Earlier today, I spotted a couple of teenagers painting graffiti on the wall of Lismore’s levee, previously hidden behind the former RSL Club.
The club closed almost twenty years ago, after going into receivership. More recently, the building was home to First Steps Early Learning Centre. The building was damaged beyond repair in the floods earlier this year, and only a shell remains.
The former RSL Club turned childcare centre.
But on the positive side, the demolition of the building has opened a view of the levee previously hidden. Already there is a fair bit of public art along the levee bank, but I thought today how wonderful would it be to have parkland along the river, with the levee serving as a giant canvas for the artistic creativity of the region.
Graffiti on the levee bank in Lismore.
Graffiti is not everyone’s cup of tea, but hopefully, there might be room for all types of art as Lismore rebuilds.
I’m back in Lismore after a break of several weeks, and there’s room for optimism, with an increasing number of shops open in the CBD.
Lismore’s legendary Tropicana has re-opened.
“Keen Street is the best”, one of the women at Tropicana (a fruit and vegetable shop) told me when I called in today. For several months Keen Street has been a construction zone. Money that was approved prior to the floods has been put to good use for post-flood reconstruction.
Not many shops are open, but at least the lights are back on in the Star Court Arcade.Back in Lismore.
My electricity bill tells me I probably used my heater far too much this year. Though we enjoy fairly mild winters in Sydney, there’s usually two or three weeks where it gets quite chilly, and there’s fairly regular rain. I’m trying to do my bit for the environment by reducing my carbon imprint by wearing warmer clothes rather than sitting around the house in summer clothing and relying on the heater. This year, the electricity bill is a fair deal higher than last year, largely reflecting the fact I’ve been working from home since March, and my heater use.
The view from my apartment window in August.The view from my apartment window only a few minutes ago.
Here in Surry Hils, the local economy remains depressed due to the pandemic. I think there’s also the factor of a changing economy, as we transition (outside of the pandemic) from regular shops to online purchases and centralisation.
It’s been a cold and wet weekend in Sydney. For the first time in a couple of weeks I’m wearing a pullover. A perfect weekend for indoor activities.
Catching up with friends yesterday at a nearby pub.
I’ve also caught up for lunch with some former and current colleagues.
One of the really great things of the last week has been catching up with workmates for the AWEI (Australian Workplace Equality Index) Awards for LGBTQI inclusion. We hadn’t seen each other for several months, and so it was great to catch-up, and to get dressed up. And have a drink or three afterwards.
And I’ve been to the movies a couple of times in the last week or so.
“Aren’t you worried about catching COVID-19?”, a number of people have asked, when I’ve mentined going to the cinema. “No, I’m often the only person in the room”, I’ve explained.
Though many people like going to the movies in the evenings, I’m more of a fan of screenings in the morning. Over the last year, as I’ve taken Wednesdays as rec leave, I’ve often gone to screenings at about 10am. Even on the weekends, it’s my preferred time.
Maybe it’s a throw back to Saturday mornings “at the pictures” at the Start Court Arcade in Lismore. At the risk of sounding like someone who is much older, I remember when you could go to a Saturday screening for as little as 20c (later 50c, and even later $1.20).
More likely, I really like the concentration headspace you have in the mornings, whereas in the afternoons or in the evenings, I can sometimes nod off. In the mornings, my brain (at least) is more engaged.
And that was certainly the case last Saturday when I went to see “I Am Greta”, the story of Greta Thunberg, the young woman from Sweden famous for her climate strikes. Amongst friends and family, I’ve been surpised to discover she’s been a polarising figure. Even though I have friends and family who are climate skeptics, it’s not only those who are “Greta Skeptics”.
“I know I shouldn’t say this, but she shits me”, a friend who feels passionately in favour of doing more about climate change told me. “There’s so many other young people doing their bit”, she told me when we caught up in the last couple of weeks. “In the film she acknowledges that”, I told her, adding there’s a moment when Greta reflects that she’s probably invited to speak “so people can be seen to be doing the right thing” (or words to that effect).
The film is a really interesting one. It starts with her first climate strike outside the Swedish parliament, and ends with her speech to the United Nations. The early footage of her in Sweden is fascinating to watch. Along the way, you see her experiences of going from that small-scale experience to achieving a much greater global impact.
Despite this global recognition, you also see that she’s a teenage girl who loves her dogs, and who is influenced by her family. You never get the sense she’s a mouthpiece for her parents. In fact, there are many moments where you see her parents seeking to moderate her, as other parents might. “Greta, you have to eat”, her father says to her at one point. By the way, he’s a rather famous Swedish actor, and her mother is a famous Swedish opera singer (who also represented Sweden at Eurovison). In the film, however, they’re just mum and dad.
The other film I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks was “Corpus Christi”. It’s a Polish film based on the true story of a young man with criminal convictions who wants to become a Catholic priest. Though his background would prevent him from doing that, circumstances allow it to occur. In a small community, he becomes an important figure allowing the community to begin the process of healing, following the tragic death of a number of people in a car crash.
“This is one of the best films I’ve seen in the last couple of years”, I said to my friend as we left the movie. She agreed heartily. The combination of the story, the acting, the emotion and the humour made it it highly enjoyable. “I wanted to go to the bathroom half way through”, I joked, “but I just couldn’t leave the cinema”. There’s one moment of extreme violence where we both had to look away, but aside from that, we both loved this film. I’d highly recommend it.
Oxford Street is an odd little street, isn’t it? One minute you’re asked by someone for any change you might have, the next you find yourself behind a six-foot-tall drag queen. Minutes later, and you’re walking in the midst of cricket fans on their way back from the SCG, or a group of young people out for a night on the town making the end of the weekend count.
Or you’re a forty-something like me who has just been out for dinner with mates, and you’ve decided one extra drink before going home makes sense. Or not.
Heading out for dinner was a toughie in some ways: the Oprah in Australia special wasn’t due to finish until 8.30pm, which meant that I would have been late for dinner. Thankfully, Olivia Newton-John turned out to be incredibly boring, and so leaving during her appearance on Oprah, and then hitting the record meant I was able to make dinner right on time.
Fallen leaves in one of my local parks
We ate at the newly re-opened Balkan Restaurant on Oxford Street. I’m not exactly sure when it re-opened, but I certainly remember when it closed a few months ago due to a fire.
I’m soooo glad they’ve re-opened: both the food and the service there are brilliant. I was with a group of people who regularly go there, and we all had our favourites which the staff knew. I was the only one who they had to ask, since I’m less of a familiar face. I chose the Mixed Grill which comes out with that wonderful hot-grill flavour, and which was accompanied by their coleslaw and potato salads. It’s such great Sunday night comfort food, and the staff make you feel incredibly welcome which is an added bonus.
Aside from dinner, I paid my friend who is in hospital a visit. He’s feeling better, though really needed an afternoon nap. And I sat for a while and enjoyed the atmosphere of my local park.
Amazingly, the leaves have already started to fall. Is it early this year, or do they always fall at this time of the year?
About the only good thing worth reading in the Sunday papers, these days, is the wedding profiles.
A friend and I were chatting about this over dinner the other week: that we love reading how the couples met, how they are planning to spend their honeymoons, and where they were planning to live.
They’re such a barometer of society, and maybe even of the economy. I’ve noticed, for example, recently the trend away from holidays in Thailand (very popular a few months ago) to this month’s favourite destination, Hawaii. Every week, there’s always a few of the couples who holiday in Queensland, and you get the occasional honeymoon in Europe (especially when they’re from Italian or Greek heritage), but mostly it’s Hawaii at the moment.
Such honeymoon plans are almost always in stark contrast with the older “flashback” couple they also feature weekly. Almost invariably, there is no mention of a honeymoon for the couple who have been together for forty or fifty years. Instead, it almost always reads they met because they were near neighbours, they got married and then settled close to home, and now enjoy spending time with their grandchildren.
There would have been no thought of an overseas holiday for that generation, and they were always much younger than the couples getting married these days, but there are similarities. The typical scenario, these days, seems to be “they met on a girls night out” or something like that, or were introduced by a mutual friend. Then there’s the often older couple (in their early thirties) who went to school together, but nothing happened until they were re-introduced a few years ago by old school mates. However they met, the profiles indicate they’re still likely to want to settle close to where they grew up.
The only other things that interest me in the Sunday papers are some of the regular columns. I love trying to guess, for example, who Ros is talking about in “Guess Who Don’t Sue” and regularly have some success. I quite enjoy Wil Anderson’s column which is usually quite funny, though today’s column about what he lost when his car was broken into bordered on the banal. Piers Akerman is always worth a laugh, as is Glen Milne, though for obviously different reasons. I also quite like the celebrity photograph pages, though I find myself increasingly unaware of who some of the young folk are, since I hardly ever watch soap operas. Oh and I love the Harvey Norman catalogues.
Yes, they’re good. So please Mr Murdoch, can you just dump all of the regular features and just feature Harvey Norman catalogues and wedding photographs from now on and I’ll be very happy indeed.
Spotted in the back laneway near home... It’s been ages since I’ve written about anything “discarded” in my back lane. Quite frankly, there’s been nothing for ages. People don’t seem to have been throwing things out. And then on the way home tonight, I saw an amazing piece of “art”. I still don’t know what to make of it.
Aside from work, the big highlight of the day was going to see a friend who is in hospital. After surgery, he’s doing remarkably well, and is probably coming home from hospital a day earlier than expected.
After a couple of long days at work, I’m a little tired, so tonight I’ve just been at home watching a bit of television.
There’s not much on the agenda for the week, aside from helping my friend for a little while, and then going to see “High School Musical” on Thursday night.
I can’t believe it’s only a week until Christmas, and I can’t believe my neighbours would throw out a piece of religious art a week before Christmas…
I begun my task, today, to see as much of the Biennale of Sydney as possible, by heading of to the Art Gallery Of NSW. Actually, task is probably the wrong word, because it’s going to be an absolute pleasure, but with the works on display at twenty or thirty venues, I’ll need to have a methodology about this. Anyway, there were three works on display at the AGNSW that I really liked and a lot of works I felt fairly indifferent about.
Unfortunately, I don’t recall the name of the creator of my favourite work, as I can’t actually cross-reference it to either the Biennale Guide nor the website. Imagine if you would something about 30 feet wide by six feet deep and four feet high, a three dimensional map of the world created out of many layers of canvas. I liked the creative concept, the enactment, and the craft that went into this work. Actually, maybe it’s not part of the Biennale at all?
I also really liked the work by John Reynolds. The NZ-artist has created a memorable work featuring hundreds, maybe thousands of words printed on boxes, all displayed on a wall. While I sometimes think works like this can seem all a little contrived and PC, especially in the choice of words, I thought this work showed humour and intelligence.
The most memorable works, though, were probably those paintings by Biljana Djurdjevic. Set inside a swimming change room or was it a Nazi gas chamber (or something like that), the images were of frightened, disturbed people with wide eyes and pale skin. I interpreted one work, “Paradise Lost” as being about child abuse, though I could be wrong.
There’s a certain level of “ritual” about voting in a federal election in Australia. As we have compulsory voting in Australia (which I support strongly), you generally need to plan your day around visiting a polling booth. It’s not so hard, really, in a capital city, since there are polling booths at many schools, and there’s the added incentive of a “sausage sizzle” or school fete which makes it a very pleasant experience.
In my own local area, it’s also usually a fairly speedy experience, due to the large number of people living locally who normally live “outside the electorate”. If you’re a “local” you can usually go to the front of the queue.
There’s also the “ritual” of making your way through the “vortex” of people who are handing out “how to vote” material. As I have usually have clear ideas about how I plan to vote – mostly based around who I want to put first and who I want to put last – my normal strategy to is to look forward, politely respond with a “no thankyou” to any direct contact – and make my way through that experience as quickly as responsible.
I broke with my regular “ritual” today by taking an “early mark” from work today. Taking into account I’ll be working a fair bit over the weekend, I thought I’d take some time off. Even then, it wasn’t really much of an “early mark”, since I was still at work until 4.00pm, and I used the time to head into the city for a bit of window browsing and to vote at Sydney’s Town Hall.
The “how to vote” crowd was stil there today, though sadly there was no evidence of a sausage sizzle. Sigh.
The other big change this year was the absence of those large physical paper books containing the electoral roll. Those books where you look down, see your name, and they put a line through the entry as they hand over the voting papers. This year, everyone had a laptop and so you couldn’t see your name. Also you couldn’t see if they were ticking your name off, though presumably the electronic system should lead to a decrease in the number of people who “vote early, and vote often”. The other “electronic innovation” I noticed was how they didn’t have a vast number of different lower house voting papers on hand. Instead, they printed on demand.
