Australia

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares36 Views

    ‘Unsung Hero’ Review: Music Dedicated to the One They Love

    by

    In fact, there’s a lot of singing in the clan whose members inspired this movie and who have racked up five Grammy Awards for their Christian recordings.In the faith-based drama “Unsung Hero,” an Australian concert promoter trying to earn a living makes a last-ditch move to Nashville with his wife and six children. Based on an actual family of musicians, it mostly plays as a treacly tribute to the parents of Joel and Luke Smallbone — a.k.a. the Christian pop duo For King & Country — and their sister the singer Rebecca St. James.Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash. Joel Smallbone plays his own father, David, who faces financial and reputational ruin after booking a big concert and failing to pack the house. He resettles the family in the United States, but no job materializes. His pep-talking spouse, Helen (Daisy Betts), and their beatific children pull up bootstraps and practically whistle while they work, but it’s not enough.Community, humility, and the power of prayer are the lessons on offer in their story, set in the 1990s, bathed in warm light and interspersed with home video segments. Fellow churchgoers pitch in, and David gets over himself; he secures auditions for his teenage daughter, Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger), who keeps breaking into dulcet song about how everything is beautiful. The outcome of “Unsung Hero,” as written and directed by Richard L. Ramsey and Joel Smallbone, is never in doubt, though the climax has a kicker line that genuinely surprises with its laughable shamelessness.The family business has become a success: Rebecca, Joel and Luke have won five Grammys among them. But despite the fuzzy good intentions, it’s tough to make much of this making-of story.Unsung HeroRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift’s Singapore Shows Stir Anger in Southeast Asia

      by

      The country is defending paying the pop star to play nowhere else in Southeast Asia. Thailand’s prime minister said the price was up to $3 million per show.Taylor Swift has descended on Southeast Asia, or one small part of it at least: All of her six sold-out shows are in Singapore, the region’s wealthiest nation.Many of her fans in this part of the world, which is home to more than 600 million people, are disappointed. But the Singapore leg of Ms. Swift’s wildly popular Eras Tour, which began last weekend and ends on Saturday, is a soft power coup and a boost for the country’s post-pandemic economic recovery.The shows — and the undisclosed price that Singapore paid to host them — have also generated diplomatic tension with two of its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines.Last month, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin of Thailand said publicly that Singapore had paid Ms. Swift up to $3 million per show on the condition that she play nowhere else in Southeast Asia. A lawmaker in the Philippines later said that was not “what good neighbors do.”Singapore pushed back. First its culture minister said the actual value of the exclusivity deal — which he declined to name — was “nowhere as high.” The country’s former ambassador at large later called the criticism “sour grapes.” And on Tuesday, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told reporters that he did not see the deal as diplomatically “unfriendly.”Fans in other Southeast Asian countries are disappointed Ms. Swift isn’t performing elsewhere in the region.How Hwee Young/EPA, via ShutterstockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

      by

      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna, Is Dead at 89

      by

      Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer.Oh, Possums, Dame Edna is no more.To be unflinchingly precise, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.His death was confirmed by the hospital where he had spent several days after undergoing hip surgery. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Mr. Humphries as “a great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind.”A stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not so much a character as a cultural phenomenon, a force of nature trafficking in wicked, sequined commentary on the nature of fame.For generations after the day she first sprang to life on the Melbourne stage, Dame Edna reigned, bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, one of the longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a series of solo stage shows and was ubiquitous on television in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.A master improviser (many of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs were ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was widely esteemed as one of the world’s foremost theatrical clowns.“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” the theater critic John Lahr told him, after watching Dame Edna night after night in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the great stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” after all, is Australian for “average.”Housewife, Superstar, National TreasureBut Edna soon became a case study in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of celebrity, and acquiring a damehood along the way. A “housewife-superstar,” she called herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, still later, to “gigastar.”Mr. Humphries, wearing a hat in the shape of the Sydney Opera House, in 1976.Wesley/Getty ImagesIn Britain, where Mr. Humphries had long made his home, Dame Edna was considered a national treasure, a paragon of performance art long before the term was coined.In the United States, she starred in a three-episode series, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock celebrity talk show broadcast on NBC in the early 1990s, and was a frequent guest on actual talk shows.She performed several times on Broadway, winning Mr. Humphries a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person show.In her stage and TV shows, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna typically made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was more than six feet tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a natural wisteria,” she liked to say), her evening gown slit to the thigh to reveal Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her body awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furniture,” she called them).Addressing the audience, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna called audience members “possums” often. She also called them other things, as when, leaning across the footlights, she would address a woman in the front row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”Mr. Humphries with the English actress Joan Plowright at the Lyric Theater in London.Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPerformances concluded with Dame Edna flinging hundreds of gladioli into the crowd, no mean feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, Possums!” she exhorted audience members who caught them, and the evening would end, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences were treated to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to finding oneself stranded in a hall of vanity mirrors.There was commentary on her husband and children (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her beauty regimen (“Good self-esteem is very important. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, among them Queen Elizabeth II and her family. (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me.”)Dame Edna’s TV shows were often graced by actual celebrity guests, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.They came in for no less of a drubbing than the audience did, starting with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense name tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the light of gigastardom so close at hand, who among us would not be reduced to anonymity?“Chuck,” Mr. Heston’s name tag read. Ms. Gabor received two: a “Zsa” for the right shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.A few pleasantries were exchanged before Dame Edna moved in for the kill.Mr. Humphries as Dame Edna in 1978. She referred to him as “my manager” and accused him of embezzling her fortune.John Minihan/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesMr. Humphries as himself in 1978. He always spoke of Dame Edna in the third person.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“You’ve had nine hits this year,” she purred fawningly at the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on one of her British TV shows. “On your website.”Turning to the audience after delivering a particularly poisonous insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”Those guests who emerged relatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face value and interact with her as though she were real. The moment he donned those rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries often said, Dame Edna became real to him too, an entirely separate law unto herself.‘I Wish I’d Thought of That’“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” he explained in a 2015 interview with Australian television. “And every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”But the truly funny thing, Possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first brought Dame Edna to life, he intended her to last only a week or so. What was more, she was meant to have been played by the distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.Mr. Humphries created a string of other characters over the years, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the public utterly — despite the fact that in later years, her mortification-inducing lines sometimes landed her, and her creator, in trouble.So fully did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to point out that he was neither a female impersonator in the conventional sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.“Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?,” an American interviewer once asked him.“If I were an actor playing Hamlet,” he replied, “would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish?’”By all accounts far more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an accomplished painter, bibliophile and art collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, always spoke of her in the third person.She did likewise. “My manager,” she disdainfully called him. (She also called Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it must be said, cash a great many of her checks.)But as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his aid when he very likely needed her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and at least one brush with the law.Mr. Humphries at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 1999 in “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” for which he won a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘I Hated Her’John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a prosperous builder; his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker.From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a more exclusive suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his parents and their circle, and depressed by his mother’s cold suburban propriety.Dame Edna was a response to those forces.“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation.”Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne; he had dropped out of the university two years before.On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest.Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self.For a revue by the company in December 1955, Mr. Humphries wrote a part for Edna, earmarked for Ms. Caldwell, an Australian contemporary. But when she proved too busy to oblige, he donned a dress and played it himself. After Edna proved a hit with Melbourne audiences, he performed the character elsewhere in the country.By the end of the 1950s, hoping to make a career as a serious actor, Mr. Humphries had moved to London, where Edna met with little enthusiasm and was largely shelved. (She blamed Mr. Humphries ever after for her lack of early success there.)Mr. Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, in the original West End production of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the role when the show came to Broadway in 1963.But though he worked steadily during the ’60s, he was also in the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later said, were of no avail.His nadir came in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to find himself under arrest.With a doctor’s help, Mr. Humphries became sober soon afterward; he did not take a drink for the rest of his life. He dusted off Dame Edna and, little by little, de-dowdified her. By the late ’70s, with celebrity culture in full throttle, she had given him international renown and unremitting employment.Edna did not seduce every critic. Reviewing her first New York stage show, the Off Broadway production “Housewife! Superstar!!,” in The New York Times in 1977, Richard Eder called it “abysmal.”Nor did Edna’s resolute lack of political correctness always stand her, or Mr. Humphries, in good stead. In February 2003, writing an advice column as Dame Edna in Vanity Fair, he replied to a reader’s query about whether to learn Spanish.“Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response read. “The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the magazine’s cover that month. Vanity Fair discontinued Dame Edna’s column not long afterward.In an interview with The Times in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.“The people I offended were minorities with no sense of humor, I fear,” he said. “When you have to explain the nature of satire to somebody, you’re fighting a losing battle.”Mr. Humphries drew further ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph in which he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the same interview, he described males who transition to female as “mutilated” men, and Caitlyn Jenner in particular as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”Sailing Above the FrayDame Edna, for her part, appeared to sail imperviously through. She returned to Broadway in 2004 for the well-received show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Mr. Humphries was back on Broadway as Dame Edna in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs herself — it was she, and not Mr. Humphries, who was credited — Dame Edna played the recurring character Claire Otoms (the name is an anagram for “a sitcom role”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV series “Ally McBeal.”Under his own name, Mr. Humphries appeared as the Great Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012); as the voice of Bruce, the great white shark, in “Finding Nemo” (2003); and in other pictures.Mr. Humphries’s books include the memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Women in the Background” (1995). He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007.Dame Edna also wrote several books, among them “Dame Edna’s Bedside Companion” (1983) and the memoir “My Gorgeous Life” (1989).Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalind Tong, and his third, to Diane Millstead. He had two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his marriage to Ms. Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Ms. Millstead.The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the British poet Stephen Spender, as well as his children and 10 grandchildren.Mr. Humphries had returned to Australia late last year for Christmas.Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a chronic invalid “whose prostate,” she often lamented, “has been hanging over me for years,” died long ago. Her survivors include an adored son, Kenny, who designed all her gowns; a less adored son, Bruce; and a despised daughter, the wayward Valmai. (“She steals things. Puts them in her pantyhose. Particularly frozen chickens when she’s in a supermarket.”)Another daughter, Lois, was abducted as an infant by a “rogue koala,” a subject Dame Edna could bring herself to discuss with interviewers only rarely.Though the child was never seen again, to the end of her life Dame Edna never gave up hope she would be found.“I’m looking,” she told NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”Constant Meheut contributed reporting. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

      by

      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Rediscovering Australia’s Generation of Defiant Female Directors

      by

      Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Essie Coffey and others had waited years to tell their stories, as a Museum of the Moving Image series shows.In the opening moments of Gillian Armstrong’s debut feature, “My Brilliant Career” (1979), a freckled, tawny-haired young woman stands in the doorway of her house in the Australian outback and declares: “Dear countrymen, a few lines to let you know that this story is going to be all about me.” The woman is Sybylla, played by a fiery, young Judy Davis, and she dreams of a long, fruitful career as a writer — love, marriage, motherhood and all of society’s other expectations be damned.Sybylla’s words might as well have been the rallying cry for a whole generation of Australia’s female filmmakers, who had waited for years to tell their own stories. Their defiant and eclectic body of work is the subject of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema, a fascinating series that opened last week at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, N.Y.“My Brilliant Career,” which shot Armstrong into global prominence, was the first feature to be directed by an Australian woman in more than 40 years. In 1933, “Two Minutes Silence,” the fourth and final feature by the three McDonagh sisters — Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette — had closed out a brief but booming era of early Australian cinema in which women had been active as producers and directors. (The MoMI series includes the 1929 film “The Cheaters,” the only feature by the McDonagh sisters for which a print still exists.)The intervening decades had drastically shrunk not just opportunities for women interested in film, but the scope of Australian cinema itself. Stiff competition from Hollywood and the ravages of World War II had more or less shuttered the country’s film industry by the 1960s. Government initiatives to subsidize production and establish a national film school eventually spurred a rebirth in the 1970s. The Australian new wave, as this resurgence came to be called, thrust antipodean cinema onto the world stage with stylized, maverick films like Bruce Beresford’s “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie,” Fred Schepisi’s “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” and George Miller’s “Mad Max.”Tracey Moffatt in “BeDevil,” a horror anthology she also directed.Women Make MoviesThe new wave was a male-dominated movement, with many of the films flaunting a grisly, macho vision of Australian culture; Armstrong often stood out as the sole female exception. But “My Brilliant Career” also represented the beginning of another kind of renaissance in Australian cinema — one led by women. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, a number of women directed landmark films across genres, introducing rousing new feminist narratives to the Australian screen.“My Brilliant Career” is one of many firsts in the aptly named MoMI series, which was curated by the programmer and critic Michelle Carey. These include Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” (1978), often hailed as the first documentary to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman; the dystopian lesbian heist film “On Guard” (1984), written and directed by Susan Lambert and believed by some to be the first Australian film made with an all-women crew; and Tracey Moffatt’s rollicking three-part horror anthology, “BeDevil” (1993), regarded as the first feature to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman. Then there’s “Sweetie” (1989), the oddball black comedy that was the debut feature of Jane Campion, who would go on to make “The Piano” (1993), the first film by a woman to win a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.This flurry of breakthroughs resulted from two intersecting developments: the creation of state film institutions like the Australian Film Television and Radio School and the Australian Film Commission in the 1970s; and campaigns by women’s and Aboriginal groups to demand policies that would ensure fair access to these public resources. Armstrong was part of the inaugural class of 12 at the school, whose graduates also include Campion and her “Sweetie” cinematographer Sally Bongers, as well as Jocelyn Moorhouse, who produced the 1994 crossover hit “Muriel’s Wedding.” “Proof,” Moorhouse’s disarmingly mordant feature debut as a director, is part of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema.While state support helped nurture a fledgling mainstream industry, it proved crucial in the development of a feminist documentary and experimental film tradition in Australia, which benefited greatly from the commission’s Women’s Film Fund. “On Guard” is a striking example. Lambert’s hourlong movie follows a group of lesbians who scheme to destroy the data held by a multinational company, U.T.E.R.O., which they suspect is performing illegal reproductive experiments on women. A kind of Aussie sister-film to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult classic, “Born in Flames,” “On Guard” subverts patriarchal control in both form and narrative. Told in short, sleek fragments, the film strips the heist thriller of all its usual machinations and violence, instead dwelling on the everyday struggles of its heroines — be it with child care, domestic division of labor or living an openly gay life.Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” serves as both a manifesto and an heirloom for her descendants.Ballad FilmsMoffatt’s movies similarly reimagine cultural and film tropes, but through the lenses of gender and race. The short film “Nice Coloured Girls” uses clever juxtapositions of image, voice and text to turn a wily story about three Aboriginal women who seduce and scam white men into a historical meditation on the power plays between early settlers and the women’s ancestors. This theme of colonial haunting is expanded with raucous invention in Moffatt’s “BeDevil,” which draws on Aboriginal folklore to tell a series of modern-day gothic tales. Tracing lines between past and present evils — colonialism, gentrification, cultural appropriation — with an irreverent and experimental approach to editing and sound, “BeDevil” refashions Australian history as a deeply unsettling ghost story. Like many films in the MoMI series, “BeDevil” feels startlingly ahead of its time.As does Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal,” despite its simple and straightforward documentary structure. Made one year before “My Brilliant Career” — and no less seminal than that film in inspiring an entire tradition of filmmakers — “My Survival” is both a personal manifesto by Coffey and an heirloom for her descendants. Coffey speaks bluntly, straight into the camera, of the violence suffered by her people, the Muruwari, at the hands of white settlers. Then she sets out with the camera, brusque and determined, to ensure that her heritage is preserved and passed down to future generations. She teaches the local children the traditional skills of her people — hunting, gathering, surviving in the bush — and laments that their education has left them without this essential cultural knowledge. At the end, Coffey declares, “I’m going to lead my own life, me and my family, and live off the land. I will not live a white-man way and that’s straight from me, Essie Coffey.”Between Sybylla’s fictional “this story is going to be all about me” in “My Brilliant Career” and Coffey’s raw and real “I’m going to lead my own life,” a whole history of Australian women’s cinema was born.“Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” runs through Aug. 14 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Go to movingimage.us for more information. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The Deeper Meaning of Elvis in Australia

      by

      I went to the Parkes Elvis Festival thinking I’d learn something about what America used to be. I left thinking more about Australia.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email.The first time I learned to love Elvis Presley, I was in my early 20s, and visiting Graceland during a cross-country trip with a few friends. I remember watching videos of his concerts in a dark theater there and being amazed at his energy and talent. Next, there was Baghdad Elvis.When I covered the war in Iraq in 2007, a photographer we worked with happened to have mastered a near-perfect rendition of “Suspicious Minds.” At one point, in our heavily fortified compound on the Tigris River, he showed up wearing a bespoke white jumpsuit, circa 1973, leading us all in a night of raucous karaoke — loud enough to drown out the sound of bullets in the distance.And then there was Parkes, the small town in rural New South Wales, which hosts the largest annual Elvis festival in the Southern Hemisphere (and possibly the world). I’d been hearing about it ever since I came to Australia but this year, I decided to go, and to bring my 11-year-old daughter with me.I was looking for more than just spectacle, though there was plenty of that. I was looking for heart. Why do 25,000 people come out to celebrate a dead American rocker in the middle of a continent where Elvis never played a concert?I thought maybe there was something to say about the America he seemed to represent, a country that had been more optimistic, carefree, effusive, and excessive than the more earnest and angry United States we’ve seen over the past few years. Perhaps Elvis nostalgia was also America nostalgia?But what I found — as you can see in my article, with amazing photos from Abigail Varney —was simpler and more local, if no less profound. America was really not the point. Small town Australia and participatory “have a go” Australia was what animated the event.According to Elvis tribute artists — and Elvis’s former tour manager, who made the trek from back home in the U.S. — Australians of all social classes, political persuasions and ages were more likely to dress up, sing, march in the parade, or play rugby, all while dressed up as Elvis, all while encouraging each other to get involved and have some fun.The Australian festival was unique because the lines between serious and silly were blurred. While Americans listened and admired Elvis, Australians made him their own.I’ve written a lot about that Australian penchant for pulling people into an activity — it’s a big part of the idea-driven memoir I published here, called “Into the Rip,” which will be out in the U.S. in the next few months with a different title. But in Parkes there was an extra layer of verve that only the combination of Elvis and small town Australia could possibly provide. My daughter loved it. So did I.Now here are our stories of the week.Australia and New ZealandA dutiful blue catfish dad, mouthbrooding eggs that he probably fertilized.Janine AbeciaMeet Mouth Almighty, a Different Kind of Fish Dad. A study of Australian fish that care for offspring through mouthbrooding shows that things underwater are not always as monogamous as they seem.Australian Gets 12 Years for Anti-Gay Killing of an American in 1988. Scott Johnson, a U.S. graduate student, was pushed off a cliff, in a case that was first ruled a suicide but that his brother refused to let go of.Helicopter Catches Booster Rocket Falling From Space. After sending a payload of 34 small satellites into orbit, the space company Rocket Lab used a helicopter to catch the 39-foot-long used-up booster stage of the rocket before it splashed into the Pacific Ocean.How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing. Elvis never played a concert “down under,” but that hasn’t stopped tens of thousands of Australians from making him their own at an annual festival.Around the TimesInside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’. A New York Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.As Victory Day Looms in Russia, Guesswork Grows Over Putin’s Ukraine Goals. The Russian holiday celebrating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany is viewed by Ukraine and NATO as a stage for the Russian president to proclaim a turn in the war.Abortion Pills Stand to Become the Next Battleground in a Post-Roe America. Medication abortion allows patients to terminate early pregnancies at home. Some states are moving to limit it, while others are working to expand access.Much Gilt, Little Guilt. The Met Gala 2022 celebrated themes of opulence, excess and fame.Enjoying the Australia Letter? Sign up here or forward to a friend.For more Australia coverage and discussion, start your day with your local Morning Briefing and join us in our Facebook group. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing

      by

      PARKES, Australia — The Elvis Presley from Japan bowed with quiet respect. Then he tore into a rendition of “Burning Love” that sounded straight out of Memphis, and that definitely stretched the crotch of his blue jumpsuit to the limit.Backstage, a few more “Elvi” — the plural of Elvis, at least at the largest Elvis festival in the Southern Hemisphere — were going over final song choices, sweating their options for a crowd that blurred the line between fans and impersonators. Thousands of Elvi were out there in the middle of Australia, aged 5 to 85, with more pompadours and leisure suits than anyone could count.“God, it’s so many people,” said Charles Stone, Elvis’s tour manager from 1971 until his death in 1977, surveying the scene with a gold chain peeking outside his T-shirt. “Look at this.”Parkes, a small town five hours’ drive from Sydney, now shines once a year with Elvis sequins and rhinestones. Around 25,000 people usually join the festival, which started out with a couple of restaurant owners trying to bring a little less conversation and a little more action into Parkes.That was back in 1993. Nearly 30 years later, the festival has become a national treasure that exemplifies how Australians tend to do a lot of things: all together, with self-deprecating humor and copious amounts of alcohol.An Elvis tribute contest during the festival.A street in Parkes blocked off during the Elvis festival to accommodate an array of vintage cars.A couple swing dancing in their matching Elvis-themed outfit at the Parkes Leagues Club restaurant.This year’s event — after Covid forced a cancellation in 2021 — felt somehow more Elvis-like than ever. A certain heaviness mixed with the thrill of rock ’n’ roll. From tiny pubs with first-time singers to golf courses and rugby pitches where games were played in matching Elvis gear — and, of course, to the main stages, where the world’s top tribute artists could be found — there was a craving for post-lockdown, post-pandemic release.What is life even for, many of them yelled over the music, if not for a dress-up-and-let-go, yank-each-other-up-on-stage-and-SING sense of abandon?“It lets us forget everything,” said Gina Vicar, 61, a small-business owner from Melbourne who had come to the festival with a dozen friends. “With all that we’ve gone through, and what the world is going through now, it’s great to see all this joy.”When we met, she had just shouted encouragement to an Elvis (real name, Deon Symo) who had announced that he was only 21 and from Adelaide, a city often joked about and rarely celebrated.He was wearing a white jumpsuit as he stood in front of a red curtain held up with rubber bands in a pub with sticky floors — and the crowd treated him like a Las Vegas superstar. Two women a decade or two his senior danced in front, mouthing the words to every song.A couple from Queensland, Australia, wearing “Blue Hawaii” themed t-shirts.Toki Toyokazu, a crowd favorite from Sendai, Japan, performing on the festival’s main stage.The annual match between the Elvis-inspired “Blue Suede Shoes” and the “Ready Teddys.”“He’s got a great voice,” Ms. Vicar said. “He just needs the confidence.”All over Parkes, from Wednesday to Sunday, Elvi won over the Elvis faithful.Toki Toyokazu, the singer from Sendai, Japan, was a crowd favorite; he won the festival’s formal competition in 2020, and his return seemed to signal a post-Covid milestone.Another performer, “Bollywood Elvis,” wearing a gold jumpsuit featuring faux gems the size of Waffle House biscuits, also seemed to pop up whenever energy flagged. His real name was Alfred Vaz. He moved to Australia from Bombay in 1981, when he was a manager for Air India, and he said he had been coming to Parkes since the festival began. This year, he brought his nephew, Callum Vincent, 24, a music teacher from Perth, who smiled as he took it all in.“There’s only one Elvis,” Mr. Vaz, 65, said on Saturday morning as the festival’s parade began. “There are a lot of pretenders and a lot of contenders, but there’s only one Elvis.””There are a lot of pretenders and a lot of contenders, but there’s only one Elvis.”Except in Parkes, a former mining town in a country where Elvis never actually played a concert.A few minutes earlier, the mayor and the area’s local member of Parliament had driven by, sitting on the back of a convertible wearing ’70s jumpsuits along with wigs and sunglasses. Ms. Vicar and her friends walked in the parade alongside, well, the full range of Elvi. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Chris Bailey, Who Gave Australia Punk Rock, Dies at 65

      by

      He and the Saints introduced the country (and later the world) to their own raw sound just as the Sex Pistols were emerging in London and the Ramones in New York.Chris Bailey, an Australian singer who with his band, the Saints, introduced their country to the raw, fast-tempo sounds of punk rock in the mid-1970s, just as the Sex Pistols were spiking their hair in London and the Ramones were donning their leather jackets in New York City, died on April 9 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He was 65.His wife, Elisabet Corlin, confirmed the death, of natural causes, but did not provide details.Mr. Bailey and the Saints did not borrow from the sounds emanating out of Britain and the United States. Rather, in a case of parallel evolution, they emerged simultaneously, shaped in their native Brisbane by some of the same forces at work in the Northern Hemisphere: high unemployment, stifling social conservatism and grungy political radicalism.They released their first hit, “(I’m) Stranded,” in September 1976, two months before the Sex Pistols debuted with “Anarchy in the U.K.” and one month before the Damned released “New Rose,” widely considered Britain’s first punk single.“(I’m) Stranded,” which the Saints produced themselves, is as pure a punk anthem as one can find, with buzz saw guitar and driving rhythms punctuating Mr. Bailey’s fast-paced snarl of a voice, singing about youthful ennui and failed romance.That single shot the Saints to national and then global attention among the underground cognoscenti, even though it caused only the shallowest ripple in the charts. Until then, no label was interested in the stringy-haired foursome from Queensland; suddenly, everyone was.The Saints — with Mr. Bailey on vocals, Ed Kuepper on guitar, Ivor Hay on drums and Kym Bradshaw on bass — signed with EMI and moved to London in 1977, just as punk was hitting its stride.They were a part of the scene there and separate from it, both sonically — they incorporated horns, for one thing — and ideologically: To them, punk, ostensibly a cri de coeur against consumer society, was already a commodified part of it. Mr. Bailey called it a “marketing gimmick.”Unlike the typical pointy-haired British punks, the Saints kept their look low-key, more like a 1990s American grunge band (and, not coincidentally, many a latter-day Seattle band noted the Saints as an inspiration).Nevertheless, they thrived. Their single “This Perfect Day” reached No. 34 on the U.K. charts, and their first two albums, “(I’m) Stranded” (1977) and “Eternally Yours” (1978), are considered punk classics. The second album included “Know Your Product,” an anti-consumer, anti-punk song that sent fans raving.But like punk itself, the Saints had a short shelf life, though by their third album, the R&B-spiked “Prehistoric Sounds,” they were starting to transcend the genre. Released in late 1978, it fizzled, EMI dropped them and a few months later Mr. Kuepper and Mr. Hay left the band.The Saints’ legacy cannot be measured by record sales; they influenced generations of Australian rockers, as well as bands emerging from the early 1980s metal scene along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, like Guns N’ Roses.Nick Cave, another Australian musician who came up in the punkish underground of the 1970s, said in a memorial statement on the website Red Hand Files, “I can only simply repeat, for the record, that, in my opinion, the Saints were Australia’s greatest band, and that Chris Bailey was my favorite singer.”Christopher James Mannix Bailey was born on Nov. 29, 1956, in Nanyuki, Kenya, where his father, Robert Bailey, was stationed with the British Army. His mother, Bridget (O’Hare) Bailey, was a homemaker.The family returned to the Baileys’ native Belfast, Northern Ireland, when Christopher was young. But with political unrest brewing and Australia opening its doors to immigrants, the family soon moved to Brisbane, where Robert found work as a night watchman in a factory.Along with his wife, Mr. Bailey is survived by his brother, Michael, and his sisters, Mary, Carol and Margaret Bailey and Maureen Schull.Mr. Bailey onstage during the 2012 Homebake Music Festival in Sydney.Don Arnold/WireImageAfter the Saints’ original lineup split up, Mr. Bailey reconstituted the band and recorded a series of albums under the same name and later as a solo act. He moved away from punk toward roots-driven rock, folk and austere instrumentation that showed off his room-filling rich voice.He moved to Sweden in the 1990s, and then to the Netherlands in 1994, where he continued to write and record. Bruce Springsteen covered one of his songs, “Just Like Fire Would,” on his 2014 album “High Hopes.”While the musician Bob Geldof reportedly said that “rock music of the ’70s was changed by three bands: the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Saints,” Mr. Bailey was unbothered by the Saints’ name recognition relative to those others.“This is the world in which we live,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Bitter and twisted is something I don’t see any advantage in being.” More