Kids Don’t Belong in Detention Centres

Surely pressure must be growing on the Australian Government to close the Manus Island detention centre. 34 children are amongst the 275 detainees being held there without adequate medical facilities, drinking water or reliable power supply. Most housing is made up of military tents with wooden floors and camp beds or stretchers. The tents are cramped and jammed together resulting in a lack of privacy, and brings to mind the dehumanizing intent of war time concentration camps. The site is situated in a low-lying swampy area and is subject to torrential downpours; mosquitoes in plague proportions; temperatures soaring into the 40’s and humidity around 100%. People are self-harming, attempting suicide and stitching their lips together as a means of protest.

The government defends this style of detention centre, identifying the deterrent effect as central to its asylum seeker policy. Plans have been made to invest a further $170 million into construction over the next 6 months. However the way this centre is being run is in direct breach of our international humanitarian obligations. Under the “no Advantage” principle, these detainees are facing an uncertain length of time in the centre, possibly years. It is that uncertainty coupled with the intolerable conditions, which threatens the mental health of everyone held in detention. The health and safety of these people is Australia’s responsibility, and given that more than 4 in 5 asylum seekers arriving by boat are found to be legitimate refugees, surely there is a better, more humane way of dealing with this situation. Subjecting children to this kind of experience is unforgivable.

College Street Belconnen

“If they can’t rectify that situation straightaway, then my view is that children and their families should be returned and managed and processed here in Australia”

A statement recently made by Paris Aristotle – A member of the expert panel employed to advise the government on asylum seeker policy, which recommended a return to off shore processing in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. He also stated that safe guards were an integral part of the original plan. “They included compliance with international obligations, no arbitrary detention, the provision of legal assistance, review mechanisms, case management services. Health and mental health programs.” These safe guards seem to have been neglected in the governments hurry to detain asylum seekers in off shore facilities.

What passes for housing at the Manus Island Detention Centre

Noise of The lambs

Who is the real vandal?

 Bus shelter on Macarthur Avenue O’Connor, previously home to “Madonna and Mirror”.

The film starts to become real and our hero (anti-hero) chokes on cue trying to balance popular elements with that, which is of interest only to him. It could be like a performance, leaving behind its atmospheric radiance to alter the environment and disrupt the lives of those who pass through the theatre – the shelter. Something surprising and incongruous such as a paste-up can cause shifts in our consciousness. Just as an advertisement is intended to work on us in a subliminal fashion while we wait for the bus. The wall is now changed, that which had had its imperfections previously committed to memory – a mark in the shape of a slipper moon; a crack like a bolt of lightening and a stain in the shape of a gingerbread man stuffed with darkness.

 ”Summer Gold Resting Place” 1998 Acrylic on Canvas 160 x 300 cm

The sheep has long been a subject of my painting. I moved with my family to Newstead, a small township cradled between Ballarat and Bendigo in the central Victorian gold fields in September 1993 – a shift that was to have a profound impact on my life as an artist.  Fresh out of art school and still full of first urges, I carried around for the longest time a sense of freedom that being on extended holiday might evoke. But also there was great confusion and disorientation, strange feelings lingering in the silence of the night before being shattered by an anxious dog screaming off down the drive way after the shadow of a rabbit. We lived on six acres of hungry country adjacent to an enormous sheep run, still owned by the relatives of the original squattocracy. My mother would walk around the fence line marking the border of our block in what she referred to as ‘the park’, just to get a sense of the place. It took her several weeks to become acquainted with the nearest neighbours buried behind bushland. Everyone along Pound Lane new all about the new arrivals of course, shyly refraining from pushy inquiries, waiting for the right moment for greetings. Having taken a tiny offering of fruit cake, the only suitable thing she had and returned from a warm reception with arms full of organically grown fruit and vegies, a feeling of welcome at last emerged.

“Hungry Country” 1998 Mixed media on paper 85 x 65 cm

The house was really just a weekender, with windows dulled by the previous residents chain smoking and the residue of kerosene lanterns. Without grid electricity and mains water, it felt like more of a home for the mice, in plague proportions that first season, than for its new and confused residents, colloquially known by the local community as “blow ins”. With just an existing rickety solar set-up that failed in the first weeks, and an old generator that nearly caused me to pull my arm out of its socket trying to start it, tribulations abounded. We quickly realised the impressive collection of kerosene lights the previous owners had accumulated were not just for show as they had intimated!  I spent many evenings drawing by flickering light pretending to emulate the feats of artists from a previous era.  Eventually, all the notions we brought with us, dreamily espoused, found a niche alongside the wrens in the eaves laying tiny blue eggs and pig face clinging to the gardens edges and the noise of the spring lambs crying for their mothers.

  ”An Ideal For Living” 1998 Acrylic on Canvas 110 x 90 cm

I formed a deep affinity with the central Victorian landscape as both a subject to paint and a place to belong. Beginning with a set of black and white ink drawings, and then gradually introducing colour and methods to depict the complex tangle of twigs and leaf litter, wallaby grass and the patterned yellow box trunks and stumps that dominate the landscape. With each step deeper into the paddocks, a certain strangeness creeps in, a sense that the world remains foreign and irreducible in its complexity – a rock, a branch, a collection of wool and bones. The dead sheep came to represent the fragility of our relationship with the land, a powerful symbol for just how it resists the changes we bring to it. I found many stopping places in my wanderings. Dam’s, reflecting the skyline in upside down darkness boarded by the fire of sunset where I could sit for an eternity listening to the persistent music of insects, like metal on metal and one call reminiscent of Aboriginal rhythm sticks. I would return my akubra bearing a sweat ring and my eyes shining out from beneath its brim like sparks in a 5 day growth. On one side the straggly remnant box iron bark forest bordering a vast paddock dotted with tree stumps, sweeping up toward a hill peaked with sheep silhouettes in convoy. On the other, tufts of wallaby grass springing out of the green aches and spinney’s of saplings crowned with the pale blue grey gum tips that had emerged in the absence of live stock. One evening I returned having walked straight through a muddy dam, an intoxicated bunyip, now resembling the colour of the place. I had hoped to be absorbed, to become indistinguishable from, the yellow curtin of summer grasses and the blue grey hair do’s of the tall gums. My brother Philip turned to me and said, ‘What the bloody hell happened to you?” I just shrugged and grinned in a way that alluded to the ridiculous.

 ”Resting Place” 2000 Mixed Media on paper 45 x 60 cm

It is hungry country, dead trees reaching skyward as if begging for moisture. When the rains do arrive, the banks of the Loddon river are breached and low lying roads washed away. The water would run off the surface, headed for troughs and valleys scarcely seeping two inches into the hard crust of the ground. In the wooded areas a poppet head might loom out of the scraggly wilderness, the ghost of a thing of beauty, no tree older than the last great clearing. My father’s ancestors had lived in Redcastle, a small township north of Heathcote, also a mining area associated with the Costerfield district that had been settled in the 1860’s. A whole host of reefs were opened up, with names like Mary Jane, Guiding Star and Beautiful Venus, formed along fault lines. It was a time when populations rapidly swelled and alluvial minors made a good living. Stephen Mitchell my great great grandfather had opened up reefs in 1859 that by the early 20^th century saw Cyanide works set up to extract gold from tailings. As a family we had under taken a pilgrimage of sorts to what was left of the town in the early 1980’s, just the occasional scattering of handmade bricks, and ironwork around the quartz in the cemetery.  It was little more than a dot on the map, still listed in homage to its earlier significance. Away from the main site of the graveyard was a fence line along which some 50 Chinamen were reportedly buried. This link to the area gave credence to our decision to shift and make it our home.

 ”Newstead Woodlands Rhythm” 2000 Acrylic on canvas laid down on board 175 x 190 cm

  ”Newstead Summer Idyll” 1999 Acrylic on Canvas 60 x 80 cm

52 Pick Up

“The Players” ANU Bus Stop Belconnen Way

We get ideas in our head about what it means to be in control – the power that trickles down seems to feed a quicksand of emotions amongst the populace. For our politicians life is there as something to control. Something that needs to be shaped and herded with maxims of benefit for the majority whether given as truth or as fabrication – we need this war (to prove that I am as great a leader as my forbears). For the most part we don’t mind being dragged nowhere in particular, it’s the journey that counts. We also share a common satisfaction in rubbishing the elite. At least we aren’t  ’disappeared’ for doing so.

Very dark, on account of the street lights being out for the purpose of road works – I did my best to smooth out the crinkles. A reprise of an earlier theme, left unfinished.

This 2003 series was intended to become a royal flush with reference to tarot meanings. Ancient stereo types fitted to the current crop of personalities. These times had witnessed much change, all the facets of myself merging that had been convenient to leave around on the studio floor. A different style of presentation than that which I now embark on. With the motive to self destruct removed, I looked at life through a pinkish lens.

At the market stall selling scarves when everything is judged so harshly, the spirit curls in for protection. Touching chilled stone, a kind of paralysis spreads, seeding doubts, missing Catherine, still locked in this old cocoon. The neighbour reads palms and has a tarot deck and a noticeable absence of clientage. At her invitation I pick out the major arcana ‘death’ from the idle deck, and ignorantly slink back to my post expecting the grim reaper to come spruiking or a brick to fall on my head!

Madonna and Mirror

First Bus shelter on Macarthur Av O’Connor, coming from Belconnen Way.

The urgency to return to my cream curved walls has ebbed and flowed for two weeks. Now my unrehearsed gesture has come to fruition and the old adrenalin rush, as fresh as that imagined head line. I chose one of those shelters that look newly painted in half light, like the monolith had just emerged, sprouting from the pavement watered by the scent of rain. Somehow, despite their truncated life, these art works seem more real by there being made public. There is a pang of sadness when the bus stops return to their undisturbed blankness, but it is a trifle and in the scheme of things, a colourful memory can be worth a thousand possessions. They offer a different reason for disapproval aside from the commuter detritus that gathers under seating or the occasional lurid remark scrawled in permanent marker – equally as impermanent. Then silence again, and the blue screen demanding some meaningful insights or shafts of wit – both eluding me this evening. But the conversations from work are louder now, and I find myself torn and distracted. My wife thought it a religious picture in time for the Easter festival, but my quieter classical conversation spanning the centuries – El Greco to Picasso, between my thumb and pinky was intended to have an almost pious respect for art traditions.

The Bush Capital

“Alienation at its most essential level is not poverty or unemployment. It is the inability to imagine your society and therefore to imagine yourself in it.”
John Ralston Saul,

My kangaroo’s of a different colour, huddle together in the bus shelter. Outside we share fashion, a common journeys rhythm. We watch free to air and are appalled by the same bad 6 o’clock news stories. But inside we carry difference, more complete than any one could guess. Fixing up the placement of the last ‘roo’, I stop for a moment. The stillness of the night is like a great hovering bird, and with every set of head lights that pass, I imagine them pulling over to investigate. But they never do, they just pick up pace and in these hours seemingly immune to speed limits, a motor could just as easily be launching from its formula one start line. On the pavement behind me, a child,s toy has been discarded, defined by the artifice of its hue, red even in the shadows and half-light – it could even be a plush kangaroo, not dissimilar to one I treasured as a small boy.

To belong to a place is an alien concept for those who have shifted. You take with you an accent, a memory of home and a vague sense of being part of a general community – united in its difference and comforted by the thought that you are one of many who feel they don’t quite fit in. Difference comes as a shock. I remember first seeing an Asian child, a refugee from Vietnam that joined our local primary school mid-term grade two. I was part of a rough group, who kicked sand in his eyes and chanted ‘ching chong china man’ at first. But something about him was interesting to me, and I soon rallied the lads to adopt him into the fold. It was a great year, hunting cicada’s, star wars action figures in the sandpit, playgrounds transformed into battle fields – and in the last days of school, my new friend confided that we were the best friends he had ever had. Something had changed in me, in such a subtle fashion that I was barely aware of it.

I am told that Canberra (The Bush Capital) has changed over the past decade. From the perspective of a Zimbabwean migrant I am working with this morning, it has become less friendly, less safe. She could leave her car unlocked at the mall, the place was so small. It is growing now, eating into the very bush that defined its character and spawned its name, consuming its earth hues, the same landscape that stretches for miles, flora adapting to micro climate. Another colleague reminisced about first impressions, mistaking the entire airport for a community lounge – a place to buy over priced sandwiches and a coke for the price of a low-ball black Russian, on route to what would of course be the main auditorium. But then he was in the street and taxi rank, with the shock of the light and the notorious chill sweeping through him with a less than welcoming whisper. Coming from a mega complex in Johannesburg, the smallness of everything was over whelming, nestled amongst mountains, farming acres and a multitude of bush environs.

What now is being Australian? Is it in the menu, the colloquial quip? The parameters of the mystical fair go or In the measure of my laconic gate – G’day mate! A national identity we seem so desperate to secure has never been more elusive. Maybe it has always been this way – The elite stricken by cultural cringe and the humble Aussie, defensive of tradition to the point of xenophobia – the digger defined by his insubordination toward British rank and the veteran fiercely protective of the Union Jack in the corner of our flag, a flag many have fought and died under. We are a country in the grip of change, not weighed down in history, but striving to build new traditions all of them now saturated in majority culture, and the hegemony of the global age.

Asylum-Seeker Soliloquy

“I Still Call Australia Home” Bindubi St Aranda

A new home, we are here, almost – yet still caged and treated like a problem to be dealt with. Some invisible process continues, digging for a reason to send us back. If they dig deep enough, I’m afraid they might reach my heart, and damage all that is left of me. I came with only the heart to start again. I will offer it to them in place of identity papers with my lineage scribbled in a spiral to the core. Unpinning the paper heart, I shall then let it float on the breeze before snagging on barbed wire. Animals are kept in pens, to stop them escaping and sheep behind fences to stop them demolishing the garden. If I could speak words with wings, they would also be ripped by the sharp edges, then plummet no further than the rocks and white breakers surrounding the Island. “Will you tell me what is wrong” – he breathed – conscious of the physical process in doing so. The voice seemed distant, though he longed to embrace it, to drown in it rather than be left. Is it true that some have sown their lips together?

“If you lived in a country governed by a tyrannical regime, and your parents had been killed, and family members had been brutalised and put in prison without trial or in some cases shot without trial, what would you then do? You could not go to the government and ask for papers. That would immediately get you into trouble. So people travel without papers, something recognised in the 1954 Refugee Convention, to which Australia was one of the first signatories.

With regard to Australian policy on Nauru and on Manus Island, ask yourself this: are we prepared to allow our government to establish a regime so brutal that the terror it creates would rival the terror from which people flee?”

Former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser

HIDE AND SEEK

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How does your Garden Grow?

Climate Change – How does your garden grow? Bus shelter, Belconnen Way.

Spinning side to side on a wheelie chair in some sought of fog, trying to dredge up a good idea. Call it inspiration, some intangible aura like perfume that passes deeper into the night blown by truckies on their 2am run. The washing machine chimes in telling me its cycle is done. Art also runs a cycle, following the scent until the brain is purged of all good ideas, false starts, small steps forward and artifacts that are diminished with later scrutiny. Good art works are born out of need, and the expectation that the new image springs forth from the embers of the old. The conclusion of the cycle cures the original need, so is it any more absurd to paste them on a wall than keep them in a folder? Besides, the kind of pictures I’m doing now are different to those I commit to canvas. Related yes, but abiding by different rules and considerate of a broader more accidental audience. Busy as a bee line, I jump from one idea to the next as each ripens in turn and the compulsion to act overwhelms.

So why do I do it? A question I find myself asking repeatedly. To put it bluntly – street art is…well, cool (for want of a better description). It is not reliant on appraisal by stuffy experts, being judged as suitable or not for the purposes of exhibition. It exists in the world as a natural consequence of events that lead to its creation. It acknowledges that art is about communication and forming connections first and foremost. It doesn’t need that other cultural context, in order to thrive and become more than just another advertisement for some loses blog! And it is addictive, gathering momentum, trying to out do the last piece or extend it in a meaningful way. Beside the world needs more art, and I’ve never minded gazing at a tangle of tags either! In some ways, street art is the new folk art for a generation, or may become so in time – as long as it can emmancipate itself from the label and perception of it being vandalism, then it can compliment and contribute to the cultural life of any community.

Short lived