This week’s Marvellous, Electrical brings us hardcore Brisbane punk, Hallowe’en summonings, and the tender power of a Tasmanian wombat sanctuary.
Category: Australia
Marvellous, Electrical: Future Sea Punks
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical explores the Brisbane suburb of West End and its annual Kurilpa Derby, street art, social justice, censorship, and the ways communities get inside your head – for good and ill.
Return of the Mouth on Legs
Today, the State Library of Queensland released its interview with Janet Fielding, the actor who played Tegan in the BBC’s Doctor Who from 1981 to 1984.
I discovered that both Janet and Tegan were Queenslanders while researching for an instalment of my newsletter, Marvellous Electrical.
Brisbane-born Janet accompanied Peter Davison’s Doctor as they battled monsters, cyborgs, and spooky snake spirits. After her time on the show, Janet went on to a career as a theatrical agent and an advocate for women in film and television. Today, based in the UK, she is director of a community venture, Project Motorhouse.
To celebrate both Janet and Tegan as iconic Queenslanders, the State Library teamed up with Spencer Howson of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to conduct a ninety-minute interview capturing her adventures across time and space. This will now form part of the Library’s lasting oral history archive.
Read more, and listen to the interview with Janet Fielding, at the State Library website.
Giant Robots Need Therapy Too
I say giant: these were the ten-dollar Transformers you can get from K-Mart or Toys ‘R’ Us.
I spent Friday working with third-year Occupational Therapy (OT) students at Griffith University’s School of Allied Health Sciences.
The Kinder Way To Enjoy Hacking
This morning I gave the opening address at the annual conference of ALIA Queensland. The theme this year was “Library Hacks”.
Hacking’s such a funny term, still threatening and techy and futuristic, and yet also so familiar; the stuff of cheesy mid-90s techno-thrillers as much as today’s headlines about Wikileaks and massive DNS attacks.
The New Yorker tells us that the word originates in the house slang of MIT, way back in the 1950s:
The minutes of an April, 1955, meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club state that “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”
Taking “hack” to mean tinkering with machines and procedures, not following the manual, I wanted to both hack the keynote and offer attendees an opportunity that wouldn’t exist at M.I.T.
So, we gave them craft materials, tinfoil and paperclips, food decorating kits, a basic electronics set…
…and Kinder Surprise Eggs.
What are you playing at? Digital comics at the Writing Platform
Why would an Aussie library get its designers to build a drag and drop comics website?
Aren’t there already plenty of free comic makers online?
What are you even playing at?
The Writing Platform, a joint venture by Bath Spa University in the UK and QUT in Australia, has my latest piece, on the new remixable comic maker from State Library of Queensland.
Read more about the State Library’s Comic Maker at The Writing Platform.
Marvellous, Electrical and the Black Prince
What does a man have to do to be accepted as a true Australian?
We took a walk through the suburbs to Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery, exploring the legacy of the 19th century champion boxer – and adopted Aussie – Peter Jackson.
Marvellous, Electrical: Forms of Myth
This week, in Marvellous, Electrical: storytelling, town planning, sculpture, and the smell of first rain on dry stone.
International Harvester: The Ozofarm Game
Today sees the official release of the Ozofarm game and game development competition for Queensland’s public libraries.
As I discovered on my visit out to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, digital technology is changing the way we farm. Cows are milked in robotic dairies. Drones are herding and surveying cattle from the skies. Self-driving machines are steering across Queensland’s fields, tending crops and baling cotton.
I worked with Eva Ruggiero and Tammy Morley of the State Library’s Regional and Public Libraries Team to devise a game which explored robotics in agriculture.
Queensland Fun Palaces 1-2 October
The long-awaited Fun Palaces weekend has arrived.
After months of planning and preparation, communities across Queensland are gearing up to celebrate the arts and sciences in all their forms, partnered with a range of libraries and other institutions.
From the islands of the Torres Strait to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, plus every library in the city of Brisbane, and of course our own State Library on the city’s South Bank, the first weekend in October will see a swathe of venues open their doors for community-led events celebrating the Fun Palace motto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”
We’ve come along way since Parkes Library hosted Australia’s first ever Fun Palace back in 2014.
I’ll be with the State Library team on Saturday, supporting events including our Scrub Turkey Sessions devised with urban ecologist Professor Darryl Jones of Griffith University.
Wherever you are in the world, check the Fun Palaces website for your nearest event, or join in online with the Comic Maker built for Fun Palaces by the State Library. (We’ve also put the code behind the site online, if you feel like a bit of digital tinkering).
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 