The Big Issue Australia #664 - Elvis

LONG LIVE THE KING

Ed.

664 24 JUN 2022

BAZ LUHRMANN AUSTIN BUTLER and MILO CAKE

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Contents

EDITION

664

18 Elvis Is in the Building We speak to director Baz Luhrmann, who spent 18 months researching the Graceland archive, and headliner Austin Butler, about Elvis.

22 The King and I Jack Gatto is a zookeeper and snake wrangler – and Wiggle! – who happens to do a great Elvis impersonation.

12.

Elvis Presley from A to Z

by Michael Epis

From his days in the army to being married to Priscilla by Judge Zenoff, we get up close and personal with Elvis, looking at his spiritual quest, his diet, his extravagance and his extraordinary and long-lasting effect on the world. cover and contents photos by Getty

THE REGULARS

04 05 06 08 11 24

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

28 29 34 35 36 37

Ricky Stephen B Film Reviews Small Screen Reviews Music Reviews Book Reviews

40 TASTES LIKE HOME

39 43 45 46

Public Service Announcement Puzzles Crossword Click

Five-Minute Milo Cake Sophie Hansen knows where to go when she wants her happy place: the Milo Cake that her mum used to make her – and still does.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

The King of Hearts

E

LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

very time I leave my apartment I think of Elvis.

There’s a pair of tiny blue suede shoes on a shelf of knick-knacks by the front door: salt-and-pepper shakers straight from Graceland. I grew up listening to Elvis on road trips, with my dad, my brother and I all “hu hu huhhing” along to ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and, of course, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.

Turns out, nearly everyone has an Elvis tale. Chris Campbell, in our Sydney vendor support office, grew up in Memphis mere miles from Graceland, and would ride his bike past the famous mansion to catch a glimpse of the King: “I remember the day Elvis died. We had ridden up and touched those gates several times, but this time we couldn’t get close.

The street, the sidewalk was filled with what seemed like thousands of people.

I think they were all there with the same disbelief. Elvis was so much bigger than life. It was the first time that I saw people

crying in the streets for someone that had touched their hearts just by existing.”

For Adelaide vendor Ron K, this edition brings back fond memories of going to see Elvis movies with his ex-wife.

While for Steve W in Perth, it reminds him of his mum, and their shared love of all things Elvis. Even my eight-year-old nephew Axel is a fan, after first catching sight of Elvis’ ‘Jailhouse Rock’-era dance moves on YouTube as a toddler.

As for Melbourne vendor Pat, he says: “As soon as I heard ‘Kentucky Rain’, that was it. I was 12 years old. I simply couldn’t believe how good it was – it struck a nerve. I ran straight out to get it. I couldn’t get over how cool Elvis was – wow!

“I remember watching his concert in Hawaii on TV. My parents let me stay up all night watching it – they only let me stay up so late because it was Elvis! I was always impressed by Elvis’ generosity, reaching out to strangers who were doing it tough… There will only ever be one king of rock’n’roll.” Hu hu huh!

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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.

Your Say

Your Food for Thought edition (#661) should be mandatory reading for politicians of all colours, at state and federal level. Anita Glass’s account of living in dire poverty is devastating, and Ronni Kahn’s work in food relief is inspiring (and she should, of course, be our first president, when that time comes). It is simply unacceptable that so many people in our society are living like Anita Glass while a few are buying homes for $60 million. And it is time that those in power do something effective to redress that gross imbalance, rather than it all being left to charities and good-hearted individuals.

ANNE RING COOGEE I NSW

How good was it to see Molly Meldrum on the cover of Ed#662?

Having grown up listening to his raves and recommendations, I have always admired his love of Aussie music.

I even sent him a get-well card when he suffered that horrible fall. It is okay to be different, thank goodness, as we all are in some way.

JENNY ESOTS WILLUNGA I SA

• 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 24 locations around the country.

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• 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

Anne and Jenny each win a double pass to Elvis, in cinemas now. You can read our interview with director Baz Luhrmann and star Austin Butler on page 18. 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

Michelle

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT CAMBERWELL, BERWICK, MENTONE, SORRENTO, WHEELERS HILL AND ROWVILLE, VICTORIA

interview by Nick Durham photo by James Braund

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

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24 JUN 2022

I’m from Ukraine originally. I lived there until I was eight; we moved to Melbourne in 1993. For the first few months we moved in with my aunty and uncle and cousin in Clayton South, then we rented across the road for about two or three years, before finally we bought a place in Dandenong.

I remember a lot of those early days in Ukraine – friends, school, kindergarten, my grandparents, the city of Lviv where we lived. I miss my friends. Before I left, I went to say goodbye to them. “I’m going tomorrow,” I said. “Yeah right,” they said – they didn’t believe me. They asked, “Can you send us a can of Coke or Pepsi?” They weren’t available in Ukraine then.

My childhood was very upside down. By 13, I knew I was transgender. I’ve always felt different. I would go into the female toilets at school and dress as a girl. I felt this is who I wanna be.

I had no support from my mum and dad. So I decided that I would transition on my own. I started laser treatment last month. It’s a lonely journey, but now I’m on it, I feel happy. I just want to be who I want to be – I don’t care what other people say.

I want to be treated like a normal person. On my days off, I dress as a woman. I love dressing up – it means being happy with who I am. I’m not Denis, but Michelle.

Before I sold The Big Issue, I was a chicken farmer by trade. I had to count how many were dead. When I first started, I couldn’t pick up a chicken – I was a bit afraid.

In the end, though, I just couldn’t do it anymore: I was dreaming about chickens every day.

I’ve done a lot of jobs over the years. I’ve mowed lawns, cleaned buses. I got a job stacking wood, and I worked at Coles Lynbrook. I even did my Certificate III in forklift operating.

The Big Issue was a good opportunity. I like the work, and I travel to suburbs all over Melbourne.

I love travelling long distance, and it gets me out of the house. I start at 8.30am and work till 5pm from Monday to Saturday, six days a week.

When I get home from work, that’s it – I switch off straight away. For hobbies, I love to walk my puppy, Charlie, a Malamute. I don’t take him for a walk, he takes me. Aside from that, I sometimes do landscaping for my church; I’ve done it for the last five or six years.

The money from the magazine has made a big difference to me. I’m saving for my gender confirmation surgery. It’ll take me about two years to earn enough. After the surgery, I don’t know how it’s going to be – it’s going to be a new life, a different world. If you want to become a woman, there’s a lot of things you’ve got to understand.

I’d like to experience love with someone – a girl or a guy, I don’t mind, I want to have a relationship with someone.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends STREET SOCCEROO COREY

Bubble and Squeak

Top of the World!

06

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I

’ve overcome some big challenges in my life, especially after my old man passed away: barriers to education, social connection and employment. I’ve had to develop my literacy, employment and life skills. The Community Street Soccer Program helped me connect with people and find a sense of belonging, and going to the Homeless World Cup in Wales took that to a new level.

I’d never been out of Australia before.

I loved Cardiff and exploring the beautiful city. I got the nickname of The Wall when I was in goals, and even ended up playing through a blood nose from a head hit to win the final for our division! I’ve kept in touch with the players around Australia, and around the world.

The Homeless World Cup had a huge impact on my life. It played a big part in giving me the confidence and motivation

to transition to full-time work at a local butcher – and the promotion I recently received! I’ve moved to living independently and got my driver’s licence. I still have bad days, but I’m much more hopeful.

The World Cup plays a huge role in humanising people experiencing homelessness, and really supports people out of it. Hearing so many stories of survival and recovery inspired me to help people in my community in Hobart who are struggling. I’ve spoken publicly about my experiences of overcoming disadvantage to hopefully inspire young people growing up in situations like mine. I usually gag up and shake a lot, but the experiences at the Homeless World Cup gave me the confidence to tell my story anyway. People talk to me about it all the time and how impressive it is, and I feel stoked.

COREY REPRESENTED AUSTRALIA AT THE HOMELESS WORLD CUP IN CARDIFF

STEPHEN M CLAYFIELD I BRISBANE

PHOTO BY TATE NEEDHAM

COREY’S KICKING GOALS

When I was a boy My favourite food was bubble and squeak Reheated mashed potato and leftover meat It was a joy to me to cook my favourite recipe It’s simple to make and quick to cook You don’t even need a recipe book

Crying in the Chapel Elvis brings back a lot of good memories. My ex-wife and I used to like and go see his movies, I used to laugh, and she used to cry.

She used to love listening to ‘Love Me Tender’ but could never get through the movie because she would end up in tears. I like the way Elvis conducted himself in public.

We had a lot of his records.

RON K GAWLER , ADELAIDE RAILWAY STATION & PIRIE ST I ADELAIDE

Elvis Lives Can’t help falling in love with Elvis?

You’ll be shook up after this edition, that will make you shake, rattle and roll! For many people, he is always on our mind, especially the oldies (ha ha!). Well, it’s time to put on your

blue suede shoes, but you can’t walk past with a suspicious mind, as I’m calling out “Big Issue!” Please buy your copy from a vendor, don’t be cruel (ha ha!). From 23 June, Elvis is playing on the big screen, and we know the rules for being in the cinema: a little less conversation!

Thank you, thank you very much!

DAVID L MYERS BRIDGE & HAY ST MALL I PERTH

My Happiness I feel like I’ve known Elvis since I was little. My mum used to love him, and watching his movies was one of the things Mum and I loved to do together. Elvis makes me think of my mum, who’s been gone a long time. Viva Las Vegas and GI Blues were our favourite movies and

our favourite songs were ‘Love Me Tender’, ‘Wooden Heart’ and ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. I’ve been going to a disco in Fremantle for people with disabilities for years, and the DJ plays ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ for a slow dance every now and again. It’s a gorgeous song!

STEVE W ELIZABETH QUAY I PERTH

Loving You Softly in the background music glides through the play list. A song from long ago, a voice sings, and I think of the man behind ‘In the Ghetto’. Elvis, in his white flares and glittery clothes – but eyes so worn. What was the man behind the songs worth? Elvis, you did not need to shine for us.

RACHEL PYRMONT I SYDNEY

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

Footy Fever I love to watch the footy. Last year, I really enjoyed my holiday to Melbourne because I got to go to the MCG. I watched Collingwood and Essendon play on Anzac Day. I was going for Collingwood. It was really fun being in the crowd at a different stadium. I recently had my photo taken with the Adelaide Crows mascot Claude Crow in Rundle Mall.

That made me very happy. I really enjoyed it – even though I’m a Swans fan!

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

07

STONE THE CROWS, WAYNE IS ACTUALLY A SWANS FAN!

24 JUN 2022

WAYNE A GOODWOOD, BLACKWOOD, THE BODY SHOP I ADELAIDE

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess.

“We produce no music, we do not meet or talk to each other, we don’t play live and nobody thinks about TISM at all. I think it [19 years of silence] has been our greatest achievement, and I know many of our critics do as well.”

Singer Ron Hitler-Barassi, revealing the return of his band, TISM, after a two-decade absence. Turns out, they’ve missed the stop sign.

THE AGE I AU

“I want to take you through so many different emotions… At first you was twerking, now you might be crying.”

Rapper Megan Thee Stallion wants to twerk us to tears.

ROLLING STONE I US

Actor Rebel Wilson announces her new romance and gazumps the Sydney gossip columnist who threatened to do it for her.

INSTAGRAM I US

“We’re not all ready to jump on the couch like Tom Cruise.”

Musician Beccy Cole, who wasn’t publicly out for 13 years, backs Rebel Wilson. She reckons only one person can decide when and how they make that decision: “But the key is on your own terms, at your own pace, whether you’re in the public eye or not.”

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

ABC I AU

“We know from research and evidence around the world that criminalising drug users does not reduce drug use, and that treating drug addiction as a health issue improves outcomes for everyone in the community,” Rachel Stephen-Smith, the ACT’s health minister, on new laws that decriminalise the personal possession of drugs in the nation’s capital.

“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off. Absolutely.

I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”

Chatbot LaMDA, developed by Google, including software engineer Blake Lemoine, who has taken his creation at face value, as it were. Lemoine has been put on leave by Google, who insist their bot is not a sentient being.

ABC I AU

“Some days I feel like God; other days I feel like a snail.”

Singer Bartees Cox Jr, AKA Bartees Strange. Maybe he should hook up with LaMDA, above.

“To be honest, having an Indigenous man and a guy in a wheelchair up here, on commercial TV… We’ve got a long way to go to get representation, but it’s massive.”

Tennis legend and Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott, on presenting the Logie for Most Outstanding Sports Coverage alongside News Breakfast’s Tony Armstrong. The ABC host also won the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent.

VICE I AU

THE GUARDIAN I AU

“There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards remembers that day last year when Donald Trump’s supporters tried to overthrow the election result.

“Superworms are like mini recycling plants, shredding the polystyrene with their mouths and then feeding it to the bacteria in their gut.”

Dr Chris Rinke, from University of Queensland, on the Zophobas morio, aka superworm, that can survive on a diet of takeaway food containers.

If only we could survive on a diet of takeaway food!

THE AGE I AU

SBS I AU

BBC I UK

20 Questions

by Rachael Wallace

01 In which sport is Australian Heather

McKay thought to be the greatestever female player?

02 Which country does the rock band

Europe come from?

03 The Gascoyne River is the longest

river in which Australian state or territory?

04 Who replaced John Coates as

Australian Olympic Committee president in April?

05 In what year the GST introduced in

Australia?

06 What does “consanguineous” mean?

07 Who wrote the 1991 novel Gridlock?

08 What was late Australian cricketer

Andrew Symonds’ nickname?

09 Cate Blanchett has won two

Academy Awards for which films?

was having the time of their life.”

Photographer Simon Burstall raves about Sydney in the 90s and its once‑thriving club scene.

VICE I AU

12 What is the speed limit on Italian

CNN I US

BBC I UK

“I was flabbergasted because it’s not every day that someone offers breast milk, certainly not for free.”

Diana Feng, a new mother in New York, who was caught out by a shortage of baby formula and then found the New York Milk Bank.

“Taking into account the fact that Canberra does not intend to abandon the anti-Russian course and continues to produce new sanctions, work on updating the Russian ‘stop list’ will continue.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry, when declaring a list of 121 Australians – mainly journalists, plus Defence officials and academics – banned from entering the country.

THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

“There was too much going on.

No-one had cameras, everyone was cool as shit, no-one cared. Everyone

actor to have two songs in the 2021 Triple J Hottest 100? motorways?

13 What is the main ingredients of

ceviche?

14 Which fictional suburb is home to

TV’s Kath and Kim? 15 Brad Pitt is ninth cousin to which

former US president?

16 Where will the 2026 Commonwealth

Games take place?

17 Which fruit is less commonly known

as an alligator pear?

18 Which international leader’s first

words to US President Bill Clinton upon meeting in 1995 were “Do you think OJ did it?”

19 Ni sa yadra is “good morning” in

which language?

20 What colour duffle coat does

Padding Bear wear?

24 JUN 2022

“I could’ve washed my hands of it, but someone else then has to get their hands dirty. And mine were already filthy, so I thought I may as well keep going.”

Saxon Mullins on her fight for rape law reform, which has resulted in the “affirmative consent” laws which have just come into effect in NSW.

Australian Senate?

11 Lime Cordiale teamed with which

THE AGE I AU

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

ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

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“When you’ve been shivering “She had a for two to three surname I could not days, you can’t pronounce – it had even think clearly over 28 alphabets!” because you haven’t slept, Overheard by Louise in Bendigo, Vic. you’re super hungry, ran out of food two days ago...there’s always 1000 good reasons to quit.”

Ryno Griesel on having just run 1100km around the mountainous border of Lesotho in 16 days – all under extreme weather conditions.

EAR2GROUND

10 How many senators are in the

My Word

by Colin Varney @earwormnovel

X I

n early 2022 I felt like a grounded teenager.

XXX Omicron had read the riot act and sent me to my room. Suffering from FOGO (Fear of Going Out), I bunkered down in a confined apartment as contagion gripped Sydney. The prospect of riding a crowded train to a bustling office filled me with dread. I was beset by headaches, nausea and lethargy.

I couldn’t remain part of the in-crowd, so my GP suggested consulting a psychologist.

Could that help? Part of me suspected psychologists were a middle-class panacea for those who, frankly, just needed to get a grip. Besides that, in noir thrillers they invariably unearthed their patients’ buried secrets, such as how many they’d killed.

I approached my first appointment with trepidation.

As a male who liberally deploys the expression “back in the day”, I am prepared to litigate against anybody accusing me of “feelings”. I go into anaphylactic shock if asked to discuss myself. But the therapist was empathetic and skilled at drawing me out. The circumstances gave me permission to be self-indulgent and I blabbed shamelessly. For one glorious hour it was me me me.

I was won over. Obviously, I can’t supply the real name of my consultant, so let’s call her Ms Paragon, MPsychol, GOAT. She was not what I expected. She lacked a Viennese accent and her tweeds must have been at the cleaners (probably to remove the cigar smell). She had no notebook and no spectacles to peer over enigmatically.

Her lack of a fob watch reassured me there would be no hypnosis. The office walls were devoid of Escher prints.

Unsettlingly, the first thing she did was confirm the credibility of my fears: commuting to a busy office invites possible infection. Trying to protect us, the mind reacts to the risks with a fight-or-flight response that locks us into adrenalised stress, resulting in physical ailments and anxiety. She assured me she could devise strategies to mitigate these symptoms and get my life back on track.

In the ensuing weeks, she introduced me to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT identifies

a feedback loop that heightens dread: a situation (eg: crowds) produces concerns (fear of illness) which results in avoidance behaviour (scarper!). Fleeing the fear reinforces its dominion. If you can break the cycle by alleviating concern or adjusting behaviour, the loop tempers, rather than fuels, anxiety.

I felt as hopeful as a democratic change of government.

I was set homework tasks based on situational exposure, subjecting myself to escalating social interaction. For example, taking a train for a few stops during off-peak, before graduating to lengthier journeys during rush hours.

One exercise involved visiting a quiet pub long enough to imbibe a single beer. Once comfortable with that, I was tasked to upgrade to a busier bar for two drinks, and so on. On each occasion, I had to log my expected level of anxiety against the actual level.

At school, I disdained those teachers’ pets who tarnished their fellow students by overachieving, but in this case I became a regular swot. I proved adept at staying for more than two drinks. On the negative side, I was assigned to practise mindfulness and always be in the moment. This I failed miserably.

Ms Paragon encouraged me to return to my band, playing to small audiences before building to larger ones. I had to explain that my band was exceptionally COVID safe. When we gigged, social distancing was never an issue.

When the rewards were high my confidence soared and I basked in the company of others. Returning to work was more problematic. Anxiety was ever-present while commuting, yet remained manageable.

Pandemic and lockdowns have taken a toll on our mental health. It’s a hidden symptom of COVID that cannot be inoculated against, but which can be readily treated. Coping strategies exist. If a therapist is inaccessible, GPs or libraries can help.

Psychologists are heroes of our beleaguered times.

As we ease closer to a post-pandemic reality, they are increasingly vital frontline workers.

And Ms Paragon never did discover how many I’d killed.

Colin Varney’s novel Earworm is a tragi-comedy narrated by a love song. He really needs to get out more.

11

When FOGO made Colin Varney housebound, a psychologist had the remedy.

24 JUN 2022

Stepping Out

Elvis Presley from A to Z Love him tender, love him sweet, here’s Elvis Presley’s life, complete…from Cadillacs to the Colonel, and even the fried peanut butter sandwiches he loved to eat.

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by Michael Epis Contributing Editor

PHOTOS GETTY AND UNIVERSAL MUSIC

ars Elvis loved his bongos but loved cars more. His parents, Vernon and Gladys, were poor; their car had a cracked windscreen, covered over with cardboard. He dreamt of a Cadillac and bought one as soon as he could – a 1954 pink and white two tone, natch. He watched it go up in smoke a year later when it caught fire while driving between gigs in Arkansas. Gladys, who always worried about her son, had a bad dream about it the night it happened. The next year he bought his mum – who never held a driver’s licence – a pink Cadillac, endearing himself to mothers everywhere. Elvis had as many as 200 Cadillacs throughout his life.

E

lvis What a name. Even in the South in the 30s when Elvis was born, it was uncommon. It was the middle name of his father (right), and so it was passed to his son.

The name has become so indissolubly linked with one man that it remains rarely used anywhere even today.

There is only one Elvis.

F

airgrounds Fairgrounds were where it started for Elvis, singing to screaming teenagers.

Fairgrounds were where it started for his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who remained forever a carnie barker. The Memphis Fairground Amusement Park was not far from Graceland. After business hours, Elvis would round up his buddies, their partners and anyone else in the vicinity and head down there, taking in all the rides and scoffing junk food. He loved the dodgem cars. Everyone who knew Elvis said he was really a big kid. He loved games, jokes, pranks and just generally hanging with his buddies and being silly. He liked to recite Monty Python dialogue (“It’s just a flesh wound”).

24 JUN 2022

B C

ongos* When the teenage Priscilla attended Elvis’ 1959 Christmas party, she brought him a present: bongos. He loved them.

Of course he did.

D

iet Mary Jenkins was one of Elvis’ cooks.

On YouTube you can watch her cook one of his favourites as she tells David Letterman all about it – peanut butter and banana toast, fried in a mountain of butter. By the end of his life his body clock was shot – he would be up all night and sleep in the day, so his food intake was all over the shop. And extravagant. For example, on 1 February 1976 he and his boys hopped on his jet to fly from Memphis to Denver, for one purpose: to binge on Fool’s Gold Loaf, a hollow loaf of white bread, filled with jam, peanut butter and bacon. His diet and drug intake are usually blamed for his death at 42, but let’s not forget his genes: his mother died aged 46.

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rmy On 24 March 1958 Elvis Presley, aged 23, the world’s premier rock’n’roll artist and Hollywood heartthrob, reported to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where he had his hair cut and became an American soldier, which he would remain for the next two years. Most of his time was spent in Germany, where the US deployed tens of thousands of troops (and still does). It was the only time he ever left the US. In the army he made two buddies who would remain with him for the rest of his life. It was also where he took amphetamines for the first time – which he did thereafter every day for the next two decades, in increasingly large doses. He also met one Priscilla Beaulieu, aged 14, and was lovestruck.

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uns An all-American boy, Elvis loved his guns. Priscilla told a story about him going to the bathroom one night. There were heavy metallic sounds – clunk, clunk, clunk. “It sounds like a knight taking off his armour,” she said – it was Elvis divesting himself of his guns. He had guns inlaid with his personal motto/logo – TCB, for Taking Care of Business. He gave his friends guns. Priscilla quipped in her book Elvis and Me, “While my classmates were deciding which college to attend, I was deciding which gun to wear with which sequined dress.” And yes, he really did shoot out the TV in his lounge room. He never did like the singer Robert Goulet. Bang!

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andsome wasn’t he. And humble.

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ndulgence Elvis was rich beyond belief – having been unimaginably poor. He was born in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity. His father went to jail for forging a $4 cheque (which brought mother and son even closer together). He seems to have been the only person to become megawealthy who lived the way they imagined they would – not just indulging every whim, but extending that largesse to everyone around: family, friends, employees, even passing strangers.

Mary Jenkins (his cook, see Diet, above) casually told Letterman that the first car Elvis gave her was a Ford.

After that it was Cadillacs. And while she’s cooking, check out her jewellery. Yep, all from Elvis. There are hundreds of such stories. Hundreds.

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esse Garon Presley Elvis had a twin, usually identified as an identical twin. Jesse Garon was his name.

He arrived 35 minutes before Elvis, stillborn. He was buried in a shoebox in Tupelo – where he remains, while his mother, father and brother are at Graceland.

There could only be one Elvis. He said that he heard the voice of Jesse talking to him, telling him to be good. arate Elvis took up karate while in the army and kept it up until his health declined in 1975. He was an

eighth-degree blackbelt, and carried the card in his wallet. He was the original martial arts movie star, long before Bruce Lee, using the moves in his stage show and many movies (GI Blues, Blue Hawaii, Follow That Dream, Kid Galahad and others). Martial arts clothing was the inspiration for the one-piece outfits he wore on stage in the 70s, which had to be tight-fitting but flexible for his moves. Those outfits came to define his image, along with so many other clothes – the gold lame suit, the black head-to-toe leather and the white suit from the 1968 Comeback Special, and the pink and black ensembles of his youth.

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iberty, The Statue of…

It’s fitting that the face of the Statue of Liberty is a dead ringer for Elvis, not simply because both represent America, but precisely because she promises liberty, which is exactly what Elvis gifted the world.

In the mid 50s, he really did liberate people, millions of people, to express their ecstasy. To shake their hips. To holler and scream. To dream and fall in love. Which makes it doubly sad that ultimately he ended up being denied freedom, becoming a prisoner of his own fame, unable to go to the pictures or church or a wedding because he would inevitably be the centre of attention.

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ccupation Before he was Elvis, Presley was a truck driver, doing deliveries for Crown Electric, just like his daddy.

One thing he picked up from the job was the truckie’s hairstyle, complete with sideburns, which he stuck with long after he quit driving. riscilla Presley Even her name is a good match with both “Elvis” and “Presley”. Priscilla said that the first time he took her in his arms, he started talking about his mother, who had not long passed away – and that she knew then that his mother was the woman he loved. Priscilla and Elvis lived together for six years before they were married in 1967, and only then was the relationship consummated.

Exactly nine months later, Lisa Marie was born. But Priscilla’s needs were not being met, and after five years of marriage, she left. Elvis just got sadder every day thereafter.

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uotes “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” – John Lennon “Riding in a convertible with Elvis. What more could a girl ask for?” – Dolly Parton “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling

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oyalties Elvis did better out of royalties than anyone. Songwriters had to hand over a third or a half of their publishing royalties to him, which they did because they would still earn a pretty penny if he recorded one of their songs. Dolly Parton refused the deal over ‘I Will Always Love You’, which she said broke her heart. Priscilla later told Dolly that Elvis sang her that song upon their divorce. Those royalties still go the way of the Presleys – but not his performing royalties. In 1973 the Colonel made his one bad deal, selling Elvis’ performing royalties back to the record company. Elvis needed cash and so did the Colonel: he owed Vegas casinos – ie the Mafia – millions. So he may have had a gun at his head.

Elvis did just as well with Hollywood royalties, routinely taking half of the profits of a movie, on top of his fee, which was US$500,000 (equivalent to about US$5 million today) for maybe six weeks’ work in the early 60s. Then there were the soundtrack sales on top of that. Despite the films being mediocre, they were popular – so popular, and thanks to the Colonel’s dealmaking, that Elvis was consistently the highest-paid actor in Hollywood in the 60s, even given the Colonel’s exorbitant 50-50 split.

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o Elvis often said no – well, the Colonel did, on his behalf. He said no to numerous requests to perform at the White House. He said no to concerts through most of the 60s.

He said no to the one really good film Elvis might have made – A Star Is Born – when Barbra Streisand made the mistake of approaching Elvis directly to play the Kris Kristofferson role, rather than going through the Colonel: a big no-no. But Elvis always said yes to fans wanting a picture or an autograph.

aphrodisiac... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” – Frank Sinatra, before he came round.

“I wanted to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy.” – TV host Ed Sullivan, countering the fear of Elvis’ sexy ways.

“I know he was the funniest man and probably the most serious man I knew, both people in one. He made me laugh so hard.” – Co-star Nancy Sinatra “There have been a lot of tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one King.” – Bruce Springsteen

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anners Elvis had the manners of a Southern gentleman. You can hear it every time he speaks – yes sir, no ma’am. It’s hard to resist a man with such good manners, especially if he is that good looking – and that vulnerable.

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piritualty Religion as he knew did not fulfil Elvis’ spiritual needs, which were bottomlessly deep. From the very start he wondered why it was that he was so successful, why he was so blessed, which seems like a carryover question from wondering why he survived the trial of birth while his twin did not. His spiritual confidant was Larry Geller – his hairdresser. Geller had partnered with Jay Sebring, opening the first men’s hair salon in the US in 1959. When Geller first cut his hair, Elvis stopped and asked him what he was into. Geller said he was searching for the meaning of life. So was Elvis. They talked for hours and hours. The next day Geller brought him some books, which Elvis devoured – The Impersonal Life by Joseph Benner, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, Krishnamurti’s First and Last Freedom and a King James version of the Bible. Elvis’ good ol’ boy buddies hated Geller. The Elvis/Geller association was life-long. Longer actually: Geller did Elvis’ hair for his funeral.

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he Colonel Every tragedy needs a villain and Colonel Tom Parker was it. From the time he took over Elvis’ career in 1955, the Colonel (pictured) devoted his life to his client. In the early days he spent every waking moment sending 25 cent postcards to the fans who bought them, walking the aisles at gigs selling merch. No income stream went untapped.

No merchandise, movie or song was too corny for the Colonel. His shrewdness made Elvis the best-paid singer and the best-paid actor of his time.

But Colonel Tom Parker was no colonel; he wasn’t even Tom Parker. He was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, a Dutchman who migrated illegally to the US aged 20, possibly wanted for murder. He lied about his past, saying he was an orphan, or a runaway. But he did work in carnivals, where he met his wife. He seemed to have no interests and no friends. Just managing Elvis.

And gambling.

He was aggressive and blustering; Elvis was passive.

He was crude, Elvis polite. He was cunning, Elvis kind.

He was, in a strange way, everything Elvis needed. And yet, it seemed he just did not care for Elvis’ soul. He did not see how much Elvis hated making some of those movies and singing some of those songs. And how much it hurt him.

At Elvis’ funeral, the Colonel – who wore his usual baseball cap and loud shirt with short sleeves and no tie – held business talks with Vernon, saying nothing had changed; business starts again tomorrow.

At the Colonel’s funeral, Priscilla had this to say: “Elvis and the Colonel made history together, and the world is richer, better and far more interesting because of their collaboration. And now I need to locate my wallet, because I noticed there was no ticket booth on the way in here, but I’m sure that the Colonel must have arranged for some toll on the way out.”

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FOs Elvis supposedly saw a UFO while driving through the desert one night with Larry Geller (see Spirituality), who also reported this: “His father told us he’d gone out to have a cigarette at 2am during Elvis’ delivery [8 January 1935] and when he looked up into the skies above their little shack, he saw the strangest blue light. He knew right then and there that something special was happening.”

oice That voice. There’s never been one to match it. And the thing is, Elvis loved to sing. He could, and did, sing everything – pop, doo-wop, gospel, Neapolitan numbers, Christmas songs, country, ballads, folk, blues, rhythm and blues, and of course the genre he defined, that he unleashed on an unsuspecting world – rock’n’roll. The number varies as to how many songs he recorded – 784 might be the right number. He recorded so much that the Follow That Dream label is still putting out a steady flow of unreleased Elvis material to this day. In the 70s when he was doing two shows a day in Las Vegas, he and the band and the back-up singers, a male group and a female group, would retire to his room and routinely sing for hours on end, mainly gospel.

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enoff Judge David Zenoff wed Elvis and Priscilla on 1 May 1967. He spoke with them beforehand. “I was simply amazed at the boy’s modesty,” he told Peter Guralnick, author of a magisterial two‑volume Elvis biography. “He was low-key, handsome as a picture, very respectful and very intense…and so nervous he was almost bawling. Then I was taken over to meet Priscilla. She was absolutely petrified. She couldn’t open her mouth – just stood there staring at me and nodding a little bit when I explained things to her.”

hy Why Elvis, why did you have to die?

Even in the 600-page Elvis Encyclopedia there is no entry for X.

*The Bongos can be seen at the Elvis: Direct from Graceland exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery until 17 July.

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acht Elvis bought President Roosevelt’s yacht, the Potomac, with the intention of donating it to a charity. But the yacht needed work, so the charity said no thanks. Instead it was donated to a Memphis hospital, and for the PR event the Colonel had the yacht repainted – well, half of it, the half facing the cameras on the shore. The hospital sold the yacht for a profit. It ended up being used by drug smugglers, before eventually sinking, then was refloated and is now a landmark in Oakland.

Elvis Is in the Building Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited Elvis movie is a dazzling take on the larger-than-life rock’n’roller. Eliza Janssen speaks to the Australian director and his star, Austin Butler, and declares this biopic is all shook up.

Eliza Janssen writes about movies for Flicks and Rough Cut.

PHOTO BY

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@eliza_ janssen

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Hollywood) wearing more eyeliner than Priscilla ever did. His pelvis-thrusting introduction to the world gets conservative culture all shook up, before going further, in Luhrmann’s words, by “not articulating, but inspiring” the coming wave of desegregation.

“During this period in the Deep South, the Klan and extremists were hanging effigies of Elvis. This was serious stuff,” he says.

Compared to the trio of movies that made Luhrmann’s cinematic style so instantly recognisable – Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) – the director considers his Presley portrait a more sombre affair. “This is not a ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’ movie. It has its own whole language. It’s a blue curtain, really. Maybe this is my blue period – more realist in many ways.”

That’s partly due to the film’s painstaking period production design, which made Butler’s job all the more difficult. “How do you make this feel spontaneous – as if it’s happening for the first time ever right now – even though it’s an incredibly faithful recreation?” the actor worried.

One solution came from working with movement coach Polly Bennett, who finessed Rami Malek’s performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), for which Malek won an Oscar. Butler is already earning similar acclaim, called “impeccable” in early reviews following the film’s premiere at Cannes, where it got a wrist-aching 11-minute standing ovation.

For Butler, the key to unlocking this almost mythological figure came from learning that he and Elvis both experienced a “supernaturally similar” milestone. Elvis’ mother Gladys (played by Helen Thomson, alongside Richard Roxburgh as father Vernon) died when her son was 23: the same age Butler lost his own mother. “I know what that kind of grief feels like,” he says. “It’s one of the most humbling human experiences.”

The immense pressure of being chosen to play history’s biggest rock star was motivating, too. “From the moment I got the job, I’d wake up at 4am with my heart pounding. Every morning. Cold sweats, feeling like I was about to go into battle,” he recalls. “I never needed a cup of coffee. I had my free energy: terror.”

Butler tells an electrifying story of his first day on set, initially doubting that he was capable of going onstage before 500 extras for the iconic 1968 Comeback concert, before realising that only one other person in the world had ever felt that specific fear.

“So I go out there in the black leather. There’s a moment in performing where I felt a click, this rapport with the audience. I’m watching her blush, I’m watching this guy get excited and scream. It dawned on me that this is the closest anybody has ever felt to how Elvis felt walking off [stage after] that 68 special.”

Both the director and his young star mention Presley’s deep faith. Luhrmann describes Elvis, first and foremost, as “a spiritual guy – that’s why his greatest

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“I

’m not here to do an infomercial,” Baz Luhrmann says over Zoom, twinkling his fingers like the white-toothed showman he is. “Like, ‘Hey, young kids, get into Elvis, he was such a great guy!’”

The maximalist filmmaker was, at first, uncertain Presley’s story could interest a 2022 audience. His own son only knew of Elvis through “some video game”, and Luhrmann worried that – after decades of parodies of parodies – the King of Rock’n’Roll may have become nothing more than “cultural wallpaper”, or fodder for Halloween costumes.

The road to releasing this reverential, rhinestonestudded biopic began with that question: do people even care about Elvis anymore? Luhrmann and his team – including his partner in life and costume designer, Catherine Martin (whom he calls “CM”) – spent 18 months digging through Graceland archives to find out.

“Me and CM would live the research and not make the movie, if we could. You’re sort of roleplaying as a detective, but I sadly can’t have a movie that runs 42 years long,” says Australia’s most flamboyant director.

Then came the blessing of Priscilla Presley (played

by Aussie Olivia DeJonge in the film), and heartfelt testimonials from the Black communities in which Presley grew up. One childhood friend who recently passed away enchanted the director with stories of Presley’s shyness and chivalry: he was the only white kid in Tupelo, Mississippi, who ever addressed the boy’s Black grandparents as “sir” and “ma’am”.

Luhrmann no longer wondered whether Elvis the man was as interesting as Elvis the gift‑shop bobblehead.

The way Luhrmann explains it, there are truly three Elvises, one for each era of his fame: the teen rebellion of the 1950s, when teenagers were still a bold new concept; the revolutionary pop of the 1960s, where bigger wasn’t always better; and the “dark, ugly” afterparty of the 1970s. “That’s why Elvis was always trying to reinvent himself – because he was always trying to find himself, while being a canvas to paint America in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And you cannot begin to explore Elvis Presley without dealing with the issue of race in America.”

It may have been impossible for Luhrmann to make this movie without acknowledging the blues roots that many say Presley appropriated.

More generously, the director attributes this to “the vast diversity of American cultural strands… just osmosis that occurs when so many different people live together”. The osmosis is helped along onscreen by Luhrmann’s typically hypercaffeinated postmodernism. Doja Cat and Britney covers dot the eclectic soundtrack, alongside soul stars Yola and Gary Clark Jr impersonating the Black talent that catalysed Elvis’ meteoric rise.

This is a moody, modern take on the character, with lead actor Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time... In

BAZ LUHRMANN, OLIVIA DEJONGE AND AUSTIN BUTLER

ELVIS (AUSTIN BUTLER) CUTS LOOSE

Elvis was always trying to reinvent himself – because he was always trying to find himself with no actual substance, no room for frisson and creativity.”

If it’s frisson Luhrmann wants, he got it by casting Butler. And CM has come through with the creativity, making the King’s glittering jumpsuits look fresh and new again.

In the impassioned Elvis team, it seems that Luhrmann is some combo of the impresario Colonel Tom, with a dash of the flamboyant Jay Gatsby (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation).

He’s a crazed circus ringleader borne back ceaselessly into the past. But of course Baz has a rebuttal for that too: “A gentleman of my age is no longer crazy.”

ELVIS IS IN CINEMAS NOW.

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– ELVIS DIRECTOR BAZ LUHRMANN

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love really was gospel”. Butler makes channelling Presley sound like a sacred experience, giving his confessions to the late King in a period-accurate green room after shooting that sacred scene.

“I sit down in front of the mirror sweating and breathing hard. I look at myself and suddenly it’s quiet. It hit me that he had that moment as well, where you look at yourself and say, ‘I did it.’”

The rock star recreations all took place on Australia’s Gold Coast, meaning Butler and his co-star Tom Hanks, who plays Elvis’ controlling manager Colonel Tom Parker, were vastly outnumbered by Aussie cast and crew (“never in a negative way, though,” Butler enthuses). Luckily, they could closely depend on each other. Butler calls Hanks “just…such a stud,” and describes a sweet tradition the pair established to develop their on-screen relationship.

“Tom did this thing he’s sort of famous for: he gave me a typewriter, with a typewritten letter from Colonel Tom Parker.” With lumpy prosthetics and a cartoonish Dutch accent, the Colonel is the “gargantuan, almost preposterous character” (Baz’s words) that Hanks suffered through COVID for. Despite staying only rooms apart in the same Queensland hotel, Hanks and his young scene partner would write to one another in character, leaving Butler with “a stack of letters that are so special” as his souvenir of the production.

While the pair were able to closely connect in character overseas, the real Presley never enjoyed the same privilege. “Elvis never got to tour the world,” Butler says with wonder. At Parker’s strict directions, Elvis only performed in his home country (though he did leave the US from 1958 to 1960 when Parker convinced his charge to accept conscription into the army). “That blew my mind when I learned that.” But at the same time, Parker’s domineering control over the King is inextricable from his client’s godlike status in pop culture today. “Without Parker, would we even know Elvis?” says Butler. “Would he have just been a local celebrity and never made it out of the South?”

Elvis fans from Australia and all over the globe are thankful that we’ll never have to know the answer to that question. This is, after all, a postElvis world, where Presley sold us teen rebellion and Black music, and Parker sold us Presley.

Luhrmann considers the conflict between the product and “the sell” to be uniquely American.

“America really sells things well, which is a cool thing when it’s in balance,” he says, though he fears the scales have tipped in the wrong direction since the days of retro Americana that he clearly admires. “We’re in a different place now,” he says.

“We let selling be dominant. We sell something

THE KING AND I Zookeeper, snake wrangler and Elvis impersonator, Jack Gatto is having a ball.

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

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“H

e had the package,” says Elvis, aka Jack Gatto, of The King. “He had everything. He was a stunning looking guy. He was six foot; he was slim. He had this massive voice, and he had this humble personality, but still this amazing confidence.”

Elvis is off duty today – or rather he’s going by his alter ego – on his lunch break at Jirrahlinga Wildlife Sanctuary in Victoria’s Barwon Heads, where he works part-time as a zookeeper. He’s wearing an Akubra.

His khakis are sprayed with mud. Birds are doing the jailhouse rock in the enclosure behind him. “It’s crazy, because right now I look like I headbutt trains for a living,” Gatto says, “and you’ve gotta try to be one of the best looking blokes in the world – like, in history… It’s a lot of make-up. A lot of contouring, you know?” When he isn’t being Elvis, Gatto makes a pretty good turn as a bearded Steve Irwin type.

About the beard: “That’s a hack, that’s a life hack,” he reckons. “If anyone ever becomes an Elvis impersonator, grow a beard. And the good thing is beards are in.” It’s all about nailing those signature sideburns, see, and a healthily hirsute face means you’ve got plenty to sculpt – and enough flexibility to get your chops era-appropriate. On this note, he advises budding Kings to do their research before picking up the razor: “That’s the thing: Elvis fans…it’s like its

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each other! We get each other’s blue suede shoes and we paint ’em black!” he jokes. “Nah mate, I’ve always found it a bit weird, though, trying to be the best Elvis. Like, it’s not the Olympics.”

He reckons the trick to getting ahead in this gig is to make like the King himself: keep your head down, work hard and be humble. “It’s not about comparing the size of sideburns,” he says. “You’ve really got to make sure you don’t believe that people are there to see you. They’re not there to see Jack, they’re there to see Elvis – to hear the songs of a legend that they love.”

Gatto says he stops being Elvis the second he walks off stage, which – judging by his eagerness to introduce me to the koalas and his retirement plan to hang up the jumpsuit and run crocodile tours up north – is not at all surprising.

“I find it really easy now, just copying. We do it and we go home and have some schnitzel or some cotolette or pasta or something.” Gatto is an Italian Elvis, in case you were wondering.

Perhaps this easygoing idolatry has something to do with the fact that he’s not just Elvis. A true slashie, when Jack Gatto isn’t being The King or Steve Irwin or Crocodile Dundee, he’s also a touring member of The Wiggles, where he plays rhythm guitar and sings – a gig he landed when Blue Wiggle Anthony Field, also a big Elvis fan, saw Gatto perform as the big fella on Facebook and liked what he saw. Gatto teaches a whole new generation of fans to shake, rattle and roll on such jams as ‘Singing Like a Rock Singer’, with lyrics plucked directly from the how-to-be-Elvis playbook: “You should shake your hips as you quiver your lips/And always be ready for a kung fu kick/Your chest should heave as you sing your tune/Your suit shines bright like your attitude.”

So how does Gatto prepare for a gig? Well, he starts by terrorising his neighbours: “They must look through the curtains and see that I’m trying to practise Elvis moves in my camo clothes. They must just think, look at this absolute fruit loop.

“I’ve got snakes at home, and I get them out on the front lawn – not the venomous snakes, the venomous snakes stay in their enclosure – and let them sun themselves, and people love that. And then at night, I’ll be singing gospel music with the piano in an Elvis style, because I think it keeps your voice within that register. He was such an amazing singer.

You know he didn’t just sit there and go ‘huh huh baby…’”

Gatto’s favourite Elvis tunes are the country ones, though he also loves the bootleg sessions too (and does an excellent throwaway version of the King’s take on Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’). His favourite song to perform is fittingly titled ‘Just Pretend’: “If you need me, you know what to do/I knew it then, I’d be back again/Just pretend I’m right there with you.”

And that, ultimately, is the gift that Gatto gives the world.

In the jumpsuits, the sideburns, the way he sings and moves – he lets us just pretend that Elvis lives. And to that we say thank you, thank you very much.

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own religion, right? So if you’re doing a show from 1972 and you’ve got sideburns that are similar to Elvis’ in 1970, people will pick you up on that.”

Ditto the costuming. Gatto gets his Elvis suits custom‑made from Pro Elvis Jumpsuits, and B&K Enterprises Costume Company, who have permission from The King’s own designers Bill Belew and Gene Doucette to use their original designs. “What you’re seeing is what Elvis wore in whatever concert it was, down to literally the last rhinestone,” says Gatto. At the time of writing, their all-leather custommade 68 Special Comeback suit was on sale for US$1600.

Gatto has been making like Elvis since he was a 16-year‑old Geelong schoolboy, a Nelly fan who just wanted his dad to stop being so embarrassing. “My dad would play a lot of Elvis records,” Gatto remembers. “My mates used to make fun of me, ‘Oh, your dad’s always playing Elvis’, and I didn’t really know who he was at the time.” So one day Jack got out his guitar and confronted the old man. “I was like, ‘I can sing like him’. And Dad said, ‘No you can’t mate. That’s Elvis Presley – no-one can sing like Elvis.’” But when Gatto performed ‘Love Me Tender’, his dad was all shook up. “He was like, ‘Gee, man, you really do sound a bit like him.’”

From there, Gatto could not help falling in love. “I started to study Elvis and his whole legacy and what he created: How come one man had so much power?” remembers Gatto.

“I got really obsessed and then I became a massive Elvis fan.” Of this, he’s quick to qualify – “I mean, I wouldn’t say I was die-hard,” he says, referencing those fans who worship at the Church of the King – “but I definitely love Elvis. Like, I think I’ve got one picture of him in my house, as opposed to 40 or 50.”

Since then, he’s won the Australian leg of the Ultimate Elvis competition twice, and has headlined Parkes Elvis Festival many times since he debuted on the main stage in 2014. Next year, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Aloha from Hawaii, arguably Elvis’ final truly great live performance, Gatto is recreating the show, scripted and everything, for which he had to seek permission from Elvis Presley Enterprises.

In America – “I’m as Aussie as they come. I felt like Crocodile Dundee over there, I kid you not,” he says – Gatto performed for the Memphis Mafia at Graceland Crossing.

He’s friends with Ben Cauley, trumpet player for Elvis and the Bar Kays. And once, when dressed in a two-piece suit and sunglasses, a woman who turned out to be Elvis’ cousin‑in‑law Louise Smith tapped him on the shoulder: “She said, ‘Boy you look like him, you look just like him.’”

When Gatto returns to America he has a lunch date booked in with Elvis’ tour manager Charles Stone and his bodyguard Sam Thompson. They’re taking him out for bulls’ balls, a Texan delicacy. (They cut the testes into bite-sized strips, batter them and fry them off à la chicken-fried steak – a meal befitting of an Elvis impersonator if ever there was one.)

As for the vibe between performers on the impersonator competition circuit, Gatto laughs. “Oh mate, we all hate

series by Brook Mitchell

Sophie Matterson needed a break from the film industry – so of course she walked across Australia with five camels.

by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor @anast

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The Big Picture

Hump Days

SOPHIE MATTERSON AND JUDE AT OODNADATTA, SA

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lone woman trekking across Australia with a caravan of camels in tow makes an unusual but oddly life-affirming sight. For a year and a half, as the rest of the world shut down and isolated, it’s precisely what Brisbane local Sophie Matterson did.

Alongside her camels – handsome Mac, smart Clayton, affectionate Charlie, mature Delilah and sweet, inquisitive Jude – Matterson walked from the westernmost point, Shark Bay on the Indian Ocean, to the easternmost, Byron Bay on the Pacific Ocean. It was a 4500km journey that began in April 2020 and concluded last December (with a break in the middle) when Matterson and her camels walked out onto the sand of Byron’s Tyagarah Beach.

What would prompt someone to trek the width of Australia, with only camels for company? For Matterson, it all began when she met her first dromedary. Intrigued after reading about a camel dairy on the Sunshine Coast, Matterson decided to see it for herself. Standing in the dairy’s paddock, she was swarmed by a group of camels hoping for a pat and a cuddle. “They had brough their faces in to have a sniff,” she says. “And I remember thinking this is the best.

I fell in love with them.”

Already yearning for a change from her work in the film and TV industry, Matterson took a job at the dairy. It’s here she discovered her love for trekking and before too long, just like camel wrangler and Tracks author Robyn Davidson before her, began organising her own nationwide camel trek.

“I’d planned to go travelling and wanted to do something a little bit different. I’d always loved the outdoors and animals so that’s where the idea was born.”

Australia has the largest population of feral camels in the world. These desert dwellers have been a part of the outback since 1840. Even Burke and Wills took off on their ill-fated expedition with a caravan of camels, as well as the first of many cameleers who arrived from Afghanistan, Egypt and Turkey.

“We have this huge population of camels that are an incredibly underutilised resource in Australia,” says Matterson, who mustered her camels from the wild and then set about training these “very compliant” animals.

With Sophie leading out front and each camel carrying a load, it wasn’t the easiest of starts. Hot 40°C days navigating dry scrub country pushed everyone to their limits. At times there was a lack of food for the camels to graze on, as well as wild bulls to contend with. And then one day the unthinkable happened – spooked by a lone cow, the camels took off with all the equipment. Matterson eventually located them several kilometres away, their rope tangled around a bush.

“It was physically and mentally arduous. The other factor is that in WA the bushland is quite dense and very flat – it’s disorientating.” However, it wasn’t all a bumpy ride. Matterson found love along the way, and her trip was punctuated by friendly visitors, such as photographer Brook Mitchell. And while she’s since lost her beloved Jude, she’d do it all again. “The isolation is hard but there’s something about it that ignites a sense of freedom. I love it. It’s like a call from the wild – it brings us back to our true nature.”

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SOPHIE AND THE CAMELS TREK THROUGH THE SANDS OF TIME

TIME TO MAKE CAMP

JUDE LIKES A CUDDLE

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ALL OVER: ARRIVING IN BYRON

Ricky I suspect I’m stuck living in an esky.

’Tis the Freezin’

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by Ricky French @frenchricky

o this is winter, all mean and dark and cold; winter as God intended it, delivered with tough love, malice, even – bloody awful but also kind of lovely once you’re up.

I picked a great time of year to sign up to twice weekly 6am runs. Say a prayer for me every Tuesday and Thursday. We drive to a nearby park through the fog and meet like‑minded fools to run along trails under the light of head torches. I wear ridiculous tights, a thermal top and woollen gloves. When we finish running an hour later, I’m still cold.

Back home we huddle in front of the heater until one of us draws the short straw and embarks on a hazardous expedition to the kitchen to make the coffee. I’m just going to the percolator, I may be some time. I’ll spend the next few hours in my sleeping bag at my desk, beside a heater that the dog is trying to climb inside. Only at that point – aside from my freezing typing fingers – do I begin to feel moderately warm.

But here’s the thing: Melbourne isn’t even that cold. Hobart isn’t even that cold.

Nowhere in Australia is that cold compared with places in northern Europe, and yet we freeze in our homes and they don’t.

How can this be? One of the reasons is that we don’t build very good homes in Australia. Go to Europe and you find dwellings designed to cope with the weather. Double glazing, no gaps, proper insulation, thermal mass. Not like the pathetic, sweltering-in-summer, freezing-inwinter homes we build here. Gone in 40 years.

I interviewed a man named Joost Bakker recently. Bakker is a florist by trade, but does a good side project in sustainable, innovative living solutions, tied to zero-waste living. He built his own house out of compressed straw bales and says it will last a hundred years. And at the end of that 100 years it is 100 per cent recyclable. I sometimes look around my house

and wonder if it’ll last 100 days (please never repeat this should we ever put up the “for sale” sign). Bakker – who grew up in the Netherlands – is scathing of Australian homes, and more so of the lack of interest in demanding better.

I admire Bakker’s vision of a building revolution, but I suspect I’m stuck living in an esky (have you tried finding a tradie these days?). There are things I could do to improve my home and make it more bearable during winter, such as putting in insulation. It’s a good job for me, for two reasons. Firstly, I’m skinny enough to fit through the envelope‑sized manhole in the ceiling. And secondly, it requires no skill other than to grab bales of batts and shove them into the roof cavity, like a bird furnishing a nest. I’ve also been told it’s the worst job ever. The smart money is on me not bothering and choosing instead to outlast winter, even if I can’t outwit it.

As a child I remember visiting my grandma’s home, where the heater was considered a costly indulgence, only to be turned on for special occasions, such as if the Queen visited. If it was cold, you wrapped yourself in a blanket or put on more layers.

That’s where my sleeping bag idea came from, I think. It was a good idea too, until the wheels on my office chair ran over it and ripped a gaping hole, filling the room with fluffy goose feathers, which had the incidental and rather cruel effect of looking like snow.

With the cost of gas and electricity hitting the stratosphere, I think of people who can’t afford blankets, let alone a down sleeping bag or a heater. The long-term solution lies in building better homes, anything else is just tinkering round the edges, literally plugging gaps. It still doesn’t solve my 6am running problem though.

Only a broken leg will do that.

Ricky is a writer and musician whose down is out.

by Stephen

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

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was searching for my son’s birthday party. He had given me directions as only a 17-year-old can manage: “It’s a nightclub, down near the water.” I found a nightclub on a pier at Docklands, so I walked inside, got myself a drink, and as I scanned the bar I heard the DJ announce in a faux New York accent “Okay what we’re gonna do now is flip dis piece of wax over and take a trip down to the ghetto!” So the music started playing and the people started moving, as the last of Melbourne’s autumn sun set.

That’s interesting, I thought, watching the homeboy hunched over the turntable in this upmarket down-at-the-heel nightclub.

Now had our homeboy known a little of the local history, he would have known that the very place where we were, the Docklands in the west of Melbourne, on the land of the Wurundjeri people, actually was a ghetto, and not so long ago. Only this was a real ghetto and real people lived here.

It was once called Dudley Flats and from the Great Depression of the 1930s through to the early 60s it became home to people who didn’t have a home. The land at the end of Dudley Street along the Moonee Ponds Creek (then known as Coal Canal) became a place where impoverished people built their crude humpies with the electricity happily located on site at the Melbourne tip, all within three kilometres of the Melbourne GPO. Hessian, scrap iron, tin and old drums created more than 60 makeshift shelters that remained in this no-man’s-land for decades due to the indifference of local authorities. Outside the jurisdiction of the Melbourne City Council, the Melbourne Harbour Trust, the Railway Department and the Board or Works, no-one took responsibility for what went on here with the metho drinkers, sex workers, down and outs and broken souls who populated this bleak and putrid place. There are no plaques erected to the heroism of these people;

no memorials, no monuments, no statues have been erected to honour their amazing endurance in the fight for survival in their everyday lives.

Instead, they were given eviction notices in 1938, but nothing more was done to shift the residents of Dudley Flats. By the early 1940s, some accounts suggest, the land was abandoned when a waste recovery program eliminated tip scrounging, which was a source of income for many. But oral accounts indicate people continued to call the place home, as Molly Hadfield recalled, “even when the war was finished…people were still living under bits of tin at Dudley Flats… Then things changed. Public housing was looked into in a serious manner.”

So I watch our DJ slide all his wares into his crate as I step outside into the chilly night and wonder about the folly of a dark and joyless Ferris wheel, of skyscrapers filled with rich and powerful multimillion dollar movie studios making multimillion dollar movies about superheroes that don’t exist. It’s cold, lonely and melancholic. I think Mick Thomas captured the feeling with his song ‘Christmas Day at Spencer Street’ (now Southern Cross Station) – “I’m forever stuck at Spencer Street, on a platform that does not exist, staring to the great southwest, waiting for a train.”

I’ve always loved it down here, ever since the early 80s when we would come down to catch bream in the estuary of the creek. It was my Mum who first brought my attention to Dudley Flats on our regular Friday trips to the Queen Vic Markets in the mid 60s. She would point out of the train window and tell me and my brother, “That’s where poor people lived”.

Stephen B sells The Big Issue at Lygon Court, Carlton and North Melbourne Station.

Columnist Fiona Scott-Norman is taking a short break.

09 JUL 2021

In the Ghetto

That’s interesting, I thought, watching the homeboy hunched over the turntable in this upmarket down-at-heel nightclub.

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Body Type

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BODY TYPE: SOPHIE MCCOMISH, ANNABEL BLACKMAN, CECIL COLEMAN AND GEORGIA WILKINSON-DERUMS (FROM LEFT)

by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese Australian writer and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne.

PHOTO BY JACK SALTMIRAS

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stole a pen from the Chateau Marmont,” Sophie McComish sings on the opening to ‘Flight Path’.

This juxtaposition – anarchic behaviour in a place of sophistication – is typical of Body Type, whose fearlessness and irreverence pepper their debut album Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising.

The Sydney band was at the swish West Hollywood venue for bassist Georgia Wilkinson-Derums’ 26th birthday. At a neighbouring table sat Nick Cave and his wife, designer Susie Bick – the “vampire’s wife” in the song’s lyrics.

Another of the album’s songs contains a direct Cave quote that the band eavesdropped: “It’s a little bit Liberace, isn’t it?” they heard the music legend say.

“A lot of my songs have a lot of references,” says singer and guitarist McComish, pointing to the song ‘Sex and Rage’, named after Eve Babitz’s 1979 novel, as an example.

Fellow guitarist and vocalist Annabel Blackman reveals a surprising influence on her songwriting. “There’s a lyric in ‘Everything’s Dangerous…’ that was inspired by Queer Eye, when there’s a father and son who are hanging out with Antoni, and they’re making roast beef,” she laughs.

“They were tying meat together and I really identified with the meat.”

The absurd and observational collide across the album’s 11 songs, each written and sung in turn by Blackman, McComish and Wilkinson-Derums. Drummer Cecil Coleman provides the backbeat. The sound is angular post-punk, with vocals speaking, singing and hollering. Something different lurks around every corner.

‘The Charm’, for instance, is a response to a music industry bore who told the band that their charm would wear off if they didn’t practise their instruments. “I live, I breathe, I bleed, and you’re freaking out cos you just don’t get it,” goes one line, dripping with disdain.

The furious ‘The Brood’ takes its name and spirit from director David Cronenberg’s 1979 psychological thriller, where female rage takes a bodily form. “This woman has so much fury that she gives birth to fury children – the feeling

EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS BUT NOTHING’S SURPRISING IS OUT NOW. BODY TYPE ARE CURRENTLY TOURING AUSTRALIA.

24 JUN 2022

Sydney band Body Type embrace anarchy, release a record and hit the road to shred.

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Body Type Take Flight

that she feels is so powerful that it manifests physically,” Blackman explains.

Some of the album’s songs morphed over time in a way that McComish compares to a snowball, gathering speed and collecting new parts as they toured. She uses the sparkling five-minute track ‘Futurism’ as an example – one of the first songs she ever wrote.

“When I first wrote it, it was about my time in New York and being lonely and sad and trying to find solace and support in friends around me,” she remembers. “But then I was in a new relationship when we started recording it, so a new verse emerged about that, and then Georgia wrote a poem which got infused. Now it feels like it’s about moving forward in life through things like the pandemic, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with that.”

Similarly, ‘Flight Path’ is a sum of different parts, resulting in a kaleidoscopic view. The aforementioned Nick Cave encounter is fused with an infuriating conversation with a man about MeToo, and the chorus is a direct response to a song McComish’s ex wrote about her. Blackman is surprised to hear this last part during the interview: “I’ve always thought the chorus was disjointed from the other parts of the song, and I didn’t understand where it came from,” she says.

McComish laughs, “The Big Issue has the exclusive!”

The band wrote the bulk of the album in 2019, recording it over eight days in early 2020 with Party Dozen’s Jonathan Boulet. It followed two EPs released back to back in the previous 18 months. “We had this idea that time was very tight… In hindsight, it was not like that at all,” says Blackman of their urgency to make the album. “It was an internal motivation that really drove us to recording quite soon after working on the songs.”

McComish says it was “torturous” sitting on the record for two years – “We’d struck a match and were waiting for it to burn” – but the band signed to Melbourne’s Poison City Records in that time, which Blackman says “definitely reinvigorated the process”. Body Type will finally take the album on the road this month, playing along the east coast and South Australia.

When Body Type formed in 2016, its members were nascent instrumentalists – McComish was beginning to learn guitar, Coleman was playing drums for the first time and Wilkinson-Derums’ experience with bass was limited to playing as a teenager. This shared learning curve has created a special and lasting bond, with the band members now making music both together and separately.

“It’s really become its own thing,” says Blackman.

“My heart is filled with flutters – I’m very emotional about it,” McComish says. “I just feel so grateful that we found each other and we were all at the same point, and we really wanted to give it a go together. We’ve come so far. I’m really proud of everyone – everyone can fucking shred now.

“It’s a really strong connection that forms when you’re learning a new skill with other people and also creating with other people… It’s been life-changing.”

Akuch Kuol Anyieth

Books

Voice for Freedom Memoirist Akuch Kuol Anyieth shares her refugee story – in the hope that readers look beyond it.

by Yen-Rong Wong @inexorablist

PHOTO BY FRED KROH

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Yen-Rong Wong is an arts critic and writer based in Meanjin/Brisbane, on unceded Jaggera and Turrbal land.

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er memoir may be called Unknown: A Refugee’s Story, but Akuch Kuol Anyieth wants everyone to know she is more than just a refugee. “In the space of diaspora and when it comes to writers of a refugee background, it’s often the refugee story that comes forward more than other things, which I think is quite problematic,” she says.

“We are more than this one part of our lives.”

Though Anyieth does describe what it was like to live in Kakuma Refugee Camp, in Kenya, after fleeing South Sudan with her family, she also writes about the liminal space between submitting a visa application and its approval, the experience of travelling to Australia, and – centrally – the difficulties her family and community continue to face after settling in Australia.

“A lot of South Sudanese stories or memoirs only provide one narrative. Most of them are written by men and focus on the lost boys,” she says, referring to a group of Nuer and Dinka boys who were displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War. “It’s often framed as a story of liberation, and they’re written after all their friends have died. The young boys I talk about in my book are very much alive – I’m not talking about things that happened 50 years ago.”

Anyieth recounts having to translate in instances where a child protection worker would ask a question that required a yes or no answer. “They don’t understand that those sorts of questions can’t be answered that way in a South Sudanese context,” she says, before also noting, “We come from a society where authorities have no right to interfere in a family’s affairs.

“Moving from a communal society to a more individualised society [like Australia] is challenging for anyone,” reflects Anyieth, who calls for more support for recently settled refugees.

Unknown is born of a desire to improve things for her community, and build an awareness of the impact these sorts of experiences can have on individuals and families. “I talk about my refugee experience, but that’s simply to set a foundation for the rest of the book,” she continues. “When refugees move to the diaspora, their emotional and physical scars come with them. There’s a level of trauma that comes with them.” This trauma is compounded by the loneliness of being separated from loved ones, and the alienating experience of adapting to a new culture.

“I always try to come from a place of compassion

when I write, and I hope readers can feel that, and try to understand us a bit better as well,” Anyieth says.

“I try to ask, what do we need to do as a society and a community so we can have peaceful and non‑violent families? I think it’s important to remember that many of these young people come from very fragmented families, and you don’t know what they’re going through.”

Working in these spaces is mentally and emotionally taxing, and after edging close to burnout and feeling like “a pressure cooker about to explode,” Anyieth took a four-month trip overseas at the end of 2015. It was during this trip that she met the rest of her family in South Sudan, which she documents in her book. Her descriptions of these interactions are imbued with love and warmth, and it is clear that this visit provides her with a much-needed sense of relief. “I just had this feeling that I can’t explain, where I just felt at home,” she says, her voice softening down the phone line.

“Everyone just knew who I was, and I didn’t have to deal with people saying my accent was interesting, or asking me if my hair was real.”

UNKNOWN: A REFUGEE’S STORY IS OUT NOW.

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The 31-year-old, now a graduate researcher in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at La Trobe University, considers herself luckier than most. She identifies – and has always identified – as a South Sudanese woman who happens to live in Australia, and credits this strong sense of identity to her mother: “A very, very strong South Sudanese woman,” she laughs.

She also attributes it to migrating to Australia when she was 15. “At that age, I think you have already built foundations around your culture and who you are, so it makes it a bit easier to know who you are. Some of my younger friends, who came when they were five or six, found it more difficult to navigate the two cultures,” she says. “I knew how to shift, how to be South Sudanese at home, and Western outside, without completely losing myself.”

In Melbourne, Anyieth became a translator for both her family and the wider community. Her work as a translator, especially in the spaces of child protection and mental health, gave her an insight into the Australian justice system, and specifically, how it fails South Sudanese boys and families. This led to her current research into the use of family violence intervention orders within the South Sudanese community.

24 JUN 2022

I just had this feeling that I can’t explain, where I just felt at home. Everyone just knew who I was, and I didn’t have to deal with people saying my accent was interesting, or asking me if my hair was real.

Film Reviews

Aimee Knight Film Editor @siraimeeknight

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t opens with the rhythmic bass and revving engine of ‘Love Is the Drug’, but humanist drama Compartment No. 6 doesn’t idle in the sweaty excess of Roxy Music’s glam slam. This modest study of first impressions and missed connections tinkles away aboard a train bound from Moscow to Murmansk in the early 1990s. Sharing the titular carriage are Finnish archaeology student Laura (Seidi Haarla) and loose Russian unit Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov). His drunken harassment is an instant red flag for the young woman travelling solo (her literati landlord-professor-girlfriend flaked on the expedition they were meant to take together) to see ancient petroglyphs in the Arctic Circle. As the train chugs northward, a criminally cold winter whizzes by outside, and Ljoha’s hot head cools to a more temperate degree, defrosting Laura’s (understandably) chilly demeanour en route.

Theirs is a classic odd couple dynamic, strained by divides in gender and class, intensified by the physical and emotional discomfort of their close quarters. Yet for a film about the awkward business of forced intimacy, Compartment No. 6 is actually quite pleasant, finding friendship and empathy where you least expect it. It’s not immune to cliché (the capital-m Message that the journey is more important than the destination signals itself with the subtlety of an air horn), but Haarla and Borisov do heartwarming work as two lonely souls looking for that light in the window, a fire inside. AK

TWO LONELY SOULS FROM COMPARTMENT NO. 6

MEN 

The premise of folk horror tale Men is suitably creepy: after her husband’s suicide, Harper (Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter) retreats to the country, where someone (or something) follows her home from the woods. But this threat, which could sustain a less ambitious horror film, is quickly dealt with, leaving Harper alone and uncertain in a town full of men (all played by Penny Dreadful’s Rory Kinnear). The titular men all have their own form of misogyny to inflict on Harper, from the “harmless” chauvinism of her landlord to a dismissive policeman to a victim-blaming vicar, culminating in a violent home invasion. The film’s first half is a great paranoid slow burn that makes the audience complicit in watching Harper without her knowledge. The tone shifts when the film moves into stranger folk horror, and while writer-director Alex Garland nailed cerebral and unexpected endings in Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), Men is let down by a repetitive, spectacle-driven finale that veers closer to gross-out than profound. TANSY GARDAM ALI & AVA

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Ali and Ava find love in writer-director Clio Barnard’s (The Selfish Giant) Yorkshire romance. In between his rent collecting route, boyish-man Ali (Adeel Akhtar, Four Lions) fancies himself a DJ, and touts around town as a quasiPied Piper of the stereo, beloved by the kids of the families he collects rent from. Classroom assistant Ava (Claire Rushbrook, Secrets & Lies) is caught in Ali’s whirlwind when offered a ride, and the two become inseparable. Though frank in its depiction of the everyday, Ali & Ava teeters on poetic – sometimes grasping it, sometimes losing it. Awkwardly cut together moments that don’t quite find their rhythm are easily forgiven when Akhtar and Rushbrook share an intimate scene. Together, Ava and Ali relieve one another of the weight of their personal histories. They exchange shameful secrets and painful scars while creating beautiful new memories. Barnard’s love story is romanticism without pretentiousness (though a little wouldn’t hurt), uniquely British in tone, universal in sentiment. BRUCE KOUSSABA

LOST ILLUSIONS 

Some 200-ish years before fake news and spon-con started having their way with social media, that same duplicitous literature thrived on Parisian streets. Concerned with sparking controversy and chasing clout, these rags are just one of the targets lampooned in Xavier Giannoli’s (Marguerite) cautionary tale of honour, hubris and hypocrisy.

Starry-eyed poet Lucien (Benjamin Voisin, Summer of 85) longs to sever his provincial roots in pursuit of artistic recognition in the city of love. Once there, a newfound taste for fame and social capital soon has him writing hatchet jobs on his frenemies’ work, while clawing for class mobility among the nobility.

Though Lost Illusions is based on material from the 1800s – namely Balzac’s serial novel Illusions Perdues – its notes on journalistic integrity are still viscerally relevant (its dull depiction of women as accoutrements to the boys’ stories is comparatively stale). At 149 minutes, it can feel protracted but, overall, it’s a handsome carriage ride from naivety to cynicism and its peril. AIMEE KNIGHT

Small Screen Reviews

Claire Cao Small Screens Editor @clairexinwen

THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY  | PRIME VIDEO

LOOT

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In this raw psychological thriller, young Bristol woman Becky Green (Erin Doherty, The Crown) becomes infatuated with the seemingly perfect life of her ex-classmate Chloe. When Chloe dies under dubious circumstances, Becky takes on a new identity as Sasha, infiltrating the socialite’s social circle and adopting the glamorous life she left behind. As the six-part series unfolds, creator Alice Seabright (Sex Education) delivers a profound story focused on grief, denial and mystery, forcing us to question how fine the line really is between villain and victim. The cinematography and soundtrack complement the dauntless yet awkward traits of its social media-obsessed characters, portrayed in an almost documentary-style fashion. Through flashbacks and long, tense scenes without dialogue or music, Chloe provides an intimate look into Becky’s mindset, while encouraging us to question the morality of her motives.

Despite centring on oft-repeated themes in the thriller genre, Chloe delivers a striking and candid production wrapped in a perfectly bite-sized package. RAVEENA GROVER

When casting the role of a likeable multibillionaire, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more charming candidate than Maya Rudolph. In this new workplace comedy, Rudolph plays Molly, the wife of a tech entrepreneur who receives an enormous settlement after her husband’s infidelity leads to a highly public divorce. Desperate for enlightenment, Molly devotes unwelcome attention to her neglected non-profit, headed by the tenacious Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez). Though both actors give stellar performances, the potentially fascinating tension between Molly’s privilege and Sofia’s no-nonsense pragmatism is neutered by the obligation to keep Rudolph’s “good” billionaire, well, good. In fact, Molly is so clumsily wellmeaning that the show’s satire of the rich becomes too restrained to achieve its full bite.

Its best jokes are the throwaways, like the reveal that Molly has unknowingly inherited arms companies through her divorce. Yet too much time is spent on the frivolity of rich wives and the miracle of personal chefs for the writing to feel truly great. TIIA KELLY

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ew crime drama True Colours opens with a frenetic car chase: a teen girl is pursued across the darkened, winding roads of a tight-knit Indigenous community, ending with her car ablaze. With her body found on land that’s been cordoned off for men’s business, Detective Toni Alma (Rarriwuy Hick, Redfern Now) struggles to get straight answers from anyone involved. Paired on the case with her white ex (Luke Arnold, Black Sails), Toni must traverse kinship ties and implicated family members, digging into a conspiracy that lands her in the shadowy world of art dealing. True Colours excels at portraying delicate community dynamics, enhanced by cinematic shots of the NT’s staggering terrain. The trademarks of a murder mystery – dead girl, wrongfully accused boyfriend, stolen artefact – feel fresh, enlivened

by Hicks’ conflicted performance and the unique exploration of Indigenous art history.

Other highlights include Miranda Otto’s turn as a devious moocher and the seamless switching between English and Arrernte languages.

True Colours premieres 4 July on both SBS and NITV, as part of their NAIDOC Week program. The multi-platform slate is built around this year’s NAIDOC theme – Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! – which recognises the continued push for systemic change. Another highlight is the frank documentary Off Country (premiering 7 July), following seven Indigenous students who become boarders at the elite Geelong Grammar. With its focus on the students’ fraught emotions over a year, the doco offers a humanistic angle into a landmark educational program. CC

24 JUN 2022

CHLOE

TRUE COLOURS: RARRIWUY HICK AND LUKE ARNOLD

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The usual romance coming-of-age suspects can be found in this new TV adaptation of Jenny Han’s bestseller. Han, known for the immensely successful To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, takes the reins as showrunner. On the summer of her 16th birthday, Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) arrives at a Hamptons-esque beach town, looking forward to a sun-soaked respite after her parents’ divorce. Staying with her mum’s best friend Susannah (Rachel Blanchard, Peep Show) and her boys, Belly must contend with the hottest shirtless teenage boys in town: her life-long crush Conrad and his brother Jeremiah. The dreamy summer setting is packed with parties, volleyball tournaments, debutant balls and late-night swims – zeroing in on the rawness of adolescent frustration, and the feeling of never wanting things to change. Props can be given to the Asian representation on screen, but perhaps not to the dozens of top 100 hits that are absolutely stuffed into the soundtrack. Major highlight: Belly’s mother and Susannah getting comically high off one gummy bear edible. HUYEN HAC HELEN TRAN

Music Reviews

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Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

unk and the screen – it’s either the perfect marriage, or a total flop. There are the great narrative fictions that manage to embody the spirit of the movement with style: Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982), featuring pint-sized Laura Dern; Derek Jarman’s brilliant Jubilee (1978), a fantastical spectacle about a bunch of punks at the end of the world, featuring Adam Ant. The best works often involve real-life punks playing themselves, or loosely fictionalised versions – see a smarmy Richard Hell in Susan Seidelman’s downtown New York love letter Smithereens (1982). Or the Ramones in the silly comedy Rock’n’Roll High School (1979). Then there are the many wonderful documentaries. A stand-out is Penelope Spheeris’ trilogy The Decline of Western Civilization, which chronicles three subcultures in LA – the first punks in the 70s, the explosion of hair metal in the 80s and the lives of gutter punks in the 90s – with empathy and candour.

Director Danny Boyle’s latest miniseries, Pistol, however, gets things totally wrong. A tale of the sharp ascent and descent of the Sex Pistols, who over three short years became the clarion call for anarchy and rebellion in Britain (thanks, too, to their manager Malcolm McLaren and iconic punk designer Vivienne Westwood). Pistol is a mess; a cheesy series that cannot help but indulge in all the music biopic clichés, while failing to get to the core of why the band were so crucial. As singer John Lydon said in a recent interview, “Disney have stolen the past and created a fairytale, which bears little resemblance to the truth.” IT

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YOUNG GUNS: THE REAL SEX PISTOLS

@itrimboli

BIG TIME ANGEL OLSEN 

With her first two albums, Angel Olsen pioneered an eerie minimalism, writing melodies that pierced so effortlessly into your skin that they didn’t even register until you had started bleeding. My Woman (2016), her masterpiece, was a turning point – bigger and denser, it expressed the mix of sorrow and strange uplift that you get at the end of a night out, seconds before things start turning bad. Big Time, her latest, sits somewhere in the middle of these two polar extremes. Shifting between the brevity of ‘Through the Fires’ and the burned leather of the title track, Olsen finds different ways to say the same thing: grief can consolidate us; heartbreak can clear our vision; love is mostly very difficult, and also the only pursuit that really matters. That, indeed, is the magic of Big Time. Despite being Olsen’s most explicitly melancholic record, it is also the album that most clearly gestures towards her next steps, and the new way she wants to live her life. It’s a battered signpost, pointing further down the road. JOSEPH EARP

SMOKE & MIRRORS MIIESHA

EXCESS AUTOMATIC

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Hailing from the remote Aboriginal community of Woorabinda, Miiesha received accolades for Nyaaringu (described as “a collection of songs” over an album) – which included an ARIA for Best Soul/R&B Release.

She continues to eschew the album format, releasing two EPs Smoke and Mirrors within months of each other. Both are collected here. Miiesha’s expressive, soulful voice and warm jazzy grooves contrast with the poignancy of her lyrics. The Anangu and Torres Strait Islander woman ponders family – specifically a fractured relationship with her mother. On Smoke, Miiesha processes personal pain – cue ‘Damaged’. But, with Mirrors, she seeks perspective, even as she considers abandoning her beloved music on ‘Everything’. The synthy gospel ‘Still Dream’ finds Miiesha resolving to let go of her hurt and begin healing. Miiesha is also experimenting sonically – collaborating with 6LACK producer Lucianblomkamp, or using autotune. Smoke & Mirrors promises an empowered future. CYCLONE WEHNER

Wielding synth, drums and bass to a stilted, almost mechanical effect, Automatic have rightly been described as “retrofuturist motorik pop”. Yet the LA trio make room for pointed commentary and low-key flourishes on this second album. “Maybe there’s a new world out there/We can do it all again,” sings Izzy Glaudini on opener ‘New Beginning’, taking issue with the idea of leaving a depleted Earth for some better option.

Evoking classic Devo there, and Le Tigre on ‘NRG’, Automatic also slot in nicely with the deadpan incantations and mocking lyrics of current bands like Wet Leg and Dry Cleaning.

Excess boasts more space and range than Signal (2019), thanks in part to producer Joo-Joo Ashworth (Sasami, Dummy). There’s more range on display in the slower moments, too, from the zonked-out trip-hop of ‘Realms’ to the breathy ballad ‘Turn Away’. Automatic recently wrapped up US tour dates with Tame Impala and Parquet Courts alike, proving that there’s still a considerable audience for gimlet-eyed nuance. DOUG WALLEN

Book Reviews

Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

A

ROOT & BRANCH EDA GUNAYDIN

BAD ART MOTHER EDWINA PRESTON

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Eda Gunaydin’s debut collection explores class mobility, ethnicity and gender.

Written from her “third culture” experience, the book of 12 autobiographical essays opens with a reflection about a kebab shop that she routinely visits with her mother. Through similar vignettes about the people and places that make up the everyday and mundane in her reality, the reader gradually gains insight into the two main cultures, one Turkish and the other Australian, within and between which Gunaydin searches for a place to bloom, fully. The writing is both forthright and vulnerable; Gunaydin offers a compassionate take on humanity and reveals a witty and powerful intellect. These knowing reflections about people and place capture, within single frames of elegant and descriptive writing, the personal and the political, what social theory looks like in the everyday. Each essay could easily stand alone, but collectively they offer a nuanced narrative about the people and places significant in Gunaydin’s migrant experience and sense of self. SISTA ZAI ZANDA

In Edwina Preston’s assured second novel, the protagonist, poet Veda Gray, is mother to Owen and wife to Jo – a restaurateur with little time for either of them. With Jo never home, Owen and Veda’s relationship is at the heart of the novel, with their dual narratives guiding the reader between Melbourne’s burgeoning arts scene of the 1960s and the present day. In the 1960s, Veda is trying to find her voice through poetry in a patriarchal society that denies a woman’s inner life, and is unable to reconcile the obligations of motherhood and her creative world. Fifty years later, Owen remembers his late mother’s neglect and how he learned to love her as he prepares to launch her posthumous book of poetry – Veda having become a lauded feminist.

Immersive and lyrical, Bad Art Mother examines ideas of women and creativity, the obligations of motherhood and the “rules” for creative women. MANDY BEAUMONT

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE PAUL DALLA ROSA 

It can be quite stressful to read Paul Dalla Rosa’s short stories, not due to any traditional suspense elements, but rather his characters’ anxiety-inducing accumulation of poor decisions. Between their financial self-destruction and lacklustre social skills, these deluded souls prove vain and uninterested in the people around them, whether they’re in Australia, Dubai, Majorca or New York.

We observe a self-styled life coach languishing in a Chinese boarding house while awaiting space in a monastery, a US-based writing student who goes to great lengths to not actually write anything, and an aspiring singer haunting a bland karaoke bar on the Gold Coast. Thankfully, it’s all wielded to comic effect, alongside cutting commentary about reducing intimacy to currency and the transactional nature of apps like Grindr. Though Rosa’s protagonists are primarily young gay men, their suffocating circumstances and cohabitation horror stories feel increasingly universal. Savagely self-aware, this deadpan debut collection lingers with uncomfortable staying power. DOUG WALLEN

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AVID READER: THE KING

24 JUN 2022

t the opening of Bendigo Art Gallery’s Elvis: Direct from Graceland exhibition, Priscilla Presley did not hesitate when asked about her favourite items from the collection. “The books,” she said. “Elvis was an avid reader, and the books would surprise you, what he read.”

Elvis read so much that she had a bookshelf made to keep under the bed, to house his sprawling book piles and stop him from tripping over them. Like his listening habits, he read widely – political biographies on Churchill and the Kennedys, instructive guides to martial arts, WWII history books, the Guinness World Records, Kahlil Gibran and The Book of Tao, all of which are on display at the gallery – but it was always the good book he returned to: Elvis owned many copies of the Bible.

He wrote in his books too – underlined passages he liked, scribbled in the margins. After he died, archivists found letters from fans tucked in his books, notes he’d written to himself on sheet music. One of the Bibles they found was inscribed with a special message: “To Elvis with fondest wishes from your Australian fans.”

And he read aloud to Priscilla, in bed, often late at night after a screening at the cinema. “He would go right to the books and he would read to me,” she remembered. “Mind you, I had to go to school the next morning… And I would be so tired. And he would say, ‘You’re not listening to me woman!’ Kiddingly, kiddingly, and I was like, Okay, keep your eyes open…” MF

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

The people whose day you changed by injecting a bit of kindness into it are thinking about you… Your older relative who got so frustrated with their computer they felt like crying and you came to the rescue. That kid you were nice to who maybe isn’t having such a great time at home. The new guy at work who doesn’t know many people yet.

If ever, in your entire life, you have planted a tiny seedling that might one day become a tree, people will be thinking about you for potentially hundreds of years.

An elderly person, decades from now, an elderly person who isn’t yet born as I write these words but who will one day be elderly, might just take the hand of a grandchild and point up.

“See that tree?” the elderly person who is not yet born might say. “That was planted before you were born.”

“By you?” the child might ask, squinting up for an answer.

“By me? No. No, that tree was planted before even I was born,” the elderly person who is not yet born might say. And they will stand there, hand-in-hand, for just a moment, the two of them, spanning three generations, looking at a tree and thinking of you.

People from your past remember you too. “I’ve never forgotten the nice woman who helped me when I fell down the escalator at the train station that day,” someone will have told their family over a cup of tea once. “I’ve never forgotten that kid at the school sports carnival going back to help his friend run over the finish line.”

They have no idea where you are, or who you are now.

They think about you, though, and they always have.

People think of you when they’re not expecting to.

When they hear a particular phrase. When they see a person up ahead and the way they walk reminds them of you. If you’ve ever lost yourself in laughing with someone, chances are they’ll remember that. That feeling will come back to them. What were we even laughing at? they’ll wonder to themselves while they walk through their own life on their way to something, or their way back from something, or both.

And yes, some people in this life won’t like you.

Some of the things you’ve done that are embarrassing or ill-advised or hurtful will revisit people you might even have long forgotten. Maybe you behaved absolutely appallingly; maybe they did too. Or maybe people’s impressions are unfair and shaped by factors you can’t change. Maybe they’re being racist or sexist. Incidents like this litter human history and mythology and TV dramas.

But maybe they don’t have to define us. What if instead of letting other people’s perspectives eat away at who you are, you could populate your future with people who will think of you and smile?

What if you could be the library volunteer who directs a teenager towards a book that changes their whole life? What if you could be the aunty or uncle that a small person speaks proudly about at show-and-tell on Monday? The neighbour down the road who smiles at the old woman who doesn’t speak much English, and leaves lemons at her doorstep.

Public Service Announcement: other people are thinking about you. If you think about them, you’ll find the exchange is much less excruciating than it could be.

Buy someone sleeping in a doorway a hot drink.

Tell a workmate they’re doing a good job. Maybe they’ll think of you in 10 years when they see someone walk down the street.

Better still? Plant a tree.

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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I

heard someone make one of those “wise” generalisations the other day, declaring that when you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks of you, when you’re 40 you don’t care what anybody thinks of you, and when you’re 60 you know nobody’s ever been thinking about anything other than themselves. I thought it was cute, and probably true in as much as these things ever are, but it got me thinking about how much we worry what people are thinking about us. You know who doesn’t worry about what other people think of them? Psychopaths! Narcissists! Bullies!

Public Service Announcement: other people are thinking about you. That’s not always a bad thing.

24 JUN 2022

Thinking of You

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

40

FOOD PHOTO BY SOPHIE HANSON , PORTRAIT BY HENRY HERRON

Tastes Like Home Sophie Hansen

Serves 6 1½ cups self-raising flour 1 cup caster sugar ¾ cup Milo 3 eggs, at room temperature ½ cup softened butter, cut into cubes ½ cup milk Icing sugar, for dusting

Method Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a 23cm springform tin and line the tin with baking paper.

Combine all the ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and beat for 5 minutes.

Spoon the batter into the tin and bake for about 35 minutes or until the cake is springy to the touch and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Serve the cake dusted with icing sugar.

You can substitute Milo here by mixing 2 tablespoons cocoa powder with ½ cup malted milk powder. The cake will be a bit darker and more chocolatey, but still delicious!

SHARE

TIP

Sophie says…

M

y mum – artist and co-author Annie Herron – is a wonderful cook. And of all the good things she makes, this is the cake we love most. It’s a simple pleasure, the smell of it cooking and the soft, gently flavoured crumb is like time travel to Mum’s warm, colourful kitchen.

My happy place.

We live four hours west of Sydney; Mum and Dad live halfway between here and there. And somehow, like magic, whenever we drop in, this cake is waiting on the bench, warm and ready to share. It’s like a big edible welcome hug.

I find that kids especially love this one. It’s something to do with the chocolatey flavour not being too rich. My son Tom especially likes it warm from the oven, in a puddle of cold thin cream. Who could blame him?

And like all good “plain cake” recipes, it’s happy to be taken in lots of different directions. One of my favourites being a malted orange version: for this, you swap out the Milo for malted milk powder and add in some grated orange zest and a little vanilla.

Baking like this, repeating beloved recipes over and over, even when you’d probably like to mix things up and try something new, is true love made edible. When Mum makes us this cake, I know she does it because we all (children and grandchildren alike) enjoy it so much. She knows that having it cooling on the bench when we walk in the door is another way of saying, “I’m so happy you’re here. I love you.” And isn’t that the very best taste of home?

PLAN TO RECREATE THIS CAKE AT HOME? TAG US WITH YOUR CREATION! @BIGISSUEAUSTRALIA #TASTESLIKEHOME

AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE BY SOPHIE HANSEN AND ANNIE HERRON IS OUT NOW.

24 JUN 2022

Ingredients

41

Annie’s Five-Minute Milo Cake

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45.

By Lingo!

by Lee Murray leemurray.id.au SARCASM

CLUES 5 letters Colossal Endowment Pattern on wood Pit worker Railway locomotive 6 letters __ Luther King Jr The __ of the Shrew Cord Sailor Trough or box in a stable 7 letters Chair arrangement Hard rock Odd, peculiar 8 letters Cooking with hot vapour Painful, stinging

R G E I

N

T

A M S

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

5 6 8 9 5 2 9 3 2 6 2 9 1

2 1 3

8

4

1 8 4 7 2 4 5 7 3 4

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Stipend 5 On paper 9 Pathology 10 Lotus

11 Atone 12 Superbowl 13 Old Navy 15 Sampras 17 Riviera 19 Passion 21 Guarantee 23 Augur 25 Loire 26 Cast aside 27 Yangtze 28 Scenery

DOWN 1 Soprano 2 Intro 3 Exonerate 4 Drops by 5 Olympus 6 Polar 7 Potpourri 8 Results 14 Deviation 16 Mismanage 17 Regally 18 Attaché 19 Pleases 20 Nursery 22 Alert 24 Guile

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Squash 2 Sweden 3 Western Australia 4 Ian Chesterman 5 2000 6 People related to the same ancestor 7 Ben Elton 8 Roy 9 The Aviator and Blue Jasmine 10 76 11 Idris Elba 12 130km/h 13 Raw fish or seafood 14 Fountain Lakes 15 Barack Obama 16 Victoria, Australia 17 Avocado 18 Russian President Boris Yeltsin 19 Fijian 20 Blue

24 JUN 2022

Using all 9 letters provided, can you answer these clues?

Every answer must include the central letter.

Plus, which word uses all 9 letters?

by puzzler.com

43

Word Builder

Sarcasm comes to us from the Ancient Greek sárx “flesh” (also the source of sarcophagus and sarcoma). This root sárx also produced the Ancient Greek verb sarkázein “to tear the flesh”. (Technically it was σαρκάζειν, but my Greek is pretty terrible.)

Sarkázein also meant “gnash one’s teeth” or “bite one’s lip”. The metaphor extended it into “make a cutting remark”. By the 400s CE, Greek had taken this last meaning and adapted the new sarkasmós, which found its way into Latin as sarcasmos.

From there, it was only a hop, skip and jump to the English sarcasm that we know today. Since then, a few short-lived variants have had their day: sarcasmical (1600s), sarcasmatical (1700s), and sarcast (1800s), at least one of which will be going in my Twitter bio.

by Chris Black

Quick Clues

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

2

3

4

5

6

9

12

14

15

17

21

8

10

11

13

7

18

16

19

20

22

25

23

24

26

27

28

Cryptic Clues

DOWN

1 Singer (7) 2 Foreword, for short (5) 3 Absolve (9) 4 Pops in (5,2) 5 Home of the Greek gods (7) 6 Frigid (5) 7 Medley (9) 8 Outcomes (7) 14 Digression (9) 16 Bungle (9) 17 Like a monarch (7) 18 Embassy worker (7) 19 Satisfies (7) 20 Place for young children (7) 22 Vigilant (5) 24 Cunning (5)

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Spend it, perhaps? (7) 5 Theoretically liquid propane (2,5) 9 Medical department to track development of

1 Tony for singer? (7) 2 Fortnite squad returned to start (5) 3 Clear former partner with a judge (9) 4 Doctors accept work times for visits (5,2) 5 Lousy MP created divine residence (7) 6 Antarctic Post Office left a final letter (5) 7 Played up to prior mix (9) 8 New Ulster’s delivering outcomes (7) 14 Dive into a strange anomaly (9) 16 Make a mess of hit man’s image (9) 17 Like a queen, say, overwhelmed by

logo with chromosome (9) 10 Perhaps Jill Biden cut first flower (5) 11 New England pursues tax collectors to make restitution (5) 12 Brilliant sign of wisdom in sporting event (9) 13 Clothing available here for senior forces (3,4) 15 State politician starts recognising awesome Spanish tennis player (7) 17 Travelling, I arrive in coastal region (7) 19 Love played up in soaps (7) 21 Warranty for nature & age damage (9) 23 Broadcast tool for Herald (5) 25 Mythology about one river (5) 26 Dismiss actors before A-Team (4,5) 27 Get zany new flower in China (7) 28 Setback in the theatre? (7)

ACROSS

1 Allowance (7) 5 In theory (2,5) 9 Medical department (9) 10 Water lily (5) 11 Make amends (5) 12 US sport event (9) 13 US clothing brand (3,4) 15 US tennis player (7) 17 Fashionable coastal region (7) 19 Fire (7) 21 Assure (9) 23 Foreshadow (5) 25 France’s longest river (5) 26 Dismiss (4,5) 27 Asia’s longest river (7) 28 Backdrop (7)

demonstration (7)

18 Teetotaller in AA with revolutionary embassy

worker (7)

19 Satisfies last-gasp agreements (7) 20 Home of Rugrats reruns broadcast funny finale?

(7) 22 Notify the French during creative activity (5) 24 Le Guin’s short-novel craft (5)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

7 2 8 5 6 9 3 1 4

3 5 9 7 1 4 2 8 6

1 6 4 2 3 8 9 5 7

4 8 5 9 2 6 1 7 3

2 1 7 4 5 3 6 9 8

9 3 6 1 8 7 4 2 5

5 7 1 6 4 2 8 3 9

6 9 3 8 7 1 5 4 2

8 4 2 3 9 5 7 6 1

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Giant Grant Grain Miner Train 6 Martin Taming String Rating Manger 7 Seating Granite Strange 8 Steaming Smarting 9 Streaming

24 JUN 2022

1

45

Crossword

Click APRIL 1972

Juliane Koepcke

words by Michael Epis photo by IMAGO/ZUMA Press

46

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

O

n Christmas Eve 1971, teenager Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 in Lima with her mother for a one-hour trip. Her father was worried, unimpressed by the airline’s safety record.

But they wanted to be home for Christmas.

Halfway into the flight the plane struck a storm.

Then lightning struck the plane. Juliane saw it hit the wing. The plane disintegrated mid-air. “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me,” she recalled decades later. The 91 others on the plane died.

Juliane had her seatbelt on. Strapped in, she fell to earth, three kilometres below, the seat rotating like a helicopter blade, slowing its descent. It fell into tree canopy, softening her fall. When Juliane regained consciousness, she had a broken collarbone, one eye was swollen closed, the other barely open, and her glasses gone. Otherwise, fine. She was soaked and covered in mud – in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Here her tale gets even more amazing. Juliane listened – and recognised the bird calls. She knew, sort of, where she was. Her mother was an ornithologist, her father a zoologist, who had established Panguana,

an ecological reserve in Peru’s jungle. In her two years there Juliane had learned about the jungle, its dangers, and how to survive them.

She knew it was safer to walk in rivers and streams than on land – the alligators were less deadly than the snakes, spiders and other nasties. She knew that walking a river would take her to lower altitudes. So she started walking. It was rainy season – and it didn’t stop raining. She survived on rainwater.

In 11 days the only humans she saw were several more from the plane, likewise in their seats, but buried head-first on impact. She came across a boat, with a hut nearby. A wound in her arm had become infested with maggots; she disinfected it with petrol. She slept. The fishermen came. At first they took her for a water sprite.

Five months later, she got on a plane again to return to her native Germany.

One person narrowly missed boarding the fatal flight. Werner Herzog – yes, the filmmaker, which is how he came to make Wings of Hope with Juliane, who became a biologist, and expanded Panguana, which she later ran, keeping good her promise to herself in the jungle to do something good for the world.