I felt like a bit of photographic exploration today, though I didn’t feel like wandering too far from home. So I wandered over to Lansdowne Street, just off Crown Street, Surry Hills. It’s only a small street, and not all that remarkable really. It has a few nice houses. A couple of shops. A power station. And a park. And I think Tilley Devine lived on the corner of Lansdowne Street for a while, though I could be wrong. And it crashes into Belvoir Street. That’s about it, really, unless you know something else? It’s not as pretty, nor seemingly as interesting as other parts of Surry Hills, though I guess it has a charm those who live in the street obviously enjoy. So here it is…. Lansdowne Street, Surry Hills
Lansdowne Street sign in Surry Hills
Power station on Lansdowne Street in Surry Hills
Ward Park on Lansdowne Street in Surry Hills
Lansdowne Street in Surry Hills
I think this was the house Tilley Devine lived in for many years.
Lansdowne Street, Surry Hills
Lansdowne Street, Surry Hills
Lansdowne Street, Surry Hills
Currently Nandos on the corner of Crown and Lansdowne streets, Surry Hills
Arriving and spending my first day in Beijing, a city whose name literally means ‘Northern Capital’, has been quite a wonderful experience. I first visited Beijing in 2010 when my friend Kate was living here, and then four years later, Sue and I did a holiday tour that also took us through the city. It was so funny today, on the bus, going past some parts of inner-city Beijing that I instantly recognised. I knew the area where Kate lived, and even though there have been a few changes since 2010, many things were very familiar. In fact, I even recognised the shop downstairs from her old apartment that I used to go to in the morning, which made me smile.
Other familiar parts of today’s trip were visiting Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square, with its immense scale, felt even more vast as I consciously navigated its open spaces, acutely aware of each step on the historic ground. Then, stepping into the Forbidden City presented its own set of considerations. I’d enjoyed exploring its depths on previous visits, but this time was certainly different. The sheer sprawl of the palace complex, with its seemingly endless succession of courtyards, grand halls, and intricate pathways, was something I had to approach with a new strategy and awareness.
My focus today was inevitably on my mobility – the sheer number of steps involved in traversing these enormous sites, the warmth of the day, and being part of a large group of about 40 people. The scale of these historic places, which on past visits just inspired awe, now also represented a significant physical undertaking.
Adding to the group dynamic, there were actually three people who opted for wheelchairs for these two big sights. Eric, our tour guide, efficiently organised these wheelchairs and people to push them, which they seemed to really appreciate. The cost was 400 Yuan, probably about $70 or $80 Australian, which seemed like a great service for about three or four hours of assistance, allowing them to experience these places more comfortably.
I decided I didn’t want to go down the wheelchair path myself, even though the thought was tempting when faced with the heat and distances. I really wanted to prove to myself, and understand for myself, that I have the physical capacity to get around these kinds of attractions. Yes, I was slower than everyone else, absolutely. And I tended to lag a bit, often finding myself keeping pace with those who were using the wheelchairs. It was a hot day, and the distances were considerable.
However, I certainly know I could not have done this particular day of extensive sightseeing on my own, especially with the same intensity as before. I would have given up much earlier. I absolutely know that if I’d been here by myself or even with just one other friend, I would have thought it was all too hard to cover so much ground.
Given the vastness, especially of the Forbidden City, and the energy required, I made peace with the fact that I wouldn’t be exploring every nook and cranny or rushing through every hall as I might have in the past. I didn’t go into some of the inner chambers or linger over every intricate detail on display. Instead, I found myself more willing to find a shaded bench, sit down, absorb the unique atmosphere of these incredible places, watch the flow of people, and simply take a break when I needed to. It was about experiencing them in a sustainable way for me, rather than trying to conquer every inch. This change in pace, though born of necessity, offered its own kind of appreciation.
When I finally checked my Fitbit later, I was astonished to see I’d clocked up around 18,000 steps. For any tourist, that’s a monumental day of walking, but it carries extra weight for an amputee. I’ve read and understood from various sources that walking with a prosthesis, especially a lower limb one like mine, requires significantly more energy – estimates vary, but it can be anywhere from 20% to well over 50% more effort compared to someone with two biological legs, depending on the amputation level and other factors. It’s not just the physical mechanics; there’s also the mental concentration involved with every step, navigating uneven surfaces and being constantly aware of your surroundings. So, those 18,000 steps felt like an even bigger achievement, and they certainly explained why those moments of rest on a shaded bench felt so necessary and so good!
Eric, our guide, and another guide, Lily, were both really fantastic throughout. They were incredibly helpful and could have easily gotten frustrated with me for being one of the slower ones in the group, but they didn’t. They were very kind, always patient, and offered help all along the way. It was a warm day, and the average age of people on the tour is probably around 50, maybe a bit more. A few people also had some weight issues and were really struggling with the pace and the heat. So, Eric took it upon himself to organise a shorter bus ride for some of us to get back to where our main tour bus was waiting, which just made things a little bit easier for us all. That local bus was incredibly hectic, let me tell you!
After that, we were headed off to a couple of optional parts of the tour, which I chose not to do. They weren’t really my thing, to be honest. Besides, I was more interested in meeting up with my friend Brian, who lives here, which felt like a really nice thing to do at the end of my first day.
Later in the afternoon, I caught up with Brian. He’s a friend of my friend Kate, and I first got to know him about 15 years ago when he was running the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. He still runs the gallery, although it has now moved to the 798 Art District. This is a really interesting area, apparently built on the site of former military factories from the Soviet era, and now home to around 50 galleries.
We spent a lovely couple of hours there. I had a bit of a wander around the galleries in the area and looked at some new and interesting works. Afterwards, Brian and I shared a bottle of wine, chatting about our lives, mutual acquaintances, and things like that. It was a really great experience.
Then it was time to catch a Didi (like Uber) back. I couldn’t get over how cheap it was for what was at least an hour’s drive across the city! The traffic was surprisingly good, so there wasn’t much to worry about. It had been quite hot earlier in the day, but by the time we were in the 798 area and catching the taxi home, the weather was beautiful. It was a lovely way to spend the evening of my first full day in Beijing.
One of my earliest ventures into talk radio was at about the age of thirteen, doing some vox pops (interviews in the street) with people in Lismore about the recently installed traffic lights. Armed with a cassette recorder, I took to the streets to see what the good folk of Lismore thought of the installation of our first set of traffic lights in about 1979.
This was pretty big news in Lismore at the time, and I seem to remember it was also somewhat controversial. Though I no longer know where the recording is, I remember some people saying it was a waste of money, while others thought it was a sign of great progress.
The lights at the corner of Woodlark and Dawson streets were removed many years later, at about the time roundabouts became the “norm”.
Everyone I know who visits Lismore for the first time mentions the roundabouts, and in particular the exotic decorations that characterise them. That’s especially at Christmas time, when one of the roundabouts is decorated with a Christmas tree made from recycled goods.
PS – Lismore no longer has any traffic lights. We’re a roundabout town, these days.
“The last time I went to the party, I saw YOU there”, I said to a colleague this week, in response to the question about my plans for Mardi Gras. “Oh that was a long time ago”, she responded. Though they say you’re only as old as you feel, I definitely feel too old for the party. Sweaty. Crowded. Noisy. Or perhaps another way of looking at it is I don’t actually have any friends who would want to go with me, even if I did. We’re all in a different phase of our lives, I guess.
But I do quite enjoy taking a walk to Darlinghurst to watch the parade. Though I must emphasise my tolerance for crowds isn’t what it once was (i.e. compared to the days when I actually went in the parade), so I tend to find a quieter spot towards the end of the parade, rather than be in the thick of it all at Taylor Square.
And though not officially “working”, I made a brief appearance on ABC Radio tonight, describing the parade.
“Feel like a beer?” was the text message I sent Graeme this afternoon.
I love a Sunday afternoon/evening beer. It extends the weekend just that little bit futher. And so long as you’re sensible, you can get up on Monday morning and head off to work without a care.
Instead of coming over my way, Graeme suggested I join Grant and him at the Petersham RSL.
Graeme was especially proud of his new membership card, and in particular at how cheap membership was ($8 for the year). Nowhere near as good as the Lismore Workers Club, I told him, which gives you drinks tickets every year, and if you pay into the Mortality Fund, will make a contribution towards your funeral. It’s the reason I’ve been a member since I was 18, I’m sure.
Picture Frame
As we sat and chatted about life the universe and everything a young bloke came up to us. “Would you like some tickets?, the young bloke asked us.
And so we bought some tickets in the usual Sunday night Prize Night.
They had a tv, a washing machine, a dryer, and miscellaneous smaller prizes in a 45 minute “frenzy” of numbers being called out. Although we all decided we would like the television, though would happily settle for a new washing machine, Grant and I also eyed off the electronic picture frame. “It’s the kind of thing you’d never buy for yourself”, Grant mentioned at one point, and I agreed. Luckily, Grant’s number was the first called out, and he chose the picture frame.
After sitting around for a while longer, Graeme and I then headed off to a nearby pub where we ran into The Other Andrew, who seemed in good spirits after an afternoon of knitting, and then an evening attending an underwear party. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write before.
An article about the art collectors group I’m involved in, written by group member, Steven Alward, has been published in the Griffith Review.
Art works
By Steven Alward
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
– Georges Braque, French painter.
It started with a life and death conversation. The doctor, faced with what was surely a terminal illness that offered at best a scant few extra years of life, had another of the many intense discussions he’d enjoyed with his niece. He’d had a rich, full and complex life: professional success, built a remarkable relationship with his equally successful wife, raised four girls in a beautiful home in Sydney and seen them through the ups and downs of modern lives and relationships, gathered around him many friends with diverse interests. He’d also amassed a significant private collection of Australian art over decades. A life well lived. But he and his niece and others in his family wanted more – to make new connections with people and ideas in a world increasingly focused on the individual rather than the community.
That conversation gave birth to Hawkesbury One – a small group of the man’s family and friends who agreed on a ten-year plan to put together, over the first decade of the new century, a collection of Australia’s emerging artists. Each member would contribute a set amount of money each year, the artists and works would be chosen by mutual agreement, the art would circulate around the members’ homes and at the end of the ten years, the art would provide a snapshot of what was happening in this country politically, socially and culturally over that period. It sounds simple.
It wasn’t.
The group started small. The man and his wife, one of his daughters, his niece and her sister, some of their friends. Some wanted it to stay small, some wanted to make it bigger. More conversations followed, more people were asked to join, some dropped out because the group’s ideas weren’t as they expected, or for personal reasons. For some, attending a meeting or two was enough to drive them away before they even joined.
The group would meet formally about every two months at the man’s home, set in a gorgeous garden he and his wife had created over many years, and surrounded by the art they had gathered through five decades.
Our early conversations were a strange combination of boundless enthusiasm and ideas about what the group could achieve over the ten years and intense debate about the legal and administrative structure and just what the group thought it was doing.
The legal discussion took months to resolve. We looked at the structures of a couple of other art-buying groups in Australia. (The first one we knew of started in Hobart, called Derwent. There’s a Yarra group in Melbourne. Keeping the river theme as we go north, ours was Hawkesbury One, in the perhaps over-confident expectation that other Hawkesbury groups would follow.) No other group quite fitted the structure we wanted. Resolution came when two new members joined, a couple of young lawyers who sorted it all out in very little time. That was part of the strength of the group: people brought all sorts of talents. Some, like those two, could bring legal brains to the meetings, some were experienced collectors or had extensive contacts in art circles, some had financial backgrounds, others were good at running meetings, or building websites.
But all of us shared a vision and believed that as a collecting group we would get access to artists and their dealers that individually we would never get. And we aimed to put together a significant collection describing what was happening in Australia the decade the group was together. What I don’t think some of us expected was that it would be a life-changing experience for many of us.
As we struggled with agreement on what an “emerging” artist was, (“She’s not emerging, she’s 60 years old” or “His stuff sells for $60,000 at auction, he’s well and truly emerged”), we also struggled to look beyond our personal tastes and decide what would work in the context of the collection. This involved getting out to galleries, public and private, researching, subscribing to every art magazine on the market, immersing ourselves in finding out who was coming up through the system and whose work was edgy, moving and likely to last. It became almost a mania for some members of the group, with every conversation touching on this or that young artist, their dealer, the politics of the art world.
In a sort of evolutionary way, each member of the group focused on building relationships with particular galleries and the people who owned them and the artists they represented. We’d often organise group visits to galleries, we got on mailing lists and developed our own internal mailing lists to alert other members about artists. Members would bring their discoveries to the group and attempt to explain why they were interesting or significant and why the group should consider them. In this way, individual members also added to their own collections.
Early on we recognised that it was not enough just to show a reproduction or a digital image of a piece of art and say you liked it. You had to offer good reasons why the group should consider it. And we had to get the best example of an artist’s work we could. This was not easy. Apart from the internal politics of the group, where there were often sharp differences of opinion, there was the byzantine politics of the art world.
The politics within the group led to smaller groups caucusing, to people dropping out, to a little amount of rudeness, a lot of arguing and a lot of laughing. Outside the group, it was a matter of getting inside dealers’ circles and spheres of influence, to be taken seriously as buyers. We began to understand the way dealers manipulate the market – for instance, slowly releasing the works of some artists, or encouraging mass production by others. We’ve been on a fast learning path about editions of photographic or sculptural work and about artists releasing large and smaller versions of their work; we’ve engaged with the near-hysteria surrounding indigenous art and tried to come to terms with the cultural chasms between black and white Australians; we’ve wrestled with notions of authorship and authenticity, proof and truth, and of being told one thing by one “expert”, the opposite by another; we’ve tried to conceptualise where conceptual art is coming from and going to and to understand the place of video and installation art.
We’ve also come to know the artists themselves – to try to understand the processes they go through to create their work, and to appreciate what drives them. This has been one of the most revelatory aspects of Hawkesbury One – while the art world can sometimes be a hotbed of pretension, the artists themselves often turn out to be completely connected with reality, the least pretentious people imaginable. They might have the most intense vision, a lyrical way of looking at the world and revealing it in surprising ways, but what also excites and drives them often seems to be the reaction people have to their work.
This process has also revealed to the members of the group a deeper understanding of each other. Some members had never met each other before Hawkesbury was formed, so there was everything to learn about the other members. Others had known each other all or most of their lives. For me, for instance, the one person I encouraged to join was my best friend from school. We’d known each other since we were 12 and had remained very close through our lives. But the journey of discovery though Australia’s emerging art in the first decade of the new millennium has added even greater depth, a new excitement to our relationship, a far richer understanding of each other. Through art we are discovering more about life. Another member I had known for more than 20 years and we had remained on the interested periphery of each other’s lives. But she has turned out to be one of my closest friends and confidants. We have begun to see, together, so much through a prism of art and what it teaches us about life.
Finally, Hawkesbury has been self-revealing. I’d been looking at art in some ways for most of my life and I’d been buying art for 20 years. I didn’t much understand it, in fact, of all the arts, the visual was the one I least understood and connected with. But the first two years of Hawkesbury have given me new eyes, and new ways of responding to the visual arts because of the conversations I’ve had and the people I’ve connected with. Where once I would choose a piece of art because it would look nice and fit a space on a wall, that is no longer enough. Now it has to scare me or make my spirit soar or make me laugh or cry or make me want to sing: art has to surprise me.
My mother died in 2003 after a long and very painful illness. Over the previous Christmas period, I stayed in Newcastle so I could look after her in the hospice to give my sister a holiday with her family. While I was there I would take her nighties home every day and wash them and bring them back the next day. Looking after her the way she looked after us as children, a sad but privileged experience. When she died I was with her and she was wearing one of the nighties I had someone make for her – with no back but just ribbons tied behind her, to make it easier for the nursing staff to change her, because she was paralysed. Two days after she died, I chose what I figured was a just tribute to her, from a small part of the money she left me: a ghostly x-rayed child’s nightie by the Australian artist Anne Ferran, who I discovered in my gallery expeditions with Hawkesbury. It is spooky and makes me sad when I see it. But it also connects me, via the artist, with my mother. Of course, I would never forget my mother. But Anne Ferran helps remind me every day about something very valuable to me, one of the most important relationships in my life, the woman who shaped me and taught me how to connect with others.
The doctor also died in 2003. He fought a parallel battle with my mother, and I shared the grief of his family as I grieved myself. He often said how much he got out of Hawkesbury. We found this a bit surprising considering he had been collecting all his life. But he told us that the way we looked at things made him look at things in a different way. Not long before he died, when none of the cancer treatments seemed to be working, a few of us met at a gallery in Sydney, run by a dealer the doctor had introduced us to. The work was terrific: very confronting and edgy and different from a lot of stuff we had seen. It was by a young artist named David Griggs. And there was one painting that the doctor and I both loved, perhaps knowing we were about to face death, his and my mother’s, both from cancer. David Griggs called it I have killed innocent women and children and now I have cancer. It moved us, it made us laugh, and it reminded us we were alive.
One of the most exciting things I’ve done recently is book tickets for Liza Minnelli’s performance at the Sydney Opera House in October.
When pre-sale tickets went online, I was there hitting re-fresh as the bookings website went into melt-down mode.
I’ve put a copy of the seating plan on my window at work with x’s where are seats are located (great seats, by the way) which always gives everyone at work a warm smile.
I suspect my workmates think it’s “all a bit gay” that I’m excited about seeing Liza, but I can assure you it’s a long-term and genuine desire I have. From an early age (like 5 or 6), I loved Judy Garland, Liza MInnelli etc. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, in anticipation of this all, Sydney Film Festival this year has had a special screening of “Liza with a Z”, a made for television program from the early 1970s, recently restored, and so tonight Colin and I went along.
Oh my God, it was amazing. The energy levels, the strength of her performance, the goose-bump-inducing moment when she sang (though not overtly) about her mother’s death. It was an amazing performance.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes of the screening, you could sense the audience was wanting to applaud, though of course that’s something you never do at the movies, is it? After a while though they relented, and when Liza gave a great performance, they responded with applause.
One of the night’s plans, to have a hook up with Liza, didn’t eventuate. It would have been six o’clock in the morning for Liza and she’d just won a Tony Award for the show she’s bringing to Australia. I think the whole theatre understood completely it was just not going to happen, given Liza’s lifetime of parties, drugs and alcohol.
And in some ways it was probably for the best. “Liza with a Z” is about youthful energy. Her performance in October will be much different. She’s in her 60s now. To contrast the two probably wouldn’t have worked. It would have been a disappointment in some ways. I think it’s best to separate the two performances with three or four months in between.
