The Big Issue Australia #624 – Imagining John Lennon

Ed.

624 13 NOV 2020

18.

PAUL DEMPSEY

SOFIE LAGUNA

28.

30.

and BRAZEN HUSSIES

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Contents

EDITION

624 18 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

‘I Was Really Intense’ Something for Kate’s Paul Dempsey on growing up in a house full of women and music, making friends with the other Black Flag‑listening misfits at school, and the joy in becoming a husband and father.

28 BOOKS

Infinite Wisdom

12.

Imagining John Lennon

by Alan Attwood

Forty years on from his death, and fans all over the world can still remember exactly where they were when they heard John Lennon had died. Alan Attwood looks back on the life, the legacy and the music of the bespectacled Beatle – and beyond.

We chat with award‑winning novelist Sofie Laguna about seeking solace in art and nature, inhabiting the world of her characters, and her latest novel Infinite Splendours.

30

contents photo by Getty

FILM THE REGULARS

04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor 06 Streetsheet 08 Hearsay & 20 Questions 11 My Word 20 The Big Picture

25 Ricky 27 Fiona 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews 37 Book Reviews

39 Public Service Announcement 40 Tastes Like Home 43 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

cover illustration by Timba Smits timbasmits

Timba Smits is a curious, multi-disciplinary graphic artist and lifelong member of the Daydream Club. His work stretches across analogue and digital media and combines illustration, typography, satirical humour and pop-culture references.

Hear Them Roar We take a look at Brazen Hussies, the new doco celebrating Australia’s women’s libbers of the 60s and 70s, and how they agitated for social change at a crucial time in history.

Ed’s Letter

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor

Greet the Brand New Day

L

ike so many of us, I grew up with John Lennon.

Not literally of course – he died before I was born – but his legacy, his playfulness, his music coloured my childhood and worldview. My earliest Lennon memories are really of my Beatle‑tragic dad. A muso too, he’d get home late from a gig and his bootsteps, so loud on the polished floorboards, would wake me up. Dad would sit by my bed and tell me all about his show, then send me back off to sleep by playing ‘Dear Prudence’ on his guitar to me – always ‘Dear Prudence’, from The White Album.

For years I thought it was a lullaby.

Forty years on from Lennon’s passing and it’s hard to know what he would have made of these strange times we’re living in, but his music endures as a comfort and a salve. In this edition, Alan Attwood remembers this flawed and revolutionary genius, and his simple message of peace, hope and imagination.

It seems particularly relevant in light of recent days. Pandemic restrictions are lifting, particularly in Victoria. Hope abounds. Last Saturday morning, I bought my new Big Issue from my local vendor Clarissa in the small Victorian town of Castlemaine where I live – it was the first time I’d seen her since March.

There was a line at her pitch!

Spring is in full bloom, coronavirus cases in Australia remain low, our vendors are back right across the country and for the first time in a long time, I am reminded that there are wonderful things to look forward to.

But how to keep track of all these wonderful things, these exciting events on our collective horizon? By marking them down in your brand-new 2021 Big Issue calendar, of course! Vendors earn 60 per cent – that’s $9 of the $15 price – of every calendar sold, a welcome boost in what has been a tough, tough year. So make like Lennon’s ‘Dear Prudence’ and “greet the brand new day” Big Issue-style!

04

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia.

It was created as a social enterprise 24 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 E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

This is the story of Ronnie The Big Issue vendor. You couldn’t hope to meet a nicer bloke. He’s always at the corner of Queen and Creek, and he’s always got a new joke to tell you (usually similar to the worst dad jokes, they always get a smile). He is always having an easy chat with the public and I’m sure he lightens up everyone’s day. When I bought The Big Issue from him today, he said, “Thanks. That’s the first one I’ve sold – that will get me some breakfast.”

What a lovely guy.

PHIL PENNINGTON BRISBANE I QLD

I was really happy to get my first post-pandemic Big Issue in the mail and know that you are back. I have missed my Mondays in Brisbane and picking up my Big Issue from Jeromy in Adelaide Street, and wish him well.

When lockdown happened, The Big Issue vendors were the first people I thought of. After a career working in Centrelink, I know how precarious life is on a pension and how essential The Big Issue is to paying bills or saving for small extras. I am sure that many found lockdown lonely and very tough, so welcome back!

SARAH DAVIES BRISBANE I QLD

• 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 20 locations around the country.

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

• The Big Issue Classroom educates school groups about homelessness.

• And The Big Idea challenges university students to develop a new social enterprise.

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Phil wins a copy of In Praise of Veg, a new cookbook by Alice Zaslavsky.

You can give her Grate Borsch recipe a go on p40. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

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Meet Your Vendor

interview by Anastasia Safioleas photo by James Braund

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

13 NOV 2020

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT PUCKLE STREET, MOONEE PONDS, MELBOURNE

05

David

I grew up in Melbourne but we moved to Warrnambool when I was a teenager. I got a job up there working at the abattoirs. I was still going to school and working at the same time – they said I could do my job and go to school so I could finish my Year 11 and 12. I ended up finishing high school.

I enjoyed school. Some of the work was a bit hard but I eventually got there. English was my favourite subject. I was top of my class for English. I still love reading. I mainly like to read crime books.

I’ve got two sisters. I don’t talk to my real dad, but I sometimes talk to my mum. I grew up alright with my sisters. Now maybe I talk to them once in a blue moon… My childhood wasn’t too bad, but it was a bit rough when I was a teenager. I was on the street when I was 13 or 14. I was on the drugs but Mum didn’t like me on the drugs, so she kicked me out. I was on the street for maybe six months but then I eventually got off the drugs and went back to Mum. It was really hard being homeless in a country town. I didn’t have many mates I could go to. I ended up getting help – I went to rehab. I just got into the wrong crowd when I was younger, that was all.

I worked at the abs for five years but then it just got too much because there were too many early morning starts, so I left. I got another job mowing lawns and then worked at Bunnings for a while.

Then I moved to Melbourne and started working at The Big Issue.

A mate that used to work for The Big Issue got me on to it.

I like selling The Big Issue. I get to meet people. It’s something to do and puts money in your pocket. I sell with my wife Kylie, so I have a bit of company while I work. We have a few regular customers who will stop for a chat and ask how our day is.

What I like best about selling The Big Issue is being outdoors and not being stuck in the house, and meeting people and selling The Big Issue to them.

During lockdown, I’d been in the city a few times and had customers come up and say hello to me.

Even though I was not selling they would come up and say hello and ask how my day’s going.

It made me feel good.

I’m really happy to be back out there selling again now. We’ve got an old lady who we often see. She always stops and has a chat, and we’d like to see how she’s doing. We haven’t seen her for a while, so it will be good to see how she is.

And me and Kylie will hopefully travel soon to Phillip Island for our honeymoon. We got married in October last year but didn’t have a honeymoon. We just celebrated our first-year wedding anniversary.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

VENDOR SPOTLIGHT

PAUL

Give Us a Chance Believe in giving us a chance In everything we do So we can step out So we can live Understanding enables us to be strong Venture out Enduring rain or shine Never giving up

Vale Paul

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Y

ou could hear it well before he came into view, the sound of that distinctive sales patter: “Just three more to go, ladies and gentlemen,” it went, “just three more and then I can go home.” In truth, often when Paul uttered these words, he had more than just a few last magazines to shift. He was a gifted salesman. Paul was good at connecting on a human level with those who crossed his path. He had many devoted customers, and counted plenty of firm friends among his fellow vendors.

The Big Issue meant a lot to Paul. It kept him out of trouble, he said, and even delivered one of his most memorable moments on the streets of Melbourne. In 2005, Paul met Prince Charles, who took home a copy of the mag, an encounter captured in a photograph that hangs proudly still in The Big Issue offices. Paul chuckled whenever that day was mentioned. This was fitting. Words didn’t flow easily from him, but that chuckle did, speaking to his affable nature and ability to make everyone feel comfortable in his presence.

Paul has passed away. The corner of Queen and Collins, the Centreway Arcade, Lygon Street and the steps at Parliament station will seem a little quieter from now on. But our memory of him will be no less bright for that silence. Rest easy, mate.

NICK DURHAM VENDOR SUPPORT I MELBOURNE

Depending on sales Our way of life Refusing to give in 9 is how much 4 everyone 2 be me SARAH W RED DOT I FREMANTLE

VESNA MOONEE PONDS & FLEMINGTON MARKETS I MELBOURNE

Ronnie’s Funnies Q: Why did the tomato blush?

A: Because he saw the chickpea.

RONNIE CNR CREEK & EAGLE STS I BRISBANE

South of the Bored After being locked down for three months, it was great to get back to the streets selling The Big Issue. While in lockdown I went through a hard time staying in my accommodation. I am so used to getting up early to work, I found it hard to find things to do. I bought a guitar and played it for a week – then got bored with it. I watched

Queensland borders are open by Christmas as I have family that I haven’t seen for years coming down to Valla Beach in NSW for a big family reunion and Christmas Day together. I am looking forward to it.

I will be celebrating 25 years of selling the magazine in July 2021.

It has changed my life – the way I think and the way I live – all in a good way. I hope to be selling for another 25 years.

DAVID S PARRAMATTA, RHODES & BURWOOD I SYDNEY

BRIAN RECEIVES HIS CERTIFICATE FROM CITY OF HOLDFAST BAY MAYOR AMANDA WILSON

Brian’s Long Service I have been selling The Big Issue for 23 years! I can’t say I have enjoyed every day – I’d be lying if I did. From Sydney to Adelaide, I have seen people come and go: vendors come and go, and staff come and go. But the best staff are Matt and Erica. I have also watched kids grow up, watched customers’ babies grow up to be teenagers and young adults. I have been going home to see my mum in Queensland when I can. I went to visit for her 80th birthday three years ago. She nearly had a heart attack, but it was the best surprise she’s ever had!

BRIAN W JETTY ROAD, GLENELG & PALACE CINEMA I ADELAIDE

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

13 NOV 2020

Since starting my connection with The Big Issue, it has helped me in so many ways. I could never have achieved what I have achieved without the support and family‑type bonds I have made, and I now have great friendships from this. A friend of mine named Greg had mentioned The Big Issue and encouraged me to make contact. I started as a quiet, shy person, not confident to push the sales so much. But over time, my confidence grew. I have made friendships not only with other vendors, but also look forward to my customers, and their genuine concern for how I’ve been. It has given me a social outlet – no matter how my day might have been, I’m able to put it to one side and look forward to my customer contact.

It has given me some structure and social interaction; it has given me friends and a future. Now I have the confidence and personality to put a smile not only on the faces of the people I sell The Big Issue to, but on my own face as well.

And that’s so empowering for me.

a lot of great films. Now I’m back selling, I am happier. It is great some of my customers are coming up to me asking where I have been.

Sales have been very slow. I didn’t want to get up for work, but I find selling the mag is an addiction and very hard to break. I am working in Parramatta and Rhodes. I have been doing a few Big Issue Classroom talks, which are very inspiring.

The students I have been talking to are very interested in the issue of homelessness. I am hoping the

07

When I See You Smile

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

The great thing about being blind, for me, is that I don’t see colour, but I do see the spirit.

And if your spirit’s not right, I can just feel it.

“It’s like heaven and hell. I don’t have any words to explain it. It was a beautiful place, but Nauru is a horrible place. For me, it’s a place where we lost our dreams, our health, our time and our identity. And we lost a lot of friends. I don’t think we were alive in that place; I don’t say we lived. I prefer to say we were dead.”

Former Nauru detainee Betelhem Tibebu on life in detention. She is now in Australia, working for Metro Trains in Melbourne.

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

VICE I AU

American music legend Stevie Wonder on whether the US is on the brink of losing its core values.

“The first four or five zero days [production] was significantly higher. We were making double or triple what we normally do.”

Raph Rashid, owner of All Day Donuts in Brunswick, on the increased demand for doughnuts on doughnut days in Melbourne – when coronavirus cases and deaths are zero.

ROLLING STONE I US

THE GUARDIAN I AU

“I know it’s random, but I have two beehives. Real ones. I’ve had them at my house for a while now. I have around 80,000 bees and we make hundreds of jars of honey a year.”

Beyoncé on literally being Queen B. She started the beehives because her two daughters have allergies – and honey has healing properties.

“It is the most joyous, free, kind-of dreamlike state…the metaphor of breaking free, being weightless and unbound, going for the skies and the stars.”

Inventor Richard Browning on making the object humans have long dreamed of – the backpack jetpack.

VOGUE I UK

“Many cat owners will find that their pet wants to get involved with what they’re doing, and won’t realise they’re not helping. Giving cats extra enrichment during working hours can help keep them occupied.”

Evy Mays, feline welfare adviser at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, on what to do when your cat is walking across your work-from-home keyboard and sending inappropriate emails.

“Even when presented with the same exact content, people can respond very differently, which can contribute to continued division.

Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree. Our experiences, and the media we consume, likely contribute to neural polarisation.”

Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and senior author of a study on why hot-button words trigger conservatives and liberals differently.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

SCIENCE DAILY I US

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“We have had Mercury retrograde, Mars retrograde, Venus in its fall position in Virgo, and Jupiter uncomfortable in Capricorn as well.

This is important because Venus (representing justice) and Jupiter (bringing good fortune) are what we can rely on in ensuring that things run smoothly in such a large-scale operation. All of these planets not performing as well can make this process arduous and inaccurate. I am predicting in general that there will not be a clear winner and this will be a long and drawn out process with not as ideal results.”

Astrologer Adama Sesay’s prediction on the US presidential election race.

BUZZFEED I AU

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last.

Every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities. And to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you

20 Questions

by Little Red

01 What does ICAC stand for?

02 What are you doing if you’re

partaking in monology?

03 The name of which member of The

Beatles means “apple” in Japanese?

04 How many legs does a lobster have?

05 King Felipe VI is the monarch of

which country?

06 Which two AFL clubs merged in

1996 to form the Brisbane Lions?

07 Name three of the world’s five

smallest countries.

08 Who has been sworn in as the

newest US Supreme Court Justice?

09 Which African country is the world’s

largest producer of vanilla?

10 Which famous Australian band just

released a mini-album titled The Makarrata Project?

“For years people have chosen to sleep with powerful people, and that’s their prerogative. After all, I got two children out of it.”

Actor Helena Bonham-Carter on sex and power in Hollywood, and meeting her ex-partner, director and frequent collaborator Tim Burton, while working on Planet of the Apes.

She loves to monkey around.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“I saw the big pool of fish, the big bait ball come up out of the water.

I saw the whale come up…I thought, Oh no! It’s too close. All of a sudden,

CNN I US

“In the old days, it was very difficult to organise a show like this.

One would not dream of getting approval for it from authorities.”

Sudanese designer Khaled Onsa after a fashion show that included male and female models. Any such show was impossible under Islamist rule from 1989 to 2019.

AFRICANEWS.COM

“Sir Sean Connery will be remembered as Bond and so much more. He defined an era and a style.

The wit and charm he portrayed on screen could be measured in megawatts; he helped create the modern blockbuster.”

Daniel Craig on his fellow Bond, Sean Connery, who has died, aged 90.

11 According to the UN, how many

babies are born each day on average: 385,000, 525,000 or 1 million?

12 The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by

Jean Rhys was written as a feminist response and prequel to which famous 19th century novel?

13 How many Australian Prime

Ministers have died in office? Bonus point if you can name them.

14 What sport do the Melbourne

Boomers play?

15 If someone is garrulous, are they

very bad-tempered, dangerously adventurous or excessively talkative?

16 What are the five boroughs of New

York City?

17 Which 1969 children’s book is

author Eric Carle most known for?

18 What are the two main ingredients

in a Banoffee pie? Hint: they also form its name.

19 True or false: three per cent of the

Earth’s water is freshwater?

20 Which Oscar-winning actress voiced

Maggie Simpson’s first word?

13 NOV 2020

SBS I AU

I lifted up, and I was in the water.”

Kayaker Julie McSorley on nearly becoming fish food with her friend Liz Cottriel when a humpback whale overturned her boat and almost swallowed them, in California.

NME I UK

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ANSWERS ON PAGE 43

09

a clear message.

Dream with Dad: “C'mon mate. ambition. Lead Hurry up.” with conviction.

Young son, lagging Kamala Harris on behind, responds: “I’m social distancing!” becoming the first woman, the first Overheard by Casey, Vic, on the morning school run.

Black American and the first South Asian American to serve as Vice President of the USA. EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Jenny Sinclair @jenny_sinclair

I

t’s early Sunday morning and I’m riding up Melbourne’s Merri Creek bike path, blissfully thinking of nothing at all. Then I round a corner and there it is: a snake. It’s curled up right in the middle of the path.

I don’t have time to stop, but I can swerve. So I do, sliding to a halt a few metres further on. I look back to check it’s really a snake. It is, grey and coiled and scaly.

It’s not moving. I can’t tell if it is even breathing. I edge closer, keeping my bike between us. I look both ways, up and down the path; no-one’s coming.

But this is a really busy bike path. It’s about 7am.

Pretty soon there will be dogs and kids and old ladies walking along here.

I stand frozen. I have always said that people who bother snakes with sticks deserve exactly what they get. But here I am: snake, bike path, no-one to help.

Plenty of sticks about.

I stand there until a jogger comes along. I warn him: snake. He takes a closer look and pronounces it alive, and a children’s python. It’s flecked with leopard-like spots and resembles a distorted pretzel. An escaped pet, he says. I wonder if he knows what he’s talking about.

It could be something deadly, venomous.

A middle-aged woman walks towards us and I say to her: snake. The jogger has to go, but the woman and I spend 10 minutes writing the word “snake” out of twigs on the bike path 10 metres either side of it, so people know it’s there. From time to time, someone else comes along and we warn them: snake. Some people turn back, some go around. This part of the path runs through bushland and we stand under the gum trees, staring at the sleeping snake.

I start making calls to whoever I can think of – snake catchers, wildlife services, even the police – but no-one wants to know.

Then, stuck for what to do, we all leave. But the further I go, the less I can believe that I’m riding away.

I come to a creek-side market garden and can’t help myself: I raid their rubbish pile for a big foam fruit box with a lid, get on my bike and ride back down.

The snake hasn’t moved, but it’s warming up in the morning sun, the knot of its body loosening a little.

I do a quick calculation of its area, line up the borders of the box and drop it down. The snake fits, barely.

Then I just stand there, no closer to resolution.

The jogger comes back, finishing his circuit. We discuss whether to wait for the police, who said they might come. But if they do, we know, the snake will be euthanised. And now we are kind of attached to the snake. Why should it die?

We are preparing, with great fuss and planning, to pick up the box and try to coax the snake into it so we can pop the lid on, when two young women come by and ask what we’re doing. One, with her blonde hair pulled back in a business-like ponytail, says: “I’m a wildlife vet.” Yep. She picks it up with her bare hands and pops it in the box. Unwound, it turns out to be at least one-and-a-half metres long, a slowly twisting strip of muscle. It doesn’t object to being handled; she calls it sweetheart and worries over how cold it is. The tiny crowd is amazed.

I have never wanted more to hug a stranger, and never been less free to do so.

And that’s it. I continue on my northbound ride; the jogger leaves; the women take the snake back to their place while trawling Facebook for snake rescue services.

When I return, heading home, there is nothing to see but a pile of twigs that used to read “snake”.

I want that vanished moment of drama to mean something. Maybe it tells me that I can’t help getting involved when I could just keep going – that I need to see how things turn out. Maybe the way the passers-by worried about the snake is heartening: what was it to them? Maybe the bigger picture is that people, once they’re part of a story, feel the need to follow it through.

The snake – I believe – is still alive. I got a text the next day: the vet and her friend drove it 50 kilometres down the Mornington Peninsula to a snake rescue service. It went into quarantine, and would later be rehomed.

I’ve ridden around that bend at least 500 times in the past 20 years, cruising between the creek and eucalypts on a narrow band of bitumen. I hope to ride around it another 500 times. And every time I do, I’ll think: this is where we saved the snake.

Jenny Sinclair is a Melbourne writer. Her books are Much Ado About Melbourne and A Walking Shadow.

Her non-fiction can be found in various publications.

11

Riding her bike alongside Melbourne’s Merri Creek, a random sighting prompts Jenny Sinclair to stop – and everyone joins in.

13 NOV 2020

For Goodness Snake

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

12

JOHN AND YOKO IN 1968

is ttwood Alan A

PHOTO BY GETTY

D

a forme

of The r editor

ecember 1980. I heard the news from the guy running a backpacker hostel in Venice, Italy.

He came in shouting: “Crazy man shot Beatle George Lennon.” This made no sense. So I replied: “John Lennon?” Yes. Him. Not long afterwards I was on a train.

A young Italian woman sitting opposite me made eye contact and asked: “John Lennon morte?” I nodded. She started weeping quietly. And for the first time I had a sense of the universality of this musician from Liverpool, who hadn’t been a Beatle for over 10 years and

e.

Big Issu

hadn’t performed in public for more than five. Within days, vigils were held all over the world. I ignored my budget and bought a copy of Time magazine with a cover portrait of Lennon and the headline ‘When the Music Died’.

Now 40 years have passed since the man who sang about giving peace a chance suffered a violent death.

This was a creative person with much ahead of him. He said so in a Playboy interview in September 1980: “Paul [McCartney] is 38. Elton John, Bob Dylan...we’re all relatively young people. The game isn’t over yet... God willing, there are another 40 years

13 NOV 2020

ood n Attw

by Ala

13

today, o g a s r usic, 0 yea m 4 s i ) t h s t o u alm died. B n o It was ( n e on. n v e i l L e n c h n o e when J is influ h d n a nd his lege

of productivity to go.” In his last radio interview, just hours before he was shot, he was also looking ahead: “Wasn’t the 70s a drag? Here we are, let’s try to make it through the 80s.”

There’s always a sense that recording artists never really die. The music of Lennon, Aretha Franklin, George Harrison, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson, Maria Callas and so many more endures and now, through streaming services, is more accessible than ever. It’s possibly even appreciated more because, well, that’s all there is, folks.

But Lennon himself resisted veneration of the dead. He took issue with Neil Young’s oft-quoted line from ‘My My, Hey Hey’ (1979): “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Lennon told Playboy: “I don’t appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne...

Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison...it’s garbage to me. I worship the people who survive.”

His music has survived. And a re-evaluation has occurred: you can make a case that the best of his post-Beatles music (1969 onwards) compares favourably with much that preceded it. ‘Imagine’ (1971) has a life of its own, recently becoming a kind of let’s-get-through-COVID anthem. Songs that once prompted eye-rolling – ‘Give Peace a Chance’, ‘Instant Karma!’, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ and ‘Woman’ – now sound thematically relevant. Time has given us perspective on them. Lennon predicted this, too, saying in 1980: “‘Imagine’, ‘Love’ and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up to any song that was written when I was a Beatle.

Now, it may take you 20 or 30 years to appreciate that, but the fact is, if you check those songs out, you will see that it is as good as any fucking stuff that was ever done.”

Forty years on, there’s little point wondering what he’d be doing now – whether he’d still be performing like Paul, Elton and Bob. It’s more

IN THE BEATLES: GOOD LITTLE BAND THAT

IN FULL REGALIA: CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF SGT PEPPER’S...

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IN BED: CAMPAIGNING FOR PEACE, WITH YOKO

IN CHILDHOOD: WITH HIS MUM, JULIA

interesting to assess what he achieved and try to gauge his influence.

Reviewing a Lennon biography in The New York Times in 2011, James Parker described four life phases: Leather John (the Quarry Men years), Beatle John, ‘Imagine’ John, John the martyr. Never, crucially, John the saint, which would be wrong. He was brilliant, but often also a jerk – most obviously in 1973-75 when, adrift from his muse and teacher (as he described her) Yoko Ono, he lost himself in a selfdestructive fog. Parker described him as “Cruel at times, chaotic, dissociated: on his bad days little more...than a gigantic human flaw through which the shining light of genius displayed itself.”

In 2012, assessing a collection of Lennon letters for The Australian, David Free wrote: “He grew up thin-skinned but cocksure – a good combination for a rock’n’roller but bad news for people who encountered him on an off day.” Lennon might have agreed. He was acutely aware of his own flaws, telling Playboy: “I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I fought men and hit women. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”

This was the guy who wrote and sang – in ‘Power to the People’ (1971) – “I gotta ask you comrades and brothers/How do you treat your own woman back home?/She got to be herself/So she can free herself.” Does this make him a hypocrite, the charge levelled at him by Elvis Costello: “Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?” Perhaps. But, again, he conducted self-analysis in public.

‘Woman’, from the Double Fantasy album he was promoting when he died, begins: “Woman, I can hardly express/My mixed emotions at my thoughtlessness.”

Keith Richards, musical rival and bender-buddy from the 1960s, has said: “I liked John a lot. He was a silly sod in many ways... John could be quite direct... John had this honesty in his eyes that made you go for him.

Had an intensity, too.” You can’t argue about “direct”. In ‘God’, released in 1970, the same year as Let It Be – he sang: “I don’t believe in Zimmerman, I don’t believe in Beatles.” When Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner later asked him why he hadn’t called him “Dylan” he replied: “Because Dylan is bullshit.

Zimmerman is his name... My name isn’t John Beatle. It’s John Lennon.”

Dylan didn’t hold it against him: his 2012 album Tempest includes ‘Roll on John’, a long and touching tribute.

The directness is there in his lyrics. The rhythm of ‘Help!’ (1965) is at odds with the lyrics: “Help me get my feet back on the ground/Won’t you please, please help me?” Then there’s ‘Nowhere Man’ (also 1965), which he told Wenner was “Probably about myself. I was going through this paranoia trying to write something and nothing would come out, so I just lay down and tried not to write and then this came out...” ‘Mother’, which opened his first post-Beatles album in 1970, is painfully raw – “Mother, you had me/But I never had you...”

This from a man brought up by an aunt after being left first by his father, then his mother.

The magic unfolded when this candour was melded with his love of words and sense of the surreal and absurd. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘She Said She Said’, both from Revolver (1966) showed how far he’d come from ‘She Loves You’ three years earlier. In ‘Across the Universe’ (1968): “Thoughts meander like a restless wind/Inside a letterbox...” Then there’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’: “Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see.” When asked for his favourite Beatles memory, producer George Martin replied: “If I had to pick just one it would be in 1966, the first time ever I heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. John played it to me on his acoustic guitar.”

Lennon biographer Tim Riley described the song as being “like a dream reassembled in a bottle”. A

And what of Australian musicians born well after the Lennon era?

Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and composer Sophia Exiner, who records as Phia, recalls singing ‘Help’ with her sister in the car as kids. “Now I listen with adult ears and hear how sincere those words really are. Talk about direct! The descending bass line that moves down a step with each cry for help lends even more of an ominous feeling to that chorus,” she says. “As I became a songwriter, John’s ability to infuse all his songs with honesty and sincerity has really appealed to me.

‘Julia’ makes me breathless every time I listen to it.” Julia was the name of Lennon’s mother.

Phia is also a Yoko fan. “His collaboration with Yoko is one that I’ve come to admire and be inspired by more and more as I’ve gotten older... I love their collaboration and the way they both maintained their independent identities while challenging each other, producing lasting music and political art. Brilliant.”

Another local artist, Banoffee, says she never listens to Beatles music, though she acknowledges it as “incredible” and influential. “I like the fact that Lennon took to activism and made influential music at a time when people needed a voice. The ability to cram so many words into a song and make it work is an artform that not many can pull off,” she says.

“But do I think his music would be famous now? No… John Lennon was such a product of his time – people wanted politics in their music, wanted to feel they were part of a movement. Now, with the media so oversaturated, people look to music to escape.”

Banoffee reckons she has been to three funerals that have featured ‘Imagine’. Whatever Lennon might have thought about that, it seems appropriate that his last stage appearance, in New York City in April 1975, ended with ‘Imagine’. Which, right or wrong, has become his anthem. It’s just a song. Sung by a flawed genius. “Lennon was only human,” David Free wrote, “but he’s also the only human who wrote ‘Imagine’.”

13 NOV 2020

Cruel at times, chaotic, dissociated: on his bad days little more... than a gigantic human flaw through which the shining light of genius displayed itself.

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PHOTOS BY GETTY

thesis should be written about Lennon and dreams. They’re mentioned in ‘Strawberry Fields…’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ and also post-Beatles. There’s the song ‘#9 Dream’; ‘Jealous Guy’ – “I was dreaming of the past...”; ‘Watching the Wheels’ – “People say I’m lazy, dreaming my life away...”. And, of course, ‘Imagine’: “You may say I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one...”

Nor was he the only Beatle. Though he was the driving force behind ‘A Day in the Life’, the climax of Sgt Pepper’s... It is possible The Beatles actually held Lennon back. He told Playboy that manager Brian Epstein had forbidden them from making any anti-war comments. The year after Epstein’s death in 1967, Lennon wrote ‘Revolution’, which was released in two versions – slow (The White Album) and as a single. “I absolutely wanted The Beatles to say something,” Lennon said. Increasingly he did, with and then without his old Liverpool pals. His message was admirable; the methods – as with the Amsterdam Hilton two-week bed-in in 1969 – sometimes odd but always eye-catching: “The newspapers said, say what’re you doing in bed?/I said we’re only trying to get us some peace.” (‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’) Forty years on, his influence is everywhere and impossible to quantify.

Sometimes it’s obvious, as in Oasis: file under “M” for Manchester Beatles.

Appropriately, Oasis songwriter and guitarist Noel Gallagher was born in May 1967, just in time for Sgt Pepper’s...

His younger brother, singer Liam, has said of Lennon: “He’s an alphabet to me; he’s a language...the ultimate rock’n’roll star.”

Sometimes Lennon’s influence is less obvious though no less felt, as in the case of US rapper Nas, who told NME this month: “The Beatles are incredible.

But I love Lennon’s solo journey because he dedicated his life to breaking down all the systemic bullshit in the world that he saw… Some would consider him greater than most artists.”

The Bird Is the Word How a knock at the door led to Eliza Herbert’s new‑found appreciation for our feathered friends.

Eliza Herbert is a writer from Melbourne, Wurundjeri country. She cares deeply about our natural world and thinks the race is on to protect it. @eliza_herbert

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’m not exactly sure how it happened.

A knock at the door one minute, a twitcher the next. Somehow, after Melbourne’s lengthy lockdown, I found myself standing among the messmate stringybark of the Wombat State Forest, a bird list in one hand and binoculars the other.

We’ll start with the knock. Wearily, one autumn day while working from home, I pulled myself from my computer screen and traipsed down the hallway to the front door for what I assumed was the postie. There was no-one there.

Back at my desk, I heard it again. Outside my window, a chocolate‑coloured bird was pecking aggressively at something stuck in the fence. I knew this bird, an Indian myna. It was an ugly thing, famed for its boisterous tactics in claiming territory and out-competing other urban birds. Maybe it was just COVID-mania, but as it dangled, pecked and weaved, I felt envious of the bird – it looked carefree.

Later, I leaned against my back door and looked at the birds in my garden. There were a couple of brown

ones digging in the vegie patch, a magpie and crow up the tree. Then, over the fence in the neighbour’s yard, I spotted a flash of colour: a vibrant red and green. A pair of rainbow lorikeets were frolicking, effervescent in wilting leaves. I pulled out my phone, typed rainbow lorikeet into Twitter and fell down the rabbit hole of #birdingathome.

That’s when it began: my fascination with birdwatching. What was it that drew thousands of people across the world to obsess over birds?

Chris Grubb, former president of conservation not-for-profit Bush Heritage Australia, first got into birdwatching as a young boy when he had a small aviary in his house where he bred Java sparrows and zebra finches.

“I’ve always been awed by how the light changes a bird’s colours,” Grubb says. “It is remarkable when you look at birds from different angles and depending how the sunlight shines on them, you get the most iridescent spectacular colouring.

“When you see birds’ nests, particularly some of the smaller ones, it’s just incredible how fragile they are and how they can survive, let alone bring up chicks. I just find it amazing.”

When I think of the archetypal twitcher I think of the grey nomad: 60-plus and sun-smart with a wide‑brimmed hat, a long-sleeved shirt and zip-off pants. I definitely don’t think of an inner-city feminist in her late twenties.

Zoe Irving is a visual artist and musician from Melbourne. When the pandemic hit, she moved in with her boyfriend and his family in the leafy suburb of Belgrave and found herself with a lot of spare time on her hands.

“It was the superb lyrebirds that drew me in,” she says. “While I was walking, I began to notice their copying calls – how they mimic the sounds around them.”

The observation encouraged her to slow down.

“When I stop, I notice the small birds in the canopy: the pardalotes flitting through the tree crowns and creepers winding their way up the trunks. In the shrubs there’s lots of wrens.

And often, when I’m studying, a group of sparrows distract me outside my window with their unified voice and movement.”

When she lived in the city her paintings were full of grungy, haunted faces, and her music had a dark, melancholic undertone. Now, she paints landscapes with soft feathery movements that capture the light in trees and the countryside.

“Sparrows are amusing,” she says. “Little birds are so interesting to watch; they make me feel curious. And lyrebirds put me in perspective, remind me of all the mystery in the world.”

I googled lyrebirds.

Pictures of the curious birds filled up my screen: their fanned, peacock-worthy feathers spread out on display with descriptions of how they appropriate the unique sounds of their environments and turn them into song.

I was beginning to see why birds were so special.

Like Chris Grubb, John Barkla, director of BirdLife Australia, fell in love with birds as a young boy when his uncle would take him on walks along the Yarra River.

“He’d take me on nature walks and point out things to me that I thought were absolutely extraordinary, like white-plumed honeyeaters and white-fronted chats and flame robins and all these wonderful, wonderful things,” he says. But it wasn’t until his adult years, when his father developed encephalitis, that he was

sightings – the data – on websites like BirdLife’s Birds in Backyards, which aims to gain an understanding of birds’ behaviours in order to protect them. Others appreciate getting out into nature as a balm for the city’s stresses and to improve their mental health.

Some are in it for all of the above.

Like Robin Leppitt (yes, Robin), an ornithologist living in Darwin whose PhD is on the Alligator Rivers yellow chat, one of Australia’s most threatened bird species. “Birds perform many ecosystem services – they perform a lot of jobs that if they weren’t around it would make life a lot harder for us. They pollinate flowers, spread seeds, control insect populations, predate on fish and help maintain the balance in ecosystems. Without them, ecosystems could easily collapse,” he says. “Plus, they can fly.”

Because for Leppitt, it’s not just about ecology.

“What got me excited about birding and kept me excited about birding was how present birds are in everyone’s life. It doesn’t matter where you go, there will always be birds. And wherever you go, the

illustration by Annie Davidson

I could hear the laughter of kookaburras in the distance.

Throngs of cockatoos flew overhead. Crimson rosellas frolicked on a wheelbarrow, and spinebills danced among the flowers. officially introduced to birdwatching. This shared activity bonded the pair in their final years together.

“His memory from the encephalitis was pretty terrible. He couldn’t remember what he’d seen, so he had to write them down. And when he was writing them down, he’d ask, ‘Now did we see that last week?’

And then he started to develop a list. He became really, really interested in birds and managed to see 700 species of Australian birds before he passed away, which is pretty incredible.”

During the pandemic, Barkla’s birdwatching has been limited to his local park, the Fitzroy Gardens, where some days he and his partner Alison will spot up to 40 bird species, “a good number for an inner-city park,” he says.

The difference between a birdwatcher and a twitcher, I’ve learned, is the desire to add as many rare birds as possible to your list. Twitchers chase rarities like it’s a competitive sport.

But there are many people, young and old, who turn to birdwatching for other reasons. Some are driven by a conservation interest. They’ll share their

birds will be different. The more you know about them, the more engaged you become in your surroundings – the more you look, the more you notice and realise the amazing diversity in birds all around the world.”

I was talking to Leppitt on my lunchbreak out the back of my dad’s place in Trentham, a small town northwest of Melbourne. As we spoke, I could hear the laughter of kookaburras in the distance. Throngs of cockatoos flew overhead. Crimson rosellas frolicked on a wheelbarrow, and spinebills danced among the flowers. It was easy to get what he was talking about.

So how did I end up in the Wombat State Forest?

Since that knock at the door, the world of birds has opened up to me. I’ve learned a deeper appreciation of these special creatures and their impact on the world (and people) around them. I’ve learned that bird populations are declining in alarming numbers across the globe. Of Australia’s 800-plus birds, I’ve added 12 more species to my own list.

I decided to do my bit. I donned my outdoor wear and signed up as a citizen scientist to Birds in Backyards. I was going to spot some birds.

Letter to My Younger Self

I Was Really Intense Something for Kate’s Paul Dempsey on fatherhood, music and being a misfit.

by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor @anast

MAIN PHOTO BY CYBELE MALINOWSKI; BAND SHOT BY DAMIEL BOUD; GETTY

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s a 16-year-old I was never really part of any particular clique at school. I went to 10 different schools so by the time I was 16 and at my final high school I was pretty self-sufficient and very independent. Changing schools that much, I didn’t really fall into any natural sort of clique other than anyone else who played an instrument or was into obscure punk-rock music. They were the people I gravitated to and they all tended to be similar people who didn’t really belong anywhere. I was a bit of a…what’s the word? A misfit. But at the same time, I got along fine with pretty much anyone I would meet. But I was very focused on music and I already knew it was the only thing that gave me true joy and excitement. It was me and my love for music against the world!

We moved around a lot. My mother remarried twice after my father passed away, so it was a constantly changing situation.

My parents were migrants from Ireland – I feel like Mum never really settled. She kept wanting to try somewhere else. And I was the last of four kids and the youngest by a lot.

Once my sisters finished school and moved out, I was still nine years old. At that point, I think Mum was kind of done with schooling and staying in one place.

I was only two years old when my father passed way. I was born in Melbourne, but my parents and three sisters had only arrived in the country in 1974. I was born in 76 and my dad died in 78. I was raised by five women.

Aside from my two stepfathers, my core family for me was my three sisters, my mum and my grandmother, who lived with us from

SOMETHING FOR KATE’S NEW ALBUM, THE MODERN MEDIEVAL, IS OUT 20 NOVEMBER.

TOP: WITH THE BAND – SPOUSE STEPHANIE ASHWORTH AND MATE CLINT HYNDMAN BOTTOM: AT LIVID FESTIVAL, 2003

13 NOV 2020

wonderful. I feel like I know who I am and I know what I’m doing and what I should be doing. And then everything else just sort of flowed from that. We were living in New York and a whole number of other things happened around that time. I guess they were the flow-on effects of beginning to feel that centeredness.

My father has loomed large through the words of others. You grow up your entire life being told that your dad was wonderful and amazing, the best guy. No-one ever says to you your dad was a pain in the arse. You’d never hear that. All you hear about is what a great dad they were and what a great husband they were. That’s what I grew up with and I don’t know anything other than that. But it sure does make you feel like there are big shoes to fill and so you want to do your best.

My mum has the capacity to just get back up again and keep going. She’s had ill health most of her life. She’s been through an awful lot and her capacity to continue to be positive and loving to everyone around her is incredible. She’s an unstoppable force. Her family is everything to her and she gives when she has nothing to give. She finds ways to give.

My happiest moment was becoming a father. Both of them [Dempsey and Ashworth have a son and a daughter] arriving in the world, there’s just nothing like that. Just every day being a dad and being a husband… nothing gives like that.

If I could go back to any particular time in my life it would be the time Steph and I moved to New York. That was about 10 years ago. We were there for a couple of years and during that time our son arrived. It was a great time in New York City itself. A magical time to live in Brooklyn. I was playing shows and we were just soaking it up and then Steph became pregnant and Miller arrived. We look back on it with a lot of happiness.

If I could offer my 16-year-old self some words of advice I would probably say “You don’t need to try so hard to make yourself understood.” I was really intense about communication and understanding others and feeling like they were understanding me.

I overthought everything to an unnecessary degree and I guess I would say to myself, “That’s unnecessary buddy. Just relax.”

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the time I was about 10 years old. Having a father role model who isn’t your father and who frankly I didn’t get along fantastic with…

I don’t want to paint a picture of discontent.

My mother was a professional singer and all my sisters play music and sing and play instruments. Our house was a really musical place. No matter what else was going on, there was always music. I mean, people could be drunk and screaming at each other but there would still be people singing. All of that stuff engendered me with a passion for music. By the time I was 10, I was playing guitar and playing piano and playing drums and absolutely obsessed with music and knew exactly that was what I wanted to devote myself to.

Music made meeting people pretty easy when we did go from place to place. If you arrive at a new school in a new area and you can play instruments pretty well, then you’ve almost got an immediate ready-made group of friends. Back then, if you could play an instrument then you were immediately friends with whoever was the best drummer in the school and the best bass player and you were in a band straightaway and just started playing. I met Clint [Hyndman], the drummer of Something for Kate, purely because I arrived at school one day in a Descendents T-shirt and he was the only other kid on the Mornington Peninsula who knew who the Descendents were. You’re immediately friends – you and the four people at the school who had heard of Black Flag.

There was a moment in my mid-thirties when I remember beginning to feel like I had finally arrived at a point where I had grown into myself. Prior to that I had always felt… older. As a teenager I didn’t feel like I was like my friends. In my twenties, I didn’t feel like I was like my peers. I didn’t really act like them or do the things that they were doing. I was always a little bit out of step with people my age. And then when I was 34 years old, suddenly I felt like I was the age that I had been the whole time. And since that point, I’ve felt like I am myself in a way that I wasn’t previously.

Parenthood wasn’t a surprise because it was planned, and I was ready for it. It felt like that was exactly what we [Stephanie Ashworth, spouse and bassist for Something for Kate] should be doing. I was 35 when my son arrived. Prior to that, I didn’t feel like I was a work in progress anymore. And when it happened I was like: I’m happy. I’m content.

I couldn’t ask for anything more and this is

series by Laurent Kronental

The Big Picture 20

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Remembering the Future Photographer Laurent Kronental takes us on a tour of Paris’ retro-futuristic housing estates, a promised utopia for the residents who’ve grown old there.

by Michael Epis Contributing Editor

FOR MORE, GO TO LAURENTKRONENTAL.COM.

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Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre.

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hen France began rebuilding after WWII, it looked back, surveying the devastation, and it looked forward, to the problems of the future. The result was the Grands Ensembles, giant housing estates built in the outer suburbs of Paris and beyond the city limits, designed to house thousands upon thousands of people. They solved the problem of housing destroyed in the war. They anticipated problems from incipient changes: mass migration from country to city as the economy restructured, the post-war population boom and increased immigration.

The Grands Ensembles were the future. They were designed to be futuristic. New building forms, new forms of living. An experiment. A utopia. They were, above all, new. But now, they are old, and aged, which is why French photographer Laurent Kronental has called his series Souvenir d’un Futur (Memory of a Future). “It recalls the melancholy of ageing, lost illusions, this concrete universe that was full of promises,” he explains.

The brochures and exhibitions at the time portrayed the estates as gleaming and new, filled with the gadgets that heralded the consumer age. “They are the symbol of a triumphant modernisation where the population reaches a generalised and standardised comfort and where the human being can blossom, away from the agitation of the metropolis,” Kronental says. Even now, decades later, the round windows, the irregular shapes, the rooftop gardens and pyramids bespeak “new” – all of them consequences of concrete.

Young families moved in – and grew up. And, eventually, grew old. Like Jean-Claude, 82, wheeling his shopping trolley through the vast expanses of the extraordinary Les Espaces d’Abraxas at Noisy-le-Grand (which The Hunger Games repurposed as The Capitol).

The Grands Ensembles were planned in the late 1940s, flourished in the 1950s, began to be criticised in the 1960s, and were abandoned as policy in 1973. The last one was completed in 1985 – and 1986 was the year that one was first demolished.

The inhabitants of the Grands Ensembles hadn’t exactly lived in utopia though. The estates housed migrants and the not-so-well-off, and soon had a bad reputation, vilified as places overrun by drugs, vandalism and crime, designated as the epitome of social isolation. Mass unemployment in the 1970s hit hard. But if you were to ask Denise, 81, as she stands outside her apartment block at Cité Spinoza, which proudly echoes ancient architecture with its Gothic arches receding into the perspectival distance, she may well tell a different story.

Kronental’s human figures seem marooned, washed up on the tides of history in their landscape, which he says evokes an “atmosphere of a parallel world mixing past and future.

The buildings appear retro-futuristic, as if they were lost between past and future.” The Grands Ensembles, emblems of a future, have become the past, coexisting uneasily with the present, forever looming over the people they were meant to serve. “They amaze me. They are unique,” Kronental says.

“Of course they should be preserved.”

José, 89, stands on his balcony at the Les Damiers complex in Courbevoie. The apartment complex was completed in 1976.

3 81-year-old Denise, at her building at Cité Spinoza, Ivry-sur-Seine.

4 The ageing concrete promise of Les Orgues de Flandre in Paris’ 19e arrondissement.

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Jean-Claude, 82, with his shopping trolley at Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand.

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The iconic Ricardo Bofill-designed Le Pavé Neuf, Noisy-le-Grand.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

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o many dogs. Goodness, would you look at them? Who invented all these ridiculous styles of canine, all running and sniffing and barking and slobbering at the local dog park? In the old days dog parks didn’t exist. Every park was a dog park. Every street was a dog street. Dogs took themselves for walks, leads were reserved for only the most uncontrollable monsters.

I feel a bit old fashioned in that I have bothered to train my dog. Just a few basic things, like to walk at heel, to sit, stay and not eat people. Despite having some previous trauma in a previous life, she’s better behaved than most children and pretty much all adults.

We walk most days at a huge parkland near our house, but were intrigued to discover the local dog park. It’s a designated area where daring dog owners can do the unthinkable and let their dogs off the lead. I had stupidly assumed that we already had an area to do this and it was called “outside”. But no, that’s not how things work anymore. Anyway, this dog park was a kind of wonderful doggy chaos, like a day care centre for extremely agile toddlers who had just been fed a lot of sugar. Being Melbourne, it was the humans who wore muzzles.

Behind masked faces we exchanged muffled questions about our dog’s breed, age, sex, employment prospects, political persuasions, the usual stuff. Many people said they had got their dog during lockdown.

It’s true that demand is outstripping supply for mongrels of all shapes, sizes and levels of tolerance for lonely humans this year.

The RSPCA has seen applications for dogs skyrocket, rehoming organisations are run off their paws, breeders can’t breed fast enough and councils all over Melbourne have seen the number of dog registrations soar. It used to be that people were warned, “A dog is not just for Christmas,” but that saying might need to expand to “A dog is not just for a pandemic”.

The dog park was an interesting social

experiment, but we crave nature. Let dogs be dogs I say. So last weekend our friends brought their dog along so the two mutts could tag-team on an intensive rabbit‑chasing mission in the parklands.

The suburbs were angry that day, my friend. Rain had swollen the river and threatened to wash over the tops of our shoes as we bravely forded the torrent. The dogs had already sloshed across, hot on the scent of vermin. We were hunting as a pack and the dogs knew it. What a heroic scene it was, like the days of yore. Send the dogs out first to bring down the prey, then catch up to cook up the catch on the fire. Nature! Of course, our pampered dogs have never actually caught a rabbit before. It’s all a bit of fun, right? The dogs get a run, the rabbits get some excitement and we get to stroll behind and talk sourdough starters. Peak pandemic.

But what’s this? Out of the bushes come the dogs, bounding towards us, looking extra excited and pleased with themselves. They had reason to be pleased. Out of one of their mouths hung a dead rabbit. This we didn’t expect. A crowd gathered to witness nature raw in tooth and claw. Children pointed but had no words.

“It’s okay,” I explained to the crowd, not very well. “It’s just a toy rabbit. Very lifelike.

I mean, previously very lifelike. I mean…”

But it got worse. With a sickening chomp the dog severed the rabbit’s head and the body dropped to the ground. It ate the head.

The crowd was stunned to silence – you could have heard a pin drop (or a rabbit).

“Okay everyone, show’s over,” I announced.

“The toy rabbit is broken. Back to social distancing please.”

I’ve since decided to embrace the orderly enclosure of the dog park. Less nature there, you see.

Ricky is a writer, musician and leader of dogs.

13 NOV 2020

Nature Unleashed

In the old days dog parks didn’t exist. Every park was a dog park. Every street was a dog street.

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Ricky

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

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tell you, what with the insults, abuse, character assassination, ugly partisanship, racism, fake news and issues with postal votes, it’s a huge relief to have the election over. The local council elections, that is. Ha! The Trump/Biden battle for the soul of America may have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but Victoria and Western Australia have been up to their armpits electing their local councillors, and I haven’t seen such an unseemly scrum since high school, when a couple of the older boys decided to teach a junior a lesson by holding him upside down, dangling his head in the toilet bowl and pressing flush.

Not sure what lesson that taught him.

Probably not the “respect” they were going for. More like something, something having power over those weaker and smaller doesn’t necessarily bring out the best in people something, something. Which brings us neatly back to elections. Turns out that competing for office and the attendant public scrutiny churns the most manicured lawn into a mud‑wrestler’s paradise.

I’ve not immersed myself in council elections before. I vote, because it’s a legal requirement, but my old hood was old money, and the candidates had an identical sleek, affluent sheen which I slid off like Teflon. Who were they? Didn’t care. Movers and shakers in circles that I, as a renter, did not move in, their campaign statements written in an artful bureaucratic Parseltongue which kept their intentions well hidden. Newly, however, I am a Home Owner in a liminal borough with different cultures, needs and incomes bumping up against each other. It’s been fresh, lively and personal, with “citizen journalists” holding the candidates to account on social media, a sprinkling of “professional” candidates, and the rest clearly folk who thought, hold my beer, I may as well give this a crack. Mate, it went off.

Because of COVID, campaigns had to move online. There were two main Facebook arenas;

the local Good Karma network – attention diverted from rehoming scobies, nearly new mattresses and moving boxes – and a “council election 2020” page set up to connect locals with candidates. One dude made it his mission to go through the personal FB pages of candidates. He posted screen shots from two years back of one independent saying that climate change was a hoax, and tagged her. She confirmed that, yes, this accurately reflected her view, before disappearing under a pile-on while trying to stay on-message about rates. She did not win office.

Another civilian went through the Yelp reviews of an independent who runs a local martial arts studio. He’d responded to a couple of negative reviews by seemingly questioning the mental health of his ex-clients; a heated discussion ensued. The same thread uncovered that a bunch of independents who shared branding barely knew each other, and had been brought together by someone in property development.

Another had misrepresented herself as involved in social justice programs.

It’s been utterly gripping and illuminating.

Every post needed a bucket of popcorn. Each candidate (there were a LOT) was invited to fill out a questionnaire detailing their values and allegiances. They were grilled. Those who didn’t respond were not judged kindly.

The community demanded engagement.

Another candidate provided just that by spending his weekends with a Mr Whippy van, posting updates on Good Karma, and using a GPS tracker so the community knew when to hit their street for ice cream. Brilliant.

It’s been exhilarating. Thrilling. Words I did not expect to associate with the words “council elections”. Hmm. It’s only four years to the next one. I may run.

Fiona is a writer and comedian who was born to run.

13 NOV 2020

Council Culture

Turns out that competing for office and the attendant public scrutiny churns the most manicured lawn into a mud-wrestler’s paradise.

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Fiona

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Books

Sofie Laguna

Infinite Wisdom Acclaimed novelist Sofie Laguna writes children well. Her fourth book for adults is told from the perspective of a young boy who, in the wake of trauma, seeks solace in art and nature.

by Bec Kavanagh @beckavanagh

Bec Kavanagh is a writer, literary critic and academic. She is currently the schools manager at the Wheeler Centre and teaches creative writing at LaTrobe University.

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hen I think about the first three adult novels, they are about the movement towards union and intimacy and family and love. This is different,” says award-winning author Sofie Laguna of her latest novel Infinite Splendours.

Trained as a lawyer and an actor, Laguna has built her careers on her ability to understand what makes people tick. In particular, her writing shows a keen insight into the lives of children who, she says, are just “human beings who have lived fewer years”. An obvious statement, perhaps, but it is rare for an author to so effectively inhabit the child’s perspective. Rare, also, to find an author who is equally skilled at writing both for children and about them – Laguna has written across the spectrum, from picture books to junior and middle-grade fiction, as well as adult literary fiction.

Her previous novels for adults – One Foot Wrong, The Eye of the Sheep and The Choke – have won or been shortlisted for Australia’s major literary prizes, including the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize. Infinite Splendours, a devastating story of childhood trauma and the ways in which it fundamentally alters the DNA of her protagonist Lawrence, will likely join them.

As a child, Lawrence experiences what Laguna refers to as “the greatest injustice”. A bright, effusive child at the outset of the novel, his experience leaves him unable to communicate with those around him, and he soon finds himself alone and damaged in the house he grew up in.

While Laguna’s earlier novels also explore trauma and isolation during childhood, they offer more opportunities for collective redemption – Infinite Splendours zooms in

much closer (uncomfortably so at times), and is set apart by its intense, singular focus. Yet it’s also about the way Lawrence finds hope and redemption through art.

Laguna describes Lawrence’s art practice as “bliss on Earth,” saying, “I think he experiences a love of life that others won’t ever come close to. There is something about nature and beauty and art that he knows and lives that others will never – that he experiences in solitude, and because of the devastation.”

Art is a significant element of Infinite Splendours.

Not only does it offer Lawrence a way to hold onto his identity when he is betrayed so profoundly by someone he loves, it also reflects his relationship with the natural world and allows him to demonstrate a great capacity for love.

Laguna, who grew up with painters and is married to one, has “a deep appreciation for visual art. I think there are just very strong parallels between writing and painting, so I think unconsciously I must just know a lot about painting and a lot about how addictive and healing it is.”

This unconscious awareness is a refrain from which Laguna draws many of her responses, committing herself to the creative process and immersing herself physically in the world of her books. She speaks of the “euphoric” experience of hiking for hours in the rain, climbing the mountains in which Splendours is set – the “extraordinary views and silence, mist, slightly scary, and beautiful”.

Laguna calls this the “double life” of the writer. “It takes centre stage; you’re really in his world and so you don’t have to do any of the ordinary things or communicate with anybody, and so you can get really caught up with the story,” she says. “It’s a really peaceful place to be.”

This peace, her determination to live as her characters, and her obvious love for them, goes some way towards explaining how and why she is willing to compel the reader to witness such horrifying moments. “When I’m with the work, I’m not really with the readers, you know?

I’m with the composition of the story. And I’ve made a decision about who I want to know, and it’s Lawrence.

The story is where my integrity is owed if you like.”’

Lawrence is so deeply altered by his past that he struggles with experiencing intimacy with another person. But when I ask Laguna about this, she throws back, “How many people know intimacy? There are many who don’t. And his work is deeply intimate. It occurs to me that everything he didn’t find with people was in his paintings.”

INFINITE SPLENDOURS IS OUT NOW.

I think he experiences a love of life that others won’t ever come close to.

There is something about nature and beauty and art that he knows and lives that others will never…

13 NOV 2020

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PHOTO BY ROCHELLE VAN DER MERWE

SOFIE LAGUNA ON HER PROTAGONIST LAWRENCE

Brazen Hussies

Film 30

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Hear Them Roar A new doco celebrates the revolutionary women’s libbers of the 60s and 70s, from protestors to the PM’s advisors, who ignited second-wave feminism and social change in Australia.

by Ivana Brehas @ivanabrehas

Ivana Brehas is a filmmaker, playwright and arts critic based in Naarm/Melbourne.

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t’s really important to learn our past to make sense of our present,” says Catherine Dwyer, writer-director of the new Australian documentary Brazen Hussies. “If we don’t understand that we can make change, and that women have done it before, then we won’t know what we’re capable of now.”

Brazen Hussies focuses on the history of Australia’s second‑wave feminist movement from 1965 to 1975 – a decade when women fought in the streets and the courts for everything from equal pay to greater reproductive rights and even gaining access to the front bar.

To capture the revolutionary chapter in history, and to ensure its hard-won gains are not forgotten, the film speaks to many key activists of the period. “They tried to be a leaderless movement, so it was really hard deciding who to interview,” says Dywer.

Brazen Hussies spotlights a range of noteworthy feminists, from First Nations artist Lilla Watson to film theorist Barbara Creed, as well as countless “everyday” women who gave the movement the momentum it needed.

Dwyer notes, “I didn’t know any of these women before

BRAZEN HUSSIES IS IN CINEMAS NOW.

13 NOV 2020

I started to research, and I’m 38. I probably only knew of Germaine Greer, because she’s very famous, but I think women get left out of the Australian historical narrative.”

Dwyer was inspired to make the film after working as a producer, researcher and editor on Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry – an acclaimed 2014 documentary about feminist history in the United States (available to stream on TUBI). Dwyer wanted to make the Australian equivalent.

Her debut feature explores the unique political climate in Australia during the 60s and 70s. Buoyed by the civil rights and anti-war movements then gaining momentum worldwide, women’s liberation was agitating for change in many arenas.

“The fact that Gough Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid as the first ever women’s advisor to a head of government in the world is a really fascinating story,” Dwyer says. “The Women’s Electoral Lobby were really brilliant at making the Labor government take note of the power that women could wield in politics.”

While some women, like Reid, moved up the ranks of political influence, others took a more direct approach –

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PHOTOS COURTESY MITCHELL STATE LIBRARY AND TRIBUNE/SEARCH FOUNDATION

WOMEN MARCH IN SYDNEY ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 1975 (LEFT AND BOTTOM) AND IN MELBOURNE (TOP)

like Merle Thornton (Sigrid’s mother) and Rosalie Bognor, who chained themselves to the bar at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in 1965, where women were banned from drinking, as they were in “public bars” across the country. It’s bold acts like this that the film’s title winkingly celebrates.

Though Brazen Hussies acknowledges the progress made by Australian second-wave feminism, it also addresses the movement’s shortcomings, like its exclusion of queer and First Nations women.

(Unfortunately, the historical exclusion of trans women goes unmentioned in the film.) Interviews reveal the ways in which these women were dismissed or ignored when they tried to bring up issues of sexuality and race.

“If it had just been celebratory, that would have been a boring film,” Dwyer explains. “I think the white women in the movement were anti-racist, but didn’t understand the lived experience of Aboriginal people, and it needed to be pointed out that their issues were not the same – and that’s still true today.”

She noticed a contemporary parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement. “The killing of George Floyd in America captured Australia’s attention and a lot of people were outraged this was happening, and then others started to point out, ‘Hey, this is happening in Australia too.’ Aboriginal deaths in custody are still outrageously ignored since the Royal Commission in 1990. White Australians often don’t realise what’s happening in their own backyard.”

Alongside the illuminating interviews, Brazen Hussies features a bounty of archival footage of consciousness-raising meetings, where the electricity in the air is palpable even today. That sort of face‑to‑face political discussion is less common now, with most political discourse now taking place online.

“I can’t speak for all people – there are people out there organising – but I think we’ve lost a bit of our sense of what you can achieve when you get together with people and organise,” Dwyer says. “The internet is a really useful tool, but I think it’s so important to get together in a room and look each other in the eye while we say things.”

Practising what she preaches, Dwyer has spent a lot of time in rooms with women during her years as a filmmaker. “She’s Beautiful was quite an experience because I got to work with this amazing team of women,” she says. “When I pitched Brazen Hussies to [executive producer] Sue Maslin, she took me seriously, which meant that I actually had to follow through and do it. She’s great at fostering women’s talent and emerging filmmakers.”

As well as Maslin (The Dressmaker), Dwyer worked with celebrated Australian producers Philippa Campey and Andrea Foxworthy, as well as a woman composer (The Go-Betweens’ Amanda Brown), editor, sound designer and animator on her creative team. “I guess I’ve just surrounded myself with amazing women. I haven’t worked with men in a really long time,” Dwyer laughs.

Back to the Land

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Music

DRMNGNOW

Hip-hop artist DRMNGNOW is using his music to amplify community and country.

by Declan Fry @declanfry1

Declan Fry is an essayist, poet, critic and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. His work has appeared in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere.

“I’m just grateful that mob have gotten a little bit of support. I [still] think, Are the families okay? I was in the very fortunate position of being able to support a lot of people, and it gives me sadness that I couldn’t support everyone,” says Morris.

“The reality is that First Nations were an afterthought [in the country’s fire relief response]. That’s how it started for me. I was seeing the fires taking place and not seeing any talk of First Nations people, knowing full well that a lot of mob live within these locations.”

In May, the killing of George Floyd convulsed America. Two months later, Morris released ‘Never Defeated’, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum across Australia, protesting the country’s grievous record of deaths in custody.

“You know, it’s quite evident that there’s a large percentage of people who have power to make decisions that impact First Nations people,” says Morris. “There’s not a high level of consideration for our full suite of rights. ‘Never Defeated’ really struck right into the core of what I was feeling at the time with George Floyd.”

Now, he returns with Archie Roach cover ‘Get Back to

DEADLY HEARTS – WALKING TOGETHER IS OUT NOW.

13 NOV 2020

If ancestors acknowledge what I’ve done and are somewhat okay with it when I get to meet them, when I’ve moved on past this life, I’ll be grateful.

the Land’, featuring Warnindhilyagwa singer-songwriter Emily Wurramara. The track comes from Deadly Hearts – Walking Together, a compilation which has been released ahead of NAIDOC week and Ausmusic month this November. The third in the series, this latest Deadly Hearts release features young and emerging First Nations artists covering iconic local songs that are important to them.

Highlights include ‘Tjitji’, which sees R&B artist Miiesha weaving her diaphanous voice in and out of rapper Ziggy Ramo’s bars, retaining the sway of her original. Isaiah Firebrace and Stan Walker offer a poignant take on Crowded House’s ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, singing in English, Te Reo, Maori and Yorta Yorta.

There’s also Southeast Desert Metal’s furious rendition of Midnight Oil’s ‘Beds Are Burning’, where the Eastern Arrernte band rewrite Peter Garrett’s call for the settler state to return land that was never ceded to begin with: “It belongs to us/So give it back!”

Less an Archie Roach cover than a reinvention, Morris retrofits ‘Get Back to the Land’ with pulsing G-Funk bass, the sort of George Clinton-inspired sound that characterised early 90s West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg. At the end of the track, hip-hop artist Pataphysics’ trumpet soars above the mix, while Morris plays clapsticks and sings “woka, mulana”, the Yorta Yorta words for land and spirit.

Born in Shepparton and raised in Mooroopna (Archie Roach’s birthplace) in regional Victoria, Morris was “a quiet child”. As a teenager he was inspired to write his own music after hearing Common’s album Like Water for Chocolate (2000). The song ‘Geto Heaven’, in particular, galvanised him: “It was so slow – like an Elder telling a story.”

In his early twenties, he studied at Deakin University, taking extra courses in literature and finding inspiration in writers like Rilke, Whitman, Kant and Nietzsche. But the period was one of loneliness and disillusionment.

He soon returned home to Yorta Yorta country, a time in his life he calls a “healing period”.

This experience of alienation has given Morris a second lease on life and a sense of responsibility to his community. With the release of ‘Get Back to the Land’, he hopes to remind people of the importance of connection to country, which Australia has routinely undermined.

He speaks movingly of his mother, a woman who grew up in Shepparton, Mooroopna, Echuca, Melbourne and Rumbalara, where members of the Yorta Yorta (including Morris’ grandparents) were moved to from The Flats following Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the regional community in 1954. He describes wanting to live proudly, in a way that was not possible for those of her generation (his mother was born in 1962). “That she can even live vicariously through what I express [in] my work,” he says, “that’s enough.”

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hen Yorta Yorta MC and poet Neil Morris performs his work under the moniker DRMNGNOW, he addresses the dead as well as the living. “If ancestors acknowledge what I’ve done and are somewhat okay with it when I get to meet them, when I’ve moved on past this life, I’ll be grateful,” he says.

Despite COVID putting a stop to performances, Morris’ year has been full. In the first weeks of 2020 – when standing among thousands of strangers still qualified as a fairly innocuous event – he released a new track, ‘Survive’. Its timing, just days out from January 26, was a conscious one. The video clip is a display of Fitzroy’s rich Black history, with Morris standing alongside community members such as activist Uncle Robert Thorpe as he raps, “Yes, we will always survive/ No matter what they do/No we never gonna die.”

Around this time, Morris organised a GoFundMe and benefit gigs for First Nation communities affected by the catastrophic summer bushfires. He managed to raise nearly $2 million. His wide reach on social media – particularly Instagram, which he uses to organise and advocate – was pivotal. Speaking over the phone in late October, he describes the effort as a “perfect storm of connections and reach”.

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

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urning 40 this year, The Elephant Man was the film that launched young director David Lynch from the midnight movie circuit into the bosom of Hollywood – at least for a while. Its hopeful story of a young man with bodily disfigurements (John Hurt, with a heaping helping of prosthetics) who is freed from a Victorian freak show by a doctor (Anthony Hopkins) touched the hearts of viewers, famously inspiring the likes of Michael Jackson and a young Bradley Cooper – as well as the Academy, who gave the film eight Oscar nominations. Set in late 19th-century London, and shot in the English capital, the film is a time capsule of a city long since razed to make way for shiny new developments. As moonlight bounces off the grimy cobblestones, the romantic mood is heightened by the classical black-and-white cinematography – one extra reason to catch the new 4K restoration when it screens nationally at the British Film Festival this month.

For those wanting more than a monochrome palette, Sydney’s Golden Age cinema presents Technicolor Dreams, a program dedicated to the colour processing technique. A gateway to vivid images and feverish fantasy sequences, the series hosts big-hitters like Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) and Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), in which a breathy, bejewelled Marilyn Monroe immortally coos ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. ABB

ANTHONY HOPKINS: ELEPHANT TEARS

A LION RETURNS 

After 18 months in Syria, fighting with radical militants in the name of the Prophet, Jamal (Tyler De Nawi) has come home to the Sydney family he has disgraced. Now blacklisted, he has snuck back into Australia to be with his dying mother. His brother Omar (Danny Elacci) brings him up to speed: his mother fears him, his father has disowned him, and his son doesn’t recognise him. Written and directed by Serhat Caradee, A Lion Returns is an emotional family drama that unfolds in real time, with gripping dialogue propelling the plot and escalating the tension. The local ensemble cast are impressive – De Nawi is a standout – though more could’ve been done cinematically to complement their nuanced, passionate performances. A Lion Returns explores sensitive topics with the grace that you’d hope a film about a radicalised jihadi struggling with his demons would, never crossing the line and repelling audiences, nor shying away from the grim truths of war and terrorism. BRUCE KOUSSABA FREAKY

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What happens when you cross a slasher film with a body swap comedy like Freaky Friday (1976)? You get the latest bloody and deliciously tropey romp from Happy Death Day (2017) director Christopher Landon, where high-schooler Millie (Kathryn Newton) accidentally trades bodies with a notorious serial killer (Vince Vaughn). Scares are a little lacking here, with most of the runtime focused on Millie and friends’ sitcom-esque efforts to reverse the curse before their classmates get diced up. Luckily, Vaughn’s physical comedy is the main event, as he wholly embodies the role of a girl dazzled by her newfound strength. The dilemma is oddly touching – in one scene, Millie confesses that she feels “kinda empowered” inhabiting a terrifying body after a lifetime of bullying.

Newton is amusing as a vicious murderer improvising his way around the limits of teendom.

Endearing performances aside, horror fans will delight in the high-octane gore and creative deaths, as the killer brandishes everything from a buzz-saw to a toilet seat. CLAIRE CAO

RADIOACTIVE 

As one of the premiere scientists of the 20th century, Marie Curie deserves the Hollywood biopic treatment. Unfortunately, Radioactive is a reminder that many Hollywood biopics, especially the worthy ones, are not very good. Beginning with Curie (Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl) collapsing in her lab, the film looks back over her extremely eventful life in a way that turns her thrilling discoveries and personal dramas into an often-uninspiring lecture. In case you stumbled into the Curie story without knowing what radioactivity is, director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) helpfully provides flash-forwards letting us know Curie’s discoveries will lead to atomic weapons and Chernobyl – don’t worry, inventing X-ray machines balances it out. Curie’s racy personal life was real but feels sleazy here, while her impressive personal achievements are filtered through a lens of modern attitudes that strip them of context or impact. Curie is interesting enough to survive this film; at least it leaves you wanting to know more. ANTHONY MORRIS

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

WE ARE WHO WE ARE  | SBS VICELAND + SBS ON DEMAND

MOONBASE 8

 | iOS

 | STAN

Newly hired by a mysterious firm, architect Carmen is sent to photograph and review a luxury home. But instead of an indulgent working holiday, Carmen’s job takes a nightmarish turn for the surreal, threatening her friendships, family and sanity. Part hidden-object puzzle, part social-media simulator, this mixed-reality game tasks players with taking photographs, then posting them on Carmen’s social media feed. Each 3D scene is cluttered with gorgeous neon, glitchy visuals, and an electronic soundtrack to match. No matter how long it takes to find an object, environments never grow stale – though extensive accessibility options and a hint system mean there’s little chance of getting stuck. The writing is sharp, with ruthless satire of influencer culture met by thoughtful discussion of trauma, identity and forgiveness. It’s a combination made easier through humour, particularly in messages from Carmen’s friends. If you feel like you’ve spent too much time on Instagram lately, HoloVista might help you kick the habit – if only for a little while. AGNES FORRESTER

When comedy powerhouses Fred Armisen, John C Reilly and Tim Heidecker join forces with director Jonathan Krisel, the result is a workplace comedy about aspiring astronauts training on a simulated moon base. Unlike Krisel’s previous, more chaotic work (like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), Moonbase 8’s gentle tone makes for easy comfort watching – absurd, nonsensical fun helmed by beloved comedians. Each main character is perfectly written for their actor’s unique voice: Skip (Armisen, Portlandia) is snippy and precise; Cap (Reilly, Step Brothers) is a lovable, bumbling doofus; and Rook (Heidecker, Mister America) is just a little off in that mundane-surrealist Tim and Eric way (he describes breakfast as “a nice hot bag of eggs”). The moon base setting is accidentally relatable, and it’s hard not to compare the would-be astronauts’ situation – indefinitely confined to a small space, rationing food, trying to live with others in restrictive conditions – to pandemic living. Rationing is important, but you’ll probably get through Moonbase 8 in a day. IVANA BREHAS

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ans of surrealism, miniskirts and queer cinema – eyes here! ACMI is delivering a doozy of 1960s experimental filmmaking direct to your device.

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) was video artist Toshio Matsumoto’s first narrative feature, and it remains a breathtakingly bizarre trip through Tokyo’s trans community in post-war Japan. Come for the crash zooms and vintage streetscapes, stay for the riffs on Oedipal myths, Snow White and social realism (19 November in ACMI’s latest digital initiative, Cinema 3).

In line with ACMI’s multiplatform model, Cinema 3 is a video-on-demand portal, streaming new releases, classics and (fingers crossed) other provocative oddities like Funeral Parade. Two more titles available at launch: a fresh restoration of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), and comedic neo-noir The Whistlers (2019) by Romania’s Corneliu Porumboiu. Promising seasonal programs that also showcase ACMI’s partners – such as Melbourne Cinémathèque and Series Mania – Cinema 3 means film fans across the country can enjoy the terrific programming.

ACMI’s revamped website is also home to interactive displays, archival video collections, written responses to screen trends, and a new virtual exhibition space called Gallery 5. It’s set to host a digital installation from multimedia artist Matthew Griffin in December.

Of course, we’re champing at the gigabit to get a look at ACMI’s brick-and-mortar glow-up when the Fed Square institution reopens next year. Until then, keep your eyes peeled (no Oedipun intended) to acmi.net.au. AK

13 NOV 2020

HOLOVISTA

TOKYO TRIP

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Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) returns to summer in northern Italy with his first foray into television. It’s the lead up to the 2016 US election: lonely 14-year-old Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer, It) arrives from New York to life on a military base in Chioggia, near Venice, with his mum Sarah (Chloë Sevigny, Big Love) – the garrison’s new commander – and her wife Maggie (Alice Braga, City of God). He’s instantly attracted to a soldier, then riveted by someone his own age, Caitlin (newcomer Jordan Kristine Seamón), also a restless army brat. Guadagnino’s strength is crafting sensual physical worlds, here capturing the volcanic drama of teens exploring their gender and sexuality. But the series soars at its quietest. Guadagnino’s camera stays close to Fraser and Caitlin, who, finding a mirror in each other, can ask questions of themselves. The eight‑part series is light on plot, but heavy on mood; intimate and immediate, it’s very much a story for today. Sexy, strange and frequently mesmerising, it’s unlike anything else on television this year. JOANNA DI MATTIA

Music Reviews

A

Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

m I a nostalgist? Two recent records that recycle the past have me questioning my dedication to the new. The first: Beabadoobee’s Fake It Flowers.

The 20-year-old artist found viral fame with ‘Coffee’, a lo-fi pop song that tugged on Gen Z’s nostalgia for the noughties (the song could easily fit on the Juno soundtrack). But on her debut album, she dips further back in time, mining 90s pop-rock to produce an album teeming with giant hooks and palpable angst. The standout moment is certainly ‘Sorry’, a track that layers guitars, violins and the artist’s airy vocals until it explodes into a cacophony of distortion. It’s a little bit Silverchair, a little bit Smashing Pumpkins, capturing the quiet-loud formula that characterised so many rock compositions of that era.

The second is Seth Bogart’s excellent new album Men on the Verge of Nothing. I’ve been a devotee of his work for years now: first through his libidinous garage punk group Hunx and His Punx, and then via his art, where he makes lurid ceramics and clothing based on punk bands, old paperback books and beauty products. His latest album is a jangle record – think The Pastels’ fuzzy pop mixed with surf rock and 60s girl-group melodies. This is a deflated record about queer politics, the disappointments of dating and the vultures that rule the art world, or as Bogart sings disdainfully on the album’s opener: “You say you’re a professional, you smell like an amateur.” IT

BEA BAD OO BEE

@itrimboli

CHLOE ALISON ESCOTT STARS UNDER CONTRACT 

Tasmanian musician Chloe Alison Escott, best known as one half of post-punk duo The Native Cats, offers a softer side on her latest solo album Stars Under Contract, working alongside producer and musician Evelyn Ida Morris. The prominent piano on the record is both glacial and frantic, the perfect accompaniment to Escott’s raw and devastating vocals. While the instrument allows for more candour, Escott retains the abstract lyricism – featuring plenty of angular metaphors and unusual imagery – that has been a hallmark of her work. But here, the unadorned and disarming piano gives significant weight to her words; album highlight ‘Half Moon’ feels heavier and more emotive through the instrument’s ability to rouse. Escott lets her guard down on many of these tracks, especially on the sardonic yet vulnerable ‘Co-Op’. Stars Under Contract is a record of catharsis and wry humour, which provides a unique window into the mind of one of Australia’s most fascinating and singular artists. HOLLY PEREIRA

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN LETTER TO YOU

EGGY BRAVO!

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The word “spirit” can mean the mood of a community, or it can refer to the ghost of someone gone yet not forgotten. On Bruce Springsteen’s 20th studio album, these concepts coalesce as the 71-year‑old storyteller reckons with mortality. His cognisance is born partly of becoming the last man standing from his first band, The Castiles, a dubious honour explored in the record’s soaring fifth track. While almost every song is suffused with a pensive awareness of what lies down the road, they don’t lack Springsteen’s trademark muscle, with the E Street Band’s daring captured live in the studio. From the chugging thirst of ‘Burning Train’ to the righteous drive of ‘Rainmaker’, fans will value the album’s vigour, as well as the inclusion of three unreleased tracks from the 70s. Often melancholic, always melodic – and, notably, never cynical – Letter to You trades red, white and blue anthems for black-and-white paeans to absent friends. Bruce may never be done with growin’ up, but he’s garnered a bittersweet wisdom in growing old. AIMEE KNIGHT

Melbourne band Eggy’s new album Bravo! conjures up memories of seeing gigs at the Gasometer, or watching one of your favourite local bands play in a friend’s backyard.

It would have been the perfect spring soundtrack in Melbourne’s DIY music scene, but unfortunately that is dormant right now.

Across 11 tracks, Bravo! ping-pongs between moments of fuzzy punk, art pop, jangle surrealism and playful experimentation. The lyrics are a joy too, capturing the chaotic state of the world with wry humour and frankness: “I’ve been thinking long and hard, about Russia, Trump and Marge Simpson...

Pop culture’s killing me.” While the album is freewheeling and sometimes scattershot, Bravo! still manages to feel centred through Eggy’s consistent serving of indelible pop melodies and off-kilter guitar leads. The anxious, jittery scuffle of ‘Round Table’ melts into the head-bobbing strum of ‘HAL 9000’ with effortlessness. In the end, Bravo! is a sprawling record that slowly reveals the intricacy and cleverness of its unique arrangements. NICHOLAS KENNEDY

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

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ROOTED AMANDA LAUGESEN

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Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose identity is still hotly debated in literary circles, has written her 11th book, translated into English. Narrated by 12-yearold Giovanna, who’s from a wealthy left-wing home in Naples, the story begins with her overhearing her father say that her face is as ugly as her estranged Aunt Vittoria’s. This sends Giovanna on a search for her aunt in the more working-class part of Naples, where familial adult lies and half-truths start to unravel. Giovanna’s character develops – her own confusing and uncertain adolescence, alongside these complex adult lives that surround her – a development that unfortunately isn’t granted to the other characters in the novel. Themes of beauty, class and rebellion are razor-sharp throughout, but the storyline in some places is exhausting in its progression, making the reading at times tedious. Ferrante’s ability to capture a young woman navigating between family and the wider world into adulthood is the strength of this novel. MANDY BEAUMONT

Those with delicate sensitivities should look elsewhere, as Amanda Laugesen’s book is a detailed exploration into bad language. According to the historian and lexicographer, obscenities, taboos, epithets and slurs enjoy a central place in our culture, even when they’ve been censored or suppressed.

They have become integrated into our very identity. How? Rooted discusses a wide and fascinating range of topics, like how swearing is usually grounded on religious, sexual or excretory terms, whether Australians have a special relationship with swearing, whether there are quintessentially Australian swearwords, the historical ambit of bad language from European settlement to the present, and why profanity is never absolute but changeable depending on time and societal standards. Gender and race also enter the fray when it comes to vulgarities and judgement. Laugesen argues it’s all about the balance of power, that “bad language can liberate and challenge, but it can also oppress and injure”. Heavily researched and accessible, with plenty of examples, Rooted is a bloody good read. THUY ON

A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES IAN RANKIN 

Ian Rankin’s famous Edinburgh detective John Rebus may be getting older, but he’s certainly not slowing down. While ill-health and forced retirement have led him to move into a downstairs flat, his eyes are very much on the living as he investigates the dead. Never a traditional father figure to his daughter Sam, Rebus is called north to Inverness, where Sam’s partner has gone missing. There he must do battle with ghosts far older than himself, while coming to terms with the fact that little changes in human nature.

With BREXIT weighing heavily on everyone’s minds, is it any surprise that old wartime internment camps spark anger and resentment anew? And what connections, if any, are there to various assaults on rich foreign students in St Andrews and Edinburgh? Rankin’s prose is seamless, and his mastery of the genre unrivalled. Readers old and new will slip into Rebus’ Edinburgh as if native‑born in this latest outing. It is a welcome return, and if neither author nor detective are slowing any, let’s give thanks for it! CRAIG BUCHANAN

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THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS ELENA FERRANTE

13 NOV 2020

pturn, edited by Tanya Plibersek, is a collection that asks its contributors to imagine what life could be like if we had the imagination and the power to change things as we rebuild the country after the ravages of the pandemic. Subtitled “A Better Normal After COVID-19”, the book gathers up 30 notable names for their perspectives.

Upturn begins with June Oscar, who talks about the impact of disease on remote communities and First Nations peoples as both a “historical truth, and today’s reality” and offers some ideas for a recovery and reconstruction plan involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The book ends with Gareth Evans, who argues in favour of international cooperation and collaboration. In between, Peter Garrett talks fossil fuels; Stephen Koukoulas, employment; Adrian Pisarski, housing; and Tim Soutphommasane, multiculturalism. Other contributors include Cate Blanchett, Jenny Macklin, Annabel Crabb and Lenore Taylor.

It’s a clean-up mission of crucial importance, because as Plibersek says in her introduction: “What’s at stake here is not just economic growth and a cohesive community. We are fighting for democracy… If we can’t solve the social and economic problems that face us today, we’ll see a continuing decline in people’s faith in our democracy itself.” TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

My inner child would be quite furious at me for the very small (and diminishing) amount of time I spend upside-down. I recently went to the park and witnessed several adults frolicking about doing cartwheels and handstands, and my inner child leapt in my chest. I decided that upside-down is a thing I should be a lot more than I currently am.

I don’t swing my legs enough either. As I eat breakfast, I don’t mindlessly hum. What happened to my hum? Why did I kill my hum?

My inner child would be most annoyed to discover how little time I dedicate to balancing. And I like balancing! The only time my inner child is happy with the amount of balancing I do is when I am on the phone in an outdoor space, because (my inner child has

noticed this lately) I tend to absent-mindedly find a log or something to stand on and then tip myself forward and back. Forward and back. I listen to the adult on the other end of the phone and I say adult words back to them, but the tipping and the balancing repeats and repeats and I feel something about it is very good for one’s brain. Someone has probably studied this. I thank them for their interest.

Gasping at rainbows is not an urge that should be suppressed just because one is on the phone to the lady at the bank. Gasping at rainbows should be indulged by all humans at all times. One should be able to interrupt a speech at the UN to gasp at a rainbow. I know we know what rainbows are – light, something-something, refracted, etc – but how good are rainbows!

Learning to avoid conflict and to not say random confronting things to people are definitely important lessons. There are many, many adults who need to learn these lessons. There is, though, something kind of amazing about how children talk to people directly.

“Hello,” they say to someone who’s homeless, “I like your dog.” Or they’ll ask (as mine did recently) someone in a wheelchair why they’re in a wheelchair, and then when that person responds “brain injury mate”, as the man said in response to my kids (as I tried desperately to think of a way to stop this from happening) the children are likely to say “Oh. We went on that big slide over there and my brother fell over.” It’s maybe not how adults should approach things, but sometimes prevaricating and tiptoeing around things and not addressing the issue is less brave than we think.

Your inner child shouldn’t always be summoned.

Sometimes it’s best to keep the raging, giggling shambles in check. But cartwheels are excellent and rainbows are lovely. So, Public Service Announcement: swing your feet at your desk. Have a milkshake. Go gasp at a rainbow. I am quite sure there is a middle ground, and we’re not meeting it nearly as often as we should.

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

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was once eating lunch in the lunchroom at work (back when that was a thing) and a colleague sat on the other side of the table.

I was sitting there with some vegetable soup and a piece of toast. The soup was green. The vegetable in the soup was broccoli. My colleague thwacked his lunch down on the table. “Whatchoo got there Clarkie?” he said to me, as the smell of chips and a burger wafted over. He slurped from a huge milkshake and grinned.

I realised with clarity in that moment that I, as a child, would disapprove of me in this moment. I told this to my workmate. He glanced at my green soup, then at his giant drink. “I reckon the child in me would be pretty rapt,” he said. An older woman we worked with, who was making herself a cup of tea, intoned matter‑of‑factly: “I am quite sure there is a middle ground.”

This moment went down in history at my old work.

The deadpan “I am quite sure there is a middle ground” was uttered for years in extreme situations. Should we print 10,000 of this pamphlet or just one? “I’m quite sure there’s a middle ground.”

Public Service Announcement: there is, I’m quite sure, a middle ground. But sometimes? Sometimes my milkshake colleague’s approach is the way to go.

Sometimes, your inner child would kick you in the shins and you know it. Being an adult has few advantages.

Indulging your inner child is one of them.

13 NOV 2020

Sweet Child O’ Mine

Alice Zaslavsky

Tastes Like Home

Grate Borsch Ingredients Serves 6–8 (with leftovers) 1 onion, roughly chopped 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped 2 tablespoons olive oil 700g cauliflower (½ large one, or 1 small), or 2 heads of broccoli ½ small cabbage (or ¼ of a larger one) 2 carrots, shredded 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, tops reserved for garnishing 2 beetroot (400g), shredded

3 litres vegetable or chicken stock juice of ½ lemon salt and black pepper ⅓ cup (80ml) sauerkraut or pickle brine (optional)

To serve dill sprigs sour cream or crème fraîche grated garlic croutons or thinly sliced baguette

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Method Whack the onion and garlic into a big saucepan with the olive oil. Let them start to sizzle over medium heat, then pop the lid on and allow the onion to sweat away in its own juices for 5-10 minutes until translucent, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, turn the cauliflower upside down and cut into the core at an angle, so that the florets all come off with a pull. Now pull them apart until they’re bite-sized. Set aside.

Once the onion has sweated down and is fragrant, add the cabbage, carrot, celery and beetroot. Pour in the stock, then supplement with extra water (preferably filtered) until your pan of choice is three-quarters full.

Squeeze in the lemon juice (to keep the brightness of the beetroot) and add a good pinch of salt.

Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for another 10 minutes. Add the cauliflower and cook until the shredded beetroot is easily bitten through, but not mushy, and the cauliflower softens slightly; keeping some “bite” here is the key for both flavour and texture.

Season to taste with the brine, if using, as well as salt and freshly ground black pepper. Garnish with dill and the reserved celery leaves, and serve with sour cream, grated garlic and croutons – or what you will!

TIP

This is one dish where schmaltz (chicken or duck fat) enriches the flavour in a most delightful way.

You could also add a little butter when sweating the onions, or a spoonful of jam for sweetness.

IN PRAISE OF VEG BY ALICE ZASLAVSKY IS OUT NOW.

13 NOV 2020

C

oming from the Soviet Union, our family kitchen was always full of frugality and innovation. I’d even go so far as to say that my mum, Frada, is a cooking hack kween. She’s a very thrifty cook because she had to be, using every last skerrick of an ingredient, and not letting a single slick of flavour go down the sink. She’ll save the water from boiling corn on the cob to bulk up a stock, or harvest the schmaltz (or drippings) from a roast for frying later.

Borsch was there for us almost every day when I was growing up. Ingredients were cheap and it was easy to make big batches – something that Mum could whip up on a Sunday night, then set and forget for the week ahead. I’d always relish the chance to go food shopping with my parents – it was (and continues to be!) one of my favourite weekend activities; dawdling among the aisles, picking up a bargain on bulk-buy seasonal produce. My babushka Zina taught me to shop the corners of the green grocers, where the mangy bits were on special, because once you got them home and trimmed off any slime and bruises, they’d be good as new.

It was this kind of knobbly veg that ended up piled into our biggest pot, the borsch bubbling away until everything was fork-tender and dyed magenta. All that my big brother Stan and I had to do when we got home from school was heat it up. I’d speedily scoff, washing down bites of garlic-rubbed rye bread, splashing splodges onto my school uniform in the hustle to get back to Widget the World Watcher on the telly. I suppose it was a little touchpoint from Mum too: “eat up, do your homework, we’ll be home soon.” These days, she’ll leave a batch for us in the fridge so that my husband Nick, daughter Hazel and I eat a ladleful or so each with whatever’s for dinner, to make it stretch the week.

It’s no surprise that the stories here, like mine, almost always speak to the chefs’ and cooks’ childhoods. The food we eat in these formative years stays with us for life – for better or worse. Memories of overboiled brassicas, chalky peas and dish-water corn on the cob are hard to shift when they’re ingrained in people’s psyches like smoke stains in the wallpaper.

That’s why I wrote In Praise of Veg, I suppose. Vegetables were such a joyous part of my childhood – and yet such a chore for many. I’d love to share that joy, to encourage people to see vegetables differently, to give a whirl to new ways of cooking that aren’t a bother or an afterthought.

To help a new generation to grow up without the baggage of bad beets, maligned mushrooms or wombok wobbles. It won’t happen overnight, but every tiny taste helps. Perhaps you might like to start with a ladleful of borsch with dinner, too.

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IMAGES AND RECIPE FROM IN PRAISE OF VEG BY ALICE ZASLAVSKY PHOTOS BY BEN DEARNLEY

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

Alice says…

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45

By Lingo!

by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com SHOPPING

CLUES 5 letters Big old stove Bleeping device Enrage Havana smoke Wild striped cat

T

P R

A G

I

E C N

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

6 4 9

9

1 7

6 1 7

6 7 3 7 8

6 letters Desperately sad Flinch Performing Sport of kings Tending 7 letters Hunting down Splitting in two 8 letters Cost (2 words) Providing food

5 1 2 4 2

5 1 4

1 6

3

3 9 4

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Sweet spot 6 Scout 9 Eardrum 10 Meccano

11 Toupee 12 Stallion 14 Tier 15 All the rage 18 Spin doctor 20 Thai 23 Theorise 24 Fierce 26 Pliable 27 Transit 28 Chewy 29 Parsonage

DOWN 1 Spectates 2 En route 3 Target 4 Puma 5 Temptation 6 So-called 7 Ocarina 8 Thorn 13 Black sheep 16 Epicentre 17 Adorably 19 Itemise 21 Harissa 22 Mikado 23 Topic 25 Star

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Independent Commission Against Corruption 2 Talking to yourself 3 Ringo 4 10 5 Spain 6 Brisbane Bears and Fitzroy Lions 7 Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino 8 Amy Coney Barrett 9 Madagascar 10 Midnight Oil 11 385,000 12 Jane Eyre 13 Three: Joseph Lyons, John Curtin and Harold Holt 14 Basketball 15 Excessively talkative 16 Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island 17 The Very Hungry Caterpillar 18 Banana and toffee 19 True 20 Elizabeth Taylor

13 NOV 2020

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

Every answer must include the central letter.

Plus, which word uses all nine letters?

by puzzler.com

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Word Builder

Long before we had shopping (earliest 1680s) we had the word shop (around 1300).

Originally a shop was a shed or booth for work and trade, as in workshop, which we still have to this day. A shop specifically for the sale of merchandise came about in the mid-1300s.

The first use of the verb “to shop” actually meant bringing something to a shop to sell. The sense of coming to a shop to look at and purchase things is from almost a century later. The first recorded use of shopping bag is 1886, shopping list is from 1913, and shopping around is first recorded in 1922. The use of shopping to refer to goods purchased is from 1934.

Crossword

by Chris Black

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

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Quick Clues ACROSS

10

12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24 25

26

28

27

29

Cryptic Clues

DOWN

1 Watches (9) 2 On the way (2,5) 3 Aim (6) 4 Feline (4) 5 Inducement (10) 6 Ostensibly (2-6) 7 Musical instrument (7) 8 Spike (5) 13 Disgraced group member (5,5) 16 The middle (9) 17 Delightfully (8) 19 Make into a list (7) 21 Chilli paste (7) 22 Old name for an emperor (6) 23 Issue (5) 25 Celestial object (4)

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Prime location for patisserie (5,4) 6 Glaswegian welcomes university recruiter (5) 9 Listening device thwarted a murder (7) 10 The place to visit? No it’s child’s play (7) 11 Removable locks (6) 12 “Stable” resident is not all sorted (8) 14 Frontiersmen having row (4) 15 Fashionable gal worked with leather (3,3,4) 18 Who followed Turnbull promoter? (4,6) 20 Split hairs about language (4) 23 Doctor is here to speculate (8) 24 Brosnan increased volume, became aggressive? (6) 26 Impressionable group ultimately responsible (7) 27 Times covered wild rain’s movement (7) 28 Tough Hollywood sidekick (5) 29 Attendant concealed crime in church building (9)

1 Watches criminal sect tapes (9) 2 Our teen played in 26-down (2,5) 3 Department store’s goal (6) 4 Dad got over hesitation for cat (4) 5 Lure fill-in worker to topless establishment (10) 6 Pretended to get third Arsenic and Old Lace

reviewing (2-6)

7 Instrument damaged short raincoat (7) 8 Barb moved north (5) 13 Spooner’s building censor for odd one out (5,5) 16 Grand meal cut short right in the middle (9) 17 Explorer entered skilfully and charmingly (8) 19 Make list about computers; I seem confused (7) 21 Is a rash treated with chilli paste (7) 22 Emperor ran amok with Di (6) 23 Adjusted optic field (5) 25 Small sailor’s heavenly body (4)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

3 6 8 4 9 7 2 5 1

5 4 9 8 1 2 6 7 3

1 7 2 3 6 5 4 8 9

4 2 1 5 7 3 9 6 8

6 3 7 9 8 1 5 2 4

8 9 5 2 4 6 1 3 7

9 5 3 7 2 4 8 1 6

7 1 4 6 5 8 3 9 2

2 8 6 1 3 9 7 4 5

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Range Pager Anger Cigar Tiger 6 Tragic Cringe Acting Racing Caring 7 Tracing Parting 8 Price tag Catering 9 Carpeting

13 NOV 2020

11

45

9

1 Best place to hit (5,4) 6 Lookout (5) 9 Part of the otic system (7) 10 Children’s building toy (7) 11 Artificial hair (6) 12 Horse (8) 14 Level (4) 15 Popular (3,3,4) 18 Political spokesperson? (4,6) 20 Asian language (4) 23 Speculate (8) 24 Passionate (6) 26 Flexible (7) 27 Conveyance (7) 28 Tough (5) 29 Church house (9)

Click 1 DECEMBER 1961

President John F Kennedy, Rupert Murdoch

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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T

he most extraordinary thing about this photo is not simply that Rupert Murdoch was once a young man – it is from nearly 60 years ago – but just who Murdoch was at the time. He owned a few Australian metro newspapers – two in Adelaide and one each in Perth and Sydney. It would be seven years before he owned a British paper (News of the World, shuttered in 2011 because of the phone-hacking scandal), and 12 years before he owned one in the US, in San Antonio, Texas. But Murdoch knew the importance of political connections.

When Rupert was just out of school, his father Keith, also a newspaperman, lunched with Prime Minister Robert Menzies, in which inside information about Australia’s exchange rate was shared. Rupert caught on quick.

Months later, he was at a White House press conference when President Harry Truman announced the Korean War. Murdoch has met every American president since.

Kennedy let Murdoch (who had just been to Cuba) know that the US was amending policy on the Dutch withdrawal from West New Guinea. Murdoch prepared to write up his scoop, but Kennedy’s press secretary insisted it was off the record. Murdoch held his ground, and flew off to New York. On landing, Secret Service agents boarded the plane

and ordered Murdoch to phone Australia’s ambassador – who informed Murdoch that if he wrote the story he would never get a US visa again. The story remained unwritten (and West Papua remains non-Communist in Indonesian hands, as Kennedy wanted at the time). Murdoch no longer needs a visa; he has long been a US citizen.

His ties with presidents are too long to list, but briefly: the man who created Murdoch’s Fox News, Roger Ailes, also engineered Richard Nixon’s TV campaign in his presidential win in 1968, and did likewise for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Bush Sr in 1988.

Then there’s Donald Trump. They shared a lawyer, Roy Cohn, whose dark deeds dated back to 1950s McCarthyism. Trump became a celebrity thanks to the Page Six gossip column in Murdoch’s New York Post.

To that degree, Trump always was Murdoch’s creation.

According to journalist Michael Wolff, Murdoch has long derided him privately (not publicly) as a fool, even while boosting him on Fox when it suited. Despite his recently discontinued daily/weekly chats with Trump, Murdoch tipped Biden to win this election, which will make it 14 presidents of his acquaintance – nearly one-third of all US presidents – if and when they meet. He likes winners.

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17 APR 2020

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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