This week’s Marvellous, Electrical covers the opening night of Brisbane’s Cabaret Festival and an uncomfortable flashback to the winsome days of the early 1980s.
There’s also gender-flipped Spice Girls, paleobotanists, and a fumbled double-bass solo that grips like wet rope.
This week I spoke at both the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and the national Broadband for the Bush Forum. The Forum is an annual gathering of people working to improve access to digital communications in remote and regional Australia. You can watch the USQ talk above.
Both events aimed to get people questioning their assumptions and exploring what they exclude or overlook in their visions of the future.
Frontier Imaginaries is an exhibition currently being held across two sites in Brisbane: ‘No Longer at Ease‘ in the Institute of Modern Art and ‘The Life of Lines‘ at Queensland University of Technology.
Beth Povinelli is one of the artists featured in ‘The Life of Lines‘ – she is also Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Beth’s research forms a critique of late liberalism – she dubs it an ‘anthropology of the otherwise’ – which I find vital to current debates about Australian identities and our visions of the future, both here and around the world. At the launch of Frontier Imaginaries, she argued that Australia is on the front lines of a crisis in Western thought, brought about in part by the pressures of climate change and the rise of digital technology.
Originally a philosophy student, Beth’s love of Australian movies led her to visit the country on a grant application in 1984. She eventually found herself working as an anthropologist and advocate for Indigenous communities. As she says, her career has been less about “explaining” Indigenous culture and society to others, more about helping to analyze how late liberal power appears from an Indigenous perspective.
On Tuesday, I’ll be over at the University of Southern Queensland, giving talks and workshops to staff and students across faculties. You can follow them online via this livestreaming link – the fun kicks off at 11am Australian Eastern Standard Time.
Then on Thursday I’m joining the Broadband for the Bush Conference on rural and regional access to digital technology and communications, running a presenterless workshop session on planning for the future. I’ll be drawing on science fiction, Afrofuturism, and comics alongside debates around copyright, government policy, and the presentation of financial data.
You can follow via the hashtag #BushBroadband on social media. I feel like non-Aussies are going to think that’s something far more salacious than it actually is…
During #BlogJune, workers in galleries, libraries, and museums Down Under commit to writing daily blog posts about their work.
One of my favourites is The Library Ghost, written by Kyla Stephan of Gold Coast Libraries in Queensland.
The blog, which has run intermittently for several years now, records the correspondence left at a librarian’s desk by the ghost which haunts her building.
We only ever see the ghost’s side of the conversation, but follow the progress of their relationship over the months and years, as the icy spirit – “I could not, in all honesty, be described as benign” – develops a certain affection for the mortal whom they haunt.
I love that Kyla invites us into a tender and wryly mannered fiction, invoking library magic to share the world of her imagination. Go check out the Library Ghost this #Blogjune.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical explores the intersection of urban ecology and Brisbane burlesque.
What links country Queensland, Barbarella, Judge Judy, and Agnes Bernelle, the World War 2 broadcaster who convinced a U-Boat captain to surrender with nothing more than her seductive voice?
On this week’s Marvellous, Electrical, I interview Australia’s greatest contemporary cabaret act.
Here’s the ever-thoughtful Justin Hoenke on conference presentations:
We’re thinking about similar things down under…last month, the State Library of Queensland experimented with a Presenterless Workshop format, as part of a wider campaign by science communicator David Robertson, called Beyond Panels.
I’ll be visiting the University of Southern Queensland next month to speak at their USQ Salon series.
If scholarship is a creative and critical conversation about the world, who are “we” having those conversations with?
What opportunities do institutions create for members of the public to have a go at what they do? And to fall in love with what they do?
From fringe scholarship to Fun Palaces, comic books and stone age megaliths to postcolonial controversy, we’ll be looking at what it means to share opportunities for learning, exploration, and adventure with the widest possible range of communities.
You can join me and the USQ team online from 11am AEST on Tuesday 7th June.
I was expecting hokey gothic from my trip to Brisbane’s Doll Hospital.
Instead I got stories from the Greek Cypriot migration, and some thoughts on how Australian attitudes have changed.
Read more in this week’s Marvellous, Electrical.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 