What’s in a name? Plenty, for an author writing a novel or a short story. As any armchair detective reading newspaper reports readily understands, just a character’s name can indicate their ethnicity and age. And where they live (whether Byron Bay or Mosman). Maybe even their wealth and social status.

Of course the sky is the limit if you’re writing something more fanciful. But if you’re writing a realistic Australian story with a character you want to portray as an average middle-aged Aussie bloke, you’re on safe ground calling him Craig, David, Michael, Greg, Steve, Darren or Brett. Throw in a Wayne, if you wish.

But forget naming him Jaxxon or Danyel. Or Atticus, no matter how much you enjoyed To Kill a Mocking Bird at school. For female characters, if you want to win the Miles Franklin award, please note that there are very few Patrick White-type aunts (or real-life grandmothers) named Savannah, Harper or Madison. Especially Maddisons with two Ds.

Similarly, for middle-aged female characters, Sharon, Janice, Rhonda, Karen, Donna, Georgina and Kylie are now safe picks, if no longer applicable for any woman under 50. For really elderly characters, however, you can safely use names like Jack and Charlotte, Ben and Alice, Thomas and Emily, William and Grace, Henry and Rose. And, name-fashions being what they are, they’re perfect for young characters as well.

Characters’ names have always fascinated me. Editing the proofs of a new book of short stories the other day, I found I had to change many people’s names because I’d liked them so much I’d used them over and over in vastly different stories and roles.

I don’t imagine Charles Dickens had such a repetition problem. Not with characters with such wildly cartoonish names as Wackford Squeers, Luke Honeythunder, Harold Skimpole, Polly Toodle, Silas Wegg, Mr Sloppy, John Podsnop, Mr Wopsle, Smike, Bumble, Pumblechook and Paul Sweedlepipe. Or David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, for that matter.

If no one could ever accuse Dickens of subtlety, you certainly knew where you stood – and still do today — with people called Ebenezer Scrooge and Uriah Heep, two Dickensian characters whose names have forever entered the English language as representing meanness and snivelling connivance.

It seems rather lame nowadays, but Dickens’ thousands of Victorian readers liked his Good Guys and Bad Guys being sharply defined by their names. Take Polly Toodle, for example. What better name for the rosy-cheeked wet nurse in Dombey and Son? Or Wackford Squeers, though a little obvious for a cruel orphanage school master.

Then there’s Silas Wegg, the one-legged shyster in Our Mutual Friend. And Mr Sloppy, the disabled fellow of the same book, not to mention Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, who’s described as “a malicious, grossly deformed, hunchback dwarf moneylender”, which seems to tick all the boxes of Dicken’s very Victorian sympathy/disgust for the physically challenged.

A less reliable behavioural and physical clue, perhaps, is the name of the same story’s “good-natured but easily-led lad”: Dick Swiveller, a modern online probe into whose name might accidentally lead the innocent literary inquirer down unexpected byways.

The names of some fictional characters, however, have captured the public consciousness well beyond the books that gave birth to them, in many cases more than a century before.

Any reader’s selection of famous book characters would surely include Robinson Crusoe, Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, Dr Frankenstein, Gulliver, Count Dracula, Anna Karenina, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Lady Chatterley, Jay Gatsby, Hannibal Lecter and Scarlett O’Hara.

Then there’s James Bond, Svengali, Lolita, Miss Havisham, Emma Bovary, Tristram Shandy, Peter Pan, Sam Spade, Tarzan, Harry Potter, Molly Bloom, Alice (in Wonderland), Dorian Gray, Philip Marlowe, Holden Caulfield and Winnie the Pooh. And you’d probably have to include Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Rapunzel.

I’m often asked where I get my characters’ names. For the surnames, usually by flipping through the phone book or classified ads. Then I choose a first name to fit the age, nationality and class of the character. I never knowingly use the name of an acquaintance, no matter how tempting it might be for an unpleasant character. Sometimes too tempting.

But if there’s even a hint of a real person identifiable in the story, I change their hair colour and physique and age just to make sure. And their nationality. And place of residence. And occupation. Maybe even their gender.

Then, when someone I don’t much like sidles up to me, frowning but clearly delighted, and says smugly, as they sometimes do, “I see you’ve put me in your book”, of course I deny everything.

Robert Drewe’s latest book is The True Colour of the Sea (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin).

penguin.com.au/books/the-true-colour-of-the-sea

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For Mullum Music Festival Director Glenn Wright, when it comes to creating events it’s about keeping it ‘small and beautiful’. In fact, this humbler, and quieter approach to the big personality world of Festival Directors is the hallmark of Wright’s creative stamp. He loves making little festivals, and the model is paying off, with Bellingen’s signature event Bello Winter Music about to hit its fifth year and a new festival for Bendigo in April 2019.

This year, he says, he’s excited about Bombino coming to the festival: “I’ve been working on getting Bombino out for a few years now. Earlier this year the New York Times wrote an article on Bombino and announced him as the next biggest thing on the international world music scene. Back in the early 90’s I remember the same heralding of Youssu Ndour in the same way. I”m just over the moon that they’re coming to Australia.”

Glenn Wright – Director of the Mullum Music Festival

After 16 years of running the Harbourside Brasserie – one of Sydney’s most iconic venues through the 80’s and 90’s – Glenn is passionate about music. In fact when he moved to Mullum with his partner to have their first child in 2003, he was still running Vitamin Records, the label he had created for artists he believed “had fallen through the cracks”.

“I took on artists who hadn’t had much traction, their work wasn’t mainstream, so it wasn’t pop, it was across genres, and it was building,” Glenn says. “Then digital downloads hit the music industry and finally subscription music, significantly changing the role of the record label.” It was this change in industry, his long history with the Sydney music scene and his experience creating Live Bait back in Bondi in 2003 that seeded the First Mullum Music Festival which is now in its 11^th year. “In Sydney when I was booking the Brasserie, there were lots of great venues, like The Basement, and the Landsdowne,” he says. “I thought wouldn’t that be fun to mimic that in a small regional town, having all those venues in one precinct – you could have a music party each day!”

Although it was the advent of the digital era that really slowed down his record label, Glenn saw this as an opportunity to build a festival to offer people something real. “In this modern day people love the real thing,” says Glenn. “They love to touch the real thing, everything is so digital or it’s on Youtube – so to put on a music arts festival and have people see feel and touch music is very special. I think its more important than ever because of the way most people tend to live their lives through a screen. A music festival succeeds best when you put your screen down and get up and dance.” A good festival, according to Glenn, is a digital detox.

Glenn believes that smaller events like Mullum Music offer something different to the big events. “Small Festivals can really put love into particular interesting and fun aspects of a festival,” says Glenn, “whether it’s comedy sessions, or outdoor theatre or small piano bars of that kind of thing. If you try and do that at a massive festival of 50 000 it just doesn’t work. It only works when you have a smaller audience. Woodford is the only large festival that still really manages to profile small and beautiful performances.”

Mullum Music Festival operates for four days in November –usually the third Thursday to Sunday, attracting around 8000 people with about 2500 in attendance each day, with 500 on opening night. What is different about Mullum Music is that it engages people from the community to participate, even if they haven’t purchased a ticket. “Around 2000 people come for the free events at the farmers market to the pop up performances, the markets and the Sunday street parade,” says Glenn.

The Sunday Street parade is something special. It’s not like a usual town parade where you stand on the sidelines and watch. This one is New Orleans inspired and features a cacophony of horns that invite thousands of passerbys to come together and dance. “I love the authenticity of the street parade,” says Glenn. “I’m an old trombone player and we bring together musicians from the festival, and community members. The parade is an invitation to get involved. People do it because they love music and want to be part of it. A couple of years ago the street parade got rolling and the California Honey Drops turned up and joined in, Harry Angus plays with us most years. There is this incredible connection between fans and the people working on the festival and the festival artists – there’s this powerful inclusiveness and enormous respect.”

Mulum Street Parade. Photography: Evan Malcolm.

Each year Glenn programs a festival that not only reaches out towards international and national profile acts, but also draws down on the strong base of local talent. “I watched the Sydney festival and it was always disheartening to see the lack of local artists perform at that festival, and it was almost a month where local musicians had to go interstate to find a gig, I don’t know if it’s the same now, but putting on a concert you can put on your internationals and nationals, but if you put on a festival you have to engage your local artists – otherwise it seems opportunistic and a bit mean, artists in a regional area want to get their art out and playing Mullum Music Festival gives them a chance to meet artists from other regions and get out and perform in major cities.’

One of the key features of Mullum Music Festivals is its knack for booking emerging artists just before they break through on the world stage. Tash Sultana played Mullum just two years back, now she’s in demand on the World stage. Parcels who came through the mentorship program are playing shows in Europe to hundreds of thousands of people.

“We focus on career artists who may have been through it and artists who may be about to go through the next step,”  says Glenn. “If you’re a music lover and you want to find the next Tash Sultana, then a boutique festival is a good place to start, if you are a real music fan and you know all about the music scene you’ll know Susannah Espie is one of the best singers in the country and she’s playing Mullum this year. We are not guided by who is the most popular act of the day but who will be in the future and who has an impressive career already. We delve into a lot of different genres, if you like diverse genres of music then this is the festival for you.”

Bombino – on this year’s list for Mullum Music Festival.

Mullum Music Festival 15 – 18 November. For line up info and tix go to Mullum Music Festival

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UK-based poets and film-makers Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery wanted to create a project with Wild Whispers which would explore the concept of adaptation and collaboration through ‘poetry film’, by sending a poetry film across the world, which was then re-created into a new poetry film and then passed on. The films, in different languages, were all ‘whispered’ from the previous one with the aim of tracing how poetry film crosses language and cultures.

The project travelled from the U.K. to India, Australia, Taiwan, France, South Africa, Belgium, Sweden and the U.S.A., creating poetry films in English, Malaylam, Chinese, French, Affrikaans, Belgium, American Sign Language, Navajo, Spanish, and Welsh.

Ye-Mimi from the Wild Whispers project invited 55 strangers in the park to read the Chinese version.

The Journey

Wild Whispers first port of call from the UK was India, before going on to Australia and then Taiwan. In Taiwan, the poetry filmmaker and artist Ye Mimi, invited 55 strangers in the park to read the Chinese version, their facial expressions, eyes, voice, and gestures all interpreting the poem. There are humorous moments when the handwritten poem led to unintentional phrases.

In France, the narrator creates a whispering fairytale-like soundtrack to the idea that ‘generation after generation, children vanish, replaced by adults who vanish at their turn…’.

After receiving the Urdu version of the poem from India, Australian filmmaker Marie Craven arranged for it to be translated into English by a professional translation agency. Marie was then keen to work with the writer Candida Baker, with whom she had already made two previous poetry films, and had established a working relationship.  Says Candida: “I was honoured to be asked to collaborate with Marie.  I took a very personal approach to this poem – I grew up in the country in England, and these days I live near Byron Bay, and green tree frogs have been a small but constant presence in my life.  I imagined these two very different landscapes, and I wondered what it would be like if, because of war, I had to flee the countryside for the cities.  If I had to lose the presence of the frogs, the lakes and the woods.  The ‘original’ words spoke to me of loss, war and death – of the pointless ongoing tragedy of Syria.”  The poem became global rather than personal, and gradually the final version began to emerge.

Helen Dewbery image from the Dewbery/Cameron poetry film.

Every country involved in the project had a different interpretation – the Afrikaans version juxtaposes the industrial world of the city with nature. The narrator yearns to be close to nature and mourns the separation from their roots. In New Mexico, the poetry film combines native American Navajo and American Sign Language, showcasing the resistance of the Native American peoples against centuries of cultural genocide, settler colonialism and violence. In Sweden the poem took on the issues of faith, love, suffering and death – and of being lost and confused in a highly technical world that has created confusion and solitude.

The project has also highlighted the challenges, and richness, of translation for poetry film. In India the translator was given the poem in Malayalam to translate into Urdu. As Malayalam is a highly Sanskritized language, she first had to translate it into Hindi and then from Hindi to Urdu before it was translated in Australia into English. The text.doc approach used elsewhere was an attempt to translate the poem into abstract digital field recordings by using Google Translate to create a chain of translations from English into every available language, described as ‘working with a software collaborator that can produce, but not understand, language”.

Wild Whispers was launched in the UK in early October.  You can view it here:   https://elephantsfootprint.com

The project is also available for touring: https://elephantsfootprint.com/contact.

The project premiered at the Swindon Poetry Festival in the UK.  The Australian poetry film is viewable to the public: https://vimeo.com/187257017

________________________________________________________________________________The Participants

Country of production: UK

Language: English

Title: Frog on Water

Filmmaker: Chaucer Cameron/Helen Dewbery

Editor: Helen Dewbery

Country of production: India

Language: Malayalam/Urdu

Title: Vellatthinu Mukalile Thavala/ Paani Par Mendhak

Filmmaker and editor: Rajesh James

Translators: Malayalam, Jose Varghese. Urdu, Jhilmil Breckenridge

Country of production: Australia

Language: English

Title: Shadow Lullaby

Filmmaker and editor: Marie Craven

Translator: Candida Baker

Country of production: Taiwan

Language: Chinese

Title: 綠金色的陰影躍進我的眼睛

Filmmaker and editor: Ye Mimi

Translator: Ye Mimi

Country of production: France and Morocco

Language: French

Title: Une ombre vert mordoré est entrée dans mes yeux Filmmaker and editor: bobie (Yves Bommenel) Translator: Marie Laureillard

Country of production: South Africa

Language: Afrikaans

Title: ’n Brons-groen skaduwee in my oë

Filmmaker and director: Erentia Bedeker

Editor: Diek Grobler

Translator: Erentia Bedeker

Country of production: Belgium

Language: Dutch

Title: In het woud

Filmmaker and director: Judith Dekker

Translator: Judith Dekker

Country and place of production: New Mexico, USA Language: Navajo, American Sign Language, and English Title: Wild Whispers: New Mexico

Filmmaker and editor: Sabina England

Translator: Meryl Van Der Bergh (from Afrikaans to English rough translation), World Translation Center for Navajo, Sabina England for American Sign Language and improved English prose.

Country and place of production: Berlin, Germany & Austin, Texas

Language: English

Title: frog_poem_text.doc

Filmmaker and editor: Annelyse Gelman Translator: Annelyse Gelman / Google Translate Music: Annelyse Gelman

Country of production: Sweden

Language: Spanish

Title: La búsqueda

Filmmaker and editor: Eduardo Yagüe

Translator: Cristina Newton

Country of production: U.K. Language: Welsh

Title: Chwiliad

Filmmaker and editor: Othniel

Translator: Sharon Larkin

Country of production: USA Language: English

Title: Sea Change

Filmmaker and editor: Dave Bonta

Translator: Sharon Larkin/Dave Bonta

The post Wild, wild whispers are gonna drag me away… appeared first on .

Amongst the incredible line-up are British India, Ash Grunwald, Jeff Martin (The Tea Party), Lloyd Spiegel, Hussy Hicks, Opal Ocean, The Fumes, Dallas Frasca, Steve Edmonds, Joel McDonald, Nathan Kaye, Tullara, Minnie Marks, Shai Shriki, and many more.

This local festival prides itself on being accessible to all – add on the impressive guitar market, masterclasses and workshops worth their weight in gold, major raffles, brewery atmosphere, an intimate setting in which to rub shoulders with heroes of the guitar, and charity support offered by this event, and it’s one festival not to miss.

After rocking out to shredders and getting inspired by British India, The Fumes, Dallas Frasca, Legs Electric and more on Saturday, guitar lovers and aficionados will have the opportunity to really indulge in this ‘guitar lovers heaven’ on Sunday. As well as a guitar market (bring the credit card!), and performances from more legends including Ash Grunwald, Steve Edmonds, The Soul Movers, Nathan Kaye and more, get up close and personal in the guitar masterclasses.

Jeff Martin: Giving a Masterclass at the Byron Bay Guitar Festival.

SUNDAY MASTERCLASSES & WORKSHOPS

SAE Qantum Byron Bay is presenting a series of intimate theatre-style masterclasses and workshops with some of Australia’s masters of the six-string, and featuring some of the world’s moist celebrated guitar brands. This is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for beginners and advanced players alike. Here’s just a taste of what you can expect:

Jeff Martin presented by Byron Music

Jeff will be talking through guitar ‘alternate tunings’ that he has created and used throughout The Tea Party and solo works. These alternate tunings have been used to create the multi-faceted soundscapes that have become a renowned signature for Jeff’s music. Jeff will run through some of the Tea Party’s most intricate songs and discuss the method behind the music.

Lloyd Spiegel presented by Wazinator Stompboxes

Join Lloyd Spiegel (AU blues legend) and Warwick Porter (Wazinator Stompbox founder) in this rare discussion and demonstration of acoustic guitar technique. Lloyd will reveal his secrets to playing fast, singing loud and his methods of connecting to the audience. Warwick will introduce the range of Wazinator acoustic stompboxes and their different features. This workshop will be fun and informative and offer an up close and personal experience with one of Australia’s greatest blues players.

Joining these legends are flamenco freaks Opal Ocean presented by Yamaha, Angus Marshall presented by Fender, and a special workshop by Pro Music. Stay tuned for more info on these.

The masterclasses are extremely popular and there is limited seating available, so get in quick.

Byron Bay Guitar Festival is an all ages event, and supports the charity Be Happy Music Club.

Tickets are $50 for one day or $90 for two and are ON SALE NOW at www.byronbayguitarfestival.com

Full 2018 line up:

British India I Ash Grunwald I Dallas Frasca I The Fumes I Jeff Martin I Hussy Hicks I Lloyd Spiegel I Opal Ocean I Jimi Hendrix Show w. Steve Edmonds Band I The Soul Movers I Murray Cook I Southern River Band I Flying Machine I Joel McDonald I Frankie’s House Band I Andy Jans Brown & Cozmic I Tullara I Malcura I Legs Electric I Dan Hannaford I Jereome Williams I Martin Lartigau I Shai Shiriki I Nathan Kaye I El Dorado I When Hawk Met Sparrow I Taj Farrant I Jordan McRobbie I Byron High School Students + more!

General festival info:

The 2^nd Annual Byron Bay Guitar Festival

Dates: Saturday 6 & Sunday 7 October 2018

Venue: Byron Bay Brewery, Byron Bay

Tickets at: https://www.byronbayguitarfestival.com/

 +61 400 354 095

#BBGF2018

Official website: https://www.byronbayguitarfestival.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/byronbayguitarfest/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/byronbayguitarfest/

The post Byron Bay Guitar Festival Rocks Around Again appeared first on .

My wife Lynne and I recently completed our nineteenth trans-continental road crossing between Lismore and Perth, each one via the 1675k Eyre Highway which links Port Augusta (South Australia) and Norseman (Western Australia).

The return journeys, depending on which of countless route options we choose either end of the Eyre Highway, usually end up around 12,000ks over six or seven weeks.

Unfortunately, because these are family-focussed trip, photography can’t have priority. Budget and time restrictions (and often school holidays) compel pre-booking and sticking to a schedule.  No exploring curious side-tracks, or waiting around to get the right subject in the right light. They’re for dedicated photo trips.

Instead, I always revert to one of the basics – and fundamental pleasures – of photography: however restricted the time and location, you still continually look for THE shot that will change the world.
I haven’t found it yet. But the effort greatly enriches the journey; aka, it’s not the destination itself but the getting there that’s important.

The photos which follow are the result of that approach. They aren’t linked thematically, I’ve selected them from several dozen possibles from this year’s seven-week journey, using just one measure: they please me!

Captions: 

1. EYRE HIGHWAY, SOUTH AUSTRALIA. 2. SERIOUS OUTBACKER KIT SEEN IN FREMANTLE, W.A. 3. THE NULLARBOR PLAIN. 4. HEED THE ESCORT VANS AND GET OFF THE ROAD! 5. SAND DUNE REFLECTION NEAR POINT SINCLAIR AND PORT LE HUNT, SOUTH  AUSTRALIA. 6. FRESHWATER BAY, MOSMAN PARK. 7. JOURNEYS START WITH FAREWELLS AND END WITH GREETINGS. THIS SIGNIFIES BOTH FOR OUR 2018 ROAD TRIP. 8. CONTRAST. FREMANTLE HIGH STREET. 9. AT THE BALLARAT ART GALLERY, VICTORIA. IF THIS WAS AN EXHIBIT, THERE WAS NO ARTIST CREDIT. BIZARRE PLACE FOR A TAP. 10. AT THE NEW YORK CITY’S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART EXHIBITION, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA, MELBOURNE. 11. A VISUAL JOKE, SEEN IN MONA VALE, NORTHERN BEACHES, SYDNEY. 12. ON THE WAY HOME – BETWEEN TAMWORTH AND TENTERFIELD. A REMINDER OF THE SAVAGE 2018 DROUGHT.

You can see more of Andrew Sooby’s work at: ANDREW SOOBY PHOTOGRAPHY luminousmudbrick.net <https://luminousmudbrick.net>

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Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s search for new sounds – especially natural or “found” sounds – leads him to standing outside in the rain with a plastic bucket over his head, listening to the noise the drops make as they land.

The film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, screening at the Byron Bay Film Festival, documents that obsessive search and how it fuels Sakamoto’s compositions, along with much else about the innovative musician, activist, writer, actor and dancer.

We watch – and listen – as he slides a violin bow across a cymbal’s edge, pounds a hollow log and plucks away at a piano that has been “warped and frayed” by its drowning in the tsunami that devastated Fukushima in 2011 – the focus of Sakamoto’s other preoccupation, the insanity of the world’s embrace of the nuclear option, be it for power or weaponry.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Searching for new sounds.

His artistry and activism are intertwined and the search always uncovers something more than sound: in the film it takes him, thrillingly, to the Arctic and to Africa. Seeking to answer the question “why are we such a violent species?” he travels to Northern Kenya, to the site where Turkana Boy – the oldest human remains – were found. “It’s where we all came from,” he says. “The African Exodus started with a family group of about 30 – our universal ancestors. We are all ‘African’. So the notion of race is a false concept.”

And in music he finds a commonality: “Africa is a vast continent but it has one universal rhythm pattern. That family shared one language, one music … the first sounds we made as humans, our original language. What songs were sung? What was our first language?”

He is struck by the “minimal and modest” community living there still, and gleefully reports recording “some great sounds” at the site, and using them “at length in my song Only Love Can Conquer Hate”.

Sakamoto is fascinated by water and in the Arctic Circle he tramps across boulders and snow to drill down through the ice to locate water running below – the sound of snow melting. He is “fishing” for the sound, he says, and records it, capturing “the purest sound I have ever heard”. He incorporates these pellucid tinkles into a later work, Glacier, along with the tingshas, or Tibetan hand cymbals he plays within that wind-swept realm.

This mixture of natural sounds and instrumentation creates “a sonic blending that is both chaotic and unified”, and segments of it within the film, alongside his calm and modest musings, make Coda an enriching aesthetic and meditative experience. For the sounds all have a significance beyond the merely aural – in the Arctic he is “at the frontlines of global warming” the melting snow below the ice a sound from a pre-industrial age, when the Earth was a healthier place. Footage of these expeditions pre-dates a diagnosis of throat cancer in 2014 – something that made him put a compositional project on hold, and indeed stop playing altogether.

But in their expansiveness – in the breadth of Sakamoto’s curiosity and wonder at nature – they mirror the expansiveness that comes as he re-emerges into creativity, into composition once again, despite the cancer.

Despite a diagnosis of throat cancer Sakomoto keeps creating.

A humble heroism is revealed: while ill he remained active in the anti-nuclear fight, and towards the film’s end he is brave enough to enter the contamination zone around Fukushima, and walk along the seafront, his Geiger counter going off the scale. The camera circles him repeatedly, expressing the giddy sensation of absorbing the unbelievable reality of a radio-active ocean.

It is a gross example of humanity’s impact on nature: Sakamoto sees that impact everywhere, even in the magnificent piano he composes on – an instrument only made possible by the Industrial Revolution which created machines capable of exerting the tremendous pressure needed to bend the wood out of its natural shape to suit the tastes of humanity.

The tsunami piano takes on a new significance: a chord he has played on it leaps out as he is listening to his latest composition. It sounds damaged, melancholic – a bit like the composer himself – but fits perfectly into the musical work. And, he suggests, the piano’s transformation in the tsunami is one in which nature reasserts itself, slowly taking the man-made object back to its natural state.

Sakamoto is probably best known in the West as the composer of scores for films such as Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, and these are lovingly referenced here. But his work since, and even very recently, is more significant: richer and more meaningful.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda will be of interest to anyone concerned with current Japan, or with nuclear power, or even those interested in witnessing a man’s response to cancer. Fans of his music will gain an understanding of the beautiful spirit of its creator.

For them, and all music lovers, and anyone interested in the creative process, it is especially mesmerising.

By Digby Hildreth

The Infinite World of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is revered the world over for her extraordinary repetitive patterns and her ‘dotty’ paintings.

Kusama – Infinity, a 17-year project conceived by American filmmaker Heather Lenz, brings Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s fascinating journey to life through rich imagery, archival material interspersed with great snapshots from 1960s America—media imagery, archival video footage and photographs—together with short interviews with key museum figures and Kusama’s long-time friends and associates. Importantly, the narrative includes readings and interviews with the artist and revealing insights into her art practice. The film presents a chronological overview of a colourful life—a story of struggle, of hard times and above all, one of fierce ambition.

Today, Yayoi Kusama (b.1929 Matsumoto, Japan) is the most successful living female artist, although this is a relatively recent accolade. It is only in the past 30 years of her prolific career that she has gained greater recognition for her contribution to contemporary art. Her practice is far-ranging: painting, sculpture, fashion designer, installation, collage, performance art, film, poetry, novels and anthologies. In 1968, she starred in her award-winning film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (directed by experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut). In 1969, she opened a boutique and in 2012 co-created the Louis Vuitton + Yayoi Kusama Collection.

Kusama – Infinity affirms the artist’s important contribution to the story of art; her unrelenting desire to succeed (against the odds)—with little support from her family (and eventual repudiation), many years of patchy interest from gallerists, ongoing illness and intense competition from the male-dominated art scene in 1960s New York.

Yayoi Kusama and some of her more recent Infinity Nets…

Central to the narrative is the formative New York years (1958–73). Lenz acknowledges Georgia O’Keeffe’s importance and the adoration Kusama received from the reclusive genius Joseph Cornell. While Kusama failed to achieve the fame she so eagerly desired in the 1960s and a fraction of that enjoyed by her male counterparts—Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jackson Pollock— she remained loyal to her practice, consistently depicting her obsessions and inner torments.

Following her move to the United States, Kusama began producing Infinity Nets paintings; in the early 1960s, soft sculptures (continuous productions of her fears—the phallus—in an attempt to self-therapy); in December 1963 her first installation Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (which inspired Warhol); and less than three years later, her ground-breaking Peep Show/ Endless Love Show (first Infinity/mirror room). From the mid-1960s Kusama was staging Happenings (often anti-war/pro-peace performances incorporating her trademark dot painted onto naked performers) that attracted much publicity in the US and Europe and a backlash in Japan.

Lenz’s film begins and ends in Japan—from a prosperous, dysfunctional family, having a troubled childhood and experiencing frightening visions from a young age, to her return to Japan in 1973, decline in health and self-hospitalisation (to this day her place of residence) and return to a fervent art practice and ultimately global recognition.

In the years following her move back to Japan, Kusama’s work received little attention. In the 1980s there was renewed interest in her work and this increased in the 1990s. The final chapter of the film outlines some key exhibitions: from ‘Yayoi Kusama: Retrospective’ at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York in 1989; to the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 (Narcissus Garden was her unofficial entry in the 1966 biennale) where she was the first artist to stage a solo exhibition in the Japanese pavilion; and ‘Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958–1968’ a major retrospective, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1998) and travelled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

An Infinity Room – Lithoar, the Spirit of the Pumpkins.

Today, museums are eager to exhibit her work: high visitor numbers are guaranteed. Her Infinity rooms attract long queues and when on display her work The obliteration room (2002–present, in the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection) is obliterated in days as visitors clamour to stick coloured dots to a white room filled with white-painted furniture. Her audience is far-ranging, and her work lends itself well to an ever-increasing world of social media users—museum visitors eager to capture themselves in her wondrous infinities.

Kusama tells the story of climbing the Empire State Building soon after first arriving in the city in the late 1950s and there deciding to conquer New York. Whilst she did not achieve the success she craved during this stage of her career, Kusama: Infinity is proof that now she has conquered the art world. With her ever-increasing popularity , the release of Lenz’s film is timely.

Emily Gray

The Byron Bay Film Festival runs from October 12-21. Kusama: Infinity screens at 7.30pm on Thursday, October 18 at Byron Community Centre. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda screens four times at the Festival – in Byron Bay, Brunswick Heads and Murwillumbah. Program and tickets at BBFF.com.au

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For two years, Wagner and Derrett – both well-known professional photographers have spent their time looking for people, who: “at first sight we found interesting”, says Wagner, and the results of which have produced a diverse and intriguing body of work. Throughout that time they’ve  photographed over eighty locals, mostly unknown to them. The sum effect of this project is very much a ‘portrait’ of Lismore.

Rosemary Bashford. Born 1932 in Sydney, New South Wales.
‘My name is Norman Lindsay and I would like to paint you for the Archibald and I promise you your life will surely change’.
Rosemary grew up in a family surrounded by 17th Century art, exquisite furniture, and fine surrounds. Leaving school at fifteen she attended business college, worked in the GPO pay office, was a legal secretary, briefly did nursing at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and later became the social editor of the Double Bay Courier. One day when she was sixteen years old while travelling on a tram Rosemary was aware of the attentions of a young man. He approached her.
He was a young artist called Norman Lindsay and he wanting to paint her for the Archibald. Despite much consultation with the family in the end her parents said ‘no’.
Aged twenty-one she travelled via sea to visit family in Devon. On the return trip Rosemary met her husband Ronald Bashford and in 1954 they married. Rosemary and Ronald had seven children. Eventually deciding to leave the city, Rosemary, Ronald, and their children, left the city moving to a farm west of Kyogle. In the 1970’s the house was destroyed by fire and rebuilt. Since the 1980’s Rosemary has lived in South Lismore. Rosemary’s love of art continues. She adores her garden which is very French and boasts over seventy old worldly scented rose bushes.
I have heard Rosemary referred to as Lismore’s Katherine Hepburn.
The painting on the wall behind her is of Rosemary, her daughter Anna, and her mother Lalla. It was painted by her son Paul Bashford (de Grey). Rosemary was the first person I photographed for this project. (Photograph: Jacklyn Wagner.)

In many ways this project is an updated version of Jacklyn’s 2001 ‘Southies’ project, based around the inhabitants of South Lismore. This body of work, now residing in the Gallery’s permanent collection, continues to be one of the gallery’s most cherished groups of work – due to the loving portrayal of the subjects. Heart and Soul, which again will enter our collection at the conclusion of this exhibition, thanks to the generosity of the artists, will no doubt continue to do the same.

Wagner and Derrett have stated a mutual respect for each other’s work, and both have had an unwavering commitment to the project. This has resulted in a relatively seamless exhibition in which both photographers are proud to have been involved.

The project has also been embraced by their photographic subjects with a sense of anticipation and  that they are part of the exhibition: “Opening night will be something special. I think it will be very much an exhibition for the subjects and their families,” says Wagner.

Alethea Jones. Born 1979
A passionate wonder-woman who wants to see women break the glass ceiling, especially in film making.
Alethea was an Alstonville girl who showed great ability in dance, acting and singing. After high school she did a degree in Theatre, Acting and Film Making at the University of Southern Queensland. She spent time making films for
advertising. Alethea won the prestigious Tropfest with a quirky short film, Lemonade Stand.
This projected her to Hollywood, Los Angeles where she now lives making TV series and movies. She recently made a full cinema film called Fun Mom Dinner with Toni Collette and is working on a number of major feature film projects.
When she comes home we always have a photoshoot and have been working on a series of pictures of Alethea wearing her mother’s ballroom dancing gowns. She wanted this photo taken in her parents’ lounge room, wearing a dress from a Ballroom Competition and under the painting by her sister Matina, a distinguished artist who was tragically killed in a car accident near Alstonville some years back. (Photograph: Peter Derrett)

Brodie Buttons. Born 1993 in Cooma, New South Wales.
I once chased a girl to an Irish dance but fell in love with the music and not the girl.
Brodie is of Australian and Sicilian heritage. Until he was sixteen Brodie and his younger sisters were home schooled by their mum. As a boy he remembers school work finished early in the afternoon followed by playtime in the bushland
adjoining their home. When he was fifteen Brodie was hit by a car and hospitalised. For the first time in his life he thought deeply about mortality and life. At sixteen he enrolled at the Lismore Conservatorium of Music studying
contemporary music for two years. Playing in a band he soon hooked up with the local musicians and formed the Irish and bluegrass group, ‘The Button Collective’. A bit of a gypsy wanderer Brodie likes to live in the moment and has
accumulated a large network of friends and contacts up and down the East Coast. Now he mostly writes songs about love and losing one’s religion and aims to create one new piece of music a month. He writes songs people can relate to in small and bigger ways. Either way is fine.
I need to create to function.
One day I would like to build a small shack, remote, safe, and somewhat isolated.
Brodie is still busking, living the transient life and was making his way to Sydney last time we spoke. He visits Lismore every few months.
I can’t stay away too long. (Photograph: Jacklyn Wagner)

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Brooke is celebrating 25 years behind the potter’s wheel with her exhibition ‘Stillness and Time’ at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina from 29 August to 23 September. The stunning exhibition features Brooke’s ceramics accompanied by photography by Demetre Minchev.

“I wanted to acknowledge my tools with both photography and my pottery. I’ve always felt photography and pottery are similar with their immediacy and truth,” says Brooke. “It’s something I want to celebrate after being a professional potter for 25 years – something I still can’t believe.”

For the last eight years, Brooke Clunie has showcased her work from her own studio gallery, the Red Door Studio, in Fernleigh.

“I purpose-built my studio gallery so people can come and see me at work, at the process of making and the many steps involved. Ultimately, I hope this creates a relationship with pieces purchased and a meaningful shopping experience,” she says. “I think people are genuinely seeking a connection. We have been so disconnected by mass production that we’re longing to get back in touch with the crafts.”

She attributes the growth she has experienced over the last five years to this, as local restaurants and cafes have also sought connection through locally sourced foods and the wares on which they serve them.”

Presenting her ceramics with images was an idea that developed as Brooke sat at her wheel and created. “The repetition, the circular motion and the hum of my wheel with my hands continually creating absorbing this quiet energy and my two hands connecting and dancing with each piece, it all fed into the idea of making a moment of stillness – and so the exhibition unfolded. The images by Demetre Minchev capture my creative journey.”

Photographs by Demetre Minchev

‘Stillness and Time’ is showing at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina from 29 August to 23 September.

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Don dropped dead on the sand and that was that. We’d just finished our lighthouse walk and he bent down to remove his shoes for our swim and keeled over. He was in his blue board shorts with the red palm trees. One shoe on and one shoe off when the ambulance took him — his new Rockport walkers. Only seventy-eight. Three years ago now and as I said, that was that.

Since that moment the days often look blurry around the edges, like I’m wearing his glasses by mistake. People loom around corners when I don’t expect them and next minute they’re on the doorstep. Jehovahs. Seventh Dayers. Charity collectors.

A Green type of woman in drifty clothes came by wanting to save baby fruit bats. She said the cold snap was making them lose their grip and fall out of the trees and they needed to be wrapped up in bandannas and fed mango smoothies. She was collecting money to provide the bandannas and smoothies and she showed me a photo of a baby bat in a red bandanna to clinch the deal.

“Look how cute it is, peeping out snug and warm,” she said.

“Cuteness is a survival characteristic of baby animals,” I said. “If you ask me, this one looks a bit confused being right side up instead of hanging upside down.”

“But very cute, you must admit,” she said, shaking her Save the Grey-Headed Flying-Fox collection tin. It hardly rattled. She was one of those North Coast women who look better from a distance.

The reason I was unsympathetic was that we’ve got hundreds of them living in a colony in our street, raiding our fruit trees and screeching all night and doing their business all over our decks, especially the Hassetts’ and the Rasmussens’, and the council playground so kids can’t play outdoors, and probably spreading the Kendra virus or Ebola or something.

Even worse than their noise and mess and being kept awake all night, the most irritating thing about them is they take only one bite out of each piece of fruit. They like to sample one bite out of every papaya and mango and mandarin on the coast — and they ruin the lot. And of course they’re protected under the Wildlife Act.

Mind you, there’s even people around here who are fond of brown snakes, the ones that kill you quickest. Those people need a slap, honestly. And down at Broken Head there used to be signs saying Do Not Molest the Sharks. The tourists pinched all the signs for souvenirs.

I said to her, “Let nature take its course, miss. If I was a fruit bat and the weather got too nippy, I wouldn’t wait for a bandanna. I’d up stakes and fly to north Queensland.”

Another day a young woman with a bossy accent called in to convince the “household” to switch to a different electricity provider. Sun-Co or North-Sun or something. There were lots of benefits for the “household” in switching to Sun-Co, she said.

I told her it wasn’t much of a household any more. “Just this gnarly old bird.”

“You should go solar and save yourself many dollars,” she insisted, in a South African sort of voice. “The sun is so harsh here you might as well benefit financially from it.”

The way she said “harsh” it sounded like “horsh”. Then she looked me up and down in a superior way. “Your skin looks like you enjoy plenty of sun.”

I let that go. “I certainly do,” I said, and gave her a big sunny grin. “I swim every day, rain or shine. I’ve earned every one of these wrinkles.”

At eighty you can choose which insults you respond to. I said the stove was gas and I just used electricity to run the TV and boil the kettle. I told her I only ate cheese sandwiches and the pensioners’ ten-dollar three-course special at the bowling club. A glass of brown rum of an evening. No point cooking for one.

I said, “Miss, when it’s dark and cold I just creep into bed like the decrepit old widow I am.”

She raised her drawn-on eyebrows and cut short her electricity spiel then, like I was one of those eccentric old witches with bird’s nest hair and forty-three cats. Maybe I’d laid the elderly stuff on too thick. But she was a hard-faced girl.

* * *

Ever notice that after people pass away the world seems to have more sunsets than dawns? I try to avoid sunsets. They stand for things being over. With sunsets I think of Don in his palm-tree board shorts swimming over the trees and hills into those pink and gold clouds — that exaggerated heaven you see in the pamphlets the Jehovahs hand out. And our darling boy Nathan and his friend Carlos in ‘87. My own Mum and Dad. Oh, sunsets draw the sadness out.

When that sunset feeling seeps in, watch out. Don’t think about everyone gone, and no grandchildren. Sorrow shows in your face. Stay upbeat and busy is my motto. Don’t worry yourself about last words either. (Don’s final word he bubbled out on the sand sounded like “Thursday” or “birthday” – I’ve stopped wondering what it meant.) And don’t blame Carlos any more for making Nathan sick. I try to face east and the dawn and the beginning of things.

Just after sun-up every morning, all seasons, I do my lighthouse walk. It’s always interesting – big blue jellyfish the size of bin lids lying there; sometimes an octopus or little stingray beached in a rock pool. One morning the shore was strewn with hundreds of green capsicums, as if a capsicum freighter had jettisoned them. All green, no red ones, just floating there like blow-up bath toys.

What I enjoy these days is stopping to pick up shells and stones and interesting bits of driftwood to take home. I look for those rare stones shaped like hearts.

Don called this stuff “flotsam”. He hated beach décor. “Listen, Bet. Are we doing our exercise or picking up flotsam?” he’d say. “Who wants to live in a beachcomber’s shack?” He preferred the surfaces kept clear for his barometer collection and shiny brass telescope and Sudoku books and his cricketers’ and politicians’ memoirs. Books with deadly-dull titles. Afternoon Light and Cabinet Diary and A Good Innings. God save us!

After my walk I leave the morning’s beach souvenirs on my towel and then I’m in the sea, swimming the kilometre from The Pass to Main Beach like Don and I used to.

One thing’s for sure – it’s my love of the ocean that keeps me going. You know what I call the ocean? Dr Pacific. All I need to keep me fit and healthy is my daily consultation with Dr Pacific.

“Morning!” I yell out to the surfers waxing their boards on the sand, zipping up their steamers. “I’m off to see the Doctor!”

Some of the boys give me a friendly wave. They treat me like I’m their crazy brown granny. “Morning, Bet! Looking good!” They can’t wait to hit the surf and ride those barrels. “They’re pumping today!” they yell.

You see things out there — fish galore, and there’s a pod of dolphins that lives off the Cape, plus many turtles. And shapes and shadows. Sometimes there’s a splash nearby, but I just keep going. I imagine the shadow and splash is Don still swimming alongside me.

* * *

We’re on the trailing edge of tropical cyclones here on the country’s most easterly point. One moment it’s a hot summer’s day and then Cyclone Norman or Cyclone Sharon spins south with its high winds, choppy surf and water spouts, little tornados twirling across the ocean. The humidity drives us locals out onto our decks. Everyone sits there with their beers and Hibachis and watches the weather over the sea like it’s the Discovery Channel.

It’s all to do with La Nina or El Nino or something. Firstly, clouds bank up over the fishing boats and container ships on the horizon, then the sky turns thundery and purple, the sea looks sulky and there’s distant sheet lightning over the Gold Coast. You can smell the storm racing south. The air smells of meat.

The wind’s blowing barbecue smoke into your face. Pressure builds up in your ears. Then a yellowish mist drops over the ocean and hailstones begin pelting down. By now the fruit bats have got night and day mixed up and they start shrieking in this strange muddy daylight as if the sky’s falling.

Just as quickly the hail stops, like a tap’s been turned off, the sky’s clear and the wind moves off-shore. The waves spray backwards against the tide in lines of spindrift. The air’s so sharp you can see the humpbacks breaching on their way back to the Antarctic.

Funny how the cyclone weather gets all the bachelor whales over-stimulated. The sea’s getting strangely warm for them here and they start displaying for the girl whales. Slapping their tails on the water, showing off like teenage boys. Slap, slap, over and over.

* * *

During Cyclone Sharon we were all out on our decks every day for a week. Even the main bat victims, the Rasmussens and Hassetts. Curiosity and anxiety plus a faint shred of hope brought everyone out. It was bedlam with the noise of the coastguard helicopters and the spotter planes and the lifesavers in their rubber duckies and jet-skis and the water-police launches. Up and down the shoreline and river mouths they were searching for poor Russell Monaghetti.

What happened was Russell’s prawn trawler, the Tropic Lass, overturned at night in the cyclone seas off Cape Byron. Russell and his two young deckhands were believed lost. But next afternoon, the youngest boy, Lachie Pascall, crawled up on Belongil beach.

Lachie had been guided by the lighthouse and swum eleven miles to shore. He was exhausted, flat as a tack, but he told the rescue services approximately where the boat had sunk.

He said he’d left the others clinging to floating stuff when he set off to swim to land. So they concentrated the hunt and, you wouldn’t believe it, six hours later they found Brendan Lutz, the second boy. Brendan was just alive. He was badly sun-blistered and dehydrated and hugging an ice box. They had to prise his fingers off it.

For a day or so that gave everyone hope. Brendan said the last he’d seen of Russell he was clutching a marker buoy. But now there was no sign of him, and after another five days the search for him was called off.

Very sad. I knew poor Russell. His boat operated out of the Brunswick Heads fishermen’s marina and when he wasn’t at sea he was a regular drinker down at the bowling club on Friday and Saturday nights. He was quite a big wheel, on the club committee and everything.

“How’s my surfer chick?” he’d call out. He liked to flirt with me in a teasing way. “Still fighting the surfers off, Betty?” he’d say. “If only I stood a chance!”

“Too young for me,” I’d shoot back. “I’m no cougar.” Russell was late sixties, I’m guessing. A good-looking silvery fellow. Lovely smile. The dashing, cheeky sort I used to go for before Don came along.

Russell knew I liked a rum or two of an evening. During the bingo he’d sneak a mojito onto the table for me when I wasn’t looking. Once he pinched a hibiscus flower off the bush by the club’s entrance and left it alongside the drink.

* * *

That strange time of Cyclone Sharon I’d be walking home from my meal at the bowling club about nine — it’s only a couple of blocks — and I’d look up and the sky would be thronging with dopey fruit bats caught in the lighthouse beam. Flapping wilder than usual, squealing, and crashing into trees and electricity wires. Bats were even on the sand and struggling in the shallows. Where’s your famous radar now? I wondered.

The colony had started raiding the local coffee plantations. They’d chewed up thousands of dollars’ worth of ripe beans and the local growers were in a panic. As usual, Parks and Wildlife was no help.

“The grey-headed flying-fox is a protected coastal species,” they said. Blah, blah. “Try scare guns or netting the plantations.” But the nets were too expensive and the fake guns only made the bats shriek and act crazier, especially now they were addicted to coffee.

As their caffeine habit increased, the bats became even more speedy and twitchy. Their flying was more reckless, their screeching and squabbles were even shriller than usual. And they began to fall off the perch.

It took a while but the survivors eventually woke up to themselves and threw off their caffeine addiction. Mind you, there wasn’t much left to eat around here by then. One full moon there was a great squawking and flapping, as if they’d come to a decision, and what was left of the colony upped stakes and flew north into the wind.

Carol Hassett’s house had taken the brunt of their droppings and noise. Carol said she hoped they all had headaches from coffee-withdrawal.

* * *

I was on my morning lighthouse walk at low tide. It was three or four weeks after the latest cyclone had rearranged the shoreline and something not regular, a bump on the smoothness, caught my eye on the hard-packed sand. A big shiny white bone had just washed up.

I stopped and picked it up. It hadn’t been long in the sea. No weed was growing on it, and it wasn’t eroded. It didn’t look like any animal bone I could recall. Thick, quite heavy, it was about as long as – I’m sorry to say — a human thigh bone.

I know I think about things too much these days. If I’m not careful my imagination runs away with me. But as I turned it over in my hand, boy, I had that prickly sensation on the back of my neck. This old duck almost passed out there on the shore.

I said to myself, “Betty, you’re holding a thigh bone in your hand!” The sides were smooth and one end of the bone was cleanly snapped. At its widest end the bone was jagged, with a zig-zag edge of sharp points, as if it had been severed by a big pair of pinking shears.

I held the white bone with the zig-zag edge and my neck did that prickly thing. I was thinking of the search for Russell, and of his friendly ways, and his silvery looks, and of what I now presumed had happened to him. It took all my concentration not to collapse on the sand.

What should I do with the bone? Take it to the Byron Bay police? The cops would probably laugh it off as bait from a lobster pot or garbage thrown from a ship. (“This lady thinks she’s found a femur, sergeant!”)

Lots of thoughts struck me. If it was Russell’s thigh bone, would his next of kin appreciate its discovery? (He was close to his three daughters and he had an ex-wife somewhere.) Wouldn’t the evidence of the bone – that sharp, zigzag pattern – be too brutal for his girls? Shouldn’t there be a thingamajig, a DNA test? Could you hold a funeral service for a femur?

Anyway, what amount of remains, what percentage of flesh or bone was necessary for a trace of a person to be counted as a body? Would a leg bone count? Did it have a soul? I’m not a religious woman – I don’t know these things. What would my pesky Jehovahs and Seventh Dayers say? God’s in nature, is all I believe.

Oh, I worried over all this. The white bone in my hand now had huge significance. It carried the weight of many emotions. In the bright beach glare it had what the local hippie chicks would call an aura. A pale but powerful aura. The aura of a handsome kind man who’d suffered a violent death.

I continued my walk while I thought about what to do. And I decided I wanted to keep the white thigh bone. I wanted to treasure the memory of poor Russell Monaghetti. I wanted to be able to look at the femur and recall his smile and the gift mojitos and the hibiscus on the bingo table.

I had no pockets and the bone was too cumbersome to carry, so I placed it on a patch of dry sand securely far from the water, and jammed a driftwood branch into the ground to mark the spot. I’d pick it up on my way back.

Of course, as I trudged along I started feeling guilty about Don. I had no treasured souvenirs of poor Don (I’d given his cricketers’ and politicians’ memoirs to the Rotary market stall). All I had were his clothes hanging in his side of the wardrobe, getting musty and moth-holed, but with his smell just faintly on them. Jackets and sweaters I was too sentimental to give to the op-shop. His Rockport walkers growing mould. The palm-tree board-shorts the hospital gave back to me.

How would Don feel about me having another man’s thigh bone on the mantelpiece? Because already that’s where I was imagining putting Russell’s femur — over the fireplace, mounted on a little stand like the gold brackets that held Don’s brass telescope. (Yes, on that very same telescope-stand.) With its pale aura gleaming out into the room, through the windows and out to sea.

I felt strangely unfaithful and wicked for most of the walk, but young and reckless as well, almost like a teenager. My brain was fizzing with excitement. Sorry, Don.

I picked up the pace on my way back. I was hurrying along the shore to pick up the bone to take home. I reached the spot I’d marked with the driftwood branch but the marker was gone. The tide was still fairly low but obviously a contrary set of waves had swept over the patch of sand, scooped it clean of debris, left it smooth and bare as a table-top, swamped it so recently that air bubbles were still popping on its surface.

That’s not unusual, of course. Waves and tides and winds seem irregular forces of nature, erratic in their evenness, but there’s always a proper reason for their existence, like Cyclone Sharon being caused by rapidly warming seas.

I understand all that. I’m an old North Coast girl. I see this every day. More than anyone I understand the way Dr Pacific does things. So I waded into the sea, into that shallow green dip between the shore break and the shore itself, and the bone was lying on the sea-bed, rolling back and forth in the tide. Quite easy to find, being so pale.

From The True Colour of the Sea, published by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin ($29.99) www.penguin.com.au/books/the-true-colour-of-the-sea

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“I was born in Ottawa, and both my brother and I grew up bilingual,” artist Jess Lacroix tells me, explaining the trajectory that has taken her from Ottawa to the Brunswick Head house where she’s currently living and working from. “I went to an arts-based school in Ontario, and when I was looking at Universities, I really liked the courses that the ANU in Canberra offered,” she says. “Originally it was meant to be for one term, but I got so involved with photography, drawing and textiles that I completed my degree there, with a minor degree in art therapy.”

Jess’s final project saw her produce a body of skatedecks, one for each city in Australia made from a wood source unique to each region, celebrated with hand-etched maps of the city on each deck

Back in Canada Jess set about throwing herself into an an arts career, becoming a full-time arts teacher, founding an arts program for children, as well as offering one-on-one visual sessions with children. “I found myself just constantly expanding,” she says. “I became really interested in the idea of art as therapy as well, so I started to do pop-up shop tutorials, I ran skype sessions, did long-distance education with my clients, and founded my little business NoBadDays, to give back to charities.”

Canadian-born, now Brunswick-based multi-disciplinary artist Jess Lacroix.

If it sounds as if Jess keeps herself exceptionally busy – well, you’d correct in that assumption. “I’m just a firm believer in never living the same day twice,” she says. “If you’re not a passionate believer in something, why do it? I want to be inspired by the unknown, not by a 9-5 routine. Someone very close to me passed away recently, and that really confirmed for me that life is too short to waste – I want to live every moment with heart. He lived on the south coast, and grew a tea plantation, moving into creating artistic tea gardens, and then a creative collective for artists.”

This lifetime around, Jess was beamed in with a need to make art: “Art has always been apart of my life,” she says. “Since I was a child I can remember holding a pencil or paintbrush or anything that can make a mark – art is who I am, in every shape, way, and form; no matter where on the wild globe my itchy feet and knack for a one-way ticket lands me.”

Jess was only 16 when her peripatetic lifestyle began, travelling to California for a summer on an arts scholarship. “I was on my own, between San Francisco and LA, and I loved it…I started to experience a bad case of itchy feet,” she laughs. “Since then I’ve been to Iceland, all through the US and around Australia. I’ve been very lucky to connect with all sorts of artists on my journey included a film photographer who was shooting in the Grand Canyon, and I got to work with him.”

An example of her surfboard art.

Byron Bay, she says, was on her ‘bucket-list’.   “Every uni break I’d travel in Australia,” she says. “I took a large format camera to Uluru and lived there for a month photographing sunrises and sunsets. I had an art show from those travels in Melbourne and one in Hobart, but I’d never been to Byron, but then by a fluke occurrence, I met the manager of the YAC in Byron. She’d seen my work and asked if I would volunteer my services to do a mural – it was exactly the kind of thing I’m passionate about, so that was that – I came up here, loved it, and now I’m based up here full-time.”

Grounded, an acrylic paint mural that now graces the inside of the YAC big space, brings the native Australian paperbark tree indoors. “I wanted it to surround visitors with the endless nourishment and grounding properties of the exquisite Melaleuca Quinquenervia tree,” says Jess.

The work is created through layers – the richness in movement of the painted trees and its unconstrained roots connecting with the outside native flora and fauna when the painted doorway is opened to the bushland. And since she’s completed the YAC mural, she’s also created one for the Torakina Café in Brunswick Heads, as well.

Jess working on the YAC mural.

Although Jess’s life (her partner is a local musician) and work is based in Byron at the moment, she misses her younger brother Dakota and her mother terribly, and travels home to Canada whenever she can. “I do try to organise shows so I can go back for a few months,” she says. “I just returned from a visit in Canada to see my family but I also organized a summer pop-up shop selling my hand-silkscreened t-shirts, and installed large format photography and skate-decks in various gallery spaces. What is odd though is that from the moment I got to Canberra, part of my heart has always been here. The art scene has simply enveloped me every time.”

As she describes her art practice it’s almost hard to keep up with her. “I build and design skateboard decks, from scratch – pressing, moulds, veneers, scraping, shredding, and carving so I can get them just how I want them. I hand paint customized surfboards, I sketch and scribble up album art for musicians; I do film photography and videography; I do t-shirt silk screening – building all my own silk screens – palm trees and pineapple skulls is the kind of vibe my work has; I do murals, jackets, cards – anything that grabs me really,” she says.

From spontaneously mucking up her surfboards in Byron Bay to spray painting deck art on vintage Z-flex’s in New Zealand, “Travelling solo through my art has totally taught me to dare to just dive in, every time, and go wild with the madness regardless of what looks good on paper. I strive to do something that truly matters, with my art. That’s everything to me,” she says. “I feel like if your art can touch or inspire or do something, anything, for one single person in a crowd, that makes it all pure gold and worth all the blood, sweat, and tears.”

To say that this young artist is inspirational is putting it mildly. As they way, watch this space.

Jess’s Instagram: @nobaddays_est.never

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