Tag Archives: Adelaide

Rants

What I Like About You …

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Our seven-year-old declared tonight that we all seemed happier living in America, and my heart broke a little bit.  She put into words what I know I’ve been thinking – observing – for awhile now. We moved to Australia for all the right reasons – family, space, and a good lifestyle – but I have to agree with the little one, we were more functional in our Brooklyn community.

The kids were well adjusted and generally happy.

Many of the things we moved here for now seem to have been a mirage, or just no longer exist: the extended family that congregated often for laughs and feasts and creating good memories; the big backyard, fishing and beach houses; seafood and generally terrific food aplenty.

The family is a soap opera in the making, we have a nice place in a good suburb but no big grassy backyard, and everything is ultra expensive. The cost of living in Australia is through the roof compared with the US and Adelaide can be mighty cliquey if you’re a newcomer.

Maybe we haven’t given it a fair go. Maybe things will get better. I hope so, because the thought of packing up and moving overseas AGAIN just makes my head hurt.

And if I leave again, I know I’m never coming back.

As the Brooklyn saying goes, ‘not for nothin’ I’ve decided to write a random list of what it is I miss about the US. Perhaps it will help give me some perspective and make it easier to just shutup and stick it out in Adelaide. If nothing else, it may be cathartic to at least think about what I miss. So here goes, in no particular order:

Friends and family, of course: the kids especially miss their paternal grandparents and their cousins, who are closer in age to them than their Adelaide relatives. We took for granted how well the kids all played together and the strength of the bonds they forged with their grandparents and aunt and uncle, even though we didn’t see them often enough.

My hairdresser: Michelle at Serendipity in Soho – you cannot be replaced. I have had three haircuts in Adelaide; one was a complete botch job, the other two were just ok. I went to Michelle for many years, from before I was even married to the week I left NY – she will be one of my first stops when I go back to visit.

Cheap manis/pedis: never underestimate an inexpensive mani/pedi from one of the hole-in-the-wall Korean nail joints in Manhattan or Brooklyn. For peanuts you can get your feet rubbed, scrubbed and toes polished and looking clean and shiny for weeks to come. I had one pedicure in Adelaide and besides the woman gouging my nail until it bled, the polish peeled off in a day – and it cost about $45.

Walking: it goes without saying that NY is a walking city. I walked the kids to school and back again everyday, I walked to the shops, I schlepped my groceries home. You walk and walk and walk – even when you ride the subway – you walk at either end. You don’t notice how much you are walking but your body notices when you stop walking and start getting into a car to run errands, to get to school or go around the corner.

To be sure, my husband and I have noticed a HUGE change in Adelaide since we first came here together to visit in 2000. People are getting heavier– there are more chubby folk than ever before squeezing themselves in and out of their enormous, sole-occupancy, gas-guzzling vehicles to go 15 minutes in any direction. I reckon it won’t be long before Australia was more heavy people per capita than the US.

Subway, Stoops + Street Noise

The subway; you can go anywhere at anytime. Enough said.

Stoops: there’s nothing nicer than hanging out on someone’s stoop – chatting to neighbors, watching the world go by, or holding a stoop sale. Stoops bring communities together. Front fences and gates and intercom-activated entry does nothing for community.

Street noise: even the occasional gunshots and police helicopters were okay. You knew you were living a city and there was life going on outside your four walls.

Neighbors: knowing that there were other people nearby whose door you could knock on it you needed to borrow a rolling pin, or a cup of sugar was comforting and handy. We could send the kids upstairs to a favourite neighbor’s apartment with a plate of cookies or some leftover dinner, without fearing they’d be abducted.

Cheap cabs: speaks for itself really. You could always find a way home, without breaking the bank.

Coffee: just a regular cup of joe from a street stand, with a splash of milk for a buck 25 – that’s $1.25 – not the average $4 you pay for a coffee here. I still haven’t worked out which coffee I actually like drinking here either. I just want a big cup of black coffee that I can pour milk into, godammit.

Delivery at all hours; one of the biggest issues with living in a small city like Adelaide is that you cannot eat after about 9pm. Kitchens close. Delivery is almost non existent. I miss the Spanish places on Smith Street that would bring beef stew, and rice, beans and plantains at 10pm for $12; I miss the pizza places that would deliver a piping hot pie at 11pm.

Pizza: there is no match for a good New York pizza. All the organic flours, handmade, flown-in-daily artisanal mozzarella and toppings in the world are no match for a plain NY pie.

That’s round one. I’ll add to the list as I think of things, but I already feel better for spilling my guts and remembering the good stuff.  I’m not trying to piss off anyone in Adelaide. This is a great place to live and raise a family – I wouldn’t have chosen to live here if I didn’t believe it, but I didn’t think for a New York minute that it would be so hard to settle back in.

 

Arts + Culture

Fee Plumley on a Quest to Make reallybigroadtrip Pozible

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Fee Plumley calls herself a geek artist, techno-evangelist and digital consultant. She hails from the United Kingdom and has become a permanent, if nomadic, resident of Australia.

Combine Fee’s geekery with her will to travel and you have reallybigroadtrip – her proposal to create and live in a truly mobile digital culture.

Fee’s plan is to get a bus, rig it with recording equipment and drive it around Australia, talking to people about how they engage with creative technology. It’s an artwork, a research project, plus a home, studio and workshop.

Among other things, this soon-to-be 39-year-old with cropped, dyed red hair and wearing a big, blingy ‘Geek’ nameplate around her neck (a gift from her sister), has co-founded a company that created a new genre of literature inspired by mobile phone technical limitations and started the Geek in Residence model that was adopted in Australia and abroad.

“It’s the stuff that breaks convention that I really love,” says Fee, speaking about theatre, where her career started years ago. But you get the idea that this is her metaphor for life too.

Anything is Pozible

Like many creatives with an idea but scant funding, Fee is tapping the crowd-sourcing site Pozible to raise money for her reallybigroadtrip. Her Pozible campaign is scheduled to end 12 July and she is anxious that it is lagging her target amounts.

“It’s the most exciting time in my life. It’s also the most terrifying,” says Fee. “I have never made myself so vulnerable and never felt so strong.”

Once she has ‘the bus’ – which incidentally will be styled-decorated-rigged out by none other than lighting, set, venue designer Geoff Cobham, also the man behind Barrio, – the plan is to hit the road and just keep driving; talking to people, documenting data, writing, and making stuff along the way.

All the traveling and talking will result in a huge amount of rich media, the best of which will be shared instantly via social networks. Follow @feesable on Twitter and you will notice two things pretty quickly: she tweets a lot and sleeps very little.

The rest of the information gathered on her journey will be stored for future development; a vast legacy of material for advocacy, data visualisation, conferences and festivals. There may also be a book or documentary in it too, or as Fee corrects – an e-book or interactive documentary.

Fee said the idea of buying a bus came up a few years back when she knew she wanted to apply for permanent residency in Australia and had to create an opportunity to make it happen.

“I adore travel, buses, creative play and geeks,” so the digital-mobile-bus combination seemed to fit together.

“I could have just traveled around from place to place on foot or by plane but the idea of a road trip seemed right. The bus is a symbol of the kind of digital community-based cloud that we exist in now.”

The bus will be Fee’s exhibition space, workshop, conference room, screening space, studio and her home, running on vegetable oil and the kindness of others. After couch-surfing for the past eight months in various Australian states, she says she looks forward to having a home, albeit mobile and on a bus.

The bigger picture – and there is always a ‘bigger picture’ when Fee’s mind starts ticking over – is to get a bus in every continent.

“The idea is to have all these spaces that become resources for other digital practitioners.

“I really want to dispel this myth that media arts are a niche or emerging. I’ve been doing it for years already and I wasn’t even there at the beginning.”

Fee recalls the day she met the Internet. She was moving into a share house in Brighton in the UKin 1996 and there was a free, online computer.

“I didn’t really know what I could do with the Internet but I knew I wanted to use it somehow.

“I went to the dole office and asked where I could learn about what the Internet was and what it meant for creative practice.” Of course, her enthusiasm met blank stares.

Wind forward some years and Fee eventually moved to Australia on a distinguished talent visa and got a job at the Australia Council, working in funding digital strategies. There she created the Geek in Residence program, which placed creative technicians with creative firms.

Just weeks shy of her Australia Council contract ending, Fee got the permanent residency status sought in Australia. Now for the bus, and her circle is almost complete.

To get this show on the road she needs funding – sponsorship, in-kind partnerships – whatever it takes to buy a bus, deck it out and keep it running from place to place. Plus, she’ll need money to cover internet access, living expenses, promotion and equipment.

“My life is this kind of ridiculous adventure,” says Fee.

Needless to say she’s not resting on her laurels waiting for money to roll in and a bus to materialise. She recently returned from Melbourne’s Emerging Writers Festival and already has conferences, speaking engagements and the like scheduled for coming months.

Among then, Fee is on the roster to give a keynote speech at the Regional Arts Australia Conference in Goolwa in October, touching on art and the economy and broadband – all sorts of things that she predicts will get her into trouble.

Find Fee’s Pozible crowd-sourcing campaign at reallybigroadtrip.pozible.com.

Arts + Culture, On The Street

Peter Drew Takes Street Art to Gallery + Back

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This could be the year of Peter Drew.

Most Adelaideans don’t know the name but chances are they’ve seen his work all over the city, from the huge posters of criminal mug shots to the Icarus motif atop a prominent city building, his personal favourite.

Peter has just opened his final solo exhibition at A P Bond Gallery in Stepney and in less than a week he’ll take part in the opening of South Australia Illustrated: From the Street at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

It’s not every street artist who finds their anti- institutional s scrawls hanging in the State’s premiere arts institution, but in keeping with the rebellious overtones of graffiti, this won’t be any regular exhibition.

There’s a twist.


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Peter has donned his curatorial hat and invited 12 fellow artists to `respond’ to an unfinished portrait of Adelaide’s founder, Colonel William Light, which he will turn frame in heavy antique frames ready for the Gallery walls.

They’ll be there, beautifully lined up when the exhibition opens, but throughout the exhibition Peter will take a portrait and hang it someplace around Adelaide.

He’ll give clues on its location using social media, such as his Facebook page.

“It is really great that the Art Gallery has agreed to this – it turns the whole exhibition on its head,” said the softly spoken artist.

But it will be nicked, won’t it? And that is the whole point.

”It’s an experiment in opportunism,” said Peter.

“The idea of theft and opportunism – that impulse hasn’t changed since colonial times. If there’s something there and people think that they can get away with taking it, they will. There is definitely a link between colonialism and opportunism.”

Even exhibiting at the `big end’ of the city, as the Gallery and its North Terrace cultural neighbours are known, can’t curb the edge of a street artist.

Around town though, Peter – an Adelaide born and educated visual artist and writer – is best known for his uncommissioned art for the urban landscape – or street art – which can be found not only on home turf but around Berlin, Glasgow and London.

Criminal Element

Peter says that having made illegal street art for years without being caught, he started to forget that it was a crime.

“When I was finally arrested I began to think more seriously about its criminality. This interest grew into a side project, which quickly blew out into the largest street art campaign I’ve undertaken.”

Adelaide’s Forgotten Outlaws grew from Peter searching police documents at the South Australian State Records. Drawn to photos from the early 1920s, he began choosing mug shots based mostly on the immediate impact of the image.

“Whether through their defiant pride, amused irreverence or shamed humiliation – some faces drew me in,” said Peter.

And so began his self-funded, ‘uncommissioned’ public project. Peter pasted some 42 black and white posters, each standing 2.5 meters, on naked city walls and sides of buildings.

Initially he worked at night, rather like the criminals he iconised, but soon realized it would be safer during the day dressed as a legitimate worker.

“When I donned the high vis vest and went about my business I didn’t feel like a criminal, I felt as thought I was performing a public good,” he said.

Unstoppable

While the man of the street has generally enjoyed Peter’s campaign, Adelaide City Council eventually traced the posters back to him and struck a deal.

The Council would stop removing the work so long as Peter legitimised the project through a ’pilot project’ scheme and removed the criminals’ surnames to protect surviving relatives.

Peter said he was just happy that people got to see the posters, as he’d intended. So impressed with his work were the folks at History SA that they let Peter loose on their photo archive.

He chose 10 portraits of everyday, extraordinary South Australians from the 1870s to the 1930s for use as part of the About Time: South Australian History Festival, which ran through May 2012.

Come August, Peter is heading abroad to study writing criticism at the Glasgow School of Art for a year or two. He wants to write a book, not surprisingly, about street art – comparing it to other artistic movements throughout history that were viewed as anti-institutional.

And while he’s away, he says he may have the urge to express himself artistically on a blank wall.

“I’m not sure that I can stop,” said Peter.

Peter Drew’s solo exhibition All you need is LIKE is currently running at AP Bond Gallery. South Australia Illustrated open at the Art Gallery of South Australia 1 June, 2012.

 

Personal Tale

New York, New York – If You Can Make it There …

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I just waved my eight-year-old son goodbye as he boarded a bus for his first ever school camp. One week into school in Australia and he was herded away to Aldinga Beach, an hour or so from the city, to run free and learn in the great outdoors. It’s all part of being an Aussie.

Every morning at school drop-off, these robust little kids are running and jumping and chasing each other, or playing one of many organised sports. Every girl in our daughter’s first-grade class has a skipping rope tucked beneath the desk to use before school and at recess. Sitting still isn’t an option.

It all fits the romantic notions about Australia, especially among Americans. From the worn out stereotypes of kangaroos bounding along city streets and Foster’s drinking blokes throwing shrimp on a barbie, Australia holds a sort of mystique from far away. Our New York friends, while sad to see us go, were excited for our brave move down under. Everyone wants to visit and everyone probably would, if it weren’t so far away.

But as recent arrivals – sit still, we do. So far it has rained almost daily since we got here in July, soaring electricity costs make us too scared to blast the heat as much as we’d like, and neither my husband nor I has found a job. With no income to speak of and no entitlement to assistance because apparently the Australian Government deems us rich, morale has its ups and downs.

We’ve endured reams of paperwork and probing questions only to be told that money in a bank, no matter how inaccessible, a part share in a house we  cannot live in yet and the fact that we could get jobs any day,  trump years of paying taxes in both Australia and the US and the absence of a pay check.

Sticker Shock

Every time we walk out of a store, sticker shock follows us. Everything costs a lot more than we’re use to paying. Even long-time Australia dwellers are balking at rising food, gas and utility prices. Basics like bananas  go for around $3 a piece and green beans top out around $18 a kilo – or almost  $9 a pound. The good life sure is pricey.

Still, here I am 40-something, married and mother of two back in my parents’ immaculate house after more than 20 years of independence. Perched at the dining room table, I feel a bit like an aged Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City, banging out resume updates and introduction letters in improbable surrounds ( how did she ever afford a Manhattan studio and Jimmy Choos on a columnist’s wage?)

To be sure, the folks are thrilled to have us back in Adelaide – as delighted as they are petrified every time a beloved grandchild swings a  backpack and narrowly misses some pricey collectible or “accidentally”  picks all the unripe lemons and stomps the onion patch.

The question we’re asked by pretty much everyone we meet is, why? Why on earth would you move from New York City – bright lights, big city, songs written about it, movies made just to showcase its vibrancy – to Adelaide? Adelaide, a sleepy city barely bigger than a country town, with lots of green space and nearly as many churches as people. Why indeed?

For family and for lifestyle mostly. We figured it was time to slow life down a little, smell the roses that bloom in Adelaide gardens and let the kids run free in the parklands and on the beaches, with cousins and perhaps a dog in tow. We wanted to own a house and a have a garden where we could cook out on a warm evening, and all sit around the dinner table together.

All in Good Time

And soon enough the sun will shine and the kids will get the beach and park time they moved for. We’ll find jobs too, I’m sure of it. We just have to adjust our timing from New York standards where emails are answered pronto to Adelaide’s more relaxed schedule.  And soon enough we’ll be able to rip up old carpets, paint walls and move into our own little home.

For now, the coffee is good, the clean country air is a mere 15 minutes “up the hill” as the locals say, the kids are happily settling into a lovely school and we are still charmed by the many people we meet and the warmth and friendliness they show us; from the boys in the local coffee shop we’ve made part of our morning ritual,  to the toothless old man I met at the weekend farmers’ market. He explained to me the pros of eating Australian olive oil and beamed with pride talking about his famous ballerina daughter.

Our waterlogged son will have his own stories to share when he slumps home from three rainy days at the beach, where he was to learn to paint a boomerang, cook on an open fire and negotiate friendships with a new crew of teachers and classmates.

As the lyrics go if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.  Let’s see if Adelaide is our “anywhere”.