The Big Issue Australia #663 - Libraries

Ed.

Love Libraries Where everyone is welcome

663 10 JUN DD MMM 2021 2022

xx.

PETER DINKLAGE L–FRESH THE LION and NENEH CHERRY

Ed. Ed.

663 643

10 DDJUN MMM 2022 2021

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XXX P E T E RXXX D I N K Land AGXXX E L– F R E S H T H E L I O N and N E N E H C H E R RY

Love Libraries Where everyone is welcome

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Contents

EDITION

663 22 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

Don’t Play It So Cool Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage on being a young punk, what makes Hollywood stories more interesting, and why he wants to take the lead.

24 Fruits of Their Labour Hip-hop star L-FRESH the LION writes about his inspiration as a songwriter, and how it all comes from his nani ji’s garden in South-West Sydney.

THE HISTORIC STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA

12.

Love Libraries Seed libraries, mobile libraries, libraries that do screenings of old footy grand finals – we tour around the country and find that no matter where you go, from Alice Springs to the outer burbs to the Victorian Goldfields, libraries are the beating heart of their communities.

contents photo by Getty

THE REGULARS

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

27 34 35 36 37 39

Ricky Film Reviews Small Screen Reviews Music Reviews Book Reviews Public Service Announcement

Cherry on Top Neneh Cherry has reworked some of her biggest hits on a new album, featuring artists like Sia and Robyn, who have a personal connection to her music.

cover illustration by Lauren Rebbeck @laurenrebbeck

04 05 06 08 11 18

28 MUSIC

40 43 45 46

Tastes Like Home Puzzles Crossword Click

Ed’s Letter

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

Shelf Life

L

ibraries change lives.

Don’t just take my word for it, visit the website librarieschangelives. org.au. Listen to the heartwarming story of Bev and Kev, seniors now, long lost siblings who reconnected after decades when Bev, aided by some research assistance with the public records at her local, tracked him down. “I feel much happier, more fulfilled, because I found him,” she says.

Terri came to Melbourne from South Korea in February 2020. It was supposed to be a holiday but what transpired was extended pandemic isolation…until she discovered Conversation Club classes online through Melbourne’s City Library.

Her classmates, who she chatted with daily, became her supports, her friends, her community. Terri went on to publish a book about them.

The old girls who call themselves The Happy Hookers sure seem like fun – they meet at Maroondah Library every week to teach each other crochet.

Your Say LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

Madelon, who recently found out her name means “mother of the dragon”, started learning Chinese at 91 years old through her library’s Chinese Chat Room. While Sammar and Sabrina fell in love with Manga at their local, and took to stashing extra books beneath the shelves once they’d reached their 20‑item borrowing limit.

This edition we celebrate the vital, inclusive and democratic spaces that are public libraries. Places of connection and community, of ideas and imagination, of books and culture and possibility. From Alice Springs to Victoria’s Goldfields to the seed libraries that are sprouting all around the world, we find that libraries have got a little bit of something for everyone – and that’s why one in three Australians are members of their local.

As author, Big Issue contributor and card-carrying book lover Nova Weetman enthuses: “If I borrow wisely, I can dream of romance, or of murder, or of galloping wildly through the bush on a horse that never trips.”

I was impressed with the article ‘Work of Art’ by Adelaide artist and Big Issue vendor Daniel K in Ed#659. Nice bird drawings and it was interesting to see what food they consumed at the party for his Fringe exhibition. It’s great he made some money.

HELEN Z WHITTLESEA I VIC

Thank you, Fiona Scott-Norman, for your refreshing, open-minded take on the patriarchy in Ed#660. You’ve hit more than a few nails on the head lately but this one leaves me in absolute applause. Bravo!

CANDACE DAVIS SOUTH MISSION BEACH I QLD

Dear friends at the Women’s Subscription Enterprise, thank you for keeping The Big Issue coming through all the ups and downs. I’ve renewed my sub, plus included a donation to celebrate my 80th birthday! I love to read your stories and poems. Stay safe and well.

JENNY FOX BRISBANE I QLD

04

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 25 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work.

• The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 23 locations around the country.

• The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales.

• The Big Issue Education workshops provide school, tertiary and corporate groups with insights into homelessness and disadvantage, and provide work opportunities for people experiencing marginalisation.

CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Helen wins a copy of John Darnielle’s new novel Devil House. You can read our interview with the author on page 32. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

interview by Ashley Snell photo by Nat Rogers

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

10 JUN 2022

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT THE BODY SHOP ON RUNDLE MALL, ADELAIDE

05

Susan & Ted

I became vision-impaired when I was about 13 years old. I woke up one day and I just couldn’t see the blackboard or the reading book very well. My vision decided to go about 10 years later. I’ve had about three guide dogs. My latest is Ted, a black labrador who’s four years old.

I loved school. When I was 14, I went to Townsend House, a school for the blind and deaf. I lived in one of the cottages with 10 other people. It was good for me. I was very shy, so this school helped my confidence. We went camping, kayaking, canoeing and did other adventurous activities. They taught us that blindness is just a small hurdle.

I am one of seven children and the oldest of all of them. My favourite memory is when my sister and I were young, we dressed up like Kiss. We loved Peter Criss and Paul Stanley. Our mother did our make-up and we went in a special Kiss parade in Hindley Street, which finished at Downtown rollerskating rink.

I have a great tribe: two children, three granddaughters and two grandsons. Watching my grandchildren grow up makes me feel proud. I’ve lived in Adelaide since 1973, when we moved from Melbourne to Gawler. I’ve moved to different places, but I always came back to Gawler, including after I divorced.

I was doing fundraising before I did The Big Issue. I liked my job, however, I was going to different shopping centres every week and I thought, I just can’t do this anymore; it’s getting to be too much of a long day. I also did family day care, where I looked after other people’s kids. I’ve also done a lot of hospitality work.

I worked in the kitchen at the Adelaide Oval and at a lot of coffee shops, which I loved mainly because of the fast pace. I was cooking and serving food to people.

I started my Big Issue journey in December of 2020. On my first shift, another visually impaired vendor gave me a couple more magazines and stood with me. He told me to slow down my voice and to breathe in and out and just relax.

The Big Issue is very good because I’m learning to get around the CBD by myself. I’m also getting my confidence up and earning money, and I like that I’m communicating to different customers.

I’m saving up for an outdoor setting. My sister passed away in January. We were selling together and had decided that we’d both buy an outdoor setting together, so it’s in memory of her.

I’d like to keep selling. I also want to get back into the Red Cross and do telephone support as a volunteer. I’ll probably do other volunteer work, but I haven’t worked it out yet. Just helping the community, to let someone know that they’re cared for. I have a pretty simple philosophy: don’t be afraid to be yourself. Be grateful about everything!

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

A Mother’s Love You were there for me right from the start.

You showed me love, and your softness and touch and tenderness and caring ways shall be with me always I never really knew the responsibilities That in your role you had to do, to set me free Em All the things with a mother’s love is something we all hang on to Home is where the heart is Home is for me All my loving from me to you is sealed and delivered with love from me Home is where the heart is in memories of your love Home is where the heart is

Vale Carol

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

t’s with great sadness that we say goodbye to our good friend Carol, who passed away unexpectedly in May. Carol joined the Women’s Subscription Enterprise in 2014, and for eight years we were fortunate to have her in our lives. Carol loved coming to work and was often one of the last to leave. She was a valuable member of the team, always volunteering for the difficult jobs and showing us all how to get things done.

But there was so much more that we loved about Carol – she was one in a million! Carol was fun to be around. She always had a joke, a funny story, or some outrageous dress-up to make us laugh. And although she’d had more than her fair share of challenges in life, she didn’t let them get the better of her. Instead, she was always doing things for others and taking care of everyone – with a smile. Carol could see the funny side of adversity, didn’t sweat the small stuff, and always had time for those who needed it. She was a good person and an amazing friend. She taught us how to laugh at ourselves, how to see the positives in every challenge, and how to be kind. She made us feel good about ourselves. That may have been her greatest gift, and something we will always be grateful for. You don’t get to meet many “Carols” in your life – we were very lucky. Things won’t be the same, but we all know Carol has left a little bit of herself with all of us. Thank you, Carol.

BEVERLEY STEWART NSW PROGRAM CO-ORDINATOR

I know a dear friend who lost her mum She grew up with her father and his three sons She blames herself every day and misses the love of a mother’s way But fear not I am here for you Because this song’s for you, Mum And to all of the mums You’re priceless and your love is unconditional To all the mums here and who have been Or mums that don’t know their own child This is a song just for you A woman’s love and a mother’s too I wouldn’t change anything for you Mum You are everything for me You are my world I hang on to And I’m so grateful that I have you LINDA I BALLARAT

Feeling Fine I had surgery on my prostate in May. It seems to have worked well which is a huge relief as I have been struggling for a long time. When I woke up in the hospital I felt remarkably good, which surprised me. The nurses woke me up in the recovery room, which I don’t remember due to the anaesthetic, but I do remember being on the ward with a lot of tubes attached to me. I left hospital on the Sunday, but I managed to stay long enough to enjoy the Sunday roast lunch.

I wasn’t able to sell The Big Issue for a little while because of the surgery. When I went to my regular pitch to do some shopping, one of the business owners told me that apparently lots of people

were asking where I was while I was away. That made me feel really good. I am back selling, and I’d like to say thanks to all the people who asked after me while I was in hospital! I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone!

me looking chilly when she bought a mag at the corner of Hay and Williams Streets in the Perth CBD. She took me straight to the shop and bought a jumper. It reminded me that people do care about us, out on the street making a living.

EDDIE WOOLWORTHS SHERWOOD I BRISBANE

SEAN STIRLING MARKET I PERTH

Tight Knit Hi, my name’s Sean. I’ve been selling The Big Issue for the last 13 years. The best thing about it (apart from making a living) is the good people you meet. I wanted to share a story from a couple of days ago. I start work early and it’s already pretty cold in the mornings.

Quite a few people offer hot cups of coffee – it’s so nice. One lady saw

Lost and Found Recently I found a wallet on the street belonging to a young man.

I met him and his mother when I handed it back. It was nice to meet them both. We had a joke and a laugh about being more careful! But really, I was happy to help, and it was lovely to meet such a friendly person.

GEORGE FAIRFIELD & PRESTON MARKET I MELBOURNE

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

PAT L HIS MAJESTY’S THEATRE I PERTH

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

07

PAT’S DIY CLEANER

What most attracts me to the library are the eResources that anyone can sign up for. There’s free access to various publications and global media online, like newspapers, books and movies. Printing your work from a USB and photocopying services are affordable and good quality as well. I’m also interested in environmentally friendly stuff with low cost. Libraries have this on offer with free workshops onsite or online – you can book and attend if you like. I learned how to make homemade citrus peel cleaner at City of Perth Library three years ago, and I’m still using it to this day.

All you need to do is collect citrus peels (lemon, lime, orange) as you eat the fruit – make sure there’s no flesh left on the peel. Store them in a clean glass jar and add a litre or so of white vinegar. Leave in a cool spot for at least two weeks. Dilute with half water then strain the liquid into a spray bottle – and pop the peels into your compost. Use the spray as a household cleaner!

10 JUN 2022

Lemon Balm

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

just moved one arm out from under the sand and gave the finger, and it worked!”

Danielo Specogna on flipping the bird, literally, after he buried himself in the dirt to keep warm after becoming lost in the WA outback overnight while prospecting for gold.

ABC I AU

I mean, I’m old and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is, and that is not what that whole scene is about.

Actor Kelly McGillis on why, unlike Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, she wasn’t asked back to be in the Top Gun sequel. Not that she’s bothered: “I’d much rather feel absolutely secure in my skin and who and what I am at my age, as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff.”

CONSEQUENCE I US

“These doors inside your heart have to flap open and closed 100,000 times a day. If you did that to your front door it would be gone in the afternoon.”

Cardiologist James Wong, from Royal Melbourne Hospital, on the extraordinary machine that is the human heart.

“It’s one of the most extreme things I’ve ever seen. It’s so extreme it’s like hanging from the wing of an airplane while everyone is sitting inside.”

Nic von Rupp, a big-wave surfer, on bodysurfers who ride 40-foot monster waves – without a board.

THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

08

NT NEWS I AU

ABC I AU

“It has been raining money on fools for too long. Some bankruptcies need to happen.”

Billionaire Elon Musk welcomes predictions of a global recession.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“There’s a lot of slimy stuff everywhere.”

Brett Summerell, chief scientist at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, on the abnormally high amounts of moss, due to the abnormally high amounts of rain.

THE GUARDIAN I AU

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD I AU

“My grandmothers could speak 12 languages between them and recreate landscapes with fire skills that would send shivers up any environmental scientist. But my nanna was only seen as ‘valuable’ when she gave birth to a baby girl with almost porcelain-white skin.”

Leanne Liddle, NT’s Australian of the Year, on the systemic failings of governments and institutions that oppressed generations of Arrernte women in her family.

“The arts subjects for me were like a de-stress. They brought joy to my Year 12.”

Eden Gray, 18, on studying music, drama and literature as part of her QCE . The number of Queensland students enrolled in arts subjects has fallen 44 per cent in 10 years, as students turn to science-based subjects in the belief they’ll deliver a higher ATAR score.

“It couldn’t have felt more awkward. They were a bunch of drunken party people who were glad to have us play. I didn’t see any fucking gold-plated toilets, but I’m sure they were there somewhere.”

One-time Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson on playing private shows for Russian oligarchs – a multimillion dollar industry that some musicians now regret.

ROLLING STONE I US

“There was this eagle, just above me, circling, eying me off – and I

“Tobacco is not just poisoning people, it is also poisoning our planet.”

The WHO’s Rüdiger Krech on tobacco’s effects: 4.5 trillion cigarette butts that end up in the environment each year can each pollute up to 100 litres of water; almost a quarter of tobacco farmers suffer from green tobacco disease; 84 million tonnes of CO2 are released into the atmosphere; and 600 million trees a year are cut down to grow tobacco. Holy smokes!

AFRICA NEWS I CG

20 Questions

by Rachael Wallace

01 Which US state has the longest

coastline?

02 Who is the current world No#1 in

women’s tennis?

03 The SS Minnow was a boat in which

TV series?

04 What is the chemical element for

mercury?

05 Who won this year’s Archibald Prize

for their portrait of fellow artist Karla Dickens?

06 What is a sobriquet?

07 In which city was world’s first

skyscraper built in 1885?

08 In 1963, who became the first

Indigenous artist to have a top 10 hit? What was the song?

09 Which Dr Seuss book was written

“Well, I just had cataract surgery.

Basically, they’re destroying the lenses in your eyes, sucking them out and then putting in plastic lenses that unfold and become your eyes… That’s pretty intimate.

Technology in your eyeballs.

I’ve got hearing aids. I’m totally bionic.”

Director David Cronenberg, who, as master of the art of body horror films such as The Fly, knows a thing or two about bodily transformation.

JAPAN TODAY I JP

10 When was the last fatal spider bite

recorded in Australia?

11 What is the only food that will never

spoil?

12 Which sitcom inspired the pop-

culture expression “to jump the shark”?

13 In the 17th century, what were

people encouraged to keep in jars to help combat the plague?

14 Who is Australia’s new Minister for

Foreign Affairs?

15 Where in the world is the walking

track called the Larapinta Trail?

16 What was the maiden name of

“It’s not just COVID, there’s the flu and colds. Because of lockdown, their resistance to diseases is down, and there is just exhaustion, to be honest.”

Greg Lacey, principal of Lyndhurst Primary School in Melbourne, on the absence of teachers (18 on one day) and students (up to half of some classes). He recently had to take a Prep class, which he described as “delightful”.

“We are quite strict about the official costume that is allowed.

It must include black shoes, black trousers or dress, waistcoat, shirt, black cape or collared overcoat and fangs on the top set of teeth.”

Jack Brookbank, official adjudicator for Guinness World Records, making sure that the 1369 people who turned up to Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire were properly dressed as Dracula. Yes, they made the count.

ABC I AU

BBC I UK

FREQUENTLY OVERHEAR TANTALISING TIDBITS? DON’T WASTE THEM ON YOUR FRIENDS SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD AT SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?

17 Which country’s flag features a red

dragon?

18 Dickie Bird was very famous in his

chosen profession. What was it?

19 Who wrote Valley of the Dolls?

20 Roughly how many people have

summited Mount Everest since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953: a) 2000 b) 4000 c) 6000 or d) 8000?

10 JUN 2022

ABC I AU

ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

09

“I am quite happy to roll up “Daddy, what’s that my sleeve today big black round and donate blood, thing?” but under the Small child pointing at vinyl current Red Cross record, as overheard by Loz in policy, I can’t Templestowe, Vic. do that.”

Ben Dudman on the rule that stops gay men donating blood if they have had sex in the past three months. Meanwhile, the Red Cross urgently needs donors – one person’s donation can save three lives.

EAR2GROUND

after the author was challenged to produce a book using only 50 different words?

My Word

by Sara Musgrave @Sara_Musgrave

W

hen I was 25, my face was disfigured in a bus crash in South America.

The bus jackknifed then overturned as it sped through red dust. Bodies tumbled then fell onto bodies on the right-hand side of the bus. Skin and limbs tore against asphalt and glass as the bus skidded on its side down the hot tarmac. Eventually it slowed, then stopped.

The smell of smoke. A large man blocking the skylight.

People trapped inside. Rising panic.

When my then-boyfriend Brendan told me weeks later about the moments after the crash, I could remember the large man. I could remember him looking at my blonde hair when I had gone to the back of the bus to catch a couple of hours of sleep. I don’t know if he survived.

I know my blonde hair didn’t.

People shouted at the large man to move. Or perhaps they hauled his body to one side to free up the skylight, now oddly on the side of the bus. The sole escape route.

People jumped or fell. Brendan tried to get me out, but I was uncooperative, and his right arm was shredded, and he needed more help.

“Uncooperative.” A word that would come up a lot after the bus crash.

“The thing is, Sara, you rub people up the wrong way,” said one HR person. “You are abrasive.”

I widen my eyes.

“I was only trying to be co_lla_bo_ra_tive.”

Brendan lost his right little finger in the crash. We told people that he spotted his appendage twitching in the dusty earth and crawled towards it, commando‑style, but as he drew close a giant condor swooped down and snatched it up. Everyone believed our story and Brendan became the South American Bus Crash Hero.

Me? Not so much.

People don’t know what to say when your face is disfigured, so they say nothing.

We waited to be rescued for two hours. It was before mobile phones. I am told that I said, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” then picked up my backpack and stalked off into the desert. It sounds like something I would do. But not something I would say. “Game of soldiers.” Really?

When I was in intensive care in Chile, I smeared Vegemite thick as peanut butter on white bread. “Muy deliciosa,” I said, handing it to my naive nurse. I laughed

and laughed at her revolted expression as she took a huge bite. My mother bought the Vegemite from the airport when she flew from Australia. I suppose she was in shock.

Three people died. I don’t know if they died at the time of impact or while we waited in the desert. Twenty‑three random people standing, slumping, screaming, pacing, crying, laughing and dying. Eventually, another bus came along. The driver agreed to take me and two other critically injured people to hospital. But we had to travel in the luggage compartment in the bottom of the bus. So much red dust.

People got injured on the right-hand side of their bodies. Hands, forearms, elbows torn against tarmac as they reached out for protection as the bus rolled. I must have got confused because I went into the brace position.

Head locked between knees like a well-trained aircraft passenger. Bad move. My face, skull, brain and right arm impacted with the asphalt at 100km per hour.

“What’s that?” he asks. It’s a rare warm day in London, years later. I wear a spaghetti-strapped dress to show off my toned arms. I look down at the grey-black circle on my right upper arm. The size of a clenched fist.

“Birthmark,” I say. “Have you got any?” Want a man to talk, ask him a question. It’s not really a birthmark, it’s an asphalt imprint from the road.

Eleven reconstructive operations had successfully removed the asphalt imprint from my face.

Ten years after the bus crash I told myself the 12th reconstructive operation would be my last. “The anaesthetist will put you under in a moment,” said the nurse at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, fiddling with the ECG stickers on my chest. It’s 7 July 2005 and I’m the first one on the list. A siren sounds, and a red light starts to flash. I’m wheeled out of the operating theatre and abandoned in a remote hospital corridor. I don’t know it yet, but the first bomb has just gone off.

Fifty-two random people killed in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks.

I get off the gurney, pull off the ECG stickers and put on my clothes. I start to walk. Joining hundreds of accidental strangers treading the silent London streets.

Saying nothing is worse than saying something. But saying platitudes is worse than saying nothing.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Everything happens for a reason.

I strongly disagree. Everything does not happen for a reason.

Everything just happens.

11

Life can turn on its head in an instant, writes Sara Musgrave.

10 JUNE 2022

Everything Just Happens

One in three Australians are members of their local library, and it’s no wonder – they’re a community hub, inclusive and welcoming, a place for learning and conversation.

Mekdes Yimam spends the day at her local, and finds it’s not just the books that keep her coming back.

Mekdes Yimam is a writer, editor and student of professional writing and editing at RMIT. Based in Castlemaine, she is editorial director of WordOSaurus. @10000hoursleft

illustrations by Grace Lee

The Book Place

During one lockdown, when a click-and-collect service was in place, the library’s foyer housed an incubator with fertilised chicken eggs.

“Our patrons could engage with something fun and hopeful at the same time as collecting their library items,” says Jess. Videos were also shared to the library’s Facebook page.

A long bench stretches across the glass wall that’s adjacent to the entrance. It looks out onto the quiet alleyway. Power outlets demarcate spaces for patrons and their devices.

Those without internet access are catered for in a nook beyond the foyer, where PCs enable access to services, employment and the wider world. As one member was quoted in the library’s annual report, “Thanks for keeping the wi-fi switched on while you were closed – I was able to Skype my

Conversation is one of the characteristics of a third place. Friendly exchanges and chance encounters with familiar faces cultivate a sense of connection to place and community.

Hayley West, a library services officer, staffs the main desk. She fields queries about membership and the online catalogue, about overdue books and where to find certain titles. She’s also a master conversationalist – chatting to members about local events (“Are you looking forward to the Goldfields Gothic Festival?” she asks one patron), suggesting DVDs to a romance-buff regular named Barbara, and sending kids off on a treasure hunt around the library – all while assisting folks with printing, extending computer sessions and reserving books.

Lorraine le Plastrier is a regular library visitor. We’ve exchanged countless smiles over the years, but today, we chat for the first time, seated at a booth where she’s reviewing dozens of printed copies of her poetry for a collection she’s working on.

A power outlet to Lorraine’s right allows her to charge her wheelchair from the comfortable distance of the table that accommodates her needs. She’s been a member of one library or another ever since she was a schoolgirl in the 1950s. “The library was full of magic. There was an undiscovered sense of what you’d find, what’s new, what’s different,” she says.

“There’s a sense of community here, a sense of belonging.

There’s a deliberate intention to be open-hearted to the community.”

This sense of community extends beyond the library’s walls. Like many libraries around Australia, Goldfields Libraries, of which Castlemaine Library is a part, has a service that helps people living in remote rural communities access books, chats and outreach programs from their homes. David Holmes, a community library officer, brings books to north-central Victorian towns like Wedderburn (population 663), Inglewood (730) and Elmore (776).

“Sometimes you see one or two people a day at an agency, which may seem inconsequential, but it’s days when you have conversations with someone and it means something to them that you see the value in the service,” he says.

David also supports people experiencing social isolation through the Loddon Digital Device Loan Scheme, visiting folks at their homes once a fortnight to provide them with digital skills training. “It means a lot to have someone explain how emails work, or how they can browse the internet on a tablet.”

I wave my goodbyes and step out of the library into the sunny winter afternoon. Next to the footpath, a man is seated on a chair. His laptop balances on its carrier bag that rests on his lap. It’s plugged into an outlet on the library’s facade – every bit of this third place designed for utility, service, connection. He looks at his screen and laughs.

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Libraries provide a “third place” for communities. The term, coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place, refers to places that welcome all community members, foster connection and belonging, and are distinct, in a number of ways, from the typical social environments of the home (first place) and work or school (second place).

Jess Saunders, manager at Castlemaine Library, says, “The impact we have on people’s lives is enormous. One of the antidotes to isolation and loneliness is coming to the library – familiar, welcoming, safe and non-judgemental.”

Castlemaine Library is one of 1600 public library service points – branches, mobile outlets or agencies – dotted across the country. Collectively they serve nine million members, providing a third place for 35 per cent of us.

It’s a vital space, says Dr Tony Matthews, senior lecturer in Urban and Environmental Planning at Griffith University. “If you don’t have enough third places, you’re running a very big risk of fracturing social cohesion, reducing neighbourhood friendliness, declining trust among people, and just generally a lower investment in community.”

son living in London from my car parked outside the library… the only thing that kept me going during lockdown.”

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tuart Winsor sits at a desk in the foyer of central Victoria’s Castlemaine Library. He wears a grey cardigan with a sew-on patch of what first appears to be the Penguin Books logo. He tells me it’s a porg – a penguin‑like creature from The Last Jedi. I’m a day too late to see his Mo Willems socks, a homage to the author of the Elephant and Piggie series, a favourite with Stuart’s young storytime crowd.

“Storytime is possibly the most fun and exhausting thing I do,” he says. He recalls two regulars who’d visit weekly with their grandmother: “One of them, I noticed, was starting to pick up the letters. It was the best. She was so excited. I was so excited. And the grandmother was so excited.

“It happened in the months of build-up to that story. It’s not necessarily me teaching the kids, it’s about giving the whole family that extra space to be. Demonstrating ‘this is how words work, how stories work’.”

That space to be has been important to my son and me, a constant through family separation and house moves. Stuart knows us from years of storytime.

No two days are the same at Alice Springs Public Library – a place that pulses with colour, life and heat.

by Eleanor Hogan @elsewhere07

Eleanor Hogan is the author of Alice Springs and Into the Loneliness.

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hen I arrive at Alice Springs Public Library, the regulars are waiting in their usual positions outside the main doors, poised to rush inside.

Another day over 40°C is forecast; a staff member says that people were waiting to come in half an hour early on the weekend, so keen were they to snatch a few hours of air‑conditioning. During my first summer working in the library, temperatures peaked at 46°C. The library pulsed with people, recording 13,000 visits in one month, roughly half the town’s population.

I began as a library casual while finishing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who, like me, had fallen in love with the desert. Gigging in the library suited me, a bookish nerd who nevertheless tired of my own company after writing for long stretches at home. I enjoyed not only the proximity to books, but the library’s diverse sociality.

What to recommend truckies looking for audiobooks to listen to on a long-haul drive? Could we order resources, bilingual or in Bengali, Panjabi and Nepali, for some of the town’s newest residents to read to their kids? Then there was “Tjilpis’ cinema”, Tjilpi being Pitjantjatjara for the older Aboriginal men who, wearing wi-fi headphones, watch westerns and old AFL finals on a mounted flat screen monitor. The library is, as one librarian put it, a place of cultural rub, where everyone in the community browses side by side.

Offering free wi-fi and a dozen PCs, the library is popular with backpackers, tour guides, jobseekers and Mormons on mission. Assisting people to format and print out résumés, navigating the fiddly myGov and Australian passport websites are mainstays of library customer service. During the COVID-19 interstate restrictions, library staff became adept at filling out online passes for grey nomads caught in border roulette. The closest thing left to an old-style video store, the library carries vast racks of DVDs. When so much is available online, who still watches these? Library regulars who live in caravan parks or town camps, or who camp in wurleys or sleep rough in the saltbushes. People who use prepaid phone plans and can’t afford the NBN, much less subscriptions to streaming services.

Alice Springs Public Library is the largest of its kind in Central Australia, a vast area of 550,000 square kilometres, the traditional homelands of 16 First Nations language groups. Established in 1953 through the Territories Library Service, which seeded free libraries throughout Australia’s remote regions, its first librarian, according to local legend, hijacked a fire truck to bring 2000 books from Darwin to furnish the town library’s shelves when it opened in a former cafe on the main drag. In 1980, a larger, purpose‑built library opened alongside the new council chambers on a block whose eclectic history is a microcosm of Alice Springs. Two date palms arc over the council lawns; planted by Arrernte, Arabanna and Welsh bushman Walter Purula Smith while working for cameleer Saleh “Charlie” Sadadeen, they’re the only remnants of the old Ghantown. Sadadeen, who ran the camel train bringing supplies from Oodnadatta before the rail was laid to Alice Springs, built the town’s first mosque, a brush and iron shed. The army are said to have demolished it to erect a “tent city” when Alice Springs became a military outpost in 1942. Anthropologist Olive Pink later claimed she slept in it before erecting her own “home hut”, where the library’s kids’ section is now located, complete with a small museum that she charged a fee for admission.

After finishing my book, I became the special collections coordinator, managing the library’s historical collection – an idiosyncratic mix of explorers’ journals, anthropological studies, geological surveys, Aboriginal gospel and heavy metal music, and films about remote community life with intriguing titles like Eight Ladies Go Echidna Hunting. While I often field queries from tourists searching for family history, most come from local First Nations people, wanting to see videos of family on Country or to find photos of relatives in old school yearbooks. One woman spotted clips from a film about her father’s stockman days on SBS’ website, which I ordered from the National Film and Sound Archive for her to watch. More challenging was another woman’s request to see a film she remembered, “Y’know, ’bout my father’s Country up north”, which we found after narrowing the field to four Alyawarre language DVDs. Soon after, she was chair‑dancing in delight, watching her father’s Country unfold on a screen.

When the library closes, we usher out lingering patrons, turn off lights and air-conditioning before being met with a blast of heat as we step out in the car park. “Hey, library!”

We hear people call out, as we walk across the library lawns, down the mall, into the supermarket or into the pub. “I know you from the library!” Because where the library’s community ends and the town’s begins cannot be disentangled.

illustrations by Grace Lee

A Library Like Alice

by Amy Fallon @amyfallon

Amy Fallon is a freelance journalist covering human rights, social justice, lifestyle, culture and travel.

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n the shelves of Kingscliff library, you won’t find only books. There are also little packets of joy, opening up a world of opportunity for members in the northern New South Wales town: it’s a seed library.

“I have grown many items, including red papaya trees, pumpkins, chillies, tomatoes, chives, shallots, basil, coriander, dill,” says Megan Byrnes, a regular visitor to the library. “[I’ve] created a food forest at home, which is just amazing and fills my heart with so much joy.”

Kingscliff is one of more than 500 seed libraries that have sprouted in public libraries and other community spaces around the globe since the Gardiner Public Library in New York began loaning out seeds back in 2004.

Seeds are free to members and “borrowed” in a loose sense via the mini-libraries. There’s usually no obligation to donate back, but after the growing season, members are encouraged to save the seeds from these plants and return some to the library for others to use.

Australia’s first seed library arrived in 2013, courtesy of Nundle Public Library, which services a town of just 500 people in NSW’s New England region.

“We didn’t know if it would be successful or not,” Kay Delahunt, the manager of cultural and community services at Tamworth Regional Council, says. “Nine years down the track, it couldn’t be stronger.”

To date, the Central Northern Regional Library, comprising 15 branches including Nundle, has loaned out 4000 packets – everything from zucchini to daikon to kohlrabi.

Byrnes first discovered the seed library at Kingscliff a few years back. She used it at a relatively slow pace in her home garden, planting a variety of herbs and a “very successful pumpkin vine”.

“I didn’t eat one pumpkin – gave them away like they were my babies. I was so proud,” Byrnes says, adding that she devoured all the herbs herself. Since then, she has also grown raspberries, finger limes, myrtles, bush mint, chokos, turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, dragon fruit, taro, passionfruit, mulberries and pomegranates.

Since COVID, Byrnes points out, the price of plants

has “skyrocketed”. The seed library has helped offset her grocery bill and fund her new love of gardening. “The seed library played an integral part of productive gardening for me,” she says.

Through drought and bushfires, seed libraries may also help guarantee the survival of some plants. In March this year, four branches of Mornington Peninsula Shire Library, south of Melbourne, unveiled seed libraries, which will help preserve rare, open-pollinated and heirloom seeds for plants that will thrive in the local climate.

“The idea began during COVID, when we thought people are reverting to more traditional skills and [rediscovering] their gardens, and also had more time for home projects,” says Gail Higgins, library programs and partnership coordinator at Mornington Peninsula Shire.

The librarians also encourage growers to donate seeds too, to ensure diversity and protect food sources for future generations.

This focus on sharing knowledge and resources among diverse groups of people is a key aim for many seed libraries. Internationally, Eating in Public (EIP) have gone one step further.

The Hawaiian-based organisation encourages people to make use of all public spaces, not just bricks-and‑mortar libraries, by planting free food gardens on public land, and setting up sustainable “shared seed” stations and free stores on nature strips and in parks.

Libraries such as these, which help with food security and wellbeing, introduce folks to gardening and create links within the community, are part of a reinvention of public libraries, beyond books. As Dr Wilhelm Peekhaus, an associate professor in education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told The Library Quarterly, “[Libraries] are moving beyond their traditional information gatekeeping roles to deliver innovative services and resources.”

This innovative reimagining doesn’t stop at seed libraries. On the NSW mid-north coast, members of the Port Macquarie-Hastings Library can now borrow ukuleles, exercise equipment, even hire a recording studio. In Melbourne’s Collingwood, public housing residents have set up a clothes library for neighbours in need. Students at Perth’s Murdoch University can “check out” a therapy dog for half-hour sessions from the library.

It’s all about bringing people together, sharing resources, and investing in our future. “Seed libraries are connecting communities together – the young, elderly and everyone in between,” says Byrnes. “The local libraries are developing and igniting passion, conservations, education, resilience.”

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Seed libraries are cropping up all over the place, and they’re helping their communities to grow.

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Sowing the Seed

For card-carrying library lover Nova Weetman, horsey books and Sweet Dreams spelled true love.

Nova Weetman lives in Melbourne. She writes novels for young adults and children, and articles for various newspapers and literary magazines.

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@novaweetman

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grew up in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, along the Yarra River from Warrandyte, in a sleepy orchard town called Wonga Park. My time was spent riding horses, swimming in the Yarra, and reading. We had a hammock outside that I would lie in for hours, with a book balanced on my knees, hoping to be forgotten by my family so I could read in peace.

Wonga Park was too small for a permanent library, and the closest council one was 20 minutes away by car. Instead, we relied on the weekly visit of a mobile library van – a large truck full of books. By the time I was 10, I was allowed to ride my yellow bike alone down the road to the tennis courts where the mobile van parked on Tuesdays between 4pm and 5.30.

The van drivers were not very interested in talking about books. They were there mainly to get their hours up for their truck licences, not for lengthy discussions with pre-teens on the detective skills of Trixie Belden versus Nancy Drew.

But I didn’t mind. My visits were about returning my pile of books and borrowing some more. As many as I could carry in the cane basket on the front of my bike. The book choice was limited, but we could make requests, and if we were lucky those books would arrive the following week with a slip of paper poking from the top with our names in typed letters.

Reading was my world. In primary school, it was bra advice from Judy Blume and then tips for solving murders from Agatha Christie. Desperate to be a detective, I started writing murder mysteries on my old black typewriter, using a suitcase of props for weapon inspiration. Then it was onto Virginia Andrews for some terrifying tales of abandonment and the Sweet Dreams series to learn all about dating a high‑school jock.

Around the time I discovered American teen romance novels, I developed a crush on a boy a couple of years older than me. He went to a private school nearby. His name was Peter, and I knew his family. His brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing.

One Tuesday I arrived at the mobile library, keen for the next dating novel, and Peter happened to be there too. He was browsing in the adult book section at the other end of the van. I pretended to be hunting for a particular title, when all the time I was watching him in his grey school trousers and blue shirt with sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

From that day on, the mobile library became a place of promise. Not only were there books to discover, but there was also a boy to dream about.

illustrations by Grace Lee

Novel Romance

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high school, groaning with resources and custom-built facilities. The library was heaving with books, and we could borrow what we liked. The only restriction was numbers. Five books a week was not enough for me. I needed more.

I’m pretty sure it was my best friend Narelle’s idea that I should interview Year 8 candidates for the job as my boyfriend. I wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend, aside from Peter of course, but if I was to borrow more library books, then I would have to find one. And fast.

The only question I asked the potential boyfriends was if they used their library card. If they didn’t then they stayed on the list. I finally narrowed it down to one boy whose name I cannot remember. And we dated so I could use his library card and take home 10 books that week. We broke up the day I returned them.

Now I have just one library card that allows me to borrow as many books as I choose. And if I borrow wisely, I can dream of romance, or of murder, or of galloping wildly through the bush on a horse that never trips.

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I began spending longer than usual finding something to change into after school, and then riding like the wind down the big hill. I’d dump my bike and climb the three metal steps into the van, hoping he’d already be there. If he wasn’t then my trip was still purposeful, but it lacked the hoped-for excitement, and I’d ride home a little flat. But on the days that we crossed paths, I wouldn’t leave until he did.

Having read almost the entire Sweet Dreams series, I branched out to horsey books about upper-crust English girls who spent all their time at pony club perfecting dressage. Those books let me pretend that it was me in the story, riding my borrowed horse Chokita in the scrub near our house. Chokita would trip over a log or into a hidden hole in the ground and I’d be thrown, and Peter would appear on horseback and save me. There were variations on the saving part, but mostly they would involve being scooped up in his strong arms and carried away.

In real life, Peter never spoke to me. I doubt he even noticed me. I did discover years later that he fancied my mum and he and his friend dared each other to leave anonymous love letters on her car window sometimes. After Mum died, her friend told me and we giggled about it, but somewhere inside my teenage heart was injured, and it took rereading one of my favourite childhood stories, Harriet the Spy, to forget all about Peter and his notes.

When I started high school, part of the appeal was the newly built brutalist-style library. It was an outer suburban

series by Gabriele Galimberti

The Big Picture THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

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Ameriguns The USA has a gun obsession, and Gabriele Galimberti offers us a close look at it.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” says Katie, whose Texas business sells home decor with quotations from the Second Amendment.

by Lilian Bernhardt lbernhardt_

Lilian Bernhardt is a writer and editor based in Melbourne.

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FOR MORE, GO TO GABRIELEGALIMBERTI.COM.

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he United States is home to more guns than people, and despite comprising just four per cent of the global population, it hosts 46 per cent of all privately owned firearms.

“The proportion is completely unbalanced,” reflects Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti, via Zoom.

Galimberti’s latest photo series Ameriguns is a portrait of American gun culture, which captures firearm owners with their collections. The two-year project began when, driven by curiosity, Galimberti entered a gun store in rural Kansas. Uncovering what he describes as “a different planet”, Galimberti asked a customer purchasing a gun if it was his first. Soon after, Galimberti found himself in the man’s home, photographing him with his 50 firearms.

“He was proud to show his arsenal in the same way that a friend would show their collection of vinyl records,” Galimberti reflects in The Ameriguns book. It was in this moment that he decided to journey across the country to document “the part of America that loves guns”.

Galimberti travelled to 30 states and spent days at a time with his subjects to understand what bonds Americans to their guns. The most commonly held value among his subjects is rooted in the ideal of freedom, and the right to bear arms, enshrined within the Constitution. Of this, Galimberti is critical.

“The meaning of the [Second] Amendment was connected to a certain situation the country was living in that moment, but now, 200 years after, everything has changed, so it doesn’t make sense anymore,” he reflects.

For some, guns are a passion connected to sport and hunting. For others, guns represent a stylistic and aesthetic pleasure connected to self-expression.

Guns are also, for many, rooted in a sense of tradition, a generational rite of passage. “When you are around age six, seven or eight, some of your relatives might say, ‘Okay let’s go out and shoot guns,’ so it’s the same way we learn how to bike,” Galimberti says.

One portrait holds particular significance to Galimberti in the wake of the recent school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers lost their lives. Taken in Texas, 11-year‑old Josh stands gun in hand with his family and their collection. “The parents were really proud to tell me he built the gun himself with parts they bought from the internet,” Galimberti says.

For him, the photo demonstrates the ease with which American children can access weaponry.

Ameriguns has circulated around the world in the aftermath of the latest shooting. Galimberti attributes its success to his visual formula, used in all his previous works, in which he focuses on the arrangement of objects.

“With this project, I think I was able to combine a simple language with a difficult topic, so that’s why I think it’s working quite well and is powerful.”

Gun influencer and former Marine Torrell Jasper (aka @blackrambotv) relaxes by the pool.

This image won first prize for portraits at the 2021 World Press Photo Contest.

Danyela D’Angelo keeps hundreds of firearms locked away in a vault.

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Avery Skipalis discovered her love for firearms after joining the Air Force at 17. She taught her sons how to handle guns at ages 5 and 7.

“Compulsive buyers and serial collectors” is how Joel and Lynne describe themselves. Their 11-year‑old son Josh carries a gun he built himself. Five-year-old Paige XXX can only shoot with parental supervision, for now.

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Robert Baldwin Jr never leaves the house unarmed and keeps all of his guns behind a bulletproof window in his home in Las Vegas.

Letter to My Younger Self

Don’t Play It So Cool Actor Peter Dinklage talks about Game of Thrones, playing the romantic, and why diversity makes stories more interesting.

by Adrian Lobb The Big Issue UK @adey70

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would definitely tell my 16-year-old self not to start smoking cigarettes. Because that’s when I started sneaking them from Dad’s ashtrays and from friends of mine – and it lasted way too long, deep into adulthood. Oh boy, and this was the 80s. What a great haircut I had! It was feathered and fluffy and I’m also not sure about that gold chain I tried to rock for a few months, or the period where men’s cologne became a thing.

Like a lot of teenagers, I fell victim to that spell where you go dark and get sullen and think you know more than everyone else. I was starting to get into Bukowski and Hemingway – all these darker male journeys, from the cowboys of Sam Shepard to Hemingway’s heroes, that had nothing in common with a kid from New Jersey. But somehow they still inspired me to live on the outside. I was at an all-boys Catholic prep school, which was an incredible education but I was on the periphery, socially. I had just a couple of friends and we put on plays.

Acting was not so inspiring for someone my size.

So I thought, I’m not going to do that – I’m going to take creative control and write stories I want to see. Then you get a bit older, you meet actual writers and work

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laugh. “Isn’t that the guy who owns casinos?” But I’d tell him to always stand behind the right thing, the morally sound thing and never be afraid to speak your mind. Although some people make fun of you, because you’re an actor and what right do you have to speak your mind about anything political?

Just don’t be afraid.

Who cares who you offend? There’s right and there’s wrong out there – and you have always got to be on the right side of history.

If I could relive one day, it would be the birth of my children. That’s TOP: BEING THE ROMANTIC WITH WIFE, DIRECTOR everything. It changes your whole ERICA SCHMIDT life. So I’d say get ready, because BOTTOM: PUNKING OUT WITH WHIZZY IN 1994 it’s not about you anymore. Even though you’re an actor, it’s not about you anymore! And that’s hard for an actor. But for any of us, when we become a parent for the first time it changes everything.

My father passed away when I was in Sweden about 18 years ago and I would love to have one last conversation with him. He was very sick but was holding on for a while. I said, “Dad, I have to go to Sweden but I’ll be right back.” I was only going for four days. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back.” Two days after I got there, I got the phone call. It would have been nice to have been there when he left this mortal coil, just to give him a big hug and tell him I love him.

Who says beautiful white people own the rights to romantic stories? Unfortunately, Hollywood has always done that through the decades, but I feel like we’re opening up that box more these days. There are love stories outside that Hollywood box and it’s making movies more interesting. Writers are more diverse than ever and they are telling their personal stories. I’m just surprised it has taken this long.

I wanted to play lead roles – romantic or not – because the lead gets to tell the whole story. To thread the needle from point A to point Z. It’s a real craft to keep the continuity of an entire film going if you’re the protagonist telling the story, as opposed to supporting parts that come in, chew it up a bit, then leave. That’s the real challenge. And, you know, usually the lead in most movies has romance in their life. And, being a romantic myself…

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PHOTOS BY JESSE DITTMAR/REDUX/HEADPRESS, GETTY. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE BIG ISSUE UK , ED#1494, BIGISSUE.COM

with great writers and realise, Oh, I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. But I’m glad I tried my hand at it.

Then you find your tribe of like-minded individuals, they start writing roles for you and say, “I know you don’t want to be an actor, but can you please act in this because I think we’d have fun? Let’s do this play downtown somewhere.” I was always a performer.

And so they dragged me back into it.

I tried to be in a punk band for a couple of years but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. So it collapsed after a couple of fun, drunken years, playing CBGB and all that. My heroes were actors and writers. I have a lot of actor friends, men my age who really were inspired when they saw Sam Shepard’s True West with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise [in a production that ran off Broadway from 1982-84]. And I’m one of them.

It was theatre that spoke to me. It was anarchistic and poetic. There’s a reason why there’s a movie called Being John Malkovich, because he had this mysterious quality you couldn’t put your finger on. He was unlike anything I’d seen. It must have been like when Brando first came out and did On the Waterfront.

I like strong, not-giving-a-shit actors, the ones where you could tell they aren’t getting their hair redone after every take. Even though he didn’t make many movies, I was always a huge fan of John Cazale. Also Ruth Gordon, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger. They have the common element of not giving a shit and going all in.

If I could tell my younger self about my career, he would probably roll his eyes – he did that a lot – and say, really? Are we going to be an actor? But he would think Game of Thrones was pretty cool. He’d regret some of the decisions I made but I would tell him that’s part of life. You have to pay the bills one way or another.

Fame is an abstract thing. I’m glad it happened now I’m a bit older. I’m married with children and had been that way for a while before Game of Thrones made me very recognisable. I’d already had a long adult life and had confidence in who I was as a person, so it didn’t ever define me. When you’re younger, that can end up defining how people see you, so I avoided the pitfalls of that.

Be more honest if you like someone. Don’t play it so cool. That’s what I would tell my younger self about love, but he wouldn’t believe that, because cool gets the girl, right? Being honest can be off-putting.

It can scare people away. So I don’t know if I would take that advice or even give that advice. But the big one is probably, as Kenny Rogers said, know when to fold ’em. If you feel like you’re desperately falling for someone and it’s not being reciprocated, walk away.

I’d warn my teenage self that there is a guy called Donald Trump and he is going to become president. He wouldn’t believe me. He’s going to

Fruits of Their Labour Hip-hop artist L-FRESH the LION ponders a favourite painting, and shares why he was born to tell his family’s stories.

L-FRESH the LION is a hip-hop artists who was born and raised in South-West Sydney. @lfreshthelion

illustration by Michelle Pereira

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ne of my favourite paintings is of a Nihang Singh sitting cross‑legged overlooking a farm. I remember the first time I saw it. The deep royal blue of his baana and the lush green fields attracted my attention to this moment in time. He is an elderly Nihang, a warrior. His strong, white and flowing beard comes midway down his chest, exuding wisdom. He looks relaxed. I assume content too, gazing upon his crops as if recalling memories, as I imagine one does as they approach their final days. He, no doubt, has stories to tell. What made this painting even more memorable to me was the caption that accompanied it: I was a soldier so my son could be a farmer.

And my son was a farmer so that his son could be a poet.

It makes me think of my grandparents with a

sense of gratitude and fondness. A glowing warmth in my chest. Nana ji and nani ji. It was my mother’s parents who made the long migration journey from Jagraon in Panjab to Glenfield in South-West Sydney. They left behind not only a very successful timber and furniture business but also their family and friends. They came to reside in a place they couldn’t relate to culturally. A place that viewed them as strange, exotic, backwards and sometimes dangerous and unintelligent. They moved to a place that perceived them as lesser, their culture and language as funny and inferior, and the colour of their skin as “diverse”.

If they were aware of that context of mid‑80s Australia and what it meant for them, they never showed it. I can’t ever recall seeing my grandparents sad, frustrated, burned out or defeated. They were the opposite of that, always

THIS IS AN EDITED EXTRACT FROM ANOTHER AUSTRALIA , EDITED BY WINNIE DUNN, OUT NOW.

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dad chopping them down with his machete, me and my brother taking turns to carry them to the garage where they are fed through a home-rigged sugar-cane juicer run by an old garage-door motor. The machine squeezes the juice out into a steel bowl, some of which goes into jugs or glass bottles and then straight into the fridge.

The rest goes directly into Mum’s big pot, which rests on top of the same garage gas burner that we all used to sit around in my grandparents’ makeshift kitchen, starting the process of making the gur that will end up in our cups of cha or hot milk. Then there’s the scene that ties it all together for me: seeing my dad sitting on a wooden outdoor chair, wrapped in a characteristically Panjabi shawl as if being embraced and protected from the morning cold by generations of Sikh ancestors. Machete in one hand and sugar cane in the other. Chopping the cane, chewing it and spitting out the remains – all the while overseeing his version of the village farm, like the Nihang Singh in the painting. When I see him back there, I find myself wondering what he’s thinking about as he chops and chews away. Is he reminiscing about his rangla Panjab, where as a child he and his friends would chase after the tractors bearing sugar cane stacked layer upon layer in a pyramid, the ends hanging off the trailer like an oversized hand-me-down hoodie? Does he imagine trying to grab a cane off the back while dodging the long, flailing stick of the guard sitting on top of the pyramid? I remember my dad describing that memory to me. At the time we were in Panjab, standing on the side of the road at a pitstop where trucks would load or unload their cargo, which was mostly fresh produce. Our taxi had a flat tyre and we were waiting for the driver’s contact to drop off a spare. The sun was setting as we waited, and approaching us on the road was a slowly moving pyramid of sugar cane. We both laughed when some kids ran up to the trailer, evading the swipes from the resolute sugar-cane defender’s long stick.

My family dedicated their lives to planting seeds so I guess it was only right that I became their poet, their storyteller. It’s only because of their journey, their never-tired-in-the-face-of-hardship mindset, their unshakeable discipline to remain firm in their faith, culture and their self-made village in Australia, that I was able to become a songwriter and an artist.

I may not have walked in their shoes, but I carry the stories they never got the opportunity to tell. They were too busy building a foundation that would allow my younger brother and me to be brave, bold, ambitious and creative.

Every time I write, I’m aware of what it took to get here. Every song is purposeful. Every bar is fiercely passionate and every word carries weight. Nothing goes to waste, just like in my nani ji’s garden. Spoken like a true farmer’s son. I have to tell their stories because if I don’t, then who will?

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smiling, optimistic and beaming with an energy that was both life-giving and magnetic. I say magnetic because they went from knowing no-one (having followed their eldest child and her husband to Australia), to their humble home in Glenfield becoming a community hub for Sikhs and Panjabis from across the entire South-West Sydney region. From having no support to becoming a support for the community.

On any given day of the week there was always a community aunty or uncle popping in with their young kids, on top of my own big family of four aunties and two uncles – most married and with multiple kids of their own. The front door was hardly ever locked. Their home was a hub, for real. They dedicated so much of their time to family and to our community. They volunteered at the local emerging Gurdwaras religiously, helping to establish them as safe community spaces.

I have so many warm memories of my nani ji, my mum and my aunties cooking in Gurdwara kitchens or in their own home kitchens or over portable gas burners in the garage for Sikh community paath and kirtan programs.

I can recall their laughs spreading and embracing everybody in close proximity, welcoming more hands and laughs into the kitchen.

I think of my grandparents and my parents as the farmers, both metaphorically and literally. My nani ji’s Glenfield backyard resembled a community plot of vegetables nestled between two homes in a pind.

Countless greens for her saag, okra for the sabzi, and strawberries.

My nani ji produced her own homemade compost in an upside-down black bin that us kids used as a makeshift wicket in our highly competitive backyard cricket matches. She also had a mango tree in the front yard, which only ever blessed us with one fruit. Once my nani ji saw it, she took extra care of the tree that was giving birth to this gift. She watched it day by day and her excitement grew as the baby mango grew. She would converse with the tree, showering it with positive affirmations while feeding it with the garden hose. Her excitement over harvesting her first mango continued to grow, until one morning a passer-by took it from the tree, a thief in the night, leaving my nani ji in tears when she realised she had been robbed. I’ve never seen anyone as passionate about their crops as her. A farmer through and through, from the pind to the burbs. Just like my father.

Our Glenfield backyard is surely one of a kind.

Pumpkin vines on the left with the herbs, tomatoes, chilli trees, spinach and okra. Lemons and oranges along the back fence with the kale, eggplant and capsicums; and sweet potato, carrots, garlic and karela near the row of sugar cane along the right-side fence.

Yes, sugar cane in Glenfield. It is my father’s favourite.

Don’t ask him how he did it, he just did. His sugar cane produces enough raw cane to chew, juice and boil down into gur for my entire extended family and then some.

It’s a scene, for real, come sugar-cane harvest season: my

by Ricky French @frenchricky

PHOTO BY JAMES BRAUND

T

he night had promised so much. We were ready – pumped, you might say. But the final whistle was so deflating you could hear the hiss of our hopes dissipate into the cool air above AAMI Park.

That’s what makes sport so powerful, the extreme emotions it arouses. Sport might be the winner on the night, but it is also the loser.

My cousin has been a professional soccer (“football” to the civilised world) player for 10 years, debuting for Wellington Phoenix FC in 2012 when he was 19. Going into the A-League elimination final last week, the formula for him was simple: win and the team survives another week. Lose and that’s the end of your career. They lost.

Twenty-nine seems so young to be ending a career, but in professional sport that’s the way it is. Ten years at the top is a long time – I think most soccer players who make the grade in Australia get three or four, if they’re lucky. But retiring young from sport has always been in my family. My uncle Bruce in New Zealand retired from rugby in the mid-1970s when he was 20, just as he was tipped to be named as an All Black. So why did he retire? He said it was getting too serious and he played only because he wanted to have fun. He was right about the serious part: he was playing at the top level in a country where rugby is a religion. Blokes he played alongside would go on to be knighted and become household names. I don’t think Bruce’s father (my grandfather) ever got over the disappointment of his retirement.

I know how Grandpa Barry feels. I think I’m taking my cousin’s retirement harder than my cousin is. He seems at peace with his decision, whereas I’m wondering what there is to live for come soccer season. It’s fun playing sport vicariously through the exploits of others, and I guess I don’t have any other choice. While I may have inherited the skinny bastard genes and some basic ball skills, I didn’t inherit any exceptional talent, and I certainly didn’t take

advantage of my youth. When it comes to sport, I blossomed late. Far too late.

Okay, “blossom” might not be the right word. I took up running a couple of years ago, partly because I worked out that exercise is the best thing you can do to help you feel good, and partly because I was quite good at it. I can probably beat you in a race. Now, this might not seem like much of an achievement to you, but it means a lot to me. That’s because I’m stupidly competitive. I don’t mind who it is I beat – little kids, grandmas recovering from open-heart surgery, people who didn’t realise they were racing – just so long as I win. I still beat myself up over a game of table tennis I lost at a pub years ago.

Because I treat every casual fun run like an Olympic final, I’ve started getting injured for no apparent reason. I’m also getting old. The other night I strained tendons in my hamstrings just by sitting on the couch watching Lego Masters. That hardly seems fair.

Having to retire from running would be devastating for me, and it isn’t even my job.

We writing hacks tend to never retire – we can’t afford to, for a start. Also, you can’t shut us up. I can just see myself as an 80-year-old, sitting in a caravan park in some country town, banging out a column about the good old days when my legs worked, when I could skip to the amenities block in the middle of the night without the need for anti-inflammatories.

That’s why sport is so intoxicating and real life is such a toil. I don’t think I could have handled the fleetingness of being a professional athlete. But you never know… the Wellington Phoenix are currently short a right wingback…

Ricky is a writer and musician who can run faster than you…except when his hammies are angry.

Fellow columnist Fiona Scott-Norman is taking a short break.

10 JUN 2022

Good Sport

I don’t mind who it is I beat – little kids, grandmas recovering from open-heart surgery, people who didn’t realise they were racing – just so long as I win.

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Ricky

Neneh Cherry

Music

Cherry on Top

by Doug Wallen @dougwallen

Doug Wallen is a freelance writer and editor based in Victoria, and a former music editor of The Big Issue.

PHOTO BY JUERGEN TELLER

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Swedish singer and rapper Neneh Cherry keeps things collaborative on her latest covers album that revisits her best-loved bangers.

the music. She often talks about how she first heard ‘Buffalo Stance’ during one particular summer.”

As more artists came aboard, the source material grew beyond that first album. Greentea Peng and Honey Dijon each chose to put their individual spin on ‘Buddy X’ from 1992’s Homebrew, while ANOHNI does a moving version of ‘Woman’ from Man (1996). Other contributors include Jamilia Woods, Sudan Archives, Kelsey Lu and Seinabo Sey. That bright collision of globe-trotting voices recalls Cherry’s own beginnings, combining her early upbringing in Stockholm with a stint in America (where her stepfather, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, was teaching) and a formative run in London’s post‑punk scene as a teenager.

The Versions is also just the latest in Cherry’s diverse track record of collaborations. She has co-written songs with Lenny Kravitz and REM’s Michael Stipe and provided vocal turns for everyone from Gorillaz and The Avalanches to Peter Gabriel and her half-brother, Eagle-Eye Cherry. “My whole life feels like a collaboration,” says Cherry. “Left to my own devices, I’m a pretty slow person. I don’t know what I would achieve.

It’s really about the exchange of ideas. I go off and

THE VERSIONS IS OUT NOW.

10 JUN 2022

My whole life feels like a collaboration.

write by myself, but at the end of the day it’s the collaborative execution that makes it happen.”

While it may look on paper like Cherry stepped away from music between the mid-1990s and The Cherry Thing (2012) album with experimental jazz ensemble The Thing, she spent those intervening years collaborating too. She joined CirKus, a band featuring her husband, the producer Cameron McVey (Massive Attack, Portishead), on top of raising a family. Cherry always intended to return to the fold, but it wasn’t until The Thing came along that she saw a way back in.

“I was at a place where I didn’t know how to reconnect with myself,” she says. “Working with The Thing became it, because we had such a powerful thing between us. It managed to take me to that really brutally honest place where you’re able to let go of all the overthinking and fears. It really helped me tap into intuition, almost like my ancestors. So it was deep, but also very natural and quite simple.”

Heralded by critics and fans alike, The Cherry Thing saw Cherry reinterpret tracks by Suicide, The Stooges, Ornette Coleman (who often played with her stepfather) and Martina Topley‑Bird, among others.

That makes The Versions all the more resonant, putting her on the other end of a covers album. It was also thrilling for her to behold new versions of some of her oldest material. Aside from regular samples of ‘Buffalo Stance’, Cherry says her songs are not widely covered – though she did once walk into a club on the island Martinique and witness an impressive take on ‘7 Seconds’, her 1994 hit with Youssou N’Dour.

After The Cherry Thing, Cherry made Blank Project (2014) and Broken Politics (2018) with English musician/producer Kieran Hebden, also known as Four Tet. Both albums favour skittering, minimalist backing, blending jazz and electronics with resourceful vocal approaches that include spoken word and more expressive turns.

While Cherry concedes that lockdown was “definitely not a music-filled creative space for me,” she’s been occupied with writing a memoir. She would love to start touring again next year, after the book is released, and ideally play some shows and release standalone singles without being beholden to an album. After her experience with The Versions, she’s also keen to reincorporate that earlier material into her live show again – and perhaps even try her hand at some of the new versions. That’s quite a happy result for someone who always aims to move forward and never do the obvious.

“In a way, this journey is carrying me on to the next place,” Cherry muses. “And it’s made it possible for me to reflect and look at the music from a new place too.”

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hen Neneh Cherry debuted with 1988’s ‘Buffalo Stance’, she voiced a striking message of empowerment over a party‑starting collage of hip-hop, dance and pop motifs. A top five hit in the US and UK, that postmodern ode to a resilient attitude was a fitting introduction to an artist who has remained just as self-possessed in the three decades since.

Now 58, the Swedish singer, rapper and songwriter has moved fluidly across scenes and styles without repeating herself. Even when curating a reissue package for her 1989 album Raw Like Sushi in 2020, Cherry decided to complement the existing swathe of remixes with full-blown reinterpretations from younger artists. That idea has culminated in The Versions, which sees Australia’s own Sia tackle ‘Manchild’ and fellow Swedish multi-hyphenates Robyn and Mapei update ‘Buffalo Stance’ with producer Dev Hynes (Blood Orange).

“It’s a way of bringing new life rather than regurgitating,” says Cherry over a morning Zoom call from her West London home. With that in mind, she made a wish list of female-led artists and began reaching out: “Robyn was the first, because I’m quite close to her. I also know that she grew up with

MATT ROGERS, BOWEN YANG AND TOMAS MATOS FIRE AWAY

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Playing With Fire Rambunctious queer rom-com Fire Island is putting the pride in Pride and Prejudice.

by Michael Sun @mlchaelsun

Michael Sun is a writer and critic who has been published in The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Sydney Review of Books and more. He works in culture and lifestyle at Guardian Australia.

PHOTO BY JEONG PARK. COURTESY OF SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES © 2022 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Fire Island

Small Screen

I

J

oel Kim Booster is peeling away his T-shirt to show me the tattoo running down his shoulder.

It’s bright in his Hollywood home, where he’s dialling in from, but our connection is grainy – it’s hard to make out the row of letters, even as the sunlight illuminates it briefly. He reads it aloud: “Of rears and vices I saw enough.” A quote from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

“There is a little bit of disagreement among scholars,” Booster says, “but most agree that this is a joke about anal sex in the navy. [Austen] was on it. She knew shit!”

It makes sense that Austen also figures in Booster’s new film, Fire Island, a rambunctious gay rom-com that he wrote and co-stars in, alongside long-time friend and fellow comedian Bowen Yang. Fire Island plays like a loose interpolation of Pride and Prejudice, except the stuffy ranks of British aristocracy are replaced with something much more treacherous: heaving swarms of gay men in various states of undress who, each summer, congregate at the mecca off the coast of New York from which the movie draws its title.

The two demographics aren’t that different. Like Austen’s world of delicate decorum, Fire Island is composed of rituals. There’s the ferry over from the mainland, and its coagulation of disparate queer

and ossified hierarchies. They play Noah and Howie respectively, a pair of best friends in a coterie of vacationers led by veteran actor Margaret Cho as their ageless house mother. Thanks to some meet-cute magic, they find themselves in the company of higher society: a country-club set of polos and penny loafers who cast instant judgement on their gauche and gaudy ways. At least initially – before Noah meets his own Mr Darcy (How to Get Away With Murder’s Conrad Ricamora).

“So many of the things that happen in the movie – good and bad – are ripped directly from the headlines of my life,” Booster says. “I remember going to a [Fire Island] party…and immediately the whole party turned to look at me, and then said, ‘I think you have the wrong house’.

“When there’s no-one else to oppress us, we find ways to oppress each other. The lack of straight people brings about this kind of freedom that is such a double‑edged sword.”

That depiction of the queer community’s underbelly lends Fire Island a lived-in legitimacy, even within its rom-com fantasy. It manages to eschew the sanitisation of some of its forebears (the gay watershed Love, Simon comes to mind) in favour of a nuanced discussion of gay men’s long-held obsession with wealth and whiteness.

In one pivotal scene, Yang breaks down: his character

So many of the things that happen in the movie – good and bad – are ripped directly from the headlines of my life.

Howie has turned up empty-handed after a week-long pursuit of love and lust. The weight of unrequited desire has taken its toll.

“A lot of the conversations between Noah and Howie are modelled after conversations that [Joel] and I have had over the years where we’ve confided in each other all these peculiarities in gay culture when it comes to Asian people,” Yang says. “Just how bizarre it is to not feel desired in this place that is supposed to liberate [us].”

Fire Island, then, is as much about the broad church of queerness as it is an ode to Booster and Yang’s friendship. “We both came of age as gay men in the height of ‘no fats, no femmes, no Asians’,” Booster says. They found in each other not just solace, but a new resistance to forge their own paths in a community – an industry – which often seemed too small to accommodate them.

“We just both got tired of waiting around. It’s something so special for Bowen and I,” he laughs at the cheesiness, “[because] we don’t know if we’ll ever get to work together in this kind of capacity again.

“Who knows how fast Hollywood will move to catch up with us?”

FIRE ISLAND WILL STREAM ON DISNEY+ FROM 17 JUNE.

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tribes – the moneyed, side-eyeing types; the nervous first‑timers; the theatre gays; the seasoned partiers.

There are the annual soirees: happy hours and beachside bacchanals alike. And there’s the lingo.

“Jane Austen invented shade,” Booster says. “She was writing the way people were awful to each other, but with so much plausible deniability…like, ‘Oh, no, that’s not what I meant’. That is just the way we communicate so often with other gay men, for better or worse.”

It was on the island, in a moment of calm amid the chaos, that inspiration for the film struck. Yang, best known for his Emmy-nominated Saturday Night Live performances, remembers the moment vividly: “It feels sort of apocryphal now.”

Booster had brought a copy of Pride and Prejudice on their first trip together, and turned to his companion by the pool.

“He goes, ‘Thinking about it now, there’s so many things in this book that apply to [this] closed circuit of an environment’,” Yang recalls. “The way that people treat each other, the way they project their anxieties about class, wealth, dating, who’s good enough…that all applies very succinctly to this place.”

Like the Bennets before them, Booster and Yang’s characters are propelled into a world of hidden barbs

10 JUN 2022

WRITER AND ACTOR JOEL KIM BOOSTER

John Darnielle

Books 32

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Mountain Goats frontman and novelist John Darnielle talks true crime, rubbernecking and morality.

by Doug Wallen @dougwallen

Doug Wallen is a freelance writer and editor based in Victoria, and a former music editor of The Big Issue.

PHOTO BY LALITREE DARNIELLE

The Devil in the Details

An ardent fan of true crime in his teens, Darnielle now has a more tempered relationship with the genre.

“The appeal of it has waned considerably over time,” he says. “But what does it say about the me who was interested in that as an angry 19-year-old? What itch was that scratching?”

He’s not setting out to disparage the genre, but he is interested in how true crime tends towards lurid accounts read by rubbernecking outsiders – and how some writers take a questionable moral stance while relating these events. In Devil House, Gage is taken to task for the impact of one of his previous books, thanks to the mother of someone directly involved with the murders that he detailed. We’re then pulled into that older crime as well as the murky Devil House Murders, amid stranger turns in the book’s ambitious seven‑part structure.

This slow-burn literary approach to horror themes will be familiar to fans of Darnielle’s 2014 debut novel, Wolf in White Van, which highlighted a devoted subculture of analogue gamers and a single startling act of violence. Similarly, his 2017 follow‑up Universal Harvester alternated between three ominous

DEVIL HOUSE IS OUT NOW.

10 JUN 2022

But what does it say about the me who was interested in that as an angry 19-year-old? What itch was that scratching?

storylines, two of which featured disturbing material unearthed from video cassettes. Each of his books could be seen as giving a voice to outsiders and following obsessive trains of thought to quite intense sets of conclusions.

“I try not to think too deeply about what my broader theme is when I’m writing,” Darnielle says, responding to that idea of connective tissue across his novels.

“You’re pursuing something and you don’t know what it is. I’m writing to figure out what I’m thinking, not to express something I’ve already thought through. It’s an exploratory process.”

Raised in California in the 1970s, Darnielle wanted to be a writer from a young age. But after dreaming of crafting sci-fi or horror tales, he found himself writing poetry as a young man, and then falling into the music business almost accidently with his idiosyncratic songwriting project The Mountain Goats. Defined by his spontaneous vocals and penetrating lyrics, which dealt exclusively in fiction before albums like 2005’s starkly autobiographical The Sunset Tree, that band grew from a cult pursuit releasing lo-fi cassettes in the mid-1990s to an acclaimed ensemble that now has around 20 albums to its name.

Darnielle’s first official venture into fiction outside of his band came when he turned a sideline of music criticism into a pitch for the album-based book series 33⅓. But rather than write the usual novella-length essay about an iconic album, he used the format of short fiction to unpack his thoughts about Black Sabbath’s 1971 record Masters of Reality. The day in 2008 when he handed in the final version of that book, Darnielle wrote what wound up being the first chapter of Wolf in White Van. But with something as dense as Devil House, which features three sets of mirrored sections as well as an ornately typeset centrepiece in which he affects Chaucerian language, there was a bit more planning involved. Darnielle thought at length about the possibilities of structure, writing certain prompts and outline concepts on the chalkboard in his family’s kitchen so that he would notice them when walking past or contemplate them while cooking dinner.

Between his books and his music – which requires long periods of touring – it’s easy to imagine the idea of work-life balance being especially formidable for Darnielle. Yet he appears remarkably in tune with both careers, in addition to being a husband, and a father of two. He keeps an office outside of the home as well as one within, and he makes it a rule not to write fiction while on the road. Like so many of his detail-fixated characters, he seems to have it down to a science.

“It’s all work,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just like having two jobs. The main thing is organising your time.”

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A

s a writer who is repeatedly drawn to themes of violence and obsession, it was perhaps inevitable that John Darnielle would eventually turn his eye to true crime. The American songwriter-turned-novelist deconstructs the booming genre in his third novel, Devil House, a horror‑adjacent meditation boasting a uniquely nested structure and an initial guide in true-crime chronicler Gage Chandler.

Moving into a sagging California home that was once the scene of a much-publicised double murder, Gage begins unpacking the would-be true account of teenagers who set up shop in the building’s shuttered porn outlet and idly filled it with Satanic imagery before the killings occurred. But Gage quickly departs from the book he’s been hired to write, instead following a sprawl of red herrings and linked cases that muddy his convictions about building his career around other people’s suffering.

Gage explains that he’s pursuing “a novel about stories and who gets to tell them” – an illuminating phrase that sets the stage for Darnielle’s preoccupations throughout Devil House. “It’s kind of a thesis statement for the book, and it also gets you ready for what’s about to happen,” Darnielle admits by phone from his home in Durham, North Carolina.

Film Reviews

Aimee Knight Film Editor @siraimeeknight

T

he German Film Festival continues across the country this month, showcasing the best in new release and classic cinema from Deutschland, Austria and Switzerland. This year’s centrepiece is Dear Thomas – the biopic of author and poet Thomas Brasch (Albrecht Schuch, Berlin Alexanderplatz), whose father snitches to the Stasi in 1968, landing the young writer in prison for “anti-state agitation”. Shot in subtle black and white, it’s a story of artistic courage in the face of pervasive censorship.

Similarly inspired by real events is Maggie Peren’s The Forger, which follows Jewish graphic artist Samson “Cioma” Schönhaus in 1940s Berlin as he forges passports and identity documents for those evading Nazi detection.

Another highlight is The Black Square – a darkly comic crime caper about a bumbling art thief (Bernhard Schütz, A Most Wanted Man), his protégé (Jacob Matschenz, Undine), and their black-market sale to a Russian oligarch, which goes down the gurgler aboard a luxury cruise liner.

These Australian premieres are complemented by a retrospective program curated by the folks at the Goethe-Institut. In honour of the organisation’s 50th anniversary on local shores, the Melbourne and Sydney teams have selected five exemplary German films – one from each decade in which the Institut has operated in Australia. There’s The Tin Drum (1979), Solo Sunny (1980), Run Lola Run (1998), Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Victoria (2015). AK

HATS OFF TO SOLO SUNNY

THE KITCHEN BRIGADE 

It’s a familiar narrative: talented but strong-willed chef who yields to no-one strikes out on their own. Except here, it’s not a substance-addicted chef (á la Bradley Cooper in Burnt) or one with anger management issues (Erik Thomson in Aftertaste). It’s the industrious sous chef Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy), dismissed for putting her own twist on a key dish. Down on her luck, Cathy becomes the head chef at a hostel for unaccompanied migrant minors awaiting their French permits. Treading a predictable path from consternation to admiration for the young boys, who become her kitchen helpers, Cathy’s evolution is heartwarming, if simplistic. Despite its wellmeaning examination of the treatment of asylum seekers in France – exemplified by one harrowing sequence when the boys are forced to verify their ages through the discredited practice of bone tests – the film veers into white saviourism and respectability politics. Sweet yet reductive, it shines most brightly when Cathy holds the boys to a high standard, one they meet. SONIA NAIR A HERO

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU



This film’s title might not accurately describe its protagonist, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi), as he walks out of prison into a weekend furlough. His plan is to repay a debt and secure his permanent release, but it devolves into something less definite. Though he appears on TV for an apparent good deed, his creditor isn’t swayed by promises or reputation. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi (himself involved in legal issues, indicted for plagiarising this story from a student) skilfully assigns naturalistic elements meaning. Characters are framed and constrained by doorways, glass screens, offices and stairs. Music is almost always diegetic. And the gazes and looks – they imply a whole web of relationships, hopes, anger and disappointments. These elements converge in a quietly significant scene, where music floats over from a nearby instrument maker while Rahim decides what to do next. A Hero is not just about Rahim’s responses to legal restrictions and social pressures, but how much his choices affect the people around him. MIKE LIM

BENEDICTION 

Terence Davies’ sombre biopic of WWI poet and dissenter Siegfried Sassoon avoids the pitfalls of patriotic nostalgia, instead portraying a man navigating his repressed sexuality in a society determined to ignore the horrors of war. Creative cinematography elevates what could be a middling historical drama into something more nuanced, with impressive performances of Sassoon in youthful disillusionment (Jack Lowden, Dunkirk) and caustic old age (Peter Capaldi, Doctor Who). Witty dialogue fizzes as Sassoon mingles with London’s post-war circle of “bright young things”, but any joyous moments of decadence are curtailed by confronting black-and-white footage of the trenches. Lowden perfectly captures Sassoon’s tender vulnerability in his ill-fated queer love affairs. Davies’ tendency to linger in moments of silence occasionally grows wearying, but despite its relatively slow pacing, Benediction is a beautifully rendered portrait of an artist beset by tragedy, with a cathartic final scene bound to provoke tears. LOUISE CAIN

Small Screen Reviews

Claire Cao Small Screens Editor @clairexinwen

EVIL SEASON 3  | 12 JUNE ON PARAMOUNT+

DARK WINDS

 | 16 JUNE ON SHUDDER

 | 12 JUNE ON AMC+

Phil Tippett, best known for his visionary special effects work on blockbusters like the original Star Wars trilogy and Jurassic Park, has constructed a post-apocalyptic world of stop-motion. Conjuring the exact aesthetic of music videos by goth bands in the 1990s – goopy and gory, jittering and creepy – Mad God follows a character known as “The Assassin”, who descends into a subterranean wasteland of monsters, crazed priests and general desolation. Stop-motion as a medium has mostly died with the advent of CGI, causing Tippett to independently dedicate 30 years to this crowdfunded labour of love. While Mad God has an undeniably impressive visual style, this is the film’s only real strength. Like the wandering Assassin, it’s easy to become lost in the near-absent plot.

This weakness is amplified by the choice to have no dialogue, leaving us with ambiguous action punctuated by Dan Wool’s meandering, bland score. For viewers excited to see the grotesque wonders of animation, Tippett delivers in spades – but the casual viewer will find it a slog. ANGUS MCGRATH

Out in the rocky expanses of Navajo Nation, a series of brutal murders brings together two contrasting Tribal Police officers. There’s the jaded Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon, Reservation Dogs), a veteran cop distanced from his culture and community.

Then, in a vivid blue suit and ostentatious car, there’s Deputy Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) – a young man returning to reckon with a nebulous past. Based on the bestselling Leaphorn and Chee mystery novels, and written by an all-Native American team, this noir thriller is a slow burn. Most of the intrigue comes from the pathos of its characters, and the ways in which they navigate tradition, trauma and bouts of unexplainable violence.

Slick production and poetic imagery (a half-decayed dog; yawning, sun-bleached canyons) enhance this mounting atmosphere of dread. A highlight is the magnetic Gordon, whose performance effortlessly slides between boyish confidence and wounded aloofness; when he finally opens up to the haunted Leaphorn, the heart of the show feels solid and true. CLAIRE CAO

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rowing up is a torturous, embarrassing, sometimes absurd experience. Wunderkind director Cooper Raiff knows this well. The 25-year-old, who debuted with indie darling Shithouse in 2020, continues to unpack the hazy period of new adulthood – when you’re no longer a child, but still feel hopelessly lost in new responsibilities, dead-end jobs and thwarted love. His second feature, Cha Cha Real Smooth, (which he also wrote and stars in) is set to screen at Sydney Film Festival this month, before dropping on Apple TV+ on 17 June.

We’re presented with a will-they-or-won’tthey dance: recent college graduate Andrew (Raiff) falls into the thrall of Domino (Dakota Johnson), an engaged older woman with an autistic teen daughter. The boyish Andrew, who avoids his future by working as a “party starter” for bat/bar mitzvahs, finds an unexpected kinship with Domino – they share a goofy sense of humour and an endless well of love for their families. Though the tale of opposites attracting is a familiar one, Raiff’s dialogue zings with singular, crackling chemistry. Any encroaching sense of tweeness is grounded by Johnson’s fiercely vulnerable performance: she exudes a wounded maturity that elevates her role above any straightforward trope. It complements her recent turn as a complicated mother in last year’s excellent The Lost Daughter.

Akin to Raiff’s debut, Cha Cha Real Smooth is populated with good-hearted people stumbling through uncertainty. Fans of warm, naturalistic romances will find themselves quietly devastated by its closing scenes. CC

10 JUN 2022

MAD GOD

REAL SMOOTH OPERATORS

35

There’s a fine line between supernatural corruption and plain ol’ psychopathy in this deliciously dark series from super-producers Robert and Michelle King, which should have fans of The X-Files and Hannibal fall to their knees. It’s an exorcise – sorry – exercise in the fun of the procedural format, following a trio of paranormal investigators fighting “the good fight” (another King joint) on behalf of the Catholic church. Last season ended on a devilish cliffhanger, with sexy priest David (Mike Colter) and sceptical, possibly possessed therapist Kristen (Katja Herbers) consummating their series-long sexual tension. Or was that just an infernal vision from below?

That’s definitely hot enough, but the new season keeps things fresh with increasingly creative monsters‑of‑the‑week: literal doom-scrolling, shrunken heads that refuse to be flushed down the toilet, and Wallace Shawn as a priest who’s left without a soul after a near-death experiment.

A great novelty of Evil is how late the opening credits appear: just when you’re totally bamboozled by each episode’s wild set-up, the real sin begins. ELIZA JANSSEN

Music Reviews

H

arry Styles is unavoidable right now. His megahit ‘As It Was’ is the soundtrack to every video online.

The star standing in a topsy-turvy living room – for his album cover Harry’s House – is plastered all over streets and the internet.

Even Mick Jagger, sick of comparisons to the former boy band member, is slagging him off in the papers: “I mean, I used to wear a lot more eye make-up than him. Come on, I was much more androgynous. And he doesn’t have a voice like mine or move on stage like me; he just has a superficial resemblance to my younger self, which is fine – he can’t help that.”

In some ways, Styles has managed to retain the mega-stardom of his boy-band days in One Direction, where his tousled hair and cheeky antics were the sources of infatuation for millions of fans. His previous two solo records were full of pomp and classic rock spectacle, which felt laboured and ill-fitting.

At least on his new album, Styles is dropping any rock star pretense. Harry’s House is an album of smooth jams that are informed by funk, 80s synth-pop and yacht rock. He sings of domesticity and falling in love. He is painfully earnest. Every hook, guitar lick and vocal is perfectly arranged.

But one wishes he would introduce some sort of edge to his work – whether it be in the lyrics (which are almost always corny, silly) or the sound, which melts into dreary easy listening. I guess it doesn’t matter, his affable charm will continue to obsess fans no matter how lacklustre the music may be. IT

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FRE RY HAR

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Isabella Trimboli Music Editor @itrimboli

MACHONA: AFAR, YOU ARE AN ANIMAL TEETHER 

Melbourne-based rapper and producer Teether constantly delivers musical excellence in his veritable ocean of releases.

These include collaborations with producer Kuya Neil, rapper Sevy, breakcore artist Hextape, experimental beat-maker Ryan Fennis, as well as his own noise-rap crew Too Birds. His new album, MACHONA: Afar, You Are an Animal is once again a standout. The album teems with glitchy, soul-inflected music that is the perfect accompaniment to his gloomy flow.

MACHONA sees Teether engaging with his Tumbuka and Toccolan heritage alongside what he calls the “disjointed nature of growing up in an ever-changing metropolis”. This dysphoria is exemplified in the album single ‘one layer’, which uses a looped soul sample that never quite hides the alarm sound underneath. While some beats feel almost horrorcore – such as ‘whirr’ and ‘cross charge (featuring chef chung)’ – there’s always a tenderness, becoming more obvious on tracks like second single ‘esuna’ or album closer ‘in DIS together (featuring nini)’. ANGUS MCGRATH

MR MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS KENDRICK LAMAR

SHE’S SO COOL WET KISS

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Compton MC Kendrick Lamar cuts a mythic figure – his last album DAMN. (2017) saw him pick up a Pulitzer Prize. Expectations for his return have been astronomical, and Mr Morale & The Big Steppers represents Lamar at his most avant-garde. For instance, the intro ‘United in Grief’ contemporises John Coltrane’s free jazz. But, lyrically, it’s confessional and contradictory, with Lamar renouncing his status as hip-hop messiah and acknowledging creative stasis. Now a family man, Lamar ruminates on self and inner conflict, while analysing the consequences of racism and masculinity. In ‘Auntie Diaries’ Lamar calls out transphobia and homophobia in Black communities, sharing family chronicles, but confrontingly drops the “f” slur. Just as contentious, the problematic rapper Kodak Black cameos multiple times.

Most harrowing is ‘Mother I Sober’, in which Lamar recalls domestic trauma in his youth.

The raw Mr Morale is a flawed masterpiece – ironically about flaws. CYCLONE WEHNER

Melbourne’s beatnik beauties Wet Kiss’ debut She’s So Cool is a major success. Lead singer and lyricist Brenna O plays with her enunciation, giving ordinary words a new grit.

“I’m a jerk/Nothing’s changing, I’m a jerk,” the siren warbles on ‘Jerk’, accompanied by playful backup vocals and sparse, jangly guitar. The album flirts with all corners of rock, from the dissonant glam of ‘Nobody Has to Know’, to the 60s malady of ‘Honey Walks Away’, to the post-punk cold sweat of ‘Ugly’, where Brenna moans, “My face changes, and nothing’s the same”. Sliding between genres with flirtatious ease, the album marries the opulent drama of the 1920s with the 2020s’ against-everything attitude. “She’s a babe/ And she hates me,” Brenna sings in ‘Like a Flower’, before a sobering cut to “Not unlike your studio drawings”. On She’s So Cool, Wet Kiss gives us an insight into the band’s uncanny valley of the dolls, toying with words and sounds with glee, irreverence and charm.

OLIVIA BENNETT

Book Reviews

Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

O

NIGHTCRAWLING LEILA MOTTLEY

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

Scott McCulloch’s debut novel Basin is a hallucinatory journey through a “terminal landscape”. It opens as Figure is fished out of the ocean and his stomach is pumped, restoring him to life. His rescuer’s name is Aslan, and as they spend time together, Figure is exposed to the world of drugs, violence and sex that thrives in the place he’s found himself. When the city is horrifically attacked, Figure flees to the neighbouring isle, and aimlessly traverses a series of war-torn locales recalling Eastern Europe – McCulloch himself having spent time in Ukraine, among other places. McCulloch’s prose is stylish, oscillating between Figure’s clipped interior monologue and lyrical descriptions of landscapes and drug-induced hallucinations. His novel’s main theme seems to be decay – of the state, of morality and of the mind – but it lacks the self-awareness or levity that could counterbalance the swathes of masculine violence. Bereft of psychology, and suffused with phallocentrism, Basin often feels like a flashy exploration of worthy subject matter. JACK ROWLAND

This extraordinary debut from 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Leila Mottley packs a punch.

Nightcrawling is an unflinching look at racism, structural inequality and injustice.

Kiara Johnson, 17, lives in Oakland with her older brother Marcus. Like everyone around them, Kiara and Marcus are barely scraping by, so when they’re slapped with an enormous rent increase, Kiara turns to sex work. Nightcrawling is superbly crafted, the author’s poetry background shining through. Mottley wrote the book when she was 17, and based it on a high-profile sexual exploitation case. She writes without mercy, forcing the reader’s gaze towards the realities of “choice” and “justice” and the inconvenient truths of privilege and power. And she writes with deep love for her characters, who “laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and night-time threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can’t escape”. BEC KAVANAGH

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY SULARI GENTILL 

When a quartet of students hear a woman’s frightful scream from somewhere inside the Boston Public Library, they quickly develop a shared bond. The Woman in the Library takes inspiration from the classic locked-room mystery, but here the question is whether one of the four could have killed the woman when they were all present during the scream. Rather than a straightforward whodunnit, however, the story is presented as a work-in-progress by fictional Australian author Hannah Tigone, who is sharing each chapter with a Bostonbased peer named Leo. Leo’s post-chapter commentary grows from fawning to sinister, adding intrigue. The meta layering deepens as Tigone makes her protagonist an aspiring mystery writer. Sulari Gentill’s novel may be an unlikely page-turner, but it’s hampered by frustrating choices and characters who continually recap events for each other. The author’s playful approach feels like a shortcut through proper character development, leaving us with a cutting room floor’s worth of archetypes and tropes. DOUG WALLEN

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BASIN SCOTT MCCULLOCH

10 JUNE 2022

nce upon a time/your father found himself/lost in the woods. He was walking when suddenly/the trees grew too close/too snarled for him to see a path,” reads a passage midway through Chloe Hooper’s tender, elegiac Bedtime Story.

Here, the acclaimed author of The Tall Man and The Arsonist turns her forensic eye to a more intimate subject: the power of stories in the face of enormous loss.

When the father of her children, writer Don Watson, is diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer, Hooper makes like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and turns to literature. What she’s searching for is a book that will bring clarity and comfort to her young children. What she discovers, by Bedtime Story’s end, is that she was on a quest to create that very text herself.

Addressed to her eldest son T, a primary schooler who is learning to read, and charting Watson’s diagnosis, treatment and eventual recovery, Bedtime Story is a striking book for many reasons, not least of all its form: a fusion of memoir, letter and picture book, illustrated by award-winning Anna Walker.

With thoughtful digressions into the history of children’s literature, and an interrogation of some of children’s best-loved tropes, including monsters, morality and the wonders of the natural world, this is a hero’s journey like no other – about one family’s quest to grasp mortality, one tale at a time. MF

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

Here’s how I found out I was an optimist: I went to IKEA. At IKEA, I bounce about with my sleeves pulled up and my hands on my hips and I think: Yes! This is it! Finally! My new life! My kitchen will look like THAT. My bathroom will have matching folded towels. Oooh, pot plants! Carelessly disregarding a literal lifetime of my kitchen being a shambles and my family’s towels being not so much folded as shoved in a bulging fist between the rail and the wall, I instead shift my focus to Future Me. Future Me has more time, more money, and makes better decisions. Future Me would never make a complete prat of herself at a party, despite the fact that Past Me has turned up to every party since I was six years old excruciatingly overconfident and left in a spiral of self-recrimination about the humiliating and irreversible social faux pas that have exploded forth from me like a fountain.

Being an optimist, in other words, has led me astray. I take on too many things. I say “yes” to things I probably can’t manage. I find myself in crazy situations that a realist would avoid getting into by being, well, realistic. I used to make theatre, for heaven’s

sake. Do you know how optimistic you need to be to put on a theatre show? Yeesh. It’s a wonder anybody lets me outside.

But being a pessimist must be hard, too. I travelled with one once, and it did seem stressful and boring and miserable to think everything was always going to be terrible. It was the self-recrimination without the fun party at which the embarrassment actually occurred.

If you think about it though, both optimism and pessimism are ways of attempting to predict the future.

Realism is, maybe, the middle ground. I thought I was there but I wasn’t. My pessimist friend didn’t think she was a pessimist either. So maybe realism is just thinking you’re right.

Perhaps we should take our forensic focus off the future and apply it to the right now. That is the only certainty, after all.

Kids are good at just being. They focus on much more interesting things as a result. Things like ideas.

Questions. Daydreaming flat on their backs looking out at the sky with their legs up the wall while chewing on a clothes peg and humming a tune as they go along.

You don’t have to do that, but you also don’t need to feel bad if half an hour passes when you sit in a comfortable chair.

Or if you find yourself singing to yourself, all alone.

Floating is a great way to spend the now. Float in the sea. Float in the bath. Watch a stick float down a river.

I dare you to be stressed.

Get yourself some flowers. Wash your hands with a lovely new soap. Give yourself a minute.

Just a minute.

To just sit and stare.

There’s something to be said for mindlessness. Not as many Instagram posts about mindlessness as there are about mindfulness, but give it time.

Go for the moment. Ignore the choices and decisions.

Don’t IKEA yourself. Just exist.

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

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A

re you an optimist? It has taken me decades of thinking I was a realist to realise that I am, in fact, an optimist. My calibration was off, it turns out. Picturing an optimist, I used to imagine a bubbly but slightly dim person who is either completely in denial about reality or utterly, humiliatingly misreading it.

A try-hard, happy fool, basically. Some days, that’s not a bad description of me, to be honest. On the other hand, I saw pessimists as miserable, self‑indulgent moaners who didn’t have the imagination to change. I know. For an optimist, I’m a very harsh judge.

But none of that mattered, you see, because I was in the middle ground. I was a realist.

Recently, though, I have been learning about the benefits of living in the moment. Of mindfulness. Most people who complain about mindfulness say that they feel like they’re “doing it wrong”, which is entirely un‑relaxing and not at all the point.

Public Service Announcement: maybe it’s time to practice mindlessness.

10 JUN 2022

No Thoughts, Just Vibes

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

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FOOD PHOTO BY ADAM LOKMAN, PORTRAIT BY MARNYA ROTHE

Tastes Like Home Alvin Quah

KL Hokkien Mee Ingredients Serves 4

Method

SHARE

In a medium-sized pan, add pork skin pieces and 1 tablespoon of the vegetable oil. Cook over medium heat to render the fat. Continue cooking until the skin is crispy and golden. Set aside and reserve the fat.

Soak noodles in hot water, cover and let stand for 10 minutes. Drain.

Heat the pork fat in a wok over high heat. Fry garlic until fragrant (approximately 1 minute).

Add prawns and just as they start to change colour, add calamari rings and fish balls. Stir fry for 2 minutes.

Add noodles, Asian cooking caramel, dark soy sauce, fish sauce, light soy sauce, pork skins and all but 2 tablespoons of stock. Cook for 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the 2 tablespoons of stock and cornflour.

Add spinach and cornflour mix to noodles and cook for another 2 minutes or until sauce thickens.

Serve immediately, as is, or accompanied with your choice of spicy condiment.

PLAN TO RECREATE ALVIN’S DISH AT HOME? TAG US WITH YOUR CREATION! @BIGISSUEAUSTRALIA #TASTESLIKEHOME

Alvin says…

O

ne of the things to do in Malaysia is to lose yourself among the bustling hawker stands.

For the love of noodles, one should go for the rich and dark KL Hokkien mee, the classic char kway teow or the newcomer that is rapidly becoming a comfort food – dried pan mee – all served sizzling from woks.

One of my fondest memories is Dad bringing home supper from one of these stalls. KL Hokkien mee was a family favourite. Poised with our bowls and chopsticks, we would unwrap our neatly packaged supper and dive in. Words of gratitude were replaced by the noise of slurping noodles.

Describing Malaysian cuisine remains a mystery to many. And yet, where culinary cuisines are concerned, Malaysia is the unsung hero of Asia. Malaysian food enthusiast Rick Stein once said, “It’s perplexing that Malaysian food is not more widely known in Australia as I find it as exciting as Thai or Vietnamese.” Malaysia’s geography meant it attracted many traders and labourers of Chinese and Indian descent, and colonisation by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British meant that various cooking techniques and ingredients were introduced alongside Chinese, Indian and the original Malay cuisines to create a heady mix. When you include the neighbouring influences of Thailand and Indonesia, it is no wonder that Malaysia’s culinary style is indescribable.

I’ve always believed that one of the best ways to experience a foreign culture is through their food. If you ever find yourself in Malaysia, then the one word you will get familiar with is makan, which means “eat” – and eat you will, if you follow the local custom. Given the chance, the locals will eat seven times a day, whether it’s snacking on a banana fritter, slurping on a bowl of ice kachang, or demolishing a plate of Indian rojak.

Here, I have created my version of the KL Hokkien mee.

The secret to this dish is the pork skins. However, it is not the end of the world if that is not your jam. Just omit them and replace the pork fat with regular cooking oil.

ALVIN QUAH STARS IN MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: FANS & FAVOURITES , ON 10 AND 10 PLAY ON DEMAND.

10 JUN 2022

10 fish balls, cut in half 5 tablespoons Asian cooking caramel 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce 2 tablespoons fish sauce 2 tablespoons light soy sauce ½ cup chicken stock 1 tablespoon cornflour 1 handful English spinach

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750g pork skin, cut into bite-sized pieces 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 500g Hokkien noodles 1 tablespoon minced garlic 200g raw green prawns, shelled and deveined, tails intact 100g calamari rings, cut in half

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45.

By Lingo!

by Lee Murray leemurray.id.au LIBRARY

CLUES 5 letters Exact genetic copy Nikola__, electricity pioneer Pieces of solid fuel Rope‑tie Take illegally 6 letters Ellipsoid Fortified building Reduced in price (two words) Rinses, scrubs Small cupboard or recess 7 letters Crocodile‑logo clothing brand Renowned Sugar present in milk 8 letters Snag

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Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

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

2

5 6 1 9

7 5 8 7 9 6 1

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Nudity 4 Occurred 10 Influenza 11 Fable 12 Avow 13 Artificial 15 Catch up 16 Minnie 19 Driver 21 Freight 23 Royal flush 25 Inca 27 Macho 28 Xylophone 29 Set aside 30 Jersey

DOWN 1 Nuisance 2 Defroster 3 Taut 5 Cranium

6 Unfriended 7 Rabbi 8 Dwells 9 Entrap 14 Chivalrous 17 Ingenious 18 Strategy 20 Relaxed 21 Fusile 22 Primes 24 Yacht 26 Epee

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Alaska 2 Iga Swiatek 3 Gilligan’s Island 4 Hg 5 Blak Douglas 6 A nickname 7 Chicago, USA 8 Jimmy Little with ‘Royal Telephone’ 9 Green Eggs and Ham 10 1979 11 Honey 12 Happy Days 13 Their farts – the foul odour was said to combat the plague 14 Penny Wong 15 Northern Territory, Australia 16 Bouvier 17 Wales 18 Cricket umpire 19 Jacqueline Susann 20 b) 4000

10 JUN 2022

Using all nine letters provided, can you answer these clues?

Every answer must include the central letter.

Plus, which word uses all nine letters?

by puzzler.com

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Word Builder

For English speakers, a library has always been a place where books are kept. In Latin, however, it began as liber “inner bark of a tree”, which the ancient Romans used for writing before they started importing papyrus from Egypt.

Over time, liber came to mean “book”, which you could find in a librārium – a bookseller’s shop.

Old French borrowed it as librairie “book shop” sometime around the 900s, then passed it on to English. By the 1300s, a library wasn’t a book shop, just a place full of books to read. Except, this leaves us with a gap of a few hundred years before library made it into English. What did English use until library came along, I hear you ask? The answer is bochord – literally a “book hoard”. That’s what I’ll be calling my office from now on.

by Steven Knight

Quick Clues

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME. ANSWERS PAGE 43.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

16

17 18

19

20

21

DOWN

22 23

24

25 26

27

28

29

30

Cryptic Clues ACROSS

DOWN

1 Flesh out untidy reforms (6) 4 Took place of copper framed by criminal

1 Bore is covered by shade (8) 2 Fed up over schedule responsible for meltdown?

10 I funnel bucks to South Africa for viral

3 Coached by teller when tense (4) 5 Head out east for manicure and massage (7) 6 Drunken feud – dinner may be cancelled (10) 7 Bugs Peter or Roger “Back off, Holy man” (5) 8 Delta source beginning to save lives (6) 9 Catch parent out (6) 14 Gallant captain busts rival in house after tip-off

record (8)

experience (9) 11 Halfback with skill is a legend (5) 12 State’s navy town off limits (4) 13 Sham works if I fall back to follow spies (10) 15 Meet in Auckland to get tomato sauce? (5,2) 16 & 19ac Female actor’s speaking role in The Italian Job ? (6,6) 19 See 16ac 21 Cargo pants for fighter (7) 23 With good hand, Roy Green boxes TV alien (5,5) 25 Reincarnated series – American Empire (4) 27 Butch is stationary (5) 28 Kiss hope only to play one instrument (9) 29 Model visits beach reserve (3,5) 30 Uniform island (6)

ACROSS

1 State of undress (6) 4 Came about (8) 10 Common form of virus (9) 11 Story (5) 12 Swear (4) 13 Fake (10) 15 Informal meeting (5,2) 16 & 19ac British-American actress (6,6) 19 See 16ac 21 Cargo (7) 23 Poker hand (5,5) 25 South American empire (4) 27 Masculine (5) 28 Musical instrument (9) 29 Reserve (3,5) 30 Pullover (6)

(9)

(10)

17 When unmasking singer, any bios must be

creative (9)

18 Design Target complex in Sydney’s outskirts (8) 20 Every other orderly sacked was casual (7) 21 Fuel is formed by melting process (6) 22 Equips 7-Eleven? (6) 24 Boat building in South Cayman (5) 26 Foil initial effort by No 1? (4)

1 Annoyance (8) 2 Device used for thawing (9) 3 Tense (4) 5 Skull (7) 6 Rejected on social media (10) 7 Jewish religious leader (5) 8 Lives (6) 9 Snare (6) 14 Gallant (10) 17 Clever (9) 18 Plan (8) 20 Laid back (7) 21 Easily melted (6) 22 Makes ready (6) 24 Sailing vessel (5) 26 Duelling sword (4)

Solutions SUDOKU PAGE 43

1 5 2 4 7 9 6 3 8

6 3 9 2 8 5 1 7 4

4 8 7 3 6 1 2 9 5

2 9 3 5 4 6 8 1 7

5 4 6 7 1 8 3 2 9

7 1 8 9 2 3 5 4 6

9 6 4 8 3 2 7 5 1

3 7 1 6 5 4 9 8 2

8 2 5 1 9 7 4 6 3

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43

5 Clone Tesla Coals Cleat Steal 6 Oblate Castle On sale Cleans Closet 7 Lacoste Notable Lactose 8 Obstacle 9 Constable

10 JUN 2022

1

45

Crossword

Click

1954

Burning Comic Books

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

T

he evil of the Nazi regime was evident and obvious from the get-go in one plain act: bookburning. Only a month after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the infamous book-burning took place, most notably in Berlin, where 25,000 books were burnt in front of tens of thousands of people. The burning was organised not by the regime, but by students, who burnt books nationwide in 34 university towns. A bonfire of the humanities. The students published their ‘Twelve Theses’, referencing theologian Martin Luther’s famous ‘95 Theses’. Pope Leo X in 1520 issued a papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication – Luther burnt the decree. Hence Protestantism. Luther also recommended burning synagogues.

The Nazi students were also consciously echoing the students who in 1817 had gathered at Wartburg castle to mark the 300th anniversary of Luther’s theses.

These students burnt books they labelled “un-German” – the same language their Nazi descendants used.

Contemporary author Heinrich Heine had a character in his 1821 play Almansor declare: “Where they burn books, they will end up burning people”. Prophetic.

And so too China, where in 213BC its first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, ordered all philosophy and history books burnt. Hundreds of scholars did not comply – so they were buried alive.

In ancient Egypt, the Great Library of Alexandria, where all human written knowledge was gathered, lost its scrolls to fire (by accident) when Julius Caesar set alight his own ships in the nearby dock in 48BC. The library soldiered on, then in 391AD the Coptic Pope – leader of African Christians – ordered the destruction of the library (or part thereof). The Muslims did it again, in 642, when the conquering invader Caliph Omar supposedly declared the remaining books be destroyed.

In Paris in 1242 all local copies of the Jewish Talmud were burnt under order of Pope Gregory IX, and succeeding popes happily burnt Jewish scriptures for hundreds of years thereafter.

Americans went the other way: first they burnt people, namely witches, also known as “women”, and only later burnt books.

In the late 1940s and into the 50s there was a craze of burning books – comic books, which are much easier to burn. The movement was led by a psychiatrist, Dr Fredric Wertham, who thought comics led to “juvenile delinquency”, as it was known. He knew the Nazis burnt books, but was not bothered by the bad optics, declaring to a US Senate hearing: “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.” There you go. He pretty much destroyed the comic book industry, which took decades to recover.

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18 JUNE 2020