The Melbourne Review March 2013

THE MELBOURNE

REVIEW Issue 17 MARCH 2013

melbournereview.com.au

THE SPIRIT OF THE BLACK DRESS Celebrating five years of sustainable fashion and textile design in Australia

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BURNET INSTITUTE IN MYANMAR

TASMANIA: THE NEW BLACK

HENRY IV, PARTS 1 & 2

Developing public health education programs among some of the region’s most needy citizens

It seemingly has everything, and mainland heads keep turning

John Bell inhabits Falstaff in Shakespeare’s immortal double bill

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sir andrew davis debuts as chief conductor with international opera star bryn terfel An extrAordinAry presentAtion of the most beloved piece of music in history

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6 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

WELCOME

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Sarah Nicole Lee sarahnicolelee@melbournereview.com.au 0435 798 816

CALLUM MORTON The artist branches out into set design for the Melbourne Theatre Company’s new production of Other Desert Cities.

Karen Lawson karenlawson@melbournereview.com.au 0421 701 709 Photography Matthew Wren Production & Distribution Karen Cini production@melbournereview.com.au For all advertising enquiries: advertising@melbournereview.com.au Please send all other correspondence to: editor@melbournereview.com.au Distributed by Mass Media Promotions and Distributions – mmpd.com.au Publisher The Melbourne Review Pty Ltd Level 13, 200 Queen Street, Melbourne Vic 3000 Phone (03) 8648 6482 Fax (03) 8648 6480

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FREELOADING

SLEEP IS EVERYTHING

PRINCE OF ST. KILDA

Chris Ruen on how a voracious appetite for free content is killing creativity

Avni Sali on the critical importance of a good night’s sleep – and the foods that help or hinder

Dave Graney MCs two nights of celebration of the music of Rowland S. Howard

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

THE FLOATING WORLD

LITTLE HUNTER

Exquisite Japanese artworks come to Shepparton Art Museum from Boston

Daniella Casamento looks at the design elements of this stylish new eatery

review

Profile

08

Politics

10

Business

12

Feature

14

Health

18

Columnists

24

Books

26

Performing Arts

28

Visual Arts

36

Food. Wine. Coffee

43

FORM

49

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WELCOME CONTRIBUTORS

WIN! FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN, ENTER YOUR DETAILS AT MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

Patrick Allington

Suzanne Fraser

Lou Pardi

David Ansett

Andrea Frost

Kate Roffey

The Loneliest Planet

Hannah Bambra

Byron George

Chris Ruen

Nina Bertok

Veronica Gilbert

Avni Sali

D.M. Bradley

Dave Graney

Christopher Sanders

Daniella Casamento

Michael Hince

Margaret Simons

Wendy Cavenett

Phil Kakulas

Katherine Smyrk

Selected cinemas From Thursday March 21 Starring Gael García Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) and set against the breathtaking backdrop of Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains, this gripping and multi award-winning new drama tells the story of a young couple, deeply in love and on the journey of a lifetime, and an incident that irrevocably transforms their relationship.

OUR COVER

William Charles

Stephen Koukoulas

David Sornig

The Spirit of the Black Dress

Brendan Crabb

Sophie Knezic

Natasha Stott Despoja

Photographer: Andrew O’Toole @ RPR Creative Director: Jordan Moore Producer: Dean Drieberg Model: Amanda @ Priscillas wearing Christie Nicole Trowbridge

Jennifer Cunich

Tali Lavi

Shirley Stott Despoja

Alexander Downer

Scott McLennan

Arabella Forge

Fiona O’Brien

See page 23.

The Man Who Planted Trees Castlemaine State Festival Saturday March 23, 7pm Castlemaine State Festival presents Scotland’s renowned Puppet State Theatre Company’s magical family show The Man Who Planted Trees. A beautiful theatrical adaption of Jean Gion’s environmental classic, bringing to life the inspiring story of a shepherd and his dog through puppetry and music.

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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Settle in for a relaxed lunch on the deck, or stop by for single estate coffee by Market Lane.

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8 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

PROFILE Morton... was always interested in the play. He likes its themes, especially its preoccupation with how public and private space is defined (and breached), the idea of ‘the home’ as monument.”

“I think it’s kind of interesting how putting something in a space that is slightly beguiling or is a little bit strange, how that maybe changes the way people think about art or practice,” he says. It’s the “little shocks”, the misrecognition, he reiterates, that help reorient people’s relationship to the space in which they inhabit.

For Morton, context is crucial, for it enables him to introduce what might have otherwise remained concealed.

CALLUM MORTON

As the set designer for the Australian premiere of Other Desert Cities, Melbourne artist Callum Morton finds himself knee-deep in the artistic process

BY Wendy Cavenett

C

allum Morton believes little shocks are important. He’s referring to that feeling or sensation when spatial experience doesn’t quite match what one perceives. Take Valhalla for instance, the often-discussed three-quarter scale work commissioned as part of Australia’s representation at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Luckily for locals, it was reprised for the 2009 Melbourne Festival. Placed on the forecourt of the Arts Centre on St Kilda Road, the now infamous, smouldering ruin (that continues to inspire all manner of interpretations), easily achieved Morton’s idea of little shocks. Moving from exterior to interior, that is, stepping over the threshold, there was a moment of confusion, a jarring that extended from body to mind, and in fact connected the two within some strange, ‘displaced space’. It was real but

it was dreamlike too, or maybe just part of the parallel universe Morton is known to create.

Yet in 2011, it happened again. In Memorium – part overview of Morton’s almost 20-year career, and part site-specific instillation – was an exhibition that saw a mini “Callum’s World” created at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Calling upon the great Morton themes – such as the interplay between public and private, the notion of the memorial, and how space is experienced in built environments – In Memorium was fraught with little shocks. “The audience that attends one of my large gallery instillations,” Morton says, “are the actors, and I’m controlling the atmosphere.”

It seems apt then, that Morton is working with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) on their latest production, Other Desert Cities.

It is his official debut as a set designer (in Sam Strong’s directorial debut for the company), and Morton – not surprisingly – is able to discuss these experiences as he offers insights into his creative practice.

Other Desert Cities by American playwright and screenwriter, Jon Robin Baitz, is a tightly plotted, contemporary American play about an affluent family in crisis. A critically acclaimed off-Broadway and Broadway hit, the Australian premiere stars Robyn Nevin (family matriarch, Polly Wyeth), John Gaden (Polly’s husband, Lyman), Sacha Horler (troubled daughter, Brooke), Ian Meadows (son, Trip), and Sue Jones (Polly’s sister, Silda). “I think everybody is excited to be working on this production,” Morton says, “and I have been fascinated by the process of getting the play ready for performance.”

When we meet in a small room located on the first floor of MTC headquarters in Southbank, it is a particularly hot day in Melbourne. Morton, dressed in black, hair short, muscles defined, sits comfortably on one end of a black chaise lounge. Windows to his left reveal open-plan office space: high ceilings, warm colours, familiar posters – Red, Constellations, The Other Place. Out of view, is a red-velvet lips couch – plush and shapely, and more interestingly, black stairs, at onethird scale, offering alternative access to the reception area at street level. Morton, who is fascinated with scale and notions of the strange, loves this design quirk. “At first, I didn’t realise it was here,” he says later, pausing at the very top of the miniature stairs. Morton looks down, lingers. He is the captivated audience.

In Other Desert Cities, what is real is often hidden, and there’s an almost biological process that takes place throughout the play that sees a mannered, constrained world transgressed by human mess and activity. Said Baitz in a 2010 interview in New York: “Rather than… moral inevitability, I think the only inevitability that I’m aware of is the shock of coming face to face with the person you didn’t think you were. And it’s in every play I’ve ever written.”

Such close proximity to human experience is a main attractor for Morton. He was always interested in the play, he says. He likes its themes, especially its preoccupation with how public and private space is defined (and breached), the idea of ‘the home’ as monument, and aesthetically, the play’s setting – the desert resort city of Palm Springs, known for its MidCentury Modern architecture, an aesthetic he is very familiar with.

Morton, who has lived in LA, immediately thought of two architects known for their desert buildings: Richard Neutra (and his Kauffman House), and Albert Frey (known for his desert house designs). With these structures in mind, Morton pictured a place where Other Desert Cities might happen, and a process of negotiation began, with the Frey and Kauffman houses initially forming the basis of the set design – an open-plan living space, ordered and functional, with large glass windows, and the presence of water. The area – exploring the idea of a “fetishized modernism” – would also be infused with the “golden or ochre light of the desert”.

“The design went through a number of iterations,” he says, “and was changed from a specific place… a specific building, to a tomb… a kind of family tomb… As the play progresses, the room becomes more defined, it remains

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PROFILE mannered and precise but the lives of the characters unravel.”

back shed,” he says. “I guess she was a mentor to me because I’d always regarded art practice as kind of magical.”

Morton, who was born in Montréal, Canada in 1965, was two years old when his parents returned to Melbourne to live. The 60s, however, had been an eventful time for Morton’s parents. His father was a young architect, and like many young architects of that period, worked in Europe. While in Montréal, Morton’s father worked with renowned Australian modernist architect, John Andrews. “Then there was Expo 67,” Morton says. “My dad worked with Moshe Safdie on Habitat, which was featured there, as was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.”

It was an exciting time in the world of architecture. Safdie’s Habitat, considered revolutionary, attempted to offer prefabricated, low-cost, multi-level urban living. Morton presented a rather disturbing interpretation of the famous structure in his 1:5 scale model, also entitled Habitat (2003).

Photo: Jeff Busby

Morton pauses. He remembers a moment in the play when Lyman – who is looking out of a window – talks of the desert “as a landscape of erasure” and “of a kind of absence” – an expanse, Morton suggests, offering relief from the pain of loss, from the family secret that occupies hidden spaces in the mind of each character.

Morton says there is an important connection between what is outside and what is inside in Other Desert Cities – and for him, it is glass that creates that surface, that connection. “I feel there’s a kind of complication around the materiality of glass,” he concludes. “Particularly in Modernity. You know, that idea, say, in Mies van de Rohe or Philip Johnson where you’re inside a glass house, looking out over the landscape – in this case, it’s the desert.

And during the day, you’re a kind of master of your domain, but at night, when the lights come on, you only see your own reflection… and the landscape no longer retreats, it almost comes to the surface of the glass.”

Melbourne Theatre Company’s Other Desert Cities.

In fact, many know Morton thanks to his many reinterpretations of signature (and mythological) buildings.

Morton, whose work is held in various public and private collections around Australia, is also a Professor of Fine Art at MADA (Monash Art Design and Architecture), a sort of “laboratory for visual culture”.

Morton studied architecture and urban planning for two years at RMIT. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at Victoria College, Melbourne (1988), and a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at RMIT in 1999.

Represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney,

While Morton insists he is not an architect, he is, nonetheless, influenced by his father’s occupation. But it was his grandmother’s dedication to painting that he remembers most fondly. “I learned how to paint in her

In a way it echoes a comment made by Indian-born British sculptor, Anish Kapoor: “I feel I’m not trying to say something,” he said, “but to let it occur.” Let’s hope the audience will be reflected in that glass surface at various moments too.

» Other Desert Cities shows at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, until April 17.

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10 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

POLITICS

Spending a dollar to make a dollar

By Kate Roffey

T

he Australian Open Tennis Championship, Avalon International Air show, Grand Prix, Red Bull Air Race – all are magnificent sporting spectacles brought to Victoria for us as residents of the world’s ultimate sporting city, to enjoy.

Australian Open Tennis alone is estimated to contribute around $240 million in direct spend annually, while the Grand Prix’s direct spend is calculated at around $32 - $34 million each year, with an additional $148 million in calculated spinoff benefits from international broadcast branding.

But our major sporting events are so much more than sporting spectacles. They are a key driver of our economy, and by far and away are our most significant and successful international marketing tool. After all, outside of a discussion on the world’s Grand Slam tennis tournaments, how often do your hear the cities of New York, London, Paris and Melbourne all mentioned in the same sentence?

Even our smaller events make a considerable economic contribution. When Tiger Woods came to town, it is estimated his appearance at the Australian Masters generated around $34 million in economic spin-offs for each visit. When you start to look at the full picture, and consider the $180 million or so the Grand Prix generates each year, or the $34 million Tiger Woods’ visits generated, these numbers start to stack up quite favourably in comparison to the $57 million the government invests in staging the Grand Prix, or the reported $1.5 million paid for Tiger Woods’ appearance at the Masters.

Yet despite the importance of these events, despite our love of all things sporting, and despite our long-standing recognition as the “world’s ultimate sporting city”, we seem to take exception to some of these events and consider them wasteful extravagances and inconveniences.

So in defence of events, before you cast down your judgement, let’s consider them in terms of their full value.

To fully understand the benefits of these events and why such significant dollar and infrastructure investments are made to attract and keep these events, you must consider the added benefits to the economy of staging these events across a range of sectors.

It is estimated that as an economic driver, our major events deliver a combined economic impact to Victoria of around $1.4 billion annually. The

Take hospitality. The Australian Open Tennis attracts more than 300 players (and their considerable entourages), and more than 700

journalists, photographers and camera crews from 44 countries. The majority of them require hotel accommodation for two to three weeks on average. The premium prices charged for these services play a significant role in allowing hotels to apply lower tariffs during the low season.

In addition to filling our hotels, a significant portion of the 686,000 people who attend the tennis or the 300,000 attendees at the Grand Prix will eat in our restaurants, drink in our bars, shop in our retail outlets, or be served by one of the 7,500 event and catering staff engaged during the tennis or 10,000 staff on site during the Grand Prix. All of these things are vital stimuli for a vibrant economy.

Along with these direct benefits, major events also bring a raft of international expertise to Australia, and showcases Melbourne and Victoria as an economy of intellect and innovation. The recent Avalon International Air Show, for example, is so much more than a magnificent display of state-of-the-art jet fighters and surveillance aircrafts. It is also one of the Asia Pacific’s most prestigious aviation, aerospace and defence events that showcases cutting edge products, technologies and services from Australia and around the world.

In addition to the near 200,000 spectators in attendance, large contingents of government, military, civil, commercial and scientific delegations and trade visitors also attend the event to view the latest developments from major players in the international aerospace industry including Lockheed Martin and Boeing (US), Rolls-Royce (UK), Airbus Industrie (France), Russian Helicopters and Israel Aerospace Industries. From this single event comes a myriad of indirectly linked benefits – tourism, business connection, research and industry development, and inward investment.

Last but not least, these events also provide valuable international broadcast exposure. In 2013, the Australian Open Tennis was broadcast to more than 200 countries, and the Grand Prix

Along with these direct benefits, major events also bring a raft of international expertise to Australia, and showcases Melbourne and Victoria as an economy of intellect and innovation.

was watched by more than 25 million people worldwide, including 2.5 million people in the UK, 2.4 million in France and 5.2 million in Germany.

This international broadcast exposure is highly effective in taking Melbourne to the world.

So why invest big dollars to attract such big and costly international events? Quite simply because these events play a key role in keeping the economy ticking over and keeping Melbourne on the map.

Unlike some other states, Victoria relies heavily on our events calendar to attract tourist dollars. We don’t have a Great Barrier Reef, a Harbour Bridge or rich mineral deposits to mine. What we do have is a wealth of magnificent major international events that provide worldwide exposure for our city and our state. So next time, before we complain about the investment made to retain and grow our major events, remember that every dollar we spend on them is returned into the economy many times over; and that is why our major events are so vital to our city.

» Kate Roffey is CEO, Committee for Melbourne. melbourne.org.au

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POLITICS

Letter from the North

BY ALEXANDER DOWNER

I

t’s a strange thing about Australians: they don’t have a strong sense of the sheer size of their country. Australia, for the record, is huge. When you fly from Melbourne to Singapore you spend four hours just flying over central and then north-western Australia. Look out the window of the plane and marvel at the mile after mile of plains and deserts.

Yet for some reason Australians seem think we live in a country not much larger than England. Every time there is a proposal to develop a mine there are howls of outrage.

A few dozen mines in a country of 7 million square kilometres are hardly likely to cripple the country.

The same with tourist resorts. We have a coastline almost as long as the circumference of the earth! A few hundred kilometres of development is hardly destroying our coastal environment.

I was reminded of this when last month I took, of all things, a ship from Sydney to Darwin via Brisbane and Airlie Beach. It took eight days. That says a lot about the huge distance involved. The Queensland coast is remarkable for its length, its beauty and its surprising lack of population. You can sail for hours up the

North Queensland coast without seeing any sign of human habitation. There are pristine beaches, picturesque coves, beautiful rain forests but not a soul in sight.

The size and the beauty of Northern Australia is world beating. Our ship sailed through that narrow navigable passage at Torres Strait. There you find an array of islands, including the inhabited Thursday Island, which qualify for the description “tropical paradise”.

There was only one problem: the rain.

February is the wet season in northern Australia and wet it was with a vengeance.

But unlike southern Australia, the North has plenty of water.

Which brings me to my point: it’s one of the mysteries of Australia that over the centuries the population has gravitated to the southeastern corner of the country, much of which is relatively dry. Settlers just haven’t taken to the north.

Some argue the reason is simple: the climate. Well, 240 million people live in nearby Indonesia which on the whole has a rather similar climate to northern Australia. Six or so million people crowd into Papua New Guinea.

70 million live in the tropical Philippines and so I could go on.

Mind you, Australia’s settlers have overwhelmingly come from north-western Europe. And you know what the Brits are like with weather. They want sun at any price.

Southern Australia clearly suited them better than the north.

Then there’s the argument about the soil.

Well, the soil may not be great in northern Australia but nor is it great anywhere in our ancient and very eroded continent. And despite our poor soils in the south, we’ve made a good fist of agriculture, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that tropical agriculture can flourish in South East Asia but we just can’t make it happen in Australia. Well, some bold entrepreneurial farmers have made a go of it.

Which brings me to the next problem: infrastructure. Okay, you can grow tropical crops in northern Australia but you can’t get the produce to market. I guess in the nineteenth century that was true of the whole country!

But it is, in any case, true of the north now and that is why governments, Federal, State and Territory, should look at innovative ways of funding infrastructure in the north.

But before we are able to develop northern Australia we need the leadership to make it a priority. Since there are more votes, apparently, in Rooty Hill than northern Australia, it’s tempting for the political class to ignore the north.

There are a couple of reasons why they are wrong. For a start, the north does have huge economic potential in terms of minerals, gas, agriculture and tourism. If we want Australia to continue to be a growing, evolving and progressive country, we need to use the north more than we do.

Secondly, our obsession with the southeastern corner of the country has led to significant problems with congestion, infrastructure and the environment – and all that despite the huge size of the country. If our population is to continue to grow, then at least some of that growth should be in the north.

But how to do it? Well, immigration could help. We should be telling potential investors from Asia they will get fast track approvals if they sink money in the north and we’ll let them move there as residents as well. And there may be a case for providing financial incentives to investors in the north. After all, the more they choke up the south-east, the greater the costs to governments of servicing those people.

And there’s one more point. It is a very long way from south-eastern Australia to Asia. That distance makes Australia seem remote from its region. It takes as long to fly from Singapore to Sydney as it does Singapore to Athens. But from northern Australia it’s a hop step and a jump. Australia’s tyranny of distance will turn into a proximity of opportunity to the fastest growing economies in the world.

This debate is a debate we have to have.

12 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

BUSINESS

Saving the day?

Why entrepreneurs might just be the saviours we’ve been waiting for

By David Ansett

F

or some reason the term entrepreneur has a slightly tarnished sheen to it, slightly less grubby than a used car dealer, but only slightly.

Entrepreneur is a description I avoid, despite having started up my fair share of businesses.

Yet I believe that when our children and their grandchildren look back on history, it just might be the entrepreneurs of the world they praise for saving the planet.

In late 2011 I attended a Learning University in Amsterdam with entrepreneurs from around the globe. On the opening evening of the event Severn Suzuki, daughter of environmental activist David Suzuki, was headlined as the

keynote speaker for what would prove to be an extraordinarily moving few days.

Severn presented a compelling view on just what it’s going to take to change the way we live in order to save our planet for future generations. Severn had first presented on the subject twenty years earlier as an 11 year old to the United Nations plenary session at the Earth Summit on behalf of the children of the

world. At the time Severn firmly believed that the world leaders provided our greatest hope, that they were best positioned to make the tough short term calls for the good of the long term. A decade later Severn concluded the task of election, re-election and the pull of political power were too great a force of distraction, and she would need to look elsewhere for our saviours.

In the decade that followed Severn courted the leaders of big business from around the world.

She spoke at summits and networked with the most powerful men in the corporate universe, seeking to draw them and the weight of their organisations to the cause. Now she stood before us, frustrated but not wearied by the realisation that but for a precious few, the demands of big business shareholders would almost always outweigh the change she was attempting to ignite.

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And so she stood on a small square stage one warm evening in Amsterdam, glowing in the spotlights and surrounded by four hundred of the world’s leading entrepreneurs, telling us her story. Her conclusion, so passionately communicated, was that it was the founders and owners of small and medium sized businesses who held her greatest hope in their hands. She reasoned with great conviction that unlike the politicians and leaders of global big business, small business entrepreneurs are relatively free to make decisions that take into account family, community and environment as well as profit.

Whilst the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Australia’s Lowy and Packer business dynasties have dipped their hands into their very deep pockets, they’ve done so after amassing sizable personal fortunes through business success.

These dizzyingly large donations are individually granted when and where they’re free from the grasp of shareholders and demands of commercial growth. By contrast, local businessman Dick Smith has long combined his business and social entrepreneurialism. It’s this freedom of self determination that owners of smaller enterprises take for granted – the freedom to make their own calls on their businesses impact on self,

family, community and sustainability. And it is this freedom that has the real potential to make all the difference.

In the US small business represents a little over 50% of the GDP and employs around 70% of its workforce. In the booming economies of China and India, and in the world beyond, those percentages are higher still. Whilst the media spotlight focuses on the world’s big businesses, it is the small enterprise entrepreneurs of the world who are diligently working in the shadows, driving much of the global economy.

It is only entrepreneurs and owners of smaller businesses who are able to make thousands of small but significant decisions every day with the potential to add up by sheer force of scale into a tsunami of change. Severn Suzuki laid down a challenge not only to the four hundred of us attending the University, but every entrepreneur across the globe to take up the movement, to shift the discourse from discussion to action small piece by small piece.

The combined actions of small business through considering the good of society by philanthropy, the community through engagement, or the environment through the adoption of simple, sustainable decision making, can make the difference required. It’s time for small business entrepreneurs to step up and take the lead – to adopt the same mindset that’s seen us survive, grow and thrive in our enterprises and do something with a greater purpose. I see this as not just an opportunity, but as a responsibility we share. It’s time to take the wheel. As Severn’s father David once said: ‘You are not what you say, you are what you do’.

» Peter Singline and David Ansett are cofounders and directors of Truly Deeply, a Melbourne based brand strategy and design consultancy. trulydeeply.com.au

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BUSINESS / FINANCE

Never had it so good

by Stephen Koukoulas

I

f the electorate focuses on the economy as it votes at the Federal election on September 14, the Labor Party should win. An era of rising wealth, sustained solid growth, near full employment and on-going lift in living standards are the material that should get an incumbent reelected.

While it is political poison to say to the general population, “you’ve never had it so good”, the cold, hard macroeconomic facts on the economy, real wages growth, wealth and incomes suggests Australians have never been richer, never been better off.

At a macroeconomic level, the economy grew by a healthy 3.1 percent through 2012, while annual inflation ended the year at 2.2 percent, in the lower half of the Reserve Bank’s target band. Right through 2012, the unemployment rate was low, holding between 5 and 5.5 percent which in fact locks in a decade where Australia’s unemployment rate has been below 6 percent.

This is a remarkable achievement given global events, the near depression in the developed world and the substantial structural changes that have occurred in the local economy.

While there is nothing particularly spectacular about 3.1 percent GDP growth, 2.2 percent inflation or the unemployment holding at 5.5 percent or below, to have them occurring simultaneously is rare.

Australia’s economic history has many examples where GDP growth has been well above 3 percent, but this has normally seen

inflation rise, which eats away at real incomes and forces interest rates higher. Similarly, there are many episodes where the annual inflation rate has been 2.2 percent or lower, but this has usually occurred when the unemployment rate is high and rising. To have this trifecta of excellent macroeconomic news owes a lot to the economic management of the economy and is something that is overlooked by an electorate that seems to be preoccupied with boat people, the marginal hip-pocket impact of the carbon price, the trivial levels of government debt and other ephemeral issues.

Looked at another way, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that whoever wins the election in September, they would be delighted to lock in a further three years where the macroeconomic numbers we have before us now are repeated each and every year of their term of office.

Frankly, it is just about impossible to do any better.

Having said that, it is clear that not everyone is sharing the benefits of the purple patch for the Australian economy. There are regions, industries and individuals that are not sharing the good times that the strong economy is delivering.

are succumbing to the reality of extinction due to high costs, inefficiency or some other factor outside the government control.

Where the government can and should help, and this is where the current government has done well, is to provide a framework that provides a safety net for the sectors, businesses and individuals who are hurting as the rest of the economy powers ahead.

The mining tax raised revenue to boost superannuation for those not directly involved in the boom sectors. Retraining, skills and even some financial support is allocated to individuals who lose their jobs as the sectors they work in shrink. Maintaining a strong overall economy will also see job opportunities show up in the sectors in the fast lane expand.

For all of the thousands of jobs lost in recent years in Qantas, Boral, the banks, the steel and aluminum firms, Santos, Holden, Toyota and Caltex, to name a few, there are 850,000 more people employed today than there were five years ago. Presumably the bulk of the people who were proverbially “thrown on to the unemployment scrap heap” have been reengaged elsewhere in the workforce.

On an individual level, the recent sharp rise in share prices and the resumption of what appears to be solid growth in house prices

is good news for the bulk of the electorate.

From the low point in 2012, the market value of the ASX 200 stock index has risen by close to $350 billion, including dividends, which will be a nice boost to retirees and those with a superannuation fund.

The rise in house prices has added around $125 billion to the wealth of residential property holders in the last three months alone.

This should be pleasing to the two-thirds of the population that own a house.

Having a job, rising wealth and rising real wages is good news and cannot be due to simple dumb luck. Generally prudent monetary policy and use of fiscal policy in a counter-cyclical way has underpinned the current economic strength.

The polls are showing that the Coalition will romp in at the election in September, even though the mix of hard economic news has rarely, if ever, been better.

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

Such unevenness is inevitable whether the economy is strong or weak, but it is important to emphasise that it is not the job of the RBA to set interest rates for Tasmania or manufacturing, for example, or for the government to spend too much money propping up industries that

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14 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

FEATURE In a quest to maintain equilibrium, the body’s only recourse is to dull our own sense of self, as Narcissus did. “Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy.”

The consequences to Narcissus seem like a literary exaggeration when you’re talking about the rise of online culture. Can the extension of ourselves through digital technology really become so self-destructive, as McLuhan’s reading of the myth suggests? Can we become so numb that we forget to guard against starvation or death?

Freeloading How our insatiable appetite for free content starves creativity

BY Chris Ruen

T

he debate over music piracy is frequently depicted as a war between greedy industry types and the music-loving masses, or as a futile discussion about something which is inevitable, anyway. Even amongst those who take a stand against online music theft, the argument is often constructed as one which only concerns intellectual property, and rarely looks at a wider context which takes in the full effect of the digital revolution on our hearts, minds and morals.

“Thought is done in solitude and silence,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and social critic Chris Hedges, “and we live in a culture where we fear any kind of solitude.

We have created such powerful systems of technology—most of us are hallucinating…. The internet and handheld devices have become tools which, if misused, make it impossible to think and cut us off from what’s real. We have to be very, very careful with these technologies.”

We convince ourselves that we are in control of our digital devices and that our brains will naturally adjust to new stimuli and evolve, as always. But the more we use technology, the more it controls and manipulates us in turn.

Marshall McLuhan, the radical media theorist who taught us that “the medium is the message” agreed that the only way to fully use a piece of technology, or “medium,” is to surrender oneself to it completely. But he didn’t advocate for such a surrender, because he knew it carried dire consequences.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan explored the “messages” of various mediums, from books to phones to television to clocks. McLuhan couldn’t have predicted anything quite as grand or pervasive as the internet, but his essential observations remain prescient. He noted that “hot” mediums— ones which concentrate a “high definition” of information upon one sense and require little participation by the viewer, such as radio or cinema—tend to effect hypnosis. “Cool” mediums, like television and the telephone, are of “low definition” and demand participation by the user. When applied across multiple senses, cool mediums effect hallucination.

The internet, video games and forms of virtual reality seem to combine both hot and cold, tempting our consciousness with both hypnosis and hallucination. In his essay “The Gadget Lover,” McLuhan brilliantly transforms the Greek myth of Narcissus into a parable for

our ever more hallucinatory, hypnotic, and narcotic modern lives.

His analysis shows that assuming the internet’s promise of efficiency, collaboration and “openness” will solve all of our problems in the end is like skipping through a minefield, or volunteering for a prison camp. We aren’t dealing with other people online, but with our numb, self-destructive replicants.

We commonly think of Narcissus as the man who fell in love with himself, but McLuhan points out that this misreads the story. It is not a tale of love or self-obsession, but the dulling of senses that occurs the further we extend our nervous system through media. “Narcissus is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness,” McLuhan writes. “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image…. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system…. Men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”

Such fascination is commonly seen in the popularity of social networking services like Facebook, where some of us devote more time and energy to maintaining our “profile” than we do to maintain the health of our real lives. If we aren’t careful, online avatars or an online “presence” end up demanding care and consideration at the expense of our immediate needs and health. The further we extend our senses, the more acute this irritation becomes.

The most entertaining way we use computers to become “the servomechanism of (our) own extended or repeated image” is certainly through video games, and nowhere in the world are more video games played online than in South Korea, which contained 95% of the world’s broadband internet capability as of 2011. The cities of South Korea are packed with internet parlors where citizens binge on multi-player online games.

Gaming is so popular in the country, it rises to the level of professional sport, with some gamers making upwards of $100,000 from gaming tournament winnings. Given such a national obsession, it shouldn’t be surprising that South Korea also faces epidemic levels of internet addiction. From 2009 to 2010, three tragic cases of such addiction underscored the unseen dangers of a too-willing embrace of technology, again bringing the myth of Narcissus to life.

One day in an internet parlor, a man collapsed at his chair and an ambulance was immediately called. He had been playing a video game for five straight days and had forgotten to sufficiently eat, drink, or sleep. His servomechanism on the computer screen had taken control to the degree that he no longer recognized his own basic needs for food and rest. Upon being taken to the hospital, the young man died of multiple organ failure.

Perhaps the most horrific example of digital narcosis occurred in 2010, involving a 45-year-old man and his girlfriend, a 21-yearold. The couple was expecting their first child, but simultaneously struggled with a gaming addiction. The couple had become obsessed with an online game, in which, fittingly, the goal was to successfully raise a digital child. When their infant was born, normally the most important event in an adult’s life, their obsession with the game went on, in a bizarre fashion. The couple began leaving their newborn alone in their apartment for hours at a time, while they tended to their digital child at a local internet cafe. One day, they came home to find their three-monthold, motionless. The infant had died from malnutrition.

These examples from South Korea are extreme, and it would be irresponsible to blame them exclusively on “the internet.” Most South Koreans do not die from gaming, murder their concerned parents, or commit infanticide out

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EXTRACT

The couple began leaving their newborn alone in their apartment for hours at a time, while they tended to their digital child at a local internet cafe. One day, they came home to find their three-month-old, motionless.

The infant had died from malnutrition”.

of neglect. The nation suffers from unusually high suicide rates in general, which suggests a deeper problem. Like any addiction, internet addiction does not develop in a vacuum. Yet, these extremes demonstrate that, just as all drugs carry the dangers of dependency and disassociation from the pain and joy of real life, so too does the internet. We fundamentally forget pieces of ourselves when employing anonymity, avatars, and selective reality online and the consequences of this can be tragic and far-reaching. Certainly, such disassociation makes it that much harder to understand or resolve a controversy as tricky as digital piracy.

What good is the internet’s radical potential for communication if we lose ourselves in the medium to the degree that we are no longer communicating about reality?

unnervingly echoed by the popular sentiment, “You can’t fight technology.” The more we embrace the authenticity of our digital selves, our real lives naturally feel less important in comparison to the images and “friends” we find on our faithful, mirror-like screens.

If careless, we all might become servomechanisms of our digital selves,

The debate over music piracy was not only born of the online world, but also largely waged

If connecting to the internet also creates a disconnection from reality, it isn’t surprising that online culture so often brings out the worst in us, as if our inner demons, normally tempered by the social norms of society, are suddenly freed to run wild and wreak havoc in an abstract, ostensibly victimless, digital world. Like Narcissus, though, we victimize ourselves in the process, along with the people we love and the real communities we are too desensitized to participate in.

within its glass, computer-screened curtain.

There, the controversy over file sharing was held hostage by the peculiar biases of online communication. Wrestling with the chaos and questions of a new medium was difficult enough without the loss of self that people experienced online. This numbness teased out our most vitriolic, irresponsible, and selfdestructive characteristics, making reasonable conversation nearly impossible.

The internet presented a genuinely new and fascinating set of problems to our traditional notions of commerce, creativity and copyright.

Consumers, creators, distributors and investors were handed an opportunity to join forces and make the most of the historic digital revolution.

Unfortunately, the incendiary nature of online communication, combined with deeply flawed attempts by the RIAA to fight piracy and good ol’ fashioned human fallibility have created a mess.

Individual consumers have gone numb to their own relationship to mass culture. They don’t feel their own impact upon society as consumers and, quite logically, assume their actions and choices about whether to pay are meaningless. Who wouldn’t choose “free” under such assumptions? But, behind free content’s superficial illusion of more lies a long-term reality of less. Sooner or later, it is something we will all have to pay for.

» This is an edited extract from Freeloading: how our insatiable appetite for free content starves creativity by Chris Ruen. Published by Scribe ($27.95) and e-book (RRP $18.99) » Chris Ruen is an author from Brooklyn whose essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The New York Press and Stereogum.

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16 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

HEALTH AN EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN

by Natasha Stott Despoja

I

n the midst of an interminable eightmonth election campaign, it is worth reflecting that parts of the world move slowly towards democracy and often by means of great personal sacrifice by some remarkable human beings.

In February, I met with one: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Daw is the honorific used in Burmese names). Myanmar’s democracy icon.

The visit with Daw Suu was the culmination of a Burnet Institute delegation that included visits to villages in peri-urban Yangon, meetings with Government officials and engagement with the international aid and research community.

The Burnet Institute is one of Australia’s leading medical research institutes, but we are also an accredited Non-Government Organisation (NGO). We have worked in Myanmar for a decade, initially in capacity building of HIV prevention, care and support and, now, in maternal and child health, and education.

We drove to the ‘new’ capital Nay Pyi Taw which is five hours from Yangon (or Rangoon as Daw Suu still calls it). We navigated dirt roads, among construction sites, to reach her home and were greeted with tea and cake as we huddled around her cosy table with her and her assistant Dr Tin Mar Aung.

Barre-Sinoussi) and, each alternate year, a great humanitarian, reflecting Burnet’s two key elements: world leading research and practical action.

Daw Suu was aware of Burnet’s work and asked testing questions and offered comments. She had strong views on the need for medical professionals in regional and rural areas, and was passionate about maternal and child health as well as HIV and AIDS (singling out Burnet’s innovative CD4 point of care test in her comments).

She did not spend time repudiating the Government, nor attacking the junta. Nor did she reflect on her time in detention. Instead, she expressed her hopefulness of political progress, reminding us that “whatever we may think of the Government”, the Parliament was taking its role seriously.

This attitude could constitute an electoral challenge for her, as her willingness to work with government provides opportunities for the more “hard-core anti-military activists” wary of the “army-dictated constitution”.

We were impressed by the keenness of senior ministers, and other government officials, to engage in constructive dialogue about the challenges facing their people, especially in women’s and children’s health.

Despite being over-worked and in high demand (a succession of visitors wait outside her humble capital home), she was elegant and calm. She appears younger than her 67 years, showing no outward signs of her incredible selflessness and sacrifice.

Although the decade has seen marginal improvements in health (a dozen years ago, the World Health Organization ranked Myanmar’s health system the lowest of 190 countries), women are still 50 times more likely to die in childbirth than in Australia.

One purpose of our meeting was to invite Daw Suu to give the prestigious Burnet Oration.

It is our annual lecture that showcases the leading talents in medical research (the 2011 oration was given by Nobel Laureate Francoise

We met with mothers’ groups in the villages who described their work on sexual and reproductive health matters (from identifying pregnancy complications to educating their peers about breast-feeding).

Natasha Stott Despoja AM visiting one of the Burnet Institute’s women’s and children’s health programs in Pyitawthat village in Myanmar.

Part of the welcoming party for the Burnet delegation in Pyitawthat village, Myanmar.

We also heard their pleas for more skilled birth attendants, birthing kits, contraceptives, vaccinations, and money for hospital referrals.

Daw Suu said she loved Australia and was keen to visit, perhaps later this year, although, after learning the federal election date, she did say she was keen to avoid the election. She and I both, we joked.

She faces her own party’s political growing pains. In March she acknowledged the “defects” in her party, stating, “If we want to build this nation into a real democracy, we, the National League for Democracy, have to change behaviour, even with ourselves.”

Daw Suu’s passion for her people (their rights, safety, health and prosperity) is evident clearly still. This is a woman who voluntarily parted from her husband and sons, and from most of the comforts of life, to put her country or, more importantly, its people first.

It is hard for us to imagine the extent of her sacrifice. Such sacrifice is what democracy – or the hope of democracy – demanded of her. She is at the very top of the heroes of democracy: she endured, she suffered, and she never wavered.

She is a phenomenal human being. It is clear that the freedom and welfare of the Burmese people are to her what we keep for our families, our own ambitions and dreams of a better Australia. She is different because she has given her all.

» Natasha Stott Despoja AM is former leader of the Australian Democrats and a Board Member, Burnet Institute.

Myanmar: targeting public health

by Brendan Crabb

I

n just three short years, much has changed in Myanmar. Unbelievably so!

Earlier this month, on March 10, the previously outlawed Myanmar National League for Democracy (NLD) was permitted to hold their first-ever party conference. There, Myanmar opposition leader, and until recently long-term political prisoner, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was re-elected as NLD President.

When I first visited visited Myanmar in 2009 it was still very much a repressive dictatorship having been ruled by an ironfisted military junta for the previous 50 years.

Everything was tough; visas to allow entry into the country (several false starts, half a year of waiting), many restrictions on where I could go and whom I could see (even though the organisation I represent had worked openly in Myanmar for the past decade), and a people who were cautious, nervous to speak their mind openly, and definitely cynical about prospects for a brighter future.

But as I discovered on a return visit just a month ago with my colleagues from the

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MEDICAL RESEARCH

Professor Brendan Crabb with Burnet’s Board Chair, Alastair Lucas AM in Pyitawthat Village.

says nothing more needs to be done. Stories like this suggest a country that is interested in improving itself.

Burnet Institute, change has been profound.

Indeed, the fact that we met at all with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, in a free and open way at her house in the capital Nay Pi Taw, is evidence enough that the political climate has most certainly changed. Aung San Suu Kyi told us, with an optimistic air, that the Myanmar’s fledgling democracy has given rise to a “functioning legislature”.

The NLD’s first-ever party conference followed last year’s remarkable sweeping victory whereby they won all but two of the 45 seats up for grabs at the 2012 by-elections, and in one of those seats it failed to win, the NLD didn’t field a candidate. Given that extraordinary momentum one could have understood the ruling ex- and currentmilitary elite to be nervous about such an event as the NLD party conference, yet go ahead it did.

An official meeting with the Health Minister Dr Pe Thet Khin, a pediatrician by training and a thoughtful and knowledgeable man it seemed to us, was also very positive. Wonderful to have that meeting at all, something that did not seem possible three years ago, but also to be speaking frankly about the burdening health issues and how groups like ours can work with government and non-government agencies to improve the lives of Myanmar’s 50-60 million people.

Issues are now spoken about in a more transparent way. Up until 2010 the estimated vaccination rates in Myanmar for hepatitis B, one of the world’s deadliest and most widespread viral illnesses, were running at 99 percent but in 2011 this fell to just 52 percent.

Paradoxically this ‘fall’ is welcome because it is far more likely to be accurate and of course more sensibly informs public health policy than a figure of 99 percent; a number that

On a humanitarian front, the problems in Myanmar are still enormous. With an average annual income of under $2,000 per person, Myanmar is the poorest country in South East Asia and its life expectancy is about 25 years less than in Australia. The chances of a mother dying during or soon after childbirth are astonishingly high, as is the risk of death and disability to newborns and young children.

Such is the concern about the emergence of a malaria parasite that is resistant to last line anti-malarial drugs in neighbouring Western Cambodia that Health Minister Khin travelled to Sydney last October for an AusAID conference examining the issue. A related tale can be told for tuberculosis and drug resistance in Myanmar and surrounds.

Much can now be done now on all health fronts. Many more doors are now open. There is now the capacity for the Burnet Institute to work in partnership with government

agencies and other partner organisations, even US-based ones that have not previously had a presence in Myanmar, to build strong and effective health systems.

And most importantly, in-country research is now possible in a manner that three years ago I would have thought was nigh on impossible.

Just as is the case here in Australia, without research, public health policy is a crapshoot.

With it, meaningful improvements to the health of the Myanmar people become possible through programs targeted at priority issues using tried and tested methods tailor-made for the country.

For a country that only spends $34 per capita annually on healthcare, such laser targeting of health interventions is essential.

» Professor Brendan Crabb is Director and CEO, Burnet Institute. burnet.edu.au

18 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

HEALTH

Sleep Wellness the overnight remedy

By Professor Avni Sali

M

ost people can relate to the feelings of impaired daytime function and fatigue, lack of concentration and memory problems associated with a poor night’s sleep. But did you know that poor or insufficient sleep can also be a major health risk? British researchers have found sleep deprivation affects hundreds of genes involved with inflammation, immunity and our cells’ response to stress. Sleep disorders, including insomnia and sleep apnoea which can present as a snoring problem, have been shown in studies to correlate with a range of health issues such as obesity, cancer and cardiovascular diseases including hypertension, strokes and heart attacks.

Just one night of short sleep duration can induce insulin resistance, a major component of type 2 diabetes.

Abnormal sleep patterns predict lower life expectancy, and individuals with insomnia are more likely to develop a mood disorder, substance abuse and other adverse health conditions.

Sleep disorders can also affect quality of life, increase the chance of injury and put a strain on relationships. Research indicates that young people getting less than five hours sleep per night are tripling their chances of developing a mental illness. Lack of sleep is as dangerous as alcohol when behind the wheel of a car.

A study conducted by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US found that 30 percent of adults report an average sleep duration of six hours or less. Sleep disorders can happen to anyone at any time, regardless of socioeconomic

status or type of work. The stressors of modern life, with its high ‘wired-to-technology’ gearing is considered a major cause of sleep disorders today but in reality our sleep problems started with the introduction of the light bulb and artificial light, which has dramatically shifted our typical sleep-awake patterns so that we no longer ‘rise and retire with the sun.’ Our present culture of sleep deprivation is pushing us past our biological capacity.

Sleep is an integral part of our biological rhythm. These rhythms are essential for health and wellbeing and provide cyclical times in which the body can perform a whole range of complex hormonal (including the sex hormones) and neurochemical processes that help keep us healthy. While we are asleep our bodies repair DNA, build and repair muscles and tissues, and regulate weight and mood chemicals. Leptin and Ghrelin, the two chemicals associated with hunger and appetite, are affected by sleep deprivation, and depression and behaviour are both affected by the amount of sleep we experience. Sleep is important for processing memories and newly learned tasks and is essential for the healthy functioning of the 75 trillion cells that comprise the human body. During sleep there is an increased secretion of growth hormone (GH) which is critical in fat breakdown, liver regeneration and normalisation of blood sugar.

Sleep also functions as an antioxidant of the brain because free radicals are removed while we are asleep. Healthy sleep should be one of our primary health concerns.

Healthy sleep consists of two types of sleep that alternate through the night. Non-REM sleep is slow-wave sleep, which comprises about 75 percent of sleep time, REM sleep, which accounts for the remaining 25 percent, is characterised by an increase in brain activity with active dreaming, decreased muscle tone, variable heart and respiratory rates and rapid eye movements. It is a cyclical state that occurs every 90 minutes or so and can last between five and 30 minutes. REM sleep is considered vital to health and many sleep disorders, including a lack of sleep, are problematic because of their impact on REM-cycle sleep.

and managing stress. These are all important components of ‘sleep hygiene’. The use of sleep medications is rapidly increasing – almost 10 million prescriptions are written annually in Australia for sleep medications. These can be useful as short-term aids, but it is more beneficial to review lifestyle causes and make the necessary adjustments. The Integrative Medicine model provides us with a range of sleep-promoting interventions that deal specifically with causes rather than symptoms and can also be beneficial to overall health and wellbeing.

Integrative options include:

Insomnia, one of the most common sleep disorders, can be experienced in different forms. Symptoms of insomnia include difficulty in initiating sleep, difficulty in maintaining sleep, waking up too early, and non-restorative or poor quality sleep. Over 50 percent of insomnia cases are caused by psychological factors, including stress and anxiety.

Tips for getting a better night’s sleep commonly focus on getting to bed earlier, changing bedroom conditions (temperature, darkness, noise), avoiding stimulants such as caffeine and alcohol, maintaining regular sleep times

Cognitive behavioural therapy Is a psychotherapeutic approach and research studies indicate that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be more effective than sleeping medication for treating chronic insomnia.

Relaxation/meditation/yoga Relaxation techniques can be useful when stress and worry causes sleep disruptions. In a recent study, mindfulness mediation had significant benefits for improving quality of sleep. Dealing with the underlying causes of stress where possible, as with CBT, is also advisable.

“Swisse – the confidence I’m giving my body what it needs.”

Mark Webber – Formula 1® Winner

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HEALTH

Exercise Many studies show exercise during the day promotes better sleep. Regular physical exercise may promote relaxation and raise core body temperature in ways that are beneficial to initiating and maintaining sleep.

Sunshine and bright light therapy Increased daytime exposure to the sun (and correlating improved vitamin D levels) and reduced exposure to bright lights in the evening (including TVs, computer screens, smart phones and artificial light) can be used to ‘reboot’ the circadian rhythms and melatonin production in the body.

Diet Diet can play an important role in sleep. Losing weight can improve sleep. Many of the brain chemicals necessary for good sleep can be found in specific foods. If intake is problematic there is also the possibility of obtaining these essentials in supplement form, under the guidance of an integrative GP or health professional.

• Melatonin: Is a hormone made in the pineal gland in the brain. It is produced from the amino acid tryptophan. Sunshine stimulates

melatonin production and darkness stimulates its release from the pineal gland.

• L-tryptophan: Is a precursor to melatonin that is necessary for the body to produce both melatonin and serotonin. It can be sourced from many foods, particularly proteins, including milk, or taken as a supplement.

Foods with substances that may enhance sleep

Foods that may adversely affect sleep

• Cherries. Are one of the few natural foods to contain melatonin, the chemical that helps control our body’s internal clock.

• Milk. Contains the amino acid tryptophan, a precursor to the brain chemical serotonin.

• Complex carbs. Such as quinoa, barley, buckwheat and whole-wheat bread, are, in general, good for sleep but it’s not a great idea to binge on carbs before bedtime.

• Bananas. Help promote sleep because they contain the natural muscle-relaxants magnesium and potassium. They are also a good carb.

• Turkey. Like milk, contains tryptophan, a chemical that can make people feel sleepy. Hummus, lentils, eggs, and many nuts and seeds are also good sources of tryptophan.

• Sweet potatoes. Provide sleeppromoting complex carbohydrates, and the muscle-relaxant potassium.

• Valerian tea. Can promote drowsiness.

The root of the valerian plant speeds the onset of sleep and improves sleep quality.

Chamomile is also useful.

• Cheeseburgers. Have a super high fat content guaranteed to be a sleep killer.

Fat stimulates the production of acid in the stomach, which can spill up into your esophagus, causing heartburn.

• Alcohol. including wine, metabolises quickly in your system and causes you to wake up multiple times during the night. And you’re more likely to snore.

• Coffee. Contains caffeine, which is a central nervous stimulant.

• Energy drinks. Are very high in caffeine. They are best avoided later in the day or, even better, avoided completely.

• Soft drinks. Contain lots of sugar, caffeine and the preservative sodium benzoate (211) and other chemicals that can aggravate the gastrointestinal tract and promote acid reflux.

• Heavily spiced foods. Can keep you awake at night, especially if the spices contribute to heartburn. Combined with a high fat dish, they are a recipe for insomnia.

• Magnesium: Is helpful especially when restless leg syndrome (RLS) is affecting sleep.

Herbal medicines Both valerian and hops have shown efficacy for the treatment of insomnia. Hops is well known as a bitter agent in the brewing industry and has a long history of use for sleep disorders.

Valerian is proven to improve sleep quality without any other side effects. Taken together valerian and hops may be even more effective.

Review of other medications A major cause of sleep disorders can be other medications. Anti-depressants are known to interrupt REM-sleep cycles and while it may be necessary to use medication to relieve pain symptoms that interfere with sleep, this can often create a counter-productive cycle. Alternative

pain relief strategies can be explored.

The average adult needs between six and eight hours sleep every night, although it is difficult to know how much sleep a particular individual should have. Adolescents and children generally require more sleep than adults. Both too little and too much sleep can negatively affect health.

Contrary to popular belief, we cannot ‘catch up on lost sleep’ on the weekend, and we are often unable to realise just how mentally impaired we are by our sleep deficit. We need to learn to sleep naturally again, and make it our health goal to awaken refreshed each morning, without the invasion of stress-inducing alarm clocks! Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Finish each day before you

begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two.’ His advice not only underlines the importance of good sleep, but also provides us with a terrific mantra for optimal health.

» 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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20 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

FEATURE

TASMANIA’s

Maria Island: walking through Nirvana

by Michael Hince

Y

ou don’t have to be over fifty to have a wish list and one item on my must do list was ticked off recently when I took the four day, three night Maria Island Walk, off Tasmania’s east coast about an hour’s drive from Hobart.

There are 334 islands surrounding Tasmania with Flinders and King the better known and havens like Bruny and Maria less so.

One of the Great Walks of Australia, albeit still largely undiscovered, the Maria Island Walk was an exhilarating, unforgettable adventure – for all the right reasons.

Occasionally there’s a time and place when and where everything just seamlessly coalesces in the blink of an eyelid – such was the case the moment I donned my hiking gear and waded ashore on a pristine, isolated beach that adorned the island.

On departure, just dump your accumulated stress in the metaphorical bin provided and immerse yourself in an abundance of flora and fauna and history aplenty. Unwind, breathe deeply and let the rugged and beautiful scenery envelop and beguile you. Best of all, luxuriate in the tranquillity, remoteness and unbridled sense of freedom and serenity Maria Island offers.

To this ethereal environment simply add

convivial company, friendly professional guides, gourmet cuisine and the best of Tasmanian cool climate wines and voilà! you have Nirvana.

After a day’s tracking (without having to carry provisions or gear – it’s all laid on for you at the wilderness camps) imagine a pre-dinner swim in the temperate, crystal-clear waters of a deserted beach where French explorers once set foot.

Then stroll to a candle-lit table for a sumptuous repast comprising of the finest Tassie tucker and ripper cool climate Tassie wines, all served with impeccable, albeit casual aplomb.

Then envision yourself meandering off to your luxurious bush accommodation and

snoozing off to sleep to the gentle, rhythmical sounds of the nearby surf caressing the shore. Well you have a couple of nights of such hedonism ahead of you, interrupted by invigorating walks, sublime scenery and layer upon layer of history that unfolds as you journey along.

The Maria Island Walk is simply what you care to make it, be you a nature lover, a history buff or simply someone in search of peace and tranquillity in like company. Wine buffs often allude to the role terroir has to play in making fine wine – well to apply this analogy to Maria Island is to say the island has a definite and

strong sense of place, regardless from what perspective you approach it.

For me, the walk threw up a whole series of highlights that culminated in animated conversation over a sublime final night dinner at Bernacchi House in Darlington (or San Diego as it was once called), rounded off by a glass or two of fine wine in the homestead’s front lavender garden in the company of curious Cape Barren geese and an inquisitive wombat or two.

I recommend that you add this to your wish list immediately – for Tasmania and Maria Island are not going to remain undiscovered for much longer!

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 21

TASMANIA

9 ways to enjoy

2. The Beer Wander around Australia’s oldest brewery, Cascade, while enjoying a pot or two of their various brews. If homebrew is more your style then Moo Brew or the Two Metre Tall Company have plenty to offer. cascadebreweryco.com.au moobrew.com.au 2mt.com.au

3. The Wine The Coal River Valley, just out of Hobart, has wineries aplenty from straight up cellar doors to those equipped with restaurants and quaint cottages. The Southern Wine Route will make sure you get a well rounded experience. winetasmania.com.au/wine-route/southernwine-route

4. The Heritage Walk around Hobart’s heritage listed building sites, stroll around Battery Point’s tiny cottages and grand homes or pub-crawl around on the Old Hobart Pub Tour with Hobart Historic Tours.

The UNESCO World Heritage listed Cascades Female Factory, Australia’s most significant site associated with female convicts, lies in the shadow of Mount Wellington. hobarthistorictours.com.au cascadefemalefactory.wordpress.com

5. The Waterfront Life The place where all the action is! Stay at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, which ignited the art hotel craze around Australia or book yourself into the sleek serviced apartments that are Sullivans Cove Apartments. Both abodes will have you living the life amongst Hobart’s hippest eateries. thehenryjones.com sullivanscoveapartments.com.au

urbanadventures.com peppermintbay.com.au/homepage_pbc.php

7. Mount Wellington Hobart lies in the shadows of the majestic Mount Wellington. The more adventurous can tackle the Mount Wellington Descent where you take a minibus to the summit, grab a bicycle, helmet and safety vest and make your way down the mountain before meeting at the Cascade Brewery for a quick ale and then a leisurely ride past the Female Factory, South Hobart and the quaint Battery Point on your way to Hobart’s waterfront. mtwellingtondescent.com.au

8. Pennicott Wilderness Journeys Take to the seas with Pennicott Wilderness Journeys for a trip along ancient towering sea cliffs, past blow holes, deep sea caves, kelp forests and breathtaking wildlife including albino wallabies, seals, dolphins, whales, seabirds and birds of prey. pennicottjourneys.com.au

9. Bruny Island Cruise on over to the bustling Bruny Island packed with eateries, foodie experiences, stunning surrounds, fascinating fauna and a luxury retreat if you find one day on Bruny Island just isn’t enough. pennicottjourneys.com.au/bruny-island-cruises parks.tas.gov.au/natparks/sthbruny adventurebayretreat.com.au

A bright future, defined by a rich past.

The University of Tasmania was founded over 123 years ago, making it one of Australia’s oldest universities.

Today we’re recognised as an international leader, ranked in the top 3% of universities in the world.* It’s that merging of rich heritage with strength of character that guarantees our greatest achievements are still to come.

utas.edu.au | 13UTAS *Academic Ranking of World Universities 2012

CRICOS Provider Code: 00586B

hobartwalks.com

6. Wild Waters Jump on The Hobart Paddle for a leisurely kayaking tour that offers history to boot or cruise your way to Peppermint Bay where you’ll be treated to a three course lunch and the chance to soak up the glorious views of Peppermint Bay, Bruny Island and Woodbridge.

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1. The Arts Scene – HobART Walks Choose from four art walks that will help you discover the hidden artistic treasures within the city. Walks start from an affordable $39.

22 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

FEATURE / TASMANIA

Creativity abounds on island state

Australia’s gourmet larder

F

A

by Michael Hince

real gastronomic, culinary and vinous buzz, excitement and energy pervades Tasmania nowadays and nowhere is this more apparent than in Hobart, rapidly becoming populated with a diverse, eclectic array of restaurants, cafés, specialty food stores, delicatessens, gastro-pubs and pop-up food outlets.

or a small island, Tasmania has an extraordinary artistic life. With a high population of artists, craftspeople and intellectuals, the state and the University of Tasmania are moving together into an even brighter and more dynamic creative future.

There’s fresh, succulent seafood aplenty at Fishy Business at Constitution Dock, some intriguing cheeses (including Nick Haddow’s Bruny Island brand), oils, condiments, vegetables and exotic organically-grown produce at The Common Ground store in Salamanca Place; the Wursthaus Kitchen in Montpellier Street boasts a deli selection to rival many a mainland counterpart.

The creative industries of Tasmania and the education of UTAS students will soon receive a further boost with the establishment of the University’s $75 million Academy of Creative Industries and Performing Arts (ACIPA) following the announcement late last year of $37 million in funding from the competitive Education Investment Fund Regional Priorities Round.

Progressive discussions are highly valued in the Tasmanian community and UTAS contributes to the intellectual life of the island with public lectures, forums and academic comment and analysis in the media.

A range of academics from the University’s arts and social sciences schools are collaborating to hold an innovative art exhibition during Tasmania’s renowned Ten Days on the Island event, held in the historic Domain House, the original home of the University.

Domain House – the original home of the University of Tasmania (est 1890) – will soon host an innovative art exhibition as part of the renowned Ten Days on the Island event.

UTAS also has a keen involvement in the state’s literary community. Several University staff members and graduates are among the short-listed authors for 2013’s Tasmanian Literary Prizes. This year’s Tasmanian Writers’ Festival, The Shock of the Now, will also feature a variety of UTAS participants, including: historian Henry Reynolds, former

foreign correspondent John Martinkus and award-winning novelists Danielle Wood and Rohan Wilson.

With UTAS as a leader in the vibrant artistic and intellectual life, Tasmania is taking centre stage as a beacon of thriving creativity in our nation.

The University’s hidden treasure trove

Roman marble torso of an heroic male figure, probably originally part of a relief frieze, 1st cent. AD, probably from Asia Minor.

Nestled in the centre of the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay campus is an (almost) hidden treasure trove, the John Elliott Classics Museum.

In 1954 the then Professor of Classics at UTAS, J.R Elliott, initiated the acquisition of ancient Greek vases with a view to creating a collection which would serve both as a teaching adjunct to the courses in UTAS School of History and Classics and provide an exhibition of original antiquities accessible to the public.

The museum is proud to have maintained Professor Elliott’s vision as it serves the University, primary and secondary schools and the public.

It houses beautiful examples of the art and culture of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece, Etruria and Rome.

It contains approximately 800 pieces

with new additions purchased or donated on a regular basis.

A highlight of the collection is the bronze statuette of the Roman messenger god Mercury which went on public display for the first time in Australia in 2012, and has already attracted crowds of curious visitors.

For more than a century, the statuette remained out of public view, admired only by the aristocratic owners of a French chateau and their guests. Dating to the Second Century AD, it is a recent and very significant acquisition by the Classics Museum.

Tours are available on request for members of the public and school or special interest groups. The museum is open Monday to Thursday 9am to 4pm (closed 12noon-1pm).

For more information, please email Classics.Museum@utas.edu.au

You can sample sensational cool climate wines that never make it to the mainland at Tim Goddard’s Cool Wine in Criterion St. Savour some delectable treats like a goat’s cheese & onion tart at Jackman & Ross in Victoria St. or sample the contemporary fare at the Brunswick Hotel in Liverpool St. If you are a sweet tooth, you’ll love the Retro Fudge Bar in Harrington St or if you are into exotic spices then Spice World in the Bank Arcade is irresistible – just follow the alluring scents.

Tassie is an organic farming mecca and produces a mind-boggling array of quality produce. I suggest you try some Tassal gravlax, Cape Grim beef or Get Shucked oysters, and when in season, some mouth-watering scallops.

And to refresh your palate and quench your thirst try some pure Cape Grim rain water or some deliciously refreshing Lucaston Park Orchards apple juice.

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 23

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

FASHION items they found at op shops.

“They’ve pulled it apart and recreated. One designer turned two pairs of men’s pants into a dress; we’ve had people use human hair. All things that have been deemed dispensable.”

And it’s quite a place for the designers to be showing their work. Central to the event is the gala night, where a runway show with the winning frocks is put on for industry professionals and the works are celebrated.

On the same evening the annual fashion film is seen for the first time. This film shows the general public about the designers in their own backyards, and has also gone viral in the past in places like the USA, Europe and China.

The Spirit of the Black Dress

By Katherine Smyrk

T

he fashion industry, worth about $450 billion worldwide, is not one to be taken lightly. Yet while it employs a vast number of people and contributes greatly to many economies, it is also doing its fair share of damage.

According to the group ‘Global Action for Fashion’, of that $450 billion, only $3 billion is deemed to be fair trade or environmentally sustainable.

The entire lifecycle of the fashion industry has an environmental impact. This includes harvesting and production of raw materials, packaging, transport, consumption and disposal. For example, around 40% of textiles produced in the world are polyester, which MELBreview1/4page

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is made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource.

In 2009 Jane Hayes and Tullia Jack decided that the industry they loved needed an exciting and stimulating way to move away from this damage. So they created an event to promote the importance of sustainability in fashion. And thus was born The Spirit of the Black Dress.

black dress. The organisers pick the top 10 and showcase them around Melbourne. Through something as simple as a black dress – an item that many women around the world have in their wardrobe – they are showing that sustainability can be exciting and imaginative.

But it’s also exciting design-wise, and represents a chance for up-and-coming designers to showcase their innovative ideas to the Australian fashion industry.

“From a design perspective they can’t use colour to trick the eye; they have to think outside the square, using different cuts and textiles. We get more avant-garde things, but it’s also relatable to the general public,” explains Hayes.

The premise also rails against the idea that to be in fashion, you have to be constantly producing and buying brand new things.

But this event is not just one night; it is a multi-faceted approach to spreading the word about sustainable fashion. There is an industry talk on March 12 that represents sustainability, creativity and business and creates a space where designers and the general public alike can come and learn from the experts.

A free magazine will also be circulating the streets of Melbourne, not just promoting the event, but educating people about fashion and its ability to be sustainable. Then from March 18 to April 1, a public exhibition will be held at the Intercontinental Rialto, which showcases the dresses, the fashion film and designers’ bios. It is here that people can also see a photo exhibition about The Spirit of the Black Dress.

Now in its fifth year, this self-funded, entirely volunteer run event is only growing larger. “We’ve got a lot of love behind it and all the volunteers definitely put our all – our hearts, bodies and spirits behind this project,” says Hayes.

“The fashion industry is a big contributor to environmental damage. How do we change that?” asks Hayes. “How do we show people that sustainability can be beautiful, can be sexy? It’s not just wearing a hessian sack.”

“A lot of people love going by trends, purchasing pieces that aren’t meant to last a lifetime, and this impacts greatly on the environment. We want what we want and we want it now. We’re an instant gratification generation,” says Hayes.

“We want to encourage people to come along to exhibition and see everything for themselves.

Whether for education or just for the love of art and design.”

The premise is simple. Australian designers submit their versions of a sustainably produced

The idea with this event is to repurpose, redesign, reimagine; some designers using

thespiritoftheblackdress.com.au lmff.com.au

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24 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

COLUMNISTS THIRD AGE Examined lives

BY Shirley Stott Despoja

W

I first learnt of Socrates’ views when I was a Philosophy 1 student aged 17 at the feet of the great and greatly feared Professor John Anderson. He walked up and down, mostly looking at his own feet, no doubt to avoid the sight of the silly young things in his lecture room. Anderson also went on quite a bit to us about whether Socrates’ wife Xanthippe was a shrew. I am not too sad that I have forgotten what his conclusion was. But what I was actually doing while looking up “Examined Life” was searching for a book by a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz, which I had been told was full of great stories about understanding ourselves with the help of a clever, sympathetic analyst like him. The Examined Life is published by Vintage Books, London. Book stores have it, but I read it on my iPad, the drawback of which is that I can’t lend it to anyone.

The stories are case histories: sad, earthy, cautionary, shocking. A married man, father of grown up children, suddenly discovers at age 70 that he is gay; Grosz is spat at for a year by a nine-year-old boy whose anger keeps him from sadness; a patient calls her husband “sweetie” when she no longer desires him and Grosz calls

it “sugar-coated hate.” The book begins: “I want to tell you … about a patient who shocked me.” (Just about all his patients shocked me.)

Grosz gets a letter from the fiancée of his young male suicidal patient notifying him of his death.

Much anguish among those who treated him. Six months later he gets a phone message from the patient confessing that he had faked his death and the letter. What an attention-getter. It takes avoidance to a new level. Grosz encounters him at the cinema some years later with his wife.

How lucky are the psychoanalysts to get abundant riveting stories while being paid to listen. But I have a spasm of squirm. Grosz says he’s “changed names and altered all identifying details.” Hang on. Surely people would recognise their own stories here, even with changes. Who would risk blurting to Grosz if they thought it would be in his next book?

Maybe Grosz, like the Pope, is thinking of retirement and thought it worth the risk.

But we can be sure that the book that is not coming is “The Examined Life: Tales from the Confessional,” by ex-Pope Benedict. It would knock Grosz’s book for six. But it ain’t gonna happen, folks.

to Rowland S Howard, the late guitar hero/pop icon/daemon Melbourne suburban rock’n’roll dark star. I demurred on this too. Not for want of respect for RSH but it seemed to be playing to that 80s crowd again. What about something else? Then I got a call from Harry, Rowland’s brother, who I am glad to call a friend and comrade and it’s different when a friend asks you to do something. So I was going to MC a night of performances of Rowland’s songs – in chronological order – done by a gang of players and singers, some of who were match fit and others who hadn’t been near a stage for two decades or more. It was gonna be interesting.

The show took off like a firestorm and sold out with mentions on social media only. No postering or pimping on radio- people just took the idea and nodded and took out their credit cards. Rowland still has pull.

The full house soaked up all the sound and the room was fantastic. MEMO in St Kilda – a heritage listed building behind the Army and Navy Club that hadn’t been used for three decades or more. Holding about 400-500 people comfortably over two levels. St Kilda used to be

full of these beautiful rooms; it seemed to breed them. You never got to the end of it. People lived in decaying old mansions and former embassies.

Poor people ascending grand, dilapidated staircases to their one-room abodes. From the first notes of the first band it was just right. So apt that a tribute to Rowland would be in a venue that was like some strange old school hall where a lot of punk rock shows would have been put on.

It was odd, and music is great in those situations.

Not so formal an occasion.

I was to try and keep some sort of flow happening as the different players came on and off. Not so difficult really. The music flowed from the Young Charlatans to the Birthday Party to These Immortal Souls to Rowland’s solo works. I warned the audience that the performers were a mixture of hardened pros with exteriors so tough that they no longer could get in touch with their “real” or “inner” selves at all – damaged and perverted beyond all human recognition – and delicate, faun-like amateurs who had no such distinctions between inner and outer or even performance and real life. I asked the people to be equally as cruel to all the performers. I advised the musicians to be as equally cruel to all the people in the room.

The sound and the aristocratic ambience set the tone off perfectly. The show lurched forward and back. I took the rudder every now and again and did my best to go closer to some dangerous rocks to add a little frisson of imminent chaos and destruction when a moment seemed to present itself. I used a fan for a prop on the first night and a pear for the second.

Performers included Penny Ikinger, Jonnine and Conrad Standish, Ron Rude, Tex Perkins, Mick Harvey, Genevieve McGuckin, Bronwyn Bonney, Brian Hooper, Gareth Liddiard and JP Shilo. There was another Tex there, Tex Napalm from Germany.

He was travelling with Dimi Dero from Paris. I struck up a chat with the latter, telling him about the “So Frenchy So Chic” discs that are issued in

Australia every year. He hadn’t heard of the series and was unimpressed by the names I said were to be found on them. Too pop, I guess. “What do you like? I asked in the way of casual conversation.

“Australian rock!” he pretty much sneered in my direction. A true believer. I was intrigued and asked what kind. “Radio Birdman and the Saints,” he said, as if delivering news of arcane figures from the fringes. “That’s OK – a bit old though,” was my only response. We didn’t have that much in common after that. As is my want, I didn’t wear any signifying rock’n’roll patches or shapes. Looked a bit square I guess. An old smoothie in lime green pastel slacks and a white T. There was an added element in the air for this tremulous community in that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were in town that very weekend.

Would Nick appear? There was a seat and table reserved for him upstairs in the mezzanine area. Part of the narrative, for some people, around Rowland was that Nick got too much attention and his former comrade was robbed.

Not really true but people need these kinds of dramatic tropes in their minds.

Many old friends and ghosts were in the room. Trembling in the dark. Many young people as well. Rowland’s image and dark, glamorous narrative have the power to live on for a long time. I’d been to the launch of his “Teenage Snuff Film” album in 1999 and half the room had been Japanese girls. People thought they owned him, and still do.

The show was on for two nights and went exceedingly well. The venue people are very hopeful of the room being a continuing success. It should be. It really is a sweet spot and I hope the locals get to treasure it. The Port Phillip council should do everything to help. Let’s hope they do.

Now, St Kilda needs a couple more clubs of smaller size and it’ll be back on the entertainment map again.

Photo: Campbell Manderson

hat a fuss about the Pope retiring. At the age of 85, why wouldn’t he choose to put up his pretty red shoes and sit dozing in the sun with his cat and his dogma?

What an option it must be, after blessing all those medals and sorting out thorny issues, to retire to a monastery and have star-struck nuns bring him pizza and chocolate biscuits and a little non-sacramental wine. If not now, when, he might ask? It does rather depend on expectations of an afterlife, but I don’t remember being promised anything more blissful than that.

So no more uncomfortable Pope mobile, being blamed for the appalling activities of his underlings, having to think about birth control at 85, and day after day forbidding, forbidding…

This is so contrary to the inclinations of most

people his age. For one thing, few of us in the third age have the power to forbid anything, and as we are confronted with life’s brevity, we want everyone to have a good time short of anything illegal.

Retirement is a beautiful thing. Do you suppose Elizabeth II has rung him and told him he’s a lucky dog? The tabloids have hinted for ages that she should hand over to Prince Charles, but she, unlike the Pope, has family to consider. He is free to enjoy the sport of watching the cardinalate, set do each other in scrambling for the throne.

Pope Benedict the Ex will now have time to live the life. And in third age, the life to live is the examined life, just like Socrates said.

Socrates actually said that the unexamined life was not worth living, probably one of the most pull-yourself-up-short statements we encounter, if we are lucky, as we muddle through our daily lives. As an aside here, I must offer the observation that the internet is a brash and often crass place. In a quite serious discussion of Socrates’ keenness on the examined life I found advice that this was the aphorism best suited to T-shirts and lapel buttons.

IRREGULAR WRITINGS Rowland S Howard: Prince of St. Kilda

BY DAVE GRANEY

I

got a call about a new venue in St Kilda. I wished the person luck as I had my doubts it is a place for any kind of music performance crowd or interest any more. There’s a crowd there by the bay but they’re just shuffling around, looking for free stuff and enjoying the illusion that it’s the Gold Coast or Byron Bay. There’s a sea breeze and an occasional glimpse of a palm tree. The trams are cute and go straight across to the other side of town, where all the music is. It used to be a music place and, occasionally, there is a little flare-up of activity from those old 80s campfires. Nothing new was happening.

They got back to me with an idea for a tribute

@davegraney

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 25

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

COLUMNISTS

LONGNECK The homeless couple

BY PATRICK ALLINGTON

I Six Square Metres Ridiculous miracles

BY Margaret Simons

T

en years ago when my children were little I lived far from any beaten track in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. I kept goats that were named after my daughter’s kinder friends, a rooster called Vronsky and a crowd of chooks.

It was a time of almost self-sufficiency. It was not idyllic. There were tough times, and great sadness as well as the joy of watching my babies grow. It was intense. What kept me sane was watching the chooks, and fooling around with my giant vegetable patch. I had no fewer than three compost heaps – proof of humble resurrection, and the triumph of life over death.

That season of life came to an end, and we moved to the inner city. I have missed gardening, and the gardening column I used to write. It ran for years in the Weekend Australian, then in Sunday Life magazine.

Over the years since then, various commentators have suggested that my views on media and politics are to be taken less seriously because I once wrote about compost, vegetables and chooks. One is a serious journalist, or a gardener. Not both.

Well, bollocks to that.

The inner city suits me and my teenagers, but last year, as life once again grew particularly intense, I found myself thinking that when I retired I would return to gardening.

Then I thought ‘why wait?’.

There are a few reasons. I have only a tiny bit of space at my little house, which backs on to a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. At the front, my house faces a post office staffed by heroic women who deal with all the joys and stresses of the suburb, speaking to people of all nations as they navigate paying of bills, the making of deposits and passport applications, and that basic act of citizenry, joining the electoral roll.

At the back I have a brick-paved space six metres square with two raised garden beds, one almost entirely in shade. At the front is a tiny strip one metre by four, divided between nutritionally challenged ornamentals and the beginnings of a vegetable patch, including a rampant grafted tomato.

I planted it the same weekend that I decided the time for gardening was now, not in some future imagined period of sunshine and leisure.

Now, each morning before I rouse the children from bed and walk the ancient Labrador, I engage in a ritual I laughingly refer to as “walking the grounds”.

I pick the tomatoes that have ripened. I climb a stepladder to view the four polystyrene boxes on the roof, which are filled with coriander, bok choy, spring onions and a cucumber setting tiny fingers of fruit. vI contemplate the pots on the verandah, and observe the fall of shadow in the back lane between me and McDonald’s, and consider whether anything would grow there. Inner suburbs being what they are, I also check whether the rat bait has been taken.

Over the last few weeks, I have decided I want to write about this again – the everyday miracles and failures of messy old gardening.

Some terms of engagement. I am an enthusiast, not an expert. I get depressed by gardening books that talk counsels of perfection. I have never in my life achieved a fine tilth. I have never clipped my edges. Things often die under my care.

This column will not be a how-to. It will talk about rat bait as well fresh lettuce, about the things that die as well as those that live. It will be ridiculous, because life is ridiculous and gardening in such a tiny space most certainly seems that way.

Yet “walking the grounds” each morning makes me unreasonably happy. I am grateful for the chance to share some that.

» Margaret Simons is a freelance journalist, writer and an academic. margaretsimons.com.au @margaretsimons margaret@margaretsimons.com.au

t’s been a slow process, finding out what the local homeless couple looks like.

That’s partly because I don’t want them to think that I’m fixated on them (although I might be) and partly because I’ve come to believe that there’s something about them that’s literally blurry.

I’m constructing a mosaic of them in my head, a work-in-constant-flux. At last check, they are in their mid-fifties. The man is short and thin, wiry as a wild rabbit. His beard is neither Unabomber-crazed nor Alex Perrychic. He dresses in blue worker’s attire, like somebody who services air-conditioners (which, for all I know, he may well do).

The woman favours knee-length dresses, perhaps with a muted floral print, and white cross-trainers. She’s slightly taller and broader than the man, and carries a fawn-coloured handbag slung across her back. She walks with a ferocious purpose but, caught from behind, she has a gait, one hip askew.

I see them nearly every day. Most often, I spy them in the early morning gloom when I’m out walking with my sevenmonth-old daughter and the dog. We pass each other on opposite sides of the street I live on, separated by a moat of bitumen.

Or sometimes I trundle past them as they go about their business under the rotunda in the small park where they sleep. It’s a lovely park, with grass, trees, a row of decent tennis courts, a playground, all set behind a hardware store and horseshoed by suburbia: large blocks, stone-clad houses, some with upper levels tacked on like ill-fitting Lego. The park has no showers or toilets.

Presumably, there’s a tap somewhere.

Some days, although I do not actually see them, I catch sight of their belongings loaded into his-and-hers supermarket trolleys, held fast by tarpaulins and twine.

Once I saw them trying to pull the trolleys from the rotunda to behind a small brick building that sits in one corner of the park.

They raced each other, straining furiously, but neither of the trolleys actually moved. It didn’t occur to me to help.

Occasionally our encounters are otherworldly. One morning, pre-dawn, I was certain that they were walking directly towards me, thirty or forty houses away. When they disappeared into thin air, I couldn’t help but take it personally. Another time, near midnight, their voices levitated past my bedroom window, harsh, indistinguishable mutterings punctuated by frequent — and more clearly enunciated — ‘fucks’ and ‘bullshits’.

As a fully paid-up member of that great twenty-first century con, the equating of empathy with action, I’ve been asking myself all the virtuous questions: Why do they live rough? What’s wrong with our society? What do they eat? Where, if anywhere, do they wash?

What happens if one of them needs a dose of antibiotics or even a couple of Panadol? How on earth do they source gluten-free muffins?

But just as often I find myself wanting to know other, more personal details: Are they a couple — I’ve never seen them kiss or hold hands — or are they, as I suspect for no especially good reason, brother and sister?

What do they chat about? Where were they born? What are their names?

My curiosity peaked the morning I noticed them jammed into the phone box around the corner from my house (I was shocked, not least, by the fact that the suburb still had a phone box). Who were they speaking to so urgently at 6.30am? Their parents? Their children?

Last week, a development: for the first time ever, we passed each other on the same side of the road. Simultaneously gawking and averting my gaze, I probably employed dead fish eyes.

There wasn’t room for all of us on the pavement, but, given the bemused looks the baby and the dog gave me, I may have exaggerated my gallant swerve onto the dirt nature strip.

‘Good morning,’ I said as they hurtled past.

The woman gave me a full nod but didn’t speak. The man, without breaking stride or altering direction, thrust his torso at me.

‘Jeezus,’ he said, waggling a finger at the pram.

‘The least yer could do is give the dog a ride.’

And then they were gone, leaving me inexplicably and unreasonably thrilled with myself. @PatrAllington

26 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

BOOKS

Tenth of December George Saunders / Bloomsbury

By David Sornig

Over the last decade, the news coming out of America hasn’t always been so pretty: war, torture, financial decline, guns, the ongoing bloom of neo-liberalism and its attendant culture of ecstatic consumerism, the increasingly bizarre descent into a parallel political universe. You only have to look as far as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to realise that, possibly, the only real triumph in US public discourse in this period has been the continuation of its love affair with satire.

The satirical inflection in the American voice is always heard loudest in the face of absurdity: Mark Twain on racism, Lenny Bruce on obscenity, Kurt Vonnegut on war. George Saunders is one of satire’s more important practitioners; in this, his fifth book of short fiction, he speaks the absurdity of the times in voices that are odd, original, funny and disturbing.

Saunders’ satire focuses on subjects rather than targets: sexual violence; exploitative consumerism; war crimes and PTSD; the

humiliations of work and social climbing; and the monetisation of the body and personality.

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ is a story reminiscent of the near-future, hyper- or postconsumer dystopias of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. A prisoner exchanges his detention in a harsh prison for a spot in a relatively cushy private facility, where he becomes a test subject for behaviour-manipulating drugs like the sinister Darkenfloxx™ and Verbaluce™. At stake is a potential fortune in the unethical trial of the not-yet trademarked love-regulating drug ED289/290.

In ‘Semplica-Girl Diaries’ the morally blind foundations of consumerism are exposed at the suburban level. Here a financially-struggling father, who keeps a sometimes morose and unintentionally hilarious diary, uses a sudden windfall to buy for his daughter the latest musthave yard accessory: a set of Semplica Girls, whose actual, disturbing provenance doesn’t become clear until partway through the story.

It’s here that Saunders gets closest to a kind of stand-up character monologue that masks what becomes a very suburban gothic horror story. ‘Am not tired of work,’ writes the diarist, ‘I am privileged to work. I do not hate the rich.

I aspire to be rich myself. And when we finally do get our own bridge, trout, treehouse, SGs, etc., at least will know we really earned them, unlike, say, the Torrinis, who, I feel, must have family money.’

Yet, rather than simply burn down his straw figures, Saunders manages to humanise them. He shows them as being capable of love, regret, honesty. Often this humanity is wrought from facing up to the truths of mortality. If the collection has a leitmotif, it is in a forced, nervous refrain of laughter that appears in more than one story: ‘ha ha ha!’, and which speaks to the desire to mask the existential awfulness of the everyday.

Saunders leavens the ruined lives, the violence and disappointment of his characters’ worlds, with the possibility of reaching out and finding life to be worth living. His message? Where there’s now, there’s hope. And that also sounds vaguely American.

Turn Right At Machu Picchu

QUARTERLY ESSAY 49

Mark Adams / Text Publishing

Mark Latham / Black Inc.

by Scott McLennan

By William Charles

Part biography of Machu Picchu explorer Hiram Bingham III, part self-deprecating travelogue, Turn Right At Machu Picchu sees the comfortably urban Adams taking leave from his role as a travel magazine editor and sweating his way through the high plains and lush humid jungle trails of Peru. Joined by the caustic Australian tour guide John Leivers, who comes across as a fascinating polymath version of Mick Dundee, the pair follow in the footsteps of Yale adventurer Bingham, who famously alerted the scientific community to the existence of the mysterious lost Incan mountain citadel in 1911. Despite Bingham’s swashbuckling National Geographic Machu Picchu pictorial reports earning global acclaim (and eventually inspiring George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones character), subsequent tussles with Peruvian authorities over archaeological relics saw the 36-year-old branded a ‘huaquero’ – a grave robber. Gently informative and genuinely energising, Adams’ is an animated tale of the secrets of Machu Picchu and its 20th century rebirth.

The Australian Labor Party (like David Bowie), is not dead yet. Putting aside a forgettable stint as Leader of the Opposition at the height of the Howard reign, and ignoring the usual right wing trope of the-man-as-nutter, Mark Latham has always been at his best as a political essayist, writer and thinker. Here he delves into his alma mater, a Labor Party beset by its own tin ear, cronyism, factionalism, political hacks, state level corruption, thuggery, utter incompetence and an antediluvian union mindset – a party cut entirely loose from its traditional raison d’être in community engagement and activism on behalf of ‘working Australians’.

It is through re-taking the lead in fighting poverty, striving for a fairer education system and above all taking on climate change – famously abandoned by Rudd – that Latham sees a clear path for Labor to return to find a purpose that would warrant the respect and support of the Australian people. Re-engaging, in other words, with the forgotten Keating legacy.

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The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 27

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

BOOKS

The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee / Text Publishing

by Tali Lavi

Marion May Campbell / UWAP

In 1969, German journalist Ulrike Meinhof followed Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin into the violent underground of the German left.

Seven years later Meinhof, in Stammheim prison together with others of the Baader-Meinhof Group, suicided in disputed circumstances.

In Konkretion Marion May Campbell reimagines the increasingly vituperative attacks on Meinhof by Ensslin in the letters they exchanged in Stammheim, and, in the present day, a return to Paris by ageing Australian lecturer, writer and radical, Monique Piquet. In Paris, Piquet floats, in imagination and decaying body, through the spaces, history, memory, literature, and philosophy of the city.

Don’t go looking for a powerful, singleengine narrative here. At times Konkretion is so dense with allusion that it seems to want to outSebald Sebald, but without nailing the hypnotic hold of the German’s gaze. Still, Campbell’s long experience as a writer has her attuned to cross-currents of humour, punning, nostalgia, Australian cultural cringe, narcissism, regret and death in a way that rewards the deep, patient reader. Once it finds its own voice, it reaches toward something quite beautiful.

Richard Wa Verdi we gner and Gi and the re both born useppe in ir dominat operas contin 1813 ue e They we the world’s sta to re born ges Europe at a tim . wa Napoleo s convulsed e when by the nic wars nation states of and when the Italy did Germany no and t yet played exist. Bo im developm portant roles th in consciou ent of nation the al a maste sness and eac artistic h r forms. of musical-dra was Th matic way mu ey transform ed sic was the the compo the atr sed extend e, and their infl for ed This new well beyond uence the work is study of their stage. richly illu live colour strated s and wit from op h art works in full dra era house wn and pri s, museu vat includes e collections. ms location superb photo It gra s great com associated wit phs of h posers and the these ir works .

Wagne r seen and thinks as ‘special’; the Vofe&rhimself di Simón ‘delivers’ infuriating Inés to whom

David, is seemingly a virgin.

Also frequenting the narrative are doubleness and ambiguity. Visionaries and charlatans are difficult to differentiate and an unsettling affinity between David and the sinister Señor Daga forms. Simón is another conundrum. A zealot, he is dogged in his quest to ‘find’ David’s mother – Don Quixote captures both his and the child’s imaginations and acts as a vehicle for exploring ideas of the real and fidelity – and guided by a faith – although never phrasing it as such, the language he uses is highly mystical – that he will recognise her, although he has never met her. Whilst his sexual frustration is reasonable, his behaviour and attitudes to women are repugnant. Countering all this is his love for David, although he is constantly at pains to disabuse anyone of the notion that he is the boy’s father.

Somewhere along the way, David sings from Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’. As befits a child, he slightly bastardises it. The unabridged version tells of a father on a journey discounting his son’s fears of an evil spirit. When they arrive at their destination, the child is dead. Is this a sideways allusion to David’s fate? Once again, we can only theorise. One imagines that as we do, both publicly and privately, Coetzee will be assuming one of his enigmatic half-smiles.

Peter B assett

By David Sornig

Peter Ba sse gave his tt is a write r and spe firs and Il tro t illustrated ake operatic r on opera wh school vatore) at the talks (on o stu age Aida Ring, A dents. His bo of fourteen to fellow oks inc Ring for lud Parsifal the – the Jou Millennium, e The Nibelun Tristan g’s rney of Wagne un a librettos d Isolde, and Soul, Richar r’s d tra . many op He has compil nslations of Wagner’s several ed or con French era programm tribute and con es temporar in the Italian d to regular , contrib utor to y repertoire andGerman, internati He was onal jou is a Dramatu rnals. lecturer rg, Artist and the 2004 coordinator ic Administra tor with the Adelaide Rin of ancillary eve , g and wa nts for premiere 1998 Adelaide s closel y involv Ring productio ed n of Pa and 2001 Au Peter ser rsifal. stralian ved Diploma for twenty years in in East tic Service in the Austr Au and He was, West Europ stralia and in alian embassie e, Asia for a fur and two So s the the Pac r dec uth Projects Australian Go ade, chief of sta ific. in Arts South Au vernors and Di ff to rector of stralia.

Since 20 01 tours in , Peter has led Europe, more He live s in Mo the Americas than twenty op , ntville, QueenslaAsia and Austr era alia. nd. www.p eterbasse tt.com.au

Wagner

1813 W a g n e r & Ver di

Konkretion

The equation of two plus two, for those familiar with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a potent symbol, for Big Brother’s subjugation of Winston is practically complete when he professes, amongst other things, that ‘TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE’.

The Childhood of Jesus has its own ‘two and two’ moments. In an inversion, Simón, the character who accompanies us through this surreal journey, laments, “What kind of crime is it for a child to say that two and two make three? How is it going to shake the social order?” Whilst Orwell’s dystopic novel was set in an unrecognisable London, J. M. Coetzee’s Novilla is distasteful in the same way the notion of the benevolent dictator is, for it is a dystopian utopia. Refugees who arrive to the city are given refuge, jobs, accommodation, employment and money. Some readers may find themselves lamenting, ‘if only it were so!’

As newly named arrivals, Simón and David, find, most people demonstrate goodwill. The rub? People are devoid of memories (in David’s case his parents are unknown), desire of any kind is virtually extinct and there are powers that be, albeit amorphous ones.

Is this, as signposted by the title, a reimagining of Jesus’s childhood? In true Coetzee style, things aren’t quite what they seem, and the reader is never sure what they should be / are thinking. It’s like a spiral that keeps on unfurling until it forms a giant question mark. Some will be befuddled and alienated, others will either willingly surrender to the writer’s hypnotic prose, rhythmic in its coolness, or partake in the book’s mischievous nature. Religious motifs abound: loaves and fish, people are ‘washed clean’ of former lives, David is

813 Wagn1 er & Ve rdi

Verdi Peter B assett

Wagner &Verdi This beautiful book has been published to celebrate the bicentenary of the births of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. Peter Bassett’s new study is richly illustrated in full colour with artworks drawn from opera houses, museums and private collections. 232 pages in large format. RRP $88. Postage free in Australia.

Order online at:

www.peterbassett.com.au

The Bombshell range of jewellery One of Oxfam Shop’s producer partners, Rajana, strive to provide Cambodian artisans with fair wages, dignity and sustainable livelihoods. Rajana’s most significant project has been the creation of the Bombshell range of jewellery. The Bombshell Jewellery is crafted from old artillery shell casings that have been gathered up from around the Cambodian countryside and the Mekong River.

“When we make jewellery then we know our country has peace,” said one young silversmith.

The bombshells are left over remnants following Cambodia’s terrible history of the Pol Pot genocidal regime, where over 2 million Cambodians were killed between 1975 and 1979. Cambodian artisans have worked on transforming the symbolism of the bombshell from one of tragedy into one of acceptance and peace.

Melbourne: Shop 45, Walk Arcade, Bourke Street Mall. Carlton: 132 Leicester Street. Chadstone: Shop 311A, Chadstone Shopping Centre, 1341 Dandenong Road. Doncaster: Shop G203, Westfield Doncaster, 619 Doncaster Road. Knox City: Shop 3111, Knox Shopping Centre, 425 Burwood Highway, Wantirna South. Phone: 1800 088 455. Online: www.oxfamshop.org.au.

Cover im age

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cido Do Simon ming Bo den Lin ccanegra at the o in the title den rol Rittersha , 2009. Photo Berlin Staatsop e in er Un us. copyrigh t Monik ter a BELOW: Götterdäm Lisa Gasteen as Adelaide merung at the Brünnhilde in , 2004.

Photo copFestival Theat re, The 20 yright Su 04 produ e Adler. by the ctio n of Sta Director te Opera of So Der Ring des Ni Symph Stephen Philli uth Australia belungen (G on ps), wit h the Ad eneral Ring by y Orchestra, wa an ela team com Australian pro s the first com ide plete and De prising Direc duction and des sig tor Schliep ners Michael Elke Neidhard ign er Scott-M t Director and Stephen Curtis. itchell, Nick and Co Th nductor e was Ash Musical er Fisch.

28 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

PERFORMING ARTS Linguistically, this is one of Shakespeare’s richest plays, with its tavern brawls, its evocation of whoring and thievery, and its many drunken speeches drawing heavily on a grassroots vernacular, set off against some typically noble royal speeches in the context of war and civil rebellion.”

Photo: Lisa Tomasetti

complementary representatives of a vanishing age and its codes.

Bell Shakespeare: Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2

by William Charles

N

ot usually mentioned amongst the glittering peaks of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, nevertheless Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 together represent a brilliant and moving tour de force. Here the Bard not only examines the eternal father-son relationship and the politicking of succession – ever relevant to our riven, factionalised national body politic – but also introduces us to one of his greatest comic creations, the immortal Falstaff. This old barfly poet with a razor wit is one of the last of the original, mercurial, Rabelaisian, medieval life-loving breed of carousers, with his sack and his capon and his whoring, in love with the moon and the poetry of life, tuned to detect food and drink and women as much as he is tuned to detect hypocrisy in any form. Falstaff – played here by John Bell himself, is a remnant of a disappearing England – with Prince Hal’s ascension to the throne, “pragmatic and in some ways Machiavellian,” suggests Bell, comes a world of rationalism, science and well-crafted political scheming that is foreign to the essential goodness and naïveté of Falstaff.

Bell has known the play since he was fifteen.

He fell in love with it then, and that love has

stayed with him ever since. “Parts 1 and 2 together, as one continuing saga – it’s quite an extraordinary achievement,” Bell believes. “It’s Shakespeare at his most realistic, in terms of the observation of everyday people. There’s no dramatic gloss over characters such as Falstaff, Bardolph, Peto – they are all authentic, drawn straight from life.”

And indeed linguistically, this is one of Shakespeare’s richest plays, with its tavern brawls, its evocation of whoring and thievery, and its many drunken speeches drawing heavily on a grassroots vernacular, set off against some typically noble royal speeches in the context of war and civil rebellion.

“The court characters only speak in verse, and the tavern characters in prose,” points out Bell. “Prince Hal is the one who speaks both, jumping between the two, as he moves between the palace and the pub.”

Bell had always felt apprehensive about taking on the character of Falstaff, feeling it was not within his range, “not really the sort of role I should go for”. But friends encouraged him, and he’s now having the time of his life. Worried about whether he was up to the physical and

Falstaff is one of the last pre-rational, preEnlightenment figures – he is, indeed, a life force as much as a character. “There is a kind of medieval quality about him,” insists Bell, “that disappears with the Elizabethan Age, with people like Bacon, Walsingham – very rational, scientific sort of people. Falstaff is a Rabelaisian figure – he’s all appetite, indulgence and inspiration, but at the same time he’s got a fantastic intelligence, a native intelligence and wit, and a great scepticism, which I respond to very strongly. For all the noble sentiments that are held up – he sees them all as being ridiculous, absurd.”

» Bell Shakespeare presents Henry IV at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse, from March 14 to 30. artscentremelbourne.com.au

Nothing illustrates this so well as Falstaff’s famous speech about honour – a fiction that serves man only when he is dead.

“On the surface he’s just a liar and a fraud and a coward and a drunk – there’s nothing you can say objectively that’s very admirable about him. But he has that zest for life, and enjoyment of life, that is quite Epicurean in a way, and that’s irresistible.”

But there is no room in the new England, among the pragmatists and statesmen, for the medieval figures of Falstaff and Hotspur – opposites in so many ways but also

Photo: Pierre Toussaint

Fathers & Son

temperamental side of playing Falstaff, Bell now finds it a great release. “There’s something in myself that responds very easily to Falstaff.”

Rather than trying to become the role, which Bell admits he has done recently with some of the more serious Shakespearean roles, it’s now just a matter of playing, and enjoying. “Letting the child within yourself out for a run,” he suggests, which is “the essential part of acting.”

The father-son relationship is here, as so often in life, a fraught and painful one. Throw all this into a contemporary Australian context, and we find Hal a teenager going off the rails, walking the fine line between anarchy, selfdestruction and self-preservation, slumming it but always with the threat of perhaps going too far and not being able to come back. The battle for possession of Hal, as Bell explains, between his father and his surrogate father Falstaff is intensely moving, and always relevant.

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 29

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

PERFORMING ARTS

Photos: Hamish Lane

247 Days Rehearsals – James Pham, Tara Soh and Alya Manzart.

“It’s Australian-only performers in the show and most of the time I work with a very international cast of people. I’ve only done two other shows with exclusively one nationality – once in Russia and once in China. What makes this show completely unique, though, is that Australians as individuals have very different backgrounds and come from different cultures.

As kids, Australians go to school together and learn the same songs in childhood and so on, there is a connection, but at the same time within that, they have roots from their parents who may be Vietnamese or Indian. They don’t

necessarily share the same backgrounds. In China, for example, everyone shares the same language as well as culture and roots. Australia is not like that, and I find that very inspiring.”

» 247 Days will show at the Merlyn Theatre, The Malthouse from March 15 until 23, as part of Dance Massive 2013. dancemassive.com.au

247 Days Rehearsals – Tara Soh and Leif Helland.

Chunky Move – 247 Days

by Nina Bertok

C

hunky Move Artistic Director, Anouk van Dijk, returns with her brand new production 247 Days after the successful season of her last work, An Act Of Now. Once again exploring the dynamics of human interaction, Van Dijk’s new work invites the audience to ask themselves the deeper questions... How do they view the world and how does the world view them? Do they behave as they are expected to, or do they accept who they truly are?

Presented in conjunction with Malthouse Theatre – and as part of the 2013 Dance Massive Festival – van Dijk joins forces again with composer Marcel Wierckx and lighting designer Niklas Pajanti, as well as her group of dancers from An Act Of Now. “An Act Of Now was very much about the dynamics within the society, or within a group or a herd,” van Dijk explains. “With 247 Days,

it’s more about people being confronted with themselves and having to reflect on the images of themselves. Within that they form an even bigger group so that they can be swallowed up within the uniformity, or perhaps even stand out more individualistically. That’s the difference between the two productions.”

But the bottom line is still ‘human interaction’, as van Dijk admits, claiming the theme is something she has found fascinating throughout her career. 247 Days is both an exposing and revelatory dance-work, she states.

“Human interactions interest me in general.

I’ve approached this production as research into how we relate to one another in the context of the broader society, but also how that reflects back into our private experiences. This is very much related to physicality because what happens around you will affect you physically...

If something stresses you out, it will make you crack up! If something distressing happens, you need a hug – so your physical environment will always impact on your physical body and the way you feel, your reaction. There is always a connection between the environment, the physical body and its movement.”

What makes 247 Days particularly unique is the “Australianness” of the performance.

Featuring an exclusive all-Aussie cast of dancers, van Dijk claims she has never been involved in a show that was anything quite like this.

DAREBIN ARTS’ SPEAKEASY PRESENTS…

The alternative comedy home – not what you’re expecting

as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 1 – 21 April 2013 Tickets darebinarts.com.au/speakeasy or call 9481 9500

30 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

PERFORMING ARTS

Comedy is really the perfect medium to make frightening formats or taboo topics accessible.

You may not consider yourself a person inclined to poetry although, if you enjoy hip hop or prettily worded novels, you may well be

be dishing up incredible comedy for kids which uniquely puts aside education and focuses purely on fun and outrage. Bron Batten will be bringing her very brave parents on stage for her show Sweet Child of Mine, in which she dissects what it’s like to be an artist and what they think she does all day.

The programming co-ordinator, Beau McCafferty, has worked with many of the performers before through the Melbourne Fringe Festival. McCafferty has an eye for eccentric talent and a solid place in the independent theatre and comedy world. This venture hopes to bring together both in one localised venue.

Telia Nevile

Speakeasy Comedy

By Hannah Bambra

The array of non-conventional comedy does not discriminate against age. The Listies will

» Darebin Arts Speakeasy, from April 1 to 21 at Northcote Town Hall, 189 High St, Northcote.

Tickets can be purchased individually or in bulk at a lower price. darebinarts.com.au/speakeasy

“It is comedy for people who love theatre and language, performance and puppets, comedy for people who are slightly left of centre and happy being pushed,” says Telia Nevile, who will be performing Live on Air with Poet Laureate Telia Nevile as part of the program.

Although her character takes her own name, Telia’s piece is centred on a teenage girl broadcasting a pirate radio show from her bedroom. The appeal of her performance, she says, is that everyone can relate to the experience of the outsider. She constructs tongue-in-cheek poems about everything from death metal to erotic fan fiction; ‘accessible things’ as Telia calls them.

Comedy is really the perfect medium to make frightening formats or taboo topics accessible.

Photo: Sabrina D’Angelo

O

ver the years the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has built itself into an extensive festival and each year you find yourself increasingly spoilt for choice.

Everyone worth seeing, who has managed to make a career out of stand-up, flies into Melbourne for the month to make up a program which can be quite overwhelming.

For the first time this year a specially curated program will be held at the Northcote Town Hall for those who are looking to filter it down and fill their planner with slightly alternative comedy. Darebin Arts’ Speakeasy, a new ongoing and adventurous arts performance program, will present comedy that is not necessarily packaged in a classic stand-up format.

You may not consider yourself a person inclined to poetry although, if you enjoy hip hop or prettily worded novels, you may well be. “And there’s nothing funnier than a white chick trying to rap,” ensures Telia. While Telia’s character channels her desire to soliloquise on live radio, body poet Sabrina de Angelo flexes her face and limbs to get laughs. Many of the Speakeasy acts are designed to engage in more than one way and leave audiences with a different point of view, as well as laughter.

The Northcote Town Hall will be a new edition to a collection of fantastic independent venues which play host to young and upcoming comedians during the festival. This beautiful art deco building will be a place for seekers of unique humour to gravitate towards for the 2013 and future comedy festivals.

Body Poet

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 31

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PERFORMING ARTS

Castlemaine State Festival

“We want to make sure that anyone can find something in the program that can appeal to them but also challenge them,” says Paten, who hopes to take people “on an adventure, they’re taking a bit of a risk on what they might see.”

Many of this year’s bands have sounds based around brass instruments and give the feel of an old-school performance in which costumes, characters and quirks lure an audience of beer drinkers or diners. Events in the indigenous program of the festival, like the esteemed Blak Cabaret, bring together Torres Strait Islander and aboriginal entertainers together to celebrate with the broader artistic community

By Hannah Bambra

I

n the gold rush era elegant, now historic buildings were erected in Castlemaine against a backdrop of native shrubbery and rolling hills. The beauty of the region and its affordable hertiage architecture has attracted many artists and musicians over the years. Castlemaine’s biannual State Festival is now in its 37th year and continues to commission works from local and international creatives.

The festival hub is in the heart of the town but works commissioned for the festival span across a wide range of venues. Art can be found high above the little town, deep underground in its mining shafts, in a mechanic’s garage and even on the walls of historic schools and churches. With creativity so engrained in Castlemaine’s society, it is as much a carnival of community as it is of arts and entertainment.

“The festival is very much part of the fabric of this place now,” says festival director Martin

Paten. “At the end of every two years the community is exhausted but also regenerated.”

for people from within and outside of the region to consider deeply what is important to preserve.

The state festival started out in the 70s with a central focus on music. This hasn’t shifted, instead remaining strong but slowly converging with other artforms, allowing comedy, theatre and dance to gain prevalence in the program.

One installation in particular fuses the festival’s communal celebration of both local produce and art. The region’s two specialities come together for the festival’s ‘living stage’.

Crates donated by leading apple producers have been used for the construction of a performance platform from which fruit continues to ripen and can be picked and eaten by audience members.

The festival has increasingly been seen as a great opportunity to educate individuals of all ages on how to support local growers and how to live more sustainably and healthily.

This year the theme which the 350 visual and performing artists were given to creatively respond to was ‘elemental’. The theme has helped give shape to the festival, while still inspiring a series of individual responses. Another central notion that shines through is the encouragement

The festival is a great opportunity for an area to re-affirm the beauty and talent of regional Victoria. One of this year’s VIPs is founder Berek Segan, in his mid-nineties and who is still anticipated to be on the centre of the dance floor, as he has been every second year for the past three-and-a-half decades.

» Castlemaine State Festival runs from March 15 to 24 at various locations around Castlemaine. A 90-minute drive from the CBD; buses and trains are also available. castlemainefestival.com.au/2013

Paavali Jumppanen ...his technique is big and his imaginative daring even bigger...

The Boston Globe

Finnish piainist, Paavali Jumppanen, joins the musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music in three

programs featuring some of the most well-known works of Beethoven and Mozart.

Fri 3 May, 11AM Performance #2 Program to include Beethoven Piano Trio in D Major Ghost Tickets All $25 Tuesday 7 May, 7PM Performance #3 Program to include Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2 Tickets Full $55/Sen $40/Conc $30 Sun 12 May, 2:30PM Mother’s Day Concert Program to include Mozart Concerto for two pianos in E flat Major Tickets Free (bookings essential)

Australian National Academy of Music South Melbourne Town Hall

BOOK NOW Phone (03) 9645 7911 anam.com.au

Photo: Petri Puromies

32 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

PERFORMING ARTS

Leap of faith National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) graduates are directed by former Cirque du Soleil Artistic Director, Matthew Jessner in Leap of Faith

by Lou Pardi

“L

eap of Faith is both the start and finish line for a group of highly motivated semiprofessional circus artists,” explains Director Matthew Jessner. “It’s the starting line in that they are completing a three year degree and will be going out into varied and challenging careers. It’s also the finishing in that this show is a culmination of the preparatory work done at NICA and earlier in their lives.

“By virtue of the personal importance of the show for each of these performers, the stakes for them are high, the energy will be electric and audiences will be able to share in this highly charged experience. There is a wide range of ground-based and aerial circus apparatus in the show, high-level skills as well as humour, stunning visuals and great music.

Jessner was introduced to NICA during a trip to Australia to see Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco in July 2011. A few months later NICA Director & CEO, Pamela Creed asked Jessner to direct the 2013 ensemble show.

Jessner met the students for the first time at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris in February 2013, a week before he arrived in Australia to start on the show. “I was impressed by the students’ participation in that professional environment,” he says.

In order to design the show, Jessner needed to be familiar with the students’ specialties. “When working with a set group of performers it is crucial to get to know their abilities and strengths. This is a different work method to devising a concept and then selecting the cast in order to realise an artistically constructed vision. So, I found out as much as I could about the students before I arrived at NICA and allowed space for the concept to evolve.”

“The performers will be taking a Leap of Faith, metaphorically speaking, by stepping out of their collective and individual comfort zones and into the process of developing this show and subsequently into the professional sector. Even if those in the audience are not

athletes, the skill and athleticism of these young performers will speak to them and they will be able to identify with the experience of ‘putting yourself on the line.’ The impact will be very visceral, powerful and emotional.”

In addition to understanding each performers’ skills, Jessner says to direct them effectively, he needs to know more. “Directing circus performers requires a great deal of ‘getting under their skin’. Each person has a very individual motivation to put themselves on the line as they do in circus and in this show in particular, so tapping into that is essential.”

Whilst Jessner has worked with both narrative-led performances (like the high

profile Cirque de Soleil pieces) and other styles, he says he doesn’t have a particular preference. “There are definitely trends in circus performance just like there are styles and periods of opera. The purpose of NICA is to expose and impart a gamut of these to their students and audiences over time and not to try to stay with market trends.

“As for my preferred style, my preference is that any style is confirmed for whatever its identity is and not to attempt to mix it to cater to an audience target. If the style of the company is narrative, go there. If the style and skill set of a company is ‘feat driven’, well go all the way there. I prefer neither over the other if they make a firm commitment.”

The show is suitable for all ages and because it is on during the April school holidays, NICA has scheduled A Day at the Circus packages with circus workshops in the morning and a ticket to the matinee performance in the afternoon.

National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) presents Leap of Faith: Circus in Motion, from April 4 – 13 at NICA National Circus Centre, 41 Green Street, Prahran. For all sessions, concessions and booking details, please visit nica.com.au

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 33

WORDS & MUSIC

State Trooper

A strikingly successful piece of daring.”

Joe Morgenstern, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

, EXQUISITE. Will provoke “POWERFUL passionate arguments over post-screening drinks.”

by Phil Kakulas

B

State Trooper is the tale of a man on the run, as told from the point of view of one very disturbed and desperate individual. As he drives through the wet, New Jersey night, without ‘license (or) registration’, he prays the police don’t pull him over. What or whom he’s running from we’re never told, but the palpable threat of violence and lack of remorse on his part are genuinely unnerving. There is little doubt what carnage would ensue, should some unlucky police officer try and stop him.

Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife The only thing that I got, well it’s been bothering me my whole life Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me Please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me Springsteen’s chugging guitar and lonesome voice loom out of the darkness. Steeped in reverb and echo, they sound ghostly and detached. The insistent two-chord progression propels the song into the night, but without rhythmic or melodic change, the pressure can only build with every verse.

In the wee, wee hours your mind gets hazy Radio relay towers lead me to my baby Radio’s jammed up with talk show stations It’s just talk, talk, talk, talk, till you lose your patience When Springsteen does crack, it’s with a yelp and a holler, in keeping with the wired rockabilly spookiness of the track. ‘Deliver me from nowhere’ he cries, before a cathartic scream blows the lid off a head full of trouble.

State Trooper owes much of its otherworldly sound and atmosphere to the unusual manner in which it was recorded. Frustrated with spending large amounts of time and money in expensive studios, Springsteen took the then unusual step of recording solo demo versions of Nebraska’s songs first at home. This, he hoped, would streamline the process of re-recording the songs with the E Street band in a professional studio later.

Entertainment Weekly • The Village Voice • Movieline • The AV Club

“BREATHTAKING.

Bruce Springsteen

efore Bruce Springsteen could become ‘The Boss’, he had to spend some time out in the badlands. His ‘dark night of the soul’ resulted in Nebraska; a home recorded album populated by killers, criminals and others living on the edges of society. Released in 1982, it remains the black sheep of his back catalogue – a folk noir masterpiece that boasts the intense, acoustic psychodrama of State Trooper.

ONE OF THE TEN BEST FILMS OF 2012

Leslie Felperin, VARIETY

Equipped with just a four-track cassette recorder, Springsteen set up shop in a spare bedroom, finishing the demos in just a few days using what few musical instruments lay at hand.

With no professional equipment for the mixdown, he compiled the master tape on the only other tape recorder available – a trusty beatbox not long rescued from a nearby muddy river.

“MESMERISING!” Ann Hornaday, THE WASHINGTON POST

Despite the extensive rehearsals and recording sessions with the E Street Band that followed, Springsteen could never better the intimate quality of those first recordings. At the urging of guitarist Stevie Van Zandt and others he shelved the ‘Electric Nebraska’ they had recorded together and instead released his home demo recordings as the official Nebraska album. Perhaps, unwittingly spearheading the lo-fi movement in the process.

“It’s amazing that it got there,” Springsteen has said, “’cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin’ it around.

Finally, we realized – uh-oh, that’s the album.”

Inspiration for State Trooper came in part from Springsteen’s love of New York electropunk duo, Suicide. In particular, the hypnotic Frankie Teardrop – a punishing ten minute saga about a man who kills his wife and child, and then himself. Awash in the same slap-back echo as State Trooper, its relentless rhythmic pulse and brutal synth parts are similarly punctuated by screams of recognition at the horror done.

Please do not reveal

‘THE INCIDENT!’

The making of State Trooper and Nebraska was a cathartic experience for Springsteen; a way of better understanding whatever had been bothering him his whole life. A rite of passage perhaps, toward a brighter future. His next album would be Born In The USA. It brought him different rewards, such as mega-stardom, untold riches and the title of ‘The Boss’.

» Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne on March 24, 26 and 27, and Hanging Rock, Victoria on March 30 and 31. » Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and teacher who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.

ONLY IN CINEMAS 21 MARCH CINEMA NOVA, PALACE CINEMA COMO, BRIGHTON BAY & KINO VIEW TRAILER & MORE AT www.TheLoneliestPlanet.com.au

34 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

PERFORMING ARTS / CINEMA Rust and Bone

by Christopher Sanders

When deadbeat dad (Ali) and his son (Sam) hitchhike to live with Ali’s sister in Antibes (France), you’re thinking this father and son relationship has no hope and you’ve got two hours to watch a relationship disintegrate with tragic consequences. Joy. But Jacques Audiard’s (A Prophet, The Beat that my Heart Skipped) latest takes a different, but no less emotional, journey.

After Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) takes a job as a nightclub bouncer (and Schoenaerts personifies a club bouncer to perfection) he rescues Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) from a fight and drives her home in a seemingly courteous display. But Ali isn’t charming. On the drive he observes that his damsel in distress dresses like a whore. Later we discover Stephanie is a killer whale trainer for a cheesy Sea World type show after the two end up at her place. Nothing happens between the two. They aren’t really interested in each other. Despite both being tough, selfish, arrogant and prone to getting themselves into dangerous situations, they don’t match, even though he is a shallow Neanderthal while she is looking for trouble.

An accident changes everything. One of the orcas pulls a Siegfried & Roy white tiger move and sends Stephanie to the emergency room. She wakes up minus her legs. While she recovers, Ali switches jobs to security.

Still a bad father, he has quickie sex with random girls while thinking about returning to kickboxing – or illegal backyard fights in the ghetto. A few months down the road Stephanie calls Ali out of the blue, distracting him from his negligible parenting duties.

What begins as an unlikely friendship turns into something more and even though the unlikely friendship theme could almost be a cinematic genre of its own, their connection and partnership is nonetheless moving and surprising.

The two leads, Cotillard and Schoenaerts, are spectacular. Their relationship is one of the most interesting I’ve seen on screen in many years. Academy Award winner, and regular Christopher Nolan star, Cotillard has garnered all the plaudits for her role as the former orca trainer who has to cope with life minus her legs but equally as impressive is Schoenaers as Ali, a perceived knucklehead whose stubborn ways helps Stephanie more than she could imagine.

Each character is far from perfect. When not together, both can be pretty damn awful but

there is something surprisingly sweet about this couple that connect at illegal street fights.

With the right balance of sentimentality and rawness, Rust and Bone is a feel good film for people who despise feel good movies.

THE LONELIEST PLANET

by D.M. Bradley

Writer/director Julia Loktev’s strange, somewhat disturbing and evidently semiimprovised drama turns out to be a stark study of relationships set against a backdrop of seriously unfamiliar countryside (it’s actually Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains, but the ‘script’ fails to properly mention that, leaving you thinking it’s Mexico or Mongolia or wherever).

A cocky pair of young engaged lovers, Alex and Nica (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg, neither properly named for ages onscreen) are

» Rated MA 15+. On general release from March 28.

on a walking tour through Eastern Europe, and we watch them go about their rambling, randy business for some 50 minutes or so before a traumatic event leads to them reevaluating their bond, their lives and their place within this mysterious universe, all with an absence of dialogue and exposition that’s sometimes intriguing and daring, and sometimes all a bit irksome. A major arthouse hit, this one’s guaranteed to divide audiences, as some will swear by its penetrating psychological edge and lyrical cinematic beauty – and some will just be swearing at it.

» Rated M. Opens on March 21.

A free, immersive film installation by acclaimed filmmaker and artist Warwick Thornton Until 23 June 2013 ACMI, Federation Square — Free exhibition www.acmi.net.au/thornton

Warwick Thornton Mother Courage Mother Courage has been commissioned

by ACMI and dOCUMENTA (13) and is part of the ACMI Commissions Series.

Image: Warwick Thornton, Mother Courage (production still), 2012.

Courtesy of the artist and Scarlett Pictures

See Turner’s impressions of light, then Adelaide in a different one.

Travel to Adelaide to experience J.M.W. Turner’s powerful and dazzling masterpieces at the Art Gallery of South Australia in the major exhibition Turner from the Tate. Witness the making of a master as you journey through Turner’s rapid rise to fame, critical triumphs and controversies. See over 100 works of art by one of Britain’s greatest ever artists.

Exhibition now showing until 19 May. Hotel & Exhibition Packages from $228* (per room, per night)

Plan your visit at southaustralia.com * Terms and conditions apply. Exhibition organised by Tate in association with Art Exhibitions Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia detail: J.M.W. Turner, Venice, Moonrise, 1840 © Tate, 2013

36 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

VISUAL ARTS

Chance x Nothing, 2012, synthetic polymer on paper, 101 x 101cm.

His Bright Materials Bill Sampson – MARS Gallery

by Sophie Knezic

B

ill Sampson’s paintings – if we can call them that – are not contrived formal images, cadences of colour carefully orchestrated into iridescent compositions. Rather, they are paper-thin stage sets for liquid acts of ruin and destruction.

Using and abusing a technique known as marbling, Sampson pours thin skeins of paint onto the skin-like surface of water then lets the paint take over, spooling in all directions with reckless assertion; little motors of churning colour.

Part-impresario/part-artist, Sampson harnesses the invisible chemical constitution of paint to unleash its kinetic power. Coaxing unpredictable assaults between water, paper and paint, he subjugates artistic will to instead play addictive games of a different kind of chemical warfare. Adding stencils for masking, using bitumen, oil or acrylic, the artist spars with his materials. He flicks tiny balls of water onto the paper before placing it in the bath to create galactic splotches of white, drowns parts of the paper to allow the pigment to seep and curdle.

Icarus, 2012, synthetic polymer on paper, 101 x 101cm.

Who would have thought that colour has actual acceleration? A literal force of propulsion specific to its hue? Indeed it does; the spectrum of paint is a series of individual profiles of mobile chemical agency. The act of marbling reveals the sheer brunt of the paint as it propels itself across the water’s meniscus, hotly fuelling its way until it hits an obstruction – pooling paint of another colour.

Pink has the greatest puissance. Yellow is only just subordinate. Black is tractable; a push-over to fulgent colour’s chemical might. Annihilated by the high keys of colorant, black is sequestered into thin perimeters, shadowy residues around more powerful zones of pigment.

The result of this chemical combat? A phantasmagoria of acidic colour and kaleidoscopic collisions. On parts of the paper, paint shrinks into sticky craters, elsewhere it stretches into bubblegum balloons. Paper stencils create white tectonic forms which, subjected to the action of the paint’s pressure, crack and tumble like shattering piano keys. There is fury here as well as torpor; a convergence of energy and inertia, coalescing as the chromatic legions reach their painterly détente, a final accord of visual blaze.

The Impossibility of Balance, 2012, synthetic polymer on paper, 101 x 101cm.

» Bill Sampson / chance upon nothing shows at MARS Gallery, 418 Bay St, Port Melbourne, until April 7. marsgallery.com.au

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 37

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

VISUAL ARTS

by The Melbourne Review

L

imited edition Scott Universita metallic photographic prints will be displayed in Toorak Village shop windows in late March and early April.

The two-week exhibition, Toorak Village Fotofest, follows the shopping district’s previous exhibitions Art Affair and Sculpture Exhibition, which were held last May and October. More than 60 Universita photographs will be exhibited in 60-plus shops and businesses in the shopping district, as the shop windows transform into mini galleries.

President of the Toorak Village Traders Association and event director, Tony Fialides, said previous exhibitions created vibrancy in the shopping district.

“It certainly creates a difference in the village.

You see the people, especially with the sculpture exhibition, walking around with their catalogues, looking for the artwork. Basically what we’re trying to do with Toorak is turn it – although we haven’t got any galleries here as such – into an art precinct. We want people to get used to the idea that Toorak will put on shows.”

Local photographer Scott Universita is selftaught and his limited edition photographs are professionally mounted and framed in copper, as his photographs are imbued with copper plate and oxidised patina and then mounted in designed boxes.

Universita, whose work is influenced by vintage architectural and travel photography, is the first solo exhibitor for Toorak Village.

“We thought his work was strong enough to do it,” Fialides explains. “He’s had success selling in his work in Melbourne and Sorrento, so judging by the amount of people that had already bought his work we thought it was worthy of a putting on a solo exhibition.

Hopefully if this works out we will be looking for some other artists so we can hold more solo exhibitions.”

Judging by the amount of people that had already bought his work we thought it was worthy of a putting on a solo exhibition.”

» Toorak Village Fotofest is a free event that is open 24 hours a day. All photographs are for sale.

» Scott Universita at Toorak Village Fotofest, from March 22 to April 7. toorakvillage.com.au

With more than 60 shops exhibiting his work, Universita is working hard to get his work for the exhibition finished as advance publicity for the Fotofest exhibition allowed him to sell more of his art.

“He’s working night and day. There will be nothing left of him by the start of the exhibition.

He’s surprised himself because there’s been a little bit of publicity about him and even word of mouth, so people have been jumping on his work.”

Images: Scott Universita

Village of dreams

“It’s easily the best framing presentation I’ve ever seen,” Fialides says. “The frames themselves are a work of art.”

38 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

VISUAL ARTS

The Golden Age of Colour Prints Ukiyo-e from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

By Fiona O’Brien

T

Utagawa Toyokuni, 1769-1825. Ladies Practicing Martial Arts (Opening Scene of the Play Mirror Mountain) Publisher: Wakasaya Yoichi (Jakurindõ) William Sturgis Bigelow Collection.

he striking images of Japanese Manga comics and Anime films permeate contemporary society, and yet their history is relatively unfamiliar. Shepparton Art Museum’s rare and exclusive exhibition The Golden Age of Colour Prints brings the origins of Japanese popular culture to life, with an exquisite collection of multi-colour Ukiyo-e prints

from the Tanmei and Kansei eras (17811801) of metropolitan Tokyo. Ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings that has exerted considerable influence over the development of Western art, including French Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Pop Art. Featuring works by three of the

most important artists in Japanese history, Torii Kiyonaga, Kitagawa Utamaro and Tōshashūsai Sharaku, along with a selection of work by their contemporaries, it offers an exciting opportunity to appreciate the mastery and visual sophistication of the polychrome printing technique that reached its zenith in the second half of the 17th century.

Newly unified after a history of warring feuding domains and hardship, Tokyo (“Edo”) had become a peaceful nation at the turn of the century, and a booming capital for commercial, mercantile and entrepreneurial activity. The strong economy gave rise to a culture of pleasure and prosperity that spread throughout the middle classes, accompanied by an interest in textiles, fashion and entertainment among the pleasure-seeking public. People had money to spend on clothes, sport and kabuki, and out of this evolved a demand for colourful printed images of popular figures including geisha, kabuki actors and courtesans – what is today’s culture magazines, posters and Hollywood stars. The public were familiar with black and white woodblock prints, but as the superficial world of beauty and entertainment took hold, so too did the demand for highly colourful images. Hand printed with up to 5000 copies, each pigment was applied with an individually carved wooden block, and required a degree of craftsmanship the likes of which you wouldn’t see today.

Peter Corrigan Cities of HoPe

RMIT Gallery

12 aPril – 8 June

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

These prints are representative of a brief period when Japan was virtually closed to the Western world, and provide a fascinating insight into consumer culture prior to international trade, mechanical printing and photography which brought a decline in Ukiyo-e, and a shift toward the production of story books and Manga. SAM director, Kirsten Paisley says “While The Golden Age will appeal strongly to national audiences already interested in Asian art, the beauty and accessibility of the imagery, along with the current broad interest

Torii Kiyonaga, 1752-1815. Actor Segawa Kikunojõ III Performing the Lion Dance (Shakkyõ).

Publisher: Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudõ).

William Sturgis Bigelow Collection.

in contemporary culture will ensure significant interest among the general public as well.”

The exhibition will be complemented by an extensive public program including a keynote address by Wayne Crothers, Curator of Asian Art at NGV, artist talks, workshops, tours and a number of free events demonstrating all things Japanese from origami and puppets, to tea ceremonies.

» The Golden Age of Colour Prints: Ukiyo-e from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows at Shepparton Art Museum from March 7 to June 2. sheppartonartmuseum.com.au/goldenage

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 39

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

VISUAL ARTS

An Artist In The Project

Bridgeman then immersed himself ‘in the project’ by becoming Heath Ledger, the golliwog.”

by Veronica Gilbert

n 2011, Eric Bridgeman was selected as artist-in-residence at Canada’s Lethbridge University, a location notable in his mind for nothing other than Heath Ledger’s triumph, Brokeback Mountain.

vulnerability of the sitter. Perhaps the highlight is the juxtaposition of two works on opposite walls; one a full-length portrait in which the artist’s gaze meets the viewer’s, the other a floor-to-ceiling bust portrait series of nine works depicting the artist in a range of poses making reference to the adage, ‘see no, hear no, speak no evil’.

The artist intended to pursue his fascination with masculinity and sexuality expressed through references to sporting culture. This theme had previously found colourful expression in his raucous photographic works parodying Australian football codes. In Lethbridge, Bridgeman intended shifting his analytical gaze to the tough and muscular world of Canadian ice hockey.

By bringing the work together in this way, this exhibition speaks broadly on human behaviour and unpacks some of the conscious choices which are made to live up to expectation, to perform and interact with one another as individuals and groups, as insiders and outsiders.

Upon arrival, he found himself not in the hip college town he had anticipated, but exiled to the small outpost of Blairmore, two hours from campus. Worse still, the ice hockey season had just ended and he was stranded in a log cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; an artist-in-residence without a premise.

» In The Project shows at Gallerysmith, 170174 Abbotsford St, North Melbourne, until April 27. Tuesday to Saturday, 11-5pm.

I

The stunning exhibition which is the product of the residency betrays none of this initial crisis.

Indeed, it is not until one speaks to Bridgeman, whose origins are Papua New Guinean, that the catalyst for his vivid works is revealed. It was an exchange with one of the otherwise impassive inhabitants of the town who referred to him as ‘Blackie’. From that moment the artist’s only companion during his residency, a toy golliwog purchased in Melbourne (and named Heath Ledger), became his muse and the vehicle for expression in his new work.

gallerysmith.com.au

hot pink and cerulean blue), Bridgeman then immersed himself ‘in the project’ by becoming Heath Ledger, the golliwog. By stepping into character, Bridgeman says he “found the ability to work through emotions ranging from anger to despair, love and optimism. I gave in to being the best outsider that I could become.”

The solo exhibition, In the Project, is thoughtfully presented. A daily video diary of the artist in the Canadian studio, condensed to five and a half minutes and played to Beethoven’s Moonlight After weeks of assembling, painting, sewing Sonata, conveys the existential angst which drove and constructing a vibrant set comprising this work. Adjacent to it is a series of photographs security mesh, 44 gallon drums, beer cans and of Bridgeman in character, works in typically wheelbarrows (painted in the lurid colours of rich palette which express both the boldness and Melbourne_Review_Ad_Dax.pdf 1 8/03/13 4:13 PM

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CM

MY

ART, CREATIVITY AND THE CANCER EXPERIENCE Friday 22 March, 9am–5pm Kenneth Myer Auditorium, Kenneth Myer Building, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

CY

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K

Drawing together the findings of scientific enquiry into psycho-oncology with the personal experiences of patients and their families as expressed creatively. www.daxcentre.org T 9035 6258 E info@daxcentre.org

40 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

VISUAL ARTS 2

1

4

1

Shepparton Art Museum (SAM)

The Golden Age of Colour Prints: Ukiyo-e from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston March 7 – June 2 70 Welsford Street, Shepparton sheppartonartmuseum.com.au

2

4

5

Naomi White Sense of Place Mark Ogge Circus March 19 – April 13 137 Flinders Lane, Melbourne flg.com.au

3

Cambridge Studio Gallery

John Howley Sightings At Time’s Edge April 3 – April 20 52 Cambridge Street, Collingwood cambridgestudiogallery.com.au

Mr Price’s Food Store

Libby Woodward April 12 – 5:30pm to 8:30pm Fibre Art – Land and Sea April 13 – 2:00pm to 7:00pm 502 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne

Flinders Lane Gallery

5

3

Eleven40 Gallery

Yury Avi Opening Night March 13, 7pm The Way Home March 14 – April 6 1140 Malvern Road Malvern eleven40.com.au

Melbourne Art Rooms Bill Sampson chance upon nothing Until April 7 418 Bay St, Port Melbourne marsgallery.com.au

6

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6

Geelong Gallery

Corporeal – a print exchange folio Until May 12 Little Malop St, Geelong geelonggallery.org.au

7

Hawthorn Studio & Gallery

Robyn Carter Return to Well Station March 16 – April 13 635 Burwood Road, Hawthorn East hawthornstudiogallery.com.au

8

Anita Traverso Gallery

Gallery 1: Matthew de Moiser Veneer: new works in laminate Gallery 2: Drew Aitken Small Obstacles Until March 23 7 Albert St, Richmond anitatraversogallery.com.au

9

Monash Gallery of Art

PEACE: South Collective exhibition Until April 28 860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill mga.org.au

10

Gallerysmith

Eric Bridgeman In The Project Ian Friend Ghost Milk March 22 – April 27 170 – 174 Abbotsford St North Melbourne gallerysmith.com.au

11

Whitehorse Art Space

Byzantine Art & Icons – contemporary and traditional Byzantine iconography From March 7 Box Hill Town Hall, 1022 Whitehorse Road, Box Hill boxhilltownhall.com.au

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 41

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

GALLERY LISTINGS 7

8

10

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Jewish Museum of Australia

McClelland Gallery + TarraWarra Sculpture Park Museum of Art

Edmund Pearce Gallery

61st Blake Prize: Exploring the Religious and Spiritual in Art March 17 – July 28 26 Alma Rd, St. Kilda jewishmuseum.com.au

McLelland Sculpture Survey & Award 2012 Until July 14 360 - 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin mcclellandgallery.com

Master of Stillness Jeffrey Smart paintings 1940 – 2011 Until April 1 Nadine Christensen and Anne Wallace Recent paintings Until April 14 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road Healesville twma.com.au

Derek Henderson & Kelly Thompson Darkness of Noon Greg Blakey Awake & Chosen Until April 6 Lvl 2 Nicholas Building 37 Swanston St, Melbourne edmundpearce.com.au

The Dax Centre

12

RMIT Gallery Peter Corrigan Cities of Hope From April 12 Storey Hall, Swanston St, Melbourne rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

Heide Museum of Modern Art Siri Hayes Back to Nature Scene From March 23 Fiona Hall Big Game Hunting From March 28 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen heide.com.au

National Gallery of Victoria Ballet & Fashion Until May 19 Bea Maddock Until July 21 NGV International 180 St Kilda Rd NGV Australia Federation Square ngv.vic.gov.au

Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre Two Hemispheres: Landscapes from the Alec Cato Collection Until May 12 cnr Carpenter & Wilson Sts, Brighton bayside.vic.gov.au/thegalleryatbacc

The Body’s Betrayal Works by Rosa Niran Until May 4 Selected Works from the Cunningham Dax Collection Until 2015 Kenneth Myer Building The University of Melbourne Royal Parade, Melbourne daxcentre.org

Art Yarramunua Gallery

Invest in a piece of Australia A rare collection of Indigenous art from across Australia, including Stan Yarramunua, Tommy Watson, Jean Burke, Jorna Newberry and Roma Butler. These highly accomplished artists would make a wonderful addition to any art collection.

Aboriginal owned and managed.

Gallery Hours Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 4pm Sunday - By appointment only 500 Collins Street, Melbourne artyarramunua.com

42 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

VISUAL ARTS viewer an Aboriginal woman who has been forced from her home and now has to journey from one exhibition to another, selling her art as a mechanism for survival.

The artist is known Warwick Thornton’s Mother Courage

By Suzanne Fraser

A

t the centre of Mother Courage (2012) is a woman painting: she sits in a van, which exists in a film, which plays on a screen, which sits in the van. When the viewer enters the darkened exhibition space in which this installation stands, they immediately encounter a large, muddy and seemingly incongruous vehicle, on the outside of which have been hung Aboriginal dot paintings and on the inside of which are two television screens (facing front and rear respectively) showing a grandmother-figure and a young man existing on loop. The scene shown on the film is staged in the vehicle in which it plays, thus as the viewer glances into the open rear of the van they find that the space recedes further and quicker than expected.

This distortion of scale and dimension is emphasised in the canvas upon which the woman is working, which spills out from the rear screen into the three-dimensional space.

Sounds of contemporary Aboriginal music and radio patter also tumble from the looped scene in the film, extending beyond the installation boundary and into the gallery space. The combined effect of these illusory devices is surprising and initially disorienting.

Both the visual format and the iconography of Warwick Thornton’s latest installation at

ACMI are exercises in self-reference; one element cites another which references a third which relates back to the first. This practice is partly founded on the artist’s distrust of the art market, which is visually alluded to in the subject of an Aboriginal woman painting Western Desert style canvases in the back of an old white van. The fictional central figure in Mother Courage (played by Grace Ruburitja) produces marketable works of Aboriginal dot painting; Thornton’s own creation in turn encompasses these recognisable standards of Aboriginal art in order to probe the viewer’s understanding of what (and how) Aboriginal art is.

In a brilliantly funny and not a little disquieting short film from 2002 entitled Mimi, Thornton – wearing the Director’s cap that would later propel him to international renown with the film Samson and Delilah – imagines an incident in which Aboriginal art physically rebels against the neat, superficial, moneydriven art world in which it finds itself. In the film, a carved mimi (or “mimih”, a slender and playful spirit being) is bought at auction by an affluent and dim-witted young woman.

The mimi then comes to life, proceeding to run amok in the bourgeois interior of the woman’s central Sydney apartment. After several calamitous attempts to outsmart the animated sculpture – involving the woman dialling 911 instead of 000 and then dialling someone else to ask whether they know “any real Aborigines” – the mimi is finally sent back to its home country, to the relief of all of Thornton’s players (including the young woman, despite the loss of her $800 investment).

Perhaps the most telling line in Thornton’s short film comes just a few second in, when the auctioneer starts the bidding for the carved mimi and announces: “the artist is unknown”.

In reality, the artist is known to be Ivan Namarrkkii. In his latest installation Mother Courage, Thornton places the artist – both the grandmother figure and himself – at the forefront of the work. The scene presented on

the television screens is semi-autobiographical, as the artist casts his earlier self in the role of the young man playing air guitar (played

by Elijah Button). For Thornton, clearly, the historic anonymity of Aboriginal artists in the Western gaze is a key indicator of the cultural miscommunication between Aboriginal art practice and the contemporary art market.

Yet this disconnection is not the product of a reciprocal interaction, but the entrenched misunderstanding of one party by another.

An effort to discuss the distinct difficulties facing contemporary Aboriginal communities is also distinguishable: a newspaper article sitting on the dashboard tells of six young men removed from their homes; an Aboriginal flag is affixed to the petrol cap of the van.”

In a recent panel discussion at the University Of Melbourne held to coincide with the opening of Mother Courage at ACMI, Thornton alluded to his inclination to “beat up” the art market in his works. In itself this notion is nothing new: a quick perusal of the history of art tells of the determinedly uncomfortable relationship between contemporary artists and the marketability of their work. Yet what sets Mother Courage apart from the vast body of market-battering art that fills our gallery spaces is the sobering social and political commentary that underpins Thornton’s installation. Initially inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s narrative of the same name, Mother Courage presents to the

The itinerant nature of this work aligns with Brecht’s story of an old woman in the 17th century trading her wares from a cart, a theme underscored in Thornton’s work by the evident roadworthiness of the van (which is currently registered to April 28, 2013). In fact Mother Courage was first exhibited in 2012 in Kassel, Germany, at the trendy and prestigious dOCUMENTA13 art event, where it travelled from one exhibition opening to another, parking outside of the glamorous venues, appearing to invade the immaculate panorama of contemporary art. Around his own exhibition – which was invited to dOCUMENTA13 like every other work exhibited – Thornton generated the mythology of an outcast, constructing Mother Courage to be a disallowed presence amongst its more conventional peers. Surprisingly, this itinerant identity is not diminished by its current fixed location at ACMI; the viewer is prompted by convention and the medium of the work to understand that this address is only temporary.

Such commentaries available to the viewer in Thornton’s installation are not simply in reference to the commercial and occasionally spurious trade in creative products that the artist sees around him. An effort to discuss the distinct difficulties facing contemporary Aboriginal communities is also distinguishable: a newspaper article sitting on the dashboard tells of six young men removed from their homes; an Aboriginal flag is affixed to the petrol cap of the van. In and upon the vehicle of Mother Courage is represented the social detritus of the imbalanced interaction between Indigenous Australians and white policy-makers. Principal amongst the ravaging episodes referenced in this installation is the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, more commonly referred to as the ‘intervention’. On the left side of the van is a series of paintings – apparently the work of the woman currently painting inside the vehicle – in which the infamous signs that accompanied the intervention are referenced.

Thornton’s motif reads: “Warning, No Grog, No Pornography, No Wepons (of mass distruction), No Jobs”. In this small image the viewer gets a brief insight into the artist’s perception of the injustices experienced by his community. This element of gravity runs alongside the thread of humour and fantasticalness that characterises Thornton’s work, embodied in the figure of the artist’s artist: the indomitable Mother Courage.

» Warwick Thornton’s Mother Courage is at Gallery 2, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Federation Square, from February 5 to June 23. acmi.net.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW MARCH 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

ITALI.CO It’s Amore! all over and Melbourne can’t get enough of it.

REVIEW BY ARABELLA FORGE

GOLDEN FIELDS

ORGANIC WINES

Little Hunter

Lou Pardi says that sometimes, it’s ok to believe the hype

Andrea Frost looks in Australia and across the Tasman for the best in organic wines

Daniella Casamento looks at the design elements of this stylish new eatery

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44 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

Golden Fields Sometimes, it’s ok to believe the hype

by Lou Pardi

I

try not to rush into new restaurants before the varnish on the bar has dried. I’m excited as the next person, sure, especially when it’s Andrew McConnell (Cumulus, Cutler and Co.) who’s created a new experience. But I like to give restaurants a month or so to settle in. I also like to give it time so the über-cool people have left by the time I get there. So that’s my lengthy explanation as to why I haven’t gotten to Golden Fields until now.

I’d heard about it of course. The roar that went up about the unmissable lobster buns, and the claims that Fitzroy Street was hitting its straps again were hard to ignore. (With the recent addition of Milk the Cow – a licensed fromagerie we shall discuss another time – Fitzroy Street certainly is on the comeback).

Golden Fields is still busy. The minimalist fit out (by Projects of Imagination) is cluttered with bodies. On one stark white wall what look like oversized chicken feet reach out as if to grab your attention. On a busy night you might find yourself similarly reaching out for the wait staff.

Overall though it’s a smooth operation and any delays are forgotten once the food arrives.

The Asian menu draws on McConnell’s time living in Shanghai and Hong Kong. For all the noise about the lobster roll, the standout dish in my opinion is an unassuming salad of sliced chicken on house made cold rice noodles. It’s

a perfect contrast of textures and manages to taste completely fresh but with nuanced flavours. The sesame paste could well be sold by the vat.

There’s plenty of mess to be made wrapping the Bonito fish (with miso, ponzu and sesame seaweed - $16) and breaking down the twice cooked duck (with steamed bread, vinegar and plum sauce - $24). For mains, the slowroast lamb shoulder ($68) is best tackled with friends. There’s also steamed barramundi ($38), whole flounder ($36) and Sher Wagyu rump ($38).

The dessert menu offers up a perfectly nailed Snickers-esque peanut butter parfait with salted caramel and soft chocolate ($10). It’s a popular choice – but almost disconcerting.

With its similarity to the chocolate bar it seems out of place in this environment. The spiced pineapple with coconut, strawberries and coriander ($14) is a refreshing and perfectly balanced end to the meal. There’s also a bowl of fresh lychees for simple decadence.

This is certainly a menu worth spending some quality time with. If you’re after tasting menus – ‘The Beast’ ($110 per head) is available for groups of 10 or more people and ‘Chef’s Selection’ ($80) per head is available for 8-14 people.

Fitzroy Street has a ways to go – but with the well-established Fitzrovia backing up drawcards like Golden Fields and Milk the Cow – we just might see more and more hungry people crossing the river, and sooner than we think.

» Golden Fields. 2/157 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.

9525 4488. Lunch and dinner: Monday - Friday goldenfields.com.au

Itali.co

It’s Amore! all over and Melbourne can’t get enough of it

By Arabella Forge

Y

ou might think that Melbourne is over run with pizza parlours, tiramisu and waiters sporting husky Italian accents. But I’m not so sure – to me, these things fall into the same category as champagne Fridays and long weekends – indulgences that you simply cannot get enough of. So when yet another Ristorante Italiano opens its doors with the smell of a fiery hot pizza oven and a decadent display of Campari behind the bar top, you’ll hear no protest from me.

Located on a slightly awkward corner in the heart of St Kilda, Itali.co is more than just a new kid in a busy neighbourhood.

Owner Remo Nicolini is a well-versed pro in a busy market. He has co-owned and inaugurated establishments such as D.O.C., Carlton Espresso and Plus 39 – classic Italian eateries that are warmly familiar to many Melbournians.

The fit out is modern and fresh with clean lines and a generous open bar area and kitchen. The design focus is on food and drink, with liquor bottles on display above the bar top and an open view of the kitchen with a wood-fired Marana pizza oven. Centrally placed in the dining area is a large glass cabinet with fresh produce and a proud-as-punch-looking collection of cured meats. There are odd-looking bits and bobs, long sausage sticks that are well-aged and wrinkly but exquisitely flavoured – most of which have been imported from selected

pockets of Northern Italy where they still cure and prepare their meats according to traditional methods. The only exception is the salami and capocello – both of which are made on site.

Head Chef Piero Roldo (you might remember him from the Sardinian hotspot, Da Noi) has collaborated a menu that is not regionally specific, but rich with trademark Italian simplicity and youthful flair. It is heartfelt Italian food, without those funky edgings and trimmings that are becoming so popular amongst the recent upswing of Italian food glitterati.

Prosciutto and melone – a combination as old as the founders of Rome, is still a heartfelt favourite, still with softly luxurious curls of melon twisted up alongside thin leatherly strips of clean-shaven prosciutto. There are also plump, well-fatted slippery scallops, with subtly-sublime cauliflower pannacotta, basil pesto and scatterings of caviar.

Of course, the real drawcard is the pizza, which is thin crusted, freshly made and decadently cheesy. It’s well worth a trip across town, whether you’re hungry, peckish, or simply in the mood.

Dessert is not optional, it is essential: try the pera e gelato, soft poached pear as plump as a spring rooster, with hints of fresh saffron and a rich scoop of house-made chocolate gelato.

The wait staff score well for friendliness,

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 45

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

RESTAURANT REVIEWS

Trunk Diner A convertible top, a leafy scene and plenty of beer to be had – what more could a guy want?

by Lou Pardi

Y

ou wouldn’t usually think of a restaurant as gender-specific, but Trunk Diner is the self-proclaimed latest home of ‘dude food’ – burgers and hot dogs, kebabs and spicy chicken.

and even better for charming, thicklyset accents. If you have food allergies or intolerances, you might be a little bit on the outer, but there are a handful of glutenfree and allergy-friendly options available.

The wine list is short and sharp, comprising a neat collection of Italian classics and a handful of options of wine by the glass.

You could call itali.co a pizza parlour, a ristorante, or just another well-heeled Italian joint to open in Melbourne. I think it’s a little more than that. The food is good. It’s simple, honest and made with a genuine sense of Italian know-how. It’s not overly trendy but makes up for it with a classic sense of charm. There is a refreshing honesty that pervades the place, from the knobbly-looking cured sausages to the warmth and friendliness of the wait staff. It’s Amore! all over and Melbourne can’t get enough of it.

» Itali.co. 1 / 173-177 Barkly Street St Kilda 9537 5300. Open: every day from 5pm italico.com.au/stkilda

The diner is in the huge courtyard of Trunk bar and restaurant. “Trunk opened in December 2007 and the Diner opened in its first incarnation in 2010 as a temporary space and was fitted out by Projects of Imagination and finished in January 2013,” explains owner Nick Kutcher.

The highlight of the fit out is a convertible glass partition roof which can be opened in good weather – it’s been well taken advantage of during breakfasts, lunches and dinners in our little summer heat wave that won’t end. Inside it’s a casual affair with diner style seating, and meals served on trays. Staff are in a mix of casual gear.

Diner-style restaurants and ‘dude food’ are order of the day in Melbourne at the moment, but Kutcher is quick to note he’s been working on the Trunk Diner for many years – before the trend hit. “I saw a gap in the market to do an American-style diner focusing on burgers way back at the end of 2009. We spent about three months on the product to source the right bun, meat, pickle etc. We also wanted to offer a price point to customers that was slightly lower than the restaurant and bar.” The menu is overseen

by Executive Chef Orazio Cutuli (previously of Madame Jo Jo’s, Café Latte).

The diner is more relaxed than the restaurant both in service and cuisine. “The Trunk diner experience is all about good times in a friendly unique environment. Being a truly indoor/ outdoor diner we focus service on being relaxed but efficient with cruisey eclectic music that suits the space and the food. The food is really based around the idea of ‘the food people love to eat’. The food has most of its origins in the Americas however isn’t limited to that area; we also have kebabs and Vietnamese spring rolls on the night menu,” says Kutcher.

Bringing traditional cuisine to Australia doesn’t always work – but the Trunk menu strikes a good balance in taking inspiration from afar and presenting dishes for the Melbournian palette. “I think American food is right at home with the Australian palette as most of us grew up with American influences in our food. You can serve authentic Mexican food to our palette – however a lot of ingredients are not available in Australia so substitutes have to be made. We try to keep our food suited to the Australian palette across all our products. This leads to authentic American food and more ‘Tex-Mex’ than Mexican, let’s face it who didn’t love nachos growing up!” Kutcher adds.

The nachos (with vine ripened tomato salsa, guacamole, sour cream and jalapeñosare $9) are indeed some of the best to be had in Melbourne. The time put into the wagyu burger was well-spent – the standard burger (175gm ground Wagyu beef, brioche, cos lettuce, thick-cut tomato and pickles - $10) is dwarfed on the tray it’s served on – but is well-balanced and more filling than it looks.

That said, some more ravenous ‘dudes’ will be eating two.

The diner experience wouldn’t be complete without a frothy milkshake treat – and Trunk has some interesting ones. “We really wanted to make our milkshakes original to Trunk Diner so we thought about all of the Australian classic sweets and came up with the Tim-Tam slam, Golden Gaytime and Liquid Lamington,” says Kutcher.

Well worth a visit if you’re in the area or have a serious burger or nachos hankering.

» Trunk Diner. 275 Exhibition Street, Melbourne. 9663 7994. Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Monday - Sunday. trunktown.com.au

46 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

WINE

Organic Wines

by Andrea Frost

E

very vintage, more and more wines are made using organic or biodynamic principles. Though still the minority, winegrowers are turning to the more natural and sustainable ways of winegrowing for the same reasons people are turning to organics and biodynamics in many areas of farming.

Reasons include elimination or minimisation of chemical additions to either the farming or winemaking process; agriculture that creates healthier environments and produce; a more responsible custodianship of the environment; and more subjective and intangible reasons such as wines that taste better and processes

that create a more intimate relationship with woman and her environment.

or organic still apply certain principles to their winegrowing, with the broad brushstroke of a more responsible and healthier way of utilising the earth.

Organics and biodynamics are separate schools requiring adherence to their own rules and systems to be certified as either. However, many winegrowers not classified as either biodynamic

Here are a few wines made with fruit from organic vineyards to make your palate – and the earth – feel good.

Spring Seed Company, Poppy Pinot Grigio 2012

Te Whare Re TORU 2011

Dog Point Section 94 2010

Fromm Clayvin Pinot Noir 2010

McLaren Vale RRP $18 springseedwineco.com.au

Marlborough RRP $25 twrwines.co.nz

Marlborough, New Zealand RRP $32 dogpoint.co.nz

Brancott Valley RRP $75 frommwinery.co.nz

Joch Bosworth and Louise Hemsley Smith of Battle of Bosworth and Spring Seed Wine Company have been leaders in the organic winegrowing movement in Australia since they started converting their McLaren Vale vineyard to organics in 1995.

Their A-Grade certified vineyards produce a range of wines under their Battle of Bosworth and Spring Seed Labels. Vibrant and expressive as the label that adorns it, the Spring Seed Poppy Pinot Grigio 2012 is made in a light and fresh style. “We wanted to retain the fresh gentle aromas of the variety and make a light bodied, fresh wine,” commented Louise. And light and fresh it is; the wine has aromas of pear, citrus and a slight Pinot Grigio spice.

Serve chilled with a smashing view.

Te Whare Re is part of the MANA (Marlborough Natural Winegrowers), “a group of like-minded, Marlborough wine growers who share a passion for producing the very best wine possible – naturally.” Anna and Jason Flowerday, owners of Te Whare Re, the oldest small vineyard in the region, take a long-term view of winegrowing. “We want people to benefit from the land just like we benefitted from the people who planted these vines in 1979. Often the work you do is not for your generation but the ones that follow.” This wine sings as seductively and beautifully as a swarm of sirens on the rocks. Wafts of floral, orange blossom and exotic spice perfume are followed by a rich, complex and textured palate. A beautiful wine that pairs wonderfully with Vietnamese or Thai food.

The Maori refer to the Wairau Valley of Marlborough where the infamous Sauvignon Blanc grows as Kei puta te Wairau “the place with the hole in the cloud”. It is this hole in the cloud, or to put it another way, the vast amount of sunshine hours, which makes Marlborough so well suited to organic farming. Dog Point wines originated with Ivan Sutherland and James Healey who have played a large role in the region’s original successes. Farmed organically, the Section 94 has a nose of citrus, lime and flint, before a complex and layered palate with ripe fruit, layers of texture and a lick of acid. A wine to put to rest any doubt of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc’s potential for evolution, or for its ability to be crafted into complex and intriguing wines.

New Zealand is an infant on the winemaking scene. In only a few decades it has created some famous stories, one being the inimitable style of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

This wine represents one of the emerging stories, set to be a classic; Pinot Noir from Marlborough’s Southern Valleys. Different aspect, different soils and slightly different microclimate than the wide yawning valleys that grow the Sauvignon Blanc vineyards. Fromm is also part of the MANA group of Marlborough winemakers and this wine from the esteemed Clayvin vineyard, tucked high in the Southern Valleys, has aromas of dark fruit, spice and savoury notes on the palate with fine tannins and an elegant finish. As well as organic farming, these wines also have music played to them during vintage. True story.

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 47

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

CAFÉS

Axil Coffee Roasters

W

hat’s better than ginger bread French toast with carmelised figs and macadamia honey mascarpone? All that with a side of bacon.

Indulgent? Yes. Frowned upon? Certainly not; in fact the waiter mentioned that that exact combo was his lunch the day before.

That pretty much encapsulates Axil – this huge barn of a place, with an obvious passion for coffee, a sophisticated and at times decadent menu, and not a hint of self-importance. That shouldn’t be a point of difference – but it is.

Order up a watermelon pomegranate and mint smoothie and just wait for someone at the table to mention adding vodka. It’s an excellent idea – but it’s fine without it.

Later in the day, the pumpkin salad with green beans, goats feta, chickpeas and Dukkah chicken manages to hold my interest for a whole plate. Quite a feat for a salad.

If you’re local you already know this place.

If not, take a trip – it’s worth it.

By Lou Pardi

S

ome days you don’t want to sit in a café.

You want to grab your carbs, hot foot it back to your desk or bed, and imbibe them in your own company. Until recently, the takeaway carb offering centred around the humble spud, which has been mashed and smashed into a variety of contortions.

Enter Etto: fresh, simple, fast pasta. There are a few tables at the South Melbourne shop but it’s really more of a takeaway affair. Perfect for those of us who struggle with slurping lengthy pastas

axilcoffee.com.au

in public. Chef and co-owner Stephane Meyer (previously of The Regent Theatre) makes fresh pasta on site daily: tagliatelle (plain, spinach and chilli), spaghetti, papardelle, rigatoni and fusilli. There’s also beef, chicken, mushroom and spinach and ricotta ravioli.

Meyer makes use of the nearby South Melbourne Market and incorporates local ingredients including Mount Zero olives and Meredith goats’ cheese. Well worth checking out if you’re in the area.

» ETTO. 261 Clarendon Street, South Melbourne. 9696 3886 Lunch and dinner: Monday – Sunday etto.com.au

Photo: Michael Amendolia

Etto

» AXIL. 322 Burwood Road, Hawthorn. 9819 0091. Breakfast and lunch: Monday - Sunday.

T H G I S E R O T S E R 5 2 $ T S FO R J U 5 4 O UT O F

E D TO B E DON’T NE D IN L B E WHO AR P E O P LE

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1800 352 352

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48 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

Photos: Nicole England.

DECONSTRUCTION

Little Hunter

by Daniella Casamento

C

arved from the basement of the old Georges building is a new restaurant from the management team of Hunter Gatherer Group, Scott McDonald and Brett Louis. On arrival at 195 Little Collins Street, a small wall plaque announces the understated entry to Little Hunter. Pass through sheet metal doors at the end of the corridor and follow the brass caged wall lights down the stairs where reward awaits you.

In a space devoid of natural light and views to the street, the journey down the stairs to the dining room enhances the sense of mystery

and intrigue for first time visitors. With a design inspired by the philosophy behind the name, Little Hunter is the epitome of industrial hunting and gathering crossed with a cool New York underground milieu. Designers Samantha Eades and Wendy Bergman have enriched the interior with a mix of new and recycled finishes and salvaged finds they have sourced from overseas. The caged wall lights were sourced from a ship salvage yard in Asia and the Maitre D scissor lift table found in an auction house in New York.

Individual elements combine to make the restaurant and bar an experience that connects you to the land from where produce is sourced.

A cow mural painted by Matthew Collins, and taxidermy in the form of a Dorking rooster that observes the room from the steel mesh waiters’ station, are decorative elements which Bergman says are a light hearted nod to the producer-driven menu. Little Hunter’s Josper charcoal oven is one of only three in Australia and is proudly on show behind the white marble servery adjacent to the dining room. A series of windows behind the long bar also allow views to the main kitchen.

Eades and Bergman have planned the restaurant to make clever use of the original structure instead of imposing their will on it. Original round steel columns sit proudly exposed on large chiselled bluestone blocks and are simply painted gloss black. The perimeter of the dining area is defined by a series of niches that house upholstered banquettes and richly textured recycled messmate dining tables which sit on timber platforms over which sit custom designed light fittings by Paul Grummisch.

Here, exposed brickwork gives a warm textural contrast to the dark navy blue saddle felt that is applied to each pillar and which serves to absorb noise of the dining room. Other nooks are home to an illuminated wine glass store and a dining booth overlooked by the cow mural.

The ceiling features original exposed beams and joists while bulkheads and suspended ceilings serve to reduce noise and conceal services. Acoustic underlay also helps to minimise noise as staff and patrons move across the timber floor.

Geometric patterned wall tiles designed by internationally renowned Patricia Urquiola

are located on the far wall and invite further investigation of the long bar. Here, you can settle in for a drink and wait for a table while you enjoy the hustle and bustle from a quiet vantage point. A series of unobtrusive hooks fixed below the recycled messmate bar top deal with the problem of where to hang your coat or bag. Low stools with salvaged timber seats and metal frames, bottle displays with panels of safety glass and feature light fittings by Grummisch are evidence of a well considered approach to the design of Little Hunter.

Eades and Bergman have employed a combination of richly coloured recycled messmate, honed marble, textured tiles, rendered bricks, steel mesh and black stained timber to create an earthy yet chic new venue.

Âť Little Hunter, 195 Little Collins St, Melbourne. 9654 0090. littlehunter.com.au

THE MELBOURNE REVIEW MARCH 2013

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

Hidebound Why political wrangling does nothing to serve our built environment

He with Glands of Wasp by New Zealand artist Rohan Wealleans.

BY BYRON GEORGE/ PHOTO BY Genevieve Beecham

Trenerry Abbotsford

TOP DESIGNS 2013

A SIGN OF ThINGS TO COME

The final release of these uniquely and beautifully finished apartments

Melbourne Museum hosts a wealth of emerging student design talent from across Victoria

Jennifer Cunich on the value of international students to the Victorian economy

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50 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

FORM

New buyers want upgrade to first class

A

new breed of apartment buyers has entered the Melbourne apartment market, especially professionals moving out of the suburbs. They want internal finishes with upgraded features to rival luxury homes, but still enjoy the amenities and location offered by inner-city fringe apartment living.

Trenerry Abbotsford apartments have responded to this new trend by re-launching their successful project, and releasing its final apartments for sale that are uniquely and beautifully finished with specifications rarely seen in affordable apartment living Melbourne.

This final release at Trenerry offers European oak floors, floor to ceiling feature tiles in bathrooms, marble splashbacks in the kitchens, all stone benchtops and significant additional cabinetry like study nooks and entertainment units.

“Trenerry has upgraded the specifications in its remaining apartments for sale because we know what buyers are telling us – they want more luxury finishes as part of the enjoyment of living in their own apartment,’’ said Robert DiCintio, Developer.

“The really interesting thing about the success of Trenerry – which is already under construction with two-thirds of the apartments sold – is that we are attracting a much higher percentage of owner occupiers. The project’s amazing location just three kilometers from the city means purchasers actually want to live where they buy,” DiCintio added.

“Purchasers can be assured the project will be well built and beautifully finished as both myself and the builder will also be moving in

to call Trenerry our home.”

Trenerry Abbotsford is located at 88 Trenerry Crescent, just near the recently redeveloped parkland of the former home of Collingwood Football Club, Victoria Park and within easy walking distance of the Yarra River and Dights Falls.

Overall the development is boutique in style with just 109 apartments in total and features a stunning sculptured lobby entrance, with bluestone floors and vertical wall garden and heritage chimney stack and facade.

There are only ten stylish apartments and two spacious townhouses remaining, all of which include separate storage and carpark offering real value.

“We know that apartment buyers now want more bang for their buck. They want an upgrade to first class affordable luxury because they want to enjoy great specifications, European appliances such as Gaggenau and Miele, and a very high standard of built-in cabinetry.

“Trenerry is in its final phase of development.

We will complete this project by June 2013, so that offers added certainty to buyers. This final release is the last chance for buyers to be part of this project,” DiCintio said.

To reflect the new standard of finishes and specifications offered by the remaining apartments for sale at Trenerry Abbotsford, a display suite is open onsite which is an actual furnished townhouse to showcase the liveability of the residences and location.

trenerryapartments.com.au

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 51

MELBOURNEREVIEW.COM.AU

SOMEBODY DREW THAT

Hidebound

by Byron George

I

don’t know if I could cope with being a politician. Being constantly scrutinised, criticised and scorned, sometimes warranted, but more often because the object of the criticism has a different political viewpoint and agenda to the critic. The partisan nature of contemporary mainstream media is depressing, not just because it’s doggedly pushing a certain viewpoint, but because of how thinly veiled most of it is.

The editorial of last Saturday’s Fin Review describes “Labor’s story as the party of redistribution” and the Liberals and Nationals of needing to be the “party of productivity.” The editor didn’t exactly use the “S” or “C” words, but both were very clearly communicated. On another occasion, I read on the front page of The Age a story of global warming and a report released by the IPCC with new evidence and bad news about the accelerating rate of climate change. On the same day, The Australian’s front page featured a story on coal mining and it apparently being the saviour of the Australian economy. Both newspapers push a certain line, The Age slightly left of centre, The Australian, considerably more to the right.

If you want to see a more extreme version of all of this, you need look no further than the comments that follow any political article.

Slander and public opinion seem to be good bedfellows. What is amusing is when those who perpetuate these views as fact believe so vehemently in what they say, but not enough to put their actual names to them.

If you believe the popular negative myths of each party, the Labor party is a socialist, interventionist, bleeding hearts, nanny state party that wants to control you and will take your hard earned dollars and give them to dole bludgers. In the same vein, the Liberal party is a 1950s conservative, capitalist company that will take away the rights of workers and

anyone who is not married with two children or running a large company. The Labor party wears freshly nuggetted white nursing shoes, while the Liberal party would never be seen in white shoes, particularly after Labour Day. The Greens on the other hand are the loony party with dangerous ideas that will undermine our way of life. They don’t wear any shoes.

But why the primary school political lecture in the FORM section? Because anecdotally, these stereotypes go some way to explain any government’s approach to shaping the public realm, and our built environment, is probably the most visible victim of the degradation of our political system.

The Government’s “Building the Education Revolution” scheme can be defined in the mythology of both sides of politics. From the point of view of the left, it was a way of providing infrastructure to public schools with the flow-on effect of stimulating the construction industry and ultimately benefiting the county in the long term. An educated population is a more productive one. From the point of view of the right, it read like the plot of an Ayn Rand novel.

Bureaucratic government borrowing money it didn’t have to build school halls that were not needed to perpetuate a myth of a government in action. In truth the money probably would have been better spent on training teachers and improving existing infrastructure, but that wouldn’t make a great photo opportunity.

The same can be said of the scheme to provide insulation to millions of households.

Great idea, saving everyone money while making homes more comfortable and reducing our carbon footprint (Australian homes are notoriously badly designed when it comes to energy efficiency and climate moderation).

This investment seems like a no-brainer. Until people are electrocuted and houses burn down.

It seems that a few dodgy operators trying to make a quick buck can reflect very badly on a government. Negative PR for the Government providing the opposition with many hours of bluster. In reality, the scheme has reduced the energy bills of thousands of Australians, while the liability seems to have entirely missed those actually at fault. There is a reason building practitioners are licensed.

Whether it was the Howard Government funneling money into middle class welfare, or the Gillard/Rudd Government building school halls that are not necessary, both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of spending money that doesn’t really solve the difficult problems.

Decisions here seem to be about getting votes rather than solving issues that are in the national interest. Just using the phrase “national interest” seems passé in our current discourse. For the right it’s all about the individual, while the left uses the idea as a PR opportunity.

The sad thing is that both sides are actually complementary. Using a building analogy, the rules and framework that prevents the destruction of our heritage and history, protecting consumers with building regulations and rules, also gives the individual architect and builder the freedom and certainty to do their job without fear of being a victim of legal action or the building falling down.

Building a large building is a difficult and complicated task from a multitude of levels.

There are those who have to make decisions, approvals from an array of authorities and organisations, compliance with a number of rules that would fill several phone books, and the coordination of a host of consultants with different and often conflicting ideas of what the outcome should be. And this is just the design phase. I guess the analogy I’m trying to make is that if a construction or design meeting ran like a parliamentary debate, what is built would be so compromised that it would be torn down by the next construction team in a short time, if it was built at all.

Personal attack is never a good way to resolve an issue, yet it is the main way things are debated in this country. This is not critical discourse, it’s a fundamental lack of being able to see beyond your own mythology. And in the end, we’re all poorer for it.

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

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52 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

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Angelica Milanes.

Celebrating emerging design

By Daniella Casamento

T

op Designs 2013 reflects a vast wealth of emerging student designers from across Victoria.

Each year, Melbourne Museum exhibits outstanding work produced by VCE students who have spent their last school year pursuing design disciplines that range from Product Design and Technology, Visual Communication, Systems Engineering, Multimedia to Film and a few more besides.

This year 108 VCE students, selected from over 1900 applicants across state and independent schools, are honoured to have their original work and supporting folios on show.

“Top Designs has called Melbourne Museum home for over a decade,” said Brett Dunlop, Manager, Melbourne Museum. “It

has become a key exhibition that we look forward to every year and we are certainly very proud to be involved with so many talented young Victorians. The exhibition not only shows great design but also stands as a testament to the students’ innovation and ambition.”

Miranda Picton-Warlow, Top Designs curator, adds, “It’s fantastic to see the students’ and teachers’ hard work come together to form such an exhibition. These subjects are tough and time-heavy, so students develop strong networks which help them to achieve their best. The results are fantastic and the students should be very proud of their work.”

Sophie Hodges has always aspired to have her work accepted into Top Designs. While

studying Product Design and Technology at Carey Baptist Grammar School, Hodges conceived the idea of wearable art made of ceramic, leather thonging and glass beads.

The result is ‘Trio’.

All three pieces exhibited at Top Designs represent a thought process which delves into the tension between “the masculinity of structure contrasted with soft materials and fragile ceramics,” explains Hodges. With her focus on bone structure and particularly collarbones, the pieces were moulded and draped to fit her client’s petite shoulders. “I’m honoured that ‘Trio’ is displayed alongside a broad range of accomplished designs,” she said. “It is an acknowledgement of the time, effort and hard work that goes into studying folio subjects.” Hodges now studies Fashion, Textiles and Merchandising at RMIT Brunswick.

Joshua Littman says he is aware of the prestige attributed to Top Designs and is excited and honoured to have his project included in the exhibition after “such a year of adversity.”

As a former student of Mowbray College, he enrolled at Catholic Regional College after the mid-year collapse of his former school.

Studying Systems Engineering gave Littman a practical outlet for his childhood passion for electronics and soldering, and despite the disruption to his studies he quickly adjusted to a new environment and range of tools. Littman’s ‘Spy Recon Tank’ (SRT) is a reconnaissance

Isabelle Mead.

robot inspired by bomb disposal robots. “Its main purpose,” he says, “is to go places that humans can’t go so that it can determine a safe path in times of disaster.” Littman has begun a degree in Bachelor of Information Technology at La Trobe University in Bundoora.

The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013 53

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“Top Designs has called Melbourne Museum home for over a decade... It has become a key exhibition that we look forward to every year and we are certainly very proud to be involved with so many talented young Victorians.”

As a regular visitor to Top Designs at Melbourne Museum, Zoe Blow’s ultimate ambition was to have her VCE folio selected for exhibition. When she found herself surrounded by a vast array of colourful gelato during a visit to the 2011 Venice Biennale in Italy, the seed was planted for the packaging design of ‘Willow & Sage’. Blow hopes that the display of supporting material from her folio explains her thought process throughout the entire design phase. ‘Willow & Sage’ shows a considered resolution of brand and packaging which utilises colour to represent ingredients in a “burst of flavour”, as she puts it. The VCE course in Visual Communications and Design required Blow to develop a client brief aimed at responding to design problems in a professional way and has prepared her well for her degree in Communication and Design at RMIT. Top Designs 2013 is a highlight of the VCE Season of Excellence and is managed by the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA). The exhibition is complemented by a series of education programs developed

by Melbourne Museum’s Education and

Zoe Blow.

Community Programs department and includes introductory talks, forums and professional development sessions for teachers. Visitors to Top Designs 2013 will have the opportunity to vote for their favourite work to win the People’s Choice Award through the Eckersley’s Art & Craft Facebook page.

» Top Designs 2013 will be held at Melbourne Museum from March 16 to June 30 and is complemented by a series of education programs including introductory talks, forums and professional development sessions for teachers.

Joshua Littman.

museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum

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54 The Melbourne Review MARCH 2013

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A sign of things to come

By Jennifer Cunich

A

ccording to the International Education Advisory Council’s latest report, Australia needs to get ready to welcome an additional 117,000 new international students by 2020. (Australia – Educating Globally, 2013).

Thanks to our world-renowned tertiary education system, Victoria hosts close to one third of all students who arrive to study in Australia.

If these long term forecasts for Australia’s international education sector are to be believed, we must start acting now to ensure that our state is able to handle these growth numbers.

Few people may know that the international education sector is in fact one of Victoria’s most valuable export industries. Each year,

international education contributes $4.6 billion to the state economy, and employs approximately 50,000 people in direct and indirect full-time equivalent jobs. However, a greater focus on the international education sector in other established destinations, such as the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, suggest that we may face fierce competition for future enrolments. Providing a high quality experience for inbound students

International students are well positioned to drive overseas visitation and increase tourism by their advocacy of Victoria to others back home. They are another means through which we can promote our brand overseas.” will therefore be crucial if we are to market Victoria as a compelling place to live and study.

Victoria must offer a study experience that is second-to-none, and part of this means making sure that our state is ready to meet the demands of an expanding student population. To this end, we need to consider three reforms that will assist in ensuring the future strength of the sector.

First, we need to provide safe, affordable student accommodation that allows for the successful integration of students. More investment in student accommodation can be encouraged by improving the appeal of this particular asset class through government finance or support through planning and approval processes. Personal safety, in addition to housing stress and the cost of living continue to be factors that impact on student choice.

Increasing the supply of affordable housing options in central locations is one way we can address this issue.

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Second, a well-connected network of public transport is needed to improve student mobility, particularly in dense urban centres. While the reality is that international students represent a small percentage of our overall population, many commuters from this demographic tend to rely on concentrated public transport for reasons of practicality and cost. Building an efficient, clean and safe transport system is a critical undertaking if we are to handle the projected numbers of visitors to this state. As such, investing in our infrastructure capacity would boost our competitiveness in relation to other Australian states as a study destination.

Finally, the Victorian Government should lead the way in making the development of regional centres a priority. This carries multiple benefits, beginning with an improved visitor experience for overseas students who choose to study at a regional tertiary institution. With the State Government eager to invest in regional areas, we should seize the opportunity to encourage greater housing provision and support services that can assist with settlement and integration.

Making Victoria more attractive for international students is an investment on many fronts. We need to recognise that the sector not only provides direct gains to our economy and social diversity, but also delivers long-term benefits for the local workforce, filling skills shortages and building further trade relationships. International students are well positioned to drive overseas visitation and increase tourism by their advocacy of Victoria to others back home. They are another means through which we can promote our brand overseas.

The international education sector makes a valuable contribution to Victoria’s social and economic landscape. Improving our capacity for coping with forecast demand and offering a positive study experience will be imperative if we are to ensure the long term prosperity of this key service sector. The time has come to set a higher bar for being good hosts – let’s get on with it!

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