The Big Issue Australia #631 – Grace Tame

Ed.

631 26 FEB 2021

28.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

16.

PERIOD POVERTY

IA N A U ST R A L R OF THE YEA

E C A GR E M TA

A VO IC E G E FO R C H A N

and

42.

CRISPY POTATO CAKES

NO CASH? NO WORRIES!

Some Big Issue vendors now offer contactless payments.

NATIONAL OFFICE

Chief Executive Officer Steven Persson Chief Financial Officer Jon Whitehead Chief Operating Officer (Interim) Chris Enright National Communications and Partnerships Manager Steph Say National Operations Manager Jeremy Urquhart EDITORIAL

Editor Amy Hetherington Deputy Editor Melissa Fulton Contributing Editor Michael Epis Contributing Editor Anastasia Safioleas Editorial Coordinator Lorraine Pink Art Direction & Design GOZER (gozer.com.au)

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Contents

EDITION

631

16

Changing the Cycle More than one million Australians experience period poverty. We take a look at this big problem – and the efforts to solve it.

28 FILM

The Road Less Travelled

12.

Oscar winner Frances McDormand is tipped for another golden statuette for her role as the freewheeling Fern, who’s forced out of her home and onto the road in Nomadland.

The End of Silence

by Grace Tame

She’s the Australian of the Year and she’s leading a community who’ve been silenced and stigmatised for too long. Grace Tame writes about surviving sexual abuse and her campaign to make these voices heard. cover photo by Kishka Jensen contents photo by Salty Dingo

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

41 Public Service Announcement 44 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

42 TASTES LIKE HOME

Rosemary Potato Cakes Whether you call them potato cakes or potato scallops, Luke Hines’ healthified version of the salty, crispy, crunchy classic will satiate your soul.

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH

Hear Her Speak

I

t was a powerful moment, the closing of a recent Q+A episode on the ABC: a 73-year-old survivor of child sexual abuse, and her adult daughter, shared a recorded video message.

“My mother Susan Dekker sent a video in last week, for Grace Tame,” said Brooke. “What she didn’t say in that video is that up until last week, when she told the whole nation that she was a survivor of sexual abuse, she’d hardly told a soul in her whole life…

“Grace helped my mum find her voice, and stand up and share her story so that others feel less alone. That’s the power of Grace Tame’s message and that’s how important this work is.”

I mention Susan Dekker’s courage and resilience here, because she is not alone.

Her public revelation mirrors many more conversations being had around the country in the wake of Grace Tame being named Australian of the Year. Through her advocacy for survivors of sexual assault and by sharing her own story,

Tame has created a space for survivors to speak on their own terms, in their own time. Her tireless work gave momentum to the #LetHerSpeak campaign, and she helped overturn Tasmania’s gag laws that banned survivors such as herself from telling their stories.

In this edition, our annual International Women’s Day issue, Tame pens a powerful essay that calls to end the silence. “I’m representing a community who’ve been silenced and stigmatised for such a long time,” she writes. “Having been named Australian of the Year for my advocacy as a child sexual abuse survivor is a pivotal symbol of progress. We’ve been included among our nation’s most inspirational, accomplished and respected changemakers, proving that every voice does matter. And our chorus is growing louder. We’re all in this together.”

If you or someone you know needs help or advice, call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.

04

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The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 24 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

Your Say

I have always enjoyed buying directly from vendors in Melbourne CBD and now am happy to support the Women’s Subscription Enterprise. It is rewarding to know that I play a part in providing meaning and value to the work of fellow citizens – thank you.

Three regular contributors get my constant admiration; Lorin, Fiona and Ricky – love your writing. Very best from a long-time supporter.

ARTURS EZERGAILIS RINGWOOD EAST I VIC

Congratulations! I was enormously chuffed to receive the latest Big Issue – wonderful that you’re ditching the plastic wrapping and doing your bit for the environment. I want to give a shout-out to the women who pack and address the mail-outs. This week I can thank Anne-Marie and Melissa. I love that their names are acknowledged as it reminds me that someone is benefitting from my subscriptions.

Reading an ethical magazine with worthwhile adverts that benefit the community gives me a warm fuzzy.

A big thank you all round!

MARGUERITE DALE WAHROONGA I NSW

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

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Arturs and Marguerite both win double-passes to a single session at the Alliance Française French Film Festival, screening at Palace Cinemas around Australia. Film editor Annabel Brady-Brown has more on the festival on p36. 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 Amy Hetherington photo by Peter Holcroft

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

26 FEB 2021

WORKS WITH THE WOMEN’S SUBSCRIPTION ENTERPRISE IN SYDNEY

05

Terri

I’ve been with the Women’s Subscription Enterprise for 10 years this year – it’s my longest job. Just through working at The Big Issue, I’m totally changed and everything’s so much better. I was in a drop-in centre, at Lou’s Place, and they asked me if I wanted a job, and I said yes. I was really struggling financially and pretty isolated. I hadn’t worked for a while – my last job was landscape gardening, before that I did French polishing and I worked in a service station looking after cars.

I was born in Sydney. I’m the youngest – I’ve got one brother, and I had two sisters. My mum died when I was 10, so I was given to my elder sister to look after me. She would’ve been in her early thirties, I think. She had to put me under state-ward welfare; I was uncontrollable.

I think I was still a bit stressed from my mum dying and stuff. So yeah, I was a bit rebellious at a young age. I was in trouble a lot.

I had a friend and he used to buy me alcohol, and I started drinking on the weekends. After I left school at 15, I got into more drugs…and I was out of home. That’s when I became homeless. It’s been on and off.

I’ve been clean and sober since 2009. A total life change was when I got housed. I can cook any time I want. I’ve got a beautiful, comfortable bed. I’ve got a cat, Lulu. I’m responsible. I adopted Lulu in 2011.

It’s been the best thing because I’ve never been able to look after anything, and I’ve been able to look after Lulu.

He had to have an operation. Because I’d worked, I’d saved money to go for a trip with my brother and his family – I was able to use that money to get Lulu the operation. It was just a good sacrifice. I can always go for a trip.

Because I’ve been working, I was able to get a plaque to put on my mother’s grave. And I fixed the flat up. And I just lay-byed a mountain bike, cos around Sydney there are heaps of bike tracks – and I think that will give me a social side, a way to meet people with the same interests.

In my recovery, I’ve gone to the gym, I’ve done yoga, I’ve done meditation. I’ve done so much, and nothing worked. The only thing that has worked for me is working at The Big Issue. I was having nightmares for years, and a few years ago it all stopped. It’s like working with The Big Issue has given me back some control.

It’s being able to do things, when over the years I’ve been told that I wouldn’t be able to do so much, and then going and proving to myself that I can do it.

I was meant to get back confidence and self-esteem and move on to other work. I got that back a long time ago. But it’s hard to find what’s better than what I have.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

SPOTLIGHT

MARCUS

I’m With You I am a woman, a mother, a creator. The world is full of beauty and beautiful creatures, and I am part of that.

With my laugh, the world becomes beautiful and colourful.

With my thoughts, the world becomes stronger.

With my hands, many things are created.

With my feet, many paths are walked.

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

MARCUS CELEBRATES 10 YEARS WITH THE BIG ISSUE CLASSROOM

Life Lessons

W

hen I tell people that I’ve been involved with The Big Issue Classroom program for 10 years, they ask what it’s about. A school or corporate group rings and books a session with a facilitator and guest speaker, like me – either a face-to-face session or eClassroom workshop. We talk about marginalisation and how it affects people’s health and society. We talk about the benefits of work. We talk about The Big Issue and what we do, including the magazine, the Women’s Subscription Enterprise and the awesome Community Street Soccer Program.

Then we talk about the serious stuff. We talk about homelessness, what causes it, and trying to break down the stereotypes that people have. We pass on some very sobering figures about homelessness and the figures still amaze me.

The guest speaker then tells their story: the good and the bad things that’ve happened in their lives. At the end the floor gets opened up for questions.

For me personally, the last 10 years as a speaker has been a challenge but enjoyable. It’s not easy at times to bare your soul to people and to tell your story, and it’s indeed very emotionally draining. Fortunately, I have plenty of support from The Big Issue.

I’ve done so many over the years I’ve lost count, but I’m thankful for the opportunity, income and the platform that I’ve been given. If I can make a difference to one student or even one adult, it’s totally worth it.

Here’s to another 10 years.

MARCUS SELLS THE BIG ISSUE IN CONCORD AND WORKS AS A CLASSROOM SPEAKER IN SYDNEY.

I have the ability to be good company as you walk your path. I am with you.

I do not remain in the past.

I just take my experiences and move on non-stop.

I look forward to and embrace the future.

I learn and teach at every moment.

I taught my children how to create and nurture peace, and to expand it.

I want the world to be peaceful and prosperous for all, and I strive for that.

I spread love with my heart all over the world.

SOODI WSE I PERTH

LAIMA WSE I PERTH

Blue Monday I was out and about yesterday, on the first day of the WA lockdown, feeling a bit down in the dumps at not being able to sell the magazine for the five days that the lockdown would be in force.

I had just been to the local pharmacy to purchase a required mask. Wearing it, as well as seeing everybody around me wearing

low‑cost no-interest loan for the rest of the money. How good is that?!

KATHY FIG TREE LANE I BUSSELTON

Inspired, Empowered I am inspired and empowered by amazing women role models in sports, and in parliament, as many years ago we were not recognised.

Happy International Women’s Day to all of us fantastic females.

ANNEMARIE WSE I NSW

Equal Pay, Equal Say I am hoping for better working conditions for all women – to have equality with men for equal pay and for equal standing in all areas of Australian life.

EDWINA WSE I NSW

Hello Dolly!

My sales assistant for the Dolly edition was Dolly Parton herself.

The lovely people from Avid Reader bookshop let me use a life‑size cardboard version of her. Working with her (although not exactly from 9 to 5) brought me a lot of fun, and put smiles on the faces of those who saw her. It was an honour for me to work next to a superstar, although she didn’t talk much. :) LENNY AVID READER , WEST END I BRISBANE

26 FEB 2021

PHOTOS BY GEORGE FETTING, KYLIE KLUGER

I was born in a post-communist country, when Russia still occupied many of the Baltic States.

International Women’s Day – 8 March – was such a memorable day for me when I was young. Most of the women living under this regime were oppressed, and this day was a day when everything felt very different. Husbands, bosses and children bought women flowers and celebrated them, and women stood taller, blossoming like flowers – with confidence and the feeling of freedom – just for a day. It was a good day for my wonderful mum. We, as schoolgirls, would be waiting for little gifts from boys in our class, and they would try to be well‑behaved and not irritate the girls. Men could show unconditional love and be affectionate in public – that was not how things usually were – and the town market would be full of people buying tulips. Tulip blossoms still make me think of 8 March. In those years of the 1980s, we didn’t yet celebrate Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Women’s Day was all of those things. I wish that all women can blossom like their favourite flowers, with self-esteem, selfconfidence, patience, trust and – number one – self-love.

them, felt a bit odd. It felt as if I were on another planet.

If someone asks me how I’m doing on a Monday, my usual reply is “not bad for a Monday”. When someone asked me how I was yesterday, I responded “not too bright this Monday”.

Knowing that there are many vendors in this situation does help. Magazine sales were a bit slow at the beginning of the year, but have picked up somewhat. I have been the recipient of some good fortune recently, too. My 90-yearold home needed to have electrical rewiring done, as the old wires had deteriorated into a dangerous state.

The local Uniting Church gave me a fiscal gift of $1000 off the required $2500 needed for the job, plus a

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

07

In Full Bloom

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

new single-shot vaccine for chlamydia in koalas. Koala numbers are in decline, but the vaccine will prevent infertility, which can only help.

ABC I AU

“

For dogs that have been lucky to have their pet parents at home with them all the time, it’s all suddenly going to change.

Vet Dr Melissa Germano, who says pets will be sad when their owners return to work. She advises weaning them: introducing incremental change and getting them out of their routines.

THE AGE I AU

“Live music alone is operating at under four per cent of pre-COVID levels as a result of continual border closures and social distancing.”

An open letter from more than 3500 Australian musicians calling for either an extension of JobKeeper or a wage subsidy to their industry, which remains, in effect, shut.

HOBART MERCURY I AU

“Any rapper that know me... knows I am out of my Mind... but I’m harmless.”

Rapper Lil Uzi Vert, on having paid off the US$24 million diamond that he had implanted in his forehead, which had been on lay-by for five years. Even still, that’s one musician who doesn’t need JobKeeper.

TWITTER

“Look at me: I’m below average height, but I don’t feel bad about it.

I’m exactly the same as someone who’s taller. In fact, in an aircraft seat I’m more comfortable than someone who’s taller. There are positives to everything. Nothing’s all bad.”

Formula One guru Bernie Ecclestone, on being 159cm tall.

That hasn’t stopped him becoming a father again, at age 89, nor amassing billions of dollars.

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

GQ I UK

“Fillers purchased online can contain non-sterile substances, such as hair gel. When injected, these substances can cause allergic reactions, infections, and the death of skin cells. Another risk is… embolism leading to blindness.”

Kristina Liu, MD, on why it’s not a good idea to buy lip filler online. You could go blind!

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL I US

“Maybe it’s just the young punk in me, but I like the spirit of the youth. I believe they can see right and wrong with more clarity. I see a lot of older people making excuses for certain behaviours, and it tends to be the younger person who is quicker to say, ‘But this is simply wrong, and we stand against it.’ I’ve wanted to remain that person.”

Actor Angelina Jolie, who this year clocks up 20 years as an envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency, on her hopes for the future.

VOGUE I UK

“We did a trial where we gave the vaccine to animals already with the disease. In six out of seven koalas it actually reversed the disease and they could be released back into the wild without using antibiotics, which can have serious side effects.”

Peter Timms, a microbiologist from University of the Sunshine Coast, on a

“It’s a catastrophe to eat at your desk. You need a pause to refresh the mind. It’s good to move your body. When you return, you see things differently… We French and you Americans have totally different ideas about work.”

Frenchwoman Agnès Dutin on legislation that removes the legal ban on eating lunch at your desk, a move to curb the spread of COVID. THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

“I leave all of my thoughts outside my bedroom door, turn on my ASMR Room, get in bed and read, and completely lose myself in a different world.”

Sam Ali, a 27-year-old book blogger in Canada, on managing COVID anxiety by calming videos – say, a burning log fire in Hogwarts school, the sound and motion of waves on the beach, or, for some, the sound of the subway.

THE AGE I AU

20 Questions

by Rachael Wallace

01 What is ascorbic acid also known as?

02 Which country of roughly 9.6

million square kilometres has only one official time zone?

03 Which Australian actor plays FBI

Agent Clarice Starling in the new series Clarice?

04 BIF is the currency code for which

country?

05 Where was former AFL footballer

Nick Riewoldt born?

06 Who designed Audrey Hepburn’s

iconic little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? A) Yves Saint Laurent B) Coco Chanel C) Valentino D) Hubert de Givenchy 07 When and for whom was the

margherita pizza created?

08 Which pen-name was author

“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia, cutting off essential information on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on

THE GUARDIAN I AU

“All known populations of an estimated 116 species (14 per cent of the total) burned, which is more than double the number of plant species endemic to the British Isles.”

So says the CSIRO in research into the impact of last summer’s bushfires. It is not quite as bad as it sounds – many of those plants are highly adapted to fire and can recover by sprouting from burned trunks or underground tubers.

THE GUARDIAN I AU

“Chance of snow in Mizpe Ramon.”

The Israel Meteorological Service, predicting snow in the Negev desert.

And before you crack any jokes about weather forecasters: they were right.

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL I ISR

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

Samuel Langhorne Clemens most widely known by?

09 What is the public transport

network known as in Hong Kong?

10 What does the word mondegreen

mean?

11 World AIDS Day is held on which

day every year?

12 Who was the Australian cricket

captain at the time of the notorious underarm bowling incident in 1981?

13 Who won the second series of

Australian Idol?

14 True or False: There are 12 Tim

Tams in a standard packet?

15 What did the inventor of the frisbee

“Steady” Ed Headrick have done with his ashes after his death?

16 What existed on the site of

Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market between 1837 and 1854?

17 According to the rhyme, how many

whacks did Lizzie Borden allegedly give her mother?

18 What did WWII veteran Captain Sir

Tom Moore do to raise almost $57 million for the UK’s health service?

19 For which of the arts is Grace

Cossington Smith best known: A) Painting B) Fashion C) Music D) Poetry?

20 On which side of the road do cars

drive in Japan?

ANSWERS ON PAGE 44

26 FEB 2021

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD I AU

Facebook removing news sites – and vital health care information – from its platform, but leaving up all the stuff about stolen elections, lizard overlords ruling the world and Denver airport being a portal to hell.

09

“When we had vanilla on the “With your new menu, it was golfing glove you look probably one of like Tiger Woods!” the least popular “But I’m more like gelatos, because a Tiger Whoops.” lot of people think Overheard by Sam in Lara, Vic. vanilla is really boring. You need to have it, but it doesn’t really sell that well.”

Sean O’Brien, co-owner of Sydney gelateria Ciccone and Sons, whose version of fior di latte outscoops vanilla these days. Just as well, given the skyrocketing price and worldwide shortage of vanilla pods. Madagascar, traditionally responsible for two‑thirds of the world’s vanilla supply, has been hit by three cyclones in three years, decimating their crops.

EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Bec Kavanagh @beckavanagh

Take the Cake

In 2018, I was 35, separated, and juggling the logistics of a new partner who lived in Sydney. When he went into hospital to remove a lump from his pancreas, I took time off to be with him. By this stage Prue, Ash and I were all

Growing up, I watched the Disney dream of love. But reality is messier than animated happily-ever-afters.

Reality is wondering if you’re doing the less-bad thing by leaving or staying, wondering if it’s this argument or the next that will make your child hate you as an adolescent, wondering if anything, ever, will be easy again.

I’ve never found it easy to make friends, but as a teenager, I lacked the filter I now have. I didn’t ask whether I was too much or too demanding. I didn’t have the tools to keep myself in check, and so the people I formed friendships with were the ones who didn’t mind. Of all the things I anticipated when I got pregnant, forging bonds with women who would leave a dent in my couch as permanent as my own was the least.

2020 was a year that broke so many, a time in which our lives became smaller. Strung out from single‑parenting, work and home-schooling, I found myself once again vulnerable. And, once again, it was female friendships that helped me through. In 2020, when my time was marked by doorstep gin drops, weekly Zooms and late-night gifs, I realised, more than ever, that women aren’t the icing, but the cake, the batter and the bowl. They wear the path beside me – and are the ones I turn to in the darkest, loneliest times.

Bec Kavanagh is a writer, literary critic and academic whose research focuses on the representation of female bodies in literature. She is the Schools Manager at the Wheeler Centre.

26 FEB 2021

I

had lived in Reservoir, Melbourne, for almost five years before I discovered the actual reservoir.

It isn’t that it’s hard to find – Edwardes Lake is 1.6km around, not including the running track, multiple playgrounds, bowls club or skate park. My bad. I’m anxious at the best of times, and struggle to venture into unknown spaces – what if someone notices I don’t belong?

It was a mothers’ group, of all things, that got me there.

A mothers’ group: the arbitrary group of women thrust on you upon having your first child. In those early days – when I wore a body sausage to keep my flesh under control, when I woke up leaking and exhausted, when I couldn’t stand without feeling that my body would tear itself apart from the inside – making new friends was the last thing on my mind. But at the six-week mark, I felt weakened just enough that I approached new human interactions with a vulnerability I hadn’t displayed since adolescence. My most unadorned self was on display; I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to prep for social encounters. If an 11am message came through for a park date at 11.15, I was ready and out the door.

So this was me at 30: underprepared for the physical trauma of birth, at home with my newborn who was both delightful and terrifying, and desperate for adult connection. I was lucky to find it. Many don’t. Mothers’ groups are allocated by two factors – the child’s date of birth, and the mother’s place of residence. Dumb luck, in other words. I was so dumb, or so lucky, to find two of my best friends in this place of cabbage leaves for mastitis, dairy-free snacks for milk intolerance, and long walks for peace. In the first 12 months of motherhood, I learned to walk without purpose. I walked alone, or with Prue and Ash: traipsing the concrete paths with our prams until the crying stopped and the babies went to sleep. Then we could talk about life outside of nappies.

I walked until I remembered what it was like to think.

back at work, and our catch-ups were squeezed in among school pick-ups, early work meetings and after-work crises. We’d survived early motherhood and more: two separations and multiple hospital sleepovers with children who had found myriad ways to keep us on our toes. Ours is a love story that speaks to the power of female friendship.

“We’re worried it could be cancer,” said the surgeon’s assistant to my partner one morning in the endless days post-surgery. Pancreatic cancer doesn’t have good odds.

I’d seen it play out and this, coupled with the surgeon’s earlier claim that “he’d know what it was when he saw it”, spiralled me into terror. By that afternoon, Ash and Prue had flown to me in Sydney and extracted me from the hospital chair I’d spent the last 48 hours imprinting.

At midnight, they ran across the intersection in pyjamas to get tampons for my unexpected period. At 8am they crawled into bed and held me while I sobbed at the thought of losing him.

11

When Bec Kavanagh joined a mothers’ group, she gained more than a few parenting tips: she gained friends for life.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

PHOTO BY KISHKA JENSEN

12

THE END OF SILENCE Grace Tame refuses to be silenced. A survivor of sexual abuse, she was unable to speak out about her experience due to Tasmania’s gag laws. She used her voice to push for legal change, to raise awareness and to advocate for survivors. Now she’s Australian of the Year. Her voice is being heard, loud and clear.

by Grace Tame

“Why didn’t you just say ‘no’?” I hear this question all the time. It is born of the false belief that if you appeal to an abuser with reason, they’ll respect your wishes.

But to predators, reason, respect – even words – are meaningless. Including “no”.

Where we often go wrong in the discussion of child sexual abuse is in attempting to examine it through a rational lens. We assume that the traditional values of human decency are upheld and that the unwritten laws of social interaction apply. They don’t.

I remember lying on my back once in a hotel room.

He had just raped me. “You weren’t into that,” he said.

He was right. The pain had become too much to hide.

My usual methods of disassociation had failed me.

I didn’t say anything, not that it would have helped.

And in fact, he responded to himself: “No matter, we’re going to do it again.”

What you say and do in the face of abuse makes no difference. You learn to tolerate the pain once you realise it is inevitable, and that resistance only leads to more suffering. As a result, you resign yourself to helplessness. You resign to silence.

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

Silence is both a form and function of the grooming

26 FEB 2021

And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence.

13

T

he literal definition of “silence” is the complete absence of sound.

In the context of child sexual abuse, however, it is something far more complex and sinister.

It is the complete absence of truth. The deliberate suppression of information.

A weapon of mass psychological destruction; of disempowerment, disengagement, distraction and division that fuels society’s collective confusion.

On average it takes a survivor of child sexual abuse 23.9 years to speak about their experience. Such is the success of perpetrators at instilling fear and self-doubt in the minds of their targets. Such is the reality of shame-induced silence.

Silence is the very reason why child sexual abuse still remains ubiquitous in our society.

He made me watch The Graduate. The film’s soundtrack was almost always playing in his office.

Thus it was ‘The Sound of Silence’ – haunting and unending – that both literally and figuratively underscored my experience of prolonged abuse at the hands of a paedophile.

I was 15. He was 58. The physical abuse went on for months. I have permanent, albeit invisible, scar tissue on the inside of my body.

So too will the untraceable psychological impacts last a lifetime.

Unsanitised history is our greatest learning resource.

Unless people are confronted with the uncomfortable realities, they will not be moved to act.

But survivors have so much more to offer than their abuse stories. We have unique insights imbued with profound catalytic educative potential. Lived experience inspires and informs change.

It is important to understand that listening to survivors is one thing, but repeatedly expecting them to recount and relive their trauma without their consent is another. The latter is exploitation and commodification of pain – an unfortunate tendency of mass media.

To truly end the silence, we survivors must grant both ourselves and those around us permission to be vulnerable and to speak on our own terms, in our own time. We must continue empowering and encouraging each other to take a stand, and share the platform to normalise the conversation.

Open communication breeds understanding.

Understanding is the foundation of education and progress.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes in the process. Often, individuals are deterred from action because we believe we are unwelcome or unqualified. This is simply not true.

Fight the fear predators are desperate to hold over us.

Lean into love. Listen, with a view to learn and grow.

We are all human. This issue is far too important to be politicised. We are all welcome at the table. When we heal as a community we heal as one.

I’m representing a community who’ve been silenced and stigmatised for such a long time.

Having been named Australian of the Year for my advocacy as a child sexual abuse survivor is a pivotal symbol of progress. We’ve been included among our nation’s most inspirational, accomplished and respected change-makers, proving that every voice does matter. And our chorus is growing louder. We’re all in this together.

If you or someone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114 or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.

26 FEB 2021

ones who benefit from softened, censored accounts.

By minimising their behaviour we shield them from the shame which is so often then misdirected towards survivors.

Sadly, our current culture, and the systemic practices by which they are both driven and reinforced, continues to bolster the confidence of abusers. Legislation and policies such as victim gag-laws – which place no such restraints on perpetrators – send a dangerous message.

A message of tolerance of sexual abuse.

As Tanya Hosch, Indigenous leader, AFL executive and South Australian of the Year, told me: “We cannot solve a problem we don’t talk about.” Evil unspoken is evil endorsed.

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that underpins prolonged sexual abuse. Grooming refers to the calculated implementation of six concurrent phases of psychological rewiring. These are: targeting you, gaining your trust, meeting your perceived needs, isolating you from your genuine supports, gradually introducing sex to normalise abuse, and maintaining control over you. The entire operation hinges on the last one.

Maintaining control involves striking a perfect balance between causing pain and providing relief from it. These two opposing conditions keep you bound by cognitive dissonance. You become programmed to feel guilt at the thought of even questioning your abuser, let alone dobbing them in.

The pain they cause drives the belief that there is no hope or escape. Through overt displays of physical dominance and intimidation, combined with veiled but very real threats, the abuser instils crippling terror. This results in a total loss of self-esteem. This is the truth you live inwardly.

The relief the abuser provides drives a false confidence in you that tricks your conscious mind into believing you still have some control. This explains your appearance of security; why you hear yourself assuring your friends and family that nothing is wrong even though deep down you know it is. This is the lie you live outwardly.

All of this plays out behind closed doors, in carefully orchestrated silence.

What’s more, predators benefit not only from the silence of their targets, but also from the silence of the wider community. They rely on collective discomfort to continue to operate uninterrupted. They fill the void with lies, taking whatever measures necessary to perpetuate the culture of victim-blaming, to re‑traumatise us and discourage us from speaking out.

Impervious to guilt and embarrassment, they smugly charm and manipulate our families, friends, colleagues and even strangers. And thus, they groom all of us, not just their individual targets.

My abuser is a prime example: from openly bragging on Facebook about having the opportunity to abuse a 15-year-old, to participating in a 17-minute online interview in which he claimed to be the real victim.

He has even attempted to defend his possession of 28 multimedia files of child pornography by claiming they arrived mysteriously on his computer after downloading an illegal font.

The power predators stand to gain from our silence does not end there.

When we do share survivor stories, but omit certain details with the intention of protecting ourselves from that which is “too disturbing”, we are again ultimately empowering perpetrators instead. They are the only

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Changing the Cycle

Period poverty is still often a taboo subject, even while affecting more than one million Australians. But the conversation is changing, and that makes bloody good sense.

by Sophie Quick

Sophie Quick is a Melbourne-based writer and editor.

A

s a teenager, Kim from Westlake, Brisbane, was a keen netballer.

But she sometimes had to skip games when she had her period.

“I was raised by a single mother who did the best she could,” Kim says. “But she had two girls and herself, and there were times when she couldn’t afford [period products]… There were times when we just had to stay home – we couldn’t play.”

Kim is almost 50 now and the stress of her menstrual cycle has continued to affect her daily life, and even the direction and shape of her life, in profound ways. After leaving home, then raising children and teenage daughters – period worries have remained a constant. Sanitary products are just too expensive.

When her own first child was little, she struggled to make ends meet. As a single mother herself, she says, sanitary items were “just not something that was on the shopping list”. Like many people in her situation, she improvised cheaper sanitary protection. “It was toilet paper or cotton wool and [face]washers folded up in my pants.”

Fortunately, the silence and the stigma around menstruation are starting to lift. In recent years our conversations, and our understanding, about menstruation – a natural biological process affecting more than half the world’s population – have become more sophisticated, more nuanced and more candid. There’s more awareness now of the environmental impact of pads and tampons and more innovation, and range, in available menstrual products.

There’s an improved understanding now, too, that it’s not only girls and women who menstruate.

Transgender men and non-binary people may also have periods. And, thanks to people like Kim, as well as a younger generation of activists, there’s an improved understanding of how lack of access to expensive sanitary products is a form of discrimination and disadvantage.

In January, Adelaide woman Isobel Marshall was named 2021 Young Australian of the Year in recognition of her social enterprise, TABOO, which works to fight period poverty overseas and period stigma here in Australia.

Proceeds from Marshall’s enterprise go to

One Girl, a charity that works for education and equality for girls and women in Sierra Leone and Uganda. Menstruation disadvantage is also a major focus for Plan International, a humanitarian charity organisation focused on gender equality and children’s rights, working in 77 countries across the world. Plan estimates that around 500 million people worldwide lack the means to manage their periods.

It’s difficult to measure the extent of the problem here in Australia. Period poverty is estimated to affect as many as one million Australians, but it’s an under-researched area, with not a lot of local data. It’s possible to get a picture of the problem, however, through small local studies and larger studies in comparable countries.

A 2017 Plan International study in the UK found one in 10 girls have been unable to afford sanitary products. A 2019 Saint Louis University survey of 183 women living in low-income communities found that 46 per cent of respondents could not afford to buy both food and period products during the past year, while 36 per cent missed one or two days of work each month. An Australian survey of 1000 people commissioned by Libra in 2019 found

26 FEB 2021

At 25, she decided to get contraceptive injections to prevent ovulation and monthly periods. For years, she went to the doctor every three months to get her injections, but not really for contraceptive reasons.

“I knew that with the injection I wouldn’t have to buy sanitary items. I knew that [the injection] could eliminate that. I could take the embarrassment away and I could guarantee that I could go to work.”

There’s a 10-year age difference between Kim’s two children. “I sacrificed having kids in [the years] between,” she says.

When Kim talks about periods, and the accompanying burdens and expenses, she uses the words “embarrassment” and “shame” a lot.

She talks of how she’s struggled to overcome those feelings over the years. And she talks about “sacrifice” and “missing out” a lot, too.

How many sports matches and how many education, work or social opportunities are people missing out on over the course of a lifetime because of their periods? And why is this happening when periods are a normal and natural fact of life for so many of us?

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illustrations by Michelle Pereira

When you don’t have any money and you worry about bleeding onto your underwear and the embarrassment and shame of that… I want to take all that away.

DIGNITY

To coincide with International Women’s Day, Share the Dignity is launching a Bloody Big Survey to collect more data and more information on the extent of period poverty in Australia. Go to sharethedignity.org.au/period-pride

26 FEB 2021

SHARE THE

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that 67 per cent of teenage girls would rather fail a subject at school than have their class know that they had their period. A 2018 report by The University of Queensland and Water Aid Australia found many students in remote First Nations communities are not attending school for several days each month during menstruation.

The demand for donated sanitary products for vulnerable people in Australia is another indication of the extent of the problem. Share the Dignity, a national charity that donates sanitary products to people who are homeless or living in poverty, was unable to meet demand for its donated packs last year. The national organisation works with local and grassroots charities, mostly women’s groups and family violence services, to distribute their packs. For their November drive in 2020, Share the Dignity was able to distribute an impressive 93,981 packs to people in need, but they were still 46,509 packs short of demand.

It’s estimated that period paraphernalia costs upwards of $19,000 across a lifetime in Australia.

COVID-19 has exacerbated problems with expense and access. Many have noted the empty shelf space in the sanitary-item section of supermarkets, especially for the cheaper homebrand products, during the various panic-buying episodes.

A Plan International study, released with help from The Body Shop Australia, surveyed 661 people who menstruate in Australia. A worrying 51 per cent of those surveyed reported period products had become harder to access during the pandemic.

Progress on this issue is slow – but it’s happening.

In 2018, after an 18-year campaign from feminist groups, the Commonwealth Government agreed to make sanitary products GST exempt, in line with other products like condoms, Viagra and sunscreen.

In the past year, Victorian and South Australian state governments have followed the example of the New Zealand Government to pass laws making sanitary products freely available in public schools.

In a world first last year, Scottish Parliament voted to make sanitary products freely available at many public places, including community centres, pharmacies and youth clubs. There’s even a period emoji now for smartphone users, a red drop of blood, thanks to a campaign by Plan International.

The emoji is part of efforts to blow open conversations about menstruation. Period poverty and period stigma are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin. The shame and stigma exacerbate the stress of period poverty. And perhaps period poverty would not be so widespread, and so normalised, if not for the entrenched silence.

Research and charitable activity are increasingly focused on the emotional burden of shame around periods, and working hard to combat it.

Freeing young people and future generations from period anxiety is something that’s close to Kim’s heart. She vividly remembers the morning her youngest daughter got her first period.

“It was a trigger for me,” she says. “It was in the morning, we were getting ready for school, about 7 o’clock, and she said, ‘Guess what, I got my period!’ And instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s awesome, you’ve become a woman’. I just went, ‘Oh my God, no no no no no. I’ll be back soon.’ And I flew to the chemist and literally filled up two baskets.”

Kim laughs, telling the story of bumping into friends at the chemist, who found her carrying mountains of sanitary products. But the reasons for her drastic actions were serious.

“I never want [my daughter] not to have an option. Unfortunately, I haven’t always had options and when you don’t have any money and you worry about bleeding onto your underwear and the embarrassment and shame of that… I want to take all that away.”

series by Jenny Lewis

Photographer Jenny Lewis celebrates the strength of new mothers in their first moments of motherhood.

by Isabel Dunstan @isabeldunstan

Isabel is a writer based in central Victoria.

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Picture

One Day Young

HAZEL AND RUDY

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FOR MORE, GO TO JENNYLEWIS.NET.

26 FEB 2021

O

ne hour after giving birth, I showered. I washed blood from my legs, while hot water ran shivers all over my body. I could only just stand up, and yet I’d never felt more strength. I moved slowly, sore and raw – and yet energised with self-gratitude that my body was able to do that.

It’s this moment, those first 24 hours of motherhood – “the joy, the overwhelming love and the triumphant victory” – that photographer Jenny Lewis has captured in her book One Day Young. It’s a keyhole into the secret power wielded by post-natal women.

After the birth of her own first baby, Lewis embarked on the project, taking 150 portraits of women and their newborns in their homes, just hours after birth. She believes that if only people knew the unique pride they’d feel after birth, then maybe they’d be better prepared for the event, and less scared.

“After I gave birth, I felt like I was just disappearing. But then I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve just won the battle.

I’m amazing!’” says Lewis, who believes the world often overlooks the heroic strength in women, particularly after birth. “The whole project was born out of fury towards that.”

A painter before she was a photographer, Lewis’ series is informed by her appreciation of light and shade, and a belief that every element of an image speaks to a history, personality and story. “When I studied art history, we were taught to look at a painting in search of clues,” she says.

She refers to the image of Nicola, who wears a scraggly purple dressing gown, and the perfect way the light falls on the folds of cloth, transforming it into a Renaissance-era-like velvet robe. Her baby cries, feeling fresh air on her tiny body for the first time and Nicola looks down, getting to know her new love.

It was Lewis’ mission to ensure a diverse range of people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds were represented in the series. “I really needed to make sure I wasn’t capturing white middle-class women like me,” says Lewis, who found the new mothers by leafleting her neighbourhood in East London.

Lewis also wanted to remove judgement and present a commonality among differences. “One image might show an older woman and her baby beside yellow roses and a sheepskin rug, and another might be a 17-year-old young woman who still lives with her own mother. The body language between the women is the same. The love is the same.”

One Day Young captures that quiet postpartum period of recovery and reminds us that it need not be a time of invisibility – but one where others know what you have achieved. Despite the myriad challenges that come with pregnancy and parenthood, and particularly the immediate after-effects of birth, this series is both a gift and a critical reminder of some universal truths: that birth is both beautiful and catastrophic, both pain and relief. And most of all, that it can ignite a quiet power that connects us.

“This book is for everyone,” she says. “It’s for people in China, Israel or Australia – it will never matter what’s happening in the world culturally; it’s for everyone.”

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SONIA AND FLORENCA

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

KYLE AND WINONA

REBECCA AND OSIRIS

26 FEB 2021

NICOLA AND JEMIMA

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DILEK AND NOAH

Anita G sells The Big Issue in Melbourne.

I

was devastated. The man behind the counter ignored me when I tried to attract his attention. He attended to the young woman who stood next to me, even though I was first. When I tried to protest, he walked off mid-sentence – it was as if I became invisible overnight.

This went on until I decided to fight back. It’s best to harness the energy sparked by your righteous anger into achieving your personal goals. How can you ignore an old lady who stamps her feet, yells and waves her umbrella around? I haven’t been snubbed lately.

We do live in an ageist society. Unfortunately, it’s particularly unkind to us women. We may live longer than men, but generally women have a shorter shelf life as desirable romantic partners. The other day a friend was crying on my shoulder because her husband cheated on her – her rival was 20 years younger. “If you want monogamy, marry a swan,” I told her, as the writer Nora Ephron wryly counselled.

The beauty and cosmetics industries have a lot to answer for. They brainwash women into thinking we are saddled with a lifelong personal appearance tax if we want to remain acceptable. They suggest that looking old is a crime, or perhaps a deep, dark secret, and at the very least we should cover up any signs of it. I’m all for improving my appearance, given the limitations of my age, but only when I choose to do so. This excludes cosmetic surgery, which can be disfiguring and even cause death.

But our value does not lie in looking decorative.

We have far more to offer, though it’s hard not to internalise society’s messages about what makes a woman desirable. When I was growing up, there were few career choices for girls. Teaching, secretarial work and hairdressing were guaranteed paths to obscurity and insignificance, or so we thought. Most girls I knew dreamed about becoming film stars or at least models.

At the age of 19 I had my own brush with glamour.

A friend dared me to enter a beauty competition. So I did. It was sponsored by a radio station and prizes were a transistor radio, a beach towel and enough make-up to last two years.

After being crowned as Miss Elwood Beach, I was a blissed-out babe for about five minutes. They probably chose me because the two runners-up were absurdly young. That didn’t stop me feeling like Miss World. Pathetic, I know…

The next day, I came down with a thud. Life went on as before.

About this time, I discovered words: their power, their possibilities, the magic they can weave. I read voraciously, looking for role models who were high achievers without relying on their looks. At the same time, I also noticed that older women were edged out of the job market and were treated with far less respect than their male peers. I channelled my anger into ambition, deciding to become a writer of short stories and novels. This was a passion that would age-proof me from the inside.

I sent a review of a book on child psychology written by experts to The Age, without being commissioned.

To my astonishment, they published it. Next, I sent a short story to a New Zealand literary magazine. This was published too.

Thousands of published articles later, I reflected on how lucky I was to pursue writing in my spare time while holding down a regular job – what enjoyment this gave me. After a couple of years, I walked into the office of a suburban newspaper and asked them to take me on. They let me start immediately as a C-grade journalist. This led to more full-time jobs in magazines and newspapers.

If only young women had been encouraged to risk trying new things instead of languishing in dead-end or incompatible jobs; who knows how many could have led more fulfilled lives?

Sigmund Freud famously asked, “What does a woman want?” We want autonomy. We want to be in control of our lives, to be respected when we become old. We want things men take for granted.

It’s time to normalise looking one’s age. In future, I insist on my right to leave home barefaced if I want to. The cosmetic industry has no right to bully me into using their products. What is this, beauty at gunpoint?

And if anyone gives me a disdainful glance, I will stare them down with the subliminal message: “This is what being 75 looks like. Deal with it!”

25

A one-time beauty queen, Anita G finds empowerment in words – and, at 75, uses them to fight against an ageist, looks-obsessed world.

26 FEB 2021

Beauty at Gunpoint?

Ricky

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

When people visit your website it’s important to establish that you don’t have a product, you have a story.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

Against the Grain

C

all me ungrateful, but I wouldn’t be too upset if I were never subjected to another tour of a brewery or a distillery ever again. These businesses seem to be under the impression that I care about their vats and stills and hops and botanicals and all the sciencey stuff they do with it. Yes, very clever – you know how to make the stuff that you sell. But do I really need to be walked through every step of the process, with the weird smells and the machine noises? It’s not like I invite people into my study and show them how I rearrange sentences endlessly and open thesaurus.com every five minutes to find a different word for boring. Just give me the damn drink and be done with it.

Wineries I have a bit more tolerance for, not for the explanations of how they make it – see previous sentence – but because you get to walk outside among the vines and get a lovely view of countryside. Vineyards, like any monoculture, are a dull (thanks thesaurus. com) blight on any landscape generally, but hey, it’s nice to get out sometimes.

If I’m sounding grumpy, maybe it’s because I’ve just spent an entire weekend regurgitating website content from all manner of bespoke, cottage, artisan, organic, free-range, natural, local, bio-dynamic and boutique businesses into readable copy – in exchange for about enough money to buy myself one can of craft beer. You know what I’ve discovered? When it comes to marketing, everyone is the same.

Here’s how it works. Firstly, when people visit your website it’s important to establish that you don’t have a product, you have a story. It is vital – no, compulsory – that “Our Story” is the first thing people see and click on when they visit your website. So, what’s your story, then?

Your story is that you are a family-owned business located in the most beautiful region in the world. Your aim – no, your passion – is simple: to produce the best (insert chocolate, cheese, pickles, salmon, wine, soap, honey…

whatever it is you sell) in the world. Then mention something about sustainability and use the preface “eco” liberally.

Once you have established that you’re not a regular bloodthirsty capitalist but a family of philanthropic souls with a simple dream, it’s time to start selling. So, what makes your product better than the rest? Well, that’s easy.

If your game is whisky, beer or salmon, it’s because your water is the freshest, cleanest and most pure in the world. You have access to glacial snowmelt, or you tap into a rich, life‑giving aquifer, or you draw it from a pristine waterfall. It’s also highly likely you have the cleanest air in the world. Lucky you!

If you make dairy products, then make sure people know your cows are happy cows, grass‑fed and raised without vaccines or antibiotics – because what good have vaccines or antibiotics ever done for anyone? Feel free to throw around the term “bio-dynamic” a lot.

Don’t worry, no-one knows what it means.

With wine, your key trading message is threefold: (1) knowledge passed down between generations, (2) a climate comparable to Burgundy, and (3) a really funky label.

With ice cream, it’s all about the cream (fresh, pure, organic, grass-fed, happy cows).

Steak is a bit trickier in that it’s harder to argue your cows are 100 per cent happy about being slaughtered, but so long as you include the words “ethical”, “sustainable” and “low-carbon footprint” you should be fine. Extra points for using the word “marbled” in your description of the meat (this also works for salmon).

Once you have established all this, you can get down to what’s important: charging people a lot of money. But don’t worry, we’re happy to part with our cash if it contributes to your family legacy and to happy cows. Just don’t expect me to feign interest in your grain mash.

Ricky is a writer, musician and artisanal sceptic.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

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an we call her Little Fatty?” I ask.

One of our new chooks is adorably beak-down in some leftover rice and organic bacon rind. Greg is well-versed in the art of feminism, and wary of landmines.

“Are we allowed to fat-shame chickens?” he asks. Solid query, but in the world of chooks, being massively into your food is a vocation, not an insult. I meant it in an adoring “this cat is CHONKY” kind of way.

As a breed, Belgian d’Uccles are rotund: little chubby Bantams with feathery tufts of face whiskers, feet sprouting feather “boots” (that cause them to run as though they’re wearing clown shoes) and surprisingly functional downward-slashing wings. Good flyers. Bing some images, I’ll wait. Gorgeous, right? I have two young ones, plus their nest mate, a black Rosecomb, and it’s been two weeks. It’s definitely time to start thinking names.

I’m struggling.

Fact is, I’m out of practice with chickens.

I’ve been living a lie for the past year, a chicken lady without chooks. On the final day of 2019, in retrospect a Game of Thrones-style harbinger concurrent with the bushfires, I was awoken at 7am at the Woodford Folk Festival by a call from my then-housemate. There are only a handful of reasons your housemate will call you at 7am, none of them good. The positive was he hadn’t burned the house down, and I’m not ungrateful since it was an actual possibility (he sometimes vagued out and left the gas on), but a fox had got into the chicken run and massacred my flock. Yes, all of the lovely gals from my (still available!) book This Chicken Life. Well hello 2020.

We bought our house because there was room for chooks, but there have been no chooks. My “big dick” chicken energy dissipated. We’d hardly fixed up the old run and restock before moving, then COVID was off and running and you couldn’t get a chook anyway, because people had panic-bought them all. And

there were renos, then a run had to be built, and it had to be, you know, really fox-proof.

So it’s been a year: a long time without chickens. Time enough to question myself. Am I getting more chickens because it’s my brand, rather than because I want them? The question is vexed and moot, because I have chicken enablers in my life and now I have more chickens. Lord, the instant drama. I’d forgotten!

So much bullying, the tiny little molls.

My placeholder name for the Rosecomb is Sister BB, for Bossy Boots, because two minutes after arrival she turned, like a Disney villainess, on the chickens she’d hatched alongside and asserted her authoritah. She was like eight weeks old. “Out of my way,” she’s clearly saying to the d’Uccles. “You! Yes you! HURRY! I HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY.” Meanwhile, a different chicken-enabling mate gifts us two more Rosecombs, a blue and a splash. The splash doesn’t look great. She’s slumped. “She doesn’t look great,” I note to my friend, who prods her. She squawks and goes hyper alert, as you do when you’re prodded. “She’s fine,” he says. The blue, meanwhile, is hysterical about being removed from home and hearth. Slumpy and Screamy. The worst of Snow White’s sidekicks. These are not great names.

It’s early days. Of course I don’t love them yet. I loved my last flock. I loved Val. It’s obviously going to feel weird. Last night we weighed them for the first time. Plucked them gently as they slept, the three little ones huddled together like feathered bats on a strut inside of the coop. Fatty, a caramel marvel, weighs 50g more than her sister. She hoes into some corn. I appreciate her gusto. I take the opportunity to stroke her a little. She doesn’t seem to mind. Her feathers are very soft.

This is nice. Hey Little Fatty. Welcome.

Fiona is a writer, comedian and fox-free lady.

26 FEB 2021

Pecking Order

I’ve been living a lie for the past year, a chicken lady without chooks.

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Fiona

The Road Less Travelled

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Film

Nomadland

Frances McDormand hits the road in Oscars frontrunner Nomadland, an almost-true story of nomadic life on the margins of American society.

by Keva York with Elaine Lipworth @kevasyork

Keva York is a New York-born, Melbourne-based writer and film critic. She regularly reviews films for ABC Arts.

W

hen she was in her forties, acclaimed Hollywood actor Frances McDormand dreamed up an itinerant alter ego for her future self.

“I told my husband that when I turned 65, I was going to change my name to Fern, smoke Lucky Strikes, drink Wild Turkey and hit the road in an RV,” says McDormand.

Now at 63, as the lead in Oscars frontrunner Nomadland – director Chloé Zhao’s sweeping, magic‑hour‑tinted portrait of post-recession America and the growing number of people who are living life on the road – McDormand can say that she’s borne out some version of her fantasy.

“Except,” she adds, “I rolled my own [cigarettes] and drank tequila!”

Shot over five months and seven states across the nation’s west, Nomadland introduces McDormand’s character Fern at a loose end. She is mourning the recent passing of her husband, and newly jobless after the closure of the gypsum plant that had originally brought the couple out to the flat patch of land known as Empire, Nevada – a real-life company town turned ghost town, its post code officially “discontinued” in 2011, when the film is set.

With her home pulled out from under her and her community in effect dissolved, Fern chooses to pack her van and strike out into unknown territory.

Hers is a road trip with no particular destination – though her route is governed by the need to find

work. Pressed into motion by the imposition of a kind of economic and spiritual exile, she has only a few precious possessions and a will to roll, with a little timidity at first, with life’s punches.

McDormand sees a connection between Fern and Mildred Hayes, the grieving mother driven to vigilantism she played so memorably in violent crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). “They were both me, so we can start from there,” she says, with characteristic directness.

Despite their different demeanours – Mildred, with her undercut hairstyle and boilersuit, comes off tough-as-nails, while Fern is gentler, more reserved, if no less stubborn – they’re cut from similarly rugged cloth.

“I do think Mildred and Fern are obviously from the same world,” McDormand says. “They come from working-class backgrounds. I’m from a working-class background... Those are the people who held and raised me.”

There’s another potential parallel between the two characters that McDormand is too grounded (or maybe too superstitious) to mention: her portrayal of Mildred earned her an Oscar for Best Actress, and her portrayal of Fern is tipped to do the same.

It would be the third golden statuette in McDormand’s collection – about a quarter century since she accepted her first, for her star turn as the unassuming, unflappable pregnant cop Marge Gunderson in the 1996 black comedy classic Fargo (directed by McDormand’s husband Joel Coen and his brother Ethan).

“I encourage writers and directors to keep these really interesting female roles coming, and while you’re at it you can throw in a few for the men as well,” she quipped in her acceptance speech.

Crafted in concert with Zhao, who spent time with McDormand and her family in their California home during pre-production, Fern is an embodiment of the actor’s longstanding dedication to creating space for complex women in Hollywood, on screen and off.

In Nomadland, McDormand wears the lines on her face with pride. “A journalist recently said that watching my face in closeup on screen is like visiting a national park,” she notes. “I consider that a great compliment.”

She is unafraid to pop a roadside squat or pass a powerful bowel movement into a bucket on camera

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PHOTO BY ALISON COHEN ROSA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/HEADPRESS

26 FEB 2021

AN D : M C D O RM FR AN C ES AN D G RA C ES N O AI RS

F F R E E WR A N C E S A S H E E L IN G FERN

D AV ID W IT H H A IR N ST R AT

On her travels, Fern finds companionship and counsel in Linda May, Swankie and community leader Bob Wells – as well as potential love interest Dave, played by McDormand’s close friend, screen veteran David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005). Each of the “nomads” have their own personal reasons for ditching “sticks and bricks”, but they’ve all found a form of liberation in “wheel estate”: they cut paths through the country in their RVs seeking seasonal work – on farms and at roadside attractions; in Amazon warehouses and national parks.

McDormand first encountered their stories through Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, on which the film is based. This work of investigative journalism “dispelled all my romanticism about hitting the road in a van,” says McDormand. “It was a good slap in the face.”

And a galvanising one, evidently: she promptly optioned the book.

She approached Zhao to direct on the strength of The Rider: “I was deeply moved and wondered, out loud, ‘Who’s Chloé Zhao?’” she recalls. (Now that Nomadland is aglow with awards buzz, and Zhao is at the helm of the upcoming intergalactic Marvel juggernaut Eternals, her name precedes her.)

As one of Nomadland’s producers, McDormand is especially invested in its representation of the nomadic life and the hardships – physical, mental and financial – that come with it, sandwiched between the stunning natural vistas and the new friends who crop up along the way.

“The choice of the van-dwellers to live a mobile

life has a lot to do with economic disparities in our country,” McDormand explains. “It’s a huge part of what’s happening all over the world.”

But she’s quick to clarify that neither she nor Zhao conceived of Nomadland as “a political statement”.

“We asked to be invited to the truth of their lives,” says McDormand of her non-professional co-stars. “We think of ourselves as docents leading you to a community made up of people who’ve made some very difficult decisions for themselves – and Chloe’s telling their story.”

It’s through Fern’s eyes that these stories come into such sharp, sympathetic focus.

NOMADLAND IS IN CINEMAS 4 MARCH.

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for the sake of verité – something very few movie stars could pull off without it seeming like an act of performative de-glamorisation, calculated to attract an Oscars nod.

In fact, McDormand’s performance is just about the opposite of showy. “The biggest thing during this process was just to try to sit still, keep my mouth shut and listen,” she says. “I learned to use that skill a lot on this film because it was about hearing the stories of the van dwellers, my colleagues, not trying to tell mine.”

As in Zhao’s 2017 film, The Rider – a contemporary western about a real-life injured rodeo cowboy – members of this community play versions of themselves onscreen. Most are baby boomers who’ve found themselves squeezed out of the housing market and unable to find stable employment.

26 FEB 2021

A journalist recently said that watching my face in closeup on screen is like visiting a national park. I consider that a great compliment.

Julien Baker

Music

That’s my deflated narcissism. The fact that I have told you ahead of time, I am the worst, and you haven’t believed me.

BAKER

PHOTO BY ALYSSE GAFKJEN

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ODD S O C KS

by Declan Fry @_DeclanFry

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

I

’m able to have a lot of mercy for myself now,” Julien Baker says from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, just a few hours from where she grew up. She is reflecting on the 19-year-old behind her debut album, Sprained Ankle (2015), who grew up on stage, in the public eye, sweating through gigs and tours, resuscitating past selves and rekindling old guilts in bars and stadiums, at restaurants and roadhouses.

“On Sprained Ankle I’m basically doing the same reductive thing that’s done in so many sad‑boy, early‑2000s bands,” Baker says, speaking in a Southern drawl inflected with SoCal rhythms (like, you know, whatever). “Where it’s just, like, this woman is characterised only by her absence in my life. There’s no discussion of my mistakes. No discussion of our dialogue. It’s just, Why won’t you love me? What did I do wrong? I was like, Well, I need to seriously rethink how I discuss interpersonal relationships.”

Though the sad or softboy is often a figure of derision (the emotionally manipulative and faux-sensitive competitor of his more straightforwardly macho archnemeses, the jocks and bros), Baker’s early influences – sad-boy staples Weezer, Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, and godfather of emo’s geekdom and Sisyphean relationship struggles Elvis Costello – enjoyed a gendered trajectory within the music industry, one that was more willing to indulge male petulance.

“I guess that it’s typical or would have been more typical for females to be slotted into the heartbreak key,” she says. “But that’s also a very heteronormative way to view it: like, the female is being hurt by the guy with machismo. I recognise that for me, as a queer female, I existed in this kind of liminal space between two really defined generations of queerness.”

Baker’s music career had its beginnings fronting hardcore-adjacent band Forrister; in a New Yorker

LITTLE OBLIVIONS IS OUT NOW.

26 FEB 2021

Lots of labels can be stuck on Julien Baker – lo-fi singer-songwriter, emo, post-punk DIY – but really, she’s just out there, making her music.

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Heart Baker

profile she described her dad taking her every weekend to the skate park to see punk and straight-edge bands as a teenager. She learned to play guitar using his $100 acoustic Yamaha, an instrument she uses to this day (it featured on her 2016 NPR Music Tiny Desk concert, covered in stickers like “Resistance Is Our Culture” and “I Read Banned Books”). Following Sprained Ankle, she released Turn Out the Lights in 2017.

Compared with her earlier work, her latest record Little Oblivions is more propulsive. The 12 songs are suffused with trip-hop rhythms, stuttering organs (see first single ‘Faith Healer’) and lead guitar lines that chime and shimmer like a car tunnelling down the freeway as the dawn catches fire. As always, Baker not only commands sole writing and production credits, but also plays every instrument on the record, including guitar, bass, piano, organ, banjo and drums. Unlike the more monastic and austere first two albums, Little Oblivions builds on her work with Forrister, as well as the three-piece she formed with fellow indie-pop luminaries Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, who released an acclaimed EP as Boygenius in 2018 (both Dacus and Bridgers appear on album highlight ‘Favor’).

On Little Oblivion’s seventh track, ‘Ringside’ – whose driving guitar line charts a course through Weezer and Mitski – Baker disclaims responsibility: “Beat myself until I’m bloody/And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” she sings. “Nobody deserves a second chance, but honey I keep getting them.” Baker is an artist who is obsessive and self-castigating in equal measure. I am the worst, so no-one can hurt me, her songs seem to say. She is always imagining the endgame, indulging the temptation to self-sabotage. Picking at old sores. Listening to her work, you get the sense that Baker struggles to forgive herself (or that, if she did, it would be long after everyone else around her had). I ask her if this is a way of internalising unhappy endings – allowing them to happen in advance.

“That’s my deflated narcissism. The fact that I have told you ahead of time, I am the worst, and you haven’t believed me. And so now I feel like I’ve been endowed with this trust. And that scares me. It’s like when you just want to have your answers back from a test, because to know that you failed is better than not knowing how to take it.”

Perhaps the decades-long mainstreaming of punk and emo, rebellion’s veneer of sexy geekdom (check the Blink-182 inflections of weepy trap artists like the late Juice WRLD, or Taylor Swift repurposing both the lyrics and sonic palette of Dashboard Confessional’s 2006 hit ‘Stolen’ for folklore’s ‘Mirrorball’) mean that misery is now contemporary pop’s prevailing key. Yet there is a realness there, an authenticity that Baker’s fans can relate to. A large part of the attraction to her artistic persona is the sense that there isn’t one.

“I have this immense awareness of responsibility,” Baker says. “So I want to be genuine.”

Sam Van Zweden

Books

GE ZE LL IG HU SA M VA N ZW NT ER : ED EN

There is an entire politics surrounding bodies and food culture, and Sam Van Zweden unpacks it in her new book.

by Dasha Maiorova @dashmaiorova

Dasha Maiorova is a Belarus-born writer living in Sydney.

In 2020 she was runner-up for the Deborah Cass Prize for Writing.

PHOTO BY LEAH JING

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Not So Fast, Food

behaviours exhibited by participants in the 1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment – food obsession and anxiety among them – have also been prevalent throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, presented as hoarding and panic-buying. Interestingly, many of the same controlling behaviours inflicted on participants in the Minnesota experiment – such as calorie counting, restriction of food groups, rigidity of habits – form the basis of many diets.

“Diets only work for something like two per cent of the people that engage in them,” Van Zweden states, citing various sources. “This really weaponises us against ourselves: we’re made to believe that we’re the failure. It becomes a really toxic way to live.”

Worrying research indicates the pervasive nature of diet culture and negative body connotations in children even of pre-primary age, but while Van Zweden references disturbing studies – like those where young kids discerned between “good bodies” and “bad bodies”, associating negative characteristics with larger bodies – her outlook is optimistic. From body activism, to fat liberation and intersectionality, Van Zweden says there are positive spaces being carved out for all. “We’re at a critical juncture where a lot of people are getting

EATING WITH MY MOUTH OPEN IS OUT NOW.

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Ultimately Eating With My Mouth Open is a book about love.

on board with ideas around body positivity, Health at Every Size [HAES], intuitive eating, anti-diet. There’s a lot of language going around, [but] if people stop there it might be doing them a disservice.”

Eating With My Mouth Open, Van Zweden’s first book, is a different type of food writing. A memoir filled with tender and powerful memories tied to food and body, Van Zweden oscillates between her family’s two opposing views on food. Her father, a commercial chef for more than 25 years, finds food “very much about nurturing and novelty and hard work”. While her mother’s relationship is “very much about anxiety and diet culture”. It is with sensitivity and tenderness that Van Zweden describes her mum as “morbidly obese” – and obesity, she writes, is “not a neutral term”.

Reflecting with vulnerability and honesty on her experiences with weight-loss, dieting, weight-gain – fluctuations that mirror the ebb and flow of her mental health – Van Zweden muses that food is a topic she keeps circling back to, like a question without an answer. The book tracks the trajectory of her recovery.

“I never went into it saying ‘This is my catharsis’.

Recovery is messy, and it’s incomplete, and that’s okay.”

The culmination of a six-year exploration of food and memory, ultimately Eating With My Mouth Open is a book about love. Scenes go from the heart-wrenching – her mother, living with schizoaffective disorder, manically baking tray after tray of biscuits (“care combined with mania can be smothering”), to the heart-warming – picking raspberries in Van Zweden’s Oma and Opa’s garden in Tasmania (“raspberries are tiny canyons glittering with jewels”). For Van Zweden, food is hearth and battleground at once. The battle is both for and against her body, and from childhood to adulthood it is fought in spaces including therapists’ offices, public transport and her home.

Van Zweden suggests that her cross-cultural examination is not merely a book about diet culture, or wellness culture, or the dangers of food trends, or body politics, but a “food book, about eating and remembering and mapping those memories down on a page”. While many of those memories are traumatic, Van Zweden wanted to integrate the happier memories, which are tied so intimately with family, heritage and identity, especially her Dutch heritage, and the sense of gezellig she is searching for.

Gezellig, Van Zweden explains, cannot be translated into English, but its meaning falls somewhere between “cosy” and “comfortable”. It is this simple, uncomplicated version of food that Van Zweden seeks now. “People have had enough of molecular gastronomy,” she says. “We’ve been a bit MasterChef‑ed out, and we’re returning to much more honest, simple, sustainable ways of cooking and eating.

We’re slowing down.”

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ood has never been more complicated. “Clean” eating, Insta-worthy (or not) bodies, obesity “epidemics”, wellness influencers, detox, keto, paleo, hidden “nasties”. Eating – an act we take for granted every day – is now a loaded maelstrom of shame, pride and joy.

In Eating With My Mouth Open, Sam Van Zweden considers the ways memory and food intersect. Citing research, food and body writing and philosophy, but also, most importantly, her own memory and experience, Van Zweden posits that eating has never been neutral. What we eat, who we share our meals with, how we construct the “architecture” of our plates: all of these choices have social connotations.

“So much of diet culture is performative, so much is what you’re seen to be doing and how those behaviours signal you as the right kind of person,” Van Zweden says. “It makes its way into language – if this is ‘clean eating’, then what’s the rest?”

Recently “COVID-kilos” joined the melting pot.

In a time marked by a loss of control, Van Zweden comments that it’s no surprise that the same

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

Y

ou can count on death, taxes, and the Alliance Française French Film Festival, which returns this March to present its 32nd annual survey of Francophone cinema nationally. Of the 37 titles on offer, I’m particularly jazzed for Mandibles – Quentin Dupieux’s dopey drama about two friends who devise a get-rich-quick scheme inspired by a giant fly – and Breathless (1960), the festival’s star restoration. Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature really did change cinema forever. Following two lovers on the run, it stars Jean-Paul Belmondo at his most magnetic, and the inimitable Jean Seberg sporting her blonde pixie cut, selling newspapers, stealing hearts.

She was given the biopic treatment in 2019’s Seberg, Australian director Benedict Andrews’ look at her life in the late 60s – namely, her support of the American Civil Rights Movement and subsequent surveillance by the FBI. Its look at the tragic effects of FBI harassment is echoed in MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard’s new documentary about the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. Making its Australian premiere as part of Non-Fiction – a program of contemporary docos on until 11 March at Melbourne’s ACMI – the film makes rich use of newly declassified documents to better understand attempts to undermine the movement, and its leader, right up until his assassination in 1968. It makes it horrifyingly clear that the FBI was driven by the same fears and prejudice that devastate America today. ABB

MLK

ABOUT ENDLESSNESS 

A Roy Andersson film is like a collection of bespoke miniatures – each one a cluster of exquisitely crafted dramatic vignettes, in moods that range from tragicomic to just plain tragic. Like his acclaimed “Living trilogy” (2000-2014), About Endlessness assembles brief everyday scenes from his native Sweden, whose mundane content belies their casual profundity.

Here we see a man tying his daughter’s shoelaces, a dentist having a bad day, a priest who has lost his faith. Sometimes an omniscient narrator clues us in to the subject, but these captions act more as a sort of punchline, at once clarifying the events before us and failing to totally capture their richness. Drawing on his experience as a director of advertisements, Andersson constructs his vignettes in a controlled studio setting, with exacting attention to the geometry of his frames.

It’s an artificial style in pursuit of a deeper existential truth. What is “endless” here are the foibles of the human condition. JAMES DOUGLAS THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS

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This might appear to be a film about rare and expensive fungi, but Italian truffle hunters and their canine companions prove to be the real subjects of this tender documentary. Without narration or any direct-to-camera interviews, American directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw expose the arduous conditions endured to collect the culinary delicacy in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, where the prized Alba white truffle grows – before it’s excessively marked up when re-sold. Truffle hunting, as explained by the aging men, is demanding work. It’s dangerous for their dogs too, who risk eating poisonous bait traps. The mutual love story between man and dog forms the emotional core, while the filmmakers investigate the predicament facing the hunters, who operate in a shifting industry. With symmetrical framing and muted pastels that evoke a whimsical Wes Anderson aesthetic, and hysterical sequences of scavenging through the forest from the dogs’ point-of-view, The Truffle Hunters delights and charms. JAMES MADDEN

BLACKBIRD 

In a luxurious but isolated beach house, Lily (Susan Sarandon) struggles to get out of bed while telling husband Paul (Sam Neill) not to help. Her family slowly arrives for the holidays: anxious daughter (Kate Winslet) and fact-spouting husband (Rainn Wilson) along with their teenage son (Anson Boon), prickly daughter (Mia Wasikowska) and her on-off girlfriend (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and an old family friend (Lindsay Duncan). The group banter and bicker, but the atmosphere is strained. Eventually it becomes clear: Lily has a terminal illness, and after this weekend she’s going to kill herself. In the hands of director Roger Michell (Notting Hill), this remake of the 2014 Dutch film Silent Heart should be an actor’s showcase, but aside from a few twists, the one-note characters provide little for the cast to chew on. A stressed-out Winslet is fun, and a stoic Neill is always soothing, but for every authentic moment there’s one that’s forced. Even Sarandon’s charm can’t lift this above a basic, efficient tearjerker; nice house though. ANTHONY MORRIS

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

NUTS  | APPLE ARCADE, NINTENDO SWITCH, PC

CHEYENNE & LOLA

 | STAN

 | SBS ON DEMAND

Thirty-three years ago, sitcom ragamuffin Penelope “Punky” Brewster (Soleil Moon Frye) hung up her mismatched sneakers. Now, the pocket-rocket returns – a little older, but equally streetwise – to hand her spunky “Punky Power!” mantle to a brand-new urchin searching for family, kinship and care.

This faithful reboot is set in Punky’s native Chicago, where the former foundling, now a parent herself, raises four precocious kids of her own in an apartment left to her by Henry (her adoptive dad from the show’s 1980s run).

A product of the nostalgia-industrial complex, the series is strewn with familiar faces and Easter-egg references that will pique the interest of long-time fans. While the script’s Twitter-ready quips – best delivered with weary wisdom by newcomer Quinn Copeland – are for younger audiences, the old-school style feels anachronistic at best. From the hammy performances to the laugh track, and even the three-camera set-up itself, Punky Brewster 2.0 runs on forced fun, though it’s not without some life-lessons on poverty, privilege and belonging. AIMEE KNIGHT

Cheyenne (Veerle Baetens, The Broken Circle Breakdown) and Lola (Charlotte Le Bon, The Hundred-Foot Journey) make an odd couple.

Cheyenne is 35, a steely tattoo artist with a buzzcut and a prison record, trying to make a living as a cleaner on a ferry. Lola is 25, stylish and feminine – though not as put-together as she initially seems (doll-like and unsettling, she’s like a French Jodie Comer). When Lola kills her lover’s wife, only to be caught by Cheyenne, their lives are thrown together – and it soon becomes clear that they do have a few things in common. Patriarchy and capitalism oppress them both – this isn’t the romanticised France we so often see, but the real one, rife with unemployment and desperation. But in a refreshing change of tone that’s unlike most TV crime dramas, Cheyenne & Lola doesn’t get bogged down in its own shadowy gloom. It’s more focused on accurately and sensitively depicting the lives of the French working class than overdramatising them. Forget Emily in Paris – let this be your new French streaming obsession. IVANA BREHAS

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’ve got a lot of things to tell you, and I’ve got six months to do it,” says 15-year-old Trinity from Wynyard, Tasmania. In her thoughtful audio diary, recorded for Big hART’s Project O initiative, she captures her experience of foster care bureaucracy, and finds beauty in the backstories of other people’s junk.

Big hART is a Tasmanian arts and media organisation creating social change across the country. Their community engagement program Project O champions gender equality in places where young women are at risk of discrimination and violence. Focused on primary prevention, the grassroots enterprise has already rolled out in Wynyard, Roebourne (WA) and Frankston (Vic), delivering theatre and visual arts events, personal development workshops and, now, a series of radio diaries that invite listeners into the complex and captivating interiority of teen girls.

I first encountered Project O at last year’s Audiocraft Podcast Festival, where Big hART’s Genevieve Dugard, joined by several young women from the program, discussed the role collaboration plays in telling sonic stories.

When Trinity shared a preview from her workin-progress, I knew the final product would be something special. So I’m stoked to hear that her full story will debut on Radio National’s Life Matters this International Women’s Day. A dispatch from Caitlin in Frankston will air 8 March, ABC Melbourne Afternoons, while Alieka’s missive from the Pilbara will premiere on RN’s Awaye!. All three will be available as podcasts thereafter. AK

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PUNKY BREWSTER

TRINITY: BIG HARTED

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In this indie surveillance mystery from Iceland, you play as a researcher in a solitary outpost, documenting the nocturnal squirrel population for an impact report. The game unfolds through procedure, exploration and observation (rather than puzzle-solving) as you set out cameras, review footage and adjust your approach, slowly revealing the path to the squirrels’ hidden nests. Nuts’ environmentally engaged narrative and play style resonate not because they challenge, but because they ask a player to look, really look, and draw conclusions. Befitting its simple gameplay, the art is stunning in a minimalist three-tone palette that shifts dramatically depending on the time of day. On the soundtrack, haunting midi strings underscore the familiar forest’s wildness.

Whether or not a player will enjoy Nuts will be clear quickly; the game’s central mechanics are consistent through its short playtime, and those motivated by challenge might find the pace and simplicity underwhelming. But for anyone looking for a gentle, environmentally conscious mystery – from the Firewatch family tree – Melmoth Forest’s secrets await. JINI MAXWELL

Music Reviews

N

Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

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o-one transformed the last decade of contemporary music like Sophie. The musician, producer and trans icon – who passed away at 34, after a tragic accident in Athens in January – leaves behind an indelible and influential legacy, distinguished by sonic innovations and inversions that forged, as the artist once sang, a ‘Whole New World’.

Originally from Glasgow, Sophie arose from the European club scene and an affiliation with pop maximalists PC Music in the early 2010s. In 2013 and 2014, Sophie released the first of many mind-bending, ecstatic singles – like ‘BIPP’ and ‘HARD’ – which were collated into the exhilarating compilation Product (2015). But Sophie’s impact was also as a peerless producer, working with artists such as Madonna, Vince Staples and Charli XCX. How to describe this music? Catchy but combusting every convention possible. Elastic and imaginative beyond comprehension. An embrace of the artificial that tore apart any notions of a static or solid reality. Even when you thought you heard something identifiable or familiar – pans clattering, kettles squealing, soda fizzing – they were completely Sophie’s invention, not samples but synthesised sounds built entirely from scratch.

Sophie’s only album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018), toyed with pop formulas to mould new forms that looked towards a limitless future. As Sophie said in a filmed interview with Arte TRACKS: “The gap between where we are now and...the places that our imaginations can take us, are so far away from what we are presented with... I can’t get too excited about anything happening now. I’m really excited about what should be happening in the future.” IT

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SOPH

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@itrimboli

BYSTANDER COOL SOUNDS 

Bystander finds Melbourne six-piece Cool Sounds settling into a wistful, alt-folk groove. Anchored by warm, open guitar tones and the wry poetics of lead singer Dainis Lacey, the record is one of unfussy and earnest craftsmanship. At times, however, this unfussed approach can see Bystander slip into a kind of formlessness that the band’s previous record (2019’s More to Enjoy, which contained plenty of playful synth textures and a few forays into falsetto) did well to avoid. Fortunately, this is a trap mostly evaded, and there is much pleasure to be derived from Cool Sounds’ assured touch. From the joyous “la la las” that recur throughout ‘South of France’, to the quietly propulsive, compression-drenched drum-work of ‘Church Bells’, these are songs built on considered and minute detail. This is most evident in the album’s longer cuts, such as ‘Plains’ and ‘Crimson Mask’ – which build up to the kind of soulful, satisfying crescendos possible only through a modest and understated approach. LUKE MCCARTHEY

TYRON SLOWTHAI

LEAFCUTTER JUNE JONES

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The sharp-tongued English rapper Slowthai became a star overnight with his debut album Nothing Great About Britain (2019) – a raging collision of socio-political commentary, poetry and punk. On his follow-up TYRON, he looks inward, recounting the anguish of isolation while reflecting on (and taking responsibility for) his much-criticised behaviour at the NME Awards in 2020. While Nothing was firmly rooted in PiL-style punk, TYRON showcases Slowthai’s more varied influences. The first few songs suggest we’re in for a grime record, especially when one of the genre’s most iconic stars, Skepta, makes an appearance on ‘Cancelled’. But on the more cerebral second half, Slowthai fully embraces post-dubstep and soul, even collaborating with James Blake and Mount Kimbie for the song ‘Feel Away’.

Despite the range of guest features (including A$AP Rocky, Denzel Curry and Dominic Fike), TYRON remains an intimate record, with Slowthai’s conversational flow – which alternates between droll and sarcastic – always at its centre. CYCLONE WEHNER

The second solo LP from former Two Steps on the Water bandleader June Jones is a hallmark of disarming and powerful poetry. Piano ballads present on Diana (2019) have given way to self-produced and intimate symphonies in the vein of FKA Twigs, with Jones deconstructing rave synths into organic compounds. Leafcutter is an affecting marriage of the sacred and the mundane – ‘Holy Water’ finds spirituality in the bathtub, while standout track ‘Therapy’ distils the consumerist desires of the material world: “You say you want to be an item/I say I want one in my hand”. This watertight thematic cohesion expands on ‘Nervous Poetry’, a song that explores the exhaustion and affirmation involved in artistic expression, sung with a level of raw yearning not found elsewhere on the record. Leafcutter is a sensual exploration of the elemental and everyday, with Jones’ shadowy sketches of interpersonal connections remaining just as potent. LACHLAN KANONIUK

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

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THE DEATH OF FRANCIS BACON MAX PORTER

SMOKEHOUSE MELISSA MANNING

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Max Porter – experimental poet-novelist, author of the exquisite Booker‑Prize longlisted Lanny and of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers – is back, with a collection of seven vignettes that explores Francis Bacon’s dying days in a private hospital in Madrid. “It’s an attempt to express my feelings about a painter I have had a long unfashionable fixation with” declares a voice in the text in a feverish imagined interview. It could be read as Porter’s statement of intent for the book, which adopts the same abstract, grisly qualities as the painter’s own work as a way of celebrating the artist without getting in the way of the art. The result is an exciting and empathic new form, think criticism‑meets-memoir-meets-lyric-poem, with bursts of viscera throughout: “A fag butt on the shit sheen of the serpentine” is a favourite line. It’s not an easy read – and would certainly benefit from prior knowledge of the artist, his life and his work – but a worthy one. MELISSA FULTON

A series of linked stories set mostly in southern Tasmania, Melissa Manning’s debut sneaks up on the reader. Opening with a novella about a tree-changed family coming to terms with a mother’s unhappiness, Smokehouse then divulges the origins of various characters, major and minor. And so we learn what brought the breadmaking German Ollie to Australia, plus the life milestones of others living in the same rural area, before the first story gets a heartbreaking conclusion. The vignettes (including ‘Stone’, first published in The Big Issue’s 2018 Fiction Edition) may feel slight compared to the two-part title piece, but they convey the way personal traditions cross generations and continents – and how life never serves up just what we expect. A natural with everyday dialogue, Manning is equally comfortable charting subtle power dynamics within relationships. This makes for plenty of bittersweet moments, as when she explores a love story cut short or the psychological toll of a house fire, but that’s perhaps necessary for a book whose major theme is forging a path towards closure. DOUG

THE IMITATOR REBECCA STARFORD 

The Imitator is the debut novel of Rebecca Starford, co-founder of literary journal Kill Your Darlings, and comes after her 2016 memoir Bad Behaviour.

While her second book is a work of fiction, it’s one that’s grounded in fact, as Starford has based it on a number of real-life historical incidents and people.

It may as well be called The Chameleon, which is protagonist Evelyn Varley’s codename during WWII. The book follows this unassuming young English woman as she becomes a spy for MI5, the British military intelligence unit. Evelyn has to learn how to blend into various communities of fascist, Nazi sympathisers in order to glean crucial information to help the Allies.

Starford messes with narrative linearity, and the book’s non‑chronological timeframe offers another sense of page-turning intrigue. The Imitator is a solidly researched and compelling drama, full of period detail and an engaging heroine who has to navigate conflicting loyalties both in her job and in her personal life. THUY ON

WALLEN

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GS: U M M IN IA L E .E . CT R O V E R S N IN C OA L L C A P S

26 FEB 2021

always read book dedications before launching into the pages, but most of them are fairly bland: usually directed towards the writer’s loved ones. So it gives me pleasure to come across truly inventive thank you notes – some you suspect are probably better than the books themselves. Here’s Shannon Hale in Austenland: “For Colin Firth. You’re a really great guy, but I’m married, so I think we should just be friends.” Joan Rivers in Diary of a Mad Diva: “This book be dedicated to Kanye West, because he’ll never fuckin’ read it.” Agatha Christie in The Secret Adversary: “To all those who lead monotonous lives, in the hope that they may experience at second-hand the delights and dangers of adventure.”

Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life: “My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.” Then there’s poet e.e. cummings, who self-published his own book and dedicated it to the 14 publishing houses who rejected it. Finally – and the author of this is unknown – but as someone with a non-Anglo name, I particularly like this meme quote, “For everyone who has a red line under their name in Microsoft Word.” TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

If someone enjoys making you feel small, the world is guaranteed to be riddled with people who despise that person. Better to be you than them.

If, though, someone critiques you – really gets to the nub of you in a way that makes you feel challenged and maybe even a bit chastened, but also feels a little bit true – take the true bit, and absorb it. Have the grace to recognise it. True constructive criticism isn’t an act of demolition, but an act of creation, of co-construction.

If someone listens to you – if you leave a conversation feeling purged somehow, and understood – the person who listened to you should be appreciated forever. Doesn’t matter if they say the wrong thing at parties and your more charming friends don’t understand why you’re friends with them. Listeners are worth their weight in gold.

If someone brings out the worst in you – and no offence to them – they’re probably not as fun as they could be. Because they could be fun and bring out the best in you. Those people are out there. Find one.

If someone makes you laugh – but you don’t agree with their politics, or you can’t stand their taste in music – seize the laugh. The other bits are negotiable.

People who are incidental in your life are main characters in their own lives. Don’t shout at them in traffic. They might be grieving. Don’t become agitated with someone serving you a coffee. They might be on the end of a 12-hour shift with a boss called Daryl who makes their life a misery. They’re the main character.

You’re just a bit part. Make your part worthwhile. You could change the whole plot.

If someone is trying to control you, chances are you probably have more power than you think, otherwise why would they be trying to control you? Remove the thing that gives them control. Sometimes that thing is you.

Anxious people have a tendency to overthink other people. I know this, for I have dabbled in anxiety on a freelance basis. Chances are, though – and I know this is hard to believe – people probably aren’t thinking about you as much as you might think they are. Sometimes, instead of exploding into a room saying “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry I’m late. You wouldn’t believe it – the bus I was on was HIDEOUSLY slow…” you might say, for instance, “Hi everyone, so sorry I’m late”. Instead of saying “Hello!

You’re looking well. Not that you’re not usually looking well, just that…” you might say, for instance, “Hello. How are you?” Asking people about themselves is a sure-fire way of getting the attention away from yourself, and it has the added bonus of getting other people to talk about themselves. Other people can be interesting, if you stop thinking they’re judging you.

Sometimes though, other people are rude or slow or annoying or do that thing where they pick their fingernails on the train. These people might seem like the worst. But remember: they might be really nice to their grandmas.

Not normal-nice, but drive-half-way-across-the-countryto-buy-Grandma-her-favourite-potplant nice. Presuming people have redeeming features until proven otherwise makes being out in the world a lot more bearable.

Of course, sometimes you have to remove yourself from one area of society completely. I don’t mean move house. I mean swap shifts as often as possible so you’re not with bloody Brian, or look around for a new housemate to replace Dave who never does the dishes.

Other people shouldn’t be in charge of your entire life.

Not even if they are sometimes nice to their grannies.

Public Service Announcement: find people who enrich your life. Enrich the lives of those around you.

Don’t, however, put up with Dave who never does the dishes. Life is too short.

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

e live in a society, which is lovely when people sing in choirs, or do hilarious TikTok videos dancing in formation to the TV news theme, or wait in line in the traffic while a family of ducks slowly crosses the road. It’s less lovely when it comes to things like war, or having to be nice to awful people, or those videos you see showing how much plastic there is in the sea. The thing about society though – whether you love it or you hate it – is that a lot of the time you’re not the only person in control of how you feel. Sometimes other people will help how you feel. Sometimes they will hinder it.

Public Service Announcement: other people are other people. You’re in charge of how much of them you take on.

26 FEB 2021

Seize the Laugh

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

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PHOTOS BY MARK ROPER

Tastes Like Home Luke Hines

Crispy Rosemary Potato Cakes Ingredients Batter 375ml (1½ cups) filtered water 270g (2¼ cups) arrowroot or tapioca flour 100g (1 cup) almond meal 1½ tablespoons sea salt 1½ teaspoons dried rosemary

Method Get started by slicing the potatoes. Using a sharp knife, cut them on a slight angle into 7-10mm-thick ovals. Repeat with the sweet potatoes, trying to make them as equal as possible.

Lower the potato and sweet potato slices into a large saucepan of boiling water and cook for 2-3 minutes. Drain and spread out to cool.

While the potato slices cool, make the batter. Mix the water, arrowroot or tapioca flour, almond meal, salt and rosemary in a bowl to form a smooth batter. Transfer the batter to the fridge and leave for 5-10 minutes, or until the potato slices are cool enough to handle.

Heat the coconut oil in a large, heavy-based frying pan over medium-high heat until a bit of batter sizzles when dropped in. Working in batches, dip each potato slice into the prepared batter to coat well, let the excess drip off, then carefully lower into the oil and fry for 3-4 minutes on each side, or until golden brown all over. Transfer the cooked potato cakes to some paper towel to drain.

Serve the potato cakes straight away with a generous sprinkling of salt and some healthy tomato sauce, if you wish.

TI P

If you’d like to turn these into a healthy source of resistant starch, simply refrigerate or freeze them once you’ve finished frying, then re-fry or bake to reheat later on. To prevent them sticking together, spread them out on a chopping board for at least two hours before you stack them on top of each other in a container to freeze.

Luke says…

S

ome of my earliest childhood memories date back to the late 80s when I was just seven years old. In my household, every Friday without fail was Fish’n’Chips Friday.

We would walk to the fish’n’chip shop as a family and the order was always the same: six pieces of battered flake, $6 worth of chips and 12 potato cakes, giving us two of these golden brown, crispy morsels of deliciousness each.

Now don’t get me wrong, the fish was epic, and the chips were the best they could be, wrapped in newspaper and all. But for me, the potato cakes were the main event. There was something so comforting and nourishing about hot, soft slices of potato, coated in the crispiest batter you’d find, salted to perfection, then smeared into the tomato sauce on the paper the chips came in.

I cherished Fridays because this food represented the family coming together after a week of our own adventures. I was the youngest in my family with three older brothers. My dad travelled a lot for work and Mum was busy running the house, so when Fridays came along it was a chance for us all to connect over an easy meal that no-one had to prepare. It wasn’t just the food either, it was the fact we always got a family-sized block of Cadbury Snack and watched a movie together.

It was the whole package that connected us. Some weeks we even swapped the family movie for a family game of Monopoly.

There is so much nostalgia for me in our Friday night tradition. Now, fast forward 30 years and I still find potato cakes one of the most soul‑nourishing foods. I had to put it in my book, healthified to an extent to reflect my current food ethos, but no less crispy, salty, fatty and delicious.

I hope my recipe brings you a similar sense of nostalgia or allows you to create new memories.

EAT MORE VEGAN BY LUKE HINES IS OUT NOW.

26 FEB 2021

2 large coliban potatoes or other white floury potatoes 2 large sweet potatoes 125ml (½ cup) coconut oil Sea salt Tomato sauce, to serve (optional)

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Serves 4

Puzzles

By Lingo!

by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com BEFORETIMES

CLUES 5 letters Elector Gin’s mixer Male bee Observed Room scheme

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

6 letters Any gnawing animal Brass instrument Head journalist Sensual Trainee nun 7 letters Adapt, switch Marital split 8 letters Creed

I

T

E

N O R C D V

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

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

2

3 1 8 2 1 6 5 9 2 1 4 9 7 6

5 1 2 6 1 8 7 3 6 2 3 4 8

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD DOWN 1 Cacti 2 Southerly buster 3 Extort 4 Necktie 5 Weather 6 Radiance 7 Tropical cyclone 8 Paperless 13 Headcount 15 Fistulae 17 Acrobat 18 Laptops 20 Unison 23 Event

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 1 Cistern 5 Wiretap 9 Crustacea 10 Droop 11 Inherit 12 Heavier 13 Herd 14 Depreciate 16 Atypically 19 Aces 21 Counter 22 Panache 24 Until 25 Bookstore 26 Torment 27 Sunbelt

Word Builder

This year has brought a lot of COVID-related terms into our daily vocabulary. Some are brand new (like COVID), and others are old words we’ve blown the dust off and put back to work. One word that’s been given a new lease on life is beforetimes, which first showed up in the middle of the 1400s. Talking about the beforetimes has become common because we are all referring to the same before – rarely does an event radically alter everyone’s lives so quickly and profoundly. If you want to mix things up you can use aforetimes and foretimes. The Oxford English Dictionary lists beforetimes as archaic, but that was in, well, the beforetimes.

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Vitamin C 2 China 3 Rebecca Breeds 4 Burundi 5 Hobart 6 D) de Givenchy 7 1889, to honour Margherita of Savoy, Italy’s Queen consort 8 Mark Twain 9 MTR 10 A word or phrase resulting from mishearing words, especially song lyrics 11 1 December 12 Greg Chappell 13 Casey Donovan 14 False – there’s 11, or nine in the fancy varieties 15 He had them made into frisbee-type discs 16 A cemetery 17 40 18 Walked 100 laps of his garden 19 A) Painting 20 The left

Crossword

by Steve Knight

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

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Quick Clues ACROSS

9

1 Tank for holding water (7) 5 Listening device used in surveillance (7) 9 Shellfish (9) 10 Sag (5) 11 Be bequeathed (7) 12 More weighty (7) 13 Group (4) 14 Reduce in value (10) 16 Unusually (10) 19 Experts (4) 21 Parry (7) 22 Flamboyance (7) 24 Pending (5) 25 Shop specialising in literature (9) 26 Suffering (7) 27 Southern US region (7)

10

11

12

13

14 15

16

17

18

DOWN

19

1 Desert plants (5) 2 Cooling summer wind in NSW and

20 21

22

Victoria (9,6)

23

3 Obtain by unfair means (6) 4 Clothing item usually worn with a suit (7) 5 & 23dn Description of a meteorological

occurrence (7)

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27

Cryptic Clues

5 7 6 4 9 1 3 2 8

WORD BUILDER

26 FEB 2021

9 1 3 2 8 5 4 7 6

after car crash (7)

5 Voter Tonic Drone Noted Decor 6 Rodent Cornet Editor Erotic Novice 7 Convert Divorce 8 Doctrine 9 Contrived

18 See buddy building computers (7) 20 Salary cap in rugby gets agreement (6) 23 See 5dn

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8 2 4 6 3 7 1 9 5

content? (9)

13 Hunt around, crack a code for group tally (9) 15 A flute is playing organ passages (8) 17 Jumper leads for oversized battery all tangled

1 9 5 3 4 2 6 8 7

‘Hurricane’ (8,7)

8 Press plea for renegotiation of online-only

Puzzle by websudoku.com

to isolate and desert plants (5)

2 Her trusty blouse is cooler when refashioned (9,6) 3 Bleed from old court injury? (6) 4 Accessory to suit computer close to Spooner (7) 5 & 23dn Never wet, heat wave, 2dn or 7dn? (7,5) 6 Joy exposes Brad’s fiancée (8) 7 Eric Clapton coy about Dylan’s third remix for

SUDOKU

3 8 7 5 6 9 2 1 4

ground (9) 26 Harry and Meghan started to rent houses (7) 27 Star band in southern US states (7)

1 Initially through COVID, autoworkers cautioned

4 6 2 1 7 8 9 5 3

1 Charlie (one back) can feature (7) 5 Breaking wasp wings I tear off bug (7) 9 Acute scar disguised crabs (9) 10 Wilt died poor in retirement (5) 11 Come in to entertain her Italian residents (7) 12 Hear about contest being more serious (7) 13 Drove pick-up picked up? (4) 14 Get cheap date drinking – recipe for disaster (10) 16 Oddly, what’s the top mark? (10) 19 50 per cent of couples applied to access guns (4) 21 Rebuff bench top (7) 22 Style of pain I ignored, then more pain (7) 24 Before turn, atrial fibrillation? (5) 25 Borders once banned from opening, so retook

DOWN

7 4 9 8 1 3 5 6 2

ACROSS

Solutions 6 5 1 7 2 4 8 3 9

26

rather than via hard copy (9)

13 Census (9) 15 Abnormal passages between organs (8) 17 Circus performer (7) 18 Personal computers (7) 20 Accord (6) 23 See 5dn

2 3 8 9 5 6 7 4 1

24

6 Brilliance (8) 7 Type of hurricane (8,7) 8 Storage of information electronically,

Click 1966

John Cale, Edie Sedgwick

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

T

he year is 1966, the scene The Factory, Andy Warhol’s workshop. He is getting an unknown band, The Velvet Underground, to play music there, where he also makes underground films. John Cale, looking more vampiric than seems possible, is in the band. Edie Sedgwick, looking more glamorous than seems possible, is in the films.

Warhol met Sedgwick at the birthday party of playwright Tennessee Williams in 1965. Her leg was in a cast – injured when she crashed her father’s Porsche.

She was the star he’d been looking for – or superstar – a word he arguably coined for her. It was the word used by Merv Griffin on his talk show when he had Sedgwick and Warhol as guests. The clip (on YouTube) is excruciating: Andy chews gum and won’t talk; Edie is all nerves and giggles, caught in the crossfire as the host tries to get Andy to speak. Yet she is captivating: her big eyes dominate proceedings, her voice is smooth and rich, her charisma palpable.

But all is not well. One brother had died by his own hand in 1964 while in a psychiatric hospital, another likewise on New Year’s Eve 1965. Sedgwick had already

spent time in institutions, once after discovering her distant, abusive father in flagrante with another woman.

Sedgwick was anorexic and bulimic.

Her family was very wealthy. One forebear had arrived in America with the Pilgrims, another co-signed the US Declaration of Independence. As Cale, the struggling musician and son of a Welsh coal miner, put it: “Edie Sedgwick would take us all out and pay the bill.”

She and Warhol fell out. She moved into the Chelsea Hotel, where she set her apartment on fire, nodding off after shooting up, dropping her cigarette. Bob Dylan too was in the Chelsea and is supposed to have had an affair with her, never confirmed, but she did date his buddy, painter and (alleged) singer Bob Neuwirth. Patti Smith wrote in a poem that Sedgwick was the “real heroine” of Dylan’s 1966 Blonde on Blonde.

The late 60s saw Sedgwick accelerate her drug use and end up in another psychiatric hospital, where she met her husband. In November 1971, she went to a party, took barbiturates, drank alcohol, went home and died in her sleep, aged 28. John Cale still walks the earth, plying his trade.

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17 APR 2020