On 16 October 2024 musician, composer, visionary, collaborator extraordinaire, Ollie Olsen returned to star dust. Ollie had been a tremendous support and influence to countless. He was greatly respected and loved. We got to know each other over a hectic couple of decades creating sound works, performances and installations in Melbourne, Newcastle and Austria. This is how I came to know about the great man.

The story of the making of my film, The Blacksmiths’ Tree. From the launch of the film on 8 February 2019, St Andrews Hall, St Andrews, Victoria.

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. For many of them I would recount my adventures as Zandor, Master Explorer, first to my younger sister and brother, then to my daughter. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars.

In 2017 my film This Choir Sings Carols could not be screened. Patricia Aufderheide described the issues constraining films like mine in this article commissioned by The Saturday Paper.

Over recent months an intense debate has had artists, authors and filmmakers in Australia rail against recommendations made by the Productivity Commission, consisting of a Fair Use provision to be added to Australia’s Copyright Act. Andrew has been one of a few supporting such a provision and he has been a guest panellist at two recent forums on the subject.

In the Borneo Highlands of Sarawak, along the border between East Malaysia and Indonesia, warriors from Kalimantan would enter the ancestral homelands of the Bidayuh Tibiya, and raid the densely forested jungle for their heads. That was a long time ago. Their descendants, the Bidayuh of Upper Bengoh, no longer fear for their heads, but they do fear for their lands.