Thursday, 1 December 2016
Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. No 'sounds' this week, but an extra item for your consideration in 'reads' instead.Words:
I had a feature story published in The Weekend Australian Review on Saturday. Excerpt below.
To read the full story, visit The Australian's website. Above photo credit: Glenn Hunt.Dazzling Dress-Up (2,100 words / 10 minutes)
The 10th anniversary exhibition at Brisbane's GOMA is enveloped in a remarkably bright installation by Shoplifter
Affixed to the glass above the entrance to Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art is a large decal depicting a curious meeting of blue and orange. At first glance, the nature of the bright substance in the image is unclear: is it smoke, paint, fairy floss, or something even weirder? Positioned in the centre of this combination are some words –"GOMA Turns 10" –and on walking through the doors, another great bloom of colour reveals itself, positioned high up on the right wall, as if a psychedelic shagpile carpet has been transposed to the vertical plane.
It's only upon journeying further into the building –past the fences that surround a towering, under-construction slippery slide –and turning right into the Long Gallery, however, that the mystery substance suddenly makes sense: it's hair, and there's a bloody lot of it. Stepping closer to take it all in, the first comparison to spring to mind is that a sizeable chunk of the Great Barrier Reef's most spectacular section of coral has somehow been transplanted here. Two white walls are connected by a furry overpass that tickles the top of your head as you walk beneath it, and in between the neutral surfaces is an ocean of bright purples, pinks, blues, greens and yellows.
Named Nervescape V, this immense installation has clearly been designed as interactive art, as the urge to touch the extraordinary arrangement of synthetic hair will be practically irresistible for any attendee, no matter their age. Its prominent position in the downstairs gallery reflects its role as a key attraction of Sugar Spin: You, Me, Art and Everything, an exhibition curated by GOMA's manager of international art Geraldine Barlow. Next month the gallery celebrates its 10th anniversary, and Barlow has been digging through storerooms to rediscover some of GOMA's greatest hits since its opening: hence the enclosed, multistorey slide, otherwise known as Left/Right Slide by Belgian artist Carsten Holler, which first appeared in 2010.
In a decade of showcasing conversation-starters and eye-poppers while becoming the nation's most-visited art complex –together, the Queensland Art Gallery and GOMA attracted 1.8 million visitors in 2010 –the gallery has never seen anything quite like this. Casting her eyes across the phenomenal field of colour that envelops the space and extends high up the wall, Barlow compares it with "giving the building a bit of a hairdo", and it's hard to disagree. There's nothing subtle about this piece, and that too is by design.
How I found this story: Simple: I was commissioned to write it by my editor at Review. I hadn't heard of Shoplifter before. This story, then, is a great example of the privilege of being offered a feature assignment, and thoroughly enjoying the experience of meeting a great artist in order to write about her work for a national audience. I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I hope my story encourages a few more people to visit GOMA to look upon Nervescape V, as it's a truly awesome sight to behold.
Reads:
The Fire Starter by Tim Elliott in Good Weekend (3,200 words / 16 minutes). A brilliantly written story about the effects of pyromania, which gave me a sinking feeling as I read it. I don't get that very often, but the way in which Tim Elliott slowly drip-feeds the narrative and leads into the climax is nothing less than masterly.
It started small, just a handful of embers hiding in the hollow of a scribbly gum tree. Twelve metres high and perhaps 60 years old, the tree stood amid thick bush south of Lake Macquarie, on the NSW Central Coast, burled and knotty and gnawed by time. On September 30, 2013, it was set alight, along with the surrounding forest, during backburning, a defensive measure against a larger fire that had broken out earlier that day to the east. In the following days, volunteers from the Rural Fire Service (RFS) moved through the backburned area, mopping up spot fires and flare-ups, their job complicated by the local geology, which is rich in coal and riddled, after 140 years of mining, with buried waste and disused collieries. The firefighters flooded the area with thousands of litres of water. But in this one scribbly gum, the water didn't get to where it should have. And so there remained a kernel of combustion, a dormant ball of ash which, encased in heartwood and starved of oxygen, gave off no smoke. As far as anyone could tell, the fire in the tree was out.
Nuclear Shelter by Katie Silver in The Saturday Paper (1,500 words / 7 minutes). An enlightening report on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the remarkable method by which Ukrainian engineers will slide a giant shield over the reactor so that it can be finally be deconstructed and decontaminated. Named "New Safe Confinement", or NSC, the shield is the largest moveable land-based structure ever built.
It's being hailed as one of the most ambitious projects in the history of engineering. Against the backdrop of a deserted industrial wasteland, a giant arched hangar is being slid atop the wreckage of the world's worst nuclear accident. Three decades have passed since reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, but it's only now that real progress is being made towards dismantling the ruined equipment and decontaminating the site and its surroundings. A combination of errors caused one of Chernobyl's four 1000-megawatt reactors to go into meltdown on Saturday, April 26, 1986, near the city of Pripyat in the far north of Ukraine. Just after 1am engineers were stress-testing the steam turbines. They wanted to make sure the turbines would keep the coolant pumps running in the case of a power outage. Deliberately switching off the safety systems, they began lowering the power. It dropped quicker and further than they expected, so they slowly increased the power again. Thirty seconds later there was an unexpected power surge, but a flaw in the Soviet-designed reactor made the emergency shutdown mechanism fail. The first explosion occurred at 1.23am, shooting a fireball into the sky. It was followed by a second more powerful explosion. Fires would continue to burn for about two weeks.
Leader Of The Tribe by Jane Cadzow in Good Weekend (4,000 words / 20 minutes). A perceptive profile of a celebrity chef that's best summarised by the line that ran on the cover of the magazine: "Pete Evans may contain traces of nut". Cadzow pulls no punches, and is skeptical throughout her time with Evans, particularly the startling way in which he readily absorbs pseudo-scientific claims and spits them back out to his 1.5 million social media followers. The final quote is telling.
Pete Evans is riding through Melbourne in the back of a black chauffeured car. I am sitting beside him. We are chatting about one thing and another when he says, "You're the biggest idiot I've ever known. Who are you, a bloody pizza chef?" Evans knows I am a journalist. He isn't addressing the remarks to me personally, just giving examples of the kinds of things that are said about him on social media. "You should see what they say," he continues. "I have hate-pages against me. Dedicated hate-pages. There's one with 10,000 people." He smiles, and I am struck afresh by his freak-of-nature good looks. At 43, Evans has an open, boyish face and bright blue eyes. His teeth are a dazzling white. His tan is golden. Up close, he actually seems to glow: perhaps that's what happens when you eat enough activated almonds. Or perhaps it's the aura of success. Besides being an advocate of the so-called paleo diet, a role he has turned into a thriving business, Evans is co-host of this country's highest-rating TV series, My Kitchen Rules, and presenter of a US television show, Moveable Feast. The former chef has written 13 cookbooks, the last seven filled with paleo recipes. Such is their popularity that for the past two years, he has been Australia's best-selling non-fiction author.
Mute Bones by Charlotte Wood in The Weekend Australian Review (1,700 words / 8 minutes). This is Charlotte Wood's excellent introduction to a reissue of George Orwell's 1984. Like Wood, I first read it in high school, and its ideas have stuck with me ever since.
Several years ago I found myself in the most depressing rooms I'd ever entered. To find the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre you must first speak to the security guard at the gate of an ugly residential apartment complex, then find your way through various towers to an unmarked door, then take the stairs or creaking elevator to the basement. There you will find hundreds of propaganda posters from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution on display. When I returned to George Orwell's 1984 –first published in 1949 –after more than 30 years, and revisited Winston Smith's colourless flat in Victory Mansions, with its broken lift and the ''dulled mirror'' of its all-seeing, all-hearing telescreen, it was those rooms that swam up from my memory. It's not just the giant face of Mao looming, Big Brother-like, over the ecstatic faces of the overall-clad masses that conjures 1984 for me now, but something more frightening; something to do with the clammy basement air, the inescapable sense of being watched. The flimsy plaster walls, the weak fluorescent lighting. The low, peeling ceilings, and the overwhelming desire in me for escape.
Light And Death by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore in The Saturday Paper (2,000 words / 10 minutes). An excellent profile of Japanese installation artist Tatsuo Miyajima, who uses arrays of LED lights to tackle big questions from a Buddhist perspective.
Light-emitting diodes aren't usually associated with genocide. But in his vast installation Mega Death, renowned Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima has used the technology to highlight the horrors of the 20th century. Three thousand white LED counters flicker and flash, counting down from nine to one at different speeds: some fast, others slow. Walking inside is like being washed in luminous sapphire: an abrasive, pulsating life force. Then, at random, the lights go out and the audience is plunged into sudden, black night. Created in 1999 for the Venice Biennale, Mega Death is now showing at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art until March 5. It is just one piece in a major retrospective of Miyajima's work, Connect with Everything, that spans 40 years of his career and includes sketchbooks, paintings, photographic and performance pieces, alongside the LED displays for which he is famous. In Mega Death each individual counter represents a human life, ticking slowly from birth to death. When the lights go out is the moment "all those lives are lost", says Miyajima on a recent spring afternoon at the MCA. The artwork is, in many ways, about darkness: after all, it was the century of the trenches and terrorism, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Yet at Mega Death's metaphorical heart is a rekindling and rebirth.
China, Lost And Found In Translation by Trent Dalton in The Walkley Magazine (2,100 words / 11 minutes). A fine summary of Dalton's recent overseas trip, alongside fellow award-winning journos Steve Pennells and Caro Meldrum-Hanna, to speak to young Chinese reporters about what they might find in their careers. It seemed to have provided Dalton with some perspective on his own work, too: "These wide-eyed, dead keen students – the majority of them young women – made my privileged first-world feature writer problems seem so deeply pathetic. Gotta fill out my expenses claims. They gave me a small four-cylinder rental car to drive through western Queensland. The feature writers never get the bureau cars. Boo-fuckin'-hoo."
It was a beautiful question, sharp and open-ended, challenging and necessary. She was a Chinese journalism student, maybe 19 or 20 years old, but this was the question of a veteran, a gentle query from someone wise enough to know that sometimes the best way to get a piece of them is to give a piece of you. "How do I be brave?" she asked. In the first half of my life as a journalist I was probably too shit-scared to ask any newsroom hero of mine that question. In the second half I was probably too proud. I had to fly 8,700km to Guangzhou, China, to hear the answer. To my right, Steve Pennells, five-time Walkley winner, five-star bloke, smiled because he was thinking the same thing I was. That question wasn't in the brief.
An Even More Inconvenient Truth by Jack Marx in CEO Magazine (1,000 words / 5 minutes). A compelling snapshot of small-town Australia and one population's response to the idea of wind farms being installed nearby. It was first proposed ten years ago and it still hasn't happened. We might be doomed after all, Jack Marx suggests, "because human nature decrees we will fight any creature, benevolent or wicked, that threatens the little patches of land we've each decided are 'ours'".
It's a Thursday night in the old town hall in Silverton, an antique Australian town that boasts a population of around 40. A dozen or so have turned out tonight to discuss the future of their outback home, and perhaps the world. It's been over 100 years since Silverton had its hustle on, the land's rich silver deposits drawing thousands of 19th century desperados to this isolated outpost. But the fever didn't last, the town virtually abandoned by the turn of the century. There was a brief rebirth of industry in 1981 when the filming of Mad Max 2 swept through the village, leaving behind the relics of futuristic vehicles, the walls of the town's only pub festooned with behind-the-scenes photographs of a post-apocalyptic future. Silverton is a ghost town now, a handful of stubborn stone dwellings guarding the corners of dusty streets whose names are remembered in the legends of old maps. Tourists trickle through to drink at the pub, be wed outside the derelict church, or just lose themselves in the emptiness –the blue sky, the red dust, the lonesome song of rusted hinges turning in the breeze –momentarily abandoning their troubles for the briefest of parts in an imagined Sergio Leone film. People whisper to one another as they wander about, careful not to wake the town spirits from their slumbers. Silverton is a place worth keeping, and worth leaving be.
Why You Should Be Talking About Work All Holiday Season by Ryan Holiday on Thought Catalog (800 words / 4 minutes). A provocative and well-argued column about a common topic of conversation. I love this: "I would argue that if you don't want to talk about work, it probably says something about what you choose to spend 8-10 hours a day...and not something very good. And certainly not something that avoidance is going to do much to fix."
One thing is for certain: at this moment, somewhere in the world, a group of people are getting together. Maybe it's for the holidays or a date or just drinks with friends after a long day. They are chatting and talking and then, right as their conversation gets going, we can safely predict that the absolute worst person in that group will say the following: "Ugh, guys, can we please not talk about work?" They'll say that because they aren't good at what they do for a living or because they don't know how to deal with stress or difficulty without resorting to pointless complaining. Or perhaps they just have some silly notion about what's proper and appropriate. But the result of their problem is a new problem: Talking about work becomes taboo. Even though it's pretty much the best thing to talk about.
Thanks for reading. If you have feedback on Dispatches, I'd love to hear from you: just reply to this email. Please feel free to share this far and wide with fellow journalism, music, podcast and book lovers.
Andrew
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