The Adelaide Review - February Edition

THE ADELAIDE

REVIEW ISSUE 408 FEBRUARY 2014

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

LIVES IN MOVEMENT Alan Brissenden previews Adelaide Festival’s exhilarating dance program, which includes Shaun Parker’s new work Am I

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ROSALBA CLEMENTE

BILLY BRAGG

COMBATING THE HEAT

The former State Theatre Artistic Director explains why she is returning to the stage for the first time in 10 years

Acclaimed songwriter and activist Billy Bragg speaks to The Adelaide Review before his anticipated WOMADelaide set

Green spaces can combat urban heat stress, writes Professor Steffen Lehmann

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LINE-UP INCLUDES: Arrested Development USA • Ngaiire AUSTRALIA • Mikhael Paskalev NORWAY/BULGARIA

Hiatus Kaiyote AUSTRALIA • Muro JAPAN • Thelma Plum AUSTRALIA • La Chiva Gantiva COLOMBIA/BELGIUM • Washington AUSTRALIA • Femi Kuti & The Positive Force NIGERIA • Tinpan Orange AUSTRALIA • Red Baraat USA • Neko Case USA • Hanggai CHINA • Quantic UK • Billy Bragg UK • Osaka Monaurail JAPAN • Fat Freddy’s Drop NEW ZEALAND • Ane Brun SWEDEN/NORWAY • The Balanescu Quartet UK and many more.

PLUS: Taste the World, Planet Talks, a Global Village, KidZone, visual arts, street theatre and so much more!

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DARREN MCRAE Artist/Singer /Song writer Darren McCrae. Be entertained with Darren’s original songs, featuring his song Valentine. Enjoy a candle lit 3 course dinner $55.00 per person at the Barossa Weintal Hotel Complex.

BAROSSA WEINTAL HOTEL, TANUNDA 7.00PM M&S $55PP

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET The Barossa Farmers Market is a genuine local produce market. A beautiful selection of specialty breads, the Barossa’s famous smallgoods, stunning pastries & baked goods to name a few. If you want a damn fine breakfast & coffee, we’ll see you next Saturday at the market!

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BEER

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BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET ANGASTON. 7.30- 11.30AM FREE

Drink along through time with Wish Experience in their Quantam Pint Machine, drinking & learning! Wish have combed the records, visited the ruins & tasted an impossible number of beers to bring you this docucomedy based on the life & times of our mistress & muse, the humble beer.

BAROSSA VALLEY BREWING, TANUNDA. 7.30PM A $25 C $20

LITTLE BLACK DRESS Little Black Dress party band is back at the Fringe, but this time at our place... the Barossa! Our eclectic mix of covers help set the mood for good fun. Celebrate with us our love of food, wine & a passion for singing & harmonies. Kids under 12 free.

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FEBRUARY

FOLLY- A MISERABLE YORKSHIRE POETRY MUSICAL Grumpy Yorkshire poet & grumpy Australian musician meet at the moment when your travel journal & your ipod rub up against each other in the airport scanner. It’s trains, planes & cheap booze. Part story, part poem told by Sally Jenkinson with a full original soundtrack performed by Nuala Honan.

CHARLES MELTON WINES, TANUNDA. 7.30PM M&S $40PP

DAVID BRIDIE

Michelle Pearson’s sold-out 2013 Fringe performance ‘Michelle & the Gentleman’s Club’ returns to tour SA’s finest food & wine regions.

With a focus on Australian music plus a sultry mix of jazz, blues & soul this 1 hour cabaret show will celebrate one of SA’s most acclaimed voices.

NURIOOTPA SOLDIERS MEMORIAL HALL. NURIOOTPA 8.00PM $34PP

JOHN MCNAMARA ACOUSTIC SOUL & BLUES

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET

An exclusive collection of female song writers in a show delivered with passion & wit. Featuring the compositions of Peggy Lee, Bobbie Gentry, Laura Nyro, Pink, Anne Ronell, Carolyn Less, Cynthia Weil & others. 5 star best Cabaret nomination in 2011.

‘Masterful blues guitar... brilliant & blisteringly fast... powerful & resonant voice’ Rip It Up ‘Exceptional music experience... a deeply satisfying show’ Three Weeks, Edinburgh.

‘Soulful is an understatement’ Broadway Baby Edinburgh. John’s delivers a unique, intimate blues experience. A must see show!

The Barossa Farmers Market is a genuine local produce market.

A beautiful selection of specialty breads, the Barossa’s famous smallgoods, stunning pastries & baked goods to name a few. If you want a damn fine breakfast & coffee, we’ll see you next Saturday at the market!

BAROSSA REGIONAL GALLERY, TANUNDA. 7.30PM $33PP

SCHILD ESTATE, LYNDOCH 8.30PM A $25 CH $23 CON. $23

JACOB’S CREEK VISITOR CENTRE ROWLAND FLAT 6.00PM $18PP

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET ANGASTON 7.30- 11.30AM FREE

PROGRESSIVE BAROSSAN BANQUET

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET

BEER VS WINE DEGUSTATION

IVOR CARTER & THE SACRED ROSE BAND

Enjoy a progressive 3 course Barossan banquet in the stunning, heritage-listed Chateau Tanunda. Each course is themed & served with a different musical act; enjoy the talents of Rainbow Rothe, Rich Batsford and Little Black Dress.

The Barossa Farmers Market is a genuine local produce market.

A beautiful selection of specialty breads, the Barossa’s famous smallgoods, stunning pastries & baked goods to name a few. If you want a damn fine breakfast & coffee, we’ll see you next Saturday at the market!

The Battle of the Bottle Degustation dining with a twist!

Barossa’s brewery & wineries go head to head! The chef is preparing 5 courses of seasonal fare, the brewer & the winemakers will take you through the debate of whether beer or wine match your dinner best. Let the battle begin!

Ivor Carter & The Sacred Rose Band present “Moculta on the Fringe” a multicultural cabaret style concert at the Moculta Hall. This eclectic mix of cross genre original material demonstrates diversity that is sure to intrique and delight. Soul 2 soul bellydance and Chinese gong performances.

ELI WOLFE & THE VAGABOND MOON FEAT. NINNI & MIKA FROM FINLAND

CHATEAU TANUNDA, TANUNDA. 12 NOON $150PP

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET ANGASTON 7.30- 11.30AM FREE

BAROSSA VALLEY BREWING, TANUNDA. 7PM $90PP

MOCULTA SOLDIERS MEMORIAL HALL. MOCULTA 8.00PM $23PP

BAROSSA WEINTAL HOTEL, TANUNDA. $13PP

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CANDLELIGHT CONCERT FEAT. DAVID GARNHAM & THE REASONS TO LIVE

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? WOMEN WRITE SONGS TOO!

VJ Productions presents ‘David Garnham & the Reasons to Live’ as part of their Candlelight Concert Series. David Garnham & the Reasons to Live craft country tinged ballads about booze & women fueled by isolation & self-loathing.

Debut LP ‘Love Inside a Jar’.

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From the warm, pastel hues of an Australian outback sunset, to the lunar fields of snow & ice that lay beneath dancing Northern Lights in Finland, this concert offers a wonderful, cultural & musical exchange. Wine tasting platters available for purchase.

GIBSON WINES, LIGHT PASS 7.00PM $23PP

MARCH

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LYNDOCH OVAL, LYNDOCH. 11AM FREE

BAROSSA WEINTAL HOTEL, TANUNDA. 7.30PM $13PP

MICHELLE & THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

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David Bridie’s 2013 album WAKE was described as “the album this country needs... Passionate, intelligent and inspired” (The Age) and “powerful and deeply disturbing” (The Australian). Now Bridie hits the road again across Feb & March with performances that mix up the old and new- songs from WAKE. As well as some gems from his extensive back catalogue in film and music.

Who would think a cricket match would be in the Fringe?

Barossa Winemakers have challenged the Fringe comedians to a duel on the cricket field.

Come along to experience the Barossa in a different light & for a spin, a schluck & a laugh in the beautiful southern Barossa.

Miss K seeks fame but was rejected by reality TV. She bakes but without online documentation does she? When there’s nothing to tweet, is a YouTube link reposted on Instagram, Pinterest, her blog & Facebook considered entertainment? Is she navigating the spam of modern existence, or really just wrong.com?

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SCHILD ESTATE, LYNDOCH. 12PM A$15 CH$5 CON$10

WINEMAKERS VS COMEDIANS CRICKET MATCH

MISS K IS... WRONG.COM

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LITTLE BLACK DRESS Little Black Dress party band is back at the Fringe, but this time at our place... the Barossa! Our eclectic mix of covers help set the mood for good fun. Celebrate with us our love of food, wine & a passion for singing & harmonies. Great views, Family Friendly. Kids under 12 free.

PINDARIE CELLAR DOOR, GOMERSAL. 12PM A$15 CH$5 CON$10 FAM$35

THE DARKS KNIGHTS OF SONG IN CONCERT A 15 strong male acapella choir who, unitl now, have been detained in Western Australia. This is their first concerted effort in Adelaide to entertain, confuse & amuse with their mixture of Georgian harmonies, songs including an appreciation of concrete & a macabre version of Teddy Bear’s Picnic.

BAROSSA CHATEAU, LYNDOCH 1.15PM A$33 C$23

JAMFACTORY OPEN DAY JamFactory opens the doors of its new Studios, Galleries & Shop at Seppeltsfield for a free Fringe Open Day! Visit the dramatically refurbished old stables in the historic Seppeltsfield winery & view the latest exhibition & artists at work in their studios

SEPPELTSFIELD WINERY, SEPPELTSFIELD. 12 - 4PM FREE

THE SECRET GARDEN PARTY

LITTLE BLACK DRESS Little Black Dress party band is back at the Fringe, but this time at our place... the Barossa! Our eclectic mix of covers help set the mood for good fun. Celebrate with us our love of food, wine & a passion for singing & harmonies. Kids under 12 free.

Enter our Secret Garden at Turkey Flat Vineyards and discover the enchantment of true Barossa Valley hospitality. Featuring the beautiful music of The Audreys & The Yearlings join the Turkey Flat family for a relaxing and entertaining afternoon of outstanding wines, delicious food & chilled out tunes. No BYO please TURKEY FLAT VINEYARDS, TANUNDA. 1.00PM M&S $73PP

KIES FAMILY WINES LYNDOCH 6PM M&S $50 CH $30, CON $40, FAM $140

BLUEPRINT Hailing from the Barossa, 2014 will mark Blueprint’s 3rd Fringe Festival.

Described by Ash Grunwald as ‘Guitar Virtuosos’. Blueprint offer stylistically complex rhythm & groove through their original compositions.

Flamenco, roots & rock merge to create a performance that is visually stimulating & instrumentally diverse.

THE IDEA OF NORTH

The Battle of the Bottle Degustation dining with a twist!

Barossa’s brewery & wineries go head to head! The chef is preparing 5 courses of seasonal fare, the brewer & the winemakers will take you through the debate of whether beer or wine match your dinner best. Let the battle begin!

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET ANGASTON 7.30- 11.30AM FREE

BAROSSA VALLEY BREWING, TANUNDA. 7PM $90PP

BLUEPRINT

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET

BEER VS WINE DEGUSTATION

The Barossa Farmers Market is a genuine local produce market.

A beautiful selection of specialty breads, the Barossa’s famous smallgoods, stunning pastries & baked goods to name a few. If you want a damn fine breakfast & coffee, we’ll see you next Saturday at the market!

The Battle of the Bottle Degustation dining with a twist!

Barossa’s brewery & wineries go head to head! The chef is preparing 5 courses of seasonal fare, the brewer & the winemakers will take you through the debate of whether beer or wine match your dinner best. Let the battle begin!

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET ANGASTON 7.30- 11.30AM FREE

BAROSSA VALLEY BREWING, TANUNDA. 7PM $90PP

CUSP: DESIGNING INTO THE NEXT DECADE

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Presented across JamFactory’s 2 venues ‘CUSP: Designing into the Next Decade’ is a glimpse into the future. It is a look at designers that are currently working within the Australian design lansdcape who have the potential to effect lifestyle, learning & cultural change in our lives.

COLLECTION PROJECTION Taking art of the wall ‘Collection Projection’ shows off the magnificent Barossa Vintage Art Collection which will be projected on the front exterior of the Gallery each night during the Fringe. A spectacular & unqiue way to enjoy art after dark!

BAROSSA REGIONAL GALLERY, TANUNDA. 8PM-11PM DAILY FREE

SEPPELTSFIELD WINERY SEPPELTSFIELD 11-5PM DAILY FREE

CHARLES MELTON WINES, TANUNDA. 4PM, $43PP

THE BAROSSA VALLEY DOES THE FRINGE LIKE NO OTHER. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE HEAD TO BAROSSA.COM OR ADELAIDEFRINGE.COM.AU ALL TICKET SALES THROUGH FRINGETIX 1300 621 255 OR ADELAIDEFRINGE.COM.AU

9 FEB TO 22 MAR 2014

GETAWAYS RESERVATION SERVICE provides a total one stop shop to book your Fringe Accommodation, Tours, and Transfers in the Barossa. ph. 85 63 1000 or book online at www.getaways.net.au

Relax with Blueprint’s visually stimulating and instrumentally diverse performance on the winery lawns. Elderton wines, local produce plates & Gourmet Dogs available for purchase.

Bookings - Not essential, but appreciated P: 08 8568 7878 E: elderton@eldertonwines. com.au W: eldertonwines.com.au ELDERTON WINES, NURIOOTPA 12 NOON FREE

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EXHIBITIONS

Up Close & Personal is the highly improvised, interactive show where you, the audience gets to choose what happens. You write the set list by requesting tunes throughout the show. You can ask questions & maybe end up on stage - every show is guaranteed to be different!

Female vocalist of the Year at the Australian Blues Music Awards, Marisa Quigley’s dynamic stage presence, earthy humour & hauntingly beautiful vocals will not disappoint. A mix of blues, roots, alt. country folk Marisa’s insightful stories translate seamlessly into captivating lyrics. Gleny Rae Virus & her Playboys play with her.

The Barossa Farmers Market is a genuine local produce market.

A beautiful selection of specialty breads, the Barossa’s famous smallgoods, stunning pastries & baked goods to name a few. If you want a damn fine breakfast & coffee, we’ll see you next Saturday at the market!

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BAROSSA VALLEY BREWING, TANUNDA. 1PM FREE

MARISA QUIGLEY

BEER VS WINE DEGUSTATION

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JACOB’S CREEK VISITOR CENTRE ROWLAND FLAT, 7PM M&S $123PP

BAROSSA FARMERS MARKET

15 FEB TO 15 MAR 2014

6 The Adelaide Review February 2014

WELCOME

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ISSUE 408

GENERAL MANAGER MEDIA & PUBLISHING Luke Stegemann luke@adelaidereview.com.au

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SENIOR STAFF WRITER David Knight davidknight@adelaidereview.com.au Digital Manager Jess Bayly jessbayly@adelaidereview.com.au ART DIRECTOR Sabas Renteria sabas@adelaidereview.com.au

Steve McQueen

ADMINISTRATION Kate Mickan katemickan@adelaidereview.com.au

The Adelaide Review interviewed the acclaimed director of 12 Years a Slave a few hours after his Academy Award nomination for the film that has everyone talking

PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION production@adelaidereview.com.au NATIONAL SALES AND MARKETING MANAGER Tamrah Petruzzelli tamrah@adelaidereview.com.au ADVERTISING EXECUTIVES Tiffany Venning Michelle Pavelic advertising@adelaidereview.com.au

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INSIDE Features 07 Politics 08 Columnists 12

MANAGING DIRECTOR Manuel Ortigosa

Opinion 16 Business 18

Publisher The Adelaide Review Pty Ltd, Level 8, Franklin House 33 Franklin St Adelaide SA 5000.

GPO Box 651, Adelaide SA 5001.

P: (08) 7129 1060 F: (08) 8410 2822. adelaidereview.com.au

Circulation CAB. Audited average monthly, circulation: 28,648 (April 12 – March 13) 0815-5992 Print Post.

Approved PPNo. 531610/007

Disclaimer Opinions published in this paper are not necessarily those of the editor nor the publisher. All material subject to copyright.

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.

THE ADELAIDE

review

Books 19 Fashion 21 Performing Arts 22

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The Daniel O’Connell

Food For Thought

Paul Wood reviews the North Adelaide pub. Does it live up to its ‘Adelaide’s Gourmet Pub’ title?

Chef columnist Annabelle Baker on the joys of street food

Visual Arts 37 Travel 45 Food. Wine. Coffee 46 FORM 57

COVER CREDIT: Shaun Parker’s Am I: Photo: Michele Aboud

Contributors. Lachlan Aird, Leanne Amodeo, D.M. Bradley, John Bridgland, Alan Brissenden, Michael Browne, Derek Crozier, Alexander Downer, Robert Dunstan, Stephen Forbes, Andrea Frost, Roger Hainsworth, Jane Howard, Andrew Hunter, Steffen Lehmann, Jane Llewellyn, Kris Lloyd, Stephen Orr, John Neylon, Nigel Randall, Paul Ransom, Christopher Sanders, Margaret Simons, John Spoehr, Shirley Stott Despoja, David Sornig, Graham Strahle, Ilona Wallace, Paul Willis, Paul Wood.

Photographer. Jonathan van der Knaap

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THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 7

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

FEATURE

OFF TOPIC:

COLIN GOODALL Off Topic and on the record as South Australian identities talk about whatever they want... except their day job. Irish-born and English-raised Committee for Adelaide Chair Colin Goodall landed in Adelaide three years ago after a distinguished career with BP, which saw him posted to far-flung locations across the globe.

BY DAVID KNIGHT

G

oodall eventually chose Adelaide as his home after the gas and oil industry veteran connected with the city during one of his annual visits from the northern hemisphere to visit his daughter, who lived in New Zealand.

“I’ve probably spent more of my life globetrotting than I have sitting in one place, which is how we got here,” Goodall explains.

“Everybody asks me, ‘Why did you come to Adelaide?’ It’s really easy to answer: it’s a lovely place. We were living in Spain, I retired from BP and I had done some other things – we built a small independent oil company in the UK and sold it to the Koreans for $4billion – so I had done that. I thought, ‘Okay, what I am going to do next?’ Our daughter was in New Zealand, so we flew through Australia every year. Sydney’s okay but I couldn’t live there. We came through here and stayed in town, visited Kangaroo Island and the Southern Ocean Lodge and went up the Murray River and to the Flinders Ranges and I thought, ‘This place is good’.”

Now settled in Adelaide with his wife (Goodall’s daughter also moved here from New Zealand), Goodall is the Chair of Committee for

Adelaide, an a-political not-for-profit collective that aims to ‘drive capital and community growth and investment in South Australia’.

Though he is not a ‘true local’, Goodall brings a lifetime of experience working in countries such as Iran, Russia, Scotland, the United States and various countries in Africa. He was BP Europe’s Chief Financial Officer and BP’s senior representative in Russia.

“My last job for BP, after a couple of years in Europe, was running Russia, which I took on against my better judgement. I was sent out there in 98. That was the tail end of the Yeltsin regime. We’d taken up an investment in a Russian company. We bought 10 percent of this company and they sent three of us in to run it. We think that it employed 76,000 people but we’re not too sure. We had farms, refineries, gas stations, prisons – pretty well everything.”

Goodall calls his Russian experience “difficult but interesting”. He travelled with two bodyguards by his side and had to deal with Russia’s tax police.

“I suspect the Australian tax inspectors don’t wear black ski masks and carry Kalashnikovs,

as the tax police in Russia do. These guys come into your office and say, ‘You owe us some tax’.

It was interesting.

“When the three of us were sent in, we would have our meetings with the management of the company and agree on things and we’d go back home on a Saturday afternoon. The following Monday nothing had happened. So we realised after we had our meetings they’d have their meetings and completely ignore everything.

“The CEO at the time was a Chechen and I worked out fairly quickly that a large amount of money was going missing. On a trip back to London I arranged that he would leave the company. What I didn’t realise was that the chief accountant, most of the legal team and all of the traders were his relatives. I used to meet him periodically after that and he’d say, ‘Now, Colin were you responsible for me being fired?’

It was a pretty challenging environment.”

Goodall experienced Russia’s evolution away from its former communist rule. He recruited Russian ex-pats who had been educated in Europe and the US and says there was a generation gap between the older generation who grew up during Soviet rule and their children who wanted a “different life”.

“The younger generation was almost as alien to their elders as estranged people. We lived in a flat in a nice area of Moscow with a beautiful lake just opposite. The building I was in was the most fantastic piece of art-nouveau architecture. This was the house of the famous Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. If it had been on Hyde Park in London it would have been worth gazillions.”

Goodall was in Iran from 75 to 79 and took the last commercial flight out of Iran before the Iranian Revolution.

“I left when the Shah left. I was on the plane

Colin Goodall.

before him. One of the fun things about oil is it tends to be found in places that are different.

I say to many people that oil is much about politics as it is about geology. It tends to be found in places where the politics aren’t easy.

“I got involved with the theatre in Iran. We held a number of theatre productions in a theatre – a hut – that held 86 people on a full night. We did the world premiere of Evita. We had the LP and transcribed it. One of the ladies, who had been a dancer, her husband was a pilot, she choreographed it and we performed it. We broke every copyright rule in the book,” he laughs. “You make your own life in those places.”

committeeforadelaide.org.au

History Book Launch

Join us as we unearth the Civil Contracting Achievements of the last 50 years DATE Wednesday 19 February VENUE CCF SA House, 1 South Road, Thebarton TIME 4pm til 6pm Meet the Author, secure your signed copy of ‘Civil Achievements - Unearthed’ and enjoy our hospitality

RSVP saevents@civilcontractors.com or 08 8111 8044

8 The Adelaide Review February 2014

POLITICS There is no evidence that a program of business and public sector tax cuts will deliver anything other than more sluggish growth, unemployment and hardship.”

There is great danger for Australia if we head down the austerity path as no doubt the Federal Government’s Commission of Audit will recommend over the coming weeks. We have learnt a great deal about the costs of this well-trodden path, lessons that should moderate the neo-liberal tendencies of the most ardent Thatcherite. There is no evidence that a program of business and public sector tax cuts will deliver anything other than more sluggish growth, unemployment and hardship.

Investment in Smart Growth the Key South Australia must compete on quality rather than cost in order to drive high living standards for all in the 21st century.

by John Spoehr

W

e must continue to move up the goods and services value chain where economic activity is characterised by high levels of knowledge intensity that underpin the generation of creative well-paid jobs.

This can drive much needed value, adding to our abundant natural resources and food industries, an outcome that requires a sophisticated manufacturing sector and smart procurement policies.

There is nothing to be gained from trying to revive the low-cost model of South Australian economic development that must finally be laid to rest. Those days are over. In a rapidly industrialising region where the great nations of India, China, Thailand, Korea and Malaysia have become global centres for low-cost manufacturing, Australia has no choice but to choose another growth path, one firmly grounded in a deep commitment to higher levels of public and private investment in education, research and development, innovation and commercialisation. There is

no place for a radical program of public sector cuts in this. Austerity programs have been a spectacular failure internationally, offering despair where hope is much needed.

A smart growth strategy is needed in Australia, one that better harnesses the very considerable talents available in our universities and creates new and very agile institutions capable of driving successful knowledge transfer, innovation and commercialisation. Researchers working with industry in both advancing and applying knowledge are easier said than done. We underinvest in this and urgently need to create a network of industry innovation centres to fill the gap. These are creative places where researchers from fields as diverse as engineering, economics, design, psychology and sociology, work with industry to explore how new processes and technologies can underpin smart and sustainable growth, solving problems and driving innovation inspired by invention.

Innovations in product development and workplace organisation can go a long way to enabling South Australia companies to succeed but only in an environment where industry and trade policies are tuned to the realities of global market conditions.

No amount of innovation can insulate a manufacturer dependent upon exports from the wrecking ball that was the very high Australian dollar, the rise of lowcost manufacturing in Asia, the continued existence of higher tariff and non-tariff barriers, as well as aggressive state financial aid for industry development in competitor nations. Australian industry and trade policy must do more than pray hopefully at the altar of free trade.

What remains of our manufacturing industry after GMH closes will depend in large part on the willingness of the Australian government to invest both directly and indirectly in industrial transformation, particularly through building robust regional innovation systems and institutions that help to accelerate transformative change. There is probably quite a lot of common ground on this between Labor and the Liberals. Where they diverge is in relation to whether sharp reductions in business taxes and public expenditure will stimulate growth. These are common ingredients in so called austerity packages, a set of policies premised on the view that reducing public sector expenditure during the global financial crisis will help to restore growth and stimulate employment. We have resisted this approach in Australia, favouring stimulatory measures designed to inject public investment into job generating initiatives in the private sector. It worked with Australia managing to sustain one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world since the GFC. Meanwhile most OECD nations have languished with chronically high unemployment, homelessness and a rapidly widening gap between rich and poor leading to growing social and political tensions.

The policies of governments must be assessed on their proven ability to counter the impact of financial crisis. When you look closely at the European experience and that of the United States it is clear that the Australian response to the GFC is the gold standard. Rewriting that history as failure will probably be a feature of the report of the Commission of Audit. It is likely to argue that public debt is unsustainable, public expenditure is too high; tax is too high and deep cuts in public expenditure urgently required. All of this is very familiar to those of us who witnessed the round of Audit Commissions undertaken in Australia during the 1990s.

In the lead up to the release of the Abbott Government’s Audit Commission report I urge you to have a close look at what has been done over recent years in the name of austerity in Europe and the United States.

Three international experts will be in Adelaide in February to share their insights and experiences at a forum on austerity policies on the 18th hosted by my centre [Australian Workplace Innovation and Social Research Centre] and the Don Dunstan Foundation. I strongly encourage you to attend and engage in the austerity debate.

»»Austerity Forum: Unmasking Austerity Speakers: Dexter Whitfield, Jamie Peck and John Quiggin Tuesday, February 18 The Braggs Lecture Theatre, The University of Adelaide 9.30am-12.30pm »»Associate Professor John Spoehr is the Executive Director of the Australian Workplace Innovation and Social Research Centre at the University of Adelaide Registration essential at: trybooking.com/DZKY

SATISFY ALL YOUR SENSES AT TASTING AUSTRALIA. Tasting Australia 2014 is all about eating and drinking, it is about experiences, not just events. Above all it is about participating, not just attending.

27 APRIL - 4 MAY 2014 / Adelaide TASTINGAUSTRALIA.COM.AU

calendar of events Langton’s Classification of Australian Wine VI / $120pp Thursday 1 May 2014 / 5.30pm – 8.30pm National Wine Centre of Australia, Adelaide ticketek.com.au

Origins Dinner / $180pp Saturday 3 May 2014 / From 7pm Secret location in Adelaide ticketek.com.au

Town Square / Free entry Victoria Square, Adelaide

Hands-on Cooking Classes / $35pp Various session times, check website for details Town Square (Victoria Square) Adelaide ticketek.com.au

Kids in the Kitchen / $20pp

Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 May 2014 / Various session times Town Square (Victoria Square) Adelaide ticketek.com.au

A few of my favourite things / $150pp

Friday 2 and Saturday 3 May 2014 / From 11am Various tour options Tours depart Town Square (Victoria Square) Adelaide ticketek.com.au

You’re Invited TO TASTE I’m personally inviting you to our 2014 Tasting Australia being held in Adelaide and regions from 27 April to 4 May. Given that my cohort from Cook and the Chef, Simon Bryant, together with wine expert Paul Henry and our bold new team are driving Tasting Australia’s creative direction, I felt honour bound to accept the position of Patron to support my old friend for this event. pastt One that has given so much to South Australia in the past and is now being taken on a new and excitingg path. rate all ra I really hope you can come and help us celebrate the great food and wine experiences we have to offer; en your you’ll be amazed by the diversity of it and when appetite is sated, there is food for the brainn too!

Producers’ Picnic / Free entry Sunday 4 May 2014 Town Square (Victoria Square) Adelaide

Spotlight Events and Regional Tours

Visit our website for a comprehensive list of spotlights events and regional tours.

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT TASTINGAUSTRALIA.COM.AU

PAT R O N

10 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FEATURE

YEAR OF THE LUDDITE The English language is a big bag of tools: 180,000 useful words, half of which are nouns, a quarter adjectives and (to prove that humans are essentially lazy) a seventh verbs.

BY STEPHEN ORR

I

f I asked a typical Review reader to memorise that many words in Farsi there’d be a fair amount of teeth-gnashing. This is why we start early. Learning a foreign language at high school is well-meant but generally doomed to failure.The English language isn’t easy. If ‘can not’ becomes ‘can’t’ why can’t ‘am not’ become ‘amn’t’? Ain’t is okay, isn’t it? Unless you’re a purist, in which case you can discriminate against words. What’s wrong with, ‘I ain’t interested in learning to read?’ Does this reveal too much about someone’s background? Why can’t a fish be like a phone? What exactly does sleep tight mean? Sleep well, for a long time, warmly? What is holy crap? Why do people say ‘the proof’s in the pudding’? The proof of what? Is it that, again, we’re too lazy to say the proof of the pudding is in the eating?

The reality is that English is a mongrel language and, like stolen cars, needs pimping.

This makes it tricky for the adult learner, or confused kids – until we just learn to accept the strangeness and inconsistency. It’s also a class tool. Accent, grammar, spelling, even being able to write your name, are separating

tools in society. To read and write is everything in a world of ideas.

John Corcoran was an American English teacher. He was well-respected and his students achieved good grades. As a child, he had trouble reading and writing. His teachers were too busy to bother with him, so they kept promoting him to the next grade. He was often placed in the ‘dumb row’ and felt traumatised by his inability to succeed. His life at school was hell.

“I can remember when I was eight years old saying my prayers at night and saying, ‘Dear God, tomorrow, when it’s my turn to read, let me be able to read’.” He describes how when asked, he’d just sit still, silent, waiting for the teacher to give up and ask someone else.

Now, you’re waiting for me to tell you that Corcoran fought to overcome his learning problems, attended college (which he did) and went on to become a great educator. No. He couldn’t read or write until he was 48, and had been teaching for 17 years. He got through school by misbehaving; hung around with smart kids and got them to do his work; copied other people’s

assessments. After cheating his way through college he was given a job during a teacher shortage and then, to quote him, “What I did was I created an oral and visual environment.

There wasn’t the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher’s assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin.”

We’ll always find someone who quotes the names of famous and wealthy people who were either school dropouts and/or illiterate: Jesus, most of Dark Ages and Renaissance Europe, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard Branson, Tom Cruise. Branson worked out that people skills beat education every time, and went on to make

a fortune smooth-talking his way through the corporate world. But for most, this isn’t reality.

Statistics show that less than two percent of Australians are illiterate, but that’s a bit like saying a hundred percent of Australians know how to catch bream from a jetty. The actual number that will end up at Soto’s fish shop on the way home is very different. Other research shows that up to half the population don’t have the basic reading and writing skills they need on a daily basis. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. If you’re trying to read the label on a bottle of sedatives or the warning label on a chain saw, this makes things interesting.

The Adelaide Review February 2014 11

adelaidereview.com.au

FEATURE I read Salinger. I didn’t learn about spirit and religion until I read Patrick White (the Hillcrest Baptist Sunday School failed spectacularly). I didn’t learn about who I was and this place I lived in until I read Colin Thiele and Barbara Hanrahan. All of these people and their words and sentences informed me as a writer and person: books taught me empathy, and how, like Atticus Finch, to act decently and fairly and never spare your love. This is what’s at stake today. The tools to learn how to be decent human beings.

Finland has (effectively) a hundred percent literacy. Its schools and universities are wellfunded and teachers need a Masters degree, and even then there’s intense competition to

enter a much-respected profession. Excellent facilities, free lunches, Open University courses for adult learners (offered at a modest 60 Euros per course) and a separate Adult Education system offered in local worker’s institutes, study centres and summer universities. In short, the Finns have got their priorities right, even without a mining boom to bankroll it.

But back to stories. I needed words because I needed stories. I didn’t learn about attitude until

I could talk about my concerns with technology, popular culture, kids turning off of books (despite the promises of the Harry Potter years), but what really concerns me as a writer is the death of the story. To many kids today, stories are animations or games.

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Sometimes I wish I lived in a country that valued words. Where kids had some idea of who Banjo Patterson and Patrick White were. Sport seems to be an intellectual contraceptive, and we’re using it more and more. Endless hours of abs and ‘it was always my dream to win the 4 x 4 relay’ seem to set the national agenda, and although politicians pay lip service to literacy, they know where the votes are. The problems could be fixed with willpower.

Someone will call me a Luddite, but I don’t care.

Machines, it seems, run us more than we run them. We accept that all technology is good.

A spell-checker, even. Despite the fact that we sense these things decrease our own reliance on our own brains. Which is the problem, perhaps.

Maybe the whole reading/writing thing is just too much trouble for our modern sensibility.

As you read, there’s a child sitting in a classroom losing interest. Because he doesn’t get it; because there’s no one to sit next to him and help him spell out the words; because we think it’s somehow smart to close libraries and turn them into virtual learning centres.

This seems to me to be what the French call excrement. Books and technology aren’t mutually exclusive, in the same way that we didn’t bin every radio in Australia when television first appeared in 1956. There are millions of books sitting in thousand libraries in Australia. Each of them contain an idea, a story, a lesson. But if we lose the skills to open them and read them, it’s almost as though they were never written.

12 The Adelaide Review February 2014

COLUMNISTS Third Age Wanted: A Wonderful Word For Us

BY Shirley Stott Despoja

I Six Square Metres

BY Margaret Simons

A

t this time of year each evening finds me in the back yard, mosquitoes at heel, watering the garden. It is a ritual that accompanies the cessation of the day’s heat.

The silverbeet recovers from the day’s heat in an astonishing fashion. One moment it seems dead, flopping on to the soil. A little water flowing in to those veins and in minutes it stands proud, glossy and green. I revive it in order to kill it. A quick slash with the knife, and we have leaves for dinner. The end of the day’s heat is also the time for harvest.

Watering the garden is almost meditative.

My back to the house, my mind at rest, I try to judge how much water is enough, and not too much, for plants that have stood all day in the parching sun. This involves an interaction with the minutia of my tiny patches of soil.

Gardeners know their gardens with the intimacy of a lover. Just as lovers know each dip and rise of flesh, so a gardener knows the contours of the soil. So it is that I can judge how long to let the hose play on each spot.

The jet of water kicks up dirt. Even though the soil is dry, it takes some time for it to accept water. The earth is like a sponge left to dry for too long. It has forgotten how to drink.

Lakes form, then overflow, then tip their contents into neighboring hollows. I know how long this will take, and the order in which the little holes will fill. I can judge it almost to the moment, and I shift the hose just before the deluge. Then there is a pause while the water sits on the dry earth. Am I imaging the tension?

Suddenly, as though a mouth has been opened, the water disappears. Then I can return with the hose, and the garden drinks deep.

With my pot plants, though, water runs out

of the bottom long before the soil is soaked. A slow drip feed is what’s needed, but who has the time for that? Inside the house there are jobs to do. Washing to be put on. Dishes to clear. Work clothes to prepare. So I create my little floods, then move on.

One of the difficulties of gardening in a small space is finding a way of doing the job without wrecking everything else that is going on. If I overwater the lemon tree the water runs out of the pot, across the brick paving and disrupts my grandson’s Lego town – although he seems quite pleased with the idea of a flood to enliven the evenings of his plastic, square-headed population.

When I water the lettuce, strawberries, beans and upside-down tomato on the sundeck, I have to first make sure that the washing line underneath is empty or everyone will be wearing clothes with earth coloured streaks.

Summer took a long while to arrive this year. For weeks, my basil plants sat and sulked through cold nights, barely putting on a leaf.

Now they want to run to seed before providing the customary summer pesto.

The coriander is all legs and arms and flowerheads, and no leaves. The capsicum is providing tiny, intense flavored fruit. Nothing is growing quite as I expect. These days that observation carries with it a freight of fear.

Is this climate change? Will the intimate knowledge of the garden soon cease to serve?

Is everything changing?

Tonight I am soaking the seeds of moonflowers, ready for planting out tomorrow.

Moonflowers grow on long vines. They can put on five metres in a single year. I have read that the flowers open in the early evening and close before noon the following day. You can actually watch them open, it happens so fast.

The fragrance is sweet and heavy.

Next summer, I hope to have the moonflowers to accompany me for the evening watering and harvest ritual.

@MargaretSimons

am searching for a word. No dementia jokes please. A word: glamorous, rich, evocative, that we can appropriate to give old age a better tint. Just as Gays did, and forever improved the image and the language. We need something to distinguish us, for example, as the last generation that experienced life in the home without computers, while being the generation that helped the invention to reach its present sophisticated state. The man who invented the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, died only last year at the age of 88. I wonder if, in his later years, any patronising young git asked him if he knew what a mouse was.

I was thrilled to see that my generation’s intimacy and expertise with computers were recognised by The Guardian UK in December when it asked actor Sheila Hancock, aged 80, to give advice on online privacy and security. She brought to bear on the subject of privacy her earlier life experience: “I grew up in a generation where we kept things private, where a letter was a lovely little very private thing that arrived. Suddenly we can send messages that could misfire, that anybody can see.

My grandchildren have a completely different attitude to privacy, but I feel I have to assume that everybody can see what I am doing on the web.” (“Spot on,” said the security expert who worked with The Guardian on the Snowden stories.)

Is there a word that describes people with this sort of applied, hands-on knowledge of life – all aspects of life – who happen to be 80-ish? Who are live wires, contributors to life and the gaiety, song and dance of it?

Elderly will not do.

‘Elderly’ has a shakiness about it, don’t you think? As though the frail person thus described might expire if the word ‘old’ were used to her or his face. I use it to get the electricity back on or the phone fixed. That is, when I am not in actual view. But I couldn’t use it face-to-face. I would find it impossible to talk face-to-face with someone whom I knew thought I was elderly. When the word ‘frail’ came up in a discussion about one of my bones, I made the rheumatologist erase it from his Dictaphone-thingy. He obliged.

Good chap.

‘Senior’ is in wide use; very popular in public service sort of communications. It seems to confer some privilege, but we know it doesn’t. It makes me feel like a Girl Guide, responsible but not powerful or glam.

“Oldster” is terrible. Don’t even go there.

Makes me feel I should have four wheels.

‘Ageing’ is ridiculous. As though we all aren’t. It does have a certain levelling quality though. Like hats that make everyone look middle aged. Except those saucers that women fashionably wear to the races or royal weddings. They make women look demented. We don’t want that association. Ageing is used for people who are old, but its connotation is ‘actively crumbling’. It will not do.

‘Old’ is okay: Old English, but no glamour.

Even old objects have to be called ‘antiques’ to become interesting. Perhaps it could acquire jollier associations in its archaic form ‘olden.’

Would I mind being an olden if the image were brushed up a bit? Olden has some mystery to it. Elder is not bad, but it has a hierarchical ring.

There is work to be done here. Some good spinning: quite useful if it makes us feel valued and takes account of our wisdom and all-round attractiveness. It will come.

Meanwhile I take enormous satisfaction from the SA government’s decision to abandon annual compulsory medical tests for drivers aged 70 and over. Victoria, which doesn’t have age-based testing, helped to show SA the way. There was no evidence that such tests lowered crash rates. They just made us feel bad.

I liked what Health and Ageing Minister Jack Snelling had to say, no doubt advised by some oldens (getting to like it better?) and elders: “People are living longer and fuller lives and we need to have more relevant policies that do not discriminate by age and support our older population.”

So there. When I was young we would have added for the benefit of those who say bad things about olden/senior/drivers: “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” These days we know that even put-downs shouldn’t be smoked. But it’s an excellent blow to discrimination. All the ‘buts’ have been considered and chased out the door. Old people, call them what you like, are as responsible as any in the community. And when we find the proper word for us, it will be evident to all. Perhaps ‘majority’?

Just joking. Oldens do that.

‘Delivers solid science as well as extraordinary spectacle.’

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14 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

POLITICS MODERN TIMES Political Provincialism

BY ANDREW HUNTER

P

olitical discourse in Australia today reflects an attitude befitting of an intellectual and cultural backwater. Those who shape public debate remain committed to the accepted orthodoxy until news of a fresh approach arrives from recognised centres of progress and development. Expansive and independent thinking is discouraged, even disparaged. This deferential, provincial attitude will leave Australia perpetually behind the curve.

Uncritical acceptance of the current orthodoxy limits debate on economic, environmental and foreign policy. We are capable of so much more.

Australia has, on many occasions, led the world with innovative social and foreign policy. Growing wealth disparity has emerged as the greatest threats to civil society of our generation. The dangers of continuing on the current trajectory are evident to all but the most zealous free-market ideologues – many of whom are now shape our public conversation.

The unsophisticated, ideological language employed by our prime minister delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos demonstrated the extent to which the current government is captive to the thinking of yesterday. The freemarket, small government narrative, banal and devoid of nuance, reflects an orthodoxy that until recently was widely accepted in the Anglosphere.

A more sophisticated debate is gradually evolving in the United States and elsewhere. While Australia waits to hear the news, Abbott continues to preach the mantra of the free-market.

Traditional citadels of conservative thinking – previously understood to represent economic, theological and political conservatism – have started to talk about the threat that soaring wealth disparity poses to society.

Prior to Davos, the International Monetary Fund identified severe income inequality as a threat to stability.

The Pope, head of one of the most conservative institutions in the world, derides the “trickle down” effect, attacks the “idolatry of money” and constantly expresses deep concern at the growing wealth disparity (and has been labelled a Marxist for his trouble).

The clearest indication, however, that the debate has shifted on this issue can be found within the Republican Party in America. Many conservatives

WHAT WILL YOU DO?

in the United States now publicly acknowledge that equality of opportunity should be the objective of all societies, and that governments have a responsibility to ensure that it is so.

This is consistent with the words of Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the American Government should “afford an unfettered start and a fair chance” in life. Unfortunately, news that leading figures in the Republican Party now acknowledge that a different approach is needed to respond to emerging challenges has not yet reached conservative outposts in Australia. Perhaps mail addressed to the Lodge, currently being renovated, has not been redirected to the AFP training college.

According to media sources sympathetic to the conservative agenda, Abbott’s Davos speech left a positive impression on some of the world’s leading business figures. It is thoroughly unsurprising that some of the world’s leading business figures are enamoured with a leader who wishes to lower taxes and believes that governments “should get out of the way”. His message was intended to reassure a domestic audience rather than those present in Davos.

Abbott was unmoved that the World Economic Forum identified severe income disparity as “the most likely’’ risk to the global economy in 2014.

He instead asserted that “stronger economic growth is the key to addressing almost every global problem”. Stronger economic growth will,

We should never take our safety for granted.

Your life and the lives of your family could depend on what you do.

apparently, simultaneously solve the problems of environmental degradation, soaring wealth disparity, and ease tensions between nations.

Is Australia condemned under this Coalition Government to move in belated accordance with political discourse evolving elsewhere? If moved by a spirit that was once egalitarian and independent, we may discover new thinking that contributes solutions to the problems that we share with other peoples. Attempts to draw attention to the situation that exists in our own society are met with moronic accusations of ‘class warfare’. Do we lack the courage to explore the uncharted territory of modern times: addressing the systemic problems that generate soaring income inequality?

Time stands still in remote, intellectually desolate outposts, such as Australia appears to become under conservative governments.

We stand remote from the dynamic change and open public debates that occur in more populated, self-confident societies. Instead of waiting for the post to arrive from our great and powerful friends, Australia should instead return to our strengths of flexible and critical thinking to identify and solve the problems that impact the Australian people.

» Andrew Hunter is the National Chair of Australian Fabians

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POLITICS

LETTER FROM TIMOR LESTE

BY ALEXANDER DOWNER

I

I didn’t agree. Unless the Timorese somehow legitimised incorporation into Indonesia – which they never liked – then the issue would contribute to regional instability. In 1998 I told the Indonesians we’d do a survey to see if the Timorese would accept the Indonesian policy of “broad based autonomy” for East Timor. We did the survey. The Timorese wouldn’t accept it.

It was as a result of that survey that John Howard wrote to President Habibie suggesting at some stage the East Timorese should be given a choice about their future: independence or autonomy. The rest is history. When we could we sent in a peacekeeping force to save lives.

And then we helped the East Timorese build a new country. As the head of the UN Transitional Government in East Timor, Sergio Vierra de Mello told me “No country has done more to help East Timor than Australia.”

This is all history. But today there’s a new debate. Australia is being accused of unfairly grasping oil and gas revenues which were rightfully East Timor’s. For a month or so the ABC news was sprinkled with commentators denouncing Australia. Now that’s standard practice at the ABC. Whenever a foreigner criticises us, it’s always our fault.

So let’s look at the facts. The Hawke government negotiated the original Timor Sea Treaty with Indonesia under which a Joint Development Area was defined and revenues from the JDA were shared equally between Australia and Indonesia.

I told the East Timorese that we didn’t want to change the boundaries because that could unravel all our maritime and seabed boundaries with other neighbours but that as far as I was concerned they could take the lion’s share of the revenue. They were a new country and a poor one.

So in 2002 I eventually gave them 90 percent of the revenue and since then they’ve accumulated about $15 billion in a sovereign wealth fund. So were we generous? Well, we didn’t really need the money to the extent they did.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. There is a huge gas deposit called Greater Sunrise which straddles the Joint Development Area where East Timor gets 90 percent of the revenue and Australia’s seabed where obviously Australia gets 100 percent of the revenue. Given the structure of Greater Sunrise – little of which was in the JDA – Australia would get 80 percent of the revenue and East Timor 20 percent.

It’s true, a virulent minority of anticapitalists think East Timor should renege on the agreements they’ve made, agreements which give them huge amounts of money. And what will they replace those agreements with?

What makes them think they’ll get even more money?

GYPSY

This is, in a word, unwise. East Timor will win a reputation for being unreliable with no leverage to gain extra revenue from its reckless policy. As a person who did so much to get East Timorese their independence, that makes me sad.

new works by Waldemar Kolbusz

So in 2006 we struck a deal with the Timorese: we’d give them 50 percent of the revenue because they were poor and we were rich. For them, as they admitted at the time, it was a good deal.

HEADLINE, 2013. Waldemar Koldbusz. Oil on linen. 102 x 102cm

n my nearly 12 years as foreign minister there were few issues I dealt with which were more contentious than East Timor. In 1996 I inherited a nasty situation. The Timorese were fighting an insurgency against the Indonesians. There was a torrent of allegations of human rights abuses largely directed against the Indonesians. Our bilateral relationship with Indonesia was at the mercy of events in East Timor. I told DFAT that our policy of supporting Indonesian sovereignty no matter what was going to be unsustainable. They didn’t like that. They took the view Australian governments had shared since 1975: that the relationship with Indonesia was too important to us to risk alienating Jakarta by supporting East Timorese independence.

But now the current East Timorese government says it wants to rip up that treaty because it’s unfair and they allege we spied on them during the negotiations.

It’s one thing for East Timor to ask for more assistance from the developed world including Australia. If they desperately need money over and above their $15 billion sovereign wealth fund then it’s fine for them to ask for it – as long as they define how they want the money to be spent. After all, we all know a fair bit about wasted aid dollars.

But it’s another thing for East Timor to sign treaties and then say later it doesn’t like them and won’t honour them. This is exactly why developed countries are reluctant to invest in developing countries. The sovereign risk is too high. An agreement, a law, a treaty is only okay when it suits the government. If it suddenly has a better idea, it’s torn up. Why would investors want to put their money into East Timor when they know the Timorese government could at any moment tear up the laws of the land?

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16 The Adelaide Review February 2014

OPINION site, biodiversity is maximised to provide a conducive environment for predators of pests and to encourage a more resilient vineyard ecology, canopy management is prioritised to enhance air flow and ripening, and simple integrated methods are applied to pest and disease control when required while stock are used to manage weeds over winter.

Nevertheless, the sceptics remain appalled, ‘The problem resides in the extension of disbelief in empirical technique ... We must confront this problem, not just as wine lovers and wine writers, but also as citizens who do not wish to live in, nor present to our children, a society in which pseudoscience and esoteric fantasies are considered reality.’

I’m trained as a scientist and acknowledge the value of scientific method. However, I’m inclined to Hamlet’s oft-quoted observation that, `There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

This certainly doesn’t mean that I’m also inclined to accept any pseudoscience or incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo. However, it does mean that I can acknowledge the value of differing perspectives and in certain cases the complementarity of different knowledge paradigms from, for example, traditional ecological knowledge, theology and science.

Biodynamic Viticulture

by Stephen Forbes

M

ichael Lane, the head viticulturist and vineyard manager at Yangarra Wines, had worked for the previous owner before Jess Jackson and Barbara Banke, of Jackson Family Wines, bought the McLaren Vale vineyard. Around 2008, Yangarra’s winemaker Peter Fraser proposed that Michael begin the transition to a biodynamic vineyard. Michael’s training in viticulture and agricultural science hardly extended to Rudolf Steiner’s arcane philosophies but Michael’s attitude to his employer was one of bemusement rather than scepticism… bio- what? Talk to Michael and his ironic streak suggests his ready acceptance of the proposal was based on the (recent) adage that, `He who pays the piper calls the tune’.

Michael’s commitment suggests otherwise.

Walk around Yangarra’s vineyards with Michael:

`You need not see what someone is doing To know if it is his vocation, You have only to watch his eyes’

W.H. Auden’s poem is insightful here.

The journey to create a balanced and vibrant vineyard ecology begins with on-going observation and enquiry rather than a formulaic series of interventions. Michael stresses that beyond Steiner’s spiritualism and preparations there’s a management of attention required that’s often missing in industrial farming.

Biodynamic agriculture begins with Rudolf Steiner’s 1924 lecture series at the Koberwitz estate in Silesia, Germany (now part of Poland) towards the end of his life. The background to these lectures is found in Steiner’s philosophical spiritualism that provides the tenets for anthroposophy – and the basis for sceptical ridicule characterising biodynamism from occult to incomprehensible. While Steiner’s philosophical spiritualism imbues the Koberwitz lectures and their interpretation in biodynamic agriculture, being an adherent of anthroposophy isn’t a prerequisite for either sending your children to a Waldorf school for drinking biodynamic wine.

Biodynamic (and organic) wines have established a significant niche in a demanding wine market. Perhaps this reflects the views and reviews of influential wine writers Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson internationally and Max Allen, James Halliday and Philip White locally. Or perhaps the wines are, for whatever reason, especially worth drinking.

The nature of our society is to seek rational, and preferably ‘scientific’ explanations for phenomena. In this context Steiner’s system of biodynamic agriculture is remarkably polarising. Adherents can be unwilling to question while sceptics, particularly scientists, are inclined to observe, ‘… clear falsehoods, digressions and odd fantasies.’

For example, Steiner does not believe plants can be diseased but rather are impacted by Moon influence that can be counteracted by a homeopathic dose of horse tail (Equisetum arvense) infused into water, massively diluted and sprayed over fields. Such arcane practices can have scientists almost apoplectic. ‘With this list of practices, best described as a kind of agricultural voodoo, we are at the heart of biodynamics.’ Further, peer-reviewed studies of biodynamic and conventional viticulture suggest no measurable differences in the vines, ‘Analysis of leaves showed no differences between treatments … There were no differences in yield, cluster count, cluster weight, and berry weight.’

But perhaps all of this rather misses the point. Soil health and soil carbon is enhanced by retaining all plant material on

Yangarra doesn’t emphasise the mystical elements of Steiner’s biodynamic agriculture.

However, it does create a healthier environment for staff and visitors, and for sustaining the land for the long term. Michael Lane observes, “The bees are back in the vineyard and the frogs returned to the creeks when we turned the old regime off. Now there are no mosquitos – the insect population is richer and healthier.

And more balanced: no bug dominates.” As winemaker, Peter Fraser emphasises the harvest of fruit truthfully expressing the rich geology and mineral elements of the soils characterising McLaren Vale. And even a special energy that Yangarra can’t really quantify or explain.

Perhaps biodynamic agriculture sees a clearer focus on environmental and soil management, perhaps it’s the management of attention rather than rote industrial farming or perhaps Steiner’s tapped into something else we’re yet to explore. I’m inclined to subscribe to Michael Lane’s closer engagement with the vineyard:`How beautiful it is, That eye-onthe-object look.’

A review of the wine isn’t my territory – but they’re pretty good – see: yangarra.com.au/ reviews-and-articles

»»Stephen Forbes, Director, Botanic Gardens of Adelaide

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 17

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

SCIENCE

A Spark of Genius

BY PAUL WILLIS

W

hy do conflicting ideas always have to conflict? In this modern world where all issues are divided into false dichotomies with two camps at opposite extremes and no common ground in between.

We seem to think that ideas and debates can be run like football matches: brutally, with maximum opposition and the winner takes all. Surely there are more constructive and civilised ways to challenge the ideas of others?

And indeed there are! It hasn’t always been like this and a wonderful example from science comes from the civilised and courteous world of late 18th century Italy.

Born in Bologna, Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) was working at the University of Bologna as an anatomist when, in the early 1780s, he made a rather unusual and completely unexpected discovery.

Legend has it that, while cutting open a frog’s leg, the steel scalpel in Galvani’s hand touched against a nerve which was being held at the other end by a brass hook. The leg twitched.

Galvani realised that electricity was the cause of the movement in the dead tissue. Galvani had recently acquired a static electricity generator and was fascinated by why and how this mysterious device could produce a spark when its various parts were rubbed together.

He conducted further experiments implicating this magical force in the movement of muscles and then went on to demonstrate that animal tissue has a natural electric current. It was Galvani’s ideas on electricity inside living tissue that indirectly breathed life into Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.

Galvani’s dissections and experiments with electricity caught the attention of another Italian scientist, Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), at the University of Pavia. Volta was more a physicist than an anatomist like Galvani, so his appreciation of the experiments was from a more physical perspective. He repeated Galvani’s experiments and confirmed his original observations.

Then a rather unusual collegial rivalry evolved between the two over explanations as to exactly what these experiments meant.

Galvani thought that the tissue itself generated the electricity that made it move but Volta thought otherwise: that the electricity was coming from outside the animal.

To settle the matter, Volta built a stack of alternating plates of copper and zinc separated

IMAGE: ZOE KIRKWOOD, LET THEM EAT CAKE

Luigi Galvani

by blotting paper soaked in acid. This pile (now known as a Voltaic Pile), when connected top to bottom, created an electric current. Volta had just invented the world’s first battery. More importantly for his debate with Galvani, nothing in this pile was alive or had ever been living tissue.

So Volta was able to demonstrate that electricity could be generated outside of an organism.

As has been pointed out several times, the irony of this debate was that both Galvani and Volta were right. Galvani correctly deduced that it was electricity that made the body move and that there is electricity in every living cell.

Volta was right in that the electricity observed stimulating a dead frog’s leg came from outside, not within the tissue.

Unfortunately, Galvani didn’t live to see the influence of the Voltaic Pile he inspired – he died in 1798, two years before Volta published the details of his battery.

So perhaps we can take a leaf out of a very old Italian book. Perhaps we can coin our opposition to another’s position on an issue in collegial and constructive terms. The outcome of such civilised debates looks to be more constructive than the knock ’em down and grab–all mentality that drives ‘discussions’ in so many areas of our modern society.

Volta went on to introduce the theory of electrical currents and just a few weeks after its unveiling, his Voltaic Pile enabled it to be shown that water could be separated into two different gasses. He was a rock star of science for his day. Volta included Napoleon among his greatest fans, and Napoleon had a special medal struck in Volta’s honour and made him a Count in 1801. Galvani’s experience with Napoleon was less auspicious: he was dismissed from the University of Bologna after refusing to take an oath of allegiance to Napoleon’s invading army.

Volta had his name applied to the unit of electromotive force – the volt. In deference to his academic adversary, it was Volta who named the phenomenon of the electrical basis for nerve impulses as “Galvanism”.

Galvanism has subsequently been expanded to include the production of an electrical current through chemical means. The galvanometer, an instrument that measures small electrical currents, was also named after Galvani.

Or perhaps I’m being too idealistic. Late 18th century Italy is a world and several generations away from modern Australia. A more genteel time perhaps, where opposing ideas could flourish alongside each other in search of a mutually agreeable solution. An era long gone and replaced by the naked aggression of the modern world.

» RiAus will be presenting A Spark of Genius at 3pm on Saturday, February 8 at this year’s Carnevale Italian Festival at the Adelaide Showground carnevale-adelaide.com

HELPMANN ACADEMY GRADUATE EXHIBITION 2014 DRILL HALL, TORRENS PARADE GROUND, VICTORIA DRIVE, ADELAIDE FRIDAY FEBRUARY 14 TO SUNDAY MARCH 9 10:30AM TO 4:30PM DAILY

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18 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

BUSINESS Avoiding the Fate of the Frog

customers as possible is being taken • Stockholdings are high but turnover is low • Market share and profit margin of core product lines is declining • Your business competes heavily on price and your response to price competition is to continually discount • Overheads are growing faster than sales If one or more of these signs is evident in your business, then the water temperature is on the rise and it is necessary to consider strategic and operational responses that will lower the temperature.

BY MICHAEL BROWNE

T

he new year brings with it the prospect of more stable economic and political conditions than we have seen in recent years. However there are significant structural and cyclical changes which show no signs of slowing: digital disruption, regulatory change, sovereign credit ratings, changes in customer preferences, product substitution and credit spreads – to name but a few. As a result business continues to face a period of further change.

For many businesses, the years since the GFC have been about survival and managing uncertainty. In order to remain profitable, business models have knowingly been changed or more commonly, unknowingly morphed to chase profit and moved well off strategy.

Whilst the changes have enabled survival and profitability, will the model which has seen them through the tough times be responsive

and competitive in the new environment they now face?

The risk in answering with a quick yes is akin to placing a frog in cold water and allowing the water temperature to gradually rise. The frog misses the vital warning signs as the temperature rises and eventually boils.

Businesses face a similar prospect if they don’t take stock and assess their business model following the significant volatility and change which has been ever-present over the last few years.

What goes into a South Australian egg?

There’s the chicken. But the chicken needs a farm. The farm needs a farmer. A farmer needs helpers. The helpers need a coup. The coup needs an engineer. The engineer needs workers. Back to the egg.The chicken needs feed. The feed needs a supplier. The supplier needs a delivery truck. The truck needs servicing. The service shop needs mechanics. Back to the egg. The eggs get collected. The eggs get delivered. The shop needs an owner. The owner needs staff. The staff need a customer.

That customer is you! The more South Australian you buy, the more South Australians you support.

Rather than a quick response, taking some time to reflect on the question might avoid the fate of the frog. Here are some warning signs to look for: • There is no real sense of where the business will be in three to five years • Short to medium term forecasting is difficult • Economic cycles rather than business structure are blamed for loss of sales • Customer preferences are changing but you haven’t revitalised your business model to adapt to changes • A defined target market is blurred so a scattergun approach to capture as many

PRESENTS

UNMASKING AUSTERITY The Audit Commission will soon be reporting on the review of the Commonwealth public sector and may suggest sweeping austerity measures similar to that seen in Queensland, the European Union and the United Kingdom. This panel of international experts will answer some important questions regarding austerity as well as provide some alternatives to austerity measures and more…...

John Quiggin (QLD) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us Jamie Peck (CANADA) Austerity Urbanism and Pushing Austerity Dexter Whitfield (UK) In Place of Austerity: Reconstructing the Economy, State and Public Services

When: Tuesday 18 February 9.30am—12.30pm (Refreshments Provided) Where: Braggs Lecture Theatre The University of Adelaide (and Streamed Live Online)

Strategically, it’s fundamental to know who the market is and have a clear value proposition that communicates the benefits your business delivers to its chosen market – the target audience. Understanding the value proposition enables a business to align its activities to those which are core to its success. It also prevents the business from spending money on activities that are not aligned to the value proposition.

The structural and cyclical changes that businesses need to respond to are not always immediately obvious or happen overnight, so it’s important to keep a constant eye on what’s happening in the business, the sector and the broader economy.

At an operational level, businesses need to remain vigilant, noting and responding to changes in the sector in which they operate to keep the water cool.

For example, in recent years, new entrants, globalisation and digitisation have eroded a business’s traditional competitive edge of location. In a pre-digital world many products were only available in specific geographic locations. Now with the internet and global distribution models, those same products are often available anywhere in the world and delivered to the customer’s doorstep. Being aware of this change and responding is a key to survival.

It is also now accepted wisdom that consumers are buying more on price than ever before. Consumers acting in this fashion have a direct and real impact on traditional sourcing, servicing and delivery models. This change in preference was gradual and businesses that did not pick up the warning signs are finding themselves in hot water as they experience loss of sales and margin.

Whilst these are only a small number of examples, the message is clear, change is all around. No sector is immune to structural and cyclical changes that can make or break the business. Take the opportunity now to review and if necessary adjust the business model.

FREE EVENT— Registration Essential at www.dunstan.org.au/events

» Michael Browne is a Partner at PwC

www.buysouthaustralian.com.au

pwc.com.au

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 19

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

BOOKS

DEAD INTERVIEWS THE GOLDFINCH Dan Crowe (ed.) / Granta

NIGHTZONE

STORM FRONT

Steven F. Havill / Poisoned Pen Press

John Sandford / Simon & Schuster (Putnam)

BY ROGER HAINSWORTH

At two am one-time Sheriff Bill Gastner, retired but still insomniac, is sitting atop Cat Mesa, which looms over Posadas, a New Mexico town. Suddenly far to the west across the almost empty landscape he sees an intense burst of light. The light was an explosion; secondary lights are the scrub fires it started. Then his binoculars follow headlights fleeing the scene and follow them as far as the outskirts of Posadas where a deputy routinely stopping a utility is instantly shot dead. Two eco-terrorists have blown up an electricity sub station serving a controversial development. One dies accidentally at the scene. His cop-killing accomplice is unknown. As a witness who knows his county backwards, the 70-plus Gastner is a vital cog in an investigation we follow through Gastner’s eyes. As always it is an enthralling ride. A privileged role for a retiree proves unexpectedly dangerous. Years ago I described Steven Havill as the best least known American mystery writer. Nineteen books later he is deservedly much better known, and in Nightzone the sense of place and the characters are as vivid as ever.

Storm Front takes us from rural New Mexico with its deserts, heat, and cacti to profoundly different rural Minnesota and the far-from retired police detective, Virgil Flowers. Virgil is an irresistible character whose adventures you happily reread more than once. Years ago I sagely observed that John Sandford could not possibly maintain his high standard with

his prodigious output. Since 2007 he has written seven Flowers novels in six years, together with six novels featuring Virgil’s distant urban boss, Lucas Davenport (23 novels and counting). I say no more. Virgil works for a state wide cross-jurisdictional police department in Minnesota and his bailiwick is provincial towns and farming communities. The stories can be violent but this is relatively peaceful. However, you have to keep focussed to follow the plot and keep a grip on the characters. Most of the latter are in hot pursuit of a potentially immensely valuable relic of Solomon with huge political overtones (even if it’s a fake).

An American archaeology professor has stolen it from an Israeli ‘dig’ and smuggled it home to Minnesota. Flowers must track down and arrest the larcenous professor, who is also a Lutheran minister; seize the missing relic, and hand it over to his superiors. Then Virgil can get back to his real work: catching Ma, a curvaceous 35-year-old blonde, who is running a scam with artificially aged timber. Ma knows Virgil loves women almost as much as he loves fishing and is trying to seduce the susceptible detective. He has too much on his mind to concentrate on some Da Vinci Code nonsense. However, he is stuck with an attractive Israeli agent of (allegedly) an organisation that protects antiquities (or is she really a Mossad agent?) Worse, he cannot find the professor, who it appears is terminally ill. He has foreign and local criminals (including Turks), and fanatical collectors coming at him. Then the genuine Israeli agent turns up. Read on!

Donna Tartt / Little, Brown

BY DAVID SORNIG

BY CHRISTOPHER SANDERS

In Dead Interviews, Dan Crowe has licensed a host of contemporary writers to imagine how they would handle an interview with the deceased icon of their choice. The pieces they produce animate a cast of writers, politicians, artists, scientists and musicians from the last two-and-a-half centuries (most of them white and male) who their inventors treat with a combination of irreverence, disdain, enthusiasm and earnest respect.

The stand outs are Rick Moody, who asks a series of increasingly irrelevant questions to the rambling and enlightened Jimi Hendrix; Geoff Dyer who, in a moment of drug-addled comic gold, barely lets Friedrich Nietzsche get a word in edgewise; and A.M. Homes’ Richard Nixon, who seems incapable of self-reflection.

The crown of the collection is Joyce Carol Oates’ short story ‘Lovely, Dark, Deep’ in which her invented interviewer of Robert Frost, Evangeline Fife, lingers around the poet at the Bead Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1951 as an increasingly accusatory ghost. As the collection’s longest piece, it’s easily its most faceted, and like its best pieces, the story plays dangerously on the line dividing the fiction and the reality of its chosen subject’s life.

It’s been 21 years since Donna Tartt stunned the literary world with her debut novel, the Generation X classic, The Secret History. Her long awaited third novel, originally scheduled for a 2008 release, will finally remove Tartt from her first novel’s two-decade long shadow. Tartt’s protagonist is a 13-year-old New Yorker, Theo, who survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum, which kills his mother, whom Theo was very close. Fleeing the scene with a priceless painting, Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch, and a ring on advice from an elderly man Theo comforts until his last breath, the novel’s first half is a fascinating look at modern adolescence.

Seemingly unwanted after the attack, Theo briefly lives at a friend’s luxury Manhattan apartment before his deadbeat addict (alcohol, gambling) of a dad (who left Theo and his mother for a Las Vegas floozy) takes him to his new home in the Nevada desert before returning to New York a few years later. Despite his cross-country adventures, the shadow of The Goldfinch lurks. Part Catcher in the Rye, part commentary on post 9-11 New York, part suspense thriller, The Goldfinch is unforgettable.

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20 The Adelaide Review February 2014

WIN / OPINION WIN! FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN, ENTER YOUR DETAILS AT ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

The Great Beauty Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas Now showing One of the most spectacular and talked-about films of the Cannes Film Festival, and Italy’s official submission for the 2014 Academy Awards, The Great Beauty is Paolo Sorrentino’s powerful and evocative tale of hedonism and lost love, and an extraordinary depiction of contemporary Rome – where life is a performance, and the city its stage. Stars Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli and Carlo Buccirosso.

Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2014 – VIP Vernissage Drill Hall, Torrens Parade Ground, Victoria Drive. Wednesday, February 12, 6.30pm A vernissage (from the French ‘to varnish’) is traditionally a private viewing of an art exhibition – a social gathering with new art, new connections and plenty of French champagne. Be among the first to meet with the artists and see the work showcased at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2014.

The Vaudevillians The Paradiso Spiegeltent, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Rundle Park, East Terrace. Friday, February 14 RuPaul’s Drag Race reigning queen – Jinkx Monsoon, makes her Australian debut in her sell-out, off-Broadway hit, The Vaudevillians with co-star Major Scales. The hottest act ever frozen alive has defrosted and returned from the speakeasies and burlesque theatres of the 1920s to reclaim their original hits Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Drop it Like it’s Hot and more!

Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo The Paradiso Spiegeltent, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Rundle Park, East Terrace. Friday, February 14 Direct from London’s West End, meet awesome prehistoric creatures at Erth’s Dinosaur Zoo. From cute baby dinos to teeth-gnashing giants, all brought to life by sophisticated puppet design and electronics. This experiential theatre production takes audiences on a prehistoric journey into a new dimension

where they get to meet a menagerie of insects, mammals and dinosaurs that once roamed the planet millions of years ago.

Win one of two family passes.

Gurrumul – His Life and Music Prince Alfred College Oval, Kent Town Sunday, February 16, 3pm After sold out concerts in Sydney and Melbourne and five star reviews, multi ARIA Award winning indigenous artist Gurrumul will perform with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Kate Ceberano at Prince Alfred College Oval in Adelaide.

Gloria Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas From Thursday, February 27 Gloria is a 58-year-old divorcée. Her children have all left home but she has no desire to spend her days and nights alone. Determined to defy old age and loneliness, she rushes headlong into a whirl of singles’ parties on the hunt for instant gratification – which just leads repeatedly to disappointment and emptiness.

But then she meets Rodolfo. However, the encounter presents unexpected challenges and Gloria gradually finds herself being forced to confront her own dark secrets. Directed by Sebastian Lelio. Stars Paulina Garcia.

Musica Viva Presents the Kelemen Quartet Adelaide Town Hall, 128 King William Street. Monday, March 3, 7.30pm Combining youthful brilliance with the finest Hungarian tradition, the Kelemen Quartet bring their energetic flair, striking charisma and thrilling modern zest to a program ranging from Bartók to the première of a new work by Australian composer Ross Edwards.

Shen Yun 2014 Adelaide Festival Theatre, King William Road. Saturday, April 19, 1.30pm With classical Chinese dance and music, dazzling backdrops and costumes, Shen Yun takes you on a journey into 5000 years of divine culture. For thousands of years, China was known as the Divine Land. This culture emphasised harmony between heaven and earth, and virtues such as integrity, compassion and tolerance.

MONTEFIORE As you ponder your voting intentions in the state election, ask not of what your state can do for you, but what the state can do for... key stakeholders.

BY Sir Montefiore Scuttlebutt

A

re you one of South Australia’s key stakeholders? They’re an elite group.

Wherever ministers wander, they gather. They’re in the corridors and at the drinks functions; they’re in the corporate boxes and wherever the ministerial white cars queue.

According to the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition, South Australia should listen to their wisdom – they make the state tick over.

The matter came to mind after perusal of What We Have Heard, published recently by South Australia’s Expert Panel on Planning Reform. It summarises phase one of its inquiry.

In it, the authors confessed that one of our most contentious Acts, the Development Act 1993, had been amended 629 times in 48 separate bills over 20 years. There’s the evidence of the key stakeholders – what a powerful presence they have on the people’s parliament. Twenty years later, when a really big planning determination is made under this Act, it’s now clear that a former system of cautious, long-term strategic planning, local council responsibility and procedural transparency has been superseded by a `one-man’ determination principle - one planning minister.

Since 2008, SA’s Labor planning ministers Paul Holloway (2007-10) and John Rau (2010-13) have been very busy exercising the generous freedoms allowed them under this Act. Not surprisingly, they have upset a vast community of South Australian families who once thought that governments respected the views of the people that elected them. Cheltenham’s anger still bubbles up over the loss of the last western suburbs open space, now being developed for high-density housing.

Woodville’s still furious at the proposed loss of its biggest public park. Mount Barker still seethes over top-quality farmland suddenly rezoned for ticky-tacky housing, with no infrastructure planning. Burnside, Unley and Prospect howl at proposed high-rise that will introduce discordant form into low-scale streetscapes. Salisbury’s still gobsmacked at rezoning of an isolated flood plain for housing far from established infrastructure.

Port Adelaide remains outraged over development vandalism that’s trashed an historic port precinct.

City communities rankle as Hong Kong-style apartments are proposed to rise within historic cottage precincts.

The Expert Panel last year recorded a blister of views from these communities, as well as a bluster of others from well-funded key stakeholders.

Not surprisingly, they were poles apart. Final recommendations won’t be tabled until December.

Meanwhile, back in the present, more unexpected changes have passed through parliament, even more radical than the Development Act – and proposed behind the scenes as a substitute. The next planning minister in the next government gets to capitalise on

brand new powers under a recently revised statute, now commonly titled The Urban Renewal Act 2013. Amendments passed now allow major new development projects distanced from the people’s participation in them. A planning minister now may declare a ‘regeneration’ site, in which the rules for building are written by that minister. Proposed areas include Port Adelaide (yes, more), Marion, Onkaparinga, Tea Tree Gully, Salisbury (yes, more), Bowden (surely no more?), Tonsley and, in the heart of Adelaide, the park lands. Development there will be the most contentious. Once declared, the local community has no guarantee of access to information or participation as the minister defines policies and principles, a master plan, and design guidelines for buildings or infrastructure.

It gets worse. As Minister Rau explained on May 2 last year: “Assessment of master plans will be undertaken against the original ministerial declaration”. How convenient. Next, the local council’s development plan for that site would be revised to suit – regardless of that council’s or community’s opposition - and the minister would then choose a `precinct authority’ – a quasigovernment statutory authority – to run the show. Who’s on it? It’s rather vague: it’s up to the minister. It would have awesome discretionary powers, including over-riding council strategic or asset management plans, disabling its bylaws and raising new levies, thus threatening a council’s rates base. Limited safeguards would add further controversy because none have been tested. These features did not escape the opposition’s blowtorch last year when planning shadow, Vickie Chapman, tore apart the draft bill. “The whole Mount Barker fiasco, of course, has been a lesson in what every government should not do in attempting to suffocate, squash and keep silenced and excluded from adequate consultation and information; if ever that was an exercise in trying to crush the public, [in] which they stood up and revolted, that is one.

You would think that there would be some lessons learned from it but, sadly, that is not the case.”

Despite the bluster a tweaked bill passed with Liberal support.

Fast forward to March 2014. Ms Chapman is the ‘planning minister most likely’ if her Liberal Party wins. It could fall to her, when key stakeholders who own land or hold contracts for land acquisition or set eyes on a generous slice of ‘empty’ park lands come knocking at the minister’s door to ask for declaration of a `regeneration site’.

And what of the Planning Review’s future for 2014? Given what went through parliament late last year, many councils perceive a strong case of ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’.

Early retirement settlements for the panel? Preelection diplomacy inhibits a response.

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 21

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

FASHION

HOW TO B GOOD

BY LACHLAN AIRD

A

that’s also in desperate need of a shift in focus.”

Part of the shift that Duff is trying to execute comes from the materials she uses for her clothes, with hemp her material of choice.

After growing up on an organic farm, she knew that hemp was a sustainable material that is underutilised and decided to use her label to “champion hemp in all its brilliance”.

nny Duff of local brand B GOODS LABEL has a strong focus on designing clothes that are environmentally and ethically sound. This endeavour has had its challenges, although Duff assures us that the extra effort is worth it.

“As a 100 percent natural fibre, [hemp is] incredibly durable yet also 100 percent biodegradable,” Duff explains. “It breathes beautifully, is warming in winter and cooling in summer, along with the added benefit of having the highest UV protection of all natural fibres.”

Duff decided to start creating clothes that are sustainable when she working as a stylist for film and television and constantly confronted by the overwhelmingly wasteful mentality to fast and throwaway fashion trends. This is why B GOODS LABELS’ ethical philosophy is the most important pillar of its business model.

Duff enthuses that hemp can grow in any climate, requires no pesticides and little water, matures in just 100 days and each part of the plant can be used for paper, fabric, building materials, fuel or food. She feels that Australia needs to take notice of the benefits of hemp and change their restrictions and look to a more sustainable future.

“It’s one of the biggest reasons I started the label,” Duff says. “I’m trying, along with many other amazing ethically focused labels [Duff works in close conjunction with fellow Adelaide ethical label, Vege Threads], to offer an alternative to fast fashion but it also give a new meaning to the industry. It’s not just about having the latest trends; it’s about the huge network it supports

“I think Australia is behind the eight-ball with new policies allowing Australian farmers to grow hemp for food and fibre. They’ll be kicking themselves soon! Especially with our sun, it’s so important to wear clothing that protects you.”

Burnside Village is calling all artists to take part in the:

FASHION RENDEZVOUS

GILLES STREET MARKET Sunday, February 2 and Sunday, February 16 10am to 4pm 91 Gilles Street, Adelaide gillesstreetmarket.com.au For fab vintage and pre-loved fashion including the latest from local emerging designers, check out the Gilles Street Market. DJs spin the tunes alongside delicious food vendors and over 90 stalls of fashion and accessories.

bgoodslabel.com

2014 RICHARD COHEN OAM MEMORIAL

SCULPTURE COMPETITION August 2014 at Burnside Village Shopping Centre Adult Prize $12,500 Junior* Prize $3,000 People’s Choice Award $2,500 Artists are invited to enter the competition by registering their interest online at burnsidevillage.com.au. Competition guidelines and official entry forms will be sent to all registrants following close of registrations.

The competition is open to all Australian resident artists. Registration is mandatory and closes 5pm, 21st February 2014.

Françoise Abraham’s “Frivole” On display at Burnside Village

To be eligible to enter the Junior category entrants must be 18 years or under as at August 1st 2014.

*

burnsidevillage.com.au

22 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

LIVES IN MOVEMENT The Adelaide Festival’s three dance pieces this year include two Australian works, as well as the long-awaited return of Israel company Basheva to present Sadeh 21.

BY ALAN BRISSENDEN

T “clever, creative, had the audience in hoots” ★★★★ the age

14 – 23 FeBruAry GArDen oF uneArthly DeliGhts adelaidefringe.com.au or 1300 621 255

Mabul, to Barry Kosky’s 1996 Festival. That impressive Australian premiere led to later visits to Sydney and Melbourne. This time the company is taking in Perth and Sydney.

Despite Naharin’s talk of delicacy, his choreography gives his dancers, who are noted for their fluidity, plenty of opportunity for sweeping gestures, explosive jumps, high lifts, rapid stamping and, beyond movement, screams, yells, talk, singing – all to be experienced in Sadeh21. The word means “field” but you’ll have to see it to discover the meaning of 21.

After 17 years as a dancer, internationally (Sasha Waltz in Germany, Meredith Monk in America) and in Australia (Meryl Tankard in Adelaide, Force Majeure in Sydney), Parker freelanced as a choreographer, creating several award-winning works including one of his two outdoor works for Britain’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012. Now he has his own company, a big step forward. “I’ve worked hard,” he says. “It’s been a slow burn over the past 10 years ... It took a long time to cross over from dancer to choreographer, to prove to everybody that I could do it.” Standing ovations for Am I, not only on the first night, indicate he and his company are proving the point.

The company, based in Tel Aviv and Israel’s premier dance troupe, was founded in 1964 by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild and American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. Naharin, its leader since 1990, brought two works, Anaphase and

BLACK OUT

While Sadeh21 is three years old, Shaun Parker’s latest hit, Am I, premiered at the Sydney Festival on January 9 this year. Philosophical about our evolution as social beings, Am I has been ticking away in Parker’s fertile brain for at least seven years, and he tells me over the phone that it took five years to raise the money to produce it. Seven musicians play an eclectic score by his frequent collaborator, Nick Wales, and seven dancers whirling, bending, swaying, pulsing, and manipulating shining metal rods express the rich texture of ideas and emotions.

Photo: rodeo.com

Directed by Anne Browning

he Festival’s big dance event is Batsheva’s Sadeh21, a showcase for Artistic Director/Choreographer Ohad Naharin’s movement language Gaga – which has nothing to do with a well-known musical person, having been developed by Naharin with his dancers over many years. It’s to do with delicacy, he says in a video interview, not just about dancers becoming better athletes, but about listening, being aware of something beyond the athletic side of dance – “something about the soul”. Unlike most dancers, Batsheva’s do not practise or rehearse before mirrors, since Gaga is “about where you are on the stage, and your distance from your colleagues”. It’s about self-awareness.

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 23

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

PERFORMING ARTS

Asked which came first, the music or the dance, he has a revealing reply. Not having enough money for music, he began with the dancers.

After raising sufficient funds, he took the footage of his choreography to Wales to discuss genres and ideas. “I wanted the music to be some other-worldly fusion – let’s say if society were to deconstruct right now, and if it was to regroup, and form a tribe or a group, and they started to generate new music, what would that music sound like? What do people know from all of their past? What would that new human sound be like?” The band went off to camp at Mittagong in the NSW Southern Highlands, and came back with two-and-half to three hours of music (Am I runs for 80 minutes). “He works a little like me,” says Parker. “We create a lot of ideas, and wait until the ones that really work are looking forward and are dramaturgically coherent.” The

is mysteriously invaded by darkness, leading the guests into all kinds of interior questionings and imaginings, about themselves, other people, the world they have been living in.

Castro, who scripted Blackout, says yes, it’s choreographed, but it’s not so much dance as “movement with a reason”. But then the cast includes award-winning dancers Larisssa McGowan and Alisdair Macindoe, as well as Stone, who trained in Berlin briefly with Sasha Waltz and Friends and for 10 months with Bhuto expert Anzu Furukawa. While working as a singer and actor in Berlin in 2001, Stone co-created and performed Blue Love with Shaun Parker, which they brought to Adelaide in 2002. In the following year back in Europe she and Castro formed the company Stone/ Castro, which has produced over half-a-dozen theatre pieces, often for European festivals, in Adelaide and elsewhere in Australia. Inbetween they continue to work with such groups as Berlin’s Schaubuehne and Alain Patel’s les ballets C de la B. They base themselves in Adelaide which, Castro says with dancing dark eyes, is “thirsty for our work”, but their festivals productions mean “connections are open to us” overseas as well as at home. He gives a big bouquet to Adelaide Festival’s David Sefton, who “has a European style of programming”. “We pitched the idea [of Blackout] to him,” Stone chips in, and he snapped it up, sight unseen.

With a cast that includes Stephen Sheehan, Nathan O’Keefe and Portuguese actor John Romao – all award-winners – who could refuse?

dancers come into it too, and Wales and Parker can combine with them to create the work right on the spot. So at times Am I became a three-way collaboration. » Sadeh 21 Wednesday, March 5 to Saturday, March 8 Festival Theatre » Am I Dunstan Playhouse Thursday, February 27 to Saturday, March 1 » Blackout AC Arts Main Theatre Monday, March 3 to Sunday, March 9 adelaidefestival.com.au

Photo: Michele Aboud

Close collaboration has been the artistic and personal mode for over a decade for Portuguese Paulo Castro and Flinders Drama graduate Jo Stone, whose Blackout is the one premiere of the three dance performances in the Festival.

Stone says the idea has been with her since 2001, when she was in the act of leaving New York just as the planes ploughed into the Twin Towers.

She watched a big city coming to a standstill, dazed businessmen getting out of their cars, bewildered. There was a “hint of the end of the world” about it. In Blackout a wedding on a boat

AM I

Photo: Gadi Dagon

Photo: Michele Aboud

SADEH 21

adelaide.edu.au

24 The Adelaide Review February 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

Mothers and Sons Adelaide’s Rosalba Clemente will return to the stage for the first time in a decade to play Irina Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s classic The Seagull.

by David Knight

C

lemente, the current Head of Acting at Flinders University and former Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, had been in discussions with current State Theatre AD Geordie Brookman for a while about a return to the stage. Her decade-long acting sabbatical was because of family reasons, as Clemente wanted to spend the time raising her two sons. With her boys now in their teens, she felt the timing was perfect to appear in Chekhov’s tragicomedy, adapted by Hilary Bell and directed by Brookman.

“Geordie asked me to come back and perform for him many times before, but it never felt right,” Clemente explains while on a break from rehearsal for the first State Theatre production of the year. “This was the first time in 10 years where I had an impulse to say yes to something as an actor, and there were all sorts of reasons for that. Sometimes it’s hard to articulate why that it is. I didn’t act for 10 years because I got to a time in my life where my children became the most important thing to me, which is why it’s interesting to be playing a woman [Arkadina] whose career is the most thing to her and she leaves her child behind, because I made the

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The Adelaide Review February 2014 25

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PERFORMING ARTS reverse decision 10 years ago.”

InThe Seagull, Clemente plays the infamous character Arkadina, a fading actress and aristocrat who cares little for her son Konstantin’s (played

by Adelaide-born Hollywood star Xavier Samuel) passion to be a writer.

“I’m really committed to bringing them up [her sons], so I had to put something aside. Acting is a very absorbing, obsessive craft. I tend to carry my characters with me the whole time and I don’t know how healthy that is for children to live with.

I made a conscious decision to leave it alone for a while. Geordie offered me a lot of work as an actor over the years, and I had lots of offers interstate, but I found it really easy to say no to all of those offers because I found something more important in life. While there’s always grief associated with saying no, when you have a real reason to say no, you know it. And you follow that internal directive.”

Another reason the NIDA-trained actress and former director agreed to appear in The Seagull is because of her respect for Brookman.

“I’m really excited to work with him and that was part of the reason I said yes, but it also felt like the right time to take that step back onto the stage. And Chekhov. And that role – it’s pretty hard to turn down. As an older actor, you don’t have many opportunities to

play some of those great iconic roles – it was too good to pass up.”

soul, in fact. In a way, the last thing she needs to do is give his soul back to him.”

While Clemente hasn’t appeared on stage for 10 years, she has been writing. Her first play, Helly’s Magic Cup, won the Rodney Seaborn Award and was produced by Windmill. The play she’s currently working on, which also features a complicated relationship between a mother and son, Silvana’s Garden, is a work that Clemente has been writing for some time.

Clemente says this play is the one that’s taken the longest to complete because it’s “deeply personal”. She hopes it will be ready for production in 2015 or 2016.

“It’s about migration and schizophrenia; a relationship between a son and a mother who are displaced from each other. She lives in Adelaide and he lives in New York. Actually, it’s about a son and mother too! This is the story of my life,” she laughs.

Clemente will let fate decide if she will regularly return to the stage after The Seagull’s run.

Last year Silvana’s Garden was one of three plays chosen to be workshopped at Playwriting Australia’s Cultural Diversity Playwriting Workshop. Clemente says the play has progressed since that experience.

“I know more about the structure and the form that I want to bleed this story through. It’s about a young man being haunted, I suppose, by his mother, and not knowing that she’s already dead and she’s a ghost in his life now. For her, going through an inventory of her life, she has to face all the things she did wrong with her child and confess to the fact that she had tried to steal his

“It will take the time that it takes. What I don’t want to do is birth it too soon. I don’t want to fall into that trap.”

“I’m really nervous about getting up there and meeting the audience again. I’m terrified and excited and, I guess, at the end of this process I’ll gain a lot of information about what the future might hold. I’ll always be an actor. I’d like to think I could do it again in a more regular way but you’ve got to hand that over to the gods and surrender to the opportunities that life hands you.”

»»State Theatre Company of South Australia The Seagull State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop Friday, February 21 to Sunday, March 16 statetheatrecompany.com.au

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26 The Adelaide Review February 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

Bragging Rights UK singer, songwriter and activist Billy Bragg was last in Australia late last year to take part at Brisbane’s Big Sound music conference as a speaker and before that for a solo tour in 2012. He is returning with his full band and new album, Tooth and Nail, for a national tour that will include an appearance at WOMADelaide on Monday, March 10.

The Byrds’ I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better and dedicated the rendition to Sid Griffin, formerly of US band The Long Ryders but now leader of UK-based country rockers The Coal Porters.

The Flamin’ Groovies even if it’s only Shake Some Action.”

“Sid had been very helpful in introducing me to some musicians for my new band,” Bragg says of his latest backing players, which include drummer Luke Bullen, pedal steel player and guitarist CJ Hillman, bass player Matt Rounds and keyboardist Owen Parker. “Sid’s very active in the London bluegrass and country scene so when I was trying to put a band together I went to him for help as I was desperate to find a young pedal steel player. There are a lot of pedal steel players in the UK but most of them are older than me and I wanted someone who might know how to play pedal steel, but also play Johnny Marr as well.

“So I went back on and did Tank Park Salute,” he reveals. “It’s a song about the death of my father so I dedicated it to Nelson Mandela as the father of his nation. While his death wasn’t unexpected, there was an audible gasp from the audience when I told them.”

Bragg was preparing for an encore when told that Nelson Mandela had passed away.

»»WOMADelaide Botanic Park Friday, March 7 until Monday, March 10 womadelaide.com.au

by Robert Dunstan

B

ragg fronted UK punk band Riff Raff in the late 70s before embarking on a successful solo career with such albums as Life’s a Riot With Spy vs Spy, Talking to the Taxman About Poetry and Back to Basics. He has also been involved with grassroots, leftist political movements such as Red Wedge.

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Bragg also collaborated with Wilco on Mermaid Avenue on which they put the unused lyrics of Woody Guthrie songs to music with the song Way Down Yonder in the Minor Key receiving much airplay on triple j.

The musician is also no stranger to WOMAD festivals as he has performed at many around the world and is greatly anticipating taking part in his first WOMADelaide.

“Sid told me there was a guy up in Manchester, CJ Hillman, who would fit the bill. So that’s how I hooked up with CJ who has brought something really special to the band with his pedal steel, the Dobro and his jangly Rickenbacker guitar.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard The Flamin’ Groovies version of I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better but CJ, who is only 26 but into jangly guitar bands, had never even heard of The Flamin’ Groovies,” Bragg adds with a laugh. “So I had to sit him down and have a bit of a chat. Everyone should hear some of

“WOMAD festivals are always such a lot of fun,” Bragg says. “They are such a great event to be involved in because it’s like a little multicultural village and you also get to see some great music.

“I’ve always had a good time in Adelaide, anyway,” he adds. “Adelaide is a place where you can really chill-out anyway and I’ve heard that Botanic Park, especially when WOMADelaide is on, is a great place to do that.

And the other great thing about the WOMAD organisation is that they choose some great locations. They always give a lot of attention to that so a WOMAD festival is never just held in a big empty field somewhere.”

The musician uses Facebook to post videos of soundchecks with a recent guilty pleasure, as they have become known, being of Bragg and Australia’s Kim Churchill covering Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way.

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“They are a lot of fun because at soundchecks you can get into a situation where you are playing the same bloody song every day,” he laughs. “But doing a few covers, mucking around and jamming on some intros to songs can be much more fun. And for the Fleetwood Mac song, we got Kim up because he was touring with us at the time and we knew he’d make a good Stevie Nicks. He’s got the right haircut for a start.”

Bragg recently posted another ‘guilty pleasure’ on Facebook of the band covering

Billy Bragg

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28 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

Melbourne Fringe Winners

BY JANE HOWARD

O

ften, much of the most exciting work at the Adelaide Fringe comes from artists just starting out. Those special moments where you feel like you’re seeing something that, in a decade, will be playing at the Adelaide Festival or headlining the Fringe comedy program.

But with such a big program, how could you even pick who these artists are? Taking a glance at the hits of the previous Melbourne Fringe might be able to give Adelaide audiences a leg up, and this year seven productions that took home nine Melbourne Fringe Awards are playing in Adelaide.

They Saw A Thylacine took home awards for Best Performance and the New Zealand Fringe’s Tiki Tour Ready Award. The show, describes creator and performer Justine Campbell, is a verse performance that tells two stories:

“One of a female zookeeper struggling with the prejudices surrounding the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity at Hobart Zoo, the other of a female tracker hot on the tail of wild thylacine.”

Performing with fellow creator Sarah Hamilton, the pair is looking forward to remounting the show in Adelaide. Melbourne Fringe, Hamilton says, is “like a cocoon. A ground to test new work,” where Adelaide is “a hive of creativity of culture. A melting pot in a hot and beautiful city.”

Radio Adelaide is one of the more unique performance locations this Fringe, but it seems perfect for Adelaide Fringe Tour Ready Award winner FOMO. Zoe McDonald plays 10 characters in the show, and says it will “reveal a world we never see: what happens at the other end of the radio.”

FOMO, she describes, is “both a love story and critique of our modern age” as her characters struggle with a constant Fear Of Missing Out. “When I started developing these characters,” she says, “the show became somewhat of a meditation on what it means to be a woman in our current cultural climate.”

On taking out the Best Comedy award, EDGE! co-creator Isabel Angus says they were “shocked and had to be pushed to walk to the stage.” Backstage, they found themselves hugging the girls from They Saw A Thylacine, “just so overwhelmed and humbled”.

Also informed by our current cultural climate is Best Comedy Winner EDGE!, about 11-yearold YouTube “sensation” Stella, which creator Rachel Davis says “looks at the celebrity-

... We Should Quit won both Best Circus and Best Emerging Circus Performer for Morgan Wilson. With comedy and circus elements, director Avan Whaite calls it “an absurdist

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glimpse of the daily grind”. For Wilson, winning the Emerging Performer award inspired her to “just do more, and encourages me as a performer to take more risks with my work”.

Also joining the circus program from Melbourne is At The Last Gasp, winner of Circus Oz’s award for Original New Circus.

This work, combining trapeze, balancing, manipulations and acrobatics, will be Angelique Ross’ first time at the Adelaide Fringe.

Winning the award from Circus Oz, says Ross, “means a lot to see that someone else relates to and appreciates the work we’ve been doing”.

Sketch comedy troupe Wizard Sandwiches are bringing two shows to Adelaide, and The Last Lunch won them the People’s Choice Award.

For comedian Dylan Cole, comedy is about “that feeling when you are laughing so hard that you can’t breathe, your abs and chest ache, you have tears streaming down your face, you think that you are about to go to hospital and you forgot why you were laughing in the first place”.

Winning the People’s Choice Award, says Cole is a “nice acknowledgement from the reason you do the show – the audience”. He goes on, “we also bribed Melbourne Fringe and bought everyone a pony”.

Rounding out the winners coming to Adelaide is Simon Keck’s Nob Happy Sock, an “award-winning comedy about suicide”. The show won Outstanding Comedy supported by Brisbane Powerhouse, and Keck says the show is “confronting, but also uplifting, and best of all it is very, very funny”.

For him, much of Adelaide is about “catching up with old friends and making new ones.

Surrendering myself to the beast that is Adelaide Fringe, perhaps drinking a little too much and laughing as hard as I can, and loving every freaking second of it.”

» Adelaide Fringe Friday, February 14 to Saturday, March 16 adelaidefringe.com.au

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 29

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

PERFORMING ARTS

A Man and his Music

he explains. “But he will definitely be singing some of the new songs when he performs in Adelaide.”

Also on the line-up for the PAC concert will be Kate Ceberano, while Hobart’s Dewayne Everettsmith, who has just released his debut album, It’s Like Love, will also be on the bill.

“Dewayne has toured with Gurrumul in the past because he really loves the quality of Dewayne’s singing and writing,” Grose says.

BY ROBERT DUNSTAN

S

Skinnyfish Music has inked a deal with Sony to release Everettsmith’s It’s Like Love.

inger and musician Geoffrey Gurrumul, who has been blind since birth, performed with Sydney Symphony Orchestra last year at Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Festival. The results surfaced on the ABC live recording His Life and Music late last year and Gurrumul will recreate the show with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at Prince Alfred College Oval.

“We believed Dewayne’s album was way too big for us,” Grose says, “so we’ve done a deal for Sony to release it. It’s a very soulful album but also very much in the mainstream pop field and we felt we needed Sony’s expertise in reaching that market.”

I spoke to Mark Grose, Gurrumul’s manager, who is also managing director of Darwin-based company Skinnyfish Music, which is now well over a decade old.

“It’s going well because our continued success with Gurrumul has really given us a national profile,” Grose enthuses. “That’s enabled Skinnyfish to make lots of new contacts and also get ourselves into mainstream music circles. So we can now continue to work with other great Indigenous artists on lots of other great projects.”

The success of Gurrumul’s Sydney Opera House concert led to the Adelaide event and Grose hints that the concept may also travel overseas where the captivating singer also enjoys a strong following.

“Gurrumul had always wanted to play with an orchestra and he absolutely loved it,” Grose says.

“It’s the pinnacle of performance, especially for someone who is blind but with acute hearing to be playing with an orchestra. The concert was just sensational with lots of hard-bitten music industry types saying it was the best gig they’d ever been to. And, as you’d know, they go to lots of concerts as part of their everyday life.

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“So we knew then that it was the way to go in presenting Gurrumul to his audience,” he adds. “From a concert-goer’s point of view, it’s such a great experience for them as well.”

Gurrumul is also working on a new recording with input from his musical director Michael Hohnen.

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“For the third studio album there will be lots of orchestration,” Grose says. “So the plan is to approach some of the leading orchestral players around Australia and get them involved.

“Gurrumul sang some of the new material at Sydney Opera House, although we purposely left them off the live recording for the ABC,”

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30 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

SHARING A VISION OF COMPASSION It took a chance event and a common cause to bring two of Australia’s most admired musicians together and bridge two highly disparate musical worlds.

BY GRAHAM STRAHLE

Photo: Ken Butti

T Nigel Westlake and Lior.

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It was “one of those special nights that people talk about for years afterwards”, says Westlake.

As the winter mist descended into the Forgotten Valley, where the outdoor concert took place, he recalls how the remarkably clear-voiced Lior “began to weave his magic upon the crowd”.

It was “a tantalising and exotic sound-world.

I was overcome by a strange yearning to be a part of it,” he adds.

Bitch Boxer UK Photographer: Alex Brenner

street n e d l ho tres & thea rton theatre theba

he setting is one freezing winter’s night in 2009 in the tiny rural hamlet of St Albans, NSW, and on stage is Lior, the Israeli born singer-songwriter, farewelling his audience with a powerfully evocative rendition of the ancient Hebrew hymn of compassion, ‘Avinu Malkeinu’. Listening intently amongst the throng is Nigel Westlake, composer for the films Babe and Antarctica.

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The Adelaide Review February 2014 31

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PERFORMING ARTS The concert was a fundraiser for the Smugglers of Light, a foundation that the Westlake family established in memory of Eli, Nigel’s son, who was killed in a tragic road rage incident the year before. The foundation’s purpose is to assist Indigenous youth reclaim their ancestral heritage through music and film. “It was a poignant occasion that had been planned to coincide with the 12-month anniversary of Eli’s death,” explains Westlake – “the music held a very special meaning for our friends and family, many of whom were still grappling with the tragic loss that had befallen us.”

His eldest son, Joel, had introduced him to Lior’s music several years earlier, and it “had quickly become absorbed into the family playlist, underscoring many happy times,” says Westlake. Indeed, the last music he shared with Eli, just a week before the tragedy, happened to be Lior’s debut album Autumn Flow, which had propelled the singer to public attention and immediately placed him at the fore of this country’s indie artists.

This fact, he says, came to hold a profound importance, “forever imbuing these sweet songs with a unique and deeply personal significance for me”.

Hearing Lior sing the mesmerising chant of ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ in this dusk concert proved a watershed moment. “As he was brought back

on stage for the encore,” says the composer, “little did I realise that his final offering for the night would hold the germ of an idea that would become the catalyst for a life-changing and enriching journey.” After the concert the two soon got talking, and Westlake suggested composing a symphonic arrangement around a recording of Lior’s performance.

“Neither of us were sure where this might lead, but I had a hunch it was at least worth a shot.” The experience, Westlake describes, was “a little like writing a movie score” to weave in with Lior’s voice. So encouraged were they by how it worked out, that they “could both sense potential in the finished idea, and it seemed a natural progression to expand the material into a song cycle for voice and orchestra”.

The result was Compassion, a symphony of songs as it’s been described. The words, chosen

by Lior, come from ancient Hebrew and Arabic writings that reflect his own Middle Eastern family history. Lior came up with melodic ideas as well, putting these to Westlake to serve as a starting point in composing the cycle. Both say their aim was to create a contemporary interpretation, without aping traditional Hebrew or Arabic musical styles.

Neither did they set out in Compassion to create a religious work in any overt or institutional sense. Instead, they say wanted

to chart a personal exploration of ideas surrounding this single universal theme.

Explains Lior: “It may seem strange in the context of this work, yet neither Nigel nor I consider ourselves religious people. We do, however, share a firm belief that much of the beauty and wisdom found within so many works of art and philosophy attributed to a certain religion need not lie exclusive to those who subscribe to its faith, or only to those who seek a connection with God through directional prayer. They have so much to offer to those who might accept them without bias or judgement.”

Both were pleasantly surprised at how the collaboration turned out. Says Westlake: “Given our dissimilar experiences in music, I couldn’t believe how we both seemed to be on the same wavelength, striving toward a common goal, critical of the same issues and agreeing on the ideas that seemed to work”.

Lior agrees that it was one of those rare ventures where two artists’ ideas and souls genuinely merge: “What began with a feeling of trepidation as to whether Nigel and I could sincerely encapsulate the artistic concept and vision we shared for this undertaking, has ended with a full embrace and a somewhat unexpected sense of renewed optimism.”

Compassion was first performed by the

Sydney Symphony at the Sydney Opera House in September 2013. Adelaide gets to hear the work in full, with Lior singing and Westlake conducting the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

»»Lior & Westlake Songs with Orchestra Friday, February 7 Festival Theatre adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au

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32 The Adelaide Review February 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

Leading Lady

you don’t have any convict ruffians in your closets.”

After satisfying her artistic streak, Noonan’s job lies in luring people to the Fringe instead of the other attractions offered up in Mad March.

A major drawcard for the Fringe is its strong showing of local and national acts. However, a quota to keep a balance between international and Australian performers is unnecessary, Noonan says.

by Ilona Wallace

A

s a performer, Katie Noonan has a 15-year relationship with the Adelaide Fringe. While still on the bill as an artist in 2014, Noonan is trying on a new hat as Ambassador for the festival. Despite the many thousands of shows in between, Noonan still remembers her very first experience behind the scenes of the Fringe. In the city after a long, long drive from Brisbane, Noonan and her band at the time, george, were struck by the vitality and “craziness” of the place.

Aside from adventures with carnies and an outlandish rental property, Noonan recalls that her popular song Special Ones, from george’s number one album Polyserena, was named at that first Adelaide Fringe. She has been back nearly every year with various bands and as a solo artist, watching the Fringe get “bigger and better”.

Noonan takes the Ambassador’s reins from national treasure Paul McDermott, whose

Katie Noonan.

enthusiasm, charisma and artistic flair made the 2013 festival such a success. His successor is not intimidated, but admits, “his are incredibly large shoes to fill. He’s the all-rounder— comedy, acting, painting—he’s amazing.”

While admitting that she can be “unintentionally funny”, Noonan feels that the divergence from a comedic ‘face of the Fringe’ is intentional.

“I guess they wanted someone who comes from a really different point of view, to reflect the diversity of the festival. Obviously there is a large comedy focus, but to be honest, I’ve never actually seen a comedy show at the Fringe—I’ve always thought of it as this amazing theatrecircus-burlesque festival.”

Like McDermott in 2013, Noonan will be part of the Fringe as an artist, bringing back the theatrical, musical, carnival performance Love-Song-Circus, which premiered at 2012’s Cabaret Festival. A collaboration with director Yaron Lifschitz and Brisbane acrobatic troupe Circa, the show tells the stories of Australia’s first female convicts. Noonan drew inspiration for Love-Song-Circus from Love Tokens, an exhibition at the National Museum. The collection displayed pennies with inscriptions by convicts to their loved ones.

“We reflect these women’s stories through song, words and movement,” Noonan explains.

“It’s really fun, and possibly interesting for Adelaideans because you’re all “purebloods”—

“The quality of the local shows being presented is so high, I don’t think there’s any chance of any festival being outrun. There used to be a bit more of a notion of that in Australia— people used to think, ‘Oh, if it’s from overseas it must be better,’ but I really think we’re breaking down that preconception. Obviously, I think it should reflect local talent, but because the local talent is so good, it holds its own against anything in the world. Ultimately quality and integrity should be the only real agenda.”

»»Katie Noonan & Circa Love-Song-Circus Garden of Unearthly Delights Tuesday, March 11 to Sunday, March 16 katienoonan.com

zorn in oz ExclusivE concErT sEriEs (usa)

“Zorn is indeed the point where all the trends of New York’s downtown music scene meet” THE TElEgrapH Maverick composer John Zorn makes his first and only appearance in Australia with a series of four star-studded concerts celebrating his genre-bending alchemy of avant-garde, jazz, klezmer, punk, pop and classical traditions.

Masada Marathon Classical Marathon Triple Bill (Bladerunner, Essential Cinema, Cobra) Zorn@60 Featuring John Zorn, Mike Patton, Bill Laswell, Marc Ribot, Joey Baron, John Medeski, Dave Lombardo, Elision Ensemble, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and many more.

f i r s t a n d o n ly a u s t r a l i a n v i s i t Festival Theatre, 11-14 Mar adelaidefestival.com.au or BASS 131 246

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PERFORMING ARTS

THIS MONTH The Adelaide Review’s guide to FEBRUARY’s highlight PERFORMING ARTS events

Ludovico Einaudi

Paul McDermott

Bitch Boxer

Santos Symphony Under the Stars

In a Time Lapse Adelaide Festival Centre Tuesday, February 11

The Dark Garden Adelaide Town Hall Saturday, February 15 and Sunday, February 16

Holden Street Theatres Tuesday, February 11 to Sunday, March 16

He’s one of the “world’s most successful living composers” according to The Independent, and the alt-classical composer – behind films scores such as This is England, Insidious and The Intouchables – performance at the Adelaide Festival Centre is the perfect place to see how modern and traditional classical music can merge to wondrous effect.

From fronting the punk-comedy antics of the Doug Anthony All Stars to TV hosting duties to fronting the Gadflys to even hosting art exhibitions – Paul McDermott has done it all.

Last year’s Fringe Ambassador is one of this country’s true comedy icons and his three shows across two days at Adelaide Town Hall are not to be missed.

Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award Winner Bitch Boxer is an acclaimed new play

by Charlotte Josephine, which enjoyed sell out runs in London and Edinburgh and a swag of four and five star reviews from publications such as The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and Three Weeks. One of the most anticipated Fringe theatre shows of the year.

Elder Park, Saturday, February 22

Each year more than 15,000 people flock to Elder Park for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s biggest concert of the year, Santos Symphony Under the Stars. This year the free concert will be led by Scottish conductor Garry Walker and features one of Australia’s best-loved baritones, José Carbó. The concert concludes with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with a firework spectacular.

state theatre company

in association with Adelaide Festival presents

The Seagull by anton chekhov

In a new adaptation by Hilary Bell

21 february — 16 march State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop

BASS 131 246

34 The Adelaide Review February 2014

PERFORMING ARTS

2014 GOLDEN GLOBE WINNER

4

WINNER EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS 2014

BEST FILM - BEST DIRECTOR BEST ACTOR - BEST EDITING

AWARDS 2014 ACADEMY ®

OFFICIAL SELECTION: ITALY

Glorious Gloria

by D.M. Bradley

“

Everyone has been so kind and enthusiastic about the film everywhere,” begins Paulína Garcia, as she discusses her titular role in co-writer/director Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria, “and they’ve been laughing too.” Laughing? But surely this isn’t really a comedy – or even a ‘tragicomedy’?

“Maybe, but it does seem to be funny for some people.”

García is very proud of her work in Lelio’s intimate drama, and speaks glowingly of how she became involved: “They [Lelio and cowriter Gonzalo Maza] called me at the very beginning and they wanted to write it for me.

I was really very honoured, and at first it was really just an idea… It took three years before they started to shoot it as there were other commitments, as well as disasters here in Chile, and a tsunami [in 2010]. They started to properly write it at the end of 2012, and yes, I was involved from the very beginning, which was wonderful.”

PREMIERE SEASON NOW SHOWING EXCLUSIVE TO PALACE NOVA EAST END CINEMAS View the trailer & more at TheGreatBeauty.com.au

Gloria, an ‘older woman’ in contemporary, chaotic Santiago facing failing health, workplace issues and demanding grown-up kids, starts a passionate relationship with a former naval officer (Sergio Hernández as Rodolfo). This role would be a demanding and difficult one for any actress, but García wasn’t intimidated: “It was both exhausting and rewarding to do…

I actually, while we were making it, found it hard, as I was alone on the screen so often. I had to [map out] the character so that I could do it, as shooting a film like this is an unusual

experience for an actress, any actress, and I consider myself mainly a stage actress.”

García is in every scene, the camera is always on her and she often doesn’t have much to say: “It was very quiet. Even though we did rehearse a lot, those scenes where it’s just me and I say nothing, you know, there was no rehearsal of those. We just did them… I actually never had an official script – just a storyboard, and ideas, and no dialogue. I was trying to find the key to Gloria and, even at the end, I still wasn’t sure if I had found it… But I was very glad to have done it.”

It’s impossible not to mention the love scenes in the film, particularly as they take place (gasp!) between ‘older people’, and García explains that it “was all about honesty, yes, but it was always difficult too. Intimacy between actors is always difficult… You know, Sergio is not my husband or my lover: he was my work partner. And sometimes they said, ‘Now!’, and we two were supposed to have this great intimacy! We did spend a lot of time with Sebastián to work out what was wanted and what we could show… And no, they’re not young people with well-shaped bodies – but they are feeling real emotions.”

Finally, García mentions that the Chilean film industry is currently thriving (see last year’s internationally renowned No, for example), and that she’s very happy with how Gloria turned out and the positive reaction to it around the world.

“I think that now I might do more movies…

But I’m not likely to find another character like Gloria for a while!”

»»Gloria opens at Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas on Thursday, February 27

The Adelaide Review February 2014 35

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PERFORMING ARTS

An Audience With Steve McQueen

by D.M. Bradley

Y

ou might have thought that Londonborn director Steve McQueen would be in high spirits mere hours after it was announced that he’d been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for 12 Years A Slave, but he isn’t, possibly as he’s still getting over a recent illness or, as he suggests towards the end of the interview, that he’s simply exhausted.

“I did know him beforehand, and he’s a very good actor and he really wanted to do it… I was very grateful that he had no misgivings about taking the role on, and he just did it so well.

He did a very fine job… Especially considering the demands of doing the film: we did it all in only 35 days with one camera.”

“Yes, I have just heard about the nomination this morning. It’s good, yes. I suppose that it’s a surprise, as you never really know if these things are going to happen, you know?”

McQueen also mentions that, amongst a fine cast that includes Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch, he was glad to again work with his apparent muse, Michael Fassbender. “Yes, we work very well together, and he’s also a great actor.”

Slave is McQueen’s third feature after the confronting Hunger (2008) and the ‘controversial’ Shame (2011), and it’s quite unlike either of those. Was it something that he wanted to do simply as it was so different?

“No, that wasn’t it, really. I just wanted to make a movie about slavery. That was all, really.

I was fascinated by the story of Solomon Northup [1808-1863], and I just wanted to make it into a movie… It was my wife who first read the book, so she was the one who found it. It was this story about a former slave, who was made a free man, who’s then kidnapped and forced back into slavery. And my wife just said to me, ‘Why don’t you make this story?’… So that was it: I just wanted to make a movie about slavery.”

Is Slave, which is mostly set in the mid-19th Century, also intended to be a movie about

7.5pt Univers 57 Condensed

right now?

“Yes, I think so. It is meant to reflect upon what’s happening now… It is meant to comment upon what is happening now in terms of exploitation.”

This is a much bigger and more elaborate production than the more intimate Hunger and Shame, and it’s also McQueen’s first in America, so how did it all happen, and was

Brad Pitt, who worked as a co-producer and has a fine small role, a key player?

“Yes, Brad was a key element in it. It wouldn’t have been made, I think, without him... So yes, he’s the one, and he helped get it all off the ground.”

Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor was also born in London, so was he maybe a friend of McQueen’s?

To wrap up, McQueen jokingly suggests that his next outing after Slave might be something totally different again, “and maybe even a musical!” but he’s not offering much more information than that as, for the moment, he just doesn’t know.

“All I can think about right now is getting home to London and spending time with my wife and kids. That’s all I want.”

»»12 Years A Slave opens on Thursday, February 6

36 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

PERFORMING ARTS THE GREAT BEAUTY

the occasional magazine feature to sustain his hedonistic lifestyle but he becomes bored of his A-list friends and random sex with beauties who are, of course, much younger than he.

Jep and his crew are like the vapid characters from an early Bret Easton Ellis novel but who live in Rome instead of LA and are almost five decades older than Less Than Zero’s vacuous mob of jaded rich kids.

BY CHRISTOPHER SANDERS

Quentin Tarantino infamously slammed modern Italian cinema in 2007, calling it depressing and to add insult to injury added that while he loved 60s and 70s Italian cinema (and who doesn’t?), modern films from the land of his idol Sergio Leone “all seem the same”. And he had a point. What happened to the great cinematic country responsible for neo-realism and the director giants Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica and Leone?

Italian siren Sophia Loren hit back at QT’s criticism with the lame rebuttal, “How dare he talk about Italian cinema when he doesn’t know anything about American cinema?”

Whether you like Tarantino’s films or not, the Pulp Fiction director is a fanatical film nerd who knows his stuff. With Tarantino’s seven-year-old criticism in mind, it is hard to remember the last time an Italian film, aside from the gangster film Gomorrah, knocked you out of your cinema seat. Until now. Enter Paolo Sorrentino’s (This Must be the Place, The Consequences of Love) delicious love letter to Rome, The Great Beauty, which will not only knock you out of your seat but through the cinema door and into the foyer’s

The Armstrong Lie

Jep, of course (despite his uber-cool and calm demeanor) goes on a journey of selfdiscovery to ponder the meaning of life and lost loves, something we’ve witnessed on screen, stage and the page too many times to mention, but somehow Sorrentino makes it work with the over-the-top set pieces, beautiful cinematography and a brilliant performance from Servillo, which is only matched by the film’s other star – Rome. Never has the city looked this wondrous.

popcorn maker. As the name suggests, The Great Beauty is a decadent feast for the senses, which lives up to the ‘21st Century’s La Dolce Vita’ hype that surrounds it.

Beginning with an elaborate party scene to celebrate writer Jep Gambardella’s 9a wonderful cheeky Toni Servillo) 65th birthday, The Great Beauty is over the top and in your

Racing Dreams

face from beginning to end. The opening scene is one of the most bizarre and debauched parties you will ever see that features a conga line. Club music blares, as the ever-grinning and superbly dressed Jep and his A-list artistic friends dance the night away. After the party, the comedown hits. Jep is a writer who hasn’t followed his acclaimed debut novel from 40 years earlier with new work. Sure, he writes

BY NIGEL RANDALL

Taxi to the Dark Side

The Last Impresario

featuring over 50 documentary films across one week

tickets from $12 docweek.org.au

» The Great Beauty is currently screening at Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas. Rated M

Detropia

THE PAST

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Is QT down with Sorrentino’s latest? Who knows? But here’s hoping The Great Beauty sparks an Italian cinema revival that every film lover has been waiting for, as this is a remarkable cinema experience.

131 246 BaSS

Australia’s International Documentary Festival

Asghar Farhadi’s follow up to his 2011 Oscar winner A Separation could well have been titled A Divorce, for it’s that event that acts as the narrative catalyst in his newest film. Another might have been The Kids Aren’t Alright, but more on that later. What this gifted Iranian screenwriter and director chose instead to call it was The Past and for good reason too.

Marie (The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo) asks her estranged husband of four years, Ahmed (Ali Mosaffa), to return to Paris from Iran so they can divorce. At the airport she attempts unsuccessfully to get his attention from behind a glass wall that separates them. Like every other carefully constructed piece of direction, it is telling. Once the communication starts proper they revert to familiar snaps and prods suggesting unfinished business. When Ahmed discovers she is housing a new boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim) and his five-

year-old son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), their business quickly expands. Throw into this mix Marie’s daughters from a previous marriage – one an angsty teenager (Pauline Burlet) and the other younger and impressionable (Jeanne Jestin)– and there’s melodrama galore. And that’s before mention of Samir’s wife who lies comatose in hospital following some mysterious incident. These character’s pasts are ever present. If it all sounds too much, fear not. Whilst that synopsis might seem somewhat dreary or convoluted, the beautifully crafted script, the absorbing naturalistic performances (Bejo and Burlet standouts), the sensitively observed camera work and masterly orchestrated direction are anything but. Farhadi’s talent is clearly evident in every gesture, each deliberate piece of dialogue, the exquisite pacing at which the secrets and lies unravel, but perhaps nowhere more so than in his handling of his youngest players. The performances he elicits from the three juvenile leads and the drama reflected in their eyes is simply heart breaking.

» The Past begins on Thursday, February 6. Rated M.

The Adelaide Review February 2014 37

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VISUAL ARTS landscape genre has a long tradition and many artists in varied disciplines have tackled it, it can present challenges. However he works conceptually and believes that while he might depict something that looks like something else, the conceptual meaning behind the way he approaches it is very different.

“I’m trying to put these subtle things in there to try and jar people into saying `Hang on it’s not romanticism at all, it’s actually something else’.”

Ackland’s latest exhibition at Hill Smith Gallery continues his exploration into the Victorian Alps. For the last four or five years, every July, Ackland has visited the Alps and created works. “I am revisiting the same location and just seeing each year how I have changed and how that is impacting on what I am noticing about the same landscape.”

The exhibition showcases a series of black and white and a series of coloured photographs of the same location. “I am really interrogating this idea of the romantic. I am trying to get them to play off against each other. It adds to this idea of the cultural landscape.”

Inconclusive Position.

Profile:

Greg Ackland

by Jane Llewellyn

M

any of us have a tendency to romanticise the landscape. We are preoccupied with finding a perfect scene or capturing that flawless view. This is not the case with photographer Greg Ackland – his images are often of uninspiring places, as he documents the experience of being there rather than the picturesque view.

max lyle sculpture survey 1961 - 2014

“I’m interested in elevating the uninteresting to get people to ponder why they might project a cultural view or a personal kind of heroic view of a landscape onto what largely isn’t.”

Ackland originally studied painting at art school before switching to photography in his final year.

“That rich history of painting has really informed what I have done,” explains Ackland.

“I am interested in the notion of a landscape and what it actually is.”

Ackland is particularly fascinated with lookouts and this idea that we visit a lookout, and view the landscape, as a projection, one that has been decided for us, and ignore the landscape we are actually in. It’s this notion of experience, that you can’t truly know what the view, or the landscape, is without actually being in it, that drives much of Ackland’s work.

“That’s the beauty for me. I have identified that the heroic landscape is not a view; it is actually being there. And so that’s what I have been interested in for a long time.”

Ackland acknowledges that because the

These ideas of landscape and identifying a sense of place are things that most people can identify with. We might have a favourite place that’s not particularly special to anybody else but it’s special to us because of an emotional tie.

“It’s the idea that the landscape itself might not be that important but an experience there or a memory makes it far more important than it is.”

»»Greg Ackland currently has work in Full Spectrum, which is touring regional South Australia until July 2015. »»He is also showing new work at Hill Smith Gallery from Thursday, February 20 until Wednesday, March 19. hillsmithgallery.com.au

Their Shadows in Us 14 December 2013 - 16 February 2014

6 - 15 February 2014 www.hillsmithgallery.com.au

F l i n d e rs U n i ve rs i t y C i t y G a l l e r y S tate L i b ra r y o f S o u t h A u st ra l i a N o r t h Te r ra c e , A d e l a i d e Tue - Fri 11 - 4pm, Sat & Sun 12 - 4pm w w w. f l i n d e r s . e d u . a u / a r t m u s e u m

38 The Adelaide Review February 2014

VISUAL ARTS

Four Rooms

by Jane Llewellyn

R

eferencing the 1995 film of the same name where four stories take place in different rooms of the same hotel, the exhibition Four Rooms will be presented in four purpose-built rooms at Tandanya as part of the 2014 Adelaide Festival.

Troy-Anthony Baylis’ role as curator mirrors that of the Bellhop character in the film whose purpose it is to stitch the stories together.

Baylis’ four rooms are linked through the main themes of space, time and authorship.

“Authorship comes out in terms of who is acknowledged as the creators of the works,” he says. In some cases the idea of authorship is blurred as the distinction between what’s original and what’s not is unclear.

Take the work of artist Jenny Fraser: she creates what Baylis calls a meta-narrative which splices together videos made by other

Wild and Wonderful

A mixed media exhibition with a fauna and flora theme

people. She produces a new work out of existing work, questioning the notion of authorship.

Through this practice Fraser recontextualises the scenes altering their meaning and how the audience responds to them.

James Luna shares the room with Fraser and has created a video response to her work.

“The different works in the room will create a conversation amongst themselves, that’s sort of where the dialogue happens. Some of it is constructed deliberately to dialogue with each other while in other cases it’s chance,” explains Baylis.

In another room, Vernon Ah-Kee, Tess Allas and Charlie Schneider have collaborated to recreate the famous ‘yes, no’ interview with Andy Warhol from 1964 where he answers `uh yes’, `uh no’ to questions about his art and art practice. Beamed through a 60s television, this trio has made 20 films of the same length asking Ah-Kee as Warhol provocative questions around Aboriginal art and authorship where he delivers the same yes/no responses.

Tess Allas, Charlie Schneider and Vernon Ah Kee, Andy Warhol on Aboriginal Art, 2013 photographic performance

Gordon Hookey occupies one of the other rooms and presents a number of works featuring his recurring kangaroo motif.

The room will be laid out like a boxing ring emphasising Hookey’s depiction of kangaroos as less cute and cuddly and more boxing kangaroo. There will be three projections

exhibitions gallery shop

7 February - 2 March 2014 THREE EXHIBITIONS

LUNA, Tree Hugger, Acrylic on canvas

16 February - 21 March 2014

Community Launch Event: Sunday 16 February 2 pm - 4 pm

Colourful Life Gordon Hookey, Terraist Animation Still 1a, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

paintings by John Hamilton mosaics by Stephen Johnson

Out of Africa

Launch Guest: Elaine Bensted, CEO, Adelaide Zoo Textiles Demonstration by Wendy Redden Jewellery Making Demonstration by Paul Smith Painting Demonstration by Annette Dawson Live African Drumming Performance

photography by David Woolaway jewellery by Maria Woolaway

Free Artist Demonstrations throughout the exhibition:

showing Hookey’s stop animation work – a new direction for him. While his paintings often contain instant drama, the new process enables the drama to unfold in a different way, slowly building to a climax.

T’Arts Collective Gays Arcade (off Adelaide Arcade)

Saturdays 22 February, 1, 8 and 15 March 2014 2 pm – 4 pm

Exciting artist run contemporary gallery / shop in the heart of Adelaide.

Free entry - all welcome!

Memories

Pepper Street Arts Centre Exhibitions, Gift Shop, Art Classes, Coffee Shop.

558 Magill Road, Magill PH: 8364 6154 Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 12 noon - 5 pm An arts and cultural initiative funded by the City of Burnside

www.pepperstreetartscentre.com.au

contemporary paintings by Erlend Smidt Lysaker

MEET THE ARTISTS 2pm, Sunday 16 February Gallery M, Marion Cultural Centre 287 Diagonal Rd, Oaklands Pk SA P:8377 2904 info@gallerym.net.au

www.gallerym.net.au

Member: Vanessa Murphy / Title: Skulls / Materials: Linen, Fabric Inks

Members Group Display from Sunday 2nd February to Saturday 1st March, 2014 Open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm Phone 8232 0265

www.tartscollective.com.au Find Us On Facebook

The final room contains works by Zane Saunders, a painter and performance artist who Baylis sees as an Aboriginal Dada artist. “I am interested in exploring his practice from the point of view of Dadaism. It’s about questioning why Aboriginal people can’t participate in it

The Adelaide Review February 2014 39

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VISUAL ARTS

THIS MONTH The Adelaide Review’s guide to FEBRUARY’s highlight VISUAL ARTS events

Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition Drill Hall Friday, February 14 to Sunday, March 9 Chosen from more than 150 graduates from the Helpmann Academy’s visual arts partner institutions, only 33 emerging South Australian artists will present their work in the 19th Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition.

Artforms include ceramics, jewellery, installation, painting and more.

Jenny Fraser, name that beach movie (still), 2014, video installation, photographic image of the video Mololai

Collidescope

1999, dir. Paul Co

Red Poles Saturday, February 8 to Sunday, March 16

[Dadaism] too. We don’t have to be conditioned by what we think we are supposed to be making.”

Saunders’ room will be set up like a cinémathèque with videos in different locations around the room – some in cases, some embedded in the wall. There will also be a stage where he will perform at the opening, and for a couple of days after. The footage of the performance will be projected onto the wall in his absence.

With Tandanya celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, you get the feeling that Four Rooms is a turning point for the Institute.

The exhibition offers a new way of looking at Tandanya and gives some indication of its potential and what might be in store for the future.

McLaren Vale’s Red Poles gallery and cellar door are hosting Collidescope, an exploration of two-tone expression. ‘What happens when you choose just two colours to paint a canvas, make jewellery or a glass object?’

Speaking at the opening (Saturday, February 8, from 3pm) is Greg Mackie OAM, Cultural Advocate.

Florabotanica Adelaide Central Gallery Continues until Friday, February 14 Examining the botanical world—how it inspires and how we respond—is the key theme to the Adelaide Central Gallery’s first exhibition of 2014: Florabotanica. Eight South Australian artists will contribute through a variety of disciplines: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and installation.

Hitnes Masterclass Adelaide Festival Centre Friday, January 31 to Sunday, February 2

»»Four Rooms Tandanya - National Aboriginal Cultural Institute Tuesday, February 25 to Sunday, April 6 adelaidefestival.com.au

Guildhouse has invited Hitnes, an internationally renowned Italian street artist, to Adelaide to teach a three-day masterclass about painting largescale murals (over 10 metres). Two outdoor walls in the Adelaide Festival Centre plaza area will be the canvas for the class.

APPLY NOW FOR 2014

Discover your creative career at tafesa.edu.au/creative

40 The Adelaide Review February 2014

A-Z Contemporary Art

E

ARTSPEAK EMO Emo has been morphing from 90s rock music into art with the inevitability of cane toads bearing down on Kakadu. Tortured otherness takes many forms so think beyond wide-eyed, downcast waifs. A few Bill Viola videos will give you an idea of how grownups can play the game. Oh what a feeling.

EMERGENT / EMERGING There is some agreement that an emerging artist has been practising professionally for five years. After that? ‘Emerged artist’ has no currency. Many artists remain submerged across a lifetime of work.

That’s a long time to hold one’s breath in the hope of being discovered.

Helpful hints on how to make your art say NOW. Plus ARTSPEAK Bonus Pack

EDGE (as in cutting) A desirable state for artwork aspiring to be effulgent.

Photo: John Neylon

by John Neylon

The Everyday Like Buddy Holly said in 1957, ‘ Everyday, it’s a getting closer’. The Everyday is one of the biggest ideas in contemporary art. Its beauty is that, like the Twist, anyone can do it.

Start up suggestion Go LOMO. The LOMO camera emerged as a spy craft tool during the Cold War. Not much larger than a cigarette packet, this camera could capture all manner of subjects in varied conditions. As you sashay across the city you’ll feel like an MI5 operative on the prowl. A lazy day of LOMO shooting from the hip could give a few hundred images, enough for several shows.

Remember the rule: Don’t Think. Consider: Some clever souls have suggested that LOMO is an acronym for Lots Of Meaningless Objects.

Why the Everyday?

If asked why you have filled a gallery with odd socks just say that you are closing the gap between art and life. If pressed try to get the word ‘quotidian’ into the next sentence. After that you’re on your own.

OPEN DAY!

EMPOWERMENT Being channelled by an artwork for the greater public good. A sweeping claim.

Difficult to prove but empowered artists are a force of nature.

Homeless plinth, Melbourne, 2013

Plinth Power Putting any old everyday object in an art setting is risky business. Some viewers may not get the ‘art-life’ nexus or appreciate the nuances of ‘implied narrative conveyed through palimpsests of usage’. Minimise the risk by visually privileging the object. Put it in a frame or on a plinth. Don’t worry that generations of artists from Duchamp have been onto this ruse.

Warning: Beware of being seen as cynically exploiting viewer desires. Solution: Add a dash of irony by subverting the plinth. Hack into it with a chain saw or use unconventional materials like crushed hoon car hubcaps.

Here’s an idea ‘Step in all the puddles in the city’ Yoko Ono, City Piece, 1963 Your turn Get with the program Everyone knows about John (‘I have nothing to say’) Cage’s 4’ 33” performance work. A

reminder: it’s a musical composition consisting of a pianist sitting at a piano, and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

It was all very Zen. The audience was meant to vibe with ambient sounds (audience snoring, car horns and so on). Take this idea for a walk: Make a sound recording of a walk in which at every 10th step you hit something with a stick (use discretion) or see how much pavement rubbish you can cram into your pockets on a 30-minute walk. Go to a pre-selected gallery and walk on your hands for five minutes. Exhibit whatever falls out of your pockets. Easy as.

Junk If your everyday art consists of collecting and manipulating junk, for heaven’s sake do not refer to yourself as a junk artist. You’ll immediately be lumped in with people who make junk critters and sell them on eBay or Etsy. Suggestion: use a scatter aesthetic, strewing objects across the gallery floor and up

the walls, to create things like metaphoric gaps, interstices, zones of uncertainty and slippages much favoured by curators.

Giving notice Make a determination to notice things such in sitting on a train and record everything about the third person to enter a carriage. Caution: Do not stalk.

Playing museums Why should (non art) museums have all the fun in giving everyday things significance?

Beat them at their own game by using similar taxonomic tricks of display. Think left field.

Suggestions: pre-loved chewing gum, coffee stains, broken toys. Things to avoid: soup cans, doorways, thongs, bottles, barbed wire, Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Yarn bombing rules You may laugh but trust me; this art genre is in its infancy. Just think beyond power poles and bike racks. Sulo bins anyone?

FRINGE OPEN DAY FREE 12-4PM SAT 22 FEB A fantastic opportunity to experience our Studios, Galleries and Shop with hands on activities, live glass blowing, demonstrations, exhibitions, tours, sausage sizzle and more!

19 Morphett Street Adelaide SA 5000 www.jamfactory.com.au

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 41

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VISUAL ARTS

Testing Grounds

BY JANE LLEWELLYN

W

hen Curator Julie Gough set about putting together a list of artists for the exhibition Testing Ground, she thought about whose work she admired and who she would most like to invite to a party.

“I think these artists would make good dinner party guests to try and understand the universe with,” she explains.

The idea, for Gough, was to put together a group of artists who stood out because of their investigative spirit and who were testing new ground.

“They were chosen more for the type of artist they are, with that sense of an investigative spirit. I was taking on a journey to collect people that could contribute work and then we would be like a big laboratory together.”

The exhibition, which has already had a run at Salamanca Arts Centre and the Davenport Regional Gallery, is culturally diverse.

“The artists are reflecting on their own circumstances, what they have inherited and the cultural practices or expectations within a culture or imposed on a culture.”

Peggy Patrick, Boab Tree, natural ochres and pigments on canvas, 120cm x 90cm

How it relates to the artist’s heritage is not always obvious. Take the work by Jeroen Offerman from the Netherlands for instance.

He has trained himself to sing Stairway to Heaven backwards (the original song was rumoured to contain subliminal messages when played backwards). It’s a mesmerising work, filmed on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and references his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing.

Sue Kneebone. Continental Drift II 2012. Giclee print, 80 x 65 cm © courtesy the artist.

Another artist, Martin Walch, presents a video work which shows the place names of Tasmania which are registered by the government on the Nomenclature Board in the place where they would be on a map. “The absence of Aboriginal place names here is evident by the super presence of these mainly English county names. It shows the overlay, overlay, overlay of western place names all over Tasmania,” says Gough. One of Walch’s ancestors is a very well known surveyor/ explorer of Tasmania so it relates back to this idea of heritage.

With the title Testing Ground, and the main focus of the exhibition being testing and experimenting, the artist Darren Cook probably encapsulates this best. Cook is turning up and undertaking an action at each site. “If he is truly testing ground then why should he deliver one thing that is static for the whole tour? That’s buying into the whole traditional art exhibition.”

Touring an exhibition of this size, 13 artists and one collective, has thrown up many

Rebecca Dagnall. Paradise 9 (detail). Archival inkjet print, 91 x 187cm © courtesy the artist.

challenges for Gough but at the same time it’s exciting. “It’s like letting your baby go. I’m kind of scared and excited by what will happen.”

Each venue is different, which can add to the experience, and it also fits in well with the theme. In a sense the exhibition is now going through its third realm of testing.

» Testing Ground Flinders University City Gallery Saturday, February 22 to Sunday, May 4 flinders.edu.au/artmuseum

warmun

art centre 12 February - 16 March 2014

SUE NINHAM

ZOE WOODS

JOSHUA MIELS

30 January to 22 February 2014

32 The Parade Norwood Mon-Fri 9-5.30 Sat 10-5 Sun 2-5 t. 8363 0806 www.artimagesgallery.com.au

444 South Road, Marleston, SA 5033 | T +61 08 8297 2440 | M 0421 311 680 art @bmgart.com.au | www.bmgart.com.au

42 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

VISUAL ARTS

DUSTBIN CONSPIRACIES Are you fit enough to survive Worlds in Collision, Adelaide International 2014?

BY JOHN NEYLON

T

rotsky in full flight. ‘You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out.

Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!’ The Mensheviks, to whom Comrade Trotsky addressed his remarks in 1917 would rather the Bolsheviks hit the dustbin but history records otherwise. This idea that things get consigned to ‘the dustbin of history’ is very persuasive. Culture – and within it, the visual arts – isn’t immune.

Until quite recently, the history of art was taught as the History of Art, a grand narrative of sorts with a star-studded cast of talents and key events chronologically arranged. Then the

Peter Lindon, Plastic Door, photograph

Endlings Evidence of life emerges from the evacuated factories at Bowden.

Photography by Peter Lindon 2 -23 February 2014 1 Thomas Street (cnr Main North Road) Nailsworth

60s and 70s came along, upended the dustbin all over it and nothing’s been the same since.

The idea of art as counter-culture subversion held sway at the time and explains the rather naughty behaviour of many art activists in bollocking institutions like galleries and the protesting the crass commercialisation of art.

Crass by the way, was an English punk rock band formed in 1977. Like the Mensheviks, Crass came in for a fair share of criticism.

Another activist organisation, Class War, said of Crass that ‘like Kropotkin, their politics are up shit creek’. Kropotkin was, among many things, a Russian evolutionary theorist and prominent anarcho-communist. Class War had obviously consigned him to the dustbin. It’s getting very crowded in there. Hardly enough space for worlds to collide.

Collision’s embrace of space as a means of interrogating human affairs is robust. The Lebanese Rocket Society by Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, for example, references the historical fact that in the early-to-mid-1960s a group of undergraduate students, their lecturer and the University College Science Club in Beirut developed a solid fuel rocket program.

This work in the exhibition is both archival and generated by the artists. Where does fact end and fiction begin? The slippages and doubt between the two are characteristic of a spin that Richard Grayson brings to the curation of this project. His catalogue essay foregrounds the ideas of an `outsider’, Immanuel Velikovsky, the Russian catastrophist and psychoanalyst.

Velikovsky was pushed into the dustbin by

Carl Sagan as presenter of the much-watched 1980 TV series Cosmos: A Personal Journey.

The wider scientific community, opposed to Velikovsky’s methodology, lent a hand. And yet ‘The Velikovsky Affair’ as it became known, did open up discussion about the way academic disciplines deal with ideas from outside their fields.

Enter Grayson and his interest in the Russian as someone who, `in the cinematic spaceopera of his vision’ created a demographic not exclusively about a search for the `truth’ but rather magical and discursive models for imagining the world. Conclusion? Conspiracy theories, SF meta worlds, nostalgia for a youthful imagination and ideals capable of taking on the world – these may not be cerebral space junk. Revisit them before a Collisions viewing experience. They will prove useful.

The late 60s-early 70s counter-culture was a

Sea Change SEA CHANGE EXHIBITION Ground Floor Gallery until March 2014 BAY DISCOVERY CENTRE Glenelg Town Hall,1 Moseley Square Glenelg Open 10am to 5pm daily Ph: 8179 9508

Chefs oil by Di King

A Celebration of seaside life in Holdfast Bay from 1900s to 1960s

SEVEN ASPECTS New Oils and Watercolours by 7 different artists.

The exhibition will be opened by Vickie Chapman MP at 11:30 Sun 2nd Feb.

2-22 February 2014 DAVID SUMNER GALLERY

Seacliff Beach 1926

holdfast.sa.gov.au

359 Greenhill Road Toorak Gardens Ph: 8332 7900 Tues to Fri 11-5 | Sat to Sun 2-5 www.david-sumner-gallery.com

THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 43

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VISUAL ARTS

Collisions Workout Are you fit enough to do the Collisions Course? Mental flab might get you to the read-the-labels stage. But tackling all aspects will take skill and stamina. Here are some suggestions: SF Squats: Science fiction writing, particularly plots dealing with interfaces between alternative worlds, haunts this exhibition. Try: Philip K Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle); J G Ballard, compelling visual images of altered states (The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, The Crystal World) Trance Dancing: Grayson extolls the virtues of experimental freedom associated with revisiting counter-culture music of the 60s and early 70s. Step into a Giorgio Sant’Angelo spandex workout bodysuit, crank up some retro

mish-mash of youth culture, sexual liberation, utopianism, psychedelia, political revolution and anarchy. It got dust-binned too – done in by economic rationalism and ideas about the free play of market forces. But, to paraphrase Grayson, it may be possible to imagine a time, now in fact, when the forces of darkness have temporarily lost momentum sufficient to create spaces in which ‘new relations and structures’ that serve the greater good, can emerge. Out of the dustbin of course.

Painting by Eileen Lubiana

psychedelia and be amazed at what planet you land on. Music selections?

For a roots experience try a bootleg tape of Grateful Dead’s 1967 Mantra-Rock Dance. Or tune in to Australian band Tame Impala’s album Lonerism. Lots of mesmeric YouTube animation and wa-wa reverbs.

Conceptual Crunches: Curl up with some conspiracy theories. Christopher Hitchens has called them the ‘exhaust fumes of democracy’. After viewing Collisions you may agree or see them as circuit breakers to counterbalance militant truths.

Acro-Yoga Space Jogging: Exploring or creating alternative realities defines a number of Collisions works. Follow this trail by looking at Russian artist Ilya Kabokov’s 1984 installation The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment.

Weights: Lift a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog out of the historical dustbin several times. Steve Jobs said it was ‘sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.’ In a Collisions context it has unfinished business.

» Worlds in Collision Friday, February 28 to Sunday, March 16 (open daily). Also Tuesday, March 18 to Sunday, March 30 (various times) SASA Gallery, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art and Australian Experimental Art Foundation adelaidefestival.com.au

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Curated by Eileen Lubiana and includes the following artists: Chloe Shay, Natalie Gock, Frances Griffin, Hannah Carlyle, Eileen Lubiana, Jessamy Pollock, Kveta Deans, Andrea Fiebig, Janice Lane, Jane Smeets , Alison Main and Eddie Ferguson.

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Trickle Crunch 16 Feb – 16 March 2014 RSASA Members’ artworks with a trickle and a crunch.

A vibrant and creative bunch of artists with colourful contemporary and traditional artworks in paintings, printmaking, photographs, mixed media, sculpture, textiles, and so much more.

To be pulped, photo by Bev Bills

RSASA Fringe/Autumn Exhibition

Where: RSASA Gallery, Level 1, Institute Bldg, Cnr North Tce & Kintore Ave, Adelaide. Mon – Friday 10.30 – 4.00pm, Sat & Sun 1 – 4.00pm. Closed public holidays.

For more information: Bev Bills, Director, RSASA Office: 8232 0450 or 0415 616 900.

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Royal South Australian Society of Arts Inc. Level 1 Institute Building, Cnr North Terrace & Kintore Ave Adelaide, Ph/Fax: 8232 0450 www.rsasarts.com.au rsasarts@bigpond.net.au Mon- Fri 10.30-4.30pm Sat & Sun 1- 4pm Pub Hol. Closed.

44 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

VISUAL ARTS

Daniel CROOKS, born New Zealand 1973, arrived Australia 1994. Colour single-channel digital video, sound, looped.

Ash KEATING born Australia 1980. NGV International North Wall Billboard Intervention 2013. Weathershield Low

Tully Moore, born Australia 1981. Chevron, Goggles, Jaws, Universal Habit 2013 (installation).

Sheen on Vinyl Billboard

Oil on canvas, cotton, chrome, plastic.

Melbourne Now: Grit Chic Melbourne Now sends an intriguing message about an appetite for street cred grit chic.

BY JOHN NEYLON

M

elbourne Now is a bit OTT. It’s not so much the weight of numbers as the wide diversity of encounters on offer from conventional works, some that trade in immersive experiences and others, particularly some commissioned works, that

refuse to be pigeon-holed. Spectacle and entertainment factors are high but it makes demands. Real concentration is required to weigh up the content of individual works and join the dots in terms of curatorial intentions underlying relationships between works by different artists.

Where is Melbourne in all this? Not the ‘creative spirit of Melbourne’, as espoused by Tony Ellwood, Director NGV and doubtless the many curators and designers who have contributed to this large undertaking, but Melbourne the city as something lived in, smelt, trodden, listened to, observed, remembered or imagined. Rick Amor’s Mobile call, 2012, is a good place to start. A city back alley. Plenty of concrete. Some graffiti and a salaryman on a mobile watched over by surveillance cameras.

This is grim, melancholic Melbourne. It’s a reminder of the kind of city it used to be, back in the wastelands of the 1960s, the dead heart ringed by suburbia. With this image as talisman consider a number of artists in Melbourne Now who draw down on graffiti as a leitmotif for defining urban character. Ponch Hawkes is drawn to ‘tree-tagging’ (the art of vandalizing tree trunks with spray tags), seeing redemption in the self-healing process of bark shedding.

Tully Moore has sourced such tags, found street art, signage and evidence of decay as raw material for paintings, which come across as secular chasubles.

Stieg Persson’s panels combine trash tagging with cuter-than kittens and piglets to invoke a so-sad stand off between pubescent antisocial mewling and middle-class taste. A full room installation by the anomalous, ubiquitous LUSH tracks similar territory by offering

sardonic advice on what it takes to be a street artist – and how to blow it. The list goes on.

A video documents the actions of artist Ash Keating paint bombing an enormous tilt-up wall of a commercial building on Melbourne’s outskirts (Truganina). There’s another story here, about the naming of an outer suburb after the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, Truganini – but another time. The artist, complete with hoodie, may be emulating guerilla style street art, but the end result has a classic gravitas.

Similar comments apply to Daniel Crooks’ ‘time slice’ animations of city laneways. No drug pushers or bins full of week old prawns. Liquid love is in the air.

Melbourne Now sends an intriguing message through such works about an appetite for street cred grit chic which feeds the self image of a city addicted to its transgressive race memories as a foil to tourist ads of waif girls rolling balls of string along Melbourne boulevards.

» Melbourne Now continues until Sunday, March 23 at the National Gallery of Victoria, St. Kilda Rd and Federation Square. ngv.vic.gov.au/melbournenow moon

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411 Fullarto 50 63 14 Fu lla rto n SA b - 16 March 20 am - 4pm 13 Fe Open daily 10

The Adelaide Review February 2014 45

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TRAVEL

A Lap of the Alps

by David Sly

T

here is one ring to rule them all – at least among alpine skiers. In Austria, where skiing is a most serious and earnest religion, there is a great 22km circuit of continuous pistes that winds through the high Arlberg region. This is Der Weisse Ring – the White Ring – which completes a circuit from the township of Lech to Zurs, Zug, Oberlech and back to Lech, giving skiers the chance to descend 5,500 metres of ski slopes. This, in any skier’s language, is heaven.

You don’t have to be gung-ho, with at least half of the White Ring graded as intermediate difficulty. It is an irresistible challenge.

The task can be completed in about three hours of continuous skiing, although it requires bravery to keep your speed up on long downhill sections – or risk long walks to ascend several crests. Fatigue is your enemy, but even if you’re not confident, there are guides who lead parties around the ski area via a network of easy routes, to obtain a sense of what the White Ring circuit has to offer.

While the skiing is exhilarating, the views are the true star of the show. The first can be enjoyed as you ride the cable car from the centre of Lech to Rufikopf mountain peak at 2362 metres. A giant White Ring logo peeking out of the snow marks the start of the route – a badge of honour. Many stop for photos, but often the wind is biting hard so most push off immediately without ceremony. Individual skiers are dwarfed by the enormity of the landscape, a cathedral of towering white peaks surrounding big open snow valleys.

This attraction was the vision of legendary Austrian ski racer/daredevil Sepp Bildstein, who encouraged the introduction of chairlifts to Lech and Urs that created the White Ring route in 1940. However, Olympic and World Champion Patrick Ortlieb created the White Ring Race in 2006, to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the ski circuit between Lech and Zürs. Ortlieb still holds the course record for this longest ski race in the world, taking only 44-and-a-half minutes, which includes riding the network of six cable cars and chairlifts.

For anyone bold enough to be among the 1000

participants in this race, professional training is available from Ortlieb and fellow World Champion Marc Girardelli.

There is a second, more informal lap of the Alps that places eating lunch as a higher priority. Leaving St Anton, you can catch two cable cars to the highest point of the resort and roll all the way to Stuben for lunch. This tiny town that was the home of Hannes Schneider (the pioneer of modern skiing instruction, who is commemorated with a bronze statue) now mostly makes its living out of serving meals to skiers stepping off the piste.

The Post Hotel has bands set up on the open patio to entice lunch crowds to linger a little longer, while at the Gasthof Mondschein dining room, delicious plates of venison sausage and blueberry strudel are the main attraction. While service is slick, most skiers seem keen to pack away more than a few drinks and big servings – so a line of taxis wait to take wobbly skiers back to their St Anton resort accommodation.

Another option for the hungry skier is to visit Arlberg Hospiz in St Christoph. Adjacent to the home of the Ski Austria Academy and national ski racing team, the Hospiz is a globally coveted place to dine and drink fine wine, thanks to its owner Adi Werner. Built around the Brotherhood of St Christoph chapel and cellar, constructed in 1386, the Hospiz has luxurious dining rooms for guests, but also has a famous lunch lodge at the edge of the piste. Ask to be taken to the big bottle cellar that houses the world’s largest collection of large format bottles of Bordeaux wines – more than 3000 big bottles, from three-litre double magnums through to 18-litre Melchiors, forming a significant part of a 50,000-bottle collection spread through five cellars within the Hospiz complex.

While people come from around the world to dine, drink and stay at the Hospitz, many more simply ski in for lunch – and if the glare is too bright on the large dining patio or the balcony, there are straw boaters for gentlemen

to wear. Similarly, if the breeze is too chilly, there are blankets. Such comforts may tempt you to consider another bottle of wine with lunch – because there’s always a nearby taxi that can ferry you and your skis home.

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Each January there is a formal White Ring race – a mad daredevil rush of 1000 competitors from a massed start – but the circuit is open to anyone at any time.

46 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE REVIEW:

DANIEL O’CONNELL

BY PAUL WOOD

B

ehind the facade of a hundred-andsomething-year-old building comes an enchanting tale of adventure.

This story isn’t one of faerie castles, sniggering leprechauns or fearsome hags, but a fable of wondrous beasts tracked locally from paddock to plate and butchered in the depths of the scullery; recipes torn from the pages of folklore and prepared in a flurry of delectable activity; nose, tail, and everything in between.

From the heart of the kitchen to the smoked heart of an ox, matched impeccably with oyster, cornichons and capers. This is the tale of the Daniel O’Connell.

Still suffering from a time when Irish pubs received wicker and glass-panelled makeovers, the frontage maintains its heritage while some recent touches have brought the important

parts of this hodgepodge venue up to date without worrying too much about cohesion.

With exposed beams, brick surrounds, and ye olde timber joinery, the interior is rounded off with clunky furniture, chesterfield couches, and whiskey on display.

There’s something to be said about Irish cuisine, and it certainly isn’t potatoes. It’s black pudding with a fruity finish of peach and apple and radish. The idea of imperious blood sausage disappears when the dish lands. Served as a cube and topped with fruits it delivers an alluring scent.

The only comparison I can suggest is an American brownie – bittersweet and velvety, with a hint of chocolate to boot. Alongside is another starter, a dollop of bone marrow custard served with lavosh and gherkin (and a large hunk of the blood pudding brownie).

Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th February 2014 Sydney’s artisan and sustainable wine and food festival.

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THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 47

ADELAIDEREVIEW.COM.AU

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE Not quite enough lavosh-to-custard ratio, we use the house-made sourdough bread to mop up the rest and move on to round three. It’s steak tartar, but not as you know it – and aptly named Dead Romance. I’m guessing that the personality of ‘loveable rogue’ sous chef Phil Whitmarsh shines through in this dish. Whitmarsh is second in command to head chef Aaron Gillespie, who is a Manse graduate and most recently peddled his wares at Grace the Establishment. These two make a formidable team; together they are building quite a reputation while creating a culinary destination.

Back to the rest of the share menu and I made a measured decision to avoid the peculiar sounding (though according to our waitress, surprisingly delicious) Pig Ear ‘Schnitty’. I appreciate the nod to Adelaide’s pub favourite, but it was back to the kitchen with that little auricle, bound for someone with less discriminating taste. I moved on to the liver parfait instead, this one served with a portion of duck breast fillet accompanied by prune, cherry and pain d’epice – another sweet element of spice cake.

The kitchen prepares dishes with minimal waste, and I was determined to eat in the same fashion. Full but determined, two main courses arrived: Saltbush mutton, peas, parsley and ricotta, and Mulloway Brandade. The ol’ ram was given the royal treatment and the simple

additions let the cut speak for itself – coated in a master stock that topped things off nicely.

The Mulloway Brandade with crisp egg, trotter and grains was the lightest of all the dishes, and served with a side of spiced yogurt-coated carrots. Delicious.

The local wines are as enticing as this culinary tale, though I’ve seen most of these on lists around town before. A Yangarra Roussane served well with the entrees, and a French Vermentino followed. I’ve heard whispers of monthly culinary feasts titled Table for 10 where the guys will serve themed selections to highlight the season and tickle your buds.

If you’re Irish (at heart) and feel like a tipple then the Jameson Whiskey flights might be for you, or perhaps a flight of their exclusively imported RC Lemaire range of Champagne.

Whether the Irish legend is true or not I’ve got my three wishes ready: beef shin, bone marrow and a chocolate stout dessert – he can keep his pot of gold.

» The Daniel O’Connell Pub And Dining 165 Tynte St, North Adelaide 8267 4032 danieloconnell.com.au

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48 The Adelaide Review February 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

The Great Grasby Food identity Marion Grasby is returning to Adelaide for the Cellar Door Wine Festival, where the MasterChef alumni, cook, food columnist and author will host a series of master classes as well as a long lunch.

by Christopher Sanders

G

rasby, who worked as an ABC journalist in Adelaide before studying gastronomy, recently moved to Bangkok due to her

Marion’s Kitchen range of products. In Thailand, the MasterChef Magazine and Taste columnist can be close to her suppliers as well as travel around Asia for inspiration, ingredients and recipes.

“Marion’s Kitchen has become the main focus of what I do now,” Grasby explains about the ingredient kits, which include Thai Green Curry, Pad Thai and San Choy Bow. “I love it because I can travel around Asia looking for cool dishes and flavours, spices and ingredients and turn them into packs that everyone back home in Australia can use everyday. It really made more sense to be in Thailand where my producers and suppliers are based. It means I can be out there and making sure everything is happening the way I want. If I want to design new products I can head out and chat to the guys about it.

“It was a Marion’s Kitchen-focused move but at the same time, Bangkok’s pretty awesome.

The city is famous for its fried chicken. There are street vendors on every corner selling fried chicken. Who doesn’t want to move to a city with fried chicken on every corner? Every time I walk to the office I walk past the grilled pork lady, the papaya salad lady and the fried chicken man – it’s such a delicious city.”

The master classes Grasby will host at the Cellar Door Wine Festival are Summer

Marion Grasby

Entertaining, Asian Favourites and the Decadent Valentine’s Day Extravaganza.

“The cool thing about the master classes – because this doesn’t happen with every sort of food demo I do – is that you get to come along to taste the food and we run through the cooking of the dishes, so it’s really exciting.”

Like her Marion’s Kitchen products, Grasby’s events at the Adelaide Convention Centrebased festival will have an Asian influence.

“I guess because of the way I cook and my family heritage, and I’m based in Asia now, a lot of my dishes have an Asian flavour. But the cool thing about coming to South Australia is that there’s such amazing South Australian produce – the dishes will have a little Asian flavour but I will definitely use local produce.”

Grasby’s new book Asia Express will arrive this May and is based on recipes Grasby

collected travelling through Asia.

“I’ve been lucky enough to travel to South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, so it features recipes from all over Asia. I always like to say I collect recipes rather than souvenirs, and when I can I smuggle in bags of peppercorn or spices – that’s not illegal in Thailand, I would never do that in Australia!” she laughs. “I guess they’re recipes I’ve collected on my travels over the last couple of years, which is really fun and also I’ve made them [the recipes] very quick, most of the recipes you can complete in about 30 minutes.”

»»Cellar Door Wine Festival Adelaide Convention Centre Friday, February 14 to Sunday, February 16 cellardoorfestival.com.au

The Adelaide Review February 2014 49

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FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

Sustainable Wine Discover the surprises inside

by Mike Bennie

T

he ebb and flow of season, the constant tinkering and unpredictable impact of nature, the advances in research, raw intuition when nurturing a vineyard, the imprint of human labour versus the ease of mechanising – all of these things conspire when considering sustainability and wine. It’s a funny thing, lending definition to something that feels a bit indefinable.

First thing is first; the growing of grapes should be managed with environmental impact in mind. Organic and biodynamic farming tend to be the best practices, with the latter not only creating a farm-bound ecosystem forged from a waste-not-want-not application of viticultural practice, but an effective recycling of farmgenerated product (and waste in the form of manures and composts), that work towards a home-grown sustainability.

ADElAiDE’S GOurmET Pub

Sustainability is, however, a bigger picture.

Goals of sustainable growing are emphatically based on relative quality increase of wine grown from sustainable farming practices, and though a change and evolution to more sustainable growing requires a leap of faith for many who consider conventional farming safe and practical, its impact is a bigger picture, locally and globally.

The value of sustainability isn’t to be quantified by trifles of higher points from critics or a new found adulation from wine cognoscenti, but a spiritual and environmental connection to place that isn’t always measured in terms of proven pecuniary worth, but in a feeling that connects responsibility to nature in a link to the toil of the farm.

Sustainability, whether pitched to or proven, brings winegrowing closer to nature, with less chemical and environmental impact, and works to protect and enhance the environment, locally and further afield.

Key elements of sustainability can be quantified, though variances are prevalent. Soil health and fertiliser management form the basis for most benefit of sustainability, but it is coupled with pest and disease management and encouragement of biodiversity that not only benefits the growing of grapes, but a broader environmental program.

Added to this are water- and waste-management programs, and following all of this comes the social impact – the benefit to local communities.

Finally, for those seeking business advantage, the removal of non-sustainable product and practice costs that beleaguer a farm, forms part of the sustainability benefit.

In a remarkable step forward, and emphatically supported by the New

For those seeking the finest food, beverage and service in the comfort of a pub.

2 0 1 3 N E W O F

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B A R • D I N I N G Zealand government, New Zealand wine has implemented a sustainability charter that requires adhering to, for participation in sanctioned NZ Winegrowers events.

Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand (SWNZ) was established in 1995 and provides, in essence, “a framework for viticultural and winemaking practices that protect the environment while efficiently and economically producing premium wine grapes and wine”.

Since its inception in 2007, approximately 94 percent of all vineyards are now SWNZ certified (2012 statistics), with around 20 percent of vineyards being farmed organically. It’s making a decided impact.

A similar program has been established in McLaren Vale wine region of South Australia, with a 37 percent growth in participation seen in 2013, and a total of 53 percent of all grapes crushed from the 2013 harvest working with the McLaren Vale Sustainable Winegrowing Australia principles. The regional initiative is a first-of-its-kind program in Australia and “provides growers with the means to improve practices in a way that optimises sustainability

of both their business and the region”.

The McLaren Vale system works a practical application of the program with self-assessment and data reporting key to the initiative and developing of practices, fostered through a group setting. Increasingly, wineries around Australia are implementing their own measures, but these are often best suited to existing winery practices or the rigmarole of marketing and marketability, rather than making full blown steps to sustainability.

To ascertain sustainability credentials is difficult without a community or industry standard or charter. Asking questions is always the first step – if you choose to make decisions that bring to your kitchen free-range eggs over cage-grown, or you source or grow your own organic vegetables, you elect lamb cutlets that are organic, grass-fed and free-range, you are already buying into ideas of process and provenance. With this, sustainable wine goes hand-in-hand. Where wine is grown and how it goes to bottle must form part of your next and on-going conversation.

• C O U R T Y A R D • P R I VAT E R O O M S 165 Tynte Street, North Adelaide, South Australia 5006 Ph: 08 8267 4032

www.danieloconnell.com.au

Email: info@danieloconnell.com.au Opening Hours: Open Daily 11:00am - close Dining menu: Mon - Thurs 12 - 3 pm 5 - 9pm | Friday - Sunday | All Day Dining

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

Oscar Wilde

50 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

CHEESE MATTERS Panir

BY KRIS LLOYD

R

agini Dey is the energetic personality behind Dhaba at the Spice Kitchen. I recently met with her at the Leabrook restaurant where she revealed the tradition of panir cheese. This fresh, acid-set curd cheese is widely used in Indian cuisine.

Ragini Dey was born into a middle-class family in Mirzapur, India. She grew up in Delhi having a sense of regional food boundaries partly due to her parents. Her father was from Bengal and her mother from the north of India. Her food has been influenced by the regional styles she grew up with at her parents’ table. Ragini’s food has an exceptional balance of spices and flavour, which she says comes from years of experimenting and an uncompromising approach.

The traditional fresh Indian cheese panir (also known as paneer, and chaana in Bengal) can be grilled, used fresh, braised or baked. It is high on Ragini’s list of ingredients. She explains:

“Dairy is a big thing in India, everyone eats cheese, they make their own yoghurt and love cream. Historically, culturally and socially, milk is very important in India.” Each household has a milking cow tethered to their verandah, she explains. “Milk is food from the gods and anything that comes from there is very precious and appreciated.” Buffalo, goat and camel’s milk also all play a part in this exotic cuisine.

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In India, panir is used in hundreds of savoury dishes; it also forms a large part of many variations of sweet dishes and desserts. As people have become busier the tradition of making panir at home is not as popular as it was in the past.

Ragini says that the “freshness and sweetness of a freshly made panir is worth the time and the relatively small amount of effort required to make it. When I was growing up the modern conveniences of today just weren’t available and people would make their own. You could buy it in some stores, but it was frowned upon.”

She explains that “homemade is always better” and relates it to buying a packaged spice mix of Rogan Josh. Back in the day this was unheard of.

“No one would touch such a thing, especially in India,” she explains. “You would buy the whole spice and you would always grind it yourself.

Indeed we would take our wheat to the local mill for freshly milled flour for the household.”

She questions the direction of this progress around food. “India has become more modern but some things haven’t changed. The shoeshine man is still there, but now he has a mobile phone to take all his bookings.”

RAGINI’S PANIR

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Ingredients: Two litres milk and 60ml white vinegar

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(makes 250 grams)

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Line a large mesh strainer with a clean square of muslin (cheese cloth). Put the milk in a large heavy-based saucepan over medium heat and bring to boil. Remove from the heat and stir in vinegar. Continue stirring until the milk starts to separate and curd forms. This should take about a minute.

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Pour the liquid into the strainer lined with muslin, so that the whey drains away and the curd is caught in the muslin. Bring in the corners of the muslin to meet at the centre and tie a knot. Transfer the bundle to a large bowl

and sit a plate, which will fit inside the bowl, directly onto the bundle, weighed down with two-to-three cans. Leave for about 30 minutes, or until the panir is firm.

Remove the panir from the muslin and immerse it in a large bowl of cold water. In an airtight container, store covered in water in a refrigerator for five to seven days. Panir can be used in curries, stuffing, dips, snacks and dessert. Different acid agents can be used to curdle, or separate, the milk producing different textures. You could try lemon or lime juice, whey, yoghurt or buttermilk. Panir can be hung instead of pressed to give a different texture and consistency, suitable for desserts.

This simple cheese features strongly on Ragini’s menu. I shared a variety of panir with her, each with a slightly different flavour and texture. What stood out was the fresh milkiness and clean flavour. Somewhere between a firm cottage cheese and soft feta style is the way I would describe it. The real treat, however, was sampling the traditional dishes where the cheese was combined with other flavours.

Cheese pakoras filled with panir, coriander and saffron, curries with solid little cubes of panir and rasgulla (a panir-based, syrupy dessert) were among my favourites.

Ragini was 26 when she arrived in Australia.

She established Dhaba at The Spice Kitchen in 1992, where she continues to create and explore a tapestry of flavours and tradition in her kitchen.

Her new book Spice Kitchen from Ganges to Goa is a must have for lovers of Indian cuisine.

» Kris Lloyd is the Head Cheese Maker of Woodside Cheese Wrights woodsidecheese.com.au

52 The Adelaide Review February 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

Food For Thought

Socca This is an excellent gluten free dish for warm summer lunches.

Top the chickpea crepes with any salad of your choosing but tomato and mozzarella is a particularly delicious combination.

Street Food

BY Annabelle Baker

T

here is no better way to discover the soul of a country than to eat your way around the landscape and embrace the local food. I once met a person who while on vacation in Bangkok, only ate pasta at their hotel due to a fear of what would be on offer in the bustling streets below. One could argue, why travel?

What’s the point of visiting a country if you can’t taste what life is like for the people who call it home?

Ingredients • 1 Cup chickpea flour (organic does make a difference) • 2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil • 1 ¼ Cup of water • Salt

For me, discovering new cities is all about the food and the people that line the streets serving it. Street food instantly makes most of us think of Asia and the food served on the lively streets of India but in fact, in one form or another, street food is present in all cities around the world.

The abundance of eels in the River Thames during the 18th century were put to good use with the creation of the original street food of London, the humble pot of jellied eel. Due to its popularity, mainly in the east end of London it started the eel, pie and mash revolution.

However, the demand for jellied eels has since significantly declined, resulting in only a handful of small vendors still serving this signature British street food.

Wieners graced the shores of America in the 1800s with the influx of European immigrants and one of the most famous American street foods was to follow.

Wieners were sold from Dog Wagons all along the eastern coast of America and with the addition of a bun and condiments the humble wiener is now the iconic American hotdog.

Would a trip to the Big Apple be complete without one?

Large shallow pans full of chickpea batter are baked in wood ovens all along the Côte d’Azur and are enjoyed by the locals from Nice to Pisa. The variations along the coast highlight the local produce found in abundance; thinly sliced artichokes or onions, wild rosemary and in its home town Genoa served with crispy whitebait.

There is no doubt that food is a universal way of connecting and although sometimes confronting, once embraced is an amazing way to break down cultural barriers. Forget the restaurants when in a new city, hit the streets and find out what the locals are eating.

Method 1. In a large bowl combine the chickpea flour, olive oil and a large pinch of salt.

2. Whisk in the water until you have a consistency similar to pouring cream.

3. Cover the batter and leave in the refrigerator for six hours or, if possible, overnight.

4. Heat a crepe or non-stick pan with shallow sides to a medium heat.

5. Spray with olive oil spray or add a tiny amount of olive oil 6. Add a ladleful of the batter to the pan and tilt to evenly coat the pan.

7. When bubbles come to the surface and it starts to shrink away from the pan around the sides, it is ready to turn.

8. Cook for a further three-to-five minutes until slightly golden brown on both sides.

9. The first one never works so have a taste and check the seasoning, adjust as required.

10. Eat warm with a light sprinkling of sea salt and cracked pepper or serve with a light salad.

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The Adelaide Review February 2014 53

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FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

Success for a Sticky Chardonnay Prank

by Charles Gent

W

ith more than 60 different wines in production, Chester Osborn – he of the hair like a Welsh sheep and the shouty shirts – can be forgiven for momentarily losing track of d’Arenberg’s prolific output. Whereas most wineries are content to make a single dessert wine, d’Arenberg, he says, produces no less than five: “Or is it six?”

One of his stable of stickies, The Noble Prankster 2010, is the runner-up in the latest Adelaide Review Hot 100 South Australian Wines, inciting the judges to describe it as: “Deconstructed crème brulee with a purity that makes for super drinkability. Exotic honey, citrus rind and cut apricot make it a sinful, hedonistic pleasure.”

A maker of stickies for nearly 30 years, d’Arenberg is one of the pioneers of the style in South Australia, and indeed can claim to be the first Australian winery to use the term “Noble” in the name of a wine, a usage which has since been adopted around Australia and the world. Chester Osborn’s very first dessert Riesling made in 1984 wasn’t released – “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he cheerfully admits – but when the revised version made its public debut the following year, it immediately won popular and critical acclaim.

Since then, the botrytis-affected Riesling, now known as the Noble Wrinkled Riesling, has been joined in the d’Arenberg catalogue by several other takes on the genre, including the Noble Mud Pie, which enlists Rhone whites Viognier and Marsanne, and the mischievously monikered Noble Botryotinia Fuckeliana, a tribute to an earlier scientific name for the

mould eponymously endowed by Karl Fuckel in the 1800s.

quantities of highly concentrated juice with a sky-high Baume.

While the Fuckeliana is made from more traditional constituents of Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon, the vast majority of the grapes that go into the Prankster are of a variety not usually associated with dessert wines – Chardonnay.

Specialised yeast strains are required to achieve fermentation, ultimately producing a golden-coloured wine of close to 10 percent alcohol that still retains luxuriant levels of residual sugar.

Osborn says that in a sense, we have the New Zealanders to thank for the Prankster.

One side-effect of the trans-Tasman tsunami of Sauvignon Blanc was reduced demand for Chardonnay, and the resulting glut saw premium Chardonnay grapes going unpicked in both McLaren Vale and the Adelaide Hills.

Blending the Hills and McLaren Vale fruit gives a mix of refined with more tropical characters, and Osborn says that while the Prankster does exhibit the lemon butter flavours typically associated with a Sauterne, the Chardonnay offers more citrus characters and notes reminiscent of Granny Smith apples, in contrast to the gooseberry-like bouquet characteristic of Semillon. For those with the restraint to cellar it, the wine will achieve greater depths of both colour and flavour.

Osborn offered to take parcels of any botrytisaffected Chardonnay from the growers, and The Prankster, so-called because it is Sauterne-like but isn’t made from Semillon, is the upshot.

The best of the available grapes go into The Prankster, with lesser quality parcels used to produce the Stump Jump Sticky Chardonnay.

(With characteristic lack of inhibition, d’Arenberg also releases Stump Jump Sticky in a sparkling version).

While the 2010 vintage is officially sold out, sharp-eyed buyers will still find it in bottle shops, as long as the Hot 100 judges haven’t beaten them to it.

darenberg.com.au

Although dessert wines can be made in other ways, the classic style, exemplified by the revered Sauternes of France, enlists the desiccating action of the mould botrytis cinerea, also known as noble rot. This naturally occurring mould penetrates the grapes to feed on their moisture and sugars, setting off a chain of chemical changes and evaporation that eventually reduces the weight of the berries by as much as half. The result is bunches of shriveled, browned fruit, singularly unattractive in appearance but containing tiny

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54 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE

WINES BY ANDREA FROST / CHEESE PAIRED BY VALERIE HENBEST FROM SMELLY CHEESE

CRITTENDEN ESTATE OGGI 2012

MOORILLA MUSE SERIES RIESLING 2011

RRP: $35 Mornington Peninsula

RRP: $30 Tasmania

“The cooling breezes from Port Phillip Bay are vital in keeping minimum temperatures up and maximum temperatures down on the Peninsula,” says Crittenden Estate winemaker Rollo Crittenden. “I’m a big fan of retained acidity and the unique aspect and climate down here allows that.” Second generation Rollo spearheads the winemaking at Crittenden Estate with a blend of classic, modern and experimental styles. ‘Oggi’ means ‘today’ in Italian and is the name given to those experimental and limited release wines made to reflect styles that are ‘of the moment’; in this case, the ancient yet re-emerging style of skin-contact white wines.

This is a blend of the highly textural varieties Friulano, Savagnin and Arneis but made like a red wine. The result is an intriguing and utterly refreshing white wine. Some lovely yet restrained aromatics on the nose followed by a highly structured, dry and textural mouthful, all zipped together on a lively line of acid.

For Moorilla winemaker, Conor van der Reest, the effects of Tasmania’s maritime region present themselves in an amalgam of ways.

“There are the normal moderating effects on temperature: we almost always have a breeze or wind blowing on the vineyard. This certainly helps with disease management and limiting any potential frosts.” Other benefits include a long slow ripening period where grapes can develop an abundance of flavour, finesse and elegance; perfect virtues for a variety such as Riesling. The first Moorilla Riesling was released in 1962 and today the variety is one of the winery’s signature wines. This wine is wildly attractive, like a walk through an orchard in springtime. The nose offers beautiful white florals, blossom and citrus and is followed by a palate of great depth, texture and acidity. The wine is as attractively packaged as it is to drink.

COUPOLE BY VERMONT CREAMERY

PETIT GRES DES VOSGES This traditional soft-ripened, washed rind cheese is a true farmhouse delight. It is made in Alsace, the region famous for other washed rinds such as Munster.

However, unlike Munster, this cheese has a more delicate palate. Grès des Vosges is carefully matured in humid cellars for a minimum of three weeks then hand packed and decorated with an attractive fern leaf from the region. It has the typical yeasty aroma of a washed rind with hints of mushroom, barnyard and smoky garlic.

The aroma is quite robust compared to the taste; underneath the moist, sticky rind is a soft supple paste with a pale straw colour and a delicate earthy flavour.

Allison Hooper and Bob Reese began the Vermont Creamery about 25 years ago. Bob was an agriculture graduate and Allison had spent time in France learning to make cheese as a student. They have since won a swag of awards for their distinctive cheese range. Coupole is named for its likeness in shape to a snow-covered dome and is made with fresh pasteurised goat’s milk from family farms in Vermont. The interior of the cheese has a dense texture and fresh, milky flavour. There is a lovely contrast between the flavour of the geotrichum rind and the delicate freshness of the interior.

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The Adelaide Review February 2014 55

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FOOD.WINE.COFFEE Kangarilla RoadScarce Earth Shiraz 2011

Voyager Estate Chardonnay

RRP: $60 McLaren Vale

RRP: $45 Margaret River

“The main word is ‘savouriness’,” says Kangarilla Road owner and winemaker Kevin O’Brien when asked how the maritime influence affects his Shiraz. “It goes for all our wines but I think it is accentuated in Shiraz.” McLaren Vale sits on the coast of the Gulf of St Vincent, which moderates the temperature and generates cooling sea breezes. This wine, part of the Scarce Earth project that Kevin describes as single vineyard wines from specific geologies, is from a vineyard on Blanche Point. Just 500 metres from the Gulf, it is the most maritime vineyard site in McLaren Vale. The nose is intense with savoury and earthy notes and a hint of spice; the palate is long, complex and woven with a lovely finessing acidity and subtle minerality. It is a seductive wine, with length and complexity that reaches to the abyss.

With wily coastlines, monster swells and wide open landscapes, surfers, travellers and winegrowers love Margaret River. Voyager Estate sits in middle of the region where just five kilometres to the west of the vineyards is the Indian Ocean, 40 kilometres south is the Southern Ocean, meaning the maritime effects abound. “This climate has a significant effect on the style of all our wines,” says Steve James, manager of winemaking and viticulture at Voyager Estate. “During the ripening season the morning warms up and, around midday, the sea breeze arrives – bringing a cooling effect and blowing the warm air mass out of the vineyards.

It also ensures we have cooler evenings, which are important for flavour and acid retention in the ripening grapes.” This is a complex and evocative wine melding notes of lemon, lime and grapefruit citrus, hints of spice and a puff of vanilla. It is a rich and complex wine, with many layers, length and great harmony.

Comté HervÉ Mons The Mons family, affineurs for three generations, selected only 11 of the 160 Comté producers with which to work.

Together with the cheese makers, they regularly taste each batch before selecting wheels for maturation. These wheels of Comté arrive at Mons at about six months of age. They are then kept in the Mons maturing tunnel where each week they are checked, turned and brushed by hand until they reach eighteen months of age. When these wheels arrive in Australia they go into the Cheese Culture maturing room where the same level of care is given weekly until they are sold. The final product has a firm texture and exquisite nutty characters.

“There is a natural affinity between cheese and wine.”

Bellavitano Gold The Sartori family’s been working with cheese in America for four generations. They have a very close relationship with their local dairies and are very proud of the quality of the milk delivered fresh to their premises in Wisconsin. They work closely with chefs, developing products for the foodservice industry. Inspired by traditional Italian farmstead cheese, BellaVitano Gold has a dense texture and full flavour.

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56 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FOOD.WINE.COFFEE art. I don’t normally eavesdrop but I overheard the barista chatting to people very sincerely, as if every customer was an old friend.

As soon as it was my turn, the passionate barista offered me the Barista Competition Blend for my espresso, which is made up of Sumatran, Papua New Guinean and Ethiopian beans. The crema was thick, dark brown and consistent. It had a bold earthy flavour, and a smooth acidity from the Ethiopian beans.

The latte came from a blend called Organic @ Origin, which is made up of Mexican and South American beans. It had light golden coloured crema that was perfectly blended with the milk and a cute dog’s face as the latte art. It had a well-rounded flavour and I could

taste the chocolate notes all the way through until the end.

The barista explained how Fiefy designed both of the blends for Andy Freeman at Coffee Snobs, who then went on to enter them in the 2013 Golden Bean Roasting Competition where both blends won gold. Fiefy won a list of competitions with the blends also, so it’s quite a privilege to have a chance to taste these beans in action.

» Fiefy’s Specialty Cafe 1/45 Pirie St, Adelaide fiefys.com.au

Golden Personality

BY DEREK CROZIER

F

iefy’s Specialty Cafe is a small boutique with a big heart in the business district of Adelaide city.

They pour coffee from Coffee Snobs

through a La Marzocco Espresso Machine that matches the décor. I can’t help but feel that Fiefy’s (the owner) personality shines through with every little detail, from the logo to the latte

Straight from the Branch

BY DEREK CROZIER

C

offee Branch is a boutique with a switched on city style interior that reminds me of Amsterdam (especially the bikes on the wall). Greeted by friendly smiles from the staff behind the bar, this is the perfect place to have a coffee break if you’re near Leigh St. As soon as I walked up to the bar and asked for the barista’s recommendations, he seemed excited to talk coffee, explaining that they use Five Senses Coffee and naked filter baskets through the Synesso Espresso Machine.

To keep things interesting Coffee Branch changes their single origin beans weekly.

YirgZero Ethiopia was on the menu for my Espresso the day I visited. The ‘zero’ in YirgZero refers to the absence of defects in this Ethiopian

coffee, which makes it a premium single origin bean that is hand-sorted once dried. The aroma was of tart and the crema golden brown. My first sip had a structured acidity, which turned to sweetness as I knocked it back. It had a delicate flavour with complexity.

The latte was an in-house blend that you’ll find there every week called Lost Sheep; made up of Colombian, Ethiopian and Guatemalan beans. Made with Tweedvale milk, it was presented with a six-leaf tulip on top as the art. I could smell the floral notes from the Colombian beans while the Guatemalan beans left a lingering clean aftertaste.

Coffee Branch is one of those places that feels like an episode of Cheers when you walk in as the baristas greet customers by name and crack jokes to make that morning/lunch coffee break all the more enjoyable.

» Coffee Branch 32 Leigh St, Adelaide coffeebranch.com

THE ADELAIDE R EVIEW F EBRUARY 2014

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

SMART DESIGN Jeremy McLeod, Justin Hermes and Matt Woods talk about their sustainable design practices

58 THE ADELAIDE REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014

FORM

GREEN SPACES CAN COMBAT URBAN HEAT STRESS Adelaide has just come out of one of its worst spells of prolonged heat on record with blazing 42-degree-plus temperatures for five days straight in January. Winning the dubious honour of the title “hottest city in the world” on January 16, in the confines of the city square mile the intensification of those temperatures was debilitating.

BY STEFFEN LEHMANN

P

acked with concrete, asphalt, glass, traffic and the man-made heat given off from over-stretched air conditiong systems, there was a strong sense of being marooned on an Urban Heat Island. It is little wonder there are urgent calls for increased green space in urban areas to mitigate the impact of heatwaves.

All predictions indicate the intensity and frequency of these conditions will increase as the planet warms. The Bureau of Meteorology predicts a higher frequency of stronger and longer prevailing heatwaves for Australia. Finding ways to design, reshape and build our cities to adapt to climate change is a matter of urgent concern and one university researchers are set to tackle.

As we have seen from recent experience this is not just a matter of comfort or securing commercial productivity – it is a matter of life and death. At the peak of this episode, 163 people needed treatment in Adelaide hospitals because of the heatwave (mainly for risk of heat stroke and dehydration).

The number of heat-related deaths in Adelaide is expected to more than double by 2030. The greatest number of deaths occurs in those aged 75 or older. Sustainable urban development principles recommend the use of green roof gardens and green walls, as vegetation cools the air temperatures; in addition, we should use construction materials that don’t store, but reflect, the heat.

Research shows a 10 percent increase in urban green space can decrease surface temperatures by up to four degrees Celsius, as well as reducing airconditioning costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

Green spaces could also reduce heat-related fatalities. Aiming for a healthy, liveable and sustainable city, we need better models of urban infill and gardens to successfully reintroduce greenery and natural habitat into a more compact urban environment.

The federal government’s 2013 State of Australian Cities report found people living in cities could be more susceptible to the effects of heatwaves. It said the urban heat island was

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Professor Steffen Lehmann

“caused by the prevalence in cities of heat-absorbing materials, such as dark-coloured pavements and roofs, concrete, urban canyons trapping hot air, and a lack of shade and green space’’.

The urban heat island effect is lifting citycentre temperatures by up to six degrees Celsius between the city centre and suburbs.

If built with the wrong materials and too little green space, cities trap and store heat like a baking oven.

During heat waves, the night cooling effect doesn’t work anymore. In the past, cities used to cool down overnight – when you came into the CBD of a morning, the heat from the previous day had dissipated. Now, due to an excess of anthropogenic heat, that is just not happening.

Usually you open the windows at night and it’s nice and cool in the morning when you get up. But in such periods of extensive heat, cities don’t cool down overnight because the way we have built our cities stores and traps heat.

It’s timely to think about changing Australia’s building code to mandate more heat-resistant designs and materials. We have to have more green roof gardens, green walls and community gardens, and use materials that reflect the heat.

The City of Melbourne has implemented the ‘Urban Forest’ concept, with the aim of doubling its canopy cover over the next 25 years – so from 22 percent to 40 percent by 2040.

As a transformational project, Adelaide could engage in a massive tree planting initiative that

The Adelaide Review February 2014 59

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FORM BlueScope Steel, Hassell Architects, the Cities of Adelaide and Sydney and the NGIA. Part of this large three-year research project is the investigation of use patterns and behavior of people in public space.

We are asking what happens in public spaces when older people and young children are not able to go out because of the heat. How do we build cities and new types of public spaces that mitigate heat stress and reduce the storage of heat?

Photo: Simon Casson

The urban heat island effect is found in metropolitan areas where an urban microclimate is created due to human activity.

It causes the city centre to be considerably warmer than its surrounding areas. Urban development is a big culprit as original land surfaces are diminished and replaced with dark energy-absorbing roads and buildings. It is also caused by waste heat from air-conditioning units, which often need to be used more to combat the effects of heat increases, further exacerbating the problem.

brings back street trees and gardens. It’s also timely to rethink the role of the parklands and create distinctive meeting places within the parklands. Luckily, we have not minimised the size of the parklands and the City of Adelaide has always protected these unique public recreational areas from any construction attempts.

Interestingly, today we know that trees make perfect business-sense, save energy and help to keep cities cool. With a project grant of more than $1 million, UniSA is leading a comparative research study to tackle heat stress in Australian cities, which has at its heart an investigation into building and construction design.

The study brings together three universities and eight industry and government partners, including SA Urban Renewal Authority,

Today, as effective and innovative as they are, we need to look far beyond green roofs to solve the problem, because when you move into a suburban context these sorts of innovations cannot be effectively applied. Every one degree Celsius temperature reduction means around five percent energy saving through reduced cooling load. In a large city like Adelaide this amounts to significant saving potential.

We know that building materials, surface colours and pavement all have a significant effect on heat buildup and transfer. For example, the fashion for black tiles on roofs is really not something we can afford to indulge if we are serious about building heat-resistant cities and suburbs.

be used in cities such as Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth would be a simple and immediate step towards improving heat resistance.

We know that cities were never intended to be completed. All cities are inherently evolutionary, in constant transformation and much of their character lies in the complexity and diversity of urban spaces. However, with the impact of population growth, demographic change, an ageing population, climate change and the urgency of global warming, achieving sustainable urban development with meaningful and sustainable ‘places’ has become significantly more urgent and complex.

The bigger task ahead is to transform our existing cities to become more walkable, compact, sustainable and liveable – and that includes a notion of cooler, more heat-resistent cities. In this process it is essential to better understand the interplay between higher densities and the risk of the urban heat island effect.

Already one year into the research, we are are well on the way to building a better understanding of the essential characteristics of urban microclimates in key Australian cities – working with Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.

Our goal is to disseminate and promote policy dialogue and peer-learning among cities, researchers and industry partners to encourage

MORE THAN BEAUTIFUL FLOORS

city-to-city knowledge transfer.

We also hope to provide capacitydevelopment programs for stakeholders in cities that are striving to become ‘Cool Cities’ and reduce cooling energy loads, and design a comprehensive framework to monitor and assess urban microclimates with key indicators and measurements, so that we can build mixeduse and vibrant urban centres that withstand the worst effects of heatwaves in the future.

Our research will also deliver cost-benefit and risk analysis of the urban heat island mitigation options so that future planning options can be evaluated.

This work will give urban local government authorities, state/regional planning and public health agencies, developers, industry and infrastructure/service providers the tools to make better planning decisions for a future which will undoubtedly include hotter and more frequent heatwaves.

»»Professor Steffen Lehmann will be one of the feature presenters at the University of South Australia sponsored Planet Talks at WOMADelaide Friday, March 7 to Monday, March 10

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Changing building codes so that black or other heat trapping tiles are legislated and not able to

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60 The Adelaide Review February 2014

JEREMY MCLEOD / Stonewood

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ome of the country’s most notable designers and architects are involved in pushing this agenda and the current outcomes are innovative, cost-effective and award-winning. We talk to Jeremy McLeod, Justin Hermes and Matt Woods about their sustainable design practices.

JEREMY MCLEOD / In To The Woods

by Leanne Amodeo

MATT WOODS / DEVON CAFE

It’s a measure of both the design and architecture industries’ commitment to the environment that high quality sustainabilityfocused work is being produced in Australia.

JEREMY MCLEOD / Stonewood

Smart Design

MATT WOODS / NEWTOWN S.C.

FORM

Jeremy McLeod As the founder and principal of one of Australia’s most well respected sustainable architecture firms, Breathe Architecture, Melbourne-based McLeod has a reputation for walking the walk and talking the talk.

How is current sustainable design practice different from when you began practising?

When I established Breathe Architecture in 2001 we were probably only one of seven sustainable architecture firms in Melbourne.

So the biggest change is our competition. Back when I was studying in 1990 there was only one environmental design course in the country, now it’s taught across multiple universities at every level. Everyone is aware of climate change and a lot of architects and designers are taking it seriously. It still frustrates me to see that some don’t, but it’s great to see so many firms doing good work.

Is your lo-fi aesthetic a deliberate stylistic intention?

We’re constantly asking our clients and ourselves what is needed rather than what is wanted. We don’t like to build houses that are more than 220sqm and so our first design consideration is around house size and building for necessity. The other thing we do is look at the design in terms of orientation, ventilation and incorporating sustainable technologies from the outset. We’re always peeling back layers of unnecessary stuff and a lot of the projects we do are about stripping things out and building less.

Do you think we’ve become less reckless with our resources as a society?

About seven years ago, I noticed that people were starting to accept that climate change was for real. This shift in attitude coincided with the drought and all of a sudden clients were asking us for water tanks. As architects we stopped fighting with our clients over sustainability features. But I’m starting to see apathy from people. It’s like we had this golden opportunity when everyone first realised climate change was upon us and now we’ve sort of plateaued.

As architects we not only have the ability to change the energy consumption or profile of a particular family or organisation, we have the potential to inspire so other people can follow.

We have a lot of responsibility and I think we can step it up. We’ve all got to do better.

People are seeing the value in utilising these materials and the idea of locking up carbon in timber rather than having it burnt or chipped.

Demand is such that I’ve also started salvaging timber – actually salvaging trees. It’s extra work but it comes with extra reward and so the effort involved in converting, storing and preparing the material more than pays for itself in terms of the end result.

for an alternative approach. They’ve got a real attachment to the material and have already invested money into converting it and invested time into waiting for it to dry. We still have to engage in the actual design process and make decisions about how to treat it, so the most exciting stories aren’t even half-way finished.

What sustainability principles underlie your work as a designermaker?

Matt Woods This Sydney-based sole practitioner is responsible for some of the city’s most exciting small-scale hospitality fit-outs. Woods doesn’t necessarily present his practice as sustainability-focused, but his strong eco values underpin every one of his designs.

Recently launching his showroom in Adelaide’s CBD, this Adelaide Hills-based designer-maker is fast making a name for himself with bespoke furniture made from reclaimed and salvaged materials.

My primary philosophy is to let the material do most of the work and try to leave it in as much of its natural state as possible. The process involved in using salvaged timber typically takes a year or two. I first take the logs to a saw miller where they are cut into slabs and then for every inch of thickness I have to let the slab dry for one year. Converting the timber myself presents exciting opportunities and I’m committed to the idea that these materials are worth saving and that it’s good for the environment and the end user. There’s so much more for people to enjoy when they’re receiving furniture that’s been made in this way from materials that have been treated with care.

Has the demand for furniture made of reclaimed materials increased in recent years?

Are there any stories behind the materials that have particularly resonated with you?

Nine times out of 10 clients don’t come to me saying they want something sustainable – although I assume they know I have a sustainable attitude. It’s pretty much at the core of what I do, so every decision is made with a sustainability perspective in mind, from layout to orientation and choice of materials. I don’t consider myself to be much of a decorator, so I’m not about adding superfluous detail.

Some of my interiors are eclectic, but what I’m really trying to do is strip them back and let the materials speak for themselves.

There is an eco trend at the moment that’s been increasing exponentially; the demand for reclaimed materials has gone through the roof in the past 10 years.

I’ve got a couple of clients who have been sad about having to get rid of some beautiful trees, so rather than go through the process of fire-wooding or mulching they’ve come to me

You recently finished your first office fit out. How were you able to incorporate innovative design features considering the modest budget?

Justin Hermes

How do you apply a sustainable design ethos to your hospitality fit-outs?

The Adelaide Review February 2014 61

adelaidereview.com.au

FORM

JUSTIN HERMES

How has the sustainable design landscape changed since you began your practice?

JUSTIN HERMES / ODASA OFFICE SA

MATT WOODS / CHI AND CO.

JUSTIN HERMES / PRODUCT FAMILY

I think The Hallway client was interested in the fact that I wasn’t an office designer and so I’d be approaching the design from a completely different perspective. They wanted me to treat their office not as an office space per se, but rather as a fun environment to hang out in. Trying to think of creative ways to do things that haven’t been done before is quite difficult when working with a small budget, but at the same time it’s an interesting challenge.

I’m an industrial designer by trade, but I received my Master of Design Science (Sustainable Design) from University of Sydney four years ago. I noticed at that time there was a big gap in the market and not a lot of people were doing what I thought should be done.

So my very first project upon graduation was sustainability-based and it’s something that I’ve constantly been pushing ever since. It’s not even a conversation I have with clients any more; it’s just something that I do.

breathe.com.au justinhermesdesign.blogspot.com killingmattwoods.com

62 The Adelaide Review February 2014

FORM

Well Planned

is supported by quality shared facilities, such as meeting areas and break-out spaces.”

These meeting areas and break-out spaces are the fit-out’s most resounding design expression and feature striking slatted timber ceiling beams that conceal the chilled beam air conditioning, while still allowing air flow.

The air conditioning system, however, was the cause of a few headaches during construction.

“A challenge we had was achieving the required acoustic rating where chilled beams crossed over the partitions,” says Schiavello’s Senior Project Manager/Team Manager Zane Betterman. “So we sourced a specific saw tooth foam to fit the chilled beam profile and our carpenters were then able to caulk around the beam.”

Australia Post’s new South Australian headquarters features a modern, open plan that seamlessly integrates smart, environmentally sustainable design features.

by Leanne Amodeo

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ower 8 is actually the third landmark building in Adelaide’s bustling City Central Precinct. This 17-level Woods Bagot-designed commercial development is notable for its ESD (environmentally sustainable design) features. It was awarded a 4.5 Star National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) rating. Last year it became the new home for Australia Post’s South Australian headquarters following their office’s relocation to levels two and three.

Moving into one of the CBD’s greenest buildings comes with serious responsibility and Australia Post was quick to embrace the challenge. They tasked Adelaide-based architects Swanbury Penglase to design the fitout and the contracts team at Schiavello’s South Australian branch was engaged as managing

contractor during its construction. Achieving the required outputs to comply with Tower 8’s Green Star and NABERS accreditation was a priority and so energy efficiency remained a pertinent consideration in all design decisions.

the perimeter close to windows and natural light further consolidates this energy efficient approach. So did the selection of all finishes, which was based on sound environmental choices like longevity and recyclability.

Swanbury Penglase excelled at seamlessly integrating key ESD features into both levels of the new office’s fit-out. “The base building services are the leading sustainability features,” says Swanbury Penglase Senior Associate Elizabeth Swanbury. “A chilled beam air conditioning system, efficient light fittings and low water-use fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen areas reduce consumption across the board.” Positioning workstations near

Although the fit-out borrows conceptually from Australia Post’s Melbourne headquarters – designed by Geyer in 2010 – the Adelaide office has its own distinct visual identity. Each floor’s colour scheme of either red or green adds a playful element to the overall design and reinforces the progressive attitude Australia Post has to its office environments. “This fit-out is a good example of how open plan can really work effectively,” says Swanbury. “As long as it

Working within a relatively tight timeframe also tested Swanbury Penglase and Schiavello but ultimately they successfully delivered the key sustainability outcomes (not that there was any other option). If standards hadn’t been met the building could have potentially lost its Green Star and NABERS accreditation. Australia Post’s new South Australian headquarters is not only a fine example of environmentally sustainable design, it is also an elegant exercise in functional open plan office environments.

swanburypenglase.com schiavello.com/auspost

At Schiavello, we understand that true sustainability is about creating a healthy indoor environment that perpetually supports high performance cultures.

The new, modern South Australian headquarters of Australia Post is a showcase for the company’s values and commitment to providing sustainable business environments for its people and the community it’s served for 200 years.

We pair an intimate knowledge of sustainable building practices with an acute understanding of our clients’ needs and aspirations to guarantee success every time.

Visit our project portfolio online, or contact us for more information.

Contact Zane Betterman zbetterman@schiavello.com telephone 08 8112 2300 schiavello.com/auspost

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