The Big Issue Australia #609 - We Are Here

Ed.

609

17 03OCT APR 012020 NOV 2019

p18.

ACTS OF KINDNESS p28.

ADAM LAMBERT

and p34.

STAY-AT-HOME COMFORTS $4.50 of the cover price goes to your vendor

$4.50 of the cover price goes to vendors

HELPING PEOPLE THEMSELVES HELPING PEOPLE HELPHELP THEMSELVES

$9 $9

NATIONAL OFFICE

ENQUIRIES

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Advertising Simone Busija (03) 9663 4533 sbusija@bigissue.org.au

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Contents

EDITION

609 12

Homeless in the Age of Coronavirus As the COVID-19 outbreak continues across the country, Australians are being urged to stay at home.

But what about the 116,000 Australians who don’t have a home?

24 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

Animals Instinct

42.

A Helping Hand The Big Issue, for the moment, is not on the streets – but you can support vendors by buying a copy online at issuu.com/ thebigissueaustralia. You can also subscribe, donate and send messages of support – all the details on p42.

She seemed to come from nowhere when Baby Animals were an overnight number-one hit, then disappeared.

Suze DeMarchi reflects on her rollercoaster ride, from Perth to London and then LA.

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

26 Ricky 27 Fiona 36 Film Reviews 37 Small Screen Reviews 38 Music Reviews 39 Book Reviews

40 Tastes Like Home 43 Public Service Announcement 44 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

BEHIND THE COVER

Big Issue vendor Jack on his Sydney pitch before street sales were suspended. He’s generously shared his story on p5. photo by George Fetting typography by Kelli Laderer @goodvibestype

28 MUSIC

Velvet Goldmine The world changed once for Adam Lambert when he appeared on American Idol, a second time when he joined Queen – and maybe now a third time, as he releases a new solo album.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

We’re Still Here

F

our years ago, I moved back to Melbourne for this very job. After nearly two decades in Sydney, my home town felt a bit different. But walking around the city I discovered a familiar community: The Big Issue. There, on many a corner, was a friendly face. Pep talks about magazine covers. Life advice. A shared joke. A helping hand.

We’ve heard the same from many of you over the past weeks, as you responded to our call for messages of support. All across the country, Big Issue vendors have made an impact on your lives. And you on theirs. As vendor Garry from Melbourne writes in this edition’s Streetsheet: “One lady said ‘I’ve been buying off you for four years. When you’re not there, I worry about you!’ I’m actually really surprised by all the love and support out there.”

But this week, for the first time in 23 years, there are no Big Issue vendors out on the streets. It’s no longer safe. So we’ve had to press pause on street sales.

It’s been more than tough. Our vendors are missing their source of income, a source of purpose and pride, a source of community. But we are creating new ways to provide financial and emotional support to all our vendors and those in the Women’s Subscription Enterprise (WSE).

We’ve been overwhelmed by so many of you asking how you can help. You can buy a digital mag at issuu.com/ thebigissueaustralia. Buy several, buy back editions. Tell your mates, your friends, your neighbours. Half of the cover price of each sale continues to support vendors – the funds will be pooled to benefit the vendor group. You can take out a print subscription, long- and shortterm. You can donate directly to The Big Issue. And you can help maintain that meaningful sense of Big Issue community by sending a message of support to vendors and WSE women via email or on our social channels. In whichever ways you can help, your generosity is much needed and much appreciated as we work together to support our Big Issue community through these difficult times.

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 23 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 fortnightly magazine.

Your Say

Every fortnight my husband buys me a copy of The Big Issue from a vendor in Adelaide. Here is the haiku he has written about the joy he gets from doing this – I wanted to share it with you.

‘An Apology for an Uneven Exchange’ Big Issue: for nine dollars and keep the change, You, gave me happiness.

ALISON TUKE ENFIELD | SA

I would like to thank the women who have been packing my magazine subscription for a few years now. As an “elderly/vulnerable” citizen I am now secluded at home, so the mag is even more welcome. I was especially moved by Lou’s story (Ed#607), and I hope her friend Angie is keeping as well as possible in this difficult time.

SALLY HORSEY LAKE MUNMORAH | NSW

Sometimes I buy from the chap outside Narrabeen Woolies, sometimes from the chap at Wynyard bus stop.

Both always bring a smile to my face and we have a good chat. I’m going to subscribe for a while, so sending them all the best and ask that they stay safe.

SELENA G ELANORA HEIGHTS | NSW

• 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 19 locations around the country.

• The Big Issue Classroom educates school groups about homelessness.

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

CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

As winner of Letter of the Fortnight, Alison wins a copy of Tara Moss’ new book The Cobra Queen. Check out our interview on p32. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

interview by Anastasia Safioleas photo by George Fetting

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

03 APR 2020

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE OUTSIDE THE CHANNEL 7 STUDIO AT MARTIN PLACE, SYDNEY

05

Jack

I come from a family of 10. As a child we moved around the country a bit and settled in a place called Coonabarabran in NSW. We had a farm and bred pigs. Through drought and stuff it got a bit hard, and my mum and dad separated. Dad went to South Australia, Mum went to Sydney and I stayed out bush working for a while.

I got halfway through Year 9 and then left school to go to work. But then I decided I was going to go back to school. I only got eight months through Year 11. I seemed to be doing alright then I fell into the wrong crowd. I got into a little bit of trouble with the law when I was 18. That sort of stuff sticks with you for the rest of your life. It was a long time ago and it’s not the sort of person that I am now.

I ended up on the Sunshine Coast, where I met my first wife and had a son. I worked as a logistics manager for a cabinet-making company.

But that deteriorated around the same time my marriage did. Jy is turning seven in July. I haven’t seen him in three years… It’s hard but I’ve had to learn how to deal with it.

When I separated from my wife I went to live with my mum.

She passed away and I just found myself with no motivation for anything. Then times got hard and I found myself out on the street in Sydney.

I saw a lady selling The Big Issue down at Wynyard and asked her about it. I was trying to clean up my act, so I started selling the magazine. My motivation came back when I started having some success with The Big Issue – that’s when I met Alesya. I was living on the streets and she came up to me and said she’d pray for me. We hit it off and next minute we’re going to have a baby, and a year later here we are, we have our son. He’ll be 12 weeks tomorrow. He’s gorgeous. Life feels good again. He was born on Christmas Day and his name is Levi. I love singing to him because he smiles at you when you do. Songs like Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Love You Baby’ or ‘You Are My Sunshine’.

Usually, I sell outside Channel 7. I’ve had Kylie Gillies buy a magazine, Larry Emdur, Samantha Armytage. And I’ve got quite a few regular customers who stop by for a chat. I’ve got people who come and check on me every day to see how I’m going in the face of this whole coronavirus thing. It’s had an impact, but I’m keeping my head above water and that’s because of the support that I’m getting from people.

To all my customers, thank you very much for the support. The income from The Big Issue took me off the streets. Essentially, you are giving me the opportunity to provide for my family.

And I want to let everyone know that me and Alesya are getting married in April. It’s given me faith that things will come good. We’re not having a big wedding. It will be a small little private ceremony with the Harbour Bridge and the city in the background. And obviously Levi is going to be a part of it. It’s going to be one of the best days in my life.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

VENDOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT

RACHEL T

A Friend Indeed Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed regulars saying how well-dressed I am. I haven’t noticed a change myself, but it improved my sales. I’ve noticed comments like “Have a nice day” when people walk past, and even my regulars noticing when I’m not on pitch or working my usual hours. One lady said “I’ve been buying off you for four years.

When you’re not there, I worry about you!” I’m actually really surprised by all the love and support out there – I didn’t realise there was so much support. My dad said to me: “You’ve been there so long, they’re more like friends than customers.”

GARRY FLAGSTAFF I MELBOURNE

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

T

uesday morning and a strange feeling in the air on the train, an air of cautious fear. But not just for me, for all now, as tears sweep down my face. I’m not the only one feeling the anxiety of the unknown. It seems life has changed before our eyes. I arrive at my pitch – my office – and the streets are empty, like a ghost town. Social distance is the new norm. I feel those old feelings of alienation, the stares of labels and judgements in the time before my little red cap was my safety, before I had this unity in Big Issue community. Before I felt the dignity of a home and a stable job. Simply Tuesday was like the days when my life was survival – homelessness is a job in itself, trying to keep your family safe.

Then we come to Thursday… The last three days have been filled with joy, sadness, fear and frustration – and finally, peace and hope in these strange times. I get up and ready, coffee and music playing in the background. I bravely go to my pitch in Pyrmont, and face the fear of reality – will it ever be the same again? Then whoosh! So much kindness, concern, sharing of stories, tears over job cuts and food shortages. The many thankyous for being positive. Then a thought hit me like a car crashing into the wall. What if, over the last 20 years or so, our leaders took more time to share and care, and worked with us to build a strong, healthy community, instead of divisions and war machines? Would we be in such a mess today? For little uneducated me, it seems the best we can do in these troubled times is to try our best not to mirror the pain and suffering, and help each other. My heart sees hope, as Thursday showed me that time and care can win against fear.

So take care everyone, and don’t forget we all can share tears and joy.

RACHEL T PYRMONT I SYDNEY

I’d like to say thank you to the gentleman who helped me buy a new pair of reading glasses. I’d also like to thank him for his ongoing support, along with all of my customers. The impact of the virus has brought the community even closer together. I hope that if anything, this teaches us to be more compassionate for less fortunate people. Sometimes when things like this happen, we realise how fortunate we really are.

DONNA CNR SWANSTON ST & FLINDERS LANE I MELBOURNE

Viral Joke You know things are getting bad when you sneeze at your laptop and the antivirus does a scan.

EDDIE KELVIN GROVE MARKETS I BRISBANE

Panic-Buy This kind of thing has never happened before and we’re trying to catch up with it. All of the cafes have shut but a few are staying open for takeaway – I just feel like the messages are so confusing! I was

PHOTO BY GEORGE FETTING

Tuesday to Thursday

Good Fortunes

In this challenging time, pedestrians fade away like a fog in the morning.

But what I know and never forget are the acts of kindness from my regulars who keep supporting me and The Big Issue. Tessa is one of them. She is a former gardener. One day on the pitch, she stepped twoand-a-half big paces and showed me what 1.5m looks like for social distancing. And then I invited her for lunch after I won the best call of the day on 6PR news talk radio about the topic of Newstart allowance – I won

Love of Chocolate We all love our chocolate. With Easter around the corner, people like to go mad but, hey, it only happens once a year. We all love the textures, silkiness and the flavours. It can be filled with caramel or with hazelnuts and almonds. Do you remember having chocolate as a kid and getting it all over your face and hands, even on the walls or on the furniture? Do you remember the times you went to the shops to buy a chocolate bar as a treat, then got home on a summer’s day to find the bar melted in your bag? I still love eating chocolate every now and then. If I had to pick my favourite chocolate bar it would

On a Roll It was a real pleasure to be able to help out this morning. I went to Coles at 8am, and I couldn’t believe how many people were there. I was going to grab two bundles of toilet paper – with 20 rolls in each. But I was only allowed to buy one. I rang Andrew in Perth Vendor Support straight away, and said I’d buy some. So after I finished on my pitch, I took out 10 rolls for myself, and gave 10 to Andrew to be distributed to other vendors. I am feeling really up in the air about everything; it’s driving me mad. I can only see my girlfriend two or three times a week, and we can’t even hug or kiss or anything. We spend a couple of hours together, talking. I have to ring her once a day now, while this is going on.

STEVE W UNDERGROUND I MURRAY ST I PERTH

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

DAVID L SUBIACO FARMERS MARKET I PERTH

Thanks for Caring I am really happy to see a sign at Milsons Point about how the councils and State Rail are now using orange oil as weed killer. Really happy that they’re using it everywhere and not chemicals. Hallelujah! A story I must tell you, factual. I need to sometimes sit in a church, doesn’t matter which one, and contemplate life. All the church doors are closed all week lately. And I thank God for every nurse and doctor in every hospital.

Thanks for caring. They’re heroes!

They could stay home but they don’t – it’s wonderful, especially during such a difficult time.

ALEX F MILSONS POINT STATION I SYDNEY

03 APR 2020

Lunch Ladies

PAT L HIS MAJESTY’S THEATRE I PERTH

be the Cadbury block with almonds, but overall Ferrero Rocher. Lastly, do you remember eating chocolate crackles as a kid? Have a great Easter!

07

KELVIN WAYMOUTH ST & ARTISAN CAFE I ADELAIDE

a $50 gift voucher for the Cutting Board Eathouse Bar as the reward.

We had quality time, good food and a good chat, without coronavirus being the main topic of conversation.

STEVE ROLLS UP WITH MUCH-NEEDED SUPPLIES

telling my customers to buy more than one magazine – panic-buy!

Buy it for their friends, co-workers, neighbours, family who are out of work, doing it tough or in isolation and can’t buy it! One lady bought two off me. Now you can buy copies online and support vendors, too.

Hearsay

Richard Castles Writer Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

I know that we all know Kenny’s in a better place than we are today. But I’m pretty sure he’s going to be talking to God sometime today if he ain’t already. And he’s going to be asking him to spread some light onto this darkness going on here.

“This finding pushes back the origin of digits in vertebrates to the fish level, and tells us that the patterning for the vertebrate hand was first developed deep in evolution, just before fishes left the water.”

John Long, strategic professor in palaeontology at Flinders University, on the discovery of “fish fingers” – articulated digits in the fin of a fossilised fish that resemble the bones found in human hands. The small bones in the fin allowed the fish to support its weight with more flexibility as it moved in shallow water or for short amphibious trips onto land.

CNN I US

Dolly Parton on her long-time friend and musical collaborator Kenny Rogers, who passed away on 20 March.

WASHINGTON POST I US

“As a species, humans are so narcissistic. We forgot that the animals with fangs and claws once dined on our predecessors. We forgot that the so-called defeat of the infectious diseases, in the early 20th century, was never actually a defeat. We have to understand that our place in the scheme of things is not very high.”

Author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) on the hubris of humans.

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

THE NEW YORKER I US

“I think it can dupe us into feeling like we’re present and connected, when in fact it can lead to a real isolation. We’re in danger of being more disconnected when we’re using this placebo drug that makes us think we’re more connected… It just eats away at your head, man…

I like the idea of small. I like the idea of relational… I think real

connection and being present feels underrated and undervalued to me, especially in this time we’re in.”

Singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford, of Mumford & Sons, on why he’s not on Instagram and why he loves playing gigs.

“When I got hit, I was angry and a part of me was hoping [my arm] was broken. I was like ‘This is it, I just need a break’... I was thinking about things I could do on the way back to snap it.”

Cricketer Glenn Maxwell on wishing his arm had been broken during last year’s World Cup campaign so that he could go home and have a rest.

An exhausted Maxwell was suffering mild depression and anxiety. He took a month-long break from the game in October.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

ROLLING STONE I US

“These masons were employed refacing these groines...[repairing the cloister] August 11th 1851 Real Democrats.”

Some 169-year-old graffiti scrawled in a secret passageway discovered in Westminster Palace, the home of British Parliament. Built in the 17th century, the passage was subsequently walled off and forgotten. The Real Democrats were part of the working-class male suffrage Chartist movement, which called for such reforms as allowing all men aged over 21 to have a vote.

“If the outcome is bad, countries might avoid or reject the chance to host the games for fear of the risk and financial burden. This is a defining time for the history and future of the Olympics.”

Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University in Osaka, on the pressure to succeed after Japan became the first country to postpone the Olympics, due to the coronavirus. The Olympic Games have been cancelled three times due to war, but the Tokyo Summer Games are the first to be delayed.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

JAPAN TIMES I JAPAN

20 Questions

by Big Red

01 When were the Olympics first held

in Tokyo, Japan?

02 Which Kenny Rogers hit song shares

its name with BB King’s guitar?

03 How many consecutive days was

the longest game of Monopoly on record, according to Hasbro: 27 days, 57 days or 70 days?

04 Who is the Chief Medical Officer

for the Australian Government?

05 Colloquially if you had a “bocka”

in Ballarat, what did you have?

06 Which Australian island is the

world’s largest sand island?

07 Which vegetable is the main

ingredient of Indian dessert gajar ka halwa?

08 Artist Harold Thomas is famous

for designing which flag in 1971?

09 Which country was the first to adopt

“I earn 600 rupees ($13) every day and I have five people to feed. We will run out of food in a few days.

I know the risk of coronavirus, but I can’t see my children hungry.”

Ramesh Kumar, from the Banda

BBC I UK

“I feel fine, which is strange because this damn thing is still inside me.”

Veteran entertainment reporter Richard Wilkins in isolation for more than a week after testing positive for COVID-19, despite not experiencing any symptoms.

2GB I AUS

“Remember me? The guy who wouldn’t even postpone a show when my goddamn leg was falling off? Well…playing a gig with a sock full of broken bones is one thing, but playing a show when YOUR health and safety is in jeopardy is another.”

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl cancelling a tour, while referencing a 2015 gig in Sweden, which he continued after falling off the stage.

the eight-hour working day in 1915?

10 Which metal is primarily used in

the making of microchips?

11 In which fictional town was TV

police drama Blue Heelers set?

12 How many colours are in the

Derwent Coloursoft range of pencils?

13 What is the fastest animal on

two legs?

14 Which actor plays patient zero

Beth Emhoff in 2011’s virus-themed film Contagion?

15 Standing at 297.3m, what is the

tallest building in Australia?

16 Author and illustrator Dorothy Wall

created which endearing Australian children’s character in 1933?

17 In which city is the World Health

Organisation headquartered?

18 Mentoplasty refers to plastic surgery

on which part of the body?

19 Which artist and song won Triple

J’s Hottest 100 of the Decade, announced in March?

20 What is the first astrological sign in

the zodiac?

03 APR 2020

AFRICA NEWS I CONGO

district in Uttar Pradesh state in India, on his fears that hunger may kill his family before coronavirus does.

ROLLING STONE I US

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

ANSWERS ON PAGE 44

09

“Manu was a king – an amazing musician “It’s a bad time – and a very humble to be a terrorist human being. It’s with the ban on becoming very rare big crowds.” now in the music A man overheard on business. He was the street by Annie of beyond music.”

Coorparoo, Qld. Cameroonian singer Gino Sitson on fellow Afro-jazz-funk legend Manu Dibango, aka Papy Groove, who died on 24 March, aged 86, from complications due to the coronavirus. Dibango hit the charts in 1972 with ‘Soul Makossa’, one of the first world-music hits. He influenced musicians from Kool & the Gang to 90s rap artists, and is known to have settled out of court with Michael Jackson for allegedly ripping off some of his lyrics. Vale.

EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Melissa Cranenburgh @thetwits2

Alone, Together

Melissa Cranenburgh is a Melbourne-based writer, broadcaster and educator. A former Big Issue associate editor, she now teaches in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing program, and hosts Triple R’s flagship book show, Backstory.

03 APR 2020

I

’m meeting a friend for dinner tonight, doing happy-hour drinks on Friday, and a dance class on Sunday afternoon, followed by some Netflix.

All of it while totally alone in my apartment.

At the time of writing, Australians are moving into a more intense lockdown phase. Many, like me, have been self-isolating for weeks. But even though I’m more literally alone than I have ever been in my life, my social life is booming.

I’m having long breakfast meet-ups with friends I usually don’t see that often. I’ve started a beautiful new friendship with a woman who sings lullabies on Instagram each night. I did the Saturday-morning quiz with a group of friends, then we went on a virtual walk together. And when I got sick last week, I had people messaging me constantly to make sure I was breathing okay, and to ask if I needed anything. (I am. I don’t. Thanks for asking.)

Another thing I’ve found is that connecting with someone on video chat feels more compellingly intimate in some ways than meeting in person. We were talking about this last night at a dinner party on the recently launched Houseparty app (a social network linked to Facebook that lets you launch impromptu video catch-ups with friends). One friend had a theory: “I think it’s because in our usual lives, people are always looking down, checking their phones. Now we’re all talking to each other on our phones, so we can’t be distracted by them.”

It’s true. The pundits that bemoaned how social media was killing actual socialising are now using those same apps as a lifeline. And you do see the world differently when you are alone with someone on live stream. It’s just you and them. Both in your own homes. Faces framed.

You might make eye contact with each other, get that human thrill of seeing a loved face. You may even gaze at your own image beside theirs and get a sense you rarely do in offline life: of genuinely seeing yourself, your reactions, through their eyes.

While video chats offer an intimate simulacrum of face-to-face contact, long conversations – just a voice on the end of a line – have always been my thing. I love nothing more than to go about some mundane task while I chat aimlessly with a good friend. Listening to

their news, sharing mine. Laughing, crying, solving the world’s problems, sharing the salty goss, listening to the well-mapped cadences of a familiar voice. There really is nothing like it.

Talking to someone you can’t see allows you to say things you never would in person. Even when we’re together, we tend to look away when we share something particularly intimate.

With a premise that now seems chillingly prescient, earlier this year Netflix released a trashy addictive reality show Love Is Blind, which has contestants go on dates in audio-linked pods – so that in this age of swiping right they have a chance to connect on a less superficial level. After only days of getting to know one another, contestants are there to fall in love…and propose marriage.

Without. Ever. Having. Met. While the contrived setting and editing obviously highlights things that feed into the show’s dramatic arc, it’s clear that some contestants develop a very real connection. One soon-to-be couple were even oddly mirroring each other, sliding down from the couch to sit closer to the wall that separated them.

It’s a premise that many people are now emulating.

Since going into lockdown, my dating apps have been running hot. Though I’m sure there are plenty of people who still want to hook up, most people I’ve chatted with just want to…talk. To roughly paraphrase a tweet I read, welcome to a return to the long, chaste, epistolic courtship – Jane Austen-style.

In China, people are using Tinder as a stealthy social media tool, sharing political and personal news with overseas users who’ve changed their settings to reach them. It’s a particularly touching use of the infamously transactional dating app. Now that China’s rate of infection has slowed, we have a lot to learn from the reactions of people just emerging from the lengthy shadow of this virus.

Now writing in the early days of Stage 3 lockdown, and contemplating weeks, even months, on my own, I know I won’t be alone. And while I miss the ability to hug, touch or kiss the people I love, I know I’ll see them again. At drinks tonight.

11

Melissa Cranenburgh finds that when you are alone, you can be with others, too.

12

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Homeless in the Age of Coronavirus As the coronavirus outbreak continues across the country, Australians are being urged to stay at home. But what if you don’t have a home?

what we need to do to flatten the curve of infection is ostensibly clear: just stay home. But what happens if you don’t have a home?

Critically, more than 116,000 Australians are homeless on any given night. Coronavirus adds additional levels of stress and vulnerability for those people without safe and secure housing – those who are sleeping rough, couchsurfing, in temporary stays, boarding houses, supported accommodation or severely overcrowded residences.

Of further concern are the 1.5 million Australians living in “housing stress” – spending more than 30 per cent of their wages on their mortgage or rent – and at risk of homelessness, compounded by the current economic shutdown and subsequent wave of job losses.

The federal government’s welfare boosts and six-month moratorium on residential evictions will go some distance to ease the strain, but as Stephen Schmidtke, executive director of client services at Sacred Heart Mission, points out, you need a roof over your head to self-isolate. “Our great fear is that with COVID-19, which is knocking at the doorstep of our community, is that there are going to be a lot of people with very compromised health, with nowhere to be able to take care of themselves, and they’re going to be incredibly vulnerable to this,” he says.

Even before the bushfire season and the outbreak of coronavirus, emergency homelessness services were turning away an average of 250 people a night across

03 APR 2020

ou know, it’s the simple things you miss when you’re homeless for a while,” says Big Issue vendor Damien T from Adelaide. “Stuff like getting up and jumping in the shower, all that stuff. I’m enjoying those little perks more than I thought I would.”

Damien was provided short-term accommodation a couple of weeks ago, in the same week South Australia closed its borders in the fight against the coronavirus. It was fortunate timing. Before that he was sleeping rough around the city. He’d lost his job as a forklift driver, fallen behind in his rent. He had a sleeping bag to keep him warm and some case workers looking out for him. A bunch of places he visited for a hot meal, a shower, to wash his clothes and check in. But in the face of this unprecedented health crisis, it’s a relief to have a place to call his own again.

“I just got a telly yesterday,” he says. “I’ve settled in and I’m keeping my place clean. I’m following all of those procedures: sanitising, keeping clean… I’m being a little cautious myself, just keeping an update on how it’s going with the spreading and with the news and stuff. It’s all we can do really.”

As COVID-19 continues to spread and the country escalates its shutdown procedures, the messaging around

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illustration by Michel Streich

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor

03 APR 2020

the country because there just weren’t enough beds for people. And it’s not just that. Those most at risk of homelessness – migrants, First Nations people, those with chronic health conditions and, increasingly, those over 65 – are among those most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“We haven’t got any slack in the system to draw on,” says Jenny Smith, chairperson of Homelessness Australia. “We have let the gap between income support and the cost of housing be as wide as anywhere in the Western world… And it’s when you get a crisis like this that it becomes apparent that it’s a precarious situation for the whole nation.”

The situation is moving quickly, but some emergency provisions for those experiencing homelessness are in place. The federal government has announced that $200 million will be provided to charities and other community agencies for food and other provisions for our society’s most vulnerable. In South Australia, motel accommodation will be made available to rough sleepers so that they can self-isolate. The Northern Territory has reopened its 1000-bed facility at Howard Springs – formerly used to house Australian evacuees from the Diamond Princess cruise ship – as a quarantine facility for those with nowhere safe to go. Other states have allocated funds for temporary accommodation during the crisis. Smith believes that the downturn in the tourism industry presents opportunities for safe and secure accommodation – we just have to make it a priority.

She argues that more needs to be done to get people into housing in the long term. “People spend a lot of time thinking about ingenious ways to support people living on the street, but living on the street is not safe and it’s particularly unsafe with this thing going on,” she says.

In the meantime, homelessness services are forging on, providing modified services. Stephen Schmidtke says that the challenge, for Sacred Heart Mission and other similar organisations, is to keep people safe and healthy while still addressing the social isolation and loneliness that many without secure housing experience.

“Just encouraging people to keep coming back, to keep dropping in, picking up a meal, have a chat. There’s still those opportunities for people, they’re just not as they

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That feeling of insecurity, that feeling of vulnerability, that feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow, that feeling of general anxiety of what might happen – Am I safe? That’s how some people live 365 days a year.

used to be and it’s definitely not the same,” he says.

Sacred Heart Mission has managed to keep most of its regular services up and running amid physical-distancing restrictions, so people experiencing homelessness still have access to outreach workers, doctors, showers and bathrooms. One of the major changes they’ve made is closing the communal dining room – which is open 365 days a year for breakfast and lunch, and where many people congregate for a meal and a chat – and switching to takeaway meals instead.

Another challenge is acquiring adequate food and toiletries and distributing them to those in need. In the wake of the coronavirus this has been challenging for several reasons – not only has the widespread hoarding of groceries placed a strain on the food supply chain (many food charities have reported dwindling supplies over the past weeks, including Foodbank WA, who receive most of their donations from the food and grocery industries), but there’s also the question of what happens to people who don’t have the means or the capacity to buy and store supplies in bulk: “The trouble with rough sleeping is you can’t carry much stuff around with you,” says Jenny Smith.

“Choosing whether to carry around your heart medication or your mental health medication or your hand sanitiser – it’s a difficult choice really. It’s just not practical.”

Before the lockdown, Big Issue vendor David had been selling from his pitch in Perth for around nine years. He sleeps rough, something he doesn’t advertise, but has done on and off for years. A few weeks ago he noticed the services he relies on were changing. Some were shutting down or running at a reduced capacity. This means crowds at other facilities, and the extra strain, combined with physical-distancing measures, means he sometimes has to wait around for two hours for a shower – rather than the usual 15 minutes.

He also noticed a change in the atmosphere. His Big Issue pitch was outside a supermarket, and people seemed a little on edge. Fewer people were stopping to chat: “The shopping centre’s been mad. Packed-out.

People panic-buying toilet paper and pasta and sauces and just whatever they can get their hands on.”

Stephen Schmidtke urges the community to stay human at this difficult time, and reminds us that we’re all in this together: “Really, what people are beginning to experience now is what other people experience all the time – that feeling of insecurity, that feeling of vulnerability, that feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow, that feeling of general anxiety of what might happen – Am I safe? That’s how some people live 365 days a year.”

David insists that he worries more about his customers than they should worry about him – “I’m pretty selfsufficient, you know.” He’ll continue to look after himself, and invites everyone else to do the same. But he believes that if the situation worsens, governments will need to step in. “They’re gonna have to do something because there’s a lot of homeless people, and I don’t know that they’re going to be able to put them all in one place.”

Stefano Lampertico, editor of Milan’s street paper Scarp de’ Tenis, writes about life under lockdown for the Italian magazine and the vendors it serves.

by Stefano Lampertico

F

rom Milan to Seoul, from New York to Sydney, there is no difference in COVID-19.

It makes no exceptions and looks no-one in the eye. Vendors of our street paper in Milan, who have always known their streets as places of work, encounters and interaction, now find them to be dark places. The effects of coronavirus on those who sell Scarp de’ Tenis will be harsh. Its heart is in Milan, sold on its streets and, in particular, following Mass – which is now suspended – in other northern cities like Turin, Genoa, Venice, Vicenza and Verona.

Ordinances and a sense of responsibility stop our vendors from being able to sell the magazine. The

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Don’t forget that life is beautiful. Always, even during these difficult times. vendors – who are mostly homeless or carry a history of poverty and severe marginalisation on their shoulders – are hit hard. The sale of the paper, and the income from it, is the only income for many of them. We know how important the human relationships are that often bind the vendors and their buyers on the streets and in our parishes.

Life isn’t easy in the Red Zone imposed by the government across the north of the country.

It requires every citizen to stay at home, initiate smart working practices and reduce movements to a minimum. It is particularly difficult for people experiencing homelessness, who are forced to live on the streets or to pass the nights in immigration centres and shelters. Last winter, Milan guaranteed only 2500 beds for people experiencing homelessness, and 300 slept on the streets. But the wheels of the solidarity machine are turning, guaranteeing a minimum of assistance to everyone, and improving, where possible, access to essential services, especially to older people.

Services like food deliveries, outreach care and reassurances via telephone. Volunteers are also doing a lot, and the generosity of the Milanese goes a long way. You should know that in Milan there is a saying that defines its inhabitants. It says: “Milan with heart in hand.” There it is.

The cities look as barren as deserts these days. Milan, hustle and bustle central, with its uncontrollable rhythm, has unearthed the sound of silence. Public transport is running, but it’s empty.

Offices are closed and many commercial companies have decided to cease their activities. The government’s aim is to stop the spread of the virus and thus allow treatment for those affected. Beds in hospitals are all taken, especially in intensive care wards where the most gravely ill are treated.

An increase in the number of sick people will seriously jeopardise the entire healthcare system in this country. There is still no light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re hanging in there. We’re sure we’ll return from this even stronger. Difficult days still lie ahead but we’re capable of overcoming the obstacles we face. We are in no way discouraged. Harking back to Enzo Jannacci’s song that gave us the title of our street paper, don’t forget that life is beautiful.

Always, even during these difficult times.

Like The Big Issue, Scarp de’ Tenis is a member of the International Network of Street Papers. Around the world, most INSP publications have been forced to take the unprecedented decision to temporarily pause street sales, and find new ways to support vendors.

COURTESY OF SCARP DE’ TENIS/INSP.NGO

Life Under Lockdown

Suddenly a Ghost Town From her pitch, The Big Issue’s Mariann B watches the city become deserted, and the streets fall silent.

by Mariann B

Mariann B is a Melbourne-based writer and Big Issue vendor.

The Bourke Street Mall is totally empty. Both major department stores are having a mid-season sale without a customer in sight. The Melbourne visitor booth sports a giant advertising sign saying “Feel the City”.

Three ladies with a microphone are doing a public Bible reading without an audience in front of the State Library. They stop me and ask whether I believe in God. One really feels the end is nigh.

W

The next morning I go to a St Kilda supermarket and just miss Seniors’ Hour. The panic-buying has stopped. A woman aged about 90 stands in front of the fridge staring wistfully at the top shelf. Deep wrinkles criss-cross her face. She looks worn out by the constant media barrage about how a person her age is doomed if she catches the coronavirus. She is coiled within herself.

A young man approaches her asking “Are you alright love? Can I help you?” He takes down a tub of yoghurt at her request. The woman unfolds like origami and momentarily looks 20 years younger.

The man hovers over her protectively. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

A stooped elder takes baby steps towards the cash register, clutching his meagre purchases to his chest. A couple of eateries in Acland Street offer takeaway meals and coffee, strictly no cash accepted. Money will soon lose much of its value, but we shall win this war because the currency of kindness is sure to prevail.

03 APR 2020

Bourke Street Mall is totally empty. Both major department stores are having a sale without a customer in sight.

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ednesday, 25 March, 3pm Melbourne Central Station’s food hall chairs are cordoned off with black-andyellow plastic tape as no-go areas.

There isn’t a soul about, and all the stores are closed. The cavernous shopping centre is darker than usual and echoes with emptiness.

I feel hollow. The Shot Tower and giant chiming clock remind me of an abandoned movie set.

A uniformed cleaner sprints to my side with a spray can of disinfectant. He wields it like a handgun, but the invisible assassins are not contained behind enemy lines. They can assault you from anywhere.

I am standing at my pitch near the Elizabeth Street entrance of the station. A young man who is homeless sits on the pavement with his dog. The suits who normally rush past without glancing at him now stop for a chat. A woman sprays a $10 note with sanitiser before passing it to the young man with a smile. Someone bends down and gives him a super-sized pizza. The dog wags his tail.

The few people who walk past look as if they’re carrying the world on their shoulders. Are any of us ever going to feel carefree and frivolous again?

Nobody is anywhere near my pitch. The only noise you can hear is the moving escalators; I can forget about selling magazines today. But wait – here comes one of my regulars.

“I wouldn’t miss The Big Issue for anything!” she shouts from a social distance. We both say “Consider yourself hugged” simultaneously and laugh.

Take Care Amid the uncertainty and isolation of a pandemic-stricken world, small (and large) acts of kindness matter more than ever.

by Katherine Smyrk @ksmyrk

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Katherine Smyrk is a former deputy editor of The Big Issue. She is in the middle of 14 days’ self-isolation after returning from Chile.

W

e didn’t start off so well, did we? Humanity, that is, in response to the horror of this global health crisis.

At first, we mostly ignored it, considering it a problem for China. Then, when things got worse, it took no time at all for us to descend into the mud of our worst instincts. We got paranoid. We spread bogus information and we started brawls in supermarkets over toilet paper.

But then, a glimmer. In among rapidly closing borders, presidents seeking exclusive patents for vaccines and people putting the vulnerable at risk by going for a fun day at the beach, there was a spark of something.

Something that looked an awful lot like…kindness.

I never thought I would find myself weeping over a recording of some random man playing Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ on a little keyboard on his balcony. But with that video, my faith in humanity was renewed. The camera pans over the pianist’s shoulder to show that almost every balcony on the whole block has a person standing on it, quietly listening to his melodious playing. Then a man a few buildings over starts up on the saxophone, leaning out over the railing so the wailing notes of his solo can carry through the neighbourhood. Behind him you can see the spires of La Sagrada Familia, the famous Gaudí church in the centre of Barcelona, Spain. The streets below are empty. As the song draws to a close, the entire neighbourhood bursts into delighted applause. The caption on the video reads: “Music against the virus.”

Here were some people sharing something lovely with their community, then with the world, just because they could. It might not seem like much, but sharing a moment of beauty among all the fear is an act of great kindness. The glimmer grows brighter.

His philosophies led to a school of thought that people will only ever look out for themselves, and will only do the right thing if they are forced to. His theories still influence modern individualism.

But in 1741, Scottish philosopher David Hume railed against these ideas. “When a man denies the sincerity of all public spirit or affection to a country and community, I am at a loss what to think of him,” he wrote. “He has forgotten the movements of his heart.”

A century after that, Charles Darwin weighed in, writing in his 1871 book The Descent of Man about the importance of “sympathy” – which by his definition basically means kindness – for a society to “flourish”.

“Sympathy,” he wrote, “forms an essential part of the social instinct, and is indeed its foundation-stone.”

And, surprising perhaps everyone who has ever used it, the internet is now helping prove this point. Countless online groups have emerged overnight whose entire aim is to keep people connected, and to ensure those in need are being looked after. In Canada a group called Caremongering created a virtual space where people

03 APR 2020

illustration by Lauren Rebbeck

I never thought I would find myself weeping over a recording of some random man playing Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’

can offer and receive support, guidance and comfort.

“Anxiety, isolation and lack of hope affects you,” one of the group’s organisers, Valentina Harper, told BBC. “In providing this virtual community, which allows people to help each other, I think it is really showing people there is still hope for humanity. We haven’t lost our hope.”

In Australia there is the Kindness Pandemic Facebook group, which was created on 14 March and now has more than 500,000 members. The Good News Movement Instagram account shares videos and stories from all over the world. In the UK, the family of Darrell Blakeley, an 88-year-old man who died from coronavirus, started the Wall of Kindness in his honour – a virtual meeting place where people can offer help to those in need, and share stories of kindness in the aim of helping the good deeds spread.

The authors of On Kindness – historian Barbara Taylor and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – write: “It is kindness that is the key to this collective existence…

It makes us more porous, less insulated and separated from others. Once you put kindness back in the picture there can be no such thing as the isolated self.”

Coronavirus has forced the people of the world to realise there is really very little that separates us. The actions of a 20-year-old in France can, surprisingly quickly, have an impact on a grandmother in Australia; the long fingers of our shared world reach into every corner of our lives. And while that is terrifying, it is also what is going to save us.

It is the sense that we are all in this together that led 500,000 people to sign up in one day to volunteer for the National Health Service in the UK after they asked for help. It is what made a Greek-Australian man in Melbourne hand out $10,000 worth of $100 notes to each person lined up outside a Centrelink office. It is what made a man in Colorado don a Mr Incredible costume and leave a rose on each of his neighbours’ verandahs, just to cheer them up. It is what made a complete stranger in a supermarket give her phone number to my friend, who lives alone and was upset, just in case she ever needs to talk. It’s what inspired a group of Grade 5 kids to donate all the money raised from their movie night to the scientists at University of Queensland who are working on a coronavirus vaccine.

There are so many examples of people reaching out, offering a hand, donating, doing something selfless, in so many countries and so frequently that it is actually impossible to list them all here. As the virus continues to spread, these little glimmers of kindness are starting to light up the globe.

This pandemic is awful and scary and tragic and there’s no way around it. But when the world emerges, bruised and battered, from this devastating time, we might just have a little more faith in each other.

As we put ourselves back together, hopefully we each might realise, as Taylor and Phillips argue: “That we are vulnerable and dependent animals who have no better resource than each other.”

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As more and more of my day is spent with a great lump of anxiety lodged in my chest, I am trying to open myself up to the kindness that is flaring up around the world. Cynic-me baulks at it all. But flesh-and-blood-me – who is stuck inside the house, scared about my loved ones, scared about my future and scared about the state of the world – needs tales of kindness more than ever.

So, I have delighted over the story about a giant game of Going on a Bear Hunt, where people hide stuffed bears in their windows and balconies for bored kids to spot on safely distanced walks around their neighbourhoods. I’ve revelled in the story of a man in Atlanta, Georgia, who spent a week setting up hand-washing stations throughout the city so that people experiencing homelessness could better protect themselves. I’ve wept over the video of a group of Spaniards surprising their neighbour on her 80th birthday, by singing to her through her window while she cries into the folds of her dressing gown. I’ve watched (over and over) the video made by Brisbane’s Pub Choir, where people from 18 different countries join in on a virtual Couch Choir to sing ‘Close to You’ by The Carpenters in gorgeous three-part harmony.

There have been debates about kindness, and humanity’s capacity for it, for centuries. In the 1600s English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote the natural state of humanity was to be in a “war of all against all”.

The Big Picture Series by

by Ami Vitale Series

It Takes a Village In Africa’s first-ever community-run elephant sanctuary, photographer Ami Vitale discovers that when we look after our animals, they look after us, too.

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by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor

THERE ARE MORE THAN 7000 WILD ELEPHANTS IN NORTHERN KENYA, AN INCREASE OF 12 PER CENT IN FIVE YEARS

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FOR A VIRTUAL VISIT TO THE SANCTUARY, GO TO RETETIELEPHANTS.ORG. AND FOR MORE FROM AMI VITALE, SEE AMIVITALE.COM.

03 APR 2020

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here was this moment when Shaba, the matriarch of the herd, accepted me,” remembers US-based photographer Ami Vitale. “She walked by me and brushed her trunk up alongside me, smelled me, and just kept going and allowed me to be in the centre of all of these babies playing. I understood at that moment I was accepted by the herd.”

Vitale was at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya, the first community-owned and run sanctuary in all of Africa, where rescued orphaned elephants are looked after by local keepers from the Indigenous Samburu community. It’s an elephant oasis of sorts, where elephants like Shaba – who arrived as a calf – can grow up learning to be wild, before they’re released back to local herds.

Since the sanctuary opened in 2016, Reteti has rescued more than 30 elephants. Shaba came as a traumatised one-year-old after poachers killed her mother. At first she was distrustful, and wanted nothing to do with the team. But her keepers persisted, and over time the dehydrated calf took to a bottle and a bond was formed.

She soon became the boss, and her keepers delighted in watching her lead her small band of baby elephants into the bush around the sanctuary, stripping leaves, tasting bark, pushing down small trees and taking luxurious mud baths. When a two-monthold baby was unable to negotiate a gully, Shaba backtracked and demonstrated how to scramble across. She’d come a long way, and the team were really proud of her.

“We take care of the elephants, and the elephants are taking care of us,” Rimland Lemojong, a Samburu man who works at the sanctuary, explains. “We now have a relationship between us.” It’s an excellent way of describing the conservation model at work here – one that prioritises community, wildlife and sustainable improvement.

The need for elephant orphanages like Reteti is the result of the decimation of elephant populations since the 1970s – from poaching, drought, human-wildlife conflict as well as natural causes. The loss of elephants has had devastating flow-on effects for the natural environment – elephants have been described as “ecosystem engineers”, because they feed on low brush and bulldoze small trees, encouraging grass to grow, and attracting grazing wildlife. Without them, not only do grazing animals suffer, but so too the carnivores who prey on them.

But the introduction of the program has turned this around.

First of all there is the return of native fauna to the area – grazing animals like buffalo, endangered Grévy’s zebras, elands and oryxes, plus carnivores such as lions, cheetahs, wild dogs and leopards – and then there is the improvement in the quality of life for the Samburu people, who are benefiting from jobs, education and a sense of security.

The elephants are helping the Samburu in other ways too.

Reteti is empowering young Samburu women to be the first female elephant keepers in Africa. The success of these women is unlocking new possibilities, and changing the way the community relates to elephants. “Witnessing these women trailblazers…has inspired me to push through my own personal barriers and work harder to uplift others,” says Vitale.

Speaking of female trailblazers, Shaba has since been reintegrated into the wild. And she’s doing great.

MARY LENGEES, A SAMBURU WOMAN, TENDS TO BABY SUYIAN, AT KENYA’S RETETI ELEPHANT SANCTUARY

RIMLAND LEMOJONG GETS ACQUAINTED WITH KINYA, A TWO-WEEK-OLD RESCUED FROM A WELL

WHO DOESN’T LIKE A MUDBATH?

DOROTHY LOWAKTU, A NUTRITIONIST WHO MIXES THE FORMULA FOR THE BABY ELEPHANTS

Letter to My Younger Self

Animals Instinct Suze DeMarchi talks Baby Animals, baby humans and being a hard-rock heroine in the 90s.

by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor @anast

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M

y 16-year-old self felt quite confident about life unfolding the way it should. I still sometimes feel like my 16-year-old self! I was pretty fancy free.

I was a little beach bum. I was into the ocean and surfing – I was always at the beach. I had a really beautiful carefree upbringing in Perth.

I think being so isolated in Perth you have this sense of wonderment about the rest of the world, so I always felt that kind of wanderlust.

My family was all quite musical apart from my dad; he was a little tone deaf. My mum was a singer and we were all brought up with music around the house. My older sister sang and played guitar and my brother played bass. By 16 I was pretty obsessed with music; I was just starting to discover live music. I remember sneaking into a pub in Perth once to see Renée Geyer. That was the age when I’d left school. I knew I didn’t want to be in school but wasn’t sure about music being a career for me. I was 17 when I joined my first band [Photoplay] – that’s when I really knew that’s what I wanted to do.

BABY ANIMALS TOUR AUSTRALIA WITH KILLING HEIDI 3 JULY–12 SEPTEMBER.

(TOP) ROCKIN’ THAT GUITAR (BOTTOM) THE BABY ANIMALS

Secretly, I’ve always believed that when you work really hard at something good things will come from it.

03 APR 2020

opened for Robert Plant for three months through America – that was pretty insane. He would be walking around backstage with his shirt off. I got to do a duet with Paul Rodgers [frontman of Free and Bad Company], just really incredible experiences. I remember meeting Brian May from Queen backstage at a show. People that you respect and admire – and they liked your music! That was always a real high.

I moved to Boston for six years and was in LA for 10. [DeMarchi married Nuno Bettencourt, guitarist for US hard-rock band Extreme.] I felt a little lost there. Definitely felt like I was always missing out on a lot of my family stuff. I was kind of alone a lot because my ex-husband’s family is Portuguese; it was a whole different cultural thing. Boston is also different, even to LA. It’s a college town; it’s quite old and it’s freezing. Even though I came back to Australia a lot – I did a solo record the first couple of years I moved to Boston – it was really difficult and expensive. I tried to get my band to come over for a while.

When my kids were younger, I didn’t tour as much and I missed it a lot. But my ex-husband was always touring and so it was tricky. I wasn’t the happiest when my kids were little – I couldn’t really work as much as I wanted to. I realised at a certain point that everything was becoming too hard to manage so [I decided] I’m going to leave it for a while and just be a mum. That was fine for a bit but then it became a situation, especially in LA where I was like, Who am I? Where do I belong?

What am I doing? When I think back to that time, I really wasn’t myself – just having a baby and dealing with those changes in your life. I got a lot of anxiety when I had my first baby and that took me years to get over and come to terms with.

I feel now I have a bit of a second wind.

I’ve been back home for nine years now. My kids are grown up. I can kind of come and go as I need to now, which is a really nice place to be. But it’s hard being a mum in this industry because of the travelling. It’s a lot easier now that my daughter is 24 and my son is 17.

We just had the 30th anniversary of Baby Animals. It feels like yesterday. I’ve always felt really grateful. I feel grateful every time I go on stage that we can still play and people still turn out. It’s a career; it’s a job and it’s something I love to do. I can’t imagine not being able to do it.

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MAIN PHOTO BY AAP/PAUL MILLER; INSET PHOTOS BY GETTY

I got a record deal with EMI in the UK and moved to London. Those days they would throw money at you. I was like, yeah, I’m going to take it. I was 20. It was that sort of age where you feel like you really don’t know what’s in store, but you go along for the ride.

In a lot of cases, for me, these opportunities came up and I was always up for those things.

I didn’t really worry too much about how it was all going to turn out.

I was a little bit lost at that point…but I also had the best years of my life. When I went to London it was the Stock Aitken Waterman era [the songwriting and producing team responsible for hit songs by Rick Astley, Bananarama and Kylie Minogue]. It was all very pop and I was solo, which I never liked but I didn’t know that then. I wasn’t doing shows – I really missed that. I was there from 1985 to 89 and did a lot of great things, saw a lot of amazing shows and worked with some great people. Queen were on EMI, Sade, Duran Duran – all these incredible bands. They used to do these EMI conferences and I remember going on a train to Scotland and Queen were flying in on their helicopter. I’d be in the same room with these people; it was mind blowing.

But it wasn’t going anywhere – my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to come back home and do the music that I felt like I needed to be doing. I came back to Australia and that’s when I put Baby Animals together.

When our album [Baby Animals, 1991] went to number one it was a really big moment. It was not expected. We were in the middle of a tour in America with Van Halen and were just about to walk on stage [when we found out] that the album had gone to number one. It stayed at number one for six weeks.

I was really surprised by how well Baby Animals did. I knew we had something special but I didn’t feel that was my big dream.

It was always about just doing the stuff that I liked to do – making the music I wanted to, hanging out in a group, touring, travelling…

We were very fortunate. Secretly, I’ve always believed that when you work really hard at something, good things will come from it. Put the work in, you’ll get it back.

In Australia in those days you could play every night of the week, no problem.

It was very busy in those days, the early 90s.

We were gone for two years with not even a weekend off; every day you’d be working in a different town or flying somewhere. We

Ricky

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The great thing about Pandemic is it’s guaranteed to keep you occupied throughout your quarantine period, because it takes about 14 days to learn how to play.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

Bored Games

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he past few weeks have seen thousands of Australians confined to their homes, sitting out a mandatory 14-day quarantine period after returning from overseas, due to you-know-what. Maybe you’re one of these people. Maybe the whole family is facing a lock-in. Maybe you’re all clawing at the walls, succumbing to cabin fever, squabbling over toilet paper and remembering a time when the world wasn’t broken. Or maybe you’re doing what bored families have done for generations: playing board games. If you are, I have a recommendation.

It’s called Pandemic, and if there’s a board game for these strange times then this is surely it. The aim of Pandemic is to discover cures for four diseases spreading around the world, before they “contaminate humanity”, as the rulebook delicately puts it. Each player assumes the role of a specific expert. You might be the medic, or the scientist, or the quarantine specialist, or the contingency planner. It’s not possible to explain the complexities of the game play in one column (or possibly a lifetime), but over the course of the game cards are played, cubes representing diseases are strewn over the board (which depicts a map of the world) and the pawns move around, doing what they can to prevent the outbreak-counter moving to the skull-and-crossbones icon. If that happens, we’re all dead.

The great thing about Pandemic is it’s guaranteed to keep you occupied throughout your quarantine period, because it takes about 14 days to learn how to play. We got the game about a year ago and sat down to play it straightaway. After 45 minutes of trying to figure out where to place the various role cards, player cards, reference cards, infection cards, event cards, epidemic cards, city cards, cure markers, outbreak markers, disease cubes and research stations, we gave up, put everything back in the box and opened another bottle of wine instead.

On our second attempt we watched a YouTube tutorial to guide us, and that helped in that we actually got the board set up correctly (just as the sun was coming up, I seem to recall). When we finally figured out how to play, we kept losing. In Pandemic you don’t play against each other; you work as a team. The whole family either wins or loses together, which is good for family bonding in the same way that Monopoly is good for fostering broken homes.

The instructions booklet is a thing of wonder, in that you wonder what sick bastard could have dreamed up a game this complicated. It’s full of little clarification boxes to help clear up a misunderstood rule (which is to say all of them). Even once you understand how to play, you can never win. Well, not at first anyway. We finally saved the world on our fifth attempt, working as a team to contain the outbreaks to a small corner of North America, and sending the medic on a mercy dash to clean the streets of Paris, London and Madrid.

It’s a great feeling to save the world.

Humanity will not be contaminated, at least not on our watch. Just as our confidence was at an all-time high, my sister went out and did something cruel: she bought us an expansion pack of the game for Christmas, just to make it a bit harder. We now have three added challenges to deal with: a virulent strain of a disease, an unexpected mutation and infiltration from a bio-terrorist. So far I’ve not found a card that plunges the world into mass toilet-paper shortage, but I guess the makers didn’t see that coming.

That’s the thing about this crisis – the major threats seem to be coming not from the disease, but from our response to it. It’s time to treat this thing not like a game of Monopoly, but a game of Pandemic. It’s not that complicated.

Ricky is a writer and musician who’s game for anything.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

Dancing on My Own with a solid emotional core. The celebs start out laissez-faire, but after some boot camp, the joy of improving kicks in, they become competitive, they experience connection, and they try their bloody hearts out. As COVID-19 encroached, the show reflected our world back to us. No audience. Hosts Amanda Keller and Grant Denyer had to vibe without a crowd. Christian Wilkins (yes, the son of Richard, he of a positive test) was isolated with his dance partner in a hotel, and they danced on the empty rooftop. Comedian Celia Pacquola was momentarily serious, noting it was vital to “put on a show”. Everyone’s game lifted. We were all in it together.

The show pivoted in mid-flight from “light escapism” to “raising spirits and bringing everyone together”: the important work that performers, musicians and creatives do.

Our value is often downplayed in Australia.

We no longer have a Department for Communication and the Arts, and although our entire sector has been destroyed by Corona, little support or acknowledgment has been forthcoming. But who puts on the benefits when there’s a crisis? Who knows how to feed people’s spirits and bring us all together? This is the work of live performance, and, currently, it is gone.

Performers are hit with a double whammy. The loss of their livelihood, sure, but the deep pain comes from the inability to do the job. To be in the community, raising spirits, easing pain, bringing people together.

We belong on the front line, and we can’t be there. We will be back. But in the meantime, well, I guess there’s always the Quarantini. * Not healthy. Disgusting. But good for Insta. ** Not sophisticated. Particularly if you’re rimming your glass with ascorbic acid.

Fiona is a writer, comedian and Quarantini mixmaster.

03 APR 2020

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

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ne week we’re attending mega-church congregations and glancing askance at people hoarding dunny rolls, now we’re queuing for guns and drinking wine from the hollowed-out skulls of our enemies. On Insta. To be fair, the gun shops are in LA, but bless our panic-buying-at-Dan-Murphy’s little hearts, Australians are determined to drink their way through COVID-19. Did any other country put bottle shops on their “essential services” list? It’s so us. Brings a tear to the eye.

And fair play. If the stress-related gift I’m getting from Corona wasn’t migraine, I’d be knocking back a Quarantini myself. Quarantinis are all the rage, btw, and are essentially a healthy* martini you can whack together during lockdown from ingredients in your medicine cabinet. The Quarantini contains vitamin C powder, gin (or vodka!), honey and lemon juice, and is a sophisticated** take on your classic hot toddy. Other Home Alone plague-inspired drinks include The Emergarita (vitamin C powder, mescal, honey, orange bitters and lime juice), and the Coronegroni (vitamin C powder, gin, Campari, fresh ginger, an orange, sugar).

Necessity’s not the only mother of invention, you know; boredom’s right up there.

Also anxiety, obviously, hahaha pass the goon. We’re all on high alert turned up to 11, and it’s entirely unsurprising that we’re reaching for numbness and distraction every which way, like ravenous pelagic octopuses in a shoal of anchovies. Mate. What a shitstorm.

Personally, I’ve been carb-loading, swimming in Port Phillip Bay (yes, it is very cold, so it’s social isolation next-level), and watching Dancing With the Stars. I watch only two reality shows, DWTS and The Voice, because they involve performers being kicked out of their comfort zone. Also, the shows happen in real time, so it’s a bit like going out and seeing a live performance. DWTS – now that the entire performance sector has shut down – has been a lifeline for my mental health.

Usually DWTS is classic light entertainment

If the stressrelated gift I’m getting from Corona wasn’t migraine, I’d be knocking back a Quarantini myself.

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Fiona

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SECOND SKIN LEOPARD SKIN: ADAM LAMBERT

Music Adam Lambert

by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor @anast

PHOTO BY JOSEPH SINCLAIR

You may know him from American Idol, or perhaps as Freddie Mercury’s replacement in Queen, but with his new solo album Velvet, Adam Lambert hopes you’ll see him as the person he truly is – himself.

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Velvet Goldmine

03 APR 2020

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hen I ask Adam Lambert if he remembers his audition for American Idol, the one that started it all for him back in 2009, he laughs.

“I remember my hair! But I haven’t seen the footage in a while,” he confesses, adjusting the oversized bejewelled sunglasses he’s wearing. (Elton John must be swooning somewhere.) “I was really nervous. There was so much riding on it. I was doing Wicked the musical in LA and I had to quit. If I didn’t make it through, what the fuck was I going to do? It’s a lesson in taking a risk.”

It’s now safe to say that risk paid off. The winner of that series was Kris Allen, with Lambert crowned runner-up. Unlike Allen however, Lambert quickly found himself on a trajectory that has catapulted him onwards and upwards. There have been numerous solo albums – he became the first openly gay artist to have a number-one record – and world tours, as well as a string of TV appearances for shows such as Glee and Pretty Little Liars. But the key moment came in 2012 when he was asked to be Freddie Mercury’s replacement as the frontman of Queen.

Australian audiences got a taste of Queen + Adam Lambert in February, when the band recreated their celebrated 1985 Live Aid performance for the Fire Fight Australia fundraiser concert in Sydney.

“It was wild. It was really special,” enthuses Lambert.

“The audience, the energy, the crowd – there was so much joy out there. I mean, the minute we started the first chords of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ there were hands flying up. The crowd was so loud. It felt really good.”

Despite the now-mythic status of that original performance at Wembley Stadium, he reveals he felt absolutely fine re-enacting the epoch-defining set.

“We’re really comfortable with each other. The only time I get nervous is when there’s something new, like performing one of my songs for the first time. But this music, now that we’ve been working together for eight years, it’s like in my body. I don’t have to think about it. And that takes care of the nerves.” Except for the one time they performed at the Oscars, which he describes as “nuts”.

Right now, Lambert is promoting the release of new album Velvet, his fourth. By his own reckoning, he’s been working on it for too long and is “way invested” in it.

It’s been five long years since the release of previous album The Original High. Duties with Queen have kept him busy. And at one point, Lambert hit the pause button on his solo career.

“I had to make a bunch of business changes and that slowed down the process. I changed labels, changed management twice… A lot of that was prompted by feeling disillusioned by the industry.” According to Lambert, it just wasn’t fun anymore.

“If there’s no joy, there’s something wrong. Yes, some music and some material is sad, but it’s coming from a place of passion. If you’re not connected to your passion – whatever emotion it’s taking on in that moment – then you’re not doing your job well. And I was a little burned-out. I’d been travelling and working really hard and I felt like I had gotten sucked into the business side of things: numbers, streaming, competition with other artists, pleasing all the different people that run the label… I lost touch with my integrity. I had to make some changes.”

Velvet is a return to the Adam Lambert before mega-stardom with Queen beckoned. He is back in the driver’s seat, the music a truer reflection of his world, friends and relationships. “It feels…it feels like me,” he announces wide-eyed.

VELVET IS OUT NOW.

03 APR 2020

PHOTO BY GETTY

Queen feels very safe because it’s tried and true and people love it. But with Velvet, it’s unknown. It’s like, let me try this and let me put myself out there.

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BACK TO BACK: QUEEN’S BRIAN MAY AND ADAM LAMBERT

Surprisingly, the new album found its shape once Lambert stopped listening to Top 40 music. Instead, Velvet has its foundations in the music he grew up with – the stuff his parents played around the house when he was young and living in San Diego.

“Sly and the Family Stone, David Bowie, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Prince, Al Green and Chaka Khan…” he reels off quickly. “And I started listening to more alternative stuff, like Tame Impala and Leisure from New Zealand, who I’m obsessed with. There’s a band from the States called Sports who are really cool.”

It soon becomes obvious how determined he is about making his own music, away from Queen.

“Deep down I need to have my creative outlet.

I need to be able to create my own art. The Queen experience is unbelievable – it’s a performer’s dream.

I love it. But it satisfies something slightly different than writing my own music. Queen feels very safe because it’s tried and true and people love it. But with Velvet, it’s unknown. It’s like, let me try this and let me put myself out there.”

It’s important to remember how different things were when Lambert first appeared at that audition for American Idol. At the time, openly gay performers were a rarity. He has since been an integral part of that wave that has changed things for the better for the LGBTIQ+ community.

“That’s one of the exciting things about the last 10 years. The industry has shifted so much in terms of that. Ten years ago, they were still concerned. Is there an audience for this? Is it going to sell? Are we going to recoup our investment? They were terrified; they didn’t know how it would work. Then I did this performance on the American Music Awards that was a bit racy and it freaked everybody out. It is so different today.”

To capture this momentum, Lambert launched the Feel Something Foundation in late 2019. Its aim is to help the queer community, with a focus on homelessness, suicide prevention and mental health.

“The suicide rates [among LGBTIQ+ kids] are so high because there’s this ‘shame animal’ that happens, it’s a dark evil force. It’s whether your parents are ashamed of you or maybe it’s a religious thing that you’ve been brought up with. The minute you start normalising it and getting it out in the open and letting it breathe and not making it a secret, it’s not that big of a deal.”

While a certain pandemic has put a hold on any touring for the time being, Lambert is happily holding up Velvet as his long-awaited return to form.

“I totally went against what was expected and people are telling me this is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he smiles, adjusting his mammoth sunglasses again. “I feel a sense of vindication, like I proved it to myself and to anybody wondering if I’m capable of doing this. I feel really good about it.”

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TARA MOSS: SPOOKY

Books

Tara Moss

Well, pythons are constrictors, so of course they give incredible hugs.

by Kirsten Krauth @kirstenkrauth

Kirsten Krauth is an author and arts journalist.

Her latest novel, Almost a Mirror, is set around the punk scene of Melbourne’s Crystal Ballroom.

PHOTO BY BERNDT SELLHEIM

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ara Moss had her first crush when she was six years old. Not a pin-up idol or John Travolta in Grease. Instead, Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi, the 1930s horror-film star best known for his silent movie, Dracula.

Moss, the author of 13 bestsellers dwelling mainly in crime and the supernatural, has always been drawn to the macabre and spooky – and her fascination with Lugosi went beyond her waking hours. She recalls going to bed after watching the black-and-white film on television with her family, then sleepwalking down the hallway.

“I went around through the kitchen, picking up speed, ran towards the staircase and tried to jump off,” she says. “And my dad caught me. That was after watching Dracula. So clearly I thought I could fly and I was ready to join the vampires.”

Her latest book is The Cobra Queen, the fourth featuring Pandora English, the small-town orphan who moves to New York to live with her mysterious greataunt. Unlike the young Moss, Pandora does get to leap off into the abyss with the Sanguine (as the vampires are now known), flying over New York and landing on the Statue of Liberty’s shoulder. Having explored earlier in the series the worlds of spider goddesses and blood countess Elizabeth Báthory – history’s most prolific female murderer – this time the setting is the Egyptian section of New York’s Met museum, where Pandora is surrounded by an assortment of boxes, which only have to be opened to unleash death and destruction.

Moss discovered Egyptian history through Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and recalls the appeal of King Tutankhamun. “We had full-colour books with Tutankhamun’s death mask,” she says. “It was such a spectacular moment when I was younger.” The Cobra Queen focuses on another pharaoh, not quite as well known: Hatshepsut.

THE COBRA QUEEN IS OUT NOW.

03 APR 2020

The new novel of author, activist and licensed P.I. Tara Moss, The Cobra Queen, combines her love for the supernatural and serpents.

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Snakes on a Page

“I really wanted to focus on her, a pharaoh done wrong in antiquity – because of this really complicated gender issue,” she says. “But she was a queen who made herself a king and was essentially erased, it would seem, because of her gender. And I find that really fascinating to contemplate, in 2020.”

Shifting between Vancouver, Canada and NSW’s Blue Mountains, Moss boasts an extraordinary CV. She hosted and produced the ABC documentary series Cyberhate with Tara Moss; is an advocate for the rights of women, children and people with disabilities; and since 2013 has been UNICEF Australia’s National Ambassador for Child Survival. Her passion for field research has led her to be licensed as a private investigator and a race car driver.

In her memoir The Fictional Woman, she traced her life as a model, starting as a teen, then as a writer, examining the fictions that surround her and other women, challenging assumptions and “refusing to participate in the limiting and damaging stereotyping of women and girls”. She sees her Pandora series as “my special mission to focus on women’s stories, histories and experiences”.

Moss has a great deal of fun playing with Gothic and paranormal paradigms in the novel, continuing her exploration of genre fiction where women characters occupy centre stage. “With my new character, Billie Walker, I’m exploring that in noir and historical fiction. And before that, Mak Vanderwall in the thriller genre. I read genre fiction as well as non-fiction and I’m interested in subverting the common tropes and centring women essentially.” With nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Cobra Queen takes Pandora into the spirit world, the spaces between the living and the dead, waiting for disruption, a fissure in the membrane separating the two spheres. Like any good heroine, she’s there to save the world.

It doesn’t take Moss much to be tipped over into these kinds of stories. “I have an endless amount of imagination when it comes to this area because I was very influenced as a child by ghost stories and the paranormal,” she says. “I do think there’s a good argument to say that we don’t know everything as human beings or as a culture or society.” But does Moss believe in spirits? “I don’t know what I think,” she says. “So, I guess I just stay open.”

As the book’s title suggests, Moss also incorporates her love of snakes into Pandora’s world. While a serpent goddess offers a terrifying element, they hold no fear for Moss, who boasts a snake-handling licence and keeps a pet black-headed Australian python, Thing, who is “in his grandpa years”. Why a snake as a pet? “Well, pythons are constrictors, so of course they give incredible hugs,” she says. Joking. Perhaps. “We’ve demonised pythons and certain snakes to the point where…there’s an idea that you should fear them.” She pauses and laughs. “And I’ve probably made that worse with this novel.”

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PODCASTS

Stuck at home? Wondering what to do? Help is at hand – here’s six podcasts and six books, handpicked by our experts Nathania Gilson and Thuy On, to get you through these strange times.

7am Hosted by investigative journalist Ruby Jones and edited by Osman Faruqi, the team behind Schwartz Media’s 7am have been reporting on the coronavirus outbreak since early this year. Whether you have basic questions about its effects, are interested in how healthcare workers are handling the growth in cases, or want to learn more about how the Australian government is facing the challenge, 7am helps you navigate these uncertain times and panicked headlines with its concise and considered analysis.

A PODCAST FOR UNSOLVED MYSTERY FANS

Last Seen

A CHATTY PODCAST TO WARD OFF SOCIAL ISOLATION

A PODCAST THAT BRINGS THE GREAT OUTDOORS TO YOU

Play at-home detective by listening to the unravelling of one of history’s largest art heists. While Melbourne has its own history of unsolved theft (google the saga of Picasso’s The Weeping Woman going missing from the National Gallery of Victoria), this is for international scandal-seekers. A 10-episode series with an hour-long grand finale, this documentary podcast plays out like a stylish, smart television series, complete with grand musical flourishes and plenty of narrative twists and turns.

Highly Enthused

Field Recordings

Hosted by two Sydney-based women named Sophie, this chatty recommendation-based podcast feels like being on a feel-good phone call with your friends from the internet. If you’ve been dealing with decision paralysis, each episode covers what you should be eating, reading, listening to, watching, buying and doing. Silly, serious and non-judgemental, Highly Enthused reminds us that it’s important to have things to look forward to and to do what feels good for you.

For those of us who miss going on long sprawling walks around our neighbourhood or escaping the city to go bushwalking, this audio project turns the mic to audiomakers who collect the sounds of open spaces. To save you from a case of the stir-crazies, recordings can be found from almost every part of the world: travel from Poland to Sri Lanka to the UK. Each upload is also accompanied by thoughtful notes describing the context behind the sounds.

A PODCAST THAT’S BETTER THAN A COOKBOOK

A PODCAST TO HELP YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR TIME

Home Cooking

How I Work

Who do you call when you’ve got a quarantine cooking question? Try Hrishikesh Hirway, host of Song Exploder podcast, and his offsider, the multi-talented chef, food writer and TV host Samin Nosrat. The two want to be your new go-to for any foodie dilemmas and curly queries. Home Cooking invites audience participation by asking us to send voice memos of questions or stories about how we’re dealing with keeping ourselves and our loved ones fed when we’ve got to make the best with what we’ve got, borrowed or foraged.

No-one should ever feel obligated to “make the most” of a global pandemic, but it’s understandable to have a few questions about how to structure your day if your work situation has changed. Organisational psychologist Amantha Imber’s podcast aims for genuine insights and practical advice that you might want to try yourself. From curing procrastination to experimenting with small acts of kindness, this series shows us it’s possible to get stuff done and to hold on to our sense of self.

PHOTO BY BRETT GOLDSMITH

Best Podcasts + Books for Now

A NEWS PODCAST THAT GOES BEYOND THE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

A BOOK FOR A BELLY LAUGH

No Apologies Edited by Joanne Brookfield We all desperately need a laugh at the moment, particularly after the cancellation of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (and everything else).

Comedian, journalist and editor Joanne Brookfield interviewed 60 Australian women comedians about all aspects of this precarious-but-satisfying humourmongering industry. You get insights into the writing of the material, right through to the performance and touring stages, from the likes of Judith Lucy, Wendy Harmer, Kate McLennan and Denise Scott.

A BOOK FOR A DIFFERENT TYPE OF ALIEN INVASION

The War of the Worlds HG Wells In times of turmoil, I tend to go back and read a classic or two.

HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds has undergone adaptations across all forms of visual and audio media, but the original sci-fi story remains chilling fiction. It’s the tale of Martians (great, tentacled creatures) who come to Earth on a killing spree and battle with humankind. The characterisation may be thin, but the plotting is tight and exciting.

A BOOK FOR SOLACE AND GUIDANCE IN ANXIOUS TIMES

When Life Is Not Peachy Pip Lincolne Released with perfect timing, Pip Lincolne’s book has helpful suggestions for navigating through troubled terrain. The Melbournebased author offers “real-life lessons in recovery from heartache, loss and tough times”. When Life Is Not Peachy provides strategies to help with problematic relationships, mental health issues and exterior calamities, showing readers how to mitigate fear, loneliness and panic.

A BOOK FOR GLOBAL TALES OF GRIT

The Watermill Arnold Zable

The Trespassers Meg Mundell Released last year, Meg Mundell’s book is scarily prophetic.

It’s a literary thriller about migrant workers leaving their overcrowded UK homeland by ship and heading to Australia.

But once aboard, there’s a murder. Then the passengers begin to become gravely ill with a mystery virus, the ship eventually becoming a quarantine station for a pandemic. Sound familiar?

The Trespassers is as pacey and fast-moving as the illness that’s claiming the lives of the embattled seafarers.

Elephants With Headlights Bem Le Hunte A warm, light-hearted, cross-cultural romance that’s literally an Eastmeets-West scenario, Elephants With Headlights is about the ructions that follow when Indian Neel and Australian Mae fall in love. After a stint together in Australia, they return to his homeland to organise the wedding, but of course things go awry. In a novel beautifully grounded in time and place, Le Hunte tracks sexual, racial and familial politics with a discerning eye. There’s also a sprinkle of magic realism.

03 APR 2020

A BOOK FOR PLAGUE FICTION FANS

A BOOK FOR A ROMANTIC ESCAPE

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Arnold Zable’s latest book is a collection of four non-fiction tales that span China and Cambodia, Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and modern Melbourne. Though based on real historical moments, The Watermill reads like a novel, so skilful is Zable’s storytelling. The book is full of tales about displacement and survival; the author’s compassion polishes the grit in these extraordinary characters.

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

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DANGER: MONSIEUR HULOT

here’s a rare and particular joy inspired by the best movies, a tingling rush of elation that can lighten the soul in strange times like these. While our cinemas are closed, it’s heartening to see shiny new initiatives created to carry us through. The Melbourne Cinémathèque might be on pause now, but their programming team has joined up with ACMI to launch a weekly Virtual Cinémathèque, announcing selections each Tuesday to stream at home (acmi.net.au), and filmmakers from Guy Maddin to Lizzie Borden are making their work freely available (on Vimeo and YouTube respectively). It’s also comforting to remember that there is a rich back catalogue of movies at our fingertips, thanks to free platforms such as Kanopy and SBS World Movies. With this in mind, our reviewers this issue are highlighting three feel-good classics to stave off the cabin fever and rouse the spirits. For those in need of a further tickle, may I also recommend the quaint films by Jacques Tati. In particular, the Frenchman’s four gentle slapstick treasures starring the Mr Bean-esque hero Monsieur Hulot – Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Traffic (1971) – as he tries to navigate the maze of modern life, and is sweetly baffled by the era’s slick new cities, homes and offices, stuffed with gizmos and gadgets. On SBS on Demand, Tati’s films are exquisitely choreographed visual feasts replete with sight gags hidden in the shadows. ABB THE NUTTY PROFESSOR  | SBS ON DEMAND

Jerry Lewis once described comedy as an “emotional safety valve”, an indispensable survival tool in times of need. It’s a tool Lewis honed to perfection in The Nutty Professor, his classic 1963 riff on the Jekyll-and-Hyde tale.

Bumbling, buck-toothed chemistry professor Julius Kelp feels uncomfortable in his own skin, leading him to devise a chemical concoction to transform himself into someone else. That someone is Buddy Love, a handsome yet egotistical lounge singer who dazzles crowds and attracts the attention of Kelp’s long-time crush, Stella (Stella Stevens).

The potion wears off, but Kelp can’t resist taking another dose. Wildly funny and a powerful ode to self-acceptance, The Nutty Professor shows Lewis at the height of his talents as both director and star. It’s also a technical marvel, from its technicolor dream palette of vivid blues and pinks, to Les Brown’s toe-tapping tunes and Edith Head’s stellar costumes. As Buddy Love proclaims, “Every move a picture!” Now on SBS on Demand. JESSICA ELLICOTT THE PARENT TRAP

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 | DISNEY+

Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills star as the long-lost identical twin sisters who happen to meet at summer camp. Each disguised as the other, Susan and Sharon switch places, and set a conniving trap to bring their estranged family back together. This sugary 1961 confection doesn’t have the same level of green-screen wizardry as the 1998 Lindsay Lohan remake, but is just as charming, and with all the requisite House of Mouse musical interludes and wholesomeness. It might also feature the worst Disney parents (yes, including Cinderella’s evil stepmother), because seriously – who separates identical twins at birth and then gets back together as soon as the kids object? Regardless, it’s a great time to get reacquainted with a classic the whole family can truly enjoy; kids will identify with the plucky dual protagonists, and adults can swoon over the mid-century production design and Susan/Sharon’s adorable pixie cut. Now on Disney+.

ELIZA JANSSEN

TAMPOPO  | KANOPY

Even those who play with their food take it very, very seriously in this mouth-watering Japanese cult classic – playfully dubbed the first “ramen western” upon its release in 1985 – from writerdirector Jûzô Itami. When a couple of truck drivers (Tsutomu Yamazaki and a young Ken Watanabe) chance upon a rundown little noodle joint owned by the titular Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), they inspire her to strive towards perfecting her ramen recipe – a wildly involved quest, to be undertaken with their assistance, of course. After the training montage comes the field work, in the form of undercover missions to rival restaurants where broth and noodle quality are mulled over with gusto. This comic adventure is intercut with a number of lightly surrealist scenarios, each one a case study in the sheer sensuality of food. Bawdily satirical and yet always underpinned by a palpable reverence for its characters, Tampopo remains a hearty and inventive dish, one of the great food movies of all time. Now on Kanopy. KEVA YORK

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

SORRY WE MISSED YOU  | DVD + VOD

NAKED

FIRST DAY

 | SBS ON DEMAND

 | ABC ME CHANNEL + APP

Do you ever miss the old SBS where you’d be channel-surfing at 10pm on a Tuesday and find yourself watching three gorgeous Brazilians going at it? Well, SBS on Demand has you covered with Naked (Desnude), a Brazilian anthology series that centres on the inner workings of women’s desire and pleasure. Created and produced by female filmmakers, the erotic drama presents sophisticated, standalone snapshots that use a feminine gaze to literally place women at the centre of each individual frame. The show engages through its experientiality, closely aligning the viewer with the characters’ tactile worlds, while giving no clue as to what the character herself might be thinking, or, at times, feeling. Unfortunately this is where the series falters. Although it communicates the sexual power of womanhood through exquisitely produced sensual scenes, Naked provides little anchorage about who these women are. But it’s an undoubtedly daring demonstration of feminine sexual power and eroticism, refreshingly produced from (reallife) women’s perspectives. ELLA PACE

The first day is the hardest, or so Hannah’s mum assures her. A young woman facing her high school debut, Hannah Bradford (Evie Macdonald) is anxious about the usual things: How does she look in her uniform?

Will she find like-minded pupils to eat lunch with? Hannah is also trans, and with her identity comes a unique set of worries, skills and strengths, rendered with affection and maturity in First Day. Written and directed

by Julie Kalceff (Starting From... Now), this four-part series centres on Hannah’s distinct experience, but tells a multifaceted story about gender, girlhood, family and friendship.

From sleepovers to periods, most – if not all – of the kids in Hannah’s class are facing their own firsts alongside her.

While their performances can be a little green, the ensemble cast is nonetheless endearing, with model and activist Macdonald bringing particular gravitas to her first series role. She’s also the first transgender actor cast in the lead on an Australian TV show. May she be the first of many.

AIMEE KNIGHT

W

hen is it okay to break the rules? It’s a question that gets pulled apart and reassembled in Unorthodox.

The new Netflix drama sees a young Jewish woman flee her conservative Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and escape to the social and cultural playground of Berlin, of all places. But the city’s ghosts, and her own troubled past, aren’t far behind as Esther (Shira Haas) tries to reconceptualise her ideas of family, community and freedom.

Based on Deborah Feldman’s memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012), the miniseries weaves together two parallel stories. Esty’s new life in Germany is regularly informed by flashbacks to her ultra-Orthodox upbringing in Williamsburg, where she was married off to nervous young Yakov, or “Yanky” (Amit Rahav), as a teen. But Esty isn’t like the other wives in her reclusive community, and her dysfunctional relationship with her husband (and his mother) falls apart when she can’t fulfil her procreative “duties”.

I wouldn’t call Unorthodox an overly warm series, but nor is it emotionally detached.

For the most part, it’s frustratingly neutral.

It portrays many Jewish customs – such as a visit to the mikveh (ritual bath) – without much context or exposition. Some secular viewers may feel lost at times, but it’s nothing a cursory google can’t solve. Of course, there are moments of intimate revelation too, but overall, this story of borders and boundaries looks and feels just a little too distant to truly embrace. AK

03 APR 2020

MICHAEL SUN

ESTHER (SHIRA HAAS) ESCAPES

37

Ken Loach’s vision of Britain has always been relentlessly bleak, all grey skies and gruff grunts. In Sorry We Missed You, it’s never felt more apt. The social realism master’s latest film continues what he started with the awardwinning I, Daniel Blake (2016), bringing his evisceration of late capitalism up to speed. Here, he critiques the UK’s zero-hour contracts, which force down-and-out labourer Ricky (Kris Hitchen) into exploitative employment as a courier for an unscrupulous delivery company where efficiency reigns supreme. “It’s your choice,” Ricky’s boss keeps parroting, and it might as well be a slogan for the gig economy itself. It’s Ricky’s choice to work 80-hour weeks for a pittance – never mind the mountains of rapidly amassing debt. As he and similarly overworked partner Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) struggle to keep afloat with a son who’s turned to petty crime, and a young daughter watching it all fall apart, Loach never over-dramatises for cheap sentiment. He doesn’t need to. The dystopia is right there, and it’s real.

Music Reviews

Sarah Smith Music Editor @sarah_smithie

N

ot long ago I was writing about the ways in which the music community had, almost instantaneously, banded together over the summer to raise money for bushfire-affected communities. Now, only months on, the arts and music community – a sector that relies on travelling and gathering people into audiences to make a living – is struggling in the face of the current health pandemic.

It started with the cancellation of SXSW – the annual music and entertainment tech conference in Austin, Texas, which attracts thousands of international visitors. This includes a large contingent of Australian artists, who are selected for the opportunity to showcase their music to international bookers and promoters. Attending often comes at a financial cost but might pay off later; however now it’s even worse, as many artists are under huge pressure after cancelling flights, tours and rearranging months of work.

Following the postponement of US festivals such as Coachella, locally we have already seen Dark MOFO, Download Festival, Ability Fest and Vivid cancelled, plus Record Store Day moved to June. Dozens of international tours with local supports have also been cancelled. The flow-on effect from all this impacts not only musicians but also venues, bookers, stage techs, sound engineers…the list goes on.

There’s no doubt it’s a difficult time for many industries, but if you have the means and there is any small way you can support your local musicians and venues – be it by streaming their music, buying music online, or purchasing merch – it would be the perfect time to do so. SS

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MELBOURNE’S RVG: PIXIES SUPPORT CANCELLED

NEW ME, SAME US LITTLE DRAGON

WOMB PURITY RING

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The sublime vocals of Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano are immortalised on the band’s six albums. From their home in Gothenburg, Sweden, the band balance a festivalleaning playfulness with stark melancholic storytelling, bringing it to the world in radiant sonic palettes. Little Dragon take a more muted approach on New Me, Same Us. There is a cohesive introspection that ties the songs together – the word “sad” appears on back-to-back titles. Even on the highs of the album, dense synthesiser pads reminiscent of club comedowns underscore the rhythm. Thumping bass and dub reverb are interspersed with the band’s usual soulful slickness. When Nagano sings “The kids are rock stars now,” it is with a nostalgic yearning: Little Dragon started out as teen friends messing around and are now, 24 years later, international stars. As Nagano puts it: “If you’re lucky, you’ll be hooked for your whole life.”

After five years, Purity Ring’s Megan James and Corin Roddick have returned with the 10-track album WOMB. The LP is a huge DIY feat, having been written, recorded, mixed and produced by the pair. The first single, ‘Stardew’, is Purity Ring doing what they do best: entrancing bangers that dance the delicate line separating light and dark. There’s hope and brightness in their songs, but often something looming and ominous too. The third track, ‘Peacefall’, captures this contrast.

Heading into the refrain, the lyrics reveal that “Peace comes at dawn, but yours comes at night/Ride like a maniac, into the light.” The song’s fade-out takes almost a minute, as if being sucked, without resistance, into a humming black hole. For Purity Ring, WOMB is a rebirth. After half a decade of quiet, it’s an album that emerges to seek peace on a planet that is quickly slipping from our grip.

With rebirth comes something beautiful and alien, and Purity Ring play best in this dichotomy. IZZY TOLHURST

CHARLIE MILLER

EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL/EVERYTHING SUCKS PRINCESS NOKIA 

Princess Nokia has always let us know they contain multitudes, so their double-release of two sonic and emotionally opposed 10-track albums makes sense.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s successful. Nokia’s first album, 1992 Deluxe, was a wonderfully messy record, smashing together trap, 90s hip-hop and neo-soul to explore their identity as a foster-care raised, queer, non-binary diasporic artist. Separating these tensions is a mistake. On Everything Is Beautiful, Nokia embraces neo-soul optimism to interrogate trauma. At its best (‘Green Eggs and Ham’, ‘Happy Place’), it’s precocious, making deceptively simple piano lines, jazz horns and cutesy rhymes work. Where Beautiful was written across two years, Everything Sucks took a week. You can tell.

Unfortunately, Nokia’s repetitive trap bravado is set to equally repetitive first-take beats. It feels throwaway, save for unique tracks like ‘Fee Fi Foe’, a sexual/religious anthem featuring pan flute.

Occasionally, Princess Nokia remembers they stand apart from the pack, but listeners will have to playlist-whittle both albums to get there. JARED RICHARDS

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

A

THE DICKENS BOY TOM KENEALLY

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When humans declare war on a hive-like race of creatures across the universe, it’s not so much we who do the fighting as powerful artificial intelligence developed by corporations. In Melbourne author Max Barry’s sharply effective sci-fi novel, AI is every bit as ominous as the alien creatures themselves.

Both display rapid learning and work in ways that often can’t be fathomed by the mixed-bag four-person crew of the warship Providence Five. Though it inevitably calls to mind genre touchstones like Alien and Starship Troopers, Providence adds plenty of updated subtext to its punchy plot. Not only are the crew members mostly left idle while their self-guided, self-repairing ship conducts automated warfare, but they’re expected to keep their social media feeds updated for the folks back on Earth, reminding us how important PR is to war. And for all the horror of the alien hordes nicknamed “salamanders”, this is just as much a cautionary tale about entrusting our lives to technology and accepting the false narratives we see online. DOUG WALLEN

In September 1868, Charles Dickens arranged the safe passage of his 10th son, Edward, to Australia. A shy and unremarkable boy, ungifted in academic fields, Edward (affectionately known as Plorn) was just 16 when he made the journey from Portsmouth to Melbourne. This is where Tom Keneally’s new novel begins, a bildungsroman that follows Plorn’s first two years in the colonies as he tries to establish himself as a stockman at a station in remote New South Wales. Featuring an expansive group of supporting characters – including convicts, eccentric landowners, pompous politicians, bushrangers with a knack for recitation and some comparatively thinly drawn First Nations people – the novel is unfortunately hampered by the onedimensionality of its protagonist, whose narration renders many of the people around him and the events that befall them dull and uninspiring. The few moments that leave an impact are those conversations between Plorn and his older brother Alfred, which attempt to unpack their father’s failings as a husband and a father.

GRANDMOTHERS EDITED BY HELEN ELLIOTT 

This is an anthology of essays by more than 20 Australian authors who are also grandmothers. As editor Helen Elliott (who has four grandchildren) points out, the experiences described within are varied: “Individuality flows through in grandmothering as much as it does through mothering.” The collection begins with Helen Garner, who is delighted by her daughter’s child, and finds that around the baby there “hummed a benign aura, a timeless atmosphere in which my harried spirit relaxed and expanded”. Ali Cobby Eckermann speaks of the difficulties of being a grandmother and Stolen Generation survivor, and Elizabeth Chong reflects on how her relationship with her grandchildren is easy and warm compared to the relationship she had with her own grandmother. Jenny Macklin stresses that grandmothers should remain engaged in policy debates that will impact future generations. Elsewhere we hear from Alison Lester, Cheryl Kernot, Judith Brett and Stephanie Alexander.

It’s a rich and diverse collection of personal stories. THUY ON

JACK ROWLAND

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PROVIDENCE MAX BARRY

03 APR 2020

s I write this the nation is in the early stages of a pandemic, with COVID-19 already forcing the closures of many arts festivals, concerts and events across the country, including the Sydney Writers Festival. It’s a devastating time for artists of all stripes as they cancel their shows, launches and performances as a precautionary measure to contain the spread of the virus. My own book launch for my debut poetry collection Turbulence is among those cancelled.

Seeing that citizens are being told to keep physically distant from others and limit their social interactions, what can we do to support Australian writers when we can’t simply go and hear them talk about their work? Many local bookshops are offering a free delivery service, so think about taking them up on their offer. If you are on Twitter, keep an eye out for social media campaigns that spotlight the work of authors who have had to postpone the launches or the promotion of their books – writers such as Jo Lennan (whose debut short story collection In the Time of Foxes will be released in May) and Sarah Epstein (whose YA crime fiction novel Deep Water is to be released this month).

But one silver lining about self-isolation is that there will certainly be more time for reading. With live performances and sports events being cancelled and postponed, there’s no better time to turn our attention to books. TO

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

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PHOTO BY BRETT GOLDSMITH

Tastes Like Home Julia Busuttil Nishimura

Ribollita Ingredients Serves 6-8

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over lowmedium heat. Add the pancetta, carrot, celery, onion, garlic, bay leaves, chilli flakes and a pinch of salt and sauté for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and fragrant.

Add the stock, 500ml of water and the tomatoes.

Leave to simmer for 20-30 minutes, partially covered with a lid and stirring occasionally. It should still be quite broth-like at this stage, so top up with more stock or water if needed. Add the cavolo nero and the beans to the soup and cook for a further 15 minutes.

Add the bread to the soup, making sure the pieces are submerged. At this point, the soup will be really thick, so if you like your soup with a bit more liquid, add some more stock or water.

Cook for just a few minutes or until the bread has softened, then season with salt.

Ladle the soup into bowls and serve with a generous grating of parmesan, if using, and a drizzle of olive oil.

T

his is one of my absolute favourite soups and encompasses all that I love about Italian cooking – simple ingredients with a little ingenuity.

I learned to make this soup when I was a student living in Florence. My landlord, Daniela, would often make me food and leave it at my door. It was a welcome reward after a long day of school and was always a pleasure to eat.

I lived in a tiny apartment right on Piazza di Santa Croce overlooking the basilica of the same name. The floor had the most beautiful terracotta tiles and even though the kitchen was tiny, it was my favourite room in the apartment. Most days I would pick up fresh buffalo mozzarella, ripe tomatoes and basil on my way home. I would share it with my flatmate and then we would go out for dinner much later and eat plates of pasta and vegetables and beans. But when Daniela made us food, we would stay in. My favourite dish was her ribollita – a traditional Tuscan soup and the epitome of comfort food.

My recipe has evolved a little since then, so I am sure you will make it your own too. I think that is why I love home cooking so much – as the cook and eater, I have complete authority as to what I will make, how I will make it. Omit the pancetta if you please, use vegetable stock or add some rosemary to the base – it’s completely up to you.

Ribollita, meaning “reboiled”, is thick and robust, brimming with beans, cavolo nero and bread. Be sure to take your time when sautéing the aromatics and use the best quality olive oil you can afford for that final drizzle – it really makes all the difference. It’s the bread that stood out to me all those years ago though. In Florence it’s unsalted and rather unlikeable on its own, but in this soup, it is really special. Repurposing day-old bread into something new is quite common in Italy and speaks to the creativeness of Italian cooking, something that I always strive for in my own kitchen. Nothing should be wasted, and as Tuscan bread is near impossible to find outside of Tuscany, any rustic day-old bread is perfect.

THIS RECIPE IS FROM OSTRO. JULIA’S LATEST COOKBOOK, A YEAR OF SIMPLE FAMILY FOOD, WILL BE AVAILABLE 25 AUGUST.

03 APR 2020

Method

Julia says…

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1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling 120g flat pancetta, cut into lardons 1 carrot, finely diced 2 celery stalks, finely diced 1 onion, finely diced 3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped 2 fresh bay leaves ½ teaspoon dried chilli flakes sea salt 500ml chicken stock, plus extra if needed 800g can whole peeled tomatoes 1 bunch of cavolo nero, tough stems removed, leaves washed thoroughly and roughly chopped 250g canned or cooked cannellini beans, drained and rinsed 4-6 slices of day-old crusty bread (about 300g in total), roughly torn grated parmesan, to serve (optional)

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

There is a nice man who lives near me who goes out every morning and gets his newspaper. The person who delivers it at 5am piffs it unceremoniously out the window of a moving car, and it often thwacks in between two branches of a tree in front of the nice man’s house.

The nice man comes out and gets his paper from the tree as though he is picking an apple every morning, then shuffles back inside. The other morning, I saw him wander out, notice a large crow in the branch of the tree near the newspaper, and realise that he might disturb the crow. And so he bowed to it ever so slightly. He waited to see how it felt about things, and then gently removed the paper under the watchful eye of the crow.

That man, whatever else he might have done in his life, bowed reverently to a crow.

Those people who put bowls of water out for animals in the summertime are not terrible.

The person who talks the shy kid out from under the

table is a wonder to behold. The person who writes the best notes, the best text messages, the best letters: cling to that person.

The person who has a skill you can watch, and the watching of that skill is itself a meditative experience?

What a joy that is. I’ve said this before – my grandfather could peel fruit in one long, thin, even snake that he could sit on the table next to the nude fruit, so that it looked like the fruit had just stepped out of the shower and was about to get dressed in its skin again. Every time I see someone peel an apple I think: Pssht, miss you Gramps.

Ever seen two old people dance? Like, a proper dance with steps? There’s something about the elegance of the steps and the slightly jaunty fragility of the movement that makes it feel like you’re watching history and poetry at once.

Another thing that’s lovely about society – about all of us being together in the world – is that you can be walking through a park, for instance (I know, I know), and you can be chatting to the person you’re with, and another person can be chatting to the person they’re with, and both of you can keep chatting but you can both go: nod. Four different lives, two different conversations, passing each other, engaging, however briefly, and moving on.

People calling out to each other from balconies, strangers singing songs together, doing a funny accent to lighten a moment in a way that makes everybody suddenly empathise. People writing perfectly told stories or intelligent explanations of things you never realised you had even misunderstood. The person who listens like nobody you know. Your favourite person, too.

That person.

Public Service Announcement: we aren’t what’s happening to us. We’re the man addressing the crow in the newspaper tree, bowing slightly, regardless of whatever news is about to greet him on the front page.

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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W

ell, well, well. Here we are. That happened fast, didn’t it? Everything, I mean. At once. It feels like, suddenly, we’re toddlers at a surf beach surprised by a wave coming in from behind while we’re busy watching a seagull.

It’s been a big year. It’s been a big year and it’s barely a quarter of the way through. There have been moments, too, this year, that have left us shocked at ourselves, shocked at the way things turn out sometimes, like when the wave of something big swallows you up from behind.

It is easy, when the wave comes, to think that there is nothing but the wave. That the wave is the whole story and there is nothing before or after. It is easy to think that all of the terrible things that are swallowing you up are, in fact, a little bit who you are.

You are not the terrible things. Well, actually, you might be. I don’t know you. Some of you are. If you have a cabinet position, perhaps email me and we’ll sort it out. But look, the point is: we live in a society.

Sometimes that’s confusing or confronting because it involves living alongside people who do or say despicable things, but most of the time it’s the reason life is lovely. Public Service Announcement: people are not always the worst.

03 APR 2020

Bow to the Crow

Puzzles

By Lingo!

by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com LOOPHOLE

CLUES 5 letters Award Bury Passive, lifeless Restaurant guest Turn into powder

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

6 letters Continue to have Goslings’ father Grounds of a house Hooped Solidify 7 letters Article’s caption Second‑hand article as part of a deal (5-2)

D G T

Sudoku

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

I

A

2

1

R N E H

by websudoku.com

4 7 2 1 5

7

5 2

9 4

7 6 3 9

1

5 7 9 2 6 1 9 5 2

3 8

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD DOWN 1 Ecru 2 Boar 3 Dominate 4 Latent 5 Defiance 6 Oodles 7 Estimate 8 Reclines 11 Koala 15 Penelope 16 Treasure 17 Transmit 19 Paternal 20 Squid 22 Stingy 24 Buffer 27 Inch 28 Sand

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

ACROSS 9 Chocolate mousse 10 Ukraine 12 Ill will 13 Manhattan 14 Stain 15 Patient 18 Empress 21 Needs 23 Ambitious 25 Lassies 26 Forbids 29 Peregrine falcon

Word Builder

Escaping through a physical loophole would be an impressive feat. Loopholes are the long, thin openings cut into walls, allowing archers to shoot, and providing light and ventilation. Loupe has been in English since at least the late 1300s, with the first recorded mention of loophole two centuries later.

The first reference to a figurative loophole, as a way to use a legal omission or ambiguity as a means of escape, is in 1664. Now that we typically don’t build with fortification and defence in mind, we rarely have reason to use this word in its original sense. The origin of loop is a bit of a mystery, although it’s possibly from Middle Dutch lupen “to watch”.

8 letters

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9

Steady slope

1 1964 2 ‘Lucille’ 3 70 days 4 Professor Brendan Murphy 5 A haircut 6 Fraser Island 7 Carrot 8 Australian Aboriginal flag 9 Uruguay 10 Silicon 11 Mt Thomas 12 72 13 Ostrich 14 Gwyneth Paltrow 15 Eureka Tower, Melbourne 16 Blinky Bill 17 Geneva, Switzerland 18 Chin 19 Tame Impala, ‘The Less I Know the Better’ 20 Aries

Crossword

by Siobhan Linde

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME. 1

1

2

1

3

1

4

1

5

1

6

1

7

1

8

ACROSS

9 1 10

Quick Clues

1

1

1

11

1

1 1

1

1

1

15

16

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

12

1

13 1

1

9 Chilled dessert (9,6) 10 Eastern European country (7) 12 Animosity (3,4) 13 New York City borough (9) 14 Discolour (5) 15 Forgiving (7) 18 Ruler (7) 21 Wants (5) 23 High-reaching (9) 25 Girls (7) 26 Prohibits (7) 29 Bird of prey (9,6)

1

1

17

1

18

1

1

1

14

1

1

DOWN

1

1

1

1

27

28

26

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

29

Cryptic Clues

Solutions

European country (7)

12 Silly, naked man displayed animosity (3,4) 13 Crew that ruined an Allen film (9) 14 Mark and Stan eat in, primarily (5) 15 Aptly, one seen by specialist! (7) 18 Measure with iron ruler (7) 21 Wants directions when travelling around

Land’s End (5)

23 Motivated by blowing up most subatomic

particles, essentially (9) 25 Having been turned loose, is Salinger embracing girls? (7) 26 Bans murder of birds (7) 29 Took one calf out and got one bird (9,6)

possession (8)

17 Spread original message on the way? (8) 19 Benevolent friend protected a bird (8) 20 Waves ultimately pound sea creature (5) 22 Mean gymnast in gym clothes (6) 24 Cushion is in better shape? (6) 27 Move slowly in church (4) 28 Polish-French novelist? (4)

WORD BUILDER

03 APR 2020

dessert (9,6)

10 British rule proclaimed by another

SUDOKU

45

DOWN

1 Cure sick fawn (4) 2 Wild pig leading oxen into pub (4) 3 It moaned about rule (8) 4 Hidden in city shelter (6) 5 Opposition from betrothed in France (8) 6 Stacks rings on top of broken sled (6) 7 Guess tea time’s ruined (8) 8 Lies about Calvin’s broadcast (8) 11 In the manner of fine, upstanding animal (5) 15 Legendary queen and writer run off together (8) 16 Turkey, oddly, placed above a certain prized

5 Grant Inter Inert Diner Grind 6 Retain Gander Garden Ringed Harden 7 Heading Trade-in 8 Gradient 9 Threading

ACROSS

9 Chose to eat a muscle, too stuffed for

9 4 1 3 8 2 6 5 7

1

7 8 6 1 9 5 2 3 4

25

1

24

5 2 3 4 6 7 9 1 8

1

1

4 1 9 2 7 8 3 6 5

1

23

1

Puzzle by websudoku.com

1

1

2 6 8 5 3 4 7 9 1

22

1

3 5 7 6 1 9 8 4 2

1

1

1 3 2 8 5 6 4 7 9

21

1

1 Light beige (4) 2 Wild pig (4) 3 Rule (8) 4 Dormant (6) 5 Resistance (8) 6 Heaps (6) 7 Guess (8) 8 Lies back (8) 11 Marsupial (5) 15 Wife of Odysseus (8) 16 Cherish (8) 17 Pass on (8) 19 Fatherly (8) 20 Calamari (5) 22 Tight (6) 24 Cushion (6) 27 Creep (4) 28 Smooth (4)

6 9 4 7 2 1 5 8 3

1

20

8 7 5 9 4 3 1 2 6

1

19

Click 1850s

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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Florence Nightingale

F

lorence Nightingale is famed for saving the lives of the British soldiers she nursed during the Crimean War of 1853-1856 – but she saved millions more.

Born 200 years ago into a wealthy family and named after the Italian city of her birth, Nightingale sought a life of service. She chose nursing, and in 1854 arrived in Scutari, Turkey (now Üsküdar) to tend to British soldiers. Disease was killing 10 times as many men as were battle wounds. The death rate

for hospitalised soldiers was higher than for wounded soldiers stranded at the front. Nightingale, a trained statistician, drew the correct conclusion – the hospital was killing them. So she had the sewers flushed, introduced ventilation, bought hundreds of clean towels, replaced lice-ridden linen and had her 38 volunteer nurses and 15 nuns clean everything.

Including their hands.

Repeatedly. “If her face too, so much the better,” she wrote.

Washing your hands might

seem obvious – but it wasn’t then.

Certainly not to doctors.

Indeed, doctors pooh-poohed the idea when it was proven they were killing patients by infecting them. A decade earlier, a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, working in Vienna’s General Hospital, had observed that women in the maternity ward run by doctors had a much higher mortality rate than those in the ward run by midwives.

His inquiries revealed the doctors often performed autopsies before delivering babies. He concluded that that was causing the mothers’ deaths. He made doctors wash their hands after autopsies. The death rate plummeted. But he failed to persuade the medical profession to adopt this practice more generally.

Nightingale succeeded where Semmelweis failed. Laying the foundation for nursing standards, she insisted on hand-washing – and successfully enforced it. Two decades before scientists proved germs cause infection, Nightingale’s methods had already been adopted worldwide.

Her good work did not stop there.

She lobbied hard for mandatory connection of house toilets to sewers, rather than pits. Again, she succeeded. The practice was replicated worldwide, saving countless millions.

Nightingale contracted disease in the war, which ruined her health and confined her to bed for years.

She continued to work from there, planning hospitals among other things. She died in her sleep in 1910, aged 90.

At St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where she established her nursing school, an exhibition on Nightingale’s life runs all year.

If we keep washing our hands like Nightingale first taught us, if we practise physical distancing and refrain from touching our faces – someday soon we might be able to get on a plane again and visit.

ISSN 1326-639X

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