THE MENSTRUUM 9: New Year's Greeting

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 15 DEC, 2010] 

The most wondrous, piercing stripe of nostalgia is that felt for a time one wasn’t a part of –it can be that longing for small histories we just missed out on, maybe by only a couple of years. For me, with just a thin claim on being a child of the seventies, the golden, unlived age took place between 1988 and 1993. That ideal half decade; oh, to have been twenty when Expo rolled into town, and not a cookie-dough-faced ten.

Stepping into the exhibition foyer of the Arts Centre, I am in Aus-pop-rock hog’s heaven: Rock Chicks, free and running to 27 Feb, 2011, is a coloured monument to Australian women songwriters and musicians. It presents time in scattered walls. Photographs, splattered guitars, silver discs, skirts of tartan, gig shots, black circles of loved and scuffed vinyl. And almost immediately, such names tied with stern twine to memory. Falling Joys, Clouds, Hummingbirds.

But then – thrown back to a place before rock and roll. Georgia Lee is playing at the Chevron Hotel and it’s 1961 – Franki Stott and Her Gay Collegians holding tight at the Merri Dance Palais in North Fitzroy, 1931. It all presents in a swirl, these strong faces and curls stuck to brows with sweat. The Seekers become Margret Roadknight’s first guitar, and then the bigness of Little Pattie.




Chrissy Amphlett on stage during the Australian Made tour, Perth, 1987.

Photograph by Bob King.

The Juke Archive, Performing Arts Collection, The Arts Centre.

 

It is difficult not to run between these images and sounds, to revel in the familiar smiles and to suck the unknowns down like mineral water. Chrissy Amphlett rains down on the room like Christ the Redeemer, and she stares into a creamy centre of the exhibition which ignites a special appetite for a boy from Brisbane.

A dull green dress marks the Go-Betweens.        

It is Lindy Morrison’s and she wore it in the clip for Head Full of Steam, and it just as easily could have been Grant or especially Robert’s if they could have pried it from her in one of their playful turns. It is insignificant that it’s green, that it isn’t the sweet and perfect red crop of Missy Higgins’, that it is neutral in its sensual flattery; it is significant that it’s here.

Below the garment’s lowest hem is a calendar, a wide page as a relic, Amanda’s document of the final month of 1989 and the final month of the Go-Betweens before their Morrison/Brown-less 2000 rebirth. A grocery list of nights: Party at the Aquatic Club; Party at Neal’s; REHEARSAL; Robert 2:00pm; Pay all RENT; JUDY MORGAN’S BBQ; Legwax 11am.   

Very normal things.



Deborah Conway, Chrissy Amphlett and Lindy Morrison c.1988
Photograph by Tony Mott
The Juke Archive, Performing Arts Collection, the Arts Centre


Keeping your hope and love tied up in something just out of reach is a shared and common occupation – the alternative is terrifying. I want this thing that belonged to someone else, that is a day or a year in the future or locked in someone else’s young adulthood.

This show is a reminder of amazing people and times gone and memories that are worth gripping onto, but it is also a note of permission. We can have our own times.   

THE MENSTRUUM 8: "And it's tombstones, cobblestones..."

[First published in INPRESS magazine, 8 Dec, 2010]

I think of what it is to be buried, and take the lift from beneath the ground, up.

Cameras, sliding doors and green-red lights suggest security and I walk out onto the public floor of the National Gallery of Victoria, and the café is busy and I let the narrow escalators suck me up to the second floor and then the third, and I think that for just another fortnight I will work in this place and wonder how from then it will be different.

Luminous Cities is an exhibition of architectural photography hidden in the plain sight of the International gallery’s top floor. Free and running for five months, it’s the accessibility and ease of this collection that will allow so many to miss it. Walking into the still, peopleless room, the air smells of good history and the forgiveness of early summer.  

The photographs move in an arc of age around the walls and reveal the change of structures and bricks and how we see ourselves beside them. Athens is a brother to Pompeii and a catalogue of ancient, conquered places. Europe is shown being made in a modern image, under archeologists’ boots and bulb flashes, and as Ed Izzard would remind us, with the cunning use of flags.

The nineteenth century hurries to be the twentieth and we’re in Paris, Berlin, and New York; that place made only of buildings and their verticals. When planes took out the towers, it was physical and bodily – it was two front teeth being knocked out of a face. The NY photographs are dizzying, with reflections doubling, tripling up in the long glass and steel rectangles.    

As I wonder how long lunch breaks become once you’ve quit your job, two white-haired women, a tight couple, arrive and tour the pictures, reminding each other of their English childhoods and landmarks they have holidayed in front of.




ENGLAND, Houses of Parliament, London, 1860s. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.



They’re laughing and clutching each other’s biceps, and I feel silly for always wanting to think in grand, romantic turns. I had penciled in to write a city without its people is made so human by their absence: but here they are, a beautiful pair of old ducks, in a place simply made of occasionally reorganized stone, and what I’m thinking and writing is a nonsense.

Eugene Atget, Coin de la rue Valette et Pantheon, 5e arrondissement, matinee de mars 1925.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 

I turn and turn again and it’s someone else’s 1925: Eugene Atget’s Coin de la rue Valette et Pantheon, 5e arrondissement, matinee de mars. It is a rust brown alley of chipped facades and closed windows, leading to almost nothing, but then the sun-cloud of the French Panthéon, a mock-up of the Roman Pantheon, itself a Hadrian rebuild of the earlier version. A dead street and a photo of a model of a model: we could construct a pithy metaphor from that, or we could meet a friend for lunch and get on with our lives.   

The amazing women cackle and I want them to include me in their jokes. I’m just a child and I smile anyway. An empty building resembles either a tombstone or a coffin, or maybe just an empty building.