”

Together they completed the partially written song. Graney says Cummings contributed the all important ‘Easter show’ lyrics as well as the music for the chorus. Cummings broadly agrees, although twenty years on, his memory of the event has grown understandably hazy.

“Songwriting is a craft, like plumbing,” he tells me. “What plumber can remember every S-bend?”

Three Dead Passengers first appeared on Dave Graney ‘n’ The Coral Snakes’ 1993 album, Night Of The Wolverine. It’s a rollicking version that is loved by many but not by Graney himself. “I re-recorded it in 2011 for Rock’n’Roll Is Where I Hide and I like that version better,” he informs me. “I don’t like the original at all.

It has violin on it and I hate the violin. I made the chords more jazz styled… in 1997, and have played it that way ever since.”

Like many a great song, Three Dead Passengers can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but Wreck On The Highway, it apparently is not. For when I ask Dave Graney if his song is a tribute to the lost hopes and dreams of his old hometown, he refutes it as a slight against his ‘hardcore’ sensibilities. “I’m a callous person,” he objects, “I don’t see the world in a sentimental way at all. That’s for Bruce Springsteen.”

» Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and teacher who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 27

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PERFORMING ARTS / CINEMA WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS

BY CHRISTOPHER SANDERS

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

BY CHRISTOPHER SANDERS

Richard Linklater’s seemingly impossible (but remarkable) sequel to Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, gets its own sequel in the form of Before Midnight, which results in possibly the greatest romantic trilogy ever filmed. While the first installment (Before Sunrise) saw American traveller Jesse (Ethan Hawke – his finest role) impulsively strike up a conversation with French beauty Celine (Julie Delpy) before asking her to join him for a night in Vienna where they walked and talked (and walked and talked some more), discovering love until his plane left for home.

Ending on a fantastic ambiguous note, which seemed a perfect endnote to (possibly) finding the one true love, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke returned to Europe nine years later for the sequel Before Sunset. It shouldn’t have worked but the sequel was arguably better than the first. Shot in real time, which added to the hyper-realism of the previous indie romantic film, Before Sunset reunited the couple for the first time and showed the

spark was still there despite the fact that both had seemingly moved on.

Now, Jesse and Celine are in their 40s.

They’ve been together for nine years, are settled in Europe and have twin daughters. But what follows the intense whirlwind romance and reunion? This is what makes Before Midnight so fascinating. In the space of a day in Greece (where the couple are holidaying) we feel the nine years of love, pain and struggles. The third film digs much deeper than the first two, as family, career, ex-lovers and a sense of home are themes that are explored. With the addition of the latest installment, the Before films feel more like a documentary series than a film trilogy. It’s the cinematic version of The Up Series where every few years we drop in on the characters to check on them. With Delpy and Hawke both contributing to the script with director Linklater, it feels more real than a couple of actors merely revisiting old characters and because of that, Before Midnight is incredibly moving and powerful. Here’s hoping we catch up with Celine and Jesse in 2022.

Julian Assange: hero or villain? There seems to be no middle ground when discussing the WikiLeaks founder but as Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) shows with his brilliant new documentary, he is neither. Rather he’s a complicated man with even more complicated ideals. Unfortunately, Assange doesn’t appear before Gibney’s cameras or answer the filmmaker’s questions, as Assange apparently wanted money. Gibney refused. This is to the film’s detriment but there is a bulk of Assange footage from previous interviews and documentaries, especially from Aussie journo and filmmaker Mark Davis, who directed his own Assange doco, and is one of the talking heads. The major success of We Steal Secrets,

BY NIGEL RANDALL

What strikes the viewer of Reality early on, at least this one, is how much its star Aniello Arena, brings to mind a better-known actor.

There’s something in his mannerisms and on-

» Rated M

» Rated MA.

in which Luciano, after much prodding by his family, attends a shopping mall audition for the Italian version of Big Brother and then slowly begins to lose his grip on that self same concept the show purports to capture.

REALITY

is the separation of Assange the man from WikiLeaks the website, which publishes major leaks (secrets) on its website for the public to view. We see Assange rise from an extended hibernation, after he attracted notoriety as a hacker some 20 years ago, to minor leak celebrity to full-blown celebrity after the Afghan and Iraq War Logs leaks, which were allegedly supplied by Private Bradley Manning, a man who is currently incarcerated, and is the real hero or villain (depending on your view of the leaks) of the story. While Manning is in jail, Assange is in his own confinement, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London (to escape charges in Sweden) while running for the Australian senate. Gibney’s second film of 2013 (after Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) separates fact from fiction, myth from reality, but no matter your opinion of Assange, it is likely to be cloudier after viewing We Steal Secrets.

screen presence as the gregarious fishmonger Luciano, that recalls a younger De Niro. What struck next were the similarities between the Italian production and Cannes Grand Prix winner and one of De Niro’s lesser-known films King Of Comedy. In that film (one of many collaborations with Martin Scorsese), he plays Rupert Pupkin – an aspiring comic obsessed with finding fame and whose desperation leads to a delusional blurring of fantasy and reality. Which leads us to… Reality,

It seems the Italians generally go crazy for the type of minor celebrity that shows like BB throw up. In Reality it is former contestant, Enzo (Raffaele Farrente), who arrives at reception centres and nightclubs via helicopter to make fleeting appearances and exclaim the earnest catchphrase “never give up” to the screaming masses. After seemingly making a favourable impression at his first audition, Luciano increasingly believes his selection for ‘the house’ is imminent. It appears true and as such, Luciano is treated like a star in his local neighbourhood. Suddenly newcomers to his fish stall are suspected to be BB spies sent to secretly assess his eligibility for the show.

These scenes leave doubt in the audience’s mind and the first cracks in Luciano’s mental state begin to appear. His paranoia ironically compels him to act as though he’s constantly

being watched… and furthermore, judged (“You talking to me?”).

As a treatise on celebrity culture, the Orwellian idea of surveillance and more obviously, religion, the film is somewhat lightweight. Luciano’s humble, hardworking co-worker Michele (Nando Paone) makes clear the spiritual connection with his continual Christian wisdom.

It is all but lost on Luciano by now, who starts giving away his family’s furniture to the local homeless as a misguided display of virtuousness.

By now it’s clear to all he’s lost all sense of reality and the final scene plays this out to the rightful conclusion. Whilst there’s much to enjoy about director Matteo Garrone’s part-comedy, partdrama - especially Arena’s performance - it overstretches its ideas and running time. With a bit of much needed trimming Reality could’ve been a much better film.

» Rated M

28 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

VISUAL ARTS

Photo: Jeremy Dillon

Nite Art 2013

Claire Bridge. Alchemy 2013. Oil on linen.

ALCHEMY & SMALL SCULPTURE

BY THE MELBOURNE REVIEW

O

ne of the central galleries along the Nite Art route is Flinders Lane Gallery. Approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary, Flinders Lane Gallery has operated from its same inner city location since 1989. Widely reputed for its active support of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists alongside Indigenous Australian artists, FLG presents work ranging from painterly abstraction, high figuration and sculpture, through to new media work exploring architectural and spatial concerns.

Featuring during Nite Art on July 24 (6pm till late) will be the work of painter Claire Bridge with her exhibition Alchemy. Bridge uses neo-classical

techniques to produce her finely crafted figurative paintings. This new exhibition investigates transitions – from stillness to movement, through changes of psychological states, across the boundaries of inner and outer worlds, and between one form of being to another.

“Here I am exploring the liminal, the space between,” Bridge has said of her current exhibition. “These figures are not passive or inert – they are innately potent. There is a state of transition from the old to the new – the space between, the void in which the magic happens.

It is physicality and spirituality, the sacred and profane, the transcendent and sensuous, form

and formlessness, the dream and the reality.

“There is something about floating and suspension that appeals to my imagination. This resistance of gravity. Clouds float. Memories float.

Experience floats. These figures float. There are unfathomable depths to our knowing. Light reveals, gives form, presence and substance, texture and colour yet we are mostly empty space.”

In support of Bridge’s exhibition FLG be presenting Field of Dreams, a one-off event to be held for Nite Art. Visitors are invited to write down a dream, wish or desire, or an imagining of something they wish transformed or something they’d like to create in their life and in the world. These dreams, like offerings, will be placed by the person into their choice of a vessel filled with coloured water, dissolving immediately. The coloured water will then be applied to a large paper surface which will become the field of dreams. The same evening Claire Bridge will also hold an artist’s talk at 8pm to discuss her practice.

Also on during Nite Art will be Small Sculpture, an exhibition featuring new works by three of the Gallery’s sculptors – Jon Eiseman, Dan Wollmering and Damien Elderfield. Jon Eiseman’s whimsical and poetic figurative sculpture, cast in bronze, extends beyond the

Nite Art is a new event format and platform for Melbourne’s art gallery scene. For the first time on one night, Melbournians can experience simultaneous gallery openings and artwalks across 21 well-known, cutting edge and experiential galleries and artist run spaces in the CBD and North Melbourne. Over 56 artists will present in a range of mediums, including photography, installation, painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, mixed media and new media.

The four precincts participating in Nite Art are: Guildford Lane & Elizabeth Street – Utopian Slumps, Screen Space, Beam Contemporary and Outre Gallery; Upper Bourke Street – including Gallery Funaki, West Space, TCB, Sarah Scout and Neon Parc; North Melbourne – Purgatory Art Space, Gallerysmith, Langford 120, Dark Horse Experiment and Rubicom; and finally Flinders Lane, featuring the Nicholas Building, Blindside, Daine Singer, Flinders Lane Gallery, Leslie Kehoe Gallery, Chapter House Lane, Edmund Pearce and Stephen MacLaughlan Gallery.

To celebrate the premiere of Nite Art, UBER, the smartphone app that connects you directly to a professional chauffeur, will be available on the night to help navigate city precincts. Free rides will be available with people encouraged to ride in groups and share rides between galleries. Refer to the Nite Art website for conditions.

Melbourne’s inaugural Nite Art: Wednesday, July 24, from 6pm – 11pm. niteart.com.au

physical to encompass notions of time, spirituality and emotion. Senior lecturer in Sculpture at Monash University, Dr Dan Wollmering will present new bronze works that continue his formalist interest in materiality. Damien Elderfield, a recent finalist in the 2012 McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award, will diverge from his impeccably designed steel and basalt forms with new works created in ABS plastic using 3D printing techniques. During Nite Art, the artists will be present with demonstrations of various tools and techniques used in their practice.

FLG will also present live music and winter warmers.

» Flinders Lane Gallery, 137 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, will participate in Nite Art on Wednesday July 24 from 6pm til late. More info on (03) 9654 3332. flg.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 29

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VISUAL ARTS

These movements arose out of a global reaction against the system of dealer galleries and its commodification of art, artists feeling creatively restrained by being expected to produce saleable objects.”

Paul Newcombe Compositions In Paint: This Is The End

BY KIRSTEN RANN

M

any recent exhibitions in Melbourne seem to have travelled in time to revisit the 1960s and 70s. The most notable of these include the fabulous Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art at the VCA’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery, an exhibition of edgy works by a cross-generational selection of national and international artists that extended the significant groundwork laid by 60s and 70s feminism using humour.

Currently Heide MoMA is showing The Sometimes Chaotic World of Mike Brown, an in-depth exploration of Brown’s expansive and often radical oeuvre formulated in the active background of 1960s and 70s Australia.

Simultaneously is the just-finishing Like

Bridge-MelbReviewQrtPge -outlines.indd 1

Mike festival, a series of five exhibitions across Melbourne featuring works by a crossgenerational selection of Australian artists who, it is argued, were influenced by Mike Brown or whose work is “Like Mike’s”, much of it resembling 1960s and 70s art!

But the show coming up at fortyfive downstairs at the end of this month – Paul Newcombe’s Compositions in Paint: This is the End, is a doozy. Why? Because Newcombe – two generations after Mike Brown – was an art student in 1970s Tasmania and his practice engages with a whole other realm of avantgarde art from that period: Performance Art and Process Art. These movements arose out of a global reaction against the system of dealer galleries and its commodification of art, artists feeling creatively restrained by being expected to produce sale-able objects. So they started exploring other artforms, including using their bodies to explore and express ideas. If independent objects were produced, it was merely as a by-product of a bodily “action” – or series of actions – rather than with any aesthetic predetermination.

During Newcombe’s art school days Performance artists like Europe’s Viennese Actionists were renowned for their self-

destructive actions, and American Chris Burden remains legendary for being nailed to the roof of a VW ‘beetle’ in the crucifixion position. Around the same time Jackson Pollock was an infamous Process Artist, moving his body across the canvas while dripping paint off the end of a stick, allowing the paint to ‘express’ its qualities until he thought a work was ‘finished’. These things filtered into his art, and one can still see the remnants.

With a simultaneous interest in dramatic theatre, Newcombe’s move to the mainland in the early 1980s resulted in his working with seminal theatre groups such as The All Out Ensemble, La Mama and Chamber Made Opera, producing his own visual theatre (mostly puppetry) while also making art and exhibiting at galleries like Pinacotheca and Roar Studios. Eventually art and performance came together, resulting in exhibitions such as 45CM x 45CM and 100 PAINTINGS x 100 HOURS where he and others ‘performed’ the specific ‘process’ of painting as described in the exhibition’s titles.

His most recent exhibition – Composition in Paint at Melbourne’s G3 Artspace – was a continuation of these performance-process projects. Alongside his paintings a video projection – titled The Fourth Wall – showed

Newcombe ‘performing’ the specific ‘process’ these works produced by using a brush; for specifically timed sessions certain colours of paint were dabbed on the canvas as his body moved around it in the same direction. Filmed over two months, he always wore the same clothes – so it appeared like it was done in one long continuous session.

The outcome of this way of working is visually fascinating. Without a predetermined outcome the elements of rigour and endurance involved in the continued deployment of a specific set of conditions produces works that appear abstract, but look more deeply and each has its own mesmerising rhythm. The works at fortyfive downstairs are slightly different but from the same series. Without the video we can only imagine his painting process, but this is a must see show: as the title Compositions in Paint: This is the End suggests, we are witness to the Grand Finale of this series, and they are truly captivating.

» Paul Newcombe’s Compositions in Paint: This is the End shows at fortyfive downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, from July 30 to August 10. fortyfivedownstairs.com paulnewcombe.com.au

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30 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

VISUAL ARTS

(WHAT’S SO FUNNY ‘BOUT) PEACE, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING...?

Winter Masterpieces at Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre

BY ALEXANDRA AULICH

Australians and white settlers, often violent and shameful, into works that are responsive and poignant.

While it may sometimes seem a humble offering, art can address historical wrongs by challenging the way the past is understood.

It can also seek to shine a confronting light on unhealthy power structures, and display in plain terms abstract issues of human rights and injustice. Eight such artists have been brought together under this very theme. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding...?, a title taken

Image: Courtesy of the artist and pARTners

T

hree richly coloured canvases by Judy Watson hang unstretched on the gallery walls. They are large floating works, absorbing and intimate, that invite you in for a closer inspection. Stepping back, the harmony of red, blue and green pigment that has been ground into the canvas forms a bird’s-eye view of land, water and rivers. Watson’s 2011 work Red flood references the devastation of the 2011 Brisbane floods and the catastrophic might of nature, evoking a land stained with blood spreading like an algal bloom. Watson is an artist who weaves the story of Aboriginal

Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat (Modernity) 1999, acrylic on linen, 182.5 x 182.5 cm, .

from Nick Lowe’s 1970s hit song, presents Australian artists who have taken to paint, print or assemblage in response to social, environmental or political issues. Works by contemporary artists Judy Watson, Gordon Bennett, Jon Cattapan and Penny Byrne are installed alongside those by senior artists Noel Counihan, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Clifton Pugh.

The exhibition differentiates between artistic periods and thematic responses to socio-political events and issues. Three small works from Noel Counihan’s The Miner Series (1947) are the earliest works in the exhibition.

Counihan travelled into the mines with the workers every day for a month, where he sketched by torchlight. The graphic images that he created record something unseen

by most. In contrast to Watson’s expansive canvases, Counihan’s linocuts are exacting and precise. Three small prints in the exhibition show the faces of young men aged by extreme hardship, afflicted with ‘the cough’, clearly illustrating the haunting reality of working in the claustrophobic space of a mine seam.

Russell Drysdale’s depictions of farmers and their families standing on the droughtravaged land broke with the tradition of the Australian Impressionists’ ‘blue and gold’, and was a long way from the more palatable images of the early settlers’ pioneering spirit.

Drysdale, who felt a great affinity with the outback, was commissioned by The Sydney Morning Herald to document the 1944 drought in north-western NSW. The figures that stare ahead to an uncertain future in Family group

From Our Roof 1964 Oil on Board 106 x 136cm

Brian Kewley 14-28 July

BIFB Collection 2013

Photography Exhibition, Print Sale & Gala Event

125 Prints 125 Photographers $100 each 320 Bay Road Cheltenham Telephone: 9583 7577 Monday to Saturday 10am-5pm Sun 12-5pm enquiries@withoutpier.com.au www.withoutpier.com.au

Sunday 14th July 1pm - 4pm www.eleven40.com.au

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VISUAL ARTS

Image: Courtesy of KalimanRawlins.

hoc gathering and a collective, reminiscent of street protests and physical confrontation with authorities. The drawings are overlaid with the use of transparencies, on occasion causing those whose body language is one of solitude to overlap with another. It is a reminder of the individuals who make up any community, as well as the power of the collective to form a united front.

Conceived and curated by Gallery Supervisor Julie Skate, the preparation for the exhibition inspired a new creation by Cattapan, exhibited here for the first time.

Jon Cattapan, Atonal group (Icy) 2013, alkyd modified oil paint, acrylic and coloured pencil on Arches paper, 140 x 140 cm.

(date unknown) look as withered and fragile as the land that has failed to provide for them.

Sidney Nolan, who first claimed Ned Kelly as his iconic figure in 1946, saw his as a story that “arises from the bush and ends in the bush”.

River (1964) reveals how landscape became an increasingly potent device in his depictions of Kelly, the anti-hero who challenged the status quo. The once augmented helmet is now diminished by the wild Australian bush. Nolan’s paintings of Kelly are not a literal representation of his life but one of contemporary myth – a dramatised hybrid of history and biography.

practices to draw the viewer’s attention to marginalised members of the community, creating discourse on ethnicity and identity and so bringing the issues associated with these topics into the consciousness of the viewer.

Two significant works by Bennett are featured, each from a different series. In Abstraction (citizenry) (2011) the artist layers a celebrity portrait over a black face. Bennett’s paintings challenge the ways in which different identities can be represented in the media and in art.

Furthermore, citizenship implies inclusion and it brings with it the powerful and ever-present implication of exclusion.

The contrast between work by Jon Cattapan and Gordon Bennett and the earlier works is striking. Pondering this, an interesting link emerges: Counihan and Bennett used their

The motif of overlaid figures recurs throughout Cattapan’s series Carbon Group (2003).

Cattapan’s figures are clustered and marked with ink blotches and line work. They are both an ad

The parameters of the exhibition extend beyond the Australian context. Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat (modernity) (1999) pays homage to twentieth century African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his artistic practice that critiques the politics of race and ethnicity. Watson, who completed a residency at University of Virginia in 2011, delves into the history of Thomas Jefferson and slavery in Charcoal kiln and nailery (2012), while in Penny Byrne’s Gitmo Bay souvenirs (2010) porcelain ladies and gents dressed in frocks and tailcoats stand in a line, with Byrne’s addition of blindfolds and chains. Byrne’s found objects are transformed with the care, knowledge and tools of a qualified restorer. There are no mixed messages in their clear political punch.

The dialogue between the different works draws out parallels between imagery and themes both

past and present across the room, transcending time as much as location. There is a progressive link between the solitude of Counihan’s miner, Drysdale’s family group on the farm, and the collective of Jon Cattapan’s figures. Likewise, Drysdale’s depiction of the drought ties in with Watson’s Red flood; the destructive extremes of nature are recurring themes both for artists and the environmentally aware.

We are able to glean here an insight into a long history of artistic practices in Australia which have been invested with hope, compassion and the belief that art has the potential to bring about change for the better. If the message is communicated in a creative and effective manner and makes an emotional connection with the viewer, then that is an important step towards education, and education can be a significant outcome for works that strive for social commentary. As the exhibition poignantly illustrates, artists who are moved into action make compelling works.

» (What’s so funny ‘bout) peace, love and understanding...? shows at The Gallery at Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre, corner of Carpenter and Wilson Sts, Brighton, until August 18. bayside.vic.gov.au/Bayside_Arts_and_Cultural_Centre

Gosia Wlodarczak –

A Room Without A View OPENING 6–8 pm Thursday 27 June DA S 28 June–17 August 2013 DATE

RMIT Gallery 344 Swanston Street Melbourne 3000 / Tel 03 9925 1717 Mon – Fri 11– – 5 / Thurs 11– 7 / Sat 12 – 5 / Closed Sundays / Free entry www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery / Like RMIT Gallery on Facebook / Follow RMIT Gallery on Twitter @RMITGallery

32 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

VISUAL ARTS

Colour Without a Name

BY MARGUERITE BROWN

C

olour Without a Name, the latest exhibition by Eolo Paul Bottaro, presents an enigmatic series of paintings inspired by the creative contemporaries, urban locales, and historical artworks that have lodged in the artist’s prolific imagination. The cryptic title of this exhibition, which evokes ideas surrounding perception and the limits of understanding, appropriately sums up this new body of work. Bottaro paints images that are infused with mystery and symbolism, and that explore existential questions that continue to haunt the human condition. The artist’s cohesive fusion of pictorial elements, reinterpreted from multiple sources, reveals a creative vision almost cinematic in its scope and ambition.

Bottaro avoids the contemporary artistic convention of working in series, where multiple works are made exploring one overall theme or idea. Rather, each painting presents a unique aesthetic and conceptual investigation into a particular topic. This approach has resulted in a body of work that is notable for the depth and richness of its diversity on many levels.

However, while creating highly idiosyncratic images, certain overall thematic threads unite these recent paintings.

These include his frequent representation of public buildings and urban spaces that become animated by human interactions within them, alternating between dramatic, surreal and commonplace. End of the Rainbow (2013) exhibits the darker end of this spectrum.

Framed by the monumental structure which forms the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, three men stand over the crumpled figure of a fourth. In an image that does not directly portray violence, but resounds with its aftermath, Bottaro subverts a postcard view of Sydney replete with two of Australia’s most important tourist attractions, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. By doing so he draws attention to confronting urban realities that dwell beneath a glossy surface.

Other works conduct an intriguing investigation into the notion of lost histories.

Whether through theft, fire, or some inexplicable reason, the history of art is marked by the disappearance of numerous masterpieces and minor works that over the centuries have simply vanished. We are now only aware of their existence through remaining fragments of drawings, or reproductive prints such as engravings and woodcuts, that were

Eolo Paul Bottaro, 333 Collins.

once the sole medium in which contemporary art was visually disseminated.

Framing a kind of conceptual, art historical archaeology, Bottaro has brought these lost works back into existence through reinterpreting their compositions in the creation of new paintings. Works such as A Lion Doesn’t Lose Sleep Over the Opinion of Sheep (2013) typify this impulse. Here St Jerome is re-imagined as a biker riding into a storm water tunnel, surrounded by lions resting upon the banks of the Merri Creek, in Melbourne’s inner north where the artist lives and works.

The composition is based on a woodcut of St Jerome surrounded by lions which is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, possibly based on a lost work by Titian. Bottaro adopts the image to explore the notion of a spiritual wilderness, expressed in a verdant yet unmistakably urban environment.

This painting is rich with symbolic allusions.

The yawning mouth of the tunnel evokes a mythic quest-like journey where the protagonist must face the underworld before emerging back into the light. The three resplendent lions that appear like gatekeepers reinforce the image’s archetypal resonance. Just as in the bible account of St Jerome, the lions are a magnanimous presence. While common to the saint’s iconography from the middle ages onwards, their inclusion in this contemporary location adorned with graffiti and gum trees lends the work an element of fantasy that pushes towards the surreal.

Bottaro continues this recreation of lost masterpieces in Peter Robb, M, and the Prickly Pear (2013). In the 1960s the mafia stole a Caravaggio nativity painting from a church in Palermo, Sicily. Bottaro chose to reinterpret the composition of this Caravaggio in a painting of Peter Robb, the author of many books including M, which explores the life of the infamous old master. This fictional collision of past and present includes a representation of Caravaggio himself, alongside Bottaro’s

Eolo Paul Bottaro, Towards, egg tempera oil on linen, 110x138cm.

Sicilian grandfather peeling a prickly pear and the artist riding into the composition on the back of a motorbike. Bottaro creates a dynamic allegorical multi-portrait that draws heavily upon his Sicilian cultural heritage for its dramatic intensity.

Other works continue the artist’s ongoing exploration of monumental architecture and Melbourne’s public spaces. In his epic painting 333 based on Melbourne’s historic 333 Collins St building, Bottaro paints the elaborate structure risen like a phoenix from the infamous financial crash that occurred during its redevelopment in the late 80s-early 90s which sparked a recession and devastated the building industry. Comprised of three panels that reflect stages of the building’s development and completion, the artist has manipulated space, light, and geometry to evoke these essential architectural elements through oil paint. In the past Bottaro has also represented NGV International, Royal Exhibition Buildings and the Shrine of Remembrance in his fusion of grand

architecture and sometimes emotionally fraught mythic narratives.

Eolo Paul Bottaro operates within the broadly categorised genre of contemporary realism. Yet despite the finely executed and detailed naturalism that defines his style, his work resides outside of a popular photorealist vernacular which has experienced a recent resurgence in contemporary Australian art.

His visible love affair with the formal elements of painting and craftsmanship, coupled with an exuberant imagination, and his archaeological approach to excavating art history to aid the conveyance of meaning in his work, expands it well beyond the edges of a snapshot.

» Eolo Paul Bottaro – Colour Without a Name shows at James Makin Gallery, 67 Cambridge St, Collingwood, from July 18 to August 10. jamesmakingallery.com

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VISUAL ARTS

Say Dada!

which is followed by conscious analysis and research inspired by these drawings to create another layer of associated imagery from a wide variety of sources.

Peter Ellis and Surrealism

Evelyn: Chance encounters, or accident, chance meetings, or design, the chance juxtaposition of image and text – how does chance play its part in your artworks? And does this mean that by utilising chance, you don’t plan?

BY EVELYN TSITAS

M

Evelyn: Say Dada! Why not? You have a long interest in Dada and Surrealism that ties in with your intense curiosity and love of ideas.

Can you explain how this artistic movement has been so important to your work?

Evelyn: Can we ask you to get into your time machine and travel back to New York and London in the late 70s? How did this trip impact on the young Peter Ellis and his view of art and place in the world of art?

» A Head In A Hive Of Bees: Selected Drawings

by Peter Ellis shows at RMIT Gallery until August 17. rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

David Wenham

Simultaneously the music was revolutionary, punk, new wave, the beginnings of new romantics and two-tone and ska. Blues players like John Lee Hooker, Jonny Shines and Robert Junior Lockwood; Clifton Chenier the king of Zydeco, all living treasures in 1979. In London it was the Marquee, Lyceum Ballroom, Electric Ballroom for Ruts, UK Squeeze, Specials, Selector, Madness, Talking Heads, B52’s, Iggy Pop, Psychedelic Furs, Pretenders, and many more. There was a sense of excitement and a DIY attitude. It must have been similar in Berlin or Cologne or Zurich in the Dada period; this first international trip was very inspiring.

My work was maturing at the same time as the Trans Avant Garde and Neo Expressionism was emerging in the early 1980s. Returning to Melbourne I was part of an exciting new period in Australian art. I had work purchased by the NGV in 1980 and Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1982 and Australian National Gallery.

Evelyn: You incorporate collage and automatic drawing techniques and obsessive sketching, and you use traditional Japanese Skikishi panels as well – how do you take sketches and turn them into artworks?

Peter: The smaller drawings and paintings are spontaneous and automatic and create a play of thoughts. From these works characters, objects, marks and associations occur that feed the larger works. Images may be derived from

ST FA

Peter: I have played “Dada Guitar” since 1975 and have made 20 CD recordings with Dr. Phil Edwards under the name of AND – a term invented by Phil in the early 90s to describe unrehearsed sonic and music collaborative performances by visual artists. In the punk days I played with Jon Cattapan, Michael Narozny, Mark Moran, and Peter Kartsounis and others.

AND is a collaboration with artists through spontaneous free sonic interaction. Artists such as Jon McKinnon, Louise Weaver, Jon Cattapan, John Aslinadis, Gracie Edwards, Richard Holt, Andrew Seaward and many others have performed as AND. The CDs have collaborative visual packaging.

techniques such as Decalcomania or taking in visions from found or fabricated stains or marks. Often I discover a creature that becomes an actor in a larger painting or drawing. In this exhibition there are ducks, penguins, scallops, oysters, bears, strange mechanical devices involving shape shifting, scientific experiments gone wrong, ghosts, abstract forms, all sorts of creatures. There is a sense of unconscious thought initially in these works

T U O

Evelyn: An artistic spirit is unbounded by medium, don’t you think? We are fascinated by your interest in punk music and indeed making music yourself and playing in a band.

How does the music interest impact on your visual literacy?

Peter: I have had the privilege of travelling overseas many times. In 1979 I backpacked around Europe but spent most of the time in New York, London, Detroit. This was a vital time for viewing the art that I had only seen in reproduction, or read about. I made pilgrimages to The James Ensor Museum in Ostend Belgium, Rimbaud Museum in Charleville, to Castelfranco with Jon Cattapan to see Giorgione, then Philadelphia to see the Duchamp collection, all the great New York Museums and the major exhibition of the Picassos before they were formed into the famous retrospective at MOMA the following year.

Peter: The chance Zen-like automatic drawing takes place usually in small drawings and sketchbooks without preconceived ideas.

This process exploits the mechanism of inspiration – these works are then extended and researched into images in a more formal way. You try a variety of strategies to make art, it’s always changing. Through looking and making lots of work one develops a limitless vocabulary, a mental storehouse of images and information locked away in the recesses of the imagination.

G IN LL SE

Peter: I see Dada and Surrealist thought not as an art movement but as a way of seeing and dealing with the world and existence on many levels. There is a direct connection to romanticism, ancient cultures, spiritual thought and animism in Surrealism. The use of dreams, chance, humour, paradox, the affront to reason, a constant struggle against constraint and conventionalism. Dada and Surrealist thought externalises obsessions, expresses the subconscious and allows for the need for myth. Dada and Surrealist philosophy is an encouragement to freedom.

Photo: Mark Ashkanasy

elbourne artist Peter Ellis has been fascinated by animals since childhood. His interest in Surrealism emerged as a young teenager and these twin artistic interests have nurtured his imagination ever since. His current exhibition at RMIT Gallery A Head In A Hive Of Bees buzzes with wit, weird hybrid creatures and a playful but intellectual approach to the fantastical wonders of Surrealist imagery. He is also a musician, with a deep love of punk music. It’s a fitting soundtrack, somehow.

MTC THe CRUCIBLE

by Arthur Miller

‘The theatrical equivalent of a gripping page turner.’

Newsday

22 June — 3 August Southbank Theatre, The Sumner

Book now mtc.com.au or 8688 0800

MTC is a department of the University of Melbourne

Major Partner Opening Night

Production Partner

34 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

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RMIT GALLERY 3

Gosia Wlodarczak A Room Without A View A Head in a Hive of Bees: Selected Drawings by Peter Ellis A Parliament of Lines: Aspects of Scottish Contemporary Drawing Until August 17 Storey Hall, Swanston St, Melbourne rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

1

ELEVEN40 GALLERY

Eugene Tan Liquidity July 20 – August 17 1140 Malvern Road Malvern eleven40.com.au

2

MONASH GALLERY OF ART

Carol Jerrems: photographic artist July 6 – September 28 860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill mga.org.au MELBreview1/4page 23/1/13 6:02 PM

LAURAINE DIGGINS FINE ART

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From Van Diemen’s Land to the MCG: Images from Colonial Hobart Town to Melbourne Now Until August 10 5 Malakoff St, North Caulfield diggins.com.au

4

GEELONG GALLERY

Impressions of Geelong – a portrait of the city and its region Until August 25 Little Malop St, Geelong geelonggallery.org.au

MELBOURNE SOCIETY OF WOMEN PAINTERS & SCULPTORS

104th Annual Exhibition Changing Perspectives 2013 August 1 – 12 The Victorian Artist’s Society Galleries 430 Albert Street, East Melbourne mswps.com.au Page 1

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CHARLES NODRUM GALLERY

BAYSIDE ARTS & CULTURAL CENTRE

Norma Redpath This is the first exhibition of Norma Redpath sculpture for many years, and will feature major bronzes from the 1960s together with a magnificent suite of bronzetti. All from her personal collection and not seen since her exhibition at Rudy Komon Gallery in 1970.

It will also include a selection of works on paper, mostly studies.

July 4 – 27 267 Church St, Richmond charlesnodrumgallery.com.au

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FLINDERS LANE GALLERY

Claire Bridge Alchemy July 16 – August 3 Various Artists Small Sculpture 137 Flinders Lane, Melbourne flg.com.au

Midwinter Masters 2013 (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding...?

Until August 18 cnr Carpenter & Wilson Sts, Brighton bayside.vic.gov.au

MCCLELLAND GALLERY + SCULPTURE PARK NEST: The Art of Birds Air Born Until October 6 360 - 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin mcclellandgallery.com

8

JAMES MAKIN GALLERY

Eolo Paul Bottaro Colour Without a Name July 18 – August 10 67 Cambridge St, Collingwood jamesmakingallery.com

!

NEW

Unique books, art and design by Maree Coote including the brand new When You Go To Melbourne, and the awardwinning The Art of Being Melbourne... PLUS The Melbourne Scarves, The Melbourne Cups & Saucers, Melbourne Cushions, Coasters and Tea Towels, The RooLamp and lots more. It’s the ultimate traveller’s takeaway.

Beautiful, Original, Meaningful Melburniana since 1994

GALLERY | STUDIO | STORE 155 Clarendon St., South Melbourne Vic 3207 Tel 03 9696 8445 www.melbournestyle.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013 35

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GALLERY LISTINGS 14

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NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA

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Greer Taylor zero&one Until July 28 Julie Irving quarter-things 418 Bay St, Port Melbourne marsgallery.com.au

Ian Strange Suburban From July 27 Monet’s Garden Until September 8 NGV International 180 St Kilda Rd NGV Australia Federation Square ngv.vic.gov.au

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MELBOURNE ART ROOMS

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THE JOHNSTON COLLECTION, EAST MELBOURNE

Murmur (mûr’mar) An installation by guest curator, Rosslynd Piggott, as part of the annual ‘house of ideas’ series, evoking facets of William Johnston as a person, collector and gardener. Piggott recaptures the spirit of Fairhall as Johnston might have lived in it.

Mon-Fri 10 am, 12 pm, 2.15 pm.

Bookings essential Until October 23 johnstoncollection.org

WITHOUT PIER GALLERY

Brian Kewley 50 Years of Painting a Retrospective with Recent Works July 14 – 28 Paul Margocsy & Robyn Rankin August 4 – 14 320 Bay Road, Cheltenham withoutpier.com.au

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BURRINJA GALLERY

Kati Thanda: Green Desert Until August 11 Entry $5 Adult, $4 Concession Cnr Glenfern Road and Matson Drive Upwey 3158 burrinja.org.au

SUMMER COMES TO MELBOURNE

EUGENE TAN / AQUABUMPS PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION JULY 20 - AUG 17

LIQUIDITY EXHIBITION - OPENING NIGHT FRIDAY 19TH JULY 6.30 PM - FREE ENTRY

1140 Malvern Road, Malvern, VIC 3144 info@eleven40.com.au T 03 8823 1140 Mon / Fri 9 - 6 | Sat 11 - 4

ELEVEN40 COM AU

PHOTOGRAPHY SEMINAR SAT 20TH JULY 1.45 PM - 4PM $65

Learn the tips of the trade from master Sydney surf photographer Eugene Tan. Business partner Debbie will also take us behind the scene and explain how Aquabumps has used social media to build over 100,000 followers!

13

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TARRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART

TarraWarra International 2013 Animate / Inanimate From June 29 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road Healesville twma.com.au

FORTYFIVEDOWNSTAIRS Paul Newcombe Compositions In Paint: This Is The End July 30 – August 10 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne fortyfivedownstairs.com

ANNA PAPPAS GALLERY Grant Nimmo World Headquarters 2103 Until August 3 Michaela Gleave Universal Truths 2-4 Carlton Street, Prahran annapappasgallery.com

HEIDE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART The Sometimes Chaotic World of Mike Brown Until October 13 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen heide.com.au

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GALLERYSMITH

Sue Lovegrove Cloud Memory Until July 20 170 – 174 Abbotsford St North Melbourne gallerysmith.com.au

SHEPPARTON ART MUSEUM (SAM) Speaking in Colour: The Collection of Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner Until August 25 70 Welsford Street, Shepparton sheppartonartmuseum.com.au

36 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

VISUAL ARTS

Unsettling Houses Ian Strange’s Suburban at the NGV

BY SUZANNE FRASER

A

cross three rooms at the NGV Studio in Federation Square, Brooklyn-based Australian artist Ian Strange presents to his Melbourne-situated audience a report on the state of the suburban home in America. This exhibition is not, however, a utilitarian record of human habitats; it is an imaginative, almost hallucinatory portrayal what the artist sees as existing behind the ordered veneer of that shipshape social structure, the suburban home.

Documenting seven houses across six states – and covering a chronological distance of two years – this exhibition surveys the complex symbolism housed within the calm streets of “classic suburbia”.

The key element in this narrative is found in the artist’s treatment of the houses he encounters. After repainting and in two instances burning the houses, he then theatrically lights the properties before setting up his cameras and waiting until dawn or dusk to create the actual works of art. The artist explains this process in our interview: “the point of the work is the documentation”. All traces of human presence are also removed prior to filming, an act which serves to produce a record of unsettled houses across America.

In fact the represented buildings were first made available to the artist and his team on account of their having been already unsettled in preparation for either demolition or reassignment. In this aspect the viewer might identify the looming presence of the GFC in suburbia, and the gradual depreciation of the American Dream. Don Draper does not live here.

Comprising nine cinematic stills, a video work shown across three screens, and several

fragments taken from the houses featured in the exhibition, Suburban documents the product of the artist’s aesthetic interventions in suburbia.

In one of the first projects of this series entitled Tenth Street, the artist presents a house that has been over-painted with a gargantuan skull and subsequently (we assume) set alight. In the moment captured in the image, orange flames emerge from a window and snake up towards the skull, while dusky smoke puffs gently from the front porch. As we imagine it, this moment is just the beginning of the fire’s destruction. Indeed Tenth Street is a nascent moment in the two-year series shown in the current exhibition, representing the beginning stages of what the artist has termed “a journey exhibition”.

This journey initially began in 2011 with an installation on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, at which point Strange’s exploration of the intersection of home and identity first took shape. This shape turned out to be a precise reconstruction of the artist’s childhood home, which Strange designed from memory and then enveloped in iconography of destruction: a painted skull, a video showing burning and smashed-in vehicles. He titled this installation Home. The overt sense of confrontation and anger that can be witnessed in this work has since given way to a “quiet rage” that can be seen in the NGV exhibition, which the artist attributes to the project’s gradual evolution over his two years of working on it.

With the new exhibition in Melbourne, the earlier career of Ian Strange has been firmly put into storage, along with his alter identity Kid Zoom. In this former guise he practiced as a street artist in Perth, before relocating to New York after being taken under the tutelage

Ian Strange. Harvard Street 2011. Archival digital print Collection of the artist, New York © Ian Strange

of graffiti master Ron English. Yet, as Strange came to realise, graff culture is inherently an inner-city animal, one nourished by an urban upbringing and, more often than not, urbanplaced agitation. Thus for Strange, who grew up in the heart of Australian suburbia, a disconnection developed between his street art identity and his own personal story. As the artist identifies it, street art was initially an outlet for his angst as a discontented youth, but something proved to be amiss: “I realised I had nothing to contribute… so I went back to that source motivation, that attachment to the suburbs”.

Suburban is the decisive realisation of this realisation. While his geographical subject is America, Strange removes national boundaries by tapping in to a widely encountered dissatisfaction with the social structures intertwined in the architecture of the suburbs.

By painting, burning and documenting these carefully-selected commonplace houses, Ian Strange makes a move to rephrase the visual jargon of middle-class life. In America, in Australia, in wherever.

And despite the artist’s platform shift from back alleyways to public institutions, the viewer can still witness the practice of a street artist in both the methods and motivations employed in this exhibition. It is just that nowadays his art exists with the full endorsement of the authorities, including local fire-fighters in America (with whom he became quite chummy) and the National Gallery of Victoria.

In a work entitled Corrinne Terrace, which shows a house painted all black except for a white void around the front window, we see, according to Strange, the future direction of his examination of suburbia. It is an immensely calm work; there are no smashed-in Holden Commodores here. It will be interesting to see where he takes this project next.

» Ian Strange: Suburban shows at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, from July 27. ngv.vic.gov.au

THE MELB OUR NE R EVIEW JULY 2013

Food.Wine.Coffee F I N E D I N I N G • S U S TA I N A B L E F O O D • C O F F E E • W I N E

FARM VIGANO

It was 2007 when Bart Crescia and David Petrilli first saw the Farm Vigano property – many misadventures later, their vision is almost realised REVIEW BY LOU PARDI / PHOTOS BY MATTHEW WREN

38 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

Milk the Cow A licensed fromagerie. It’s one of those concepts that you hear of and think ‘of course!’ And now it’s a reality in St Kilda

BY LOU PARDI

T

here was a time when if you’d told Laura Lown she’d end up in a career in cheese she would have laughed at you.

FARM VIGANO It was 2007 when Bart Crescia and David Petrilli first saw the Farm Vigano property – many misadventures later, their vision is almost realised

BY LOU PARDI

T

he beautiful 16-acre Farm Vigano is preserved as a heritage site.

It was once the home of Italian restaurateur Mario Vigano and artist Maria Teresa Vigano.

“They used to grow all of their produce here for their restaurant, Mario’s on Exhibition Street,” explains Bart. “And at that point, the property went all the way out to Plenty Road so there was a piggery at the top and they had cattle. They had literally everything that was used in the restaurant,” adds David.

The two clearly have a passion for the property, which they came across in 2007 and immediately fell for. As fate would have it a change in government meant that the committee deciding what to do with the property couldn’t decide, and at one stage it seemed like their proposal wouldn’t be accepted.

“We were both really upset because from the moment we first walked down the driveway we knew that this was us and this was what we were about and what we wanted. We still had our hearts set here, had never left this property,” says David.

Sometime later Bart contacted the committee again and the two submitted their vision for the

property – not only a restaurant and function centre with the kinds of gatherings Mario and Maria might have had many years ago – with sharing and laughter and Italian food – but a place for the whole community with an orchard and kitchen garden, cooking classes and opportunities to share food and culture.

The proposal was successful and the vision is well on its way to being realised. Head up to Farm Vigano any Sunday afternoon and you’ll find families and friends gathered around tables strewn with pizzas, antipasto and Farm Vigano’s incredible braised and slow cooked lamb.

Bart and David are both children of Italian migrants. Bart’s parents are from Abruzzo, and David’s father is also from Abruzzo and his mother is from Piedmonte. David says the menu doesn’t reflect any one region. “We go through the whole of Italy with the menu, but for us the philosophy of Italian food is very simple, it’s good ingredients, it’s using ingredients from the property when we can get them, we just keep it simple.”

Farm Vigano has been well-received, but it’s perhaps Bart’s father’s review which is most cherished. “My Dad’s very conservative, he’s a sceptic,” says Bart, describing the kind of

father who seldom gives positive feedback.

“Dad came here, he’d seen it before when it had been in transition, but he came this time when it was finally open and we’d been trading for a month. The place had a soul, had a life, there were customers, it was alive. He’d come up to the bar on his way out and I just said, ‘Dad what do you think?’ and there was this long pause, and his response was, ‘Best restaurant in Australia.’”

It’s only set to get better, with the final touches being put on a function room downstairs to cater for the corporate functions and weddings which make up much of the restaurant’s trade and more community events planned.

“For us, being here gives us the opportunity to give kids that link with what we grew up with,” says David. “We really don’t want to lose that tradition because I learnt so much from my parents, and my mother when it comes to cooking and food and once my mother is no longer here, there is a link in that chain that is lost and I don’t intend to lose that. All of her recipes are documented and I’ve made them with her step by step.

“I can’t bear the thought of losing those, so that’s the kind of thing that we really want to keep on going, because we really feel it’s important, and the culture and the heritage of this place gives us the opportunity to do that.”

» Farm Vigano 10 Bushmans Way, South Morang (03) 9407 1212 Lunch: Tuesday - Sunday Dinner: Thursday - Sunday farmvigano.com.au

“I actually started in fashion photography, doing my degree in London,” says Laura with a tell-tale lilt. “Like any student I got a part time job; and it was working in a fromagerie. I didn’t know anything about cheese, I refused to eat cheese – I was one of those reluctant people who wouldn’t even have a pizza because I just didn’t know anything about it. It was just this yellow melted stuff.”

Laura put her fashion design skills to work making the large cheese counter presentable and ensuring each cheese was wrapped and positioned properly.

Her employers recognised her interest and sent her to further training, and she eventually left to work with Paxton and Whitfield, a heritage brand famous for supplying cheese to the Ritz and Her Majesty the Queen.

When Laura was invited by her sister to move to Australia, she didn’t imagine she’d find a similar role, but in no time she’d been contacted by founder of Milk the Cow, Daniel Verheyen. Although Milk the Cow draws on Laura’s knowledge of cheese, the experience is unique. Customers can take away cheese, but the best part of the experience is taking a seat and experiencing the cheese and beverage matches.

“We have a wine, beer and spirit flight,” explains Laura. “Every week I change that menu and we not only use a different cheeses, but every week we use different wines.” Increasingly though, beer is becoming a popular choice over wine. “A lot of people say that cheese and wine just go hand in hand. It’s becoming more and more the norm that beer pairs more than wine with cheese.”

One theory is that cheese and beer are more closely related than wine and cheese.

“The cheese comes from the cows which graze on the grass and the beer comes from the grain. So a lot of people say that that’s more a preferred combination than

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RESTAURANT REVIEWS cheese and wine,” says Laura, adding, “Then there’s the spirit side as well and we pair cheeses with cocktails because why not, really!”

In what’s been a difficult time for some businesses in St Kilda, Milk the Cow seems to have found its audience. “During the day we work more as retail, a lot of people come in and buy their cheese to take away,” explains Laura.

“Come about three or four in the afternoon, people start to come in for our cheese and wine flights. We really kick off and get busy around six in the evening with the after work crowd.

A lot of people come before dinner and a lot of people come after dinner. Obviously we’ve got fantastic restaurants surrounding us like Golden Fields and Fitzrovia and if they’re full a lot of people come to us while they are waiting for a table. And then you get people that come in about midnight for cheese – we’re open until late, sometimes 1am on Friday and Saturday.

So it’s interesting when people have cravings for cheese.”

One winter cheese craving is fondue, and Milk the Cow has recently started offering its unique fondues. There’s even discussion about a beer fondue. Perfect Match Mondays gather an intimate crowd to meet a different cheesemaker and beverage maker each month and taste some matches they put together. The latest event on the Milk the Cow calendar is

‘Laura Lown’s Cheese 101’ a course for both the experienced and novice cheese enthusiasts where Laura will step the group through cheese styles and some of the cheeses she’s gathered from all over the world – some of which aren’t otherwise available in Australia.

Whether you’re mad for cheese or simply want a glass of wine in a lovely venue with fantastic staff, Milk the Cow is worth a visit.

» Milk The Cow 157 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda 9537 2225 Tuesday – Friday: 2pm – late Saturday: 12pm – 1am Sunday: 12pm – 11pm milkthecow.com.au

TAKE A JOURNEY WITH US Throughout July, 32 of Australia’s finest restaurants will host the Cloudy Bay Pinot & Duck Trail, offering diners the ultimate pinot noir and duck experience.

Follow the Melbourne trail to sample the flavours of the new release Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir matched with the chef ’s signature duck dish.

Taste just one or sample them all...

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Red Emperor

Mr Mason

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10/07/13 10:59 AM

40 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE / WINE

A Tour N of Spain

o matter how you slice it, Spain is complex.

BY ANDREA FROST

Its many rulers and influences over the centuries, including the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors and Christians, have all left their legacy in parts of the country. Spain’s human geography is no less complex with today’s 17 communities banded together under

the Kingdom of Spain often operating quite autonomously. Geologically Spain’s terrain is diverse from the cool, green and rugged Atlantic Coast, to the inland desert landscapes and the maritime coasts of the southeast.

large, affluent bodegas of Rioja and Penedes, to the small, artisanal wineries reclaiming the land in the northwest regions of Bierzo, Rias Baixas and Ribeira Sacra. Each region with a fascinating story to tell.

The same diversity is true of its wine industry that spans operations in various stages of evolution and approach. From

Here is a selection of wines, all available in Australia, from some of Spain’s winegrowing hotspots.

DESCENDIENTES DE J. PALACIOS ‘PÉTALOS’ MENCIA 2010

SEGURA VIUDAS RESERVA HEREDAD CAVA

VALDESIL PEZAS DA PORTELA 2010

SOLAR VIEJO CRIANZA 2010

Penedes, Spain RRP $50 seguraviudas.com

Valdeorras, Spain RRP $69 valdesil.com

Rioja, Spain RRP $25 solarviejo.com

Segura Viudas is situated in the wine region of Penedes west of Barcelona. The bodega or winery is an old stone building set among hills that roll and fold to the horizon. Lush forests and orchards surround the property and its vineyards.

It’s a lovely setting for the winery that produces both Cava and table wines in an increasingly environmentally sensitive manner. But it wasn’t always this tranquil; the medieval tower that stands as the centrepiece of the winery hints at the region’s tempestuous history. In the 11th century, the region was at the crossroads of religious wars and the tower built to protect crops that blanketed the region. Today Penedes is the main Cava producing region in Spain and Cava is Spain’s answer to Champagne.

It is made in the same traditional method as Champagne, but with local white grape varieties of Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel.lo. The Segura Viudas Reserva Heredad is the crown jewel of the Cava range. Taking more than three years to produce, it is a wine of richness, freshness and complexity, with the pewter-trimmed bottle only adding to the wine’s presence.

One man’s madness may well be the future generations’ fortune. High on a broken slate hillside in the Valdeorras region of northwest Spain is the Valdesil Pedrouzos vineyard.

Planted by grower José Ramón Gayoso in 1885, the 500 native Godello vines have thick, gnarled and twisted trunks. Some larger branches are propped on stacks of smooth rocks, like an elderly person resting swollen joints on a bench.

At the time, Gayoso was considered mad to plant a straight Godello vineyard but, convinced of the variety’s potential, he insisted. The Pedrouzos vineyard has survived the demise and subsequent rise of Godello – at one point only a thousand square metres remained until an industry program reversed the decline. Just as Gayoso provided offspring to continue the winemaking business, the Pedrouzos vineyard has supplied much of the material for Godella’s revival, in particular, the 10 ‘pezas’ or plots that make this wine, the Pezas da Portela. Complex, fleshy with layers of fruit, acidity and a lovely texture, it’s a wonderful introduction to a variety experiencing a very happy renaissance.

Laguardia is a charming medieval village built high on a hill in the north of Rioja, in the Basque province of Alava. Because of the breathtaking views from the hill it was built as a defensive town to guard the neighbouring region of Navarra; hence the name, ‘La Guardia de Navarra’. To the north, the view sweeps across vineyards and farmland, until the Cantabrian Mountains jut up, grey and jagged, protecting the region from the cool winds that blow off the Atlantic Ocean. To the south is the snaking Ebro River, which forms the natural boundary between the sub-regions of Rioja. These natural features create a cocoon of ideal weather for winegrowing. Bodegas Solar Viejo originated in Laguardia, its name coming from ‘Casas Solariegas’, the noblemen’s houses where the first Solar Viejo wine was made. Now the winery is situated a short drive away at the base of the Cantabrian Mountains. This 100% Tempranillo Crianza has bright red fruit, spice, vanilla and liquorice, soft tannins and a fresh and elegant finish. If possible, enjoy with the view from Laguardia.

Bierzo, Spain RRP $49 bodegasricardopalacios.es Driving through Ricardo Palacios’ vineyards in the hills around Villafranca del Bierzo in northwest Spain, you get the feeling nature is only just being held back. Vineyards don’t dominate so much as dot the landscape between cherry, almond and apple trees and small plots for farm animals. There is no largescale wine industry here and many vineyards are managed as subsistence farms. For Palacios, who first moved into the region in 1999, working with these plots has made the job of crafting biodynamic wines an easier one. Palacios’ focus is the native red grape Mencia, another variety enjoying a renaissance. Mencia makes a medium-bodied, elegant red wine offering red fruit, spice and earth. As well as making some of the most exciting versions of Mencia, Palacios also takes an holistic approach to the community where he has established a school to teach skills including cheese making, farming and winegrowing: “People are not using these skills and if we don’t teach them, they will be lost”. Exciting wines, wonderful approach.

THE MELB OUR NE R EVIEW JULY 2013

FORM D E S I G N • P L A N N I N G • I N N OVAT I O N

KITCHENS & BATHROOMS • Ways to make the most of small spaces • Minimalist, purist, collector... which is your style?

• Design choices for intimacy and engagement

42 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FORM

Photo: Steven W Semes

Does public housing keep the buyers away?

Apartment and shopping complex on Via Aurelia, by architect M. Coronelli, 1971-1976.

SOMEBODY DREW THAT From the museum to the suburbs

BY BYRON GEORGE

H

olidays are so often just punctuation in our lives. Planning that trip to another beach or resort or museum; tour groups shuffling thousands of people in trainers, ear buds in place, listening to why the thing they are looking at is important in twenty languages. I just came back from a month-long round the world trip. This one was different for me for two reasons: it only involved a small amount of work, and it involved taking my mother overseas for the first time.

The low point was probably the Vatican Museum.

After paying around $250 for a “semi private tour”, we were shuffled through quickly. Our group of 19, sandwiched together, went through the museum like fibre through your intestines, and at about the same speed. Not able to get up close to anything, not able to stop and rest, the mother getting more and more cranky muttering words like “cigarette” and “child molestation” while we gurgled past the crowds in front of some of the most incredible artworks of the old world.

This is the problem with European cities in the summer. Famous landmarks and cobbled streets are literally overrun. A380 after A380 dumping millions of people in places designed for thousands. Tippy toes and thongs; a sea of disposable fashion and flash bulbs; in the modern world, it’s not the Visigoths who sack Rome, it’s the tourists.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of European urbanism as a way of cramming more people into cities while still making them great places to live. It’s also no secret that this generally involves looking at moving people and goods in ways that do not involve large numbers of cars. But if you move beyond the historic tourist centres, are European cities really the panacea they are made out to be?

Cross the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris and you can find yourself in some pretty bleak neighbourhoods, particularly to the northeast.

Rather than elegant boulevards, people live in a mix of grey tower blocks and apartment houses. Unemployment is high and scars of old industry remain. The southern suburbs are better but people still live in densities far greater than Australians do.

In Rome, romantic medieval apartments with casement windows overlooking cobblestone streets are distinctly Roman, but the majority don’t actually live like this. A typical Roman suburban apartment block is a squat, square brick building with balconies and window shutters, surrounded by broken bitumen and cars, anywhere from four to eight stories high.

Some of these are really beautiful – wander around the EUR district (which feels a little like Melbourne’s Ivanhoe) and you’ll see great 60s blocks in lush gardens. In other parts of the city they are bleakness personified. Perhaps

the thing that was the most surprising is that these neighbourhoods seem to be planned around the assumption that the occupants will have a car. In much of Rome, a car is as necessary as it is in Melbourne.

Italy’s car ownership rate is just under Australia’s, with 679 cars per 1000 people compared to 695 in Australia. This compares with 797 for the USA and 607 for Canada, two countries known for car dependence.

In a country that gave us Ferrari, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Lancia, this is not surprising, but the impact it has had on Italian cities in the twentieth century was. Gone was the piazza and narrow capillary-like street network.

In its place are the car park and suburban shopping centre.

From Helsinki to Madrid, once you are out of the historic centre, the car rules. Is this a bad thing? The answer is similar to what you would say for most things. Yes and no. The real question should be around how liveable these cities are.

I used to bemoan the spread-out nature of our pancake city when coming back from Europe. Australian cities always feel decidedly empty when compared to the great cities of Europe. But most Europeans don’t live in those centres, and the residents that do are so overrun with tourists and the infrastructure that is there to support them that it’s almost infuriating. If you compare our suburbs with the places Europeans actually live, on the livability stakes we don’t look so bad. Cities are more than museums after all.

» Byron George and partner Ryan Russell are directors of Russell & George, a design and architecture practice with offices in Melbourne and Rome. russellandgeorge.com

BY ROBERT LAROCCA

T

he question of whether high density public or affordable housing has a negative impact on property values is an issue raised at times in Melbourne’s planning debates. In answering it you learn a lot about the city and how it’s changing.

When viewed through the prism of house prices the divide between Melbourne’s rich and poor used to be clear with the most expensive housing in the east and south east, but this is less and less the case as the inner city, especially the inner north, becomes gentrified.

The inner city has gentrified over the past two decades with industry moving out and replaced by apartments and the ever present cafés – many of which are in old factories themselves. This has led to an increasing prevalence of high end modern developments requiring professional incomes being colocated with publically provided or subsidised accommodation. If you stand in Johnson, Gertrude or on Racecourse Road this is obvious to the naked eye.

Recent Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics brings this into sharp relief when contrasted with sale prices for houses. For those unfamiliar with the data, a SEIFA score in excess of 1000 denotes a suburb whose residents have a socio-economic status that is statistically above average. When it is plotted against the median prices houses sold over the past year the outcome – in all bar a few suburbs – is unsurprising but quite illuminating. The higher the SEIFA score the higher the property values with East Melbourne at one end and Frankston North at the other. Toorak misses out because of the high number of older flats along the main roads.

What is interesting is the five outliers. They show how the old divide is less pronounced now.

They have a lower than average SEIFA and above average house prices. The five suburbs – Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Flemington

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FORM

Time to uncork Victoria’s Port

BY JENNIFER CUNICH

T and North Melbourne – are all within the top 10 suburbs in Victoria ranked by proportion of public housing. They have a large number of people living in publicly provided housing, most notably in the high rises. These dwellings stand tall and in stark contrast to the terraces and apartments invariably located across the road.

Median house prices in those suburbs range from $725,000 in Flemington to $923,000 in Carlton whilst their SEIFA scores are between 892 in Flemington and 990 in North Melbourne. This means little till you look at house prices in suburbs with similar SEIFA scores. Albion in the west has the same SEIFA as Flemington but its house prices are half as much. Noble Park North in the outer east has the same SEFIA as Collingwood but with house prices slightly more than half those of Collingwood.

Clearly the location of the public housing has not stopped the other parts of these suburbs under private ownership from gentrifying. This is because, like most matters real estate, it’s all about the location.

The high housing prices are driven by the scarce and now in high demand inner city land values. These high values are the catalyst for the

transformation of these suburbs with medium density accommodation becoming financially viable for developers and in demand from people wanting to live close to work. In just one year, 2011, the population of Flemington increased by 4.3 percent, in North Melbourne by 3.8 percent and 1.6 percent in Carlton. These population increases don’t come from public housing tenants; they are owner occupiers and renters in the private market.

The intermingling of public and private housing, whether by design or accident, has been a policy of governments for a number of years now. The idea is that it provides for a more cohesive society with greater opportunities for those who, due to the cost of housing, are consigned to the outer suburbs.

If the property values are a useful guide then the outcome of this policy so far has to be good news for Melbourne. The diversity now inherent in these suburbs is a positive feature in its own right and it’s certainly not keeping the buyers away.

» Robert Larocca is Policy and Public Affairs Manager, Real Estate Institute of Victoria.

he Port of Melbourne is the last major capital city port on the eastern seaboard owned by government, after a long-term lease over the port of Brisbane was sold in November 2010 to a consortium of overseas investors for $2.1 billion. In the 1990s the Kennett Government sold the ports of Geelong and Portland, but withheld the Port of Melbourne for concerns over major waterfront disputes and issues around the expansion downriver at Webb Dock.

Given that these concerns no longer apply, it is time for Victoria to re-examine the role of the private sector in supporting our high levels of growth and activity. The case for commercialisation is strong since ports do not fit the bill for providing essential public services and their local monopoly characteristics can be managed through external monitoring or regulation. Moreover, private involvement in the running of our ports can ensure their operation is more flexible and innovative, due to the private sector’s inclination towards efficiency and revenue growth.

Although privatisation has become a controversial concept in some respects, it takes on a new dimension when considered as asset recycling. Governments can sell assets and use the proceeds to invest in new assets – a compelling proposition when we consider the increasing pressures placed on taxation revenue in today’s economic environment.

As the examples from New South Wales and Queensland demonstrate, it is possible to use asset recycling as a mechanism to drive growth. Furthermore, they serve to remind us that Victoria should act now to avoid playing catch-up with our interstate peers.

The Brisbane sale suggests that the amount which could be raised by changing management control of the Port of Melbourne would be in the vicinity of $4 billion, allowing for substantially greater throughput. Such a large fiscal injection of funding into Victoria’s infrastructure pipeline would be a welcome boost to our productivity, by cutting down time spent on congested roads and ensuring that businesses can operate more efficiently. Moreover, it would also open the door to greater expansion of the port through the injection of private investment. This is urgently needed in the coming years, given that the Port of Melbourne is likely to face major bottlenecks from 2015 as it begins to reach capacity.

There is no time to lose – Victoria’s base competitiveness and wealth are inextricably tied to the health of our infrastructure. The result of past privatisations have resulted in lower government debt, lower electricity prices and lower passenger rail subsidies than would have previously been the case.

With considered investment in projects that are genuinely economically sound, the process of commercialising Victoria’s public assets would enhance our state’s growth immensely.

» Jennifer Cunich is Victorian Executive Director, Property Council of Australia. propertyoz.com.au/vic

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW AIA AWARD EDITION In collaboration with the AIA Victorian division The Melbourne Review Presents the annual Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Awards edition.

Out On Thursday, August 15

melbournereview.com.au

44 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FORMFEATURE

BRICKE HOU S

Images: Shannon McGrath. shannonmcgrath.com

BY I NS COUS E R CL A HITECTS A RC

MINIMALIST, PURIST, COLLECTOR...

In the design of kitchens and bathrooms, what makes for a successful space?

BY CLARE COUSINS

W

hen posed with the question of kitchen and bathroom trends it leads me to think of recurring themes in our designs and the work of others that we admire.

Kitchens and bathrooms are utility zones that need to be highly functional while providing an opportunity to reflect your taste and personality.

What observations might people make of you and your space? Are you a minimalist (concealed storage), collector (open display shelves), purist (all white) or lover of warm, natural spaces (expansive timber)? It’s essential to design the space for you and your family.

The kitchen is typically the social hub of the house.

We’ve all experienced the domestic phenomenon that finds everyone mingling in the kitchen, so it’s essential that the kitchen is a space you enjoy.

When designing a kitchen consider the following: • The layout is key. People talk of the ‘kitchen triangle’, which keeps the distance between key areas in the kitchen (sink, cooktop and fridge) in close proximity. Galley kitchens tend to provide the most efficient layout, with a wall of cabinetry behind and a parallel bench in front. The trend towards island benches reflects this spatial efficiency. Many

designers are beginning to treat the island bench as a furniture-like feature of the house, lifting it off the floor on legs, extending it to accommodate a desk or adding a dramatic cantilever.

• Drawers vs. cupboards? I say drawers. They provide such effective storage that we even use them under the kitchen sink. Using a non-slip liner in the base of drawers prevents glasses and crockery from sliding around. Butler’s pantries have recently emerged as a “must have” in new kitchens but it’s important to remember that they’re a luxury both spatially and financially. Deep, well organised cupboards can provide pantry space and a usable bench-top for appliances. A second sink in a butler’s pantry just means twice the washing up.

• Cooking appliances are often the focus of the kitchen; we love stand-alone cookers for their impact. Other kitchen appliances are generally concealed such as dishwashers, rangehoods and pull-out bins.

• When selecting finishes for a kitchen consider durability, quality and the mood they will create.

Kitchens aren’t limited to laminate, paint finishes and stainless steel. Consider texture and colour and how a material will age with time. We frequently approach material selection from an

architectural perspective, choosing a natural but textured palette of timber, tiled splashbacks and stone or concrete benchtops, but frame the space with stronger architectural elements such as glazed brick or painted timber panelled walls.

The bathroom should be a restorative environment and requires comfort for bathing, storage for products, appropriate lighting and durable surfaces.

• Like kitchens, bathrooms can also be social spaces, particularly at busy times of the day.

They require users to be considerate of others and for the space to work efficiently. Consider a single long sink with two tap-sets rather than twin sinks and reconsider the growing trend for ensuites for each bedroom.

• No longer an exclusive item, a standalone bath provides a sculptural focal point to a room. Soft lines are preferable to sharp corners, a trend reflected in tapware and fittings. Powder-coated tapware is currently popular; black or white fittings provide a statement that is classic and understated.

• Effective storage allows products to be stowed out of view, maintaining a calm space. Joinery that floats above the floor looks visually light

making the space appear larger, while mirrored cabinets provide easy access to many small items.

• We prefer light spaces in the bathroom that help to awaken the body. Consideration of pattern, colour and texture is essential. For example, flat white floors show every strand of hair, so a pattern on the floor will help you avoid endless cleaning.

Ideally, both the kitchen and bathroom have access to ample natural light and effective artificial light for the evening. Quality of light (natural or artificial) is critical in all spaces and can significantly affect the perceived colour of surfaces. Unless there is access to large windows, consider skylights – they are a great asset to the space and eliminate issues of privacy.

Finally, while trends are fun and inspirational, it’s important not to follow them blindly. Pick and choose elements you love and pair them with classic and functional design to create a space that is comfortable, practical and reflects you.

» Clare Cousins is the recent recipient of the National Emerging Architect Prize. clarecousins.com.au

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KITCHENS & BATHROOMS UITE S N E QL D A & B E N J E MM

Top 3 tips for small bathroom spaces

BY ROVE H I G H G O O MS BATHR

1. It’s all in the planning Small bathrooms require clever planning and product selection. Key to this is measuring your bathroom – understanding how much space you have will help ensure you can maximise what is available and create the illusion of more.

2. Doors really matter Carefully consider the placement of doors in a small bathroom as the direction in which your shower and vanity door open can substantially impact space. The same is true of the door to the bathroom itself. Sliding doors for the bathroom and shower are great space saving options, while open vanity shelves can help create the illusion of more space.

3. On trend and space enhancing: wet room style showers Having an open wet room (tiled floor with no door) instead of a traditional shower is not only on trend, but also a great space enhancing solution for small bathrooms.

Visit reece.com.au or phone 1800 032 566 to locate the nearest Reece showroom.

Highgrove Bathrooms

H

ighgrove Bathrooms has been revolutionising the bathroom industry for seven years, featuring a huge range of exclusive bathroom products.

They offer designer products at wholesale prices direct to the public, cutting out the middle men and ultimately saving customers money. With a huge range of bathroom

supplies Australia-wide, the fastest growing bathroom company across 23 stores nationally and their experienced staff can assist with creating the ultimate bathroom sanctuary by providing expert advice in all aspects of bathroom renovation, from product selection to delivery.

Whether you’re a home owner, builder, developer or architect, catering for all levels of expertise and budgets, the friendly staff at Highgrove Bathrooms are passionate about great design and can provide professional advice to tailor a complete bathroom solution.

Recently, a selection of Highgrove Bathrooms exclusive products were featured on Channel 7’s reality TV show House Rules.

With six teams across Australia handing over the keys to their home and leaving their competition rivals to transform their house, contestants chose a selection of exclusive Highgrove Bathrooms products including European designed Ottimo mixers, Lyra floor mount vanity cabinet, Monsoon rectangle shower head, Nuova freestanding corner spa and Fuzion toilet suite.

For a selection of designer products at wholesale prices, visit your nearest store.

» Highgrove Bathrooms 2215 Princes Hwy/Dandenong Road, Clayton 9558 5770 Also at Abbotsford and Geelong highgrovebathrooms.com

46 THE MELBOURNE REVIEW JULY 2013

FORMCOMMERCIAL

KITCHENS & BATHROOMS

T

he kitchen is the heart of a home. It is important that it is designed to be conducive not only to the flurry of domestic activities that traditionally occur in the kitchen, but equally important for it to be fit for interaction and engagement with other occupants. A well designed kitchen in contemporary living should be the focal point from which all other living spaces and activities radiate.

Conversely, the bathroom is a personal and private space. However, like the kitchen, it needs to create a sense of luxury in its functionality and space, as well as warmth

through materiality. Equally important is the potential for the space to act as a canvas for the occupants to inject their personality onto. C. J. Koay, PDG’s Design Manager and Roberto Dreolini Architectural Associate at Disegno Australia, have been working to create something unique for PDG’s latest residential development, Ryan & Leveson in North Melbourne.

Fact: apartments are getting smaller.

In the Ryan & Leveson development, PDG wanted to focus on retaining a significant amount of space and building value through a smart design approach and high quality

Each apartment’s dark grey mirrors in the bathrooms are echoed in the kitchen’s smoky grey splashback, creating a polished setting. Elements like finger pull joinery, a natural grain in the stone topped benches and matching grout colour between tiles are small details that make all the difference to the eye when looking at a room as a whole. The project has also been afforded a suite of black chrome fixtures and fittings. Unlike their more common powder-coated counterparts now saturating the market, these fixtures provide an alternative that is far superior in terms of durability, as well as delivering a little extra luxe to the space that a matte finish just cannot match. The palette selected exudes a subtle sense of contemporary elegance and identity without being imposing. This means that occupants can easily personalise the spaces with their own furnishing and styling interpretations. interiors and finishes. Storage capabilities also emerged as an important factor to those looking to buy in today’s property market.

The layout of each apartment has been designed with this emphasis on storage in mind.

This consideration is reflected in the timber veneer kitchen with soft-close drawers, a full height pantry and cabinets both under bench and overhead. The bathroom features custom made, oversized vanities with insert ledges on either side for increased countertop space, an inbuilt toiletries recess and plenty of draw space both under the sink and in custom made cabinetry above the toilet. According to Koay, this is a rare occurrence in the current apartment market where space is increasingly being minimised.

Contemporary living now more than ever strikes a complementary balance between ergonomic functionality and design sensibility.

The kitchens and bathrooms of all Ryan & Leveson apartments have been designed to reflect just that. Beauty is in the detail.

The timber veneer proposed for use in the apartments are ‘reconstructed’ in that they are sourced from fast growing plantation trees, minimising wastage compared to a natural timber approach. Both veneers and laminates specified within the build are themselves bonded to environmentally sustainable GreenTag certified MDF. The kitchens and bathrooms within the Ryan & Leveson development have been designed to integrate with the rest of the home and reflect the lifestyles of their occupants. They are more than the simple, utilitarian rooms they are often designed as in other apartment buildings.

Like everything in the Ryan & Leveson, building these crucial rooms for everyday living has seen a planning process starting with a solid information base fed with careful thought and a keen eye for contemporary design.

ryanandleveson.com.au

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Display open 12-4pm daily. Corner of Paisley & Albert Street Footscray.

GRENADE BAN012

Stage One Sold Out - Stage Two Now Selling & Numbers Are Limited!

www.18albert.com