“Take only what you need…share what you have. The idea is not that radical. We teach sharing to our kids but it gets lost somewhere along the way.”
In this week’s Marvellous, Electrical, Brisbane activist Andy Paine tells of a life spent striving to live without money.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical interviewee is Hesam Fetrati, an Iranian satirist based in Brisbane.
https://twitter.com/DrMattFinch/status/759213810062336001
The first of a three-part series: VW Beetles, artistry, engineering, and stories of migration at Marvellous, Electrical this week.
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.
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.
Could parts of Queensland ever secede from the Sunshine State? Is Queensland identity especially unstable now, and does this reflect political turmoil in the US and UK?
How long is the history of independence movements here? And how flexible is the Commonwealth of Australia when it comes to redrawing boundaries and reshaping identities?
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.
If you work in a cultural institution, what do you do in response to a tragedy like the shooting in Orlando last week?
You see a lot of rainbow flags on social media and there’s a hashtag going round, #LoveIsLove. There have been gatherings in major cities, showing solidarity with Florida and letting each local LGBTQ community know they are celebrated and cherished.
These are wonderful things but I wanted us at the State Library of Queensland to do more.
On Monday morning, we fast-tracked a project to acquire a major piece of Australian LGBTQ oral history – the final interview tapes of Bernard King.
King was the flamboyant, gay, notoriously acid-tongued pioneer of Aussie TV cookery and talent shows. We discovered the tape as part of my weekly newsletter Marvellous, Electrical when I interviewed King’s biographer Stephanie Clifford-Smith.
You can read the Bernard King edition of Marvellous, Electrical here.
This is a major acquisition of materials from a forgotten Queensland icon whose work was under-represented in the state’s libraries and archives. You’ll see more about it through official channels in coming weeks.
The interviews will now be digitised by the library’s Queensland Memory team. State Library oral histories currently available online include the LGBT Lives: Oral Histories collection and the Greg Weir collection.
I have to say massive thanks to Dianne Byrne and Gavin Bannerman of Queensland Memory for helping us to pursue this acquisition.
I also spent my evenings this week investigating Queensland’s Panic Defence – a lingering clause of the state legal code which seems to allow killers to claim they were provoked to manslaughter if their victim made a homosexual pass at them.
Alongside celebration and solidarity, it’s important to look to our own doorsteps and recognise where prejudice and injustice can be found right before our eyes. Discussion of the Panic Defence led to some uncomfortable truths about murder and straight male privilege in Australia’s Sunshine State.
You can read Marvellous, Electrical: The Panic Defence here.
Brisbane is just shading into winter now, and while it doesn’t get too cold in subtropical Queensland, you still need to make a little effort if you want a place to feel cosy.
On the fringe of the cultural quarter, entrepreneur Angela Hirst is doing just that, as she plays host to the city’s most adventurous chefs and diners at her “food incubator” Wandering Cooks.
In this week’s newsletter, Angela explains the links between philosophy, architecture, permaculture, and her attempt to create a special place for culinary innovators in the heart of Brisbane.
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.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
