September 2016

trouble 138

DRAWING, ALL THE TIME – LILY MAE MARTIN Ararat Regional Art Gallery, Town Hall, Vincent Street, Ararat (VIC), 15 September – 30 October 2016 ARTIST’S TALK: Saturday 17 September at 1pm. http://www.facebook.com/araratgallery

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: (cover) I am blood, bones and a beating heart 2015, ink on paper, 105 x 75 cm. Untitled 2015, ink on paper, 77 x 57cm. Wrestling four 2015, ink on paper, 105 x 75 cm.

Lily Mae Martin’s work is also included in current exhibitions of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery and the Rick Amor Drawing Prize at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. She was recently awarded the Ursula Hoff Emerging Artist Acquisitive Award at the 2016 National Works of Paper Award, Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery.

She is represented by Scott Livesey Galleries. Artist’s site lilymaemartin.com

CONTENTS DRAWING, ALL THE TIME LILY MAE MARTIN

Ararat Gallery ..........................................................................................

COMICS FACE

Ive Sorocuk ..............................................................................................

TRAVELS IN CLOWLAND: PART ONE

Judith Lanigan .........................................................................................

1787

Nick Brodie ...............................................................................................

SEPTEMBER SALON

Supercillious ............................................................................................

FINDING THE ART IN PHUKET: CATCH OF THE DAY

Anthony S. Cameron ...............................................................................

02 07 08 24 36

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COVER: Lily Mae MARTIN, I am blood, bones and a beating heart, 2015, ink on paper, 105 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries. Drawing, all the time – Lily Mae Martin, Ararat Regional Art Gallery, Town Hall, Vincent Street, Ararat (VIC), 15 September – 30 October 2016 (Artist’s Talk: Saturday 17 September at 1pm) - facebook.com/araratgallery Issue 138 SEPTEMBER 2016 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 EDITOR Steve Proposch CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Judith Lanigan, Nick Brodie, Anthony S. Cameron, love.

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This comic first appeared in Trouble October 2013

TRAVELS IN

PART ONE

“I

have learnt that any business that pays more than ten percent, or is conducted after nine o’clock at night, is a dangerous business.”

- James Bond, as written by Ian Fleming

1. Taking the piss: the simplest thing, and a warning ...

It was late afternoon when I drove down through the hills to the city.

I had been stranded, as it were, away from Clownland for a while, with an injury. I was not really sure how I fitted into the world and I don’t think the world was very sure about me, either. We could best be described as being quite unsure about each other.

I had been injured. I was still limping. In the country town I had ended up in there wasn’t anyone who had known me before “the fall”. I tried explaining what I used to do before I smashed my foot but I found that most people had absolutely no idea what a clown really was, or how many different types of clown there are. This is number three of the three reasons I am embarking on this trip, this quest, as your tour guide.

Patrick Bath, aka Dirty Pat, aka Squeak the Clown, aka Neville, has been more places on the map of Clownland than anyone else I know. This is a good place to start. I asked Pat to explain what a Clown is.

‘It is easier to define clown by what it is not,’ he said. ‘It’s not the way they look or sound or even behave. It’s the way they relate to the situations they find themselves in. The rational, the obvious, the predictable, are not options for the clown. The clown transforms everyday problems, not overcoming them, but transforming them into something strange and wonderful. It is the ability to extract humour, sorrow, or beauty from nothing or less than nothing.

When I asked him about his early experiences of clown he said this: ‘When I was a kid there was this horrible tradition that I grew up with; fat horrible men dressed in a full clown costume with clown make-up, who weren’t Clowns, because it was a country thing and they didn’t have any real Clowns there. And they would just sit there being obnoxiously themselves and throw lollies to the kids, and so a big thing for us when we started doing Clown was to completely change that, because we thought that was horrible. This person that wasn’t attempting to do anything, they were just in a costume like Santa every year.’

‘Do you think that’s got something to do with fear of clown as well?’ I asked. ‘People in Clown costume who have no idea of the intent?’

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Judith Lanigan photographed by Lisa Mills. > Patrick Bath photographed by John McCormick.

Pat nodded. ‘Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of it, but in Western society there’s been this rise in Coulrophobia – fear of Clowns – spurred on by films like It and Poltergeist where there was an evil clown under the bed.

They’ve been popularised in film. Sometimes when I’m in Squeak the Clown I’ll meet a full Coulrophobe, and you have to be really sensitive to it and just disappear, because they really can’t cope. Usually someone will tell you because someone with Coulrophobia can’t even speak to you, but someone else will say “oh, don’t go near that girl”. I had one recently and for some reason I didn’t disappear, I just went over and took the nose off and she immediately relaxed, but I couldn’t put it back on until I was out of sight. I have a theory about it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I think it is racism, because Clowns are their own race and because racism is all about not liking difference.’

We walked through his house. One wall was covered by a bookshelf loaded with books and figurines, Clown toys, headdresses and hats. A formal ‘tails’ coat made of plaid fabric and a naval shirt with the epaulettes of an officer hung off each other from the shelves. On the other side of the fireplace stood a four-foot high pink flamingo and behind it leant a surfboard with a picture of Captain America on it. Above a lamp decorated with a print of The Last Supper was an old film poster with a blonde woman and a gun, which stood over a glass box, inside of which was a two-headed chicken. On the wall beside that was a frame containing the corpse of a human-like fish exhibited in sideshows as mermaids. The windows were draped with dark red velvet curtains tied back with eight large gold tassels. Below the window were two tiny toy pianos, one of top of the other, and next to them a glass frame in which was a selection of miniature musical stringed instruments, none of which I could name. Sitting on the table in the corner was an Indian Harmonium with brass knobs and on the wall were ten paintings. By the door was a vase full of plumed kewpie dolls, each one brought home to his wife by Pat Bath from each Agricultural show that ‘Squeak’ had performed at.

I was distracted by Pat Bath’s watch. It was enormous. The watch face itself was wider than his wrist. The winding knob connected by a small chain to the outside of the watch was larger in diameter than my little finger. The watch was held to his wrist by a stitched leather band as wide as my hand. Pat explained that when his mother gave it to him for Christmas his first thought was that his clown ‘Squeak’ could wear it, as he always needed to know what the time was. His mother, he said, was a little offended.

‘There’s a thing clowns do,’ Pat said. ‘They recognise the simplicity, the simplest form of funny, and one of the simplest forms of funny is just things being mis-sized. That’s what a clown does, things that a normal person

Clownland / Judith Lanigan

wouldn’t do, and this is what upsets people sometimes, or disturbs or confuses them on a very simple, basic elemental level.

‘There’s a great Australian thing about “taking the piss”,’ Pat continued, ‘and from the reading I’ve done it harks right back to the indigenous people, who, as a generalism, identify themselves as the comedy people. It is an aspect of them that we, as white Australians, often don’t get. When the first Europeans arrived they had a lot of trouble understanding that the aboriginals, as part of their culture, were taking the piss out of them. When they meet different subgroups, the way they diffuse potentially dangerous situations is by taking the piss. They are really the “make fun” people, so I think to a certain degree part of the Australian character comes from them.

Taking the piss is a very Australian thing, and even when I’m talking to the older generations, within a few seconds of meeting someone that I have never met before someone will take the piss in some way.’

I asked Pat to explain taking the piss. It is a very Australian expression, almost a way of life, that you may not be familiar with if you are not from here.

‘It is a shortening of the Australian expression “to take the piss out of” and can often refer to subversion through thinly disguised parody. In a general sense it means to mock, tease, ridicule or scoff at something; to find the soft underbelly of a situation and poke at its hypocrisies and ridiculousness. It is an attempt to deflate false pride. Taking the piss is an aspect of what clown is, even this watch,’ he said, ‘is taking the piss; especially in an age when small is often considered better.’

I followed Pat through to the kitchen where two fringed, red Indonesian umbrellas stood guard over the kitchen table. In front of me was a picture of three men in whiteface makeup, their heads sticking up out of white buckets which had been placed upside down around their necks, like you’d put on a dog to stop it biting itself. This is The Dirty Brothers. One of them is ‘Dirty Pat’. In the video that Pat showed me later The Dirty Brothers danced slowly across a stage spread with set mousetraps, in bare feet, and wearing the aforementioned white buckets, to the music of Zorba the Greek. Then one of them staple-gunned flowers from a lei to his bare chest and danced a reluctant hula to the sound of a musical saw, and the other put an elbow in a dingo trap, and then showered in the sparks from an angle-grinder. The Dirty Brothers are dark clowns.

Patrick Bath is what you might call a multi-functioning clown. I could probably fill this book just with his thoughts on the subject, but then you would never get to see any more of Clownland. One of Pat’s suggestions for the next step of this journey you and I are on is Rani Huszar.

NEXT SPREAD: Dark Party photographed by John McCormick.

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‘She’s a genius because she is a pin-up gorgeous girl and she goes and takes the piss out of herself at any opportunity, like she has no awareness of how people see her. Either that or she is taking the piss out of being the gorgeous pinup. It’s brilliant.’

The room in which I was to sleep was full of things too. In one corner was a pile of drum-kit hardware, a ‘singing’ saw, a djembe, congas and a piano which had about fifty different things piled in a jumble of pictures, hats, feathers and froth on top.

Against the wall leant the wings and tail of a gargoyle. In an open box sat a Japanese Geisha wig, and the stack of boxes it sat on contained more wigs. An old fashioned Berlini keyboard, a synthesizer, ukuleles, a valve amp, concertina, amplifier, drum kit, a case full of percussion instruments, a glockenspiel, another harmonium, a Mariachi bass, more ukuleles, more keyboards, a couple of swans, an electric guitar, acoustic guitars, a sitar, a film screen, a couple of eight-track digital recorders, paintings and posters from The Dirty Brothers recent season at the Opera House, and a few more suitcases, still somehow left ample space for a bed.

Pat was about to close the door when he paused and said, ‘You know there is the risk that if you dissect something like Comedy, or Clown, too much, you might learn about it, but you’ll never put it back together in exactly the same way ...’ and then he said good night.

I don’t want to end up with pieces of clown scattered all over the floor that I don’t know how to put back together. But that’s not what worries me the most.

2. My coffee theory and an early digression The next step was in the end accidental, and a digression, but essential.

From years of being on tour to international festivals I had ended up with a habit of drinking coffee out, at a café. It is a reassuring ritual when you wake up in a hotel room in a strange country, and the habit has stuck with me because you can end up in some odd conversations.

Back in the real world, waiting to meet with Rani Huszar, I went out for coffee and ended up in conversation with the two men – an acquaintance and his boyfriend – at the next table. They asked what I had been doing and I explained my quest; this clown trip you and I are on.

Tommy Brogden and Paul Dunn aren’t clowns, but what they had to say is quite interesting.

‘I really don’t know what Clown is, and that’s why I like them,’ Tommy said.

‘There was a significantly terrifying scene with ...’ his words picked up pace, ‘a toy clown that comes to life and tries to eat this boy.’

Clownland / Judith Lanigan

‘So for you a clown image brings up TV and film horror?’ I asked.

‘It’s not fluffy-lovey, but I think there’s value in anything that breaks through the routine sense of normality that we put up because it is completely fake, and yet we stick to it tenaciously, for stability and stuff, as if that is how things should be, and anything that shakes that up is good,’ said Tommy. ‘In the city I think Drag Queens are taking the place of clowns. Years from now they’ll be having transvestites at kids parties instead of Clowns. Clowns have become so normalised, so accepted, that that’s what they’ll have to start doing. They have the same exaggeration of form.’

Tom’s friend Paul put down his coffee and said, ‘There’s been a lot of research recently into the way that people recognise faces; the eyes have to be placed just so, and the mouth has to be a certain shape and proportion.

I definitely think that facial recognition is an important part of the Clown because it makes us have to focus and actually pay attention and engage with it on a level that we don’t take for granted. When you look at the brain, the eyes are just a small pair of nuggets sticking off the brain itself, and the brain is given over to neural processing and a lot of that is facial processing, because we are social creatures, and when we see people with an exaggerated face we have to stop and stare, the same as when we see people who are a little androgynous.

We stop and stare because we can’t classify them immediately.’

‘What do you do that you know about this sort of thing?’ I asked.

‘My formal training is in Computational Biology and Artificial Intelligence,’ he said. ‘Modelling biological processes is where you get an understanding of how things change over time. What I study is how things change; how new ideas evolve with populations in a genetic basis, and sometimes in an ideological basis. It is like a virtual garden; you just play with things you can grow, and sit back and watch them all.

‘Facial recognition has been a huge thing. For my thesis I modelled small brains and I created an evolutionary algorithm that created these brains about ninety neurons, about the same size as a pea. I figured they would be good enough to apply themselves to certain tasks very well. The task I applied them to was facial recognition. So from an image that was a fragment of a face I managed to get those ninety neurons to pick it up about ninety percent of the time. The brain is really well-geared towards facial recognition and picking up these small pieces and extrapolating the full picture, but when it deviates from that focus is required, and I think that is what the clown does and what the shaman does. It takes that step outside our everyday interactions with people and makes us think more in the process.

‘What I’m curious about,’ Paul continued, ‘is the clowns themselves.

Whether they ever stop and take the make-up off. I always thought it was like, you can wake up one day and you’re a clown, but not many people wake up

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and realise they are not a clown. And becoming a clown? It is almost a “coming out” story, the process of realising you’re different. It is almost a comedy show, with the clown describing the way they came out to their parents as a clown.

You know, “my parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor but I went to Clown school instead”.’

They asked about my interest in Clown, and I explained. Part of my explanation involved the theory that a clown always says yes, or else the game is over. Paul found this interesting.

‘There’s a theory that the conscious mind is only capable of an inhibitive process; to say no. So the sub-conscious mind generates the ideas and the conscious mind says no to the bad ones. The sub-conscious mind will go back, develop a new idea and bring it forward to get permission or not. So you are never actually generating new ideas by thinking consciously, you are only examining ideas for whether or not you want to progress with them. So the idea that a clown always says yes is a form of channeling the subconscious directly out onto the stage.’

Back at home I researched this further. Apparently we have these “latent inhibitors” which help to filter out the irrelevant information around us and allow us to focus on something whilst being amongst other stimuli, like reading a book on a train.

Creative people are creative because their latent inhibitors are less effective and allow stimuli in for the brain to process into a creation. But if the individual is unable to balance the latent inhibitors and focus, they can’t get anything done.

Wiki explains Latent Inhibitors thus: “Most people are able to ignore the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but this capability is reduced in those with low latent inhibition. ... Those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, enabling their creativity and increasing their awareness of their surroundings. Those with less than average intelligence, on the other hand, are less able to cope, and as a result are more likely to suffer from mental illness and sensory overload. It is hypothesised that a low level of latent inhibition can cause either psychosis or a high level of creative achievement, or both, usually dependent on the individual’s intelligence. When they cannot develop the creative ideas, they become frustrated and/or depressive.”

So ... Clowns have low latent inhibitors, and the sub-conscious and the conscious cannot both be present when working on a problem. The subconscious can only do its job when the conscious is not actively engaged on the problem.

Clownland / Judith Lanigan

3. A Fresh Willing Idiot In the city the traffic was thick and the cars were a torrent of headlights coming towards me. When I saw a shape that looked like the van I was waiting for, it was escorted by flashing police lights signalling it to pull over.

The van stopped beside me, the police car behind it. One officer got out to talk to the driver, then gestured at me to get in the van.

It was lucky I didn’t bring much with me because the van also contained a quite a few suitcases, a square glass box about the same size as a hatbox, and a bundle of pieces of metal. A man in a dinner suit and bow tie was asleep in the back seat.

Rani, laughing that the police had signalled her to pull over exactly where I was waiting, kissed me hello, then pinned up her thick, long, shiny black hair.

She smoothed her 1950s flowered silk cocktail dress and passed me a sparkly pair of high heels, which she had just taken off, saying ‘can you put them in the back for me?’ She said ‘Don’t mind Romeo,’ and I realised that the man in the back seat was not her partner Daniel Oldaker, but the life-sized figure that she dances with in one of her shows. We drove off down St Kilda Road.

This is Rani Huszar, aka Ruby Rubberlegs. We were driving to Adelaide.

Once we left the city behind us I asked her what she thinks of when she thinks of Clown.

‘I think of a fresh, willing idiot who is in the moment,’ she replied.

It was raining lightly. Ahead there was a long deep puddle on the side of the road and the car in front threw up a wave as it sped past us. She leaned forward and switched the wipers on. A truck veered past us round a curve, veering over onto our side of the white line.

Rani said, ‘a clown is an individual character, so when someone copies someone else’s clown, or is taught someone’s traditional routine, unless they are a particularly good actor, it is not going to work, because there are elements of the person that is missing. A clown is a ripped back, raw, individual idiot. They are so revealed that they are completely vulnerable.’ She laughed, ‘Having said that, I hate insecure clowns.’ And she laughed again.

‘So you don’t define it as circus clown?’ I asked.

‘I hate circus clown unless they have that that fresh willing idiot thing.

There are some people that are total clowns, but they would never get on stage. And then there are a lot of clowns I’ve seen on stage that don’t have an inkling of clown in them, and they are doing clown routines and you just want to punch them because they don’t have clown in them.’

I put forward the theory suggested in the previous chapter, that drag queens are the new clown.

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‘No,’ said Rani. ‘Drag queens are the oldest clown. It’s always existed. It always used to be men that played women, and guys playing women has always been funny, because they are bigger and more awkward, and clumsier.

A guy can’t really be a woman without being ridiculous. They can be all the wrong stuff about women. They have permission to do that. Women have always been sexualised, and part of what is funny is to see that being broken down by a great clumsy ape trying to play a sexualised creature. If you go back in every possible culture, even in Polynesian culture, it is a traditional thing; there is a role for a man who pretends to be a woman.’

Suddenly there were big trucks, the road had been split in half by road works, there was a confusion of lights, stop signs and diversions, and Rani concentrated on her driving.

‘In Polynesian culture in each village it’s common for a man to be chosen from a young age to be trained as a woman,’ she continued once in the clear.

‘He will live his entire life as a woman and he is a central character and like an “agony aunt” who people can tell their problems to. His job is to keep the joy there. You should talk to Fez about that.’

Rani’s first shows were snake dancing, sideshow, tightrope walking, and belly-dancing. She said, ‘Somewhere along that road is where I started to fall in love with the idea of just making people laugh. All my ideas, my driving forces, are always really simplistic. I just want people to feel the happiness I feel. I like the colour and the flamboyance of things, and I just want people to experience that. I want people to laugh. I just like the sound of people’s laughter. Laughter is better than applause because laughter is such an honest reaction.’

We drove on through the night and eventually passed a town that took half a minute to drive through, half way between Adelaide and Melbourne. In the middle of it was a shop with flashing lights that were six different colours, and then the town was gone. A quarter moon had just emerged from behind clouds and then we were driving down an Avenue of Honour; the long row of trees that line the road out of town, each one planted for a soldier that didn’t arrive home from a war.

It was three o’clock in the morning when we drove into the centre of Adelaide. We parked alongside Rymill Park and got out of the van and stretched and looked around. We could hear music. There were coloured lights strung in trees on the other side of a big fence. A security guard stood waiting beside a doorway. Rani showed him her passes and he nodded and waved us through. We walked down a long crooked hallway made of doors, open to the sky. It opened up into a big enclosure where there was music and a hundred people danced, and a hundred more stood around the bar, drinking and laughing and talking and smoking. Beneath my feet there was a > Rani Huszar, aka Ruby Rubberlegs.

wooden floor. Above my head was a canopy of leafy branches. We had arrived at the Artists Bar of the Adelaide Fringe festival.

On the stage was a tall and very beautiful man dressed in a sequinned gown, high heels, a wig, and a carefully groomed beard and sideburns. He is obviously a trained dancer. This is Fez Faanana.

Fez is a founding member and creative director of the male burlesque company ‘Briefs’ who, he said, are inspired by pop culture, the artistry of drag, the guts of circus, the showmanship of burlesque, and the traditions of theatre.

In media interviews Fez has explained that he is of an era of short attention spans and multiple, fast-paced stimuli, and inspired by the epic music videos of the eighties and nineties, the irreverence of comedians, and Samoan culture, which has strong elements of clowning and is energetic and boisterous.

‘I began performing,’ he said, ‘as a little immigrant islander with a dance group made up of a few fellow Samoans, on the outskirts of Brisbane. And by outskirts of Brisbane I mean Ipswich. We Samoans can be very robust and proud of our culture, and this was also true of my family. My parents were very insistent on keeping our culture alive through the creativity of dance and music. I am tone deaf, so dance was naturally my forte. I was also lucky enough to go to a high school that had some great teachers who were very supportive of my creative work both in and out of school.’

On stage he is strong, graceful, masculine, feminine, and very funny. The comedy comes from a blatant confident honesty about himself and the world around him.

In Wiki I found the traditional Samoan cross gender clown defined as “Fa’afafine”. It is hard to pronounce, but probably a word we should know better. Fa’afafine are a third-gender people of Samoa and the Samoan diaspora. They are an integral part of traditional Samoan culture. Fa’afafine are male at birth, and have both masculine and feminine gender traits. The prefix fa’a means “in the manner of”, and the word fafine, means “woman”.

This third gender is not “drag queen”, and it is not considered homosexual or gay. It is simply a gender unto itself that recognises the natural instincts of the person concerned, and what makes them happy.

And isn’t that, after all, what we all want – to be happy?

NEXT ISSUE: The Garden of Unearthly Delights and ‘jizzing the gag’.

Judith Lanigan is the daughter of a journalist and a detective. She studied her circus specialty – hula hoops – at the Moscow State Circus School and documented her experiences in A True History of the Hula Hoop, published

by Picador in 2009. This series is extracted from her latest book, Clownland, released by Aerofish Media in August 2016 - judithlanigan.com.au

1787 The lost chapters of Australia’s beginnings Nick Brodie

Extract from 1787 by Nick Brodie

NOT A PROLOGUE

Australia’s history did not start in January 1788. However habituated we have become to telling it this way, our national story did not begin with the arrival of a British fleet. That origin story survives because it is easy to tell, easy to remember, and difficult for our nation to forget. We can acknowledge that something happened before, but it is a something that we rarely discuss.

The time before the settlement of New South Wales is too often treated as a prefatory chapter that starts 50,000 years before the present and ends as sails are seen on the eastern horizon: the ‘Dreamtime’ ends and history begins. In this way, a great slab of human history is relegated to archaeology and hermetically sealed by the founding of a British colony. But decent history does not work that way, with easy beginnings and simple sequences of events; instead, it is a process of engagement with the past.

So it is in this spirit that we need a new early Australian history. We need to look to longer colonial processes, broader world stories, a larger regional frontier, and take in the bigger story that emerges from these fleeting yet significant encounters.

While this book focuses on coastal interactions, it is not yet another rendering of the European ‘discovery’ of Australia, a paint-by-numbers narrative of ‘firsts’, who-found-what-when-and-why, and large slabs of quotation from well-thumbed sources.

Prior to the formal establishment of colonies in New South Wales in 1788, Van Diemen’s Land in 1803 and Western Australia in 1829, Australia and its peoples were already part of the great story of human history, with its local variations, conflicts, collaborations, continuities and changes. Certainly in 1787 a fleet was dispatched from England, but the processes leading to that decision involved more than just someone stabbing at a map and demanding it be done. Those processes went PREVIOUS SPREAD: Australians fishing in Port Jackson. Subsistence strategies quickly came to dominate the way Aboriginal Australian people were described. (Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, DL PXX 84)

back well beyond Cook, and the first peoples of a Greater Australasia had more to do with it than is often allowed. There is a long history of Eurasian exploration of, but also engagement with, the land that came to be called Australia, and also its near neighbours like New Guinea, Vanuatu and New Zealand. All are part of the same story.

When the narratives of discovery are turned around, and the encounters they record are examined closely, bigger histories are revealed. Viewed collectively, these encounters become the story, instead of just isolated vignettes within larger ‘European’ narratives.

We will have to abandon our old assumptions about Australia’s first peoples, and face up to our sometimes wilful ignorance about pre-1788 Australia. We will see that the Australia of the twenty-first century is a product of a much longer and more complex past than we normally allow.

ABOVE: Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, 1792. Voyagers regularly used this site as a replenishing station from the 1770s onwards. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

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Australian bookshelves are stacked with event-based one-word titles that perhaps understandably speak to our collective obsessions: 1788, Eureka, Gallipoli, Kokoda and so on. What follows takes a step away from the buzzword histories, the pop biographies, or the yarning folklore of yore, and insists that we start to explore our deeper history in a less proprietorial, more broadly inclusive way. ‘1787’ does not stand for a year — it stands for an idea. *** A good illustration of this idea occurred on a warm and breezy September day in 1818, when Jacques Arago stepped ashore on the western coast of Australia. He left his companions and headed off alone, wearing a straw hat, shouldering a musket and carrying a tin lunchbox.

In part, he was looking for Aboriginal Australians.

A draftsman on the Uranie, a French expedition of discovery and exploration, Jacques struggled in the hostile environment. He slipped on a rocky slope, and flies bothered his face, seeming compulsively attracted to his eyes. The sun was searing. He tilted his hat low over his face and spent some time walking backwards, trying to get relief.

After a few hours someone from the ship went after him, and brought him back to the main French camp. The Australians had turned up, and seemed hostile. His companions were worried for Jacques’s safety. He could see that there had already been some limited bartering — glass beads and metal knives for spears and clubs. And with the exchanges seemingly over, the Australians gestured for the French to leave. The Australians kept saying ‘ayercadé, ayercadé’ — interpreted as ‘go away, go away’ — and pointing to the ships.

Jacques hoped to get closer, as he wanted to sketch the Australians.

He noticed an old man who attracted everyone’s attention. The man was painted with coloured stripes, and wearing a prominent shell on a string that hung over his belly; his companions seemed to look to him for instruction. So Jacques decided to make towards him. Trying to allay the old man’s fears, Jacques pulled out some castanets and played them 1787 / Nick Brodie

as he approached. The old man briefly danced to the tune, and another Australian kept time with his own implements.

The old man signed to Jacques to leave a gift, which he did, and signed to return in the morning. As Jacques walked back to camp the old man sang, and was joined in this song by the rest of his people.

The next day Jacques again met with a group of Australians. They came down the hill in force, armed, and one stepped out in front and made a long speech. Then Jacques was once more told, with gestures for emphasis, to ayercadé. But, prepared for this eventuality, Jacques put on a little pantomime and appeared to get angry with a sailor companion he had brought to the meeting. Jacques told the sailor to ayercadé, and walked away. In on the scheme, the sailor followed Jacques, who again told the fellow to ayercadé. The sailor disobeyed and Jacques shot him.

ABOVE: This 1789 image of an Australian domicile displayed items featured in Cook’s 1770 encounter. Earlier reports of encounters greatly influenced subsequent representations. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, DL PXX 84)

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Or so it appeared. Having prearranged the show, Jacques aimed high, and the sailor fell at the bang. The Australians fled in apparent horror, and the sailor sprang up and the two made good their escape. Jacques had hoped to instil fear with this show, which would protect him against a potential attack by the Australians, who had superior numbers, but this was not the end of the encounters. Later there was another exchange where the French offered gifts. One even satisfied the locals’ curiosity by undressing. But over subsequent days there were no further meetings, only French expeditions to abandoned huts, and the discovery of a discarded gift of trousers.

The expedition continued north to Timor, west past New Guinea, and on into the Pacific. The French went as far as Hawaii, where they spent some considerable time, before turning westwards again towards Australia. Over a year after meeting some of the western Australians, Jacques had the opportunity to witness the other side of the continent.

The Uranie put into Port Jackson, and Jacques met Governor Macquarie and saw the growing urban settlement of Sydney, with its elegant buildings and gardens, active social scene, busy commercial wharves and labouring convicts. But Jacques could not comprehend why the government allowed Aboriginal Australians to nakedly wander the streets and inhabit the settlement. They drank and danced, carried weapons and rattled fences, and struck each other in the streets.

Jacques’s confusion probably stemmed in part from seeing Aboriginal Australian people overlaying the ostensibly settled and almost picturesque colonial scene. These people seemed part of the colonial society, but they also stood aside from it. And amid the scenes of public ribaldry and wrath, they clearly continued to govern their own society by their own traditions and rituals. Jacques even watched an old woman knock out the teeth of a younger woman, which he recognised was a sort of ceremony. It was performed with piece of wood struck by a stone, while the girl’s head was held against a wall, making a colonial structure a tool in an apparently pre-colonial practice. His curiosity piqued, he inquired as best he could what this was for, and by gestures learned the girl was to be married. A man soon arrived, placed a kangaroo skin over > Early modern European maps reveal more than explorers’ trails; they chart a Eurasian frontier advancing towards Greater Australia. Beyond the Eurasian frontier, as depicted in 1593. (Cornelis de Jode, Novae Guineae forma, & situs, National Library of Australia)

the girl, and led her into the bush near the governor’s garden.

But there was a darker side to Jacques’s musings, which went beyond social order and public behaviour. Jacques continued to observe and dwell on the violence and disorder of the Aboriginal Australians of Sydney, and the existence of a heated frontier war between the Australians and the intruders, in his letters to friends in Europe. He related an experience of Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupr., another member of the Uranie expedition, who had a brief encounter with an old and sick man during the course of a journey over the Blue Mountains. The old man ‘had shown himself the most formidable enemy of the English’, Charles’s guide informed him, and was ‘the sovereign of all that part of the mountain’. The guide noted he had made war on other tribes, assassinated Englishmen, guided expeditions of troops and so on.

On the face of it the crew of the Uranie’s encounters with Australians seem to speak to opposites. In the far west there were peoples still unaffected by colonisation. On the eastern seaboard its effects were well evident, summed up by the twin spectres of death and drunkenness. In the east some of the old ways were passing; in the west they still had a little way to go. To the casual reader it is evidence of the state of affairs before and after that magical colonial moment, that first footfall, that first flag-raising, that first memorial plaque. The east exhibited a post1788 world; the west was still in 1787.

But the irony is that the west had a longer history of outside contact.

The old man on the western sand dunes did not necessarily lack for precedent when dealing with overseas visitors. He knew the ships had carried the strangers, and he seemed to know to keep himself and his people at a discreet distance. And when the French expedition travelled to the north of Australia, near New Guinea, and into the Pacific, they were sailing through Eurasia’s south-eastern frontier — a conceptual geography that had been expanding in fits and starts over a very long time, connecting the cultures and economies of far western Europe to far eastern Asia. This dynamic frontier abutted another large cultural and economic zone that was not yet fully part of the Eurasian story: Greater Australasia.

1787 / Nick Brodie

This vast territory is the scene of our real national beginning. It was almost invisibly busy beneath the clouds hovering above its waters — until the coming of the written word drew the clouds back, exposing it to and inscribing it on the greater world.

This is an edited extract from 1787 by Nick Brodie published by Hardie Grant Books RRP $29.99 and is available in stores nationally hardiegrant.com.au Nick Brodie is a self-confessed history nerd and archaeologist, currently lecturing at the University of Tasmania and frequently returning to NSW where his family is still based. As well as academic papers, he’s written a history of St Mary’s Cathedral, and is an experienced public speaker having given lectures at Cambridge, interviews on ABC radio and 7.30 Stateline. Nick Brodie’s book Kin was published in July 2015.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Ships firing on canoes in Torres Strait in 1792. The caption says they were ‘obliged to fire’, following a conversation that represents British colonial violence as primarily defensive. This is part of a voyage under Captain William Bigh. He stopped at Adventure Bay, and also visited New Zealand and Tahiti. Such exploration was integral to colonisation. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563) ABOVE: The 1770 Endeavour River settlement. (I.S. Klauber sculpts, Gezigt van de Rivier Endeavour op de Kust van Nieuw-Holland, 1795, National Library of Australia.)

september salon

Peter WAPLES, Dingo in the Bush 2016, mixed media on paper, 10 x 20cm.

I never painted my dreams, I painted my reality, Kingston Arts Centre, 979 Nepean Hwy, Moorabbin (VIC), 2 – 27 September 2016 - kingston.vic.gov.au

ABOVE: Stuart MCFARLANE and Darrin VERHAGEN, A series of small wire objects (many of them uninteresting) 2014, dimensions variable, sound, light, code and wood. AkE (Audiokinetic Experiments) Lab RMIT, (((20Hz))) Image Š the Artist, courtesy Experimenta Media Arts and RMIT Gallery, Photography Mark Ashkanasy. Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art, Anne & Gordon Samstag Musuem of Art, University of South Australia, 55 North Terrace Adelaide (SA), until 23 September 2016 – unisa.edu.au/ samstagmuseum > Lucas GROGAN, The Universe Quilt 2013, cotton thread on laminated cotton cloth. Stitch: straight stitch, seed stitch, satin stitch, French knots, 200cm x 175cm (variable). Purchased with the assistance of the Robert Salzer Foundation and Ararat Rural City Council, 2013. Ararat Regional Art Gallery Collection. Photographer: Andrew Curtis.

SLIPSTITCH, A NETS Victoria and Ararat Regional Art Gallery touring exhibition, curated by Dr Belinda von Mengersen, Castlemaine Art Museum, 14 Lyttleton Street, Castlemaine (VIC), until 25 September 2016 - castlemainegallery.com

PREVIOUS SPREAD, Mark VALENZUELA, Terraformers (detail) 2015, white stoneware paper clay and underglaze pencil, approx. 46 x 20 x 25cm each; image courtesy of artist. Headshots, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, Vimy Lane, Parap (NT), 8 October – 5 November 2016 - nccart.com.au THIS SPREAD: Yukultji NAPANGATI, Untitled 2016. Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Domain Road Sydney (NSW), until 9 October, 2016 artgallery.nsw.gov.au NEXT SPREAD: Polixeni PAPAPETROU, (left) Psyche (right) Blinded, both 2016, pigment print, 127.3 x 85cm. Eden, Stills Gallery, 36 Gosbell Street Paddington (NSW), 3 September to 1 October 2016 stillsgallery.com.au

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FINDING THE ART IN

Phuket Catch of the day

by Anthony S. Cameron

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If you are looking for a nicely written food review, you are in the wrong place. If you are looking for a glowing account of a diving tour or a boat trip to James Bond Island, then you are in the wrong place.

If you are looking for travel tips or directions to the best local market, then, I am sorry to say, you are in the wrong place. If you are looking to buy a pool-villa or condo at a discounted price for a limited time only, then you are definitely in the wrong place. If you are looking for a wakeboard park, go kart track, Tuk Tuk ride or parasailing adventure, then, sadly, you are in the wrong place. If you are looking for an elephant ride or massage, new suit or free tickets to the fucking dolphinarium, then I am afraid you are in the wrong place. But if you want to feel the pulse of this mad island, if you want to peel back the lid and have a peek inside, then grab a beer and stick around.

This aint no advertorial.

The art of the everyday is everywhere, all the time, and yet you won’t find it in any brochures at the airport. You won’t see it out of a bus window on your way to the sunset lookout with the other 5000 people. You won’t be sitting next to it at the poolside bar, or eating from the same bain marie at the hotel buffet.

You won’t be lying next to it on the massage table, wondering if you should strike up a conversation or not. The art I am talking about is the stuff in the background as you whiz past on your way to somewhere else, and if you’re not careful you could easily miss it.

This is probably a good time to say ‘I fucking love this place!’ so that you know where I am coming from here. I should also probably mention that I have a fairly bent view on life, but you probably knew that already, assuming some of you are recidivist readers of my tropical ramblings.

I am the guy who walks into the squalid heart of the sea gypsy camp, rather than the beachside fish market because, the gypsies are more beautiful to me. I am the guy who will hassle the pickpockets and begging children more than they do me, because then it’s like we’re rapping. I speak just enough Thai to make a funny conversation possible, and I have just enough spark in my eyes to follow it through. I love the sea gyspy kids: they are wild; they are agile, and their eyes see

Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron

everything. They are the indigenous fringe dwellers in a place where they were the only people for thousands of years. Sound familiar, Aussies?

So at around 5pm every night the buses start arriving at the sea gypsy market, laden with Chinese, Korean and Russian tourists on a package deal which includes a boat trip to an island and a visit to the sea gypsy market. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention the free breakfast buffet.

As soon as they get off the bus, the sea gypsy kids go to work in ragged teams of three or five, distracting some, engaging others with their clown-like antics and method acting begging style. It’s almost like watching a show that is in its 20th season. Everyone knows their lines so well they are now having fun with it. More and more buses arrive and the old sea gypsy men sit and watch the passing parade of gluttony whilst the women keep busy scaling and gutting the catch of the day.

Young sea gypsy girls with their make-up set on whore can be seen heading off to the nearby nightclubs to ply their trade to the same tourists who are now buying their fish and taking it across to the seafood restaurants, who will cook it for them.

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As for the pickpockets, they really have to pounce before the tourists sit down to eat, so they try and get them whilst they are dazzled by the first of many seashell souvenir shops at the entrance to this strange sideshow. After that, they are down to the odd straggler out in the open, a much more difficult target.

Surrounding the restaurants on all but one side is the sea gypsy camp, a ramshackle collection of rusted iron and broken cinder block windowless rooms with panoramic views of abject poverty. I’m pretty sure these rooms don’t come with a free breakfast buffet. What they do come with is all the trappings of a third world existence. And, as an added bonus, for a limited time only, you also get to be ineligible for a Thai ID card, which means you cannot vote, buy a motorbike, own land, or run a business. Sound like a good deal?

Not convinced? Ok, we’ll throw in the fear of being evicted at any time so a bus parking lot can be built for those poor fish-starved tourists.

Soon the sea gypsies will be arriving by bus too, in full sea gypsy costume, ready for the 5pm show.

I am the guy who finds a spot behind the dirty street that passes as a promenade and listens to the mad clatter of the knives, forks and spoons of a hundred people devouring seafood as an old sea gypsy guy sitting nearby in the dirt carves a fish out of a discarded water bottle. I watch his hands turn the ugly plastic reminder of the human condition into a part of his soul. He hands it to me with a toothless grin, shows me the ocean trapped in his eyes, and now embedded in this carving I hold in my hands.

You won’t find this in any art gallery soon. There won’t be a special offer attached to draw you in. There won’t be free wine and grand proclamations by people trying to earn their 40% commission. This didn’t come out of government arts funding, and never will. This is the art of the streets, the art of desperation, the art that cannot help itself because it’s a normal, everyday part of life.

And may it always inspire me.

ANTHONY S. CAMERON is an Australian ex-pat living in Phuket, Thailand, and the author of two novels, Driftwood (2014) and Butterfly on Bangla (2015).

Born in Melbourne, he escaped in his early twenties to central Victoria, where he designed and built a sustainable house, raised two sustainable children. His books are available on Amazon here.

Pics by Tony Cameron