Thursday, 8 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.Words:
I have a letter published in the newly released book Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Collection From Women of Letters, which is curated by Michaela McGuire and Marieke Hardy.
I first read this aloud at Men Of Letters in Brisbane last November, alongside chaps such as Anthony Albanese, Jason Whalley and Trent Dalton. Excerpt below.
To read the full letter, pick up a copy of Signed, Sealed, Delivered from your favourite bookstore. Hint: it'd make a great Christmas gift for avid readers and lovers of Australian culture!To The Woman Who Changed My Life (1,300 words / 7 minutes)
You were a big woman, in size and in presence. I say this not to be unkind, but because your size is fitting when considering your impact on my life. You are the reason I am here today, reading this letter to a crowd of people.
I didn't like you at first. I might have hated you, in the irrational way that arrogant teenagers can respond when challenged by an authority that's perceived to be unjust.
The first time we interacted was early one morning at Bundaberg State High School. I was the first of my group of friends to arrive at school - a fairly common occurrence, as my mother dropped me off before getting an early start on her own classroom role, teaching at a primary school across town. I was sitting there in my school uniform, absorbed in my Discman and earphones, and probably listening to hard rock music ideally suited to young men without an outlet for their angst. So probably Rage Against The Machine or Tool or Metallica.
On this morning, while I sat by myself, something compelled me to look up. There I saw you, sitting on a golf buggy not far from me. This was a quirk of playground duty at Bundaberg High, which might have been unique to my school: rather than walking around to check that students weren't misbehaving, teachers instead buzzed around in golf buggies, which were recharged at the office when not in use.
You didn't have a pleasant look on your face. I'm sure I didn't, either. I removed my earphones to hear what you had to say: that I shouldn't have the Discman at school because it was against the rules. You warned me that if you saw it again, you'd confiscate it. Then you drove off, my teenage eyes burning hatefully into your retreating figure as you steered the electric buggy out towards the wide green oval.
So it wasn't love at first sight. When you became my English teacher partway through Year Twelve, after my previous teacher left unexpectedly, I was not pleased. Some of my friends had been taught by you before and had kind words to say, but I didn't want to believe it. In my mind, you'd been pegged as a bossy killjoy who'd interrupted my enjoyment of a sick Tom Morello guitar solo from Rage Against The Machine's self-titled debut album on an otherwise mundane morning.
Sounds:
Richard Flanagan: Life After Death (67 minutes). An excellent documentary about the events and locations that have inspired the novels of Australian author Richard Flanagan. The above photo might suggest it's all furrowed-brow seriousness, but that's not quite true; while there are passages of crushing sadness, there are also some moments of levity, too. Flanagan is clearly a man who thinks and feels deeply, and these qualities shine through in his writing.
Richard Flanagan journeys with Presenter, Alan Yentob through his native Tasmania, visiting the places that have inspired his novels, and on to Thailand, to see first-hand the site of the Death Railway.
Seneca, Nebraska on Radiolab (30 minutes). A strong episode about a divided small town in the centre of the United States, and how its fractured community might point to deeper problems across the entire country.
Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority wanted to they'd self-destruct, end the town and wipe their community off the map. Producer Simon Adler goes to Seneca to knock on doors and sit down with residents for a series of kitchen table conversations. Along the way, we try to piece together what happened in this tiny town and what its fracture says about America.
The Human Sample Kit Experiment by Tom Thum (6 minutes). I love everything this Brisbane-based beatboxer does. Dude's a genius. Here, he partners with a handful of musicians to live-sample his voice into other musical instruments, in order to create a track on stage at the YouTube Brandcast event this year. It's awesome.
For myself experimentation is a huge part of my creative process and I'm always trying to think of ways I can diversify my performances to keep me on my toes. I also hate performing by myself, it makes my willy shrivel. So I thought I might start a band, but not a band in the traditional sense but something that was a little bit more in line with my noisemaking nature and have all the players playing my human sounds that I sample live in to the instruments. (what a conceited wanker.) Anyways this was the first public performance of the idea and a little sight of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the possibilities of what can be achieved using this concept and I really look forward to pushing it further. This was filmed at Youtube Brandcast 2016 and I should make special mention that they really helped me push this idea where I wanted it to go so massive thanks!
Boy In Photo on Reply All (46 minutes). Some of the finest Reply All episodes are based on exploring internet rabbit holes to the extreme, and that's certainly the case here. The mystery in Boy In Photo is summed up by the three words below, and the way it unfolds is an example of the show's best storytelling.
Who was Wayne?
Reads:
Going South by Mark Dapin in Good Weekend (3,200 words / 16 minutes). What's life really like for the thousands of Australians who work in Antarctica? Mark Dapin gathers data and anecdotes to paint a compelling portrait of what must be one of the strangest places on Earth to spend an extended period of time.
Old Antarctic hands say they never tire of watching the penguins, looking at the ice, or dressing up as members of the opposite sex. They say relationships at home can crumble when one partner spends a season there, and new romances may form when two people are thrown together at the end of the Earth. It can be painful to watch a couple in love when your other half is 3000 kilometres away but, with no television, people become the entertainment. A disproportionate number of the 4000-strong summer population of Antarctica are Australian. The Australian Antarctic Territory covers about 42 per cent of the continent, or 5.9 million square kilometres made up largely of continuously shifting ice, and the upkeep of our Antarctic interests costs more than $100 million a year.
The Crooked Ladder by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker (4,900 words / 25 minutes). A fascinating essay about how, for some Italian-American families, crime was the means by which this group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins – though not necessarily through outright violence, despite the pop cultural gangster depictions that spring to mind as you read this. Instead, a sociologist describes it as climbing the "crooked ladder" of social mobility.
'A Family Business' was the real-life version of 'The Godfather,' the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. But Ianni's portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. There were no blood oaths in Ianni's account, or national commissions or dark conspiracies. There was no splashy gunplay. No one downed sambuca shots at Jilly's, on West Fifty-second Street, with Frank Sinatra. The Lupollos lived modestly. Ianni gives little evidence, in fact, that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from Giuseppe's earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.
The Long Road by Oliver Mol in The Saturday Paper (1,300 words / 7 minutes). The most recent issue of The Saturday Paper was one of its best yet, and this is the first of four articles from it that I'll recommend here. If you're a non-subscriber, you'll only be allowed to read one of these before hitting the paywall, so I'm linking this first. It's a tribute to Oliver Mol's cousin, who died of suicide earlier this year, and how he and members of his family have responded to this news. There's something about the hurried way in which Mol writes that adds a layer of raw, desperate urgency to this story, and I found myself in tears by the time I reached the end.
If I had to tell you my first memory of our cousin, Jackson, it would be this: he is running down his driveway with both hands in the air and he is smiling. We have just arrived in Gosford from Canberra and we are yelling through our windows, 'Hi Jackson!', but Jackson doesn't hear us because he has already scaled the tree above our heads. He is four years old and swinging by one arm from a tree branch and the wind is going woooshhhhh and he is laughing. Jackson is laughing because the world is not full of monsters and there is no pain and the wind is catching his laughter and spreading it over the land like a fever. The day Jackson took his life my brother, Harrison, was in Scotland. Jackson was 17. Harry was preparing to hike Spain's GR11: an 850-kilometre coast-to-coast hike that begins on the Bay of Biscay in the Atlantic and runs close to the French border to finish in the Mediterranean. That afternoon he received a message from our mum that began, 'Dear Harry'. He'd received messages like this before. He knew something was wrong. He read the message and yelled for his girlfriend. He kept saying, 'Fuck.'
Original Gangstas by Dave Faulkner in The Saturday Paper (1,800 words / 9 minutes). An excellent review/analysis/interview regarding an album named Reclaim Australia by indigenous Australian hip-hop duo A.B. Original. Faulkner describes it as the most exciting local release of 2016, and after spinning it a few times since reading this, I can certainly see where he's coming from.
Reclaim Australia by A.B. Original is the most exciting record released by an Australian artist this year. An incendiary album of agit-prop hip-hop, the beats slam hard and the raps slam even harder. This aggressive, uncompromising and brutally honest album may be too bitter a pill for many people to swallow but our body politic is ailing and this is just what the doctor ordered. Come and take your medicine, Australia. A.B. Original is a collaboration between two Aboriginal hip-hop artists, solo rapper Briggs and rapper/producer Trials, the latter being one-third of Adelaide's Funkoars. The two men have worked together on and off for 10 years but this is their first project as equal partners. They wanted to make the kind of record they wished they'd had when they were kids, back when they fell in love with hip-hop and with West Coast gangsta rap in particular. As Briggs told me last week, 'There was always a piece missing for kids like us in the '90s, when rap music was at such a peak, with the Snoop Doggs and Ice Cubes and Tupacs, you know? We really wanted to make an album that we could have played alongside those.'
Certain Women by Sarah Price in The Saturday Paper (2,300 words / 12 minutes). A striking profile of Pakistani filmmaker and journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who has devoted her life to exposing violence against women.
The first time I see Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy she is surrounded by a small team of people. We're at the Dendy Cinema at Sydney's Circular Quay for a double screening of her documentaries: Saving Face and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. Standing in front of the screen, Obaid-Chinoy tells the audience that her aim is to have the conversations most people don't want to have, to tell the stories that are not being told. She smiles, then disappears into the darkened reaches of the cinema. The lights are dimmed and the audience is transported to Pakistan, to images of dusty streets and square buildings, and of brutality against women. Zakia's mouth is lopsided, her left nostril bare, the flesh on her face burned so deeply that the pink hollow of her eye socket cannot hold a glass eye. She was at the courthouse seeking a divorce when her abusive, drug-addicted husband threw battery acid over her face. 'She's mine,' he tells the camera, 'it's a matter of my dignity.' In a cement-walled room in the family home, Rukhsana's husband threw acid at her face, before her sister-in-law tossed petrol over her, and her mother-in-law lit the match. Rukhsana still has both her eyes, but the shiny skin on her face and neck is pulled tight and mottled with scars. She still lives with her husband and in-laws. After the attack they built a brick wall inside the house, so Rukhsana could no longer see her daughter.
Scoffed Diplomacy by Andy Hazel in The Saturday Paper (1,300 words / 7 minutes). As I've written here several times before, the 'travel' section of The Saturday Paper is one of its most consistently entertaining and interesting pages, and this piece holds true to form. Here, the writer visits a restaurant franchise in Shanghai named Pyongyang, which is run by the North Korean government. As you might expect, he finds the whole experience bizarre and unsettling, down to the singing, dancing, dead-eyed waitresses.
Typically, when a country sells itself internationally it promotes what it has in abundance and that of which it is most proud. In this, as in many other respects, North Korea is not like other countries. If there is one thing Kim Jong-un's hermetic fiefdom is known to lack, it is food. Yet one of the country's most lucrative exports is a chain of restaurants named for its capital Pyongyang, which specialises in plying diners with copious delicacies from north of the 38th parallel, such as cold noodle soups, kimchi and alcoholic spirits with proclaimed therapeutic benefits. Since launching their first Pyongyang restaurant in China in the mid-1990s, North Korea's Haedanghwa Group has unveiled about 130 branches. Almost all are in China, though there have been others – one failed and closed in Amsterdam in 2012.
A Message To Journalists In The Trump Era by Martin Barton in Vanity Fair (2,200 words / 11 minutes). Marty Baron is the former editor of The Boston Globe who oversaw that publication's investigative reporting into the Catholic Church, which was brilliantly depicted in the film Spotlight earlier this year. Last week, he was awarded a prize in the memory and legacy of late Vanity Fair contributing editor and columnist Christopher Hitchens, and this is the text of the speech he gave. It takes a little while to warm up, but the journalists among Dispatches readers should read it right through to the end: "The truth is not meant to be hidden. It is not meant to be suppressed. It is not meant to be ignored. It is not meant to be disguised. It is not meant to be manipulated. It is not meant to be falsified. Otherwise, wrongdoing will persist."
After the release of the movie Spotlight, I was often asked how we at The Boston Globe were willing to take on the most powerful institution in New England and among the most powerful in the world, the Catholic Church. The question really mystifies me–especially when it comes from journalists or those who hope to enter the profession. Because holding the most powerful to account is what we are supposed to do. If we do not do that, then what exactly is the purpose of journalism? God forbid we take on the weaker institutions, the weaker individuals, while letting the strongest ones off the hook only because they can forcefully fight back.
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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