Thursday, 13 December 2018

From Little Things Big Things Grow, Interview with Dads On The Air, 13 December, 2018.

From Little Things Big Things Grow

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2018 AT 9:00AM

With special guest:

John Stapleton
… in conversation with Bill Kable

John Stapleton is a legend at Dads on the Air. In the year 2000 while working as a journalist he became involved with a number of fathers who struggled to see their own children because of the machinations of the Family Court. Worse still, because of the legislation no-one in the broader community knew what was going on. So John resolved to shed some light on the problem through a community radio program run on a shoestring from 2GLF in Liverpool New South Wales after giving the program its name. Here we are 18 years later still going strong.

In this program John Stapleton tells us some of the history of the early days and then lets us know about his most recent venture a niche book publishing company called A Sense of Place Publishing. John has published his own books notably Chaos at the Crossroads and most recently a book by former Dads on the Air presenter Peter Van de Voorde called Children of the State. It is clear that the fire still burns in John about the many injustices fathers suffer silently.

It is a great pleasure for us to go back to the source and speak with John Stapleton who for many years was not just the voice but he also provided the media expertise and was the source for many of the stories brought to air.

Song selection by our guest: Wild Man by Kate Bush

Listen Now (mp3)

Wednesday, 12 December 2018

Salman Rushdie, A Sense of Place Magazine, 12 December, 2018.

Salman Rushdie

Hunting the Famous

Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things.

Back in London in the 1980s, I was using my new found status as a freelance journalist to pursue literary idols.

The interview with Salman Rushdie took place in the same room where he had written Midnight’s Children.

He was already world famous, having won Britain’s insanely prestigious Booker Prize.

These were the days before a voluminous The Satanic Verses scandalized the Islamic world and a fatwa was issued against him — a time when Rushdie’s fame was more or less contained within a bookish realm.

Back then the British treated Australians, colonials as we were, with something between amusement and contempt.

I doubt things have changed all that much.

Salman Rushdie was a special case.

It took a bit of effort to convince the PR woman that I should interview a man who had pole vaulted his way to literary stardom

Fortune favors the brave, often enough the foolhardy.

Brazen, I still found it relatively easy to inveigle my way into all sorts of situations. Lose my luggage; spend a lost weekend with the baggage handlers.

I was young, knew no fear, and was convinced fame and creative fulfillment lay ahead, on an ever upwards trajectory of success.

And yes, even Salman Rushdie had product to sell — Shame.

It was his first book after Midnight’s Children had set the world alight, and was being greeted with considerable anticipation.

Those were the days before numerous life pressures crowded out the days and I, like so many time-poor working journalists, would be obliged to interview people without having read a word of their work, heard their music or seen their paintings; barely having time to scan the press release in the taxi on the way to the job.

But these were different, pre-salaried days.

And so it was that I found myself outside Salman Rushdie’s London house, frantically trying, before the allotted interview hour, to finish reading Shame, a black, sprawling work set in Pakistan.

The landscapes are full of camel drivers and stunted trees, shrouded women made eerie in dust storms.

None of the characters are admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. It promptly disappeared from the public imagination.

The Multiple Voices of Midnight’s Children

I particularly loved Midnight’s Children, as had millions of other readers. I read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it became known in 1995, where the book was set.

I even went to the obsessive length of visiting some of the locations in the book, including the site of a Jain temple in a sprawling, jumbled area of Mumbai possessed of a wonderful feeling of fading wealth.

Midnight’s Children, as so many critics observed, resonated with the chaos and multiple story lines of India.

The first paragraph sets the tone, and perhaps explains the world’s obsession:

I was born in the city of Bombay. . .once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No it’s important to be more. . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I stumbled forth into the world. There were gasps and outside the window fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate — at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.

Rushdie At Home

Salman Rushdie, UK National Portrait Gallery, 1981. Much as he looked when I interviewed him.

The London house where Rushdie lived at the time was a large hushed home which even then must have cost a substantial amount of money.

Rushdie came from a wealthy family. Struggling to survive was not part of his life experience.

In contrast I was living in squats at the time, and the casualness of the money struck me. My own life had been riddled with bohemian friends, and I was impressed by this world of casual wealth, influence and success.

A maid opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were occupied by the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing in the London I was most familiar with.

His wife of the time appeared briefly before disappearing into the bowels of the house. I was escorted up to Rushdie’s study.

In those days, before my shorthand and personal hieroglyphics became good enough to keep up with most conversations, I used a tape recorder, which I duly set up.

We were amiable together more or less from the beginning.

We had something in common: we both liked science fiction.

Surprisingly, given all the plaudits rained upon his later work, his first book Grimus, published in 1975, had belonged to the much disparaged genre.

Well connected, even then, he had managed to attract a major publisher.

But that was as far as it got.

As one reviewer suggested, Grimus “nosedived into oblivion amidst almost universal critical derision.”

Another suggested he should go off and become a bank clerk, and never contemplate writing anything ever again.

The Phenomenal Crowds of India

There I was, a literary journeyman, sitting in the very study where one of the most famous books of the era had been written.

I had been to India, met many Indians.

But like other Western travelers, most of the Indians I had met were on the streets, shopkeepers, rickshaw drivers, hotel staff.

It took a while to adjust to this level of wealth, this superior grace, Rushdie’s perfect English, extravagant courtesy, high order of education.

Rushdie went out of his way to put me at ease.

I asked him, I don’t know why, in an intimate rather than reverential way, if he was surprised by the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children.

He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him.

He showed me the desk where he had written the Booker Prize winner and replied: “If you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, could you have possible imagined it would be a success?”

“No,” I replied.

And then the author pointed out a framed black and white photograph of a house featured in Midnight’s Children, the rambling Indian house where he had grown up.

And the question everybody was asking: could he do it again? Could literary lightning really strike twice.

There were people all around me who were reminding me how difficult I must be finding it. But what I felt was that it was easier, because for the first time in my life, I was able to write with the expectation of an audience.

To me, literature is the business of taking interesting risks, and the more confidence you have, the easier it is to take risks.

So Much Was To Follow

The interview went well.

Afterwards, Rushdie saw me graciously to the door.

I walked back down the road into my own contrasting life.

After that intimate hour with one of the world’s most celebrated writers, I always followed Rushdie’s career with interest; the wall of secrecy and security that surrounded him after the death threats stemming from Satanic Verses, the changed wives, the run of books.

The Moor’s Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown, most recently The Golden House.

Nobody ever dared edit Salman Rushdie after the stratospheric success of Midnight’s Children. Not that I’ve read them all, but I must admit there were moments in his subsequent voluminous, expansive, unrestrained books when I found myself skimming across paragraphs and sections, with that sneaking, could I be so arrogant thought: “If I had been the editor…”

His was the very opposite of writing for newspapers, with their tight deadlines and clipped word counts.

Personally, I would have been dead in some self-destructive orgy if I had been allowed such indulgence, if I had not been forced by circumstance to get up every day and go to work, to write about the real world.

The public relations person from Jonathan Cape said Rushdie had rang after our encounter and told her it was the best interview he had ever done.

I couldn’t have been more chuffed.

Not all interviews went as well.

Douglas Adams, author of the comedy science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, rang up after my flood of questions ceased and loudly told the PR woman: “That’s it. No more interviews. I don’t care who’s scheduled.”

I had a similar effect on the rock star Marilyn at the Savoy Hotel in London, when he said loudly to his on-hand publicist words to the same effect, making sure I heard.

Author Fay Weldon decided she didn’t like me the moment we sat down at her kitchen, while at the same time taking a great liking to my intense German artist friend Kristoff, who I had brought along for the ride. We think these moments are significant. They’re not. We think they will last forever. They don’t.

Singer Elvis Costello, another god of the era, gave me withering look well beyond disdain when I asked him what the song Every Day I Write the Book meant; as if it wasn’t self explanatory.

Sometimes, facing yet another famous person, you just run out of questions.

Adapted for Medium from the upcoming memoir Hunting the Famous.

John Stapleton worked as a news reporter on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian for more than 20 years. A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.

Saturday, 8 December 2018

Katoomba Noir: Australian Gothic, The Photography of Dean Sewell. A Sense of Place Magazine. 8 December, 2018.

Katoomba Noir: Australian Gothic

The Photography of Dean Sewell

Dean Sewell

Dec 6

Wherever I have lived I have always documented my own immediate environs.

The photograph above is of my front yard.

You don’t get any more immediate.

There is an old quip about Katoomba: The Retired, the Retarded, the Retrenched and the Religious.

No one laughs but us.

Proponents call it the home of The Relaxed, The Rejuvenated, The Recharged and The Revived.

Oh sure.

Katoomba, a small town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, is a unique place, rife with colorful characters.

It is a social welfare state.

The bookend suburbs are much more affluent.

It is what it is.

Through a Dark Glassily

Katoomba was built because of coal.

There is this old industry which is dying out, but there are the vestiges rattling through the place.

The station opened in 1874 as ‘The Crushers’, a stopping-place for trains with quarry men, equipment and wagons for transporting ballast.

There is still that feel, a place of toil and grinding work.

A place of finite dreams.

It’s damned cold in winter.

But there are always other layers.

There were historical train rides throughout this particular day, which marked the 150th anniversary of the Blue Mountains line.

The area was in severe drought.

The embers were flying out of these steam trains, and lit the litter on the side of the tracks.

The train stopped and this man, dressed in period costume, went back down the track to put out the fire.

My immediate thought: There is no indicator in this scene to suggest it is from the present.

The Winter Magic Festival

This image is of a young lady who was making her debut if you like into the steam punk subculture — which is based around the aesthetics of the industrial age.

Their adherence to this bygone imagery, their unique sense of the beautiful, is entirely intriguing within itself.

They dress in theatrical costume, there are lots of mechanics.

They reference the 19th century scientific romance of Jules Verne, H.G.Wells, Mary Shelley.

Victorian era. Early steam trains. Watches. Telescopes. Brass and iron.

It’s all about the way things once looked.

To define it is hard.

That’s true of a lot that happens here.

The Winter Magic Festival was cancelled this year because of all the new laws and regulations, traffic management, security.

The festival brought together all these subcultures, steam punks, furries, hippies, all sorts.

If not one of them, I have always felt a kind of empathic appreciation.

They are, if nothing else, aesthetically beautiful.

Beside the ratbags, there is a huge creative community up here.

Music is prominent, as are the visual arts.

Magic mushrooms grow throughout the mountains.

They once were an integral part of the Winter Festival. People believed in them, as if it was all part of a sacred ritual. We weren’t born yesterday.

After a 24 year history the Winter Magic Festival went into hiatus in 2018. Winter Magic attracts people from all over the world to celebrate the solstice on the shortest Saturday in winter.

With heightened concern across the country over the decimation of grassroots community events through ever tightening and excessive regulation, Katoomba locals say it has become harder and harder to stage the festival.

Myceleum: We are all connected

Most of the visuals which come out of the mountains are vistas, bluffs and things like that, the physical environment.

Chocolate box photography abounds; sheer cliffs bathed in beautiful golden light, there’s heaps of it.

Most people come up here for that.

These are the images tourists take away with them.

I think they bypass a lot.

We moved up here from Sydney.

I lived most of my life in Sydney’s inner-west. I had become tired, visually.

As kooky and interesting as that part of Sydney is, I had been walking the same streets for 30 years or more making photographs.

The upper Blue Mountains is a totally different aesthetic.

The Winter Of Discontent: It’s So Damn Cold Here

This is taken whilst out walking the dog.

Look at this place!

Visually I was attracted.

Straight away.

These are places people go to all the time, but rarely photograph.

Up here, you are subjected to different weather patterns than Sydney. We have a lot of mist and fog up here which is sympathetic to the architecture, flora, fauna.

And I tell you now, it’s always cold.

The cold eats into you up here. It comes up through the floorboards, through the window frames. You can’t escape it.

You have to learn to deal with it. Not everybody stays.

It is a mix up here. Visually. Socially. In the heart of everything.

European trees blend in with the native eucalypts. Rundown gardens adjoin estate grandeur.

That is the beauty. The wisteria outside wooden cottages in the spring. The narrow dark, inaccessible valleys the indigenous believed were deeply unlucky, where almost no one has walked in thousands of years.

There are fine remnants everywhere you look. Swiss chalets from the wealth that flowed out of Sydney during the 1900's, hidden estates from the earliest aristocrats of the colonies who wintered in the mountains to get away from the stifling coastal heat.

Plebeian and profound. Art Deco architecture. Old working cottages. Log cabins.

Back where we last were, we lived in brick boxes.

They Care For This Dripping Place

People around here bush walk.

They talk about the best vantage points. The state of the tracks. The places unexplored.

Outside the creative aspect of the upper mountains community, there is a staunch environmental component built into the people.

There are groups here who have their heads around climate change and the expansion of coal mines in the region, a concern to many of the people here.

A significant part of the Blue Mountains is World Heritage listed.

There is a lot of concern about development, including the new Badgerys Creek airport in Western Sydney, which would mean increasing flyovers and higher levels of visitation.

The raising of the Warragamba Dam wall, the main water source for the exploding population of Sydney, threatens to flood great swathes of the Blue Mountains National Park — drowning with it countless indigenous cultural sites.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The mainstream media which I have worked for all my life can be restrictive in senses, with such time limits placed on things. Deadlines. It doesn’t always suit for the creation of great photography.

Often the best pictures we take are outside a time frame, they don’t always fit a roster.

A lot of the images in my series Katoomba Noir are very close to home, the front yard, the end of the street, the station at the top of the hill.

I tend to concentrate on my immediate neighborhood because assignments often take me elsewhere, other people, other cultures.

I should be able to apply what I do to where I live.

I am always behind the camera.

I am always taking images.

As I took images I liked, I began collating them.

After a while I started to see a common theme linking these images together, and I realized it looked dark, brooding.

But that’s what it feels like up here. I’m not saying it’s bad. It gives the place a lovely character.

Our immediate friends are artists, chefs, past roadies, solar panel installers, masseurs and amateur astronomers.

They are people who tinker.

We find them a big inspiration; in many ways. Everything we are involved in collectively, they contribute to that, and they are creative people.

But there is an underlying darkness. I don’t know where it comes from but it is there.

Dean Sewell made his name as a documentary photographer concentrating his gaze on the social implications of the new globalized world economy and the environmental consequences exerted by climate change.

Through his acute studies Sewell also explores the dichotomy between the urban environment and its human habitation. This sits in stark contrast alongside his more reserved yet apocalyptic representations of drought and fire ravaged landscapes.

Sewell was the back to back winner of the 2009 and 2010 Moran Contemporary Photography Prize for a work borne out of a three year study of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia and the Sydney Harbor ferries.

He has been the recipient of three World Press Photo Awards in 2000, 2002 and 2005 for works covering the transition of East Timor to an independent state, Australian Bushfires, and the 2004 Tsunami aftermath in Aceh.

Sewell was awarded Australian Press Photographer of the Year in 1994 and 1998.

In 2005 and 2008, Sewell’s art practice has seen him awarded artist residencies in the remote gold-mining town of Hill End, a town famous as a haven for artists in the post-war era.

Sewell’s works are regularly exhibited in leading Australian and International galleries.

He is a founding member of the photographic collective Oculi.

THE JOURNALISM OF JOHN STAPLETON

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