Catherine Truman’s SALA Opening Address

Posted on 2 August 2016 by admin

One of the biggest pleasures of the SALA festival is hearing the keynote address from the featured artist.

Last year it was Giles Bettison on the importance of art. This year, Catherine Truman spoke to a packed house about the joys of ‘tadpoling’, and how important a sense of adventure and a strong work ethic are as an artist – or, indeed, a scientist.

Catherine’s very kindly shared her speech with us here. We agree with her – viva SALA! And, may we add, viva Catherine Truman!

Tadpoling at the Bench

Firstly, I to would like to acknowledge that we meet on Kaurna land and pay respect to their spiritual relationship with this country past, present and future.

Thanks everyone for being here tonight, especially my dear friends, family and colleagues who’ve travelled from far away places to share in the celebrations.

It is such an honour to address you tonight as the featured SALA artist for 2016 but this wonderful achievement has only been possible through the support, love and inspiration from a lot of other people and so firstly a few personal thank yous.

And then I’d like to tell you a little story – a story about tadpoling. In fact I’ve titled my address to you tonight Tadpoling at the Bench.

Catherine Truman addresses the crowds at SALA opening night

Thanks to the SALA committee and to Penny and Kate for their incredible commitment to this ever-growing phenomenon that is SALA and a nod to Paul Greenaway, the instigator, for his vision. To Arts South Australia and Wakefield Press for their support of the SALA publication especially Michael Bollen, Margot Lloyd and Clinton Ellicott. To Melinda Rackham for her intelligent, insightful, writing and to both Melinda and André Lawrence, our mentee on the project, for their commitment to getting it thoroughly right. And to Rachel Harris, our designer, for the magic she wove to bring together Melinda’s fine words and the many, many luscious images by Grant Hancock into such a magnificent book. We are all really proud of it. I hope you all enjoy it.

I never dreamed that having a book written about you would be quite so intense, quite so wonderful. We had to proof it a few weeks ago, and I must admit I felt very emotional holding the pages in my hands for the first time. I became so absorbed, I forgot I was meant to be proofing and by the end I was so excited I really wanted to rush back to the studio and make some more work. So that’s a good sign eh?

A special thanks to my Gray Street family, Jess Dare and the gang for keeping me afloat through thick and thin and to my lifelong partner Sue Lorraine for her patience, sage advice and rock solid love.

And to the people at the coalface of Arts South Australia and the Australia Council, for your professional support and for believing in my practice.

The Art Gallery of South Australia has held such an important place in my growth as an artist. I do feel that it is embedded in my DNA. It is deeply satisfying to present such a large body of work in this gallery. It’s a great honour. Thanks Nick Mitzevich and Lisa Slade for their chutzpah and commitment to showing live and kicking practising South Australian Artists and Rebecca Evans the curator of European and Australian decorative arts. My exhibition was her first major project in her new position at the Art Gallery of South Australia and she hit the ground running with grace and elegance and it has been a pleasure to work with her. Thanks to all of the install and registry staff too, especially Jess and the crew who had to document well over 300 objects for the show!

So you can see I haven’t sustained my long career without the support of many others and I thank them from my heart.

Now to my tadpoling story and I promise it’s short and sweet.

I want to tell you about an image that’s in the book being launched tonight.

When I was seven my dad took a picture of me tadpoling in National Park. In this picture – a 35 mm Kodak slide, the kind with the cardboard mount – I seem completely unaware of either the camera or my dad for that matter. There I am standing in the creek, brown Bermuda shorts, scrawny little legs covered in mud with a blue plastic strainer in my hand, bent over, absolutely focussed on the water, poised, ready to pounce on some poor unsuspecting taddy. Mum’s shade-house was forever croaking as I was growing up. Every time I look at that photo I relive those moments of complete bliss, of absorption, and curiosity, the thrill of discovery and the deep pleasure of pursuit. And I’m really pleased that forty-three years later this picture appears in the beginning pages of the book because it still resonates on many levels.

When I create work I touch base with tadpoling. Hunting and gathering is integral with my daily practice of making art. It’s full of challenging and difficult and delicious experiences of absolute absorption, deep focus and pursuit. Connecting with the wider world – observing, listening, learning, staying open, interacting, engaging and exchanging – is critical to being an artist. It provides context and meaning. I actively seek out contact with others, mostly scientists because they like to go tadpoling too, and I like to think the world is a better place because of the creative exchanges we have. I’ve been artist in residence in the School of Medicine and the biomedical laboratories of Flinders University for several years now and learnt firsthand that there are rich parallels between art and science. Full-time practise in either field is mostly a day-to-day slog and some days, there is nothing tangible to show for it. But we both agree, it’s the slog that’s compelling and fruitful and wonderful. Now I can better understand and embrace the chaos and rhythms embedded in my day-to-day creative processes. This time next year the JamFactory will be presenting a solo exhibition of my art/science project works.

The wonderful South Australian painter Deidre But-Husaim put up a post on Facebook recently, a quote by Chuck Close. He said:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

I couldn’t have said it any better. And I learnt that through tadpoling at the bench and working with scientists.

This is wise advice, but it seems that the nitty gritty part of creative practise is not always understood by the consumers of art or the powers that be – those powers that have just been narrowly re-elected for example. Enough said. It is usually romanticised and separated from real life. So it is vital we put voice to the day-to-day creative processes of full-time practice and take advantage of SALA to give us that important voice

In rounding this up, when I think about my dad sneaking up on me to take that photo of me blissfully tadpoling in that muddy creek in National park, I feel incredibly moved that he recognised the substance of the moment and that he cared enough to record it for posterity.

I hope you all get to do a little tadpoling yourselves this SALA.

Please visit my show upstairs and Melinda and I are now going to be happily signing books in the foyer, please come up and say hello!

Thank you and viva SALA!

Catherine Truman: Touching distance

Deb Kandelaars launching Coast to Coast

Posted on 28 July 2016 by admin

Coast to Coast is the true story of one family’s incredible undertaking: to walk across India in order to help children living in the poorest parts of the world. We’re all in awe of the Petruccos for their generosity, tenacity and good humour. In her speech at the launch, Deb Kandelaars explained her own history with this incredible family …

We first met the Petruccos on the South Coast about 10 years’ ago now. It turned out that both our families had made a sea change from the city at around the same time and our kids were at the same school. We immediately became good friends. The Petruccos are a very warm and welcoming family. Our kids played together, and for Bec and I, our husbands were often away with work so we were great company for each other. Wednesday taco night became an institution.

Our friendship was cemented on one of these evenings when a horrible thing happened: a very pregnant Bec slipped and slid face-first down our long staircase, landing chin first at the bottom. She was taken by ambulance to South Coast Hospital and then by chopper to Flinders. It was a very dramatic and worrying night. Nick was on his way home from interstate, and the kids stayed at our place watching ‘The Simpsons’. I also remember uncharacteristically letting them have Coke at McDonalds at 10 o’clock at night. I think we were all a bit traumatised! Thankfully all was okay with Bec…and Bec and baby Gus both survived to tell the tale, but that terribly stressful night has become the stuff of legends – a kind of marker in our friendship.

We all eventually left the South Coast – Nick and Bec and family to Melbourne, Malaysia, Adelaide and Melbourne again…and us back to Adelaide. It was during a family trip to visit the Petruccos in Melbourne a few years’ ago that Nick brought up the idea of walking across India and raising money for Childfund. My first response was ‘Bloody hell, really?’ It was no surprise to me that Nick and Bec were looking to raise money for children in India. They’d previously spent time there, and had supported an orphanage for some time. Both of them had travelled and worked in India and they had a heartfelt connection with the place and the people. But to pack up the kids and actually walk across India – it rattled my neat city sensibility of life being predictable and in its place. That night we chatted about the plan and made a few jokes about Nick dressing in Gandhi-like white flowing apparel and walking with a large stick across India.

But when Nick has a dream – Nick really has a dream! And his patient, enthusiastic and seemingly tireless partner, Bec, was by his side. Before long they were organising a fundraising day in Melbourne and they pulled together an amazing range of inspirational speakers who donated their time… and they managed to sell hundreds of tickets, raising thousands of dollars for their cause. It really was a wonderful, inspiring day, and they were a little closer to realising Nick’s dream.

A few years’ ago, Nick and Bec set off with their family on a trip up the east coast of Australia. It was precious time out for all of them from work and school, and a chance to travel together. They bought a camper trailer and lived the dream for a few months. Just before they set off on their India trek, the beloved camper trailer was sold to help finance the journey.

So they set off to India with their kids… and their wonderfully supportive extended family and friends joined them along the way. I should mention that at this point in time, I was at home in Adelaide, in the comfort of our home…but to be fair, I did support them by posting ‘go team’ ‘yay, good on you’ ‘keep going’ messages.

As they travelled, Nick made regular blog posts about their journey – and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t always joyful. Like any good journey story, it contained magnificent highs and desperate lows, overcoming adversity and, finally, after a long and arduous journey, reaching their goal. The success of any one walking day was subject to the weather, extreme heat, rain, energy levels, and just generally trying to look after everyone’s needs. Sometimes they walked along incredibly busy roads with little room to spare; other times they were in peaceful rural settings stopping at a roadside coffee tent, and mingling with the locals.

I remember one of Nick’s stories about a particularly horrendous case of food poisoning where he was hallucinating and the hotel room was spinning. I think at this point, Nick was wondering what on earth he’d gotten them all into. Yet at other times, they found themselves surrounded by a throng of happy Indian children, as they handed over supplies and bikes for their school.

When the journey was over and Nick had turned his blogs into a manuscript, he asked me to read it for him. From the outset, I was right there on that journey with them in India. The locations are fascinating; the people are heart-warming. Within the walking group, there was a real sense of team work, unity and love. If the kids got tired, they could jump in the support car; if there was a medical dilemma, Bec (aka Nurse Ratchett) came to the rescue; Nick’s mum Jen was very supportive with the children and general morale; and Nick’s stepdad Nick (yes, you’re right, there are way too many Nicks in that sentence!) helped bolster the team’s spirits when they needed a lift. Nick’s sister, Kate, and her children, flew in to do part of the walk, and the cousins had a great time together on their family adventure. As I said, there were highs and there were lows – but all in all they achieved what they’d set out to do – to walk across India and raise money for children in need.

So congratulations to all of you who made the walk, and played your part in this special story. And particular congratulations to Nick for documenting it and bringing the story to life. I know this is something you’ve wanted to do for a long time and I’m really proud of you. And a special mention to Bec because she’s played an integral role in this journey and this book; and she is always there in the wings, ever-enthusiastic, loving, organised and supportive.

I urge you to buy a copy of Coast to Coast, not only because funds raised from the sale of the book will go to children in need; but also because it’s a wonderful story. Whether you take the journey via your armchair or perhaps it inspires you to do more, it’s a great read about an ordinary family doing something quite extraordinary.

Stephen Orr speaks to the Friends of the Barr Smith Library

Posted on 5 July 2016 by admin

In 2016 the Friends of the Barr Smith Library have teamed up with Wakefield Press to present a series of talks by Wakefield Press authors. On 21 April, renowned novelist Stephen Orr entertained the masses (despite attesting that he prefers to ‘terrify’) with an overview of his writing career, beginning with this fitting reflection on the Barr Smith itself.

You can listen to Stephen’s speech in its entirety here thanks to Radio Adelaide.

I first came to the Barr Smith twenty years ago. Sat in a corner, somewhere. Admired the spray-on concrete ceiling, the flickering lights, the books about mycology. Eventually, I sharpened my pencil and began. What might’ve been a career; although it’s mostly felt like a hobby; what might’ve been the Great Australian novel; although the remaindered fragments of the 2000 Vogel-runner-up, Attempts to Draw Jesus, are scattered far and wide. The pages yellow; the glue fails; the spine cracks. You find a copy (inscribed) at the Port Dock market. $3.00, or negotiable.

Point being. I was off and running. On a career that’s had more downs than ups, lows than highs, disappointments than vindications. Henry Lawson went through something similar. His advice to Australian writers was to ‘study elementary anatomy, especially as it applies to the cranium, and then shoot yourself carefully with the aid of a looking glass.’ Ninety years later, George Johnston felt the same way. Living on the Greek island of Hydra in 1958, he explained his and Charmaine Clift’s combined income of 125 pounds ‘comes from five books in circulation or accepted, two foreign translations, one sale of foreign serial rights, an earlier novel and certain magazine extracts. For this, and all the work it represents, the return…I’m sure you’ll agree is hardly worth while.’

Hardly worth while. But, he explained, ‘I have all sorts of writing plans and shall probably go on producing a novel a year for many years to come.’ This, as all writers know, is the curse of perpetual frustration. He explained it away by saying, ‘I have, you see, enough confidence in myself at least…’

Back to the Barr Smith; two levels below here. The terrazzo dunnies with their outstanding graffiti. Phil Grummet, a character in my second published book, Hill of Grace, studies pharmacology at Adelaide University, but he has a bent for other things (if you know what I mean). This includes perfecting his poetic gifts on the dunny walls (a sort of budget Mastersingers of Nuremburg). Someone drills holes in the walls. Just enough to cop an eyeful. But Phil writes messages like, Not Recommended for Children, or, Insert Here. He adds the predictable: Arts Degrees, please take a single sheet, above the bog paper, and tries some Eliot on the back of the door. We shall never cease from exploring. And he doesn’t. Ending up at Mt Crawford vomiting mushrooms he mistakes for the magic variety.

The Barr Smith has changed. I spent hours watching flies trying to escape from cobwebs, the spider emerging, the worst of natural selection as my fiction went unwritten. I wrote my first five books here. Longhand. Clearing my throat when people talked, and the librarians didn’t spring to life, jumping on the miscreants like an elite SS troop. Eventually I’d give up and move, throwing a angry glance, not that anyone cared. Silence, I think, is the most valuable thing of all. Up there with love, wisdom, an unexpected sunburst.

The Barr Smith rendered by Simon Fieldhouse.

I loved the Barr Smith’s retro fifties feel, although it wasn’t actually retro. The desks, the chairs, the Khrushchev-era windows. The idea that a million people had written a million books about a million topics and, if I had the time, I could explore them all. That’s always what’s excited me. The potential to know. I could never understand sport. That only ever had the potential to kick a bit further, run a bit faster. So what? So I’d sit there for an hour after I’d finished writing. Looking through maths texts, wondering why I was looking through maths texts. Reading a history of sans serif types, or the Hitler Youth. The same thing I did as a kid, at school. The grass was always green, the sandwiches stale and sweaty. But if you were early enough, and got a copy of Asterix, your lunch would be bearable.

That’s why libraries matters. Why the Barr Smith matters. All of this knowledge is held in trust. For our great great grandkids. God knows they’ll have Weatherill’s plutonium to deal with, so we should leave them something they actually want. I hope the books remain. The heavy, smelly paper types. I hope someone doesn’t come in, digitise them, and then arrange a book burning on the Barr Smith lawns. Or maybe others have that in mind? The Advertiser. Winston Smith snipping away at the truth, producing a world view pleasing to the North Terrace mob. Bill and Ben, flower pot men. Praising ham strings and high octane stupidity in equal measure.

So, now you’re saying. My, he’s a bit angry, isn’t he? To which I reply: Moi? Problem being, speaking writers, it seems, are meant to entertain audiences these days. I prefer to terrify. And at this, Patrick White was the best. If I can share a selected quote: ‘The Bicentennial circus tends to hide from us the fact that we are no longer a democracy. We are a country run by and for millionaires and by a prime minister who toadies to them.’ Or: ‘In a society where there has been such a serious lapse in integrity, our politicians’ attitude to uranium isn’t surprising.’ Wonder what he’d make of Kimba, glowing with golden wheat, sheep, and other things?

Stephen Orr reading his latest novel, The Hands, as part of the upcoming Goulburn Biggest Read.

Listen to the rest of Stephen’s speech here thanks to Radio Adelaide.

Sydney: Talking Points

Posted on 26 May 2016 by admin

The man sitting next to me introduces himself as Michael Robotham. Someone stops to talk to David Malouf by the side of the harbour. Kerry O’Brien walks by. This could only be Sydney Writers Festival.

Readers in the sun at Walsh Bay

But the writers aren’t the only stars. We are here for the Visiting International Publishers (VIPs, indeed). The main game is two days of speed dating between these visitors and Australian publishers and agents hoping to reach beyond our shores.

The event opens on Wednesday with a series of panels about the state of publishing across the globe. Each VIP seems to open by saying their market is ‘much the same’ as the last, before presenting us with something completely different. The Australian sense of humour translates well in Slovenia, where libraries are king. Koreans do not read for pleasure, but will buy Liane Moriarty when it’s framed as self-help. A newborn mobile publisher is hoping to capture the ‘one device’ market of India, delivering serialised books by politicians and adult film stars to smartphones in carefully timed instalments (just in time for the news cycle? Or at 10pm each night?).

In the afternoon, the focus turns inwards but the content is no less stimulating. Sandra Phillips of the First Nations Australia Writers Network challenges all publishers to include at least one First Nations writer on their list every year – not because we should, but because there’s so much wonderful work (Dark Emu, of course, winning Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards on the Monday night). A roundtable on Australian writers festivals, including the directors of the Sydney event, sparks fiery discussion about platforms for Australian writers. Our independent bookshops – looking at you, Readings – come up again and again.

And all to the backdrop of proposed changes to the Australian publishing industry and angst about where the arts sit in this election campaign.

There is certainly a lot to be said.

Jean-François Vernay takes to the Curiosity Stage

And there is time for the Writers Festival as well, to discuss Kate Tempest’s electrifying opening address (and the ensuing media storm). To see our authors, Sydney local Jane Jose and New Caledonian visitor Jean-François Vernay, take to the stage to share their insightful books with new audiences. And for a sticky cinnamon scroll from the festival coffee stall (or maybe two).

The Sydney sun is warming, but so is the conversation. Or there is certainly enough to be said.

Another extract from Quiet City

Posted on 13 May 2016 by admin

With the upcoming launch of Quiet City by Carol Lefevre on Sunday at West Terrace Cemetery, we couldn’t resist sharing another extract. This one comes from the chapter “Darkness in Daylight” and the illustration is by Anthony Nocera.

But there is, too, a long and more troubling list of activities that eventually became the focus of a government investigation. They involved the appropriation of bodies for dissection, especially from public institutions such as the gaol, the lunatic and destitute asylums, and even the Adelaide Hospital. As so often happens in life, a major event was sparked by an apparently minor one – the sudden death of a hapless fellow on a winter morning in 1903.
At Ovingham railway station north-east of Adelaide the man scribbled a few lines on a scrap of paper, then drew a revolver from his pocket, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. The note read: Cannot get work; no food or shelter. Better give up the struggle than starve. The body was removed to the city morgue, the Dead House at West Terrace Cemetery. A jury was sworn in over the remains and the coroner, Dr William Ramsay Smith, conducted an inquest. A pawnbroker with whom the deceased had dealt with in the days preceding his suicide identified the body as that of Eugene Green. To a non-medical person, what happened next is sickening, but I feel I owe it to Eugene Green, and to others who suffered a similar fate, to relate the awful details.

Anthony Nocera

More from Quiet City

Posted on 10 May 2016 by admin

Carol Lefevre will be launching Quiet City at the West Terrace Cemetery this Sunday May 15. To celebrate, here is another extract with an illustration by Anthony Nocera. This extract comes from the chapter “In Deep Water”.

The names of people who drowned in the River Torrens would fill a book. Many of them were children, and although few could swim they found their way towards the water. On a Sunday afternoon in November, Henry Charles Etheridge, aged nine, and his brother Edward, seven, left their home on the Parade at Norwood and went to the river near Hackney Bridge. Neither boy could swim. The younger boy entered the water and at once sank to the bottom. His brother jumped in to save him, and he, too, disappeared.
Some small boys who were on the riverbank noticed what had happened and raised the alarm. Three lads of about eighteen rushed to assist – Charles Veitch, Clem Hill, and Herbert Leslie. They stripped off and leapt into the water, and after several dives the body of the older boy was found, soon followed by that of his brother. Charles Veitch brought them both to the surface; they had been in the water for twenty minutes. Three medical students came upon the scene, along with Dr Brummitt. Resuscitation was attempted for almost an hour, without success. The boys were the sons of Henry (Harry) Joseph Etheridge, a bootmaker, and his wife Mary Frances (Minnie).
Money to fund a headstone was collected by a Mr Blunt, and in February 1903 it was unveiled by the mayor of Norwood. The monument of white marble stood seven-and-a-half feet high and was surmounted by a cross; the grave was enclosed by an iron fence. At the unveiling ceremony much was made of the older boy’s heroism in sacrificing his life to try and save his brother. It was good to die for another, the mayor said, but he hoped everyone would remember that it was good to live for each other, hence the sympathy and goodwill evident in the memorial designed by Mr Blunt.

An Extract from Quiet City

Posted on 3 May 2016 by admin

The following extract is taken from “Unhappy Women” in Quiet City by Carol Lefevre. Quiet City explores the extraordinary and unusual lives of the people now resting beneath the tombstones of West Terrace Cemetery. The illustration accompanying this extract is by Anthony Nocera. The launch will be taking place at West Terrace Cemetery on May 15 at 2pm. Carol will be leading a tour of the cemetery and taking us to some of her favourite grave sites.

Unhappy Women

Of all the unhappy women in West Terrace Cemetery, Winnie Goater stands out. At twenty-one she was already the mother of a three-year-old child and by September of 1906 she was, secretly, ‘in a certain condition’. At 2.30 on a Sunday afternoon, Winnie told her mother she was going out for a ‘walk with Will’ on the Unley Road and would be home in time for tea, and slipped out the front door of their house at 254 King William Street. It was the last time Mary Ann Goater would see her daughter alive.
At the beginning of September, Mary Ann had noticed that Winnie appeared pale and unwell and she had quizzed her about her relationship with the man she had been keeping company with for the past nine months: he was known to her as Will Cameron. Winnie had told her mother that there was no need to worry, that she was quite all right, but Mary Ann remained suspicious.
When Winnie did not return, her mother reported her missing. Mrs Goater had spoken to Will once when he called while Winnie was out, and asked him whether he had employment. Cameron had told her he was working for the government, fixing warning bells on the railways, so in the wake of her daughter’s disappearance Mrs Goater enquired after him at all the government offices. Eventually she tracked him to a house in Pirie Street, and when he opened the door, according to Cameron, she ‘started up at a terrible rate’, demanding to know whether Winnie was inside and accusing him of having ruined her daughter. Will Cameron was adamant that Winnie was not there and that he had not seen her since 13 September, when he took her to the Show.
‘But I’ll help you look for her,’ he said, ‘because she’s a nice little thing.’
William Cameron boxed clever, but Mrs Goater was having none of it. Somehow she forced him to accompany her to the’Detective Office’, where she insisted he account for his movements on the day of her daughter’s disappearance. Once there, Cameron suddenly denied that he had even accompanied Winnie to the Show. A furious Mrs Goater accused him of lying, and ‘ran him down to the lowest’. She would never give up the search, she said, until she found her daughter, dead or alive.
How those words must have rung later in Mrs Goater’s ears, for by then her daughter was dead, and had been buried at West Terrace Cemetery under the name of Mary Elliot.

Anthony Nocera

Invisible Mending launch

Posted on 26 April 2016 by admin

On April 17 we were excited to host the launch of Mike Ladd’s new collection Invisible Mending right here at Wakefield Press.

Rachael Mead had the honour of launching Mike’s book. We recently hosted an exhibition of Rachael’s photography alongside the launch of Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here Where We Live, and it was a pleasure to have her back.

If you weren’t able to make it to the launch, don’t worry we’ve got you covered. You can read Rachael’s speech below!

Hello and thank you all so much for coming. It is my great pleasure and honour today to be launching the latest book by one Australia’s most loved and lauded writers – Mike Ladd.
I’ve just used the label “writer” and while we are here to celebrate the launch of Mike’s ninth book, to call Mike a writer is to try to squeeze him into a box that doesn’t properly contain him. Don’t get me wrong, Mike is one of Australia’s most esteemed poets and you can find his work in just about every anthology of Australian poetry in existence. Mike started his career as a poet at seventeen and by 25 he published his first collection The Crack in the Crib.
Just as he was launching his literary career, he started work for the ABC in Adelaide as a sound engineer and by 1997 he’d worked his way up to creating and producing his own Radio National program, Poetica which ran for 18 years until 2015, when it was taken off the air much to the outrage of Australia’s literary community. Mike’s current role with Radio National is in the features and documentary unit but once again the box of documentarian doesn’t contain him either.

In the 80s Mike was a musician in the new wave band The Lounge and he frequently collaborates with musicians and artists, writing poetry for the screen and live performance with groups such as The Drum Poets, newaural net, and Max Mo. He writes, films and edits video poetry and I would recommend finding Zoo After Dark, and The Eye of the Day on YouTube.

Rachael Mead and Mike Ladd
Most recently he and his partner the wonderful visual and installation artist Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art and you can see their work in the Adelaide Bus Station and Tram Stop 6 on the line to Glenelg.

Now the reason I’ve gone on about Mike’s rich and varied creative career is that the book we are here for today, Invisible Mending, draws the many threads of his past work together. Invisible Mending is more than a poetry collection; it contains essays, creative non-fiction, personal vignettes and photographs. While on the surface this seems incredibly diverse it is a remarkably coherent mediation on themes of human impact on the natural world and how to mend the rents that grief, loss and change tear in our lives.

The book weaves together poetry and prose pieces, picking up and elaborating on themes that Mike has explored in past work; displacement and marginalization from Picture’s Edge, family and suburbia from Close to Home, and politics and social injustice in Rooms and Sequences. However, the themes of his most recent works clearly still preoccupy him. Transit explored the compounding effect of momentous life events in the construction of identity and healing after loss is a thread that weaves its way through Invisible Mending. Mike also continues to draw on his deep cultural and ecological understanding of Adelaide that was so beautifully expressed in Karrawirra Parri. Environmental devastation, particularly human impact on our natural world is another of Mike’s ongoing preoccupations. With these themes in mind we can see his choice of title is perfect. It is taken from a line in the final piece, “A Country Wedding”, where Mike notices the landscape healing itself after the devastation wrought by flood. This book is an intensely personal account healing after wreckage – both ecological and emotional.

To me, one of the most significant aspects of this book is that all these pieces are non-fiction. Mike is a documentarian and this book showcases his skill at observing subjects from different angles and digging at the surface until what lies beneath is revealed. The piece that best illustrates this is “Traffik” – a story set in Malaysia and Japan that resembles short fiction but is in fact drawn from real events. Mike produced this work of creative non-fiction from television and newspaper reports while he and Cath were in Malaysia and faced with the unavoidable evidence of deforestation and species loss as a result of the palm oil industry. But even so, the documentarian sees that not everything is black and white. At the heart of this piece is the understanding that emotional bonds can exist between species, and that as humans we do things, often inexcusable things for love and connection. While the ends don’t justify the means, those ends can be understandable, even beautiful. It is not easy, being human. Mike as documentarian observes and reports but does so with empathy and it is his ability to interweave reportage with compassion that makes this book both compelling and insightful.

Guests at the launch

I’d like to read you one of my favourite poems from the book now – “Travelling the Golden Highway, thinking of global warming”.

I read this to you not only an example of Mike’s brilliance as a poet, showing his mastery of minimalist style and his potent combination of natural and industrial imagery to powerful political effect. But to me this poem demonstrates how Mike, with so few words can embed us in an experience with him. We are there, both crammed into the backseat and crammed inside his head in that moment, thinking about the landscape and climate change. Again, Mike the documentarian is working with Mike the poet to translate his sensory experience of the world into such effective imagery that the reader is given an almost visceral understanding of being Mike Ladd at that point in time. It is this ability to transport us that also makes him a brilliant radio documentarian – in a world where sight is the prime sense he delivers stories that engage the mind by stimulating the minor senses, giving us access to experiences and situations that inspire and fascinate us, allow us to perceive the world differently, peel back layers and feel our way to understanding what lies behind the things we see.

There is so much to say and this book is so diverse yet so coherent I’m really struggling to make this concise so I’m just going to pick out one more thread from this book – a thread that runs through the whole collection – that of grief over the rents and losses that accrue throughout life and the ongoing work of mending to make oneself whole again. While the book moves geographically from Adelaide across Australian highways to the east coast then on to Malaysia, Sydney, South America, Spain and back to Australia the themes of family and loss travel with us – reinforcing that the things make us and break us in life are inescapable – love and grief.

Mike introduces us to his father and the heartbreaking progress of his dementia in the book’s first section, which is grounded in Adelaide and family. We are in Malaysia with Mike as he is researching the Malaysian roots of the pantun form when he hears of the death of his father. Like the Malaysian journey, the essay on the pantun veers into the personal as grief overwhelms all else. “The Book of Hours at Rimbun Dahan” is one of the most moving pieces on grief I have read. Please read it. Then look up the award-winning video poem Eye of the Day on YouTube. It is a gorgeous combination of a selection of tunggal pantun, sound and film and an immersive illustration of the experience grief, regret and distance.

I’m going to read for you now Winter Light.

Book Launch Guests
This book illuminates a writer’s commitment to the mending of grief, the work to close distances that gradually widen in families, the reclamation of lost histories, and the healing of land after centuries of abuse. We look at Mike and see the laid-back, generous, thoughtful man we think we know. But like all of us, this is just the coherent skin we show the world. Turn us inside out and you see all the darning, all the messy stitching holding us all together. And, to me, that’s what this book represents – these poems and stories, insights and observations – these words are all the stitches that hold Mike together. Turn him right side out and it’s Invisible Mending.

Congratulations Mike. It is truly brilliant work and I am honoured to declare Invisible Mending officially launched!

Rachael Mead

The Inconsequential Tourist by Stephen Orr

Posted on 14 January 2016 by admin

A guest blog from our adventuring novelist Stephen Orr, who’s currently conquering Europe.

You can check out Stephen’s award-winning novels here.

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Sitting on a train from Berlin to Munich, it seems a good time to ruminate (lack of cows in fields, although plenty of wind turbines) on the nature of lit-tourism. Just past Dessau, villages, birch and the fiery glare from the white-blue eyes of an old man (what? what am I doing wrong?) across the train.

We can search for writers, we can go to the places they lived (for short times anyway) – but can we ever really find them? Evidence, everywhere, but most of it makes them seem too ordinary. Then again, what was I expecting?

It started in Dublin. The James Joyce House in North Great George’s Street. Joyce never lived here, but parts of several stories from Dubliners are set close by. Belvedere College at the end of the street, where Joyce was first taught by the fearful Jesuits. Eccles Street, Molly and Leopold wandering. A walking tour took me to Hardwicke Street, where Joyce once lived (opposite ‘The Boarding House’), although Joyce’s home has been consumed by council flats. It didn’t seem very, well, Joycean. A couple of kids on a motorised scooter kept circling the tour, and we had to move.

The James Joyce Centre, Dublin (next to ‘Orrwear’!)

Leipzig. Cast iron train station. Fifteen platforms with no one in sight.

So what was I expecting? To actually see Joyce? Work out why (and how) he wrote what he wrote? Nope. None of that. Just Dublin’s ever-present seagulls, rain, Liffey-chilled breezes, tourist buses. As I reminded myself this was the place he (like Samuel Beckett) escaped from. Maybe he wrote not because of Dublin, but despite it? Maybe that’s what writers do.

Swift would save the day. Bus to St Patrick’s Church (where he was dean, giving sermons about people falling asleep in church, meanwhile writing Gulliver’s Travels and pamphlets such as ‘A Modest Proposal’, about the necessity of eating your children to save the country money – the first and best satirist). I saw where he preached, lived, worked, was buried, but I didn’t see Jonathon Swift. I saw pictures, furniture, but not so much as a ghost.

London would save the day. A quick walk to Bloomsbury. 48 Doughty Street, where Charles Dickens lived during the first flushes of his success. Now, here was a writer’s house. All preserved from when the great man wrote several early novels. Sitting room (where wife Catherine was exiled with the kids), dining room (long boozy nights with Forster), then upstairs to the great man’s study. The actual desk where he penned Oliver Twist. But, it just seemed to be a desk. Shouldn’t it have been greater, grander, deskier? Bedroom, where he sired his generous brood, and up to the nursery. All so ordinary. The kitchen, laundry, cellar. Mm… I left feeling I knew Dickens no better. A sort of anti-climatic walk back to Trafalgar Square through theatreland. A stop at Russell Square, to gaze in the window where T.S. Eliot worked at Faber and Faber.

Charles Dickens’s house, London

More green fields, still no cows. The old man reads Die Welt, as die Welt passes us by (maybe he’s seen it too often). The conductor checks our tickets with the brutal efficiency that seems to characterise most things German.

As I ponder. The pattern repeats in Edinburgh (the cafe where Rowling scribbled The Philosopher’s Stone, the medical school where Conan Doyle learned all about deduction from his teacher, Joseph Bell, Stevenson’s old haunts, Scott’s house etc.) Then to Berlin. The Brecht House. The rooms where he wrote his plays and poems, the bed the threepenny playwright died in.

The café in Edinburgh where J.K. Rowling wrote The Philosopher’s Stone

But Brecht wasn’t home. None of them were. Maybe the writers were in my head. One thing was interesting though. The important role these writers still play in their native countries. T-shirts, mugs, walking tours, the lot. In Ireland, most bookshops save the most prominent display at the front of the shop for Irish writers.

More turbines. Green, green grass. A few distant factories. Not really what I thought the German countryside would look like. But what did I expect?

Stephen Orr with a couple of well-known writers, Berlin

Giles Bettison on the state of the arts

Posted on 29 September 2015 by admin

This year, Giles Bettison was the SA Living Artists Festival’s featured artist and the subject of our beautiful monograph.

Giles made a speech that brought the house down on opening night, and he’s kindly allowed us to share a bit of it with you here …

Good evening everyone. Tonight I would like to acknowledge the Kaurna people, whose land our ancestors occupied and on whose land we are standing now.

It is an amazing honour to be the featured artist for the 2015 SALA monograph. I never imagined that there would be a book about my work: it’s amazing and a bit overwhelming. Part of the price I have to pay for that honour is that I get to give this address tonight.

I never thought anyone would let me loose on a crowd like this. […]

Being recognised in South Australia and Adelaide like this is a very humbling experience. I hope that Margot Osborne and my contribution to this great series of documents will be both a useful addition to our South Australian cultural history as well as to artists and crafters alike all over the world. The opportunity to chronicle my work in the monograph is of inestimable value to me and I hope to the rest of the art and glass appreciating public.

I want to share with you ways that I think about the glass things I make and how I think about art. The things that keep me going and what I see as important things about art and what it does.

One of the things that I think art is for is to engage people. Art is a tool to help us to see ourselves and our world. More than ever, in these busy times people look without seeing, which is sad and dangerous. There is so much to see and know around us; we need to recognise it for our health and the health of others, our souls if you like.

Art helps us to know our world and engage with it. It gives us a different perspective than our own. It is people making representations of things and telling stories, something we have done for millennia. It shows we are seeing and thinking, that we are engaged.

We notice art because it is a different point of view than our own, it can take us outside ourselves and be a point of contact with others. We can see the difference between what we see and the perception of other people. It is also a perception of time. When you really see art you become part of a discussion about different ways of seeing things. When we are engaged and connected like this we are better able to care and to take care. With art the conversation begins and the dialogue goes on – if you let it …

In our high-tech and hyper-connected world people are more disconnected and disengaged than ever. Increasingly people are overloaded by the speed and intensity of the barrage of information being slung at us, most of it arbitrary and irrelevant at best. The so-called social media is actually anti-social media. People are interacting with screens more and more and interacting with actual people and things and their environment less and less. I have been to parks, restaurants and art galleries where most of the people there are on their devices, not interacting with each other. It’s tragic. It’s like they’re blind.

The more disconnected and disengaged we are, the easier it becomes to make decisions that don’t take the care of other people into consideration. We become isolated. It becomes easier to make decisions that are informed by fear and misunderstanding that do not have broad positive outcomes. I’ve experienced how destructive people working this way can be. I think we have all seen it and are aware of it.

It seems to me that there is a trend for people to isolate themselves from other people and from their environment. We need to engage and to commit to each other and to turn this trend around.

There are a whole bunch of things that happen when you are engaged by art. When you listen to a piece of music that moves you, you get tingles down your spine and your hair stands up. Your brain and body are being activated and it is usually a very good experience. I experience this when I attend great music concerts. At the beginning of the show we are just people trying to get to our seats or to a good position close to the band, but at the end of the show when we have all shared this expanding musical experience together and as we are all leaving, I feel a kind of connection to everyone. I imagine that my fellow concert goer feels this also. We have all shared the same experience and had similar uplifting feelings and everything feels right. We’re connected.

I have similar experiences with visual art. It can happen in nature, in crowds, in many ways in many different situations, but art specifically is the gift of people trying to elicit this connection and engagement a discussion with other people – one of our survival tools I believe.

When we are moved by art it is exercising our engagement muscle. The more we have these experiences and recognise them the better we are able to attain and maintain this condition. When we are in this state we are empathetic, we are more likely to make smart and caring choices. Art is good for the environment.

One of the important things about art and artists, this art gallery and all other galleries, is that they are places where discussions and engagement can happen. There is all the potential to engage and to be present and to give back. We need to engage and we need to make careful and compassionate choices.

SALA was and is visionary. It gives a huge cross section of artists across South Australia a valuable opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the broader public, a very important thing. I hope there are all kinds of discussions started and carried on as a result. We are all here to celebrate this kind of positive dialogue.

So, on that note please look and please think, please care and please speak.
Enjoy this event and as many other SALA events as you can.

This part of tonight’s entertainment is over. Thank you.

To read more about Giles and purchase his monograph, head over here.

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