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The first of a three-part series: VW Beetles, artistry, engineering, and stories of migration at Marvellous, Electrical this week.
Category: storytelling
Marvellous, Electrical: Toowong Knights
The Regatta Hotel, Toowong – Public Domain image by Wikipedia user Adz
“Every problem in life has a solution. A bouncer stopped me at the pub door once for wearing flip-flops. I had tape in my bag.”
“Take a walk around the block. Put silver duct tape around your feet and shoes, loop it over, make it look pretty. Come back wearing ‘silver sandals’, they’ll let you in.”
Meet the patron saint of Brisbane’s student drinkers in this week’s Marvellous, Electrical.
Brisbane Writers Festival
I’m appearing twice at the Brisbane Writers Festival this September.
The program is out today in papers across the city and you can see it online at the website of organisers UPLIT.
On Saturday 10th September from 4-5pm, I’ll be at Queensland Art Gallery speaking on “The Rules of Engagement“, a panel with Kate Pullinger and Caroline Keins exploring the changing ways that artists, institutions, and communities interact.
Then on Sunday 11th September, I’ll help a panel of scientists and science-fiction writers to explore science, imagination, and identity. Join Dr Maggie Hardy, Prof Tamara Davis, Ellen van Neerven, and Dr Maree Kimberley for “Science and Belonging“, which I’ll be moderating from 11.30am-12.30pm at The Parlour in the State Library of Queensland.
Find out more at the UPLIT / Brisbane Writers Festival website.
Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Move
The people who made me came to England from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and other places besides. My parents met in Spain, a country where I would work in my early twenties. From my first year of life, Germany and Spain were as important to our sense of family as the green fields of England.
I was born in London, that great world city, and I moved straight back there from the country when I turned eighteen. I was a student and a barista at the Soho YMCA. The people around me were from Finland, Austria, Colombia, Ireland, Brazil. I kept studying: my doctorate looked at refugees, exiles, and émigrés who came to Britain fleeing the Nazis, and from that I went on to work with asylum-seeking children.
Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to travel and work overseas. I’ve been made welcome in communities thousands of miles from where I was born, found new family, found new friends; I hope I’ve done that, in turn, for people who have come to live and work alongside me.
It wasn’t so much a choice as a vocation. Everything in my life has involved crossing seas, crossing borders. So much of who I am is founded on a sense that our lives and identities are about routes more than origins; time more than territory. That freedom of movement is vital.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical finds hope and horror and secret identities in an ordinary-looking Queensland cafe.
The Library Ghost
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.
Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Night of the Ibis
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical explores the intersection of urban ecology and Brisbane burlesque.
Marvellous, Electrical: Everything’s Coming Up Kransky
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.
Electrical updates
There’s been some new entries on Marvellous, Electrical in recent weeks.
Here’s a few highlights:
You can sign up for weekly updates from Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical here.
Marvellous, Electrical: The Nation Coped
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This Friday, 25 March, would have been Bernard King’s 82nd birthday.
One of Australia’s first celebrity chefs and talent show judges, King was known and beloved for his sharp putdowns, his flamboyance, and his all-but-inedible recipes.
He was as iconic in his own way as Dame Edna or Crocodile Dundee, but he died in poverty in 2002. Today he’s all but forgotten. That erasure of one of Australia’s biggest gay celebrities highlights the tensions and troubles which still exist in a country on the verge of a referendum over same-sex marriage.
Find out more about Bernard King’s life – and the time he poached a fish in a soft drink – over at Marvellous, Electrical.
Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Smart State Plates
This week at Marvellous, Electrical: every man has a flaming car, a flaming car over his shoulder.
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matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
