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Call the art police: the Wynner is a fraud

The proof is in the painting. It has been 'revealed' that this year's winner of the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting is a fraud, a fake, a phoney, a copycat, and worst of all, unoriginal. Yep, it's true. Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos by Sam Leach is almost an exact replica of a work painted by a dead European dude (while he was alive, presumably). Specifically, Adam Pynacker's Boatmen Moored on the Shore of an Italian Lake, circa 1660.

Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 21-04-2010, 1 user comment

A slippery reality

Driving out to remote communities is always an adventurous experience, particularly after a good dose of rain. Last week was no exception as a friend, her sister and I got into a hired 4WD ute and raced out to Ampilatwatja, a 320km trip up the Sandover Highway from Mparntwe/Alice Springs. Bad music; bogs, puddles, mud flying everywhere; slipping and sliding across the red sand – the trip had it all.

We drove out with a video camera to film events taking place the following day. One was a meeting that was happening in the community, the other was evidence that the Barkly Shire Council had dumped 3000 litres of raw sewage in the tip. Sewage that was still, almost a week later, sitting there exposed to the sun and the rain. Sitting there for the dogs to play and roll around in. Si

Written by Scott Foyster on 21-04-2010, 3 user comments

World sanitation

The UN News Service reported last week that there are more mobile phones in India than there are toilets – 545 million of them, enough for 45% of the population in a country where over half the population can’t afford a loo.

It reminded me of a story on Foreign Correspondent I watched back in 2006. It also reminded me how amazed I was by the sheer enormity of the impact that poor sanitation was having on the people of India.

In a country of one billion people 80% don’t have a toilet and most in cities and towns aren’t connected to a sewage system anyway. That’s eight hundred million people going in the open in rivers, under bridges, anywhere they might hope to get some privacy...Each year 40,000 children under the age of five die from diarrhoea alone.

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Written by Louise Pine on 20-04-2010, 5 user comments

Lock up your borders

Racist business cardOne apparently innocuous morning two weeks ago – 6 April, I believe – I received in my letterbox what at first glance seemed to be a small, harmless piece of white paper. Closer inspection revealed the sinister truth.

It appears to be striving towards business card presentation but in reality falls into the category of cut up paper. The meagre funding behind the xenophobic propaganda is perhaps one of the few positives to come from this experience. (Though I did also derive amusement from the graph in the bottom right corner that conveniently illustrates the devastating problem without having to take the trouble to spell out more confusing statistics.) ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 20-04-2010, 11 user comments

Review – Kill Your Darlings |
Issue One

Kill Your DarlingsKill Your Darlings has a lot to live up to. In its inaugural issue its editor, Affirm Press’ Rebecca Starford, says the journal’s mission is to ‘reinvigorate and re-energise’ Australia’s literary scene. She quotes editor Rob Spillman as saying that most journals are ‘good for you, but they taste awful’. KYD intends to redress this – to shake up the medium and ‘publish literature that bites back’. A big, bold statement.

Written by Irma Gold on 19-04-2010, 2 user comments

Mourning

It is 2004, going on to 2005. I’m thinking about ‘identity’, and thinking about the person who in 2000 wrote:

To me, sexuality has been so important for my journey to enlightenment. That’s not to assume that enlightenment is an end thing, it’s a continual process. It’s a continual reassertion of the self, or reawakening of the self, and I believe it has a lot to do for me with sexuality. When your body becomes like an enemy, if you distrust or dislike your body, which often happens to people with disabilities, you often lose your sense of self. You have to reclaim your body. Sexuality is so important for this. It’s like a reawakening for your self, and pleasuring your body can be part of that reclamation.

She was confident, self-assured and sexually active. ... read more

Written by Samantha Hodgkins on 19-04-2010, 3 user comments

La Mama Poetica – Monday 19 April

La Mama Poetica

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Written by Maxine Clarke on 19-04-2010, No comments

Collapsing societies

So I finally got around to reading Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Clearly I'm way behind the times, but the book is eight hundred pages long. Anyway, the central thesis of the book is that environmental factors, and the way people respond to them, can play a major role in the collapse of societies. The suggestion is not that environmental issues cause all societal collapses, but that if enough environmental pressure is placed on a society, if that pressure is not relieved or responded to in an appropriate way, societies can fail – and even cease to exist. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 19-04-2010, No comments

Cockatoo Island: when governments get it right

Last Thursday I went camping here, on Cockatoo Island, the largest island on Sydney Harbour:
Cockatoo IslandCockatoo Island has been a prison and a shipyard since European colonisation – and now it’s an urban park, with campsite. I’ve been to Cockatoo Island three times since 2008 and each time has been extraordinary: first for the Sydney Biennale, then for Nick Cave’s 2009 music extravaganza ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and again last week.

As I walked around the island last Thursday, through its ruined warehouses and abandoned dockyards, past rusted machinery and sandstone cliffs overlooking the harbour, I thought: some government has got it right. As it turns out, it was the federal government of 2001, which put the island in the care of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust. It got it right because it left the island alone, pretty much, and gave it to the people. Despite its convict past and dereliction Cockatoo Island feels alive, haunted perhaps but not devastated. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 16-04-2010, 6 user comments

Whiteout

When I first moved to Darwin, the old slogan ‘You’re on Aboriginal Land’ took on a meaning that was absent when I lived in Melbourne. In Melbourne, it was more of a theoretical statement, an acknowledgement of history.

As I sit on my veranda in Parap, an inner suburb of Darwin, the balmy night caresses me, the sweet smell of Frangipani and Jasmine lace the air. A mob of Aboriginal people walk past, talking in language; they speak quickly, the words intonated and modulated in a fashion I’m not used to.

The next morning, as I ride my rickshaw to the market with my daughter, there’s over one hundred Aboriginal people sitting in a long line on the footpath. They smile and wave as I ride past.

Once, as I was riding along the Vesteys beach bike path, I saw an Aboriginal man wading waist deep through the water, spear high in his hand, poised to throw. It was a timeless moment in a contemporary setting. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 16-04-2010, 6 user comments

The dreams of children

I usually write my blog sitting at my desk in my study. This time I’m sitting on a rickety bed in a miserable motel in Cairns, watching Deadwood, a hard-drinkin’ cable-TV epic about the legendary Dakota frontier town where men were men, and women took their clothes off. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, where men were men and had deep and complicated interior lives and women took their clothes off. Deadwood brought to mind, perhaps unexpectedly one might think, Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Time of Cultural Devastation, a book I have recently read, which much occupied my thought, that deals with a real event that took place about twenty years before the fictional ones in Deadwood, in the neighbouring state of Montana. The event that Lear’s book concerns itself with is a dream. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 15-04-2010, 18 user comments

Meanland extract – The Google Reader will creep up and steal all your spare reading/writing time in the blink of an eye

Incredibly (given how much I time I devote to talking about it), I am a recent convert to the whole Google Reader thing (three weeks and counting), and would possibly have never stumbled upon the technology if a fellow blogger had not made a seemingly innocent remark (thank you, Joshua Mostafa). The Google Reader fetish means my productivity has taken a nosedive. As can yours.

The Google Reader (aka feed aggregator, RSS reader), or any RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeder acts as a central site to bring in all the internet content you as an individual are interested in – user-determined content, or your own newspaper, if you will.

It’s a web-based reader application that helps you keep track all of the content continually being updated on the Internet, whether the content is taken from blogs, newspapers, journals, podcasts or other audio and video content. The Reader presents all of this information in a single location in a standardised format. This means the onus is no longer on us, as readers, to regularly visit all of these sites, which can be a long-drawn-out process. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 15-04-2010, 1 user comment

Off to see the wizard

It’s wonderful to see the diversity of good folk involved in the profession of writing, editing, publishing and scriptwriting. I am impressed by the dedication and passion of individuals who publish, teach, speak, blog, run workshops, assess, praise and damn – and their enthusiasm for writing and writers, both established and emerging.

What strikes me is the fine line between amateur and professional when it comes to the industry of writing and how much that razor’s edge is defined by the estimation and judgement of the mainstream publishing industry.

I was lucky enough to have a ticket to ‘In conversation with Nick Cave’ at the Arts Centre in April, 2008. Nick talked about the business of writing as his work – how these days he goes into his office and works at the creative art of writing. I thought I understood what he was getting at, attempting to demystify the process and illumine the hard-work aspect, but remember thinking – that’s all very well once your work has been published or received acknowledgement as valid and worthy. Until such time, going into your office and spending hours of unpublished, unacknowledged work is a very different proposition and, in my experience, seen in a very different light, that is: not as work at all. Nick also attempted to debunk the idea of the Muse and at the same time declared his own Muse to be a real bitch, so I guess it’s not all clear for him either. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 14-04-2010, 15 user comments

The bloggers are out tonight

It was uni summer holidays when Y2K was supposedly going to hit. I was working full-time in the kitchen of a major New South Wales hospital. Hospital electricians were powering up generators in case the life support and other medical equipment went berserk, nurses filled up baths and sinks with water and reassured terrified patients, and down in the kitchen we had ordered enough food to plate cold meals for the next week in the absence of working ovens – and rostered on an extra ten staff for the following day in case the industrial dishwashers stopped working.

Despite being an avid blogger, to me the hysteria being generated by ‘media commentators’ regarding the e-book’s ambitious plans to change our reading habits forever is the literary equivalent of the Y2K madness. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 14-04-2010, 9 user comments

Mucking up at Muckaty

Black clouds burst from the sky and rain hammered down on Darwin all that morning. The trees were luminescent and the cool of the rain had washed away the hot night. By late morning the clouds and rain had been sucked back into higher altitudes to be replaced by stifling heat and blazing sun.

I placed my daughter into my rickshaw and peddled off, sweat soaking my Jabiluka singlet in no time. By the time I got to Parliament House I was soaked.

A mobile shelter had been set up, chairs aligned in a row as if a concert was about to begin, to provide shade. Most people were clustered around the edge of the car park where a cool breeze randomly offered relief from the heat and humidity.

Close to one hundred people were gathered outside Parliament House in Darwin this April afternoon – traditional owners from Muckaty Station, activists from Alice Springs and Darwin, a woman who’d helped defeat the waste dump proposal in South Australia, unionists, two politicians and concerned citizens. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 14-04-2010, 6 user comments