Homeland, portraiture, the curated self and war

Feb 26, 2025

Homeland, portraiture, the curated self and war

Oleg Garton (centre) Displaced Persons Camp, Laggerstrasse, Spittal an der Drau, Austria, circa 1948

Family photos led my family and I to discover our father, Oleg’s Ukraine homeland and stories of resilience in the face of impending crisis, war and occupied territory I won’t be able to visit any time soon.

Andrew Garton
Feb 25, 2025

My brothers and sisters and I grew up with an old suitcase filled with photos from the old world. Every so often it was pulled out from under our parents bed, carefully opened, each photograph a container for stories.

One by one black and white photos would be picked out and placed on the dining table we’d be sat around. Often our father, occasionally our mother would unpack the stories there, every year a little more would be told. These were mostly cherished photos they had brought with them, migrating to Australia on a work visa as displaced, stateless people, survivors of the second of world wars and many conflagrations that preceded it. On my father’s side, surviving World War Two was only the most recent of wars and persecution they faced and barely survived. These photos were the only remaining physical evidence of their history beyond Australia, beyond even their own memories.

Many of these photos were taken during the mid to late 1940s in and around a displaced persons camp in Austria. Others were twenty or more years older, three or four of them dating back to the 19th century. The oldest were of my Oma’s family, portals into her world, a visual record of her identity and perhaps something of my own. These were portraits of her parents, her sisters, unknown women, girls and boys, and the one that attracted me the most, a family portrait taken circa 1919.

Ustimenko family — L to R Kseniya, Anna, Elena, Lidiya Ustimenko, circa 1919

My Oma, Elena Alekseyevna Ustimenko is about 18 years old. She stands behind her mother, Anna Ivanovna and her two sisters, Lidiya on the right and Kseniya on the left. This photo was taken at the height of the civil war that brought down Russia’s dynastic empire whilst laying the foundations for the Soviet Union. Lidiya and Kseniya are playing a strategic naval board game as Anna looks ahead, her face bears the signs of endurance, of her personal losses and what fate has in store for her family. Elena stands behind her, both aware that she and Kseniya will soon flee Lenin’s approaching Red Army obliterating families with complex ties to the collapsed Russian Empire and Ukraine’s turbulent history such as theirs.

We had very few photos of my Opa, Andrey Fedorovic Garton. This one, taken in Novi Sad just as Germany invaded Poland, had its own story to tell. But it would take another eighty years before it revealed its own secrets and when it did, both his and Elena’s photos lead me to Ukraine, first to Crimea and then to its Poltava region.

Both my father’s parents were not only born in Crimea, both had Cossack lineages going all the way back to the 17th century and the formation of an independent Cossack led polity, the Zaporozhian Sich in what is now south-eastern Ukraine.

Elena was born in Sevastopol and Andrey was not born in the former Yugoslavia as we had thought, but in Simferopol. These discoveries were, however, bitter-sweet. Both cities are in Crimea which, since 2014, have been forcibly occupied by Russia. I will not be visiting the homeland of my father’s parents any time soon.

In February 2022, declaring he would “denazify” Ukraine, wannabe Tsar, Vladimir Putin, mobilised his troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine. Eight years prior Russia invaded Crimea and instigated a proxy war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

This strange, dangerous man joins a lineage of dictators and tsars who, for more than four centuries have claimed Ukraine as Russia’s historical homeland, allegedly saving the country from itself. First Catherine the Great extinguished the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775. Then followed the banning of the Ukraine language in 1876 by Tsar Alexander II and the seizure of Kyiv in 1919 by the Bolsheviks. Stalin’s cruel collectivist program lead to the Holodomor in 1932 when millions of Ukrainians died of famine. If this was not enough, in 1937 Stalin personally signed off on the execution of hundreds of Ukraine’s scientists, teachers, writers and other intellectuals including one of my relatives, Pyotr Kirillovich Nechiporenko.

Three years ago the thought of war in Europe seemed distant and frankly, impossible. Then suddenly… it was not! One hundred and two years after Elena and Andrey fled Ukraine it was brutally attacked by the country whose former Red Army and its increasingly skittish and despotic leadership they feared. Russia mounted an invasion of Ukraine and every shocking threat bearing moment was transmitted on an ever expanding number of social media threads. The Internet was awash with shock, alarm, mayhem, video streams of Russia’s advancing army and Ukraine citizens defending their towns and cities and selfies! A lot of them. Photos would again lead me to my homeland.

Nazar Nebozhenskyi took and published a selfie as he left to defend his country from Russia’s invasion. Nazar was mortally wounded saving twenty of his fellow Ukrainian soldiers from Russian bombardment. He was 23 years old. Source: @rishcast/Reddit, July 2022 — Nazar Nebozhenskyi took and published a selfie as he left to defend his country from Russia’s invasion. Nazar was mortally wounded saving twenty of his fellow Ukrainian soldiers from Russian bombardment. He was 23 years old.
Source: @rishcast/Reddit, July 2022

As the war intensified, selfies of both Ukraine and Russian soldiers appeared on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram. The war had become personal and individualised. I was looking at faces of men and women forced into battle with one another. These were not the black and white faces of young English, Austrian and Yugoslav combatants long dead I would find in the few dozen photos my parents left Europe with. These were high resolution digital stills of people who only weeks earlier shared selfies of themselves at parties, weddings, on holidays, or at home with their pets. They had taken their curated, social media selves to war. Pets were replaced with machine guns and the latest fashion with flak jackets. Against a background of devastation war was becoming a live, public photo-me-booth.

Russian soldier posts a selfie from a Ukrainian home, 2022

Former Ukraine model posts a selfie, 2022

Alleged Russian orphan conscript posts selfie, 2022

Ukraine lawmaker with AK47 posts a selfie, 2022

Ukrainian Instagram cat finds a saviour during war, 2022

In April of 2022 photos of another sort emerged. These were of a man with his hands tied behind his back sprawled face down on the pavements and steps leading to some of Moscow’s most iconic landmarks.1 Titled Акция “Буча-Москва” (Action “Bucha Moscow”) a Russian performance artist had taken to replicating a photo taken of a Ukraine citizen found tortured on the streets of Bucha, what would become known as massacre of civilians, a war crime perpetrated by the Russian military.2 At that time there was little by way of resistance in Russia to the war taking place in their name. Actions such as this one on the Bridge at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow remain rare. That it was documented at all and shared internationally even rarer still.3

Акция “Буча-Москва”, Bridge at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, 5 April 2022

What struck me about this photo and many more like it is how much it reminded me of the internet I knew of former times, an internet that was primarily about coordinating and transmitting physical acts of resistance into the virtual, and how they would spread from one platform to the next, reaching thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, motivating others to do the same or similar. It was how an international ban on rainforest timbers had been mobilised in the late 1980s, how war crimes in Bosnia Herzegovina and torture in East Timor were recorded, transmitted and shook the outside world. This was an era when a photograph, a media release or a call to action would be stir people to action, to organise and participate in any number of international events from protest, to lobbying and embargoes.

Over thirty years before Action “Bucha Moscow” quietly infiltrated social media, a simpler version of the Internet emerged from the firmament of imminent war in the Middle East, the harrowing destruction of ancient forests and fear of a radically changed climate. In the late 1980s through to the early 1990s, no attention-seeking hand-held devices derailed our focus or motivated us to curate our social media selves through violence.

Powerful photographs mobilised protest and international condemnation. These include Napalm Girl, Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of nine year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a street naked after being severely burned by a napalm attack, the Penan forest blockades in Sarawak immortalised in the book and film Blowpipes and Bulldozers, and Jeff Widener’s 1989 photograph of Tank Man, one man with shopping bags confronting a convoy of tanks on Tienanmen Square, China. Would Napalm Girl have the same impact today as it did in 1972?

Today we are saturated with powerful images. But not even the actual photographs of the victims of Russia’s war crimes in Bucha, least of all our lone protester on the streets of Moscow, stirred Russians to protest what continues to be perpetrated in their name. If Ukraine is, as Putin claimed in his February 21 speech, “an inalienable part” of Russia’s “own history, culture and spiritual space” why destroy it? Why rain missiles into apartment buildings, shopping centres, schools, and why brutalise its people? Can Russians not see the crimes, the contradictions? Was “Bucha Moscow” a rare, daring act of protest in a country convinced it should murder its own “spiritual” sisters and brothers? Where is the revolt in Russia itself? Has the wannabe tsar paralysed courage, outrage and dissent?

When 236 Ukrainian refugees arrived in Canada on a special flight from Warsaw in July 2022 they were welcomed by Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Napalm Girl. Where there is a paucity of revolt in the country perpetrating violence, torture and a war of attrition against its brothers and sisters in Ukraine, there are others the world over who do stand by them.

What else did I learn from my Oma and Opa’s photos?

From the work of courageous and meticulous archivists in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, we were to discover that Andrey, a multi-instrumentalist, was playing in Dresden when it was bombed by allied forces. In 1950, when giving a reason for ending his employment so suddenly, he wrote ‘FLED’ on an Application for Assistance. Andrey and his new wife were seeking to migrate from Germany to Canada. Elsewhere on the document a US official presiding over displaced persons in Germany writes, Eligibility established.

Extract from Andrey Garton’s **Application for Assistance**, Germany, September 1950

It’s Tuesday, 25 February. As I write, three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, peace negotiations are underway, but key discussions exclude Ukrainian representation. The UN General Assembly passes a resolution ‘condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’. Those voting against the resolution include the US, Russia, North Korea, Israel, Belarus and Hungary. As UN media releases spread across social media, Germany announces a new government. Its newly minted Chancellor Friedrich Merz comes out strong in his support of Ukraine distancing Germany from the US now siding with Russia. Other countries in the EU are expected to follow. At around 3 AM EEST Russia launches two TU-95 long range missiles aimed at Ukraine. Explosions are reported in Kharkiv as “peace negotiations” continue.

Я за Україну

Post by a Ukrainian citizen on BlueSky, 25 February 2025

Endnotes

1 Unknown performance artist stages multiple ‘silent provocations’ at Moscow landmarks to protest the Russian military’s massacre of civilians in Bucha, @KevinRothrock/Twitter forwarded from Telegram, 5 April 2022

2 UN report details summary executions of civilians by Russian troops in northern Ukraine, United Nations Media Centre, 7 December 2022 [viewed February 2025]

3 Kishkovsky, S 2022, Russian artist stages protest performance against Bucha massacre, The Art Newspaper, 7 April 2022 [viewed February 2025]

Share on

There was nowhere else to go but inside

Oct 25, 2024

There was nowhere else to go but inside

Ollie Olsen performing with Terminal Quartet, February 2006

On 16 October 2024 musician, composer, visionary and 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.

Andrew Garton
Oct 25, 2024

Crystalline excretions grew deep underground drip by drop. Timeless. Ancient passageways emerged from glistening rock in all directions. I had been in a reverie of listening and what I heard took me down, way down beneath the Brisbane River where it flowed parallel to Oxlade Drive. Twenty seconds in and a choral-like voice evoked the first tumbling of primal drums accompanying my descent. The pace quickened, and I seemed to be flying into a cavern lit by stars reflected through countless quartz crystals embedded within a nest of barely perceptible shafts riven through bedrock. Then, a voice, as if gouged from coal and ground pestle-like into sentences, emerged from the vast speleogenesis landscape, from the step stomp of beats. Into your mind. The vastness had spoke! Timeless.

This was a strident, self-assured music emanating from everywhere within an ancient, timeless chamber. How it evoked this was as beguiling as finding myself here. And it was here, in the centre of this void of smooth rock and myriad stalactites overhead, a single eye-ball of improbable proportions was suspended. It was big! It blinked and simultaneously I heard a pulse of sorts. A repeating sine wave, hypnotic and primal. Voices invited me to it, the eye. Then! A breath! A pause… It blinked again. There was no where else to go but inside, to.it, the music, the eye.

I was in my bed. It was late. I had headphones on and listening to Third Eye’s Ancient Future. An album I would cycle over and over, mesmerised by it, allowing the music to create spaces I imagined beneath me, beneath the weatherboard cottage I’d spent 14 months in Brisbane in. I was listening to a brooding, yet expansive and seductive electronic music.

Techno had been on the outer periphery of my world of music. Its repetitive beats as meaningless and mournful as the chaotic, senseless wailing I’d thought punk was about; its social story, its political dimensions as lost on me as were the raves flourishing in forests, warehouses and Brisbane’s nightclubs. It was 1993. I’d been living in Brisbane for about a year when I met Kathleen ‘BigK’ Williamson. BigK had been photographing a live interpretation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Frankenwein was performed by the Omniscient Gallery at the former Woolloongabba rubber factory where the then Sydney based musician, David Nerlich and I were performing a live and noisy underscore.

BigK invited me to contribute my bare butt in a polaroid photo series of infamous Brisbane bottoms. At the informal launch of her series BigK introduced me to another of her butt models, local electronic music producer, Andy Bagley. She was eager to have us work together on a play she was involved with.

With our butts having had their 5 minutes of fame behind us, Andy and I agreed to work together on a score for the Brisbane based Debacle Theatre Company’s interpretation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The book was published in 1962, the year I was born. Burgess had written it up as a play in 1987 and it was this reworking of his well known futuristic classic that would be seen for the first time on an Australian stage.

In the weeks that followed Andy and I set to work on music drawing inspiration from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Hitler’s apocalyptic speeches on agricultural productivity and our distinctively individual music making approaches, Andy’s driven by beats and bass riffs and mine by aleatoric melodies, textures and drones.

Our collaboration took place in Andy’s well equipped studio. It housed the most diverse collection of keyboards and synths I had ever seen. Andy had synthesizers from every era of their making and we would use many of them. But first, before we recorded a single note we would get to know each other through the music we listened to at that time. At our first gathering in the studio I’d brought Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Radio Inferno which remains a thrilling inspiration to me. When it came time for Andy to share his offering he began with a Front 242 album. I recall it being loud, hard and bereft of harmony. I didn’t like it. Then, Andy loaded up Quilombo, the 1991 release from JG Thirwell’s Steriod Maximus project. I was so taken by it I bought a CD of the album the following weekend and listened to it so much I doubt I’ll listen to it ever again. He then played Third Eye’s Ancient Future and I was drop-jaw smitten!

Who’s this, I asked?

This, Andy replied, is Ollie Olsen.

Huh? Ollie… Olsen?

I’d first heard Ollie’s name in 1980 I’d when his song Win/Lose appeared on 2JJ; a desperate appeal for sanity amid deranged and uncertain times. I adored its odd shuffle, its angular motion, its weird organ grinder aesthetic. Win/Lose was one of those pieces that changed the way I listened to music and what I would look for in it.

I told Andy that throughout the 1980s Ollie’s trajectories in music somehow found me in many of my own. Bands such as Orchestra of Skin and Bone, Whirlywirld and No would feed my curiosity for this man’s bewildering creativity. But Ollie Olsen writing, producing and releasing techno? On a label of his own making too! At first, it didn’t make sense, but here was a music that was not only infectious it had cadence, harmony, an orchestral kind of approach to its arrangements and it had a dynamism that I could listen to. Yes, I actually could listen to Ollie’s techno as I would Bach or Bowie.

Andy loaned me the album and that evening I rode back to my Newfarm cottage, parked the bike, slid off my helmet and leapt up the wooden stairs, opened the door, changed into shorts and a t-shirt and lay in bed with a pair of headphones plugged into a portable CD player I kept atop a stack of books. I flipped open the player, inserted Ancient Future, pushed down the lid, pressed Play and Repeat. I laid back and closed my eyes.

Just as The Clash and Elvis Costello eventually led me to the wide world of punk, Ollie’s Third Eye tuned my ears to techno that was musical, that had history to its making and a creative dimension I’d not heard, nor understood before. Here, embedded within Ollie’s Ancient Future, were elements of Stockhausen, Noi, Can, Ligeti, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Gorecki.

In the years that followed I would dance the fuck out of Ollie’s music and we would work together on any number of projects – Terminal Quartet, Regenerative/Generative, D3 Derive to name but a few – and share in each others deeper thoughts and aspirations, but back then, it was all about laying on my bed in an old Brisbane weatherboard, a crisp evening in 1993 with possums scampering across corrugated iron, fruit bats camped in the trees outside and the Brisbane river nearby as I lay listening, going nowhere else but to Ollie’s third eye suspended there

Rest in Love Ollie.

The wonder of the Blacksmiths Tree

Feb 8, 2019

The wonder of the Blacksmiths’ Tree

The Blacksmiths’ Tree [Video Still: Michael Wilkins]

My story with the Blacksmiths’ Tree began in 2011. Its own story began in 2009, but if truth be told it began much earlier than that.

Sometime between 2558 and 2532 BC, ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom build the oldest known sculpture in Egypt, The Great Sphinx of Giza. We know it was carved out of bedrock, but how and for what reason is lost to us as might have been the Sphinx itself were it not for centuries of restoration, its distinct features once buried under sand. But in AD 1378 its long beard and one-metre wide nose were chiselled off by a religious zealot when he observed commoners offering gifts and salutations to the mighty rock. According to Arabic historians, he was hung for his vandalism.

In 280 BC, over 2000 years since the Sphinx emerged from a single piece of stone, a statue of the Greek Sun God Helios was erected in the City of Rhodes. The Colossus of Rhodes was said to have stood 33 metres high, celebrating the tumultuous victory of Rhodes’ over the ruler of neighbouring Cyprus. The tallest statue of the ancient world collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC. Parts of it remain to this day, but it was never rebuilt.

On July 20, 1969, the first human stepped foot on the Moon. It took just under 10 years of a massive scientific and engineering undertaking to not only breach the Earth’s gravity but to reach the Moon and return three astronauts safely back to Earth. The mission was driven by a yearning to outflank the Soviet Union’s efforts, who had themselves thrown the first satellite, then a dog and finally a man into orbit around the Earth.

As incredible as these and other human achievements have been, as far-reaching the technologies that led us here, it did not take the posturing of powerful kingdoms nor their gods, or the celebration of war and the craving for power it underscores, nor had it taken political avarice and cold war theology to motivate a small group of artisans, blacksmiths and welders, engineers and volunteers to create what now stands 9.8 meters tall in Strathewen, one of several townships affected by the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia.

In the 21st Century, the makers of the Blacksmiths’ Tree show us that human ingenuity need not be driven by magical thinking, by war and political ambition. It can come to us all by serving our community needs, through collaborative outreach and action… and love. It is this that we may learn from the Blacksmiths’ Tree, that we can come together, today, tomorrow and the days ahead to remake the way we live here on planet Earth. And we do so so that our children and their children’s children may live long, well and safe because this stainless steel Tree, unlike the Sphinx and the Colossus of Rhodes, may, if politicians continue to falter in their responsibilities, this the Blacksmiths’ Tree may well be the last tree standing. But for now, it isn’t and how it came about and what it means to us all is the story I tell in my film, Forged from Fire — the Making of The Blacksmiths’ Tree.

I am not an alien

Dec 22, 2018

I am not an alien

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.

Andrew Garton
Dec 22, 2018

“Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.” ― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. What I believed to be memories waned in my 30’s, re-surfaced in my early 50’s and came to a necessary halt around the time I turned 56. But it was that first decade when the backyard walks of my childhood fired my imagination so much that the outer space adventures of Zandor the Master Exporer lived both in me and the stories I would share with my younger sister and brother. Our mother would have us bed down early — as children we slept in the same room as our parents — and I would recount my memories of adventures across the cosmos to them.

As I grew older I knew I was not of Earth. How could I be human when I had such little in common with anyone I knew? I’d move about schoolyards from infant to secondary, often alone and when not taunted, pushed about and ridiculed for my accent, blond hair or lisp I would be in the library cultivating my stories with the many others I found there. We lived across the road from the primary school I attended in Sydney’s outer western suburbs. On the few days I would have lunch at home, my mother would often wait for me at our front gate . That too was a source of much harassment. Mummy’s boy, they would taunt.

It took several decades to realize how much I yearned for an extended family, a village, a collective happening beyond the perimeter of the school yard or that of my home. My parents migrated to Australia from Europe, arriving in 1950 escaping their world war memories and trauma. They arrived in suburbs where homes were fenced off from each other. The White Australia Policy was still in play. My father was of mixed Ukraine heritage and my mother grew up in a mountain village in Austria. My genes may not be of Australian soil, but I would come to realise that I am not an alien.

Andrew Garton in Game Over a short 8mm film by David Nerlich, Sydney, 1985.

I am not an alien. I did not arrive on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, keeping myself alive by evolving through plant and animal DNA. No, I am not the galactic adventurer, Zandor, who mastered English in this life, but somehow had forgotten the hundreds, perhaps thousands of others he would have spoken across the eons including his own alien mother tongue. I had not originated in the Mentas System nor was I stranded on Earth, crash landing here waiting for my people to come.

I am not an alien. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars. What I am and what you are is of those stars, and that is the remarkable achievement of life.

If I were such a creature from the stars I would know how to navigate the galaxies and understand something of the technologies that brought me here. My stories of a crystal powered spacecraft is not evidence enough.

I would also know of the flora and fauna of my home world, its linguistic capacities, its historical achievements, but I have no recollection of any. What I do have is a loosely constructed narrative of an adventurer with a child’s view of their inner and outer world; a child that had grown apart from his family, neighborhood and a small cohort of school friends. A child mesmerized by science and astrophysics, consoled by music and radio plays, creatively restored by filmmaking and writing. A boy whose head was not in the clouds, but among the stars from where he knew, with all his being, all life had emerged from.

Andrew Garton performing Tong Tana with Benguela, Cape Town July 2009. Photo by Niklas Zimmer.

Here we are, on Earth, bound to it by the atmosphere and gravity that prevents us from falling in every direction into space.

Here we walk, sleep, stand and flourish as flesh wrapped to bone stood upright, with skin that heals itself when cut, with eyes embedded within a unique hominoid skull housing the very same human brain from where both the fictional Zandor emerged and the perceptive thinking of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It is extraordinary that not only have we the historical records to prove this, but that we exist at all. That we literally evolved from cosmic dust, from the essence of the numinous we can barely fathom, that our telescopes and radio scopes scan the heavens to fuel our curiosity for, marvels beyond the stratosphere and our imagination; that is the making of me and the making of us. All of us.

Consider the atmosphere; a thin triple-decked pancake comprised of troposphere, stratosphere and the mesosphere. Astronauts have described the atmosphere as thin as a slick of oil, astounded at how fragile it appears from space.

That thin slick protects us from the random violence of the entire universe, from asteroids smashing into celestial objects, stars collapsing, black holes devouring everything including light. Thankfully, we are too far from the nearest black hole to be sucked into it.

The atmosphere has its limits, and yet it protects us from our own sun, mighty and supercharged whipping solar flares across our galaxy. And here we remain, protected from this unruly cacophony and the deep chill vacuum of space. Such is the fragile nature of all that keeps us from oblivion, but sadly the atmosphere cannot protect us from ourselves and the penchant for extinction oligarchs the world over appear to prefer than a life palatable for all.

Air pollution, India, 2015 — Air pollution on the road to Alwar, India, 2015.

I grew up with a cocktail of stories of a life beyond this planet. Stories that helped me survive school, that gave me the courage to travel beyond the domestic fence boundary, a troposphere of wire and concrete, that filled a longing for my traumatized father who left us too young, for laughter, and for love. And I took those stories with me into adulthood where they became less necessary, somewhat embarrassing and finally extinguished when I longed for my daughter whom I had been separated from in her early teens, for laughter still and again for love.

At fifty-six, all that had been imagined collapsed. No, I am not an alien from Alpha Centauri, 4.22 light years away from us here on Earth. No, I am not. But I and we, are of all that Alpha Centauri is comprised; we are of the stars. But we did not come here in a spacecraft, we arrived through the most incredible confluence of protons and neutrons. At the atom heart of our bodies resides the very stuff of stars and that is an astonishing thing to behold!

There are wonders enough out there, said the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, without our inventing any.

Artistic licence

Jun 10, 2017

Artistic licence!

Unlike countries with a fair use exemption, copyright laws in Australia require artists to secure prohibitively expensive licences for even the smallest quotation of others’ work.
Patricia Aufderheide

Flip Case leads rehearsals — A scene from Andrew Garton’s documentary ‘This Choir Sings Carols’.
Credit: SECESSION/FILMS and FIRST IMPRESSIONS YOUTH THEATRE

Once a year, in early October, around 60 people gather at the City of Whittlesea’s Fountain View Room in the northern fringe of Melbourne to begin 10 weeks of rehearsal for a single concert.

They span generations – aged from eight to over 90 – cultures and faiths. For nine months of each year they never see each other, and then they come together to sing Christmas carols as part of a healing process that began after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. I documented one year’s worth of rehearsals with the help of a grant from the council and volunteers from First Impressions Youth Theatre.

The result, a 30-minute documentary called This Choir Sings Carols (2016), writes Patricia Aufderheide, will probably never be seen.

Since then, it has, but that story is for another time. For now, we are interested in why the film was constrained from being publicly seen. Read Copyright rules crippling artists, published in The Saturday Paper, 10 June, 2017.

View/Download Copyright rules crippling artists _ The Saturday Paper [PDF]

« Older Entries