Miscellaneous - Notes from Pig City

The pop art legend hiding in the hinterlands

Miscellaneous / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

In the lush subtropical hinterlands behind Noosa Heads, 90 minutes north of Brisbane, a short dirt road takes you to the home of one of the pre-eminent artists of the last century.

In a large, bright studio, down a short incline from the home he shares with daughter Zoe and her partner, Peter Phillips – who made his name in the early 60s in the vanguard of British pop artists along with Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and David Hockney – continues to paint.

Along with large, more abstract recent works and some of his earliest sketches, a few of his most famous pieces are here, including the giant Art-O-Matic Riding High (another painting from the same series, Art-O-Matic Loop-Di-Loop, was used as the cover of a 1984 album by the Cars called Heartbeat City).

But Phillips left behind the style which made him famous, and which he helped pioneer, a long time ago. “I definitely don’t favour the early work,” he says. “I am excited about some of the newest pieces, possibly because it is what interests me most at the moment.”

Recently, Phillips, who is celebrating his 80th birthday, opened his studio to the public as part of the Noosa Food and Wine Festival.… Read more..

The pop art legend hiding in the hinterlands Read More »

David McCormack on being Bandit, Bluey’s dad

Miscellaneous, Music / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

As the frontman for Brisbane band Custard, David McCormack was an anomaly in the ultra-serious early-90s world of indie-rock. In an ocean of angst, he was a goofball: whimsical, absurd, childlike and funny.

He can still be all of those things. But McCormack, who turned 50 last year, has two young daughters now, and around a successful soundtrack career as well as occasional reformations of his old band – now more of a hobby – he lives the dad life.

He’s also living it out in cartoon form: McCormack is the voice of Bandit, the dad dog in the ABC Kids animated short series Bluey, which chronicles the adventures of an irrepressible six-year-old blue heeler, her younger sister, Bingo, and her mum, Chilli.

Since premiering last October, Bluey has been a runaway success – with over 75 million plays, according to the ABC, it’s the most-watched show on ABC iView. A series of three Bluey books will be out in time for Christmas, and on Thursday it was announced that Bluey has been renewed for a second season. And it’s brought McCormack a very different kind of new-found fame.

Bluey is aimed at five- to seven-year-olds: that age when kids, like dogs, just want to play all day.… Read more..

David McCormack on being Bandit, Bluey’s dad Read More »

21 July 1969: The day that stopped the clock in Vietnam

Miscellaneous, Music / May 21, 2019 / 6 minutes of reading

Bill Wilcox’s watch stopped dead at 2.20pm on 21 July 1969 and never restarted. A field engineer in 1 Squadron in the Royal Australian Engineers (RAE) in the Australian army, he’d been up in the Long Hai hills in south-eastern Vietnam for about 10 days. He and his mates were due for a break.

It had been dirty work, even by wartime standards: dropping into active tunnel systems used by the Viet Cong, at risk of underground combat or possible asphyxiation and mine demolitions.

The irony was the engineers were mostly destroying their own mines, laid two years earlier. Nearly 23,000 US M16 “jumping jack” mines had been buried in a barrier aimed at isolating their enemy combatants in the jungle.

But the field hadn’t been properly secured. At enormous risk to themselves, with many soldiers lost, the North Vietnamese army learned to excavate and redeploy the mines against Australian forces.

Wilcox and the rest of 1 Squadron were heading back to base in a helicopter when they received the news that members of the 6th Battalion, of the Royal Australian Regiment, had strayed into a minefield in the “light green”, with one killed and many more wounded.

The “light green” was an area on the map that had been partially cleared – where defoliants including Agent Orange were used to strip the forest canopy of cover and where mines were likely to have been buried.… Read more..

21 July 1969: The day that stopped the clock in Vietnam Read More »

Kat Roma Greer: Taking art to the streets

Miscellaneous / May 21, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

Musician Frank Zappa once said that the most important thing in art is the frame, for without it you can’t tell where the art stops and the real world begins. Extending that logic, the art gallery itself is a frame where art is displayed, bought, sold – and for many, effectively sealed off.

Kat Roma Greer (MA(Res) ’14 MA ’14), founder of the travelling art festival Micro Galleries, aimed to break art out of its frames and take it to the streets. Starting from the chaotic precincts of her base in Hong Kong in 2013, her aim was for “people to stumble over it. That’s when they begin to shift their perceptions and believe they should have access to art as well,” she says.

Since then, Micro Galleries has exhibited everywhere from Kathmandu to Cape Town, using local and international artists to blur the line between street art and ﬁne art and bring a sense of wonder to unexpected, often disused and neglected spaces. Along the way, she’s touched thousands of people who may otherwise never set foot inside a gallery.

One of them was Robbie, a street kid from Denpasar in Bali. In exchange for meals, Robbie cannily worked his way into the Micro Galleries crew, starting by stirring glue and minding the equipment, which he became obsessed with.… Read more..

Kat Roma Greer: Taking art to the streets Read More »

Preserving the past

Miscellaneous / May 21, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

A 100-year-old chocolate bar may not sound like the tastiest treat in the world. But imagine receiving it in the trenches of World War 1.

Bill Thompson, museum curator at the Ballina RSL sub-branch in northern New South Wales, says the chocolate was a Christmas present to soldiers – a small token of luxury during a time of international trauma, courtesy of the Australian War Contingent Association in London.

Now, the chocolate lives in the museum, donated by Dorothy Brumley. The recipient had been her father, Henry Wharton-Braithwaite, when he was in France in 1915, after he had served at Gallipoli.

“It’s still in the tin, [and] it’s in excellent condition – except the chocolate, of course. It looks bloody awful!” Thompson says.

Almost all Australians are familiar, at least by name, with the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and its treasures of memorabilia. But fewer know that their local RSLs often feature their own exhibits, sometimes of thousands of items.

These pieces have the power to touch not only those with personal associations and memories of wartime, but younger generations who have grown up without any kind of equivalent experience.

“We get a lot of visitors from schools, and they all arrive with a great list of questions, and they’re usually more orientated with some of the later conflicts,” Thompson goes on.… Read more..

Preserving the past Read More »

Andrew McGahan 1966-2019

Miscellaneous, Qld Politics / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

If you grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s, Praise, the debut novel by Andrew McGahan, was to the city’s literature what the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded was to music. Appearing in 1992, when it won the Vogel award for best unpublished manuscript, it captured the town’s torpor and the ambivalence of its inhabitants better than any book since David Malouf’s Johnno.

But whereas Malouf luxuriated in detailed poetic descriptions and may have been the first writer to describe Brisbane as a “big country town” (and Johnno moved at about the same pace), Praise was full of pent-up energy. A classic of Australian dirty realism, it’s a novel in which not a lot happens – but like Brisbane itself, all the action is happening beneath the banal facade, fuelled by frustration and repressed rage.

“Look at this city,” complains one of its minor characters, on holiday from a bigger, brighter world. “There’s nothing happening. There’s no one on the streets. How can you stand it?” Gordon (whose very name is used as a metaphor for the town’s plainness) replies that things are happening: “You just have to look a little harder. At least no one bothers you. There’s worse places than Brisbane.”… Read more..

Andrew McGahan 1966-2019 Read More »