WWII monument on Peleliu. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Originally published in Dynasty, China Airlines’ inflight magazine, August 2009.

Deep in the North Pacific ocean, 800km east of the Philippines and over 3000km south of Tokyo, lies the Republic of Palau. You may know it from the Survivor TV show, which filmed two series here, making full use of the archipelago’s beaches, lagoons, reefs and rock islands to put its contestants through survivalist hell. But secretly, you know those people had a great time, because Palau is possibly Micronesia’s most attractive destination – local myth even suggests it’s the ‘beginning of everything’. Certainly, it’s one of the world’s most spectacular diving and snorkelling spots, with coral reefs, war wrecks, hidden caves and tunnels, blue holes and numerous vertical drop-offs to explore. There’s also a wonderful array of marine life: coral, fish, rare sea critters, giant clams and a phantasmagorical lake populated by millions of softly pulsating, stingless jellyfish.

Palau also has the region’s richest plant and animal life: exotic birds and crocodiles in the mangrove swamps, striking flora in backyards. Plus the local people are friendly, and they love a good acronym. You’ll see these coded missives everywhere on signs, billboards and posters, like ‘W.A.V.E. – Welcome All Visitors Enthusiastically’ or ‘Know Your A.B.C. for Life! Abstinence. Be Faithful. Condomize’. You might find yourself playing this game, too. P.A.L.A.U., for example – could it be ‘Palau’s Archipelago: Lovely And Unique’, for the Republic is very diverse. It includes the capital Koror, a polyglot place with unusual culinary delights, like, er, fruit-bat pie. Southwest, the magical Rock Islands consist of a series of mushroom-shaped limestone islands dramatically undercut by erosion. Babeldaob, the second-largest island in Micronesia, derives its power from incredible waterfalls, traditional architecture and strange, alluring monoliths. Peleliu, once host to one of WWII’s worst conflicts, is now quiet and tranquil, while tiny Angaur, the coral atolls of Kayangel and Ngeruangel and the outlying South-West Islands (some 595km southwest from Koror) offer more remote pleasures.

Assuming that, like most visitors, you’ll only have limited time to island hop, Kayangel, Ngeruangel and the South-West Islands will be well out of reach. But there’s no excuse for not visiting the rest. Begin your stay in the capital, Koror State, which comprises Koror, Malakal and Arakabesang islands, all connected by causeways and forming Palau’s economic centre and cultural hub, home to two-thirds of the population. Here, histories mingle and cultures are borrowed, with many people coming from outlying villages to look for work, joining a steady stream of workers from the Philippines and elsewhere. Downtown Koror is a heady and vibrant place (with unbelievable traffic in peak period), but it’s not the definitive Palau experience … unless you’re after food. Indeed, Koror might well have Micronesia’s best cuisine. Mangrove crabs and shellfish are common menu items, as is the aforementioned fruit-bat pie, which tastes like chicken.

While Koror is not especially picturesque, the Rock Islands certainly are: many of the photos associated with Palau are taken here. The locals know these knobs of limestones, covered with jungle growth and rounded by the wind, as Chalbacheb. There are over 200 of them, a beautiful sight, spread out over a 32km expanse of water. Their bases have been stripped away by erosion, nibbling fish and tiny, scraping chitons, resulting in their surreal, trademark mushroom shapes. The islands are teeming with bird life and the waters around them are home to abundant varieties of marine creatures. Remarkably, there’s also four times as many coral species than in the Caribbean. Another outstanding feature is the 80 marine salt lakes, in varying colours due to algae infestation, each hosting a unique ecosystem. Jellyfish Lake is the best known, and snorkelling here should be number one on your list of priorities. The lake is filled with millions of transparent jellyfish, but don’t worry – they’ve lost their sting. Floating among these flimsy, pink creatures – which expand and contract like so many pulsating brains – is like exploring the atmosphere of an alien world: inspiring, uncanny and spiritual all at once. Don’t touch the jellyfish – they are really fragile – and don’t eat them. Certain tourists have been known to steal them away in bags to use in meals, but remember, these creatures have no natural predators, which is why they’re stingless, so don’t encourage them to develop their weaponry all over again. Other Rock Islands worth visiting include Carp and Neco, calm places with white-sand beaches that are perfect for snorkelling. The Milky Way cove is also popular – it’s actually white, limestone-sand emulsion, supposed to be great for the skin. For experienced divers, the Blue Corner is unmissable, with its bedazzling array of fish and abundant hard and soft corals. Novices should try the German Channel and Turtle Cove. The Ngemelis Wall, also known as the Big Drop-off, is reckoned to be the greatest wall dive in the world, dropping 300m from knee-deep water. There are also intriguing WWII wrecks dotted around the islands, including a half-submerged Japanese Zero fighter. The islands are uninhabited, meaning no hotels, but the camping is atmospheric and tremendous.

Babeldaob (or Babelthaup), joined to Koror by bridge, is huge – around three-quarters the size of Guam – but it’s sparsely populated, as most young people head to Koror for work. Ancient stone footpaths connect the villages, most of the roads are dirt (you’ll need to hire a 4WD), with no traffic lights, and the resorts of Koror may as well be a galaxy away. It’s like travelling back in time to Palau as it was in days gone by. Babeldaob is a mysterious place: at Ngarchelong in the north, there are enigmatic monoliths whose origin and purpose is unknown (save for various god theories). Found in an open field, these rows of four-foot-high basalt markers are known as Badrulchau. Babeldaob’s east coast has beautiful stretches of sandy beach, while the west coast’s shoreline is littered with mangroves and two very lovely waterfalls. The Ngatpang waterfall provides the easiest access, while Ngardmau is Micronesia’s tallest. A dip in the pools at the base of either is essential.

Peleliu, accessible by state boat from Koror, imparts a peaceful, easy feeling. There’s not much to do here, and often it will seem like you’re the only person around. Walking and exploring the jungle and war relics is an awesome, often humbling experience. In 1944 Peleliu was torn apart by one of WWII’s bloodiest battles: the island is just 13 sq km, but 15,000 men were killed here in two months and the forests and jungle were completely destroyed. Today, the greenery has regenerated, making for an eerie sensation should you chance upon a rusted pillbox or burnt-out tank hidden away. Even then, the experience is leavened by the whistles and songs of tropical birds thriving in the regenerated vines and leafy foliage, a cornucopia that has mostly healed the hideous battle scars of old. For divers, the Peleliu Wall is another fine wall dive, beginning in 3m of water but dropping an incredible 300m. White Beach, Bloody Beach and Honeymoon Beach are great for snorkelling. Finally, if time permits, visit serene Angaur, 11 kilometres southwest of Peleliu, where there’s also good diving.

by SIMON SELLARS & STEVEN from MELB PSY

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

[audio:melwalk_triple.mp3]

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

ABOVE: Back cover from The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

Originally published on ballardian.com, 16 July 2008.

I have been curious about Lovecraft for some time. When I was younger I saw the film of Reanimator. When I was a little older, I got beaten up by headbangers who loved Metallica’s ‘The Call of Ktulu’ and were offended that I, as a card-carrying punk, only knew of Master of Puppets, a crossover fave with chaospunks but the liking of which was seen as a symbol of a tryhard bandwagon jumper according to them. Later, when I was a travel writer, I visited on assignment the Pohnpei island group in Micronesia, which includes the ruins of Nan Madol, inspiration for some of the setting of the Cthulhu Mythos. And now, during my tenure as curator of ballardian.com, I have been most intrigued by the re-modulation of the Lovecraft frequency on my radar, calibrated via the online acquaintances I’ve made through the site.

But how exactly does Lovecraft speak to Ballard aficionados? Don’t the two writers in fact speak to separate audiences? Could you really imagine an Alcoholica fan banging their head to Ballard’s Crash while listening to Ride the Lightning? In fact there appears to have been a certain critical tradition of sorts that equates some aspects of Lovecraft’s work with some aspects of Ballard’s. As far back as 1959, Ballard’s story ‘The Waiting Grounds’ was introduced by Ted Carnell in New Worlds like so:

Not for a long time have readers seen a story quite like this one. Those with extensive collections or good memories will remember the impact H.P. Lovecraft made in the middle 30s with his all-too-few science fiction stories, particularly ‘At the Mountains of Madness.’ Undoubtedly author Ballard has a touch of that same genius which eventually made Lovecraft great.

And in 1994, Ballard’s 1965 short ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ even appeared in a Lovecraft tribute volume, The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, edited by D.M. Mitchell, although, as wiki notes, ‘Some of the stories in the collection — notably those by Burroughs and Ballard — were not inspired by Lovecraft, but were seen by Mitchell as sharing his “visions of cosmic alienation”.’

More recently, I have noted that k-punk (Mark Fisher) and Ben Noys, both Ballard scholars and also past contributors to this site, were involved in the conference ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory’ in April 2007. Cousin Silas, whom I interviewed in 2007, told me that his music is inspired by both Ballard and Lovecraft. And at the Ballard conference in Norwich in May 2007, Mark Williams gave a paper on Ballard and New Worlds that contained, as I noted at the time, ‘a surprising diversion into Lovecraft territory’.

In fact, Noys, over at his excellent new blog, No Useless Leniency, goes some way to explaining why Ballard, a writer not primarily known for horror or Gothic fiction, is so frequently aligned with Lovecraft:

In the formation of “reactionary novelties” (Badiou) Lovecraft can be aligned with those forms of “High Modernism,” such as T. S. Eliot’s, that constituted themselves, in Peter Nicholls words, as “an attack on modernity” (251). The difficulty, in terms of Badiou’s evental tracings, is how Lovecraft’s “novelty” is something artistically “new” while at the same time “politically” reactionary (and reactionary against other artistic innovations); it suggests the intersection or imbrication of events: in this case art, science, politics.

His reaction against these currents of the new produces a “reactionary novelty,” but actually also a true novelty of disruption that exceeds its primary evental site – Gothic fiction; this may be why that it only outside of the Gothic that we find Lovecraft’s true disciples: William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Michel Houellebecq, artists like H. R. Giger and John Coulthart, and muscians like The Fall and Patti Smith. The Lovecraft event therefore problematises Badiou’s formulation of the artistic event by being a reactionary event that produces something new.

ABOVE: Front cover illustration for The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

Wanting to know more, I was inspired to approach John Coulthart himself, a contributor to the aforementioned Lovecraft tribute volume and the foremost visual interpreter of Lovecraft’s work today. Coulthart is an operative of Savoy Books, and as such, given the Savoy trajectory, is well placed to comment on Ballard’s work, too.

Given that John’s art is included in A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft, the mighty volume that has just been released, the timing could not in fact be better to ask him for his own take on the Ballardcraft crossover:

ABOVE: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1984), by John Coulthart.

JOHN COULTHART: One of the earliest works of mine I can stand to see displayed in public is my drawing from 1984 intended to accompany the story (as opposed to the book) of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was going to be part of a series of drawings illustrating each chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition collection with each picture joining to the next to form a single long work. I completed the second one, The University of Death, then ran out of steam, and the whole idea was completely negated by the superior RE/Search edition of TAE, and then dropped in favour of my starting work on the Lovecraft stuff.

There are some vague parallels between the two writers: both are very imitable writers in terms of superficial style yet that style is at the service of a unique imagination. Both have a very identifiable inner landscape (to borrow a Ballard phrase), sufficiently notable to give us the terms Ballardian and Lovecraftian. Both transcend the genres they started out in; HPL moved from horror to a kind of visionary sf more concerned with conveying the sublime feeling of the vastness of space and time than generating a horror thrill. And both have their own readily identifiable mythology, of course. It irks me the way Lovecraft’s mythology, at least where Cthulhu is concerned, has been rendered cuddly by Americans. Have you noticed how they do this with everything, putting monsters on cereal packets and kids’ TV? I keep telling people that Hannibal Lecter (and the inferior Jigsaw from the Saw films) will be next to be absorbed by this process. Hannibal is already on his way after the last book and film.

ABOVE: ‘Haunter of the Dark’ from The Haunter of the Dark and other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

There are a couple of other parallels although the trouble with these discussions is that you can stretch the comparison too far and then it breaks. However…. HPL was the first writer to move the content of horror stories away from the Gothic with its ghosts and vampires into the 20th century. I’ve noted elsewhere how he was grasping (albeit in a pulp fashion) after an articulation of horror that parallels some of Kafka’s writing; the concerns are with the point at which our existence in three-dimensional space becomes disturbing and threatening, a fear of unusual angles and paranoia inflated to a cosmic scale. He’s known generally as an inventor of a pantheon of monsters but its that reinvention of the medium which makes him important. As Ballard did with sf, he found a way to take the tools of a popular genre and use them to say something new about our perception of the world. And like Ballard, eventually the genre trappings lost their interest. Lovecraft’s later work has little overt horror content, it’s more a kind of sublime sf with a vague horror atmosphere; At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time were both published in Astounding magazine after Weird Tales rejected them for not being scary enough.

ABOVE: ‘The University of Death’ (1984) by John Coulthart.

So there you have it — thanks John. Some of these comments back up what Ben Noys wrote about Lovecraft’s ‘true novelty of disruption that exceeds its primary evental site – Gothic fiction’, and all of it helps me to understand a little better for I am very far from a Lovecraft expert.

To end, I’ll leave you with a quote from Ballard himself, probed in 1991 by Paul Di Filippo (on the ball as always):

PAUL DI FILIPPO: Could I get your reaction to the rather bizarre assertion that your work bears secret affinities to that of the cult horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, with its emphasis on “alien geometries,” “the outsider,” and landscapes as symbols of mental states?



J.G. BALLARD: I’ve never read him, but there may well be correspondences.

‘Ballard’s Anatomy:
An Interview by Paul Di Filippo’, SF Eye, 1991.

Still from The Boy Who Loved Rain.

by Simon Sellars

Originally published in RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007.

RECENTLY IN REALTIME AND ELSEWHERE I’VE BEEN CRITICAL OF AUSTRALIAN SHORT FILM AND ANIMATION, SO MUCH SO I’M BEGINNING TO BORE MYSELF (AND DOUBTLESS OTHERS) WITH THE OLD REFRAIN. STILL, I VOICE THESE CRITICISMS FROM A POSITION OF RESPECT FOR THE AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENT SCENE AND ITS UNREALISED POTENTIAL, WHICH IS WHY IT WAS SO REFRESHING TO ATTEND THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL’S AUSTRALIAN SHORT STORIES SESSION.

These weren’t shorts made by superhero writer-directors who think they can do it all, insulting the audience’s intelligence with woeful scripts, lame punch lines, toilet humour and clichéd narrative tricks, and they weren’t shot in such a hyperaware glossy. fashion that I was forced to wonder whether the director wouldn’t be happier making ads. Instead we were presented with genuine, lived-in dramas rooted in experience and a sense of worldly self-awareness. These were films made by people who actually have something to say about their immediate environment, rather than by filmmakers who appear to have little motive other than adding another notch to their showreel by aping overseas trends (trends that are stale by the time they reach these shores anyway).

Indigenous short film
Australian Stories, a showcase for Indigenous film, included four animation shorts produced as part of the 12-strong Dust Echoes series that collects Dream Time stories from Arnhem Land, produced by the ABC in association with Deakin University and the Djilpin Arts Aboriginal Corporation. Of these, Mermaid Story (James Calvert, 5mins) was told entirely through music and sound—no narration, no dialogue. Mixing cut-outs, silhouettes and traditional drawing styles, the simple story, about a man who chooses to live with mermaids, thus forsaking his family, was achingly poignant. The Bat and the Butterfly (Dave Jones, 5mins) was perhaps the most impressive. Its characters looked like a cross between gingerbread men, stone carvings and claymation, and the story was told through snatched whisperings and ambient desert sounds, culminating in a powerful tale of cowardice and lack of responsibility versus courage and redemption. Dust Echoes was stunning, with every element in synch, creating a rich, sensory experience—visualising the Dream Time by melding the techniques of the future with the raw emotion of the very distant past.

The live action in Australian Stories was also impressive. Pauline Whyman avoided sentimentality in Back Seat (5mins), a film seen mostly through the blurred POV of the child protagonist, aimed at the Aboriginal family she sees at the end receding through the window of the car driven by her white foster parents. Stark emotional dynamics told the story: close-ups of car locks and windows; a simple Polaroid frame left lingering in the memory.

The hilarious Nana (Warwick Thornton, 5mins) featured a young girl’s comments on the titular oldie, an ancient lady whose good works include beating up alcohol smugglers who threaten the sanctity of her community. In her down time Nana paints, delighting the little girl with her off-the-cuff remark that “I paint the same painting every time. White people wouldn’t know the difference anyway.”

Adrian Wills’ Jackie Jackie (5mins) is a completely warped film about an Aboriginal girl who has to put up with the ghastly prejudices of her white boss at the supermarket where she works. All around her, the robots who work at this place are represented in hypergarish style: blue plastic wigs, clothes in colours that would do Howard Arkley proud. In the end, the boss gets his and the message is clear: stick up for yourself, because self-respect is often all you’ve got. Back Seat, Nana and Jackie Jackie are from the AFC Indigenous Branch’s latest initiative, Bit of Black Business (see page 23).

Darlene Johnson’s Crocodile Dreaming (26mins) starred David Gulpilil as an elder with the power of magic. When his clan’s sacred stone is stolen and thrown into the river, Gulpilil must defy totemic crocodiles to retrieve it. He’s the perfect choice for such an ‘aqua man’, with his ultra-smooth skin and pitch-dark eyes like portals to another dimension. The film is a tour de force, including all the performances (Tom E Lewis is the antagonist); Darlene Johnson is one hell of a filmmaker—the disturbing scene of a crocodile’s revenge and another where one swims quietly above Gulpilil are testimony to that.

When the Natives Get Restless (28min), also from Adrian Wills, is a raw look at an Aboriginal housing estate in Dubbo, a lawless non-place. One resident says, “My life’s not worth living”; another despairs, “I hate Dubbo, hate the estate, hate what it’s done to me.” The point is made that in the city people only hear media versions of what goes on, like a recent riot depicted here. The film takes us beyond that. An interviewee says that ever since settlement black people have not been allowed to work. After you see how subtly and insidiously hardwired this attitude is, you realise this country hasn’t come very far. Here, aggressors come to seem more like victims and we are left shaken with the sense that people are still left to live like this in the 21st century.

Animation
The animation component of MIFF 2007 also contained some impressive Australian work. Thomas Fraser’s The Boy Who Loved the Rain (7mins) was a wonderful, impressionistic and atmospheric short, blending all sorts of morphing effects with nature’s rain and the unnatural snow of a TV set, while Susan Danta’s The Bronze Mirror (7mins), based on a Korean folk tale, related with wit, style and grace the story of simple folk bamboozled by their reflection in a mirror. The absence of these two films from the 2007 Melbourne International Animation Festival’s disappointing Australian Panorama, supposedly a showcase of our best recent local talent, is puzzling.

Of the internationals, The Adventures of John & John (William Bishop-Stevens, UK, 7mins) told the story of a couple of geeks who invent a machine that projects thoughts onto a screen. With its fearless crosscutting of variegated animation styles aligned to fierce, black humour and a self-deprecating tone, this one was a cut above. However it was matched by Gitanjali Rao’s Printed Rainbow (India, 16mins), about an elderly Indian lady living in a grey present-day dystopia dreaming of her former life via the multicoloured, psychedelic hues of her matchbox collection, souvenirs of the old country. Taking her cat along for a ride through inner space, she steps into the ultravivid matchbox scenes, perhaps never to return, willing a better life in a transcendental, beautifully rendered testament to the power of the imagination.

Lapsus (Juan Pablo Zaramella, Argentina, 4mins) was loads of fun, its blocky, black-and-white style milking maximum coverage from a nun whose body changes shape and form seemingly against her will. Yours Truly (Osbert Parker, UK, 7mins) was an outstanding noir: found objects from old films and magazines reanimate to provide twisted thrills (think Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid with a Blood Simple sensibility). Spain’s The Lady on the Threshold (Jorge Dayas, 14mins) was disturbing, an unearthly combination of secret sects and voluntary amputation enhanced by the deceptively passive quality of the animation.

Experimental
I also caught MIFF’s Experimental Shorts program. Nothing matched the highlight of last year’s session, in which two fat Germans wanked to Mozart. Instead we had Silver Poem (Cristiana Miranda, Brazil, 4mins), a riot of monochrome textures, scratchy film and a great soundtrack. Order-Re-Order (Barbara Doser, Hotstetter Kurt, Austria, 7mins) used video feedback to form all sorts of shapes from cellular blobs of light. It was like diving into a dissected brain to the accompaniment of phased, symphonic, loop-locked music. Stuart Gurden’s Harmonium (UK, 9mins) also played perceptual games, using visual and aural tape loops to create complex inter-rhythms that slowly resolved themselves into a Terry Riley piece overlaid with spoken text by Kurt Vonnegut. Harrachov (Matt Hulse, Joost Van Veen, P Esther Urlus, UK & Netherlands, 10mins) was old school, visually reminiscent of Nosferatu, all stop motion and time lapses, with its depiction of a machine assembling itself. That’s a clichéd theme, but the addition of shots of nature also assembling itself—clouds moving, water rippling—lent the film a timeless quality that was beguiling.

Finally, I’d like to note Paul Winkler’s Popkitsch (Australia, 17mins), a hellish mishmash of the tackiest cultural refuse: a midi soundtrack of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” set to flipbook-style animations of kewpie dolls, photos of Hawaiian muscle hunks endlessly replayed, coagulating into a poptrash, shapeless blur…This film sums up the maddening quality of MIFF’s experimental shorts: that thrill of recognition tempered by utter, infuriating banality that makes you question your very will to live with the crushing, yet sometimes bizarrely uplifting, boredom of it all.

Melbourne International Film Festival, July 25-Aug 12, www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au

RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 pg. 19

Here are some advance details.

‘Subterrain #2: An Introduction’ was originally published in Subterrain magazine #2, July 2007.

Subterrain is a magazine that provides an opportunity for homeless and marginalised people, primarily those using the services at Ozanam Community Centre (see opposite), to tell their story. That’s about it as far as mantras or mission statements go. We’ve already published one edition, in November 2005, and that was a great success, relaying stories from Melbourne’s real ‘underground’ with candour and wit. We didn’t pull any punches and the feedback we received was that most who read it were moved by the emotions and intelligence on display. With that encouraging start behind us, we were grateful to the City of Melbourne’s Community Community Cultural Development program, which supplied us with further funding to publish a second edition.

And here we are, with some returning contributors plus a whole flock of new participants. As before, what strikes me is the honesty and the willingness of people to tell the story of their lives. There’s no shirking, no blaming others, no looking for a ‘free ride’, no denial of responsibility – none of the negative clichés that seem to stick to homeless people like mud or even shit, propagated by the mainstream media and smug members of the general public who think they know it all. No, in its place is simply that raw, naked willingness to get to the heart of the matter: ‘This is wrong; this is broken. And this is what I’m going to do about it.’

The theme of the first edition was the ways in which artistic and recreational projects can make a difference to the lives of ‘homeless and marginalised’ people. We profiled theatremakers, sportspeople, writers, poets, filmmakers and musicians who’ve worked with disadvantaged people, and we interviewed the participants themselves. The result was a compelling body of work and a clear message for the politicians to chew over: ‘The arts can, and have made a difference to people’s lives, and what the hell are you doing trying to cut funding?’

For this edition, an equally important theme began to emerge: that public housing and crisis accommodation in this country is woefully inadequate. It’s not that we consciously set out to document this issue, simply that in all the interviews we conducted – and in all the poetry and writing submissions we received – this was the central, crucial concern of people ‘living the life’: how do you find a safe, stable roof over your head when you are struggling with mental-health issues, or drug and alcohol issues? Where are the safety nets?

The stories and articles we present to you in this edition are straight from the horse’s mouth, with minimal interference from myself or my editorial team, save to record the stories and edit them in consultation with the clients. There’s no preaching here, but simply, again, that desire to tell it like it is. Because there’s nothing more annoying or frustrating or simply more wrong than a stable person from a good upbringing pontificating that all people living on the streets have it in their power to get off the streets, because apparently it’s ‘a level playing field and fundamentally we’re all the same’. But what if you do suffer from depression, or you’ve been sexually abused, or your family doesn’t give a stuff about you and kicks you out when you’re young and raw and scared, or you have a learning difficulty and you can’t break things down into simple, manageable chunks like looking for a place and paying the rent? Then, chances are, you’re on the streets, or you’re jammed into roach-infested dens not fit for dogs, presided over by standover men and predators of every stripe.

Do you think I’m being dramatic? Exaggerating to score lefty points? Stealing the voice of marginalised people to score street cred? In the course of putting together this edition I’ve been accused of all this (sometimes violently; I was actually threatened at one point) by certain people who can’t seem to accept that the facts are all that matters. OK, believe me, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal. I am what you might term a terminal cynic, but I’ve interviewed enough people for this edition to have had my eyes opened so wide I resemble Alex in A Clockwork Orange, eyelids permanently jammed open, unable to remove the ghastly truth from my line of sight.

In short, I never realised how bad the state of rooming houses and crisis accommodation is because I’ve never had to use these services, but more crucially because you just don’t hear about the conditions and squalor and abuse that goes on in these places. Sure, we can have celebrities blathering on in the papers about kicking their heroin addiction and ‘fighting their demons’, but as soon as ordinary people try to express themselves similarly the finger wagging starts.

But if a UN representative can come to this country and say we have some of the worst housing conditions he’s seen in the Western world, and that the government is not doing enough to house marginalised people in a dignified and humane manner (see p20), then it’s time for the rest of us to sit up and take notice. So let’s take this moment to thank everyone who contributed their story this time around because what we now have is another compelling body of evidence, and this time the message to politicians is still exactly the same as it was last edition: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing cutting off funding?’

I want to end with words from some of our contributors, so you can judge for yourself:

‘I used to live in boarding houses, real shit holes, cockroaches in the kitchen – a real no-go zone. There’s plenty of violence at these places. Your room might get broken into or the owner might give you heroin on credit, and if you can’t pay then they stand over you.’ (Peter, p. 4)

‘Sometimes there would be blood and needles everywhere from people shooting up. Two blokes died in their rooms.’ (Phil, p. 14)

‘They were using drugs in their room, goes on for three months. I ring up the managers, ‘If I get stabbed or beaten up, what are you gonna do?’ And she said, ‘We have to warn three times and you have to come to the court.’ I said, ‘I’m not coming to the court. These guys, they’re looking at me like they’re gonna eat me. The eyes – the way they’re looking at me.’ (Chris, p. 16).

‘There’s not enough cheap, affordable housing, and as for rooming houses – well, if you live in a rooming house you’re classified as homeless because they’re that unsuitable. Some of them are really dangerous and nasty. I had someone pour fire accelerant under my door and light it.’ (Tojo, p. 22)

‘I’m living in Holland Court, the housing-commission building in Flemington. It’s too rough. The other night they tried to steal my neighbour’s car ’cause he hadn’t paid the money or something. I’m trying to get out of there. In the time I’ve been at Holland Court, two people have jumped out from the eighth floor.’ (Karen, p. 76)

And so on and so on.

Just telling it like it is, people. Still, it’s not all gloom, because once again we are including a healthy arts section: poems, lyrics and stories from those in the ey of the storm. Plus interviews with creative individuals who work with marginalised people – and conversations with the marginalised people themselves who are in turn creative individuals.

So, let’s get real reductive, then: Subterrain is all about two basic necessities of life – to develop a healthy, active mind and to secure a stable roof overhead. Along with food, that’s about as base as it gets. Why then, is the supply of these basics so low down on the government’s checklist? Search me: I don’t pretend to understand politics. However, after working on Subterrain I’d like to think I know a little bit more about life. And that’s the humble aim that we aim to impart to anyone reading this, too.

What’s the future of Subterrain? I don’t know. We’ve come to the end of our funding agreement. Once again, my sincere thanks to the City of Melbourne’s Cultural Development unit for all its help and encouragement. But if there’s any rich people – any corporations – out there, with a social conscience who’d like to see this magazine continue, well, you know where to find us: www.subterrain.org. If Jamie Oliver can swan into town and start up a restaurant with the aim of training homeless people, then surely a third edition of Subterrain is not too distant a prospect.

by Simon Sellars

Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 19 January 2007.

I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my family’s immigration story to the second book in Jim Hammerton’s ‘Ten-Pound Poms’ series. Ours is a strange tale, in that when we emigrated to Australia from England in 1970, on the Greek ship RHMS Ellinis, we left my brother and sister behind — they were old enough to do what they wanted and so they stayed put. I didn’t see them again for 20 years. This was clearly the most painful decision my parents ever had to make, but the context is that the grimy, economically depressed England of the time held limited prospects for working-class people like them.

Postcard depicting the RHMS Ellinis.

Although I was three years old when we came over, I used to have a recurring dream about the voyage when I was about 10. In the dream I was flying through the air, above the Ellinis, with all the passengers below, pointing up at me and gasping. The wind was very strong and everyone seemed afraid that I would be carried away, although I can remember thinking, “What’s the problem? I know what I’m doing.” Like crows do, I was able to manipulate the wind, soaring and sinking according to the thermal currents. My mum tried to reassure everyone. “Don’t worry” she’d announce. “He’s just playing on the humps of air.” That’s what she said — “humps”. This odd, out-of-place terminology has remained with me to this day. The dream is as vivid now as it was then.

This head has seconds to live (photo: Mary Sellars).

In real life, not in the dreamworld, there was a dress-up party on the boat and someone had made a papier-mache head, which was thrown overboard. I have a photo of the head bobbing in the water far, far away. Even as a kid, this image touched me in ways that I am only just beginning to understand — as a symbol of something lost, something out of reach, on the edge of reality.

The Ellinis landed at Melbourne’s Station Pier and I remember visiting the pier a few years back, staring at the Melbourne Welcomes You sign. When I was growing up I couldn’t help but think we were like colonists on Mars – that we’d left Earth to live on a different, harsher planet. Today, looking back over the water, towards the horizon, imagining the Ellinis powering into view, is like looking into the Martian sky, seeing Earth as a pinprick of light. Another memory I have is of the family being housed in corrugated-iron barracks in Nunawading, like we were in some kind of prisoner-of-war camp. I also recall searchlights in the sky over the barracks, which only added to the martial atmosphere.

Three cheers for the vague blur! (the speck in the water to the left is the papier-mache head; photo Stan Sellars).

Australia seemed lawless to my young mind — we lived in the suburb of Upwey at one stage and I remember thinking “how can this place be so close to the city”? It was like the bush – with mountains, huge spiders, strange birds, redneck neighbours…one time my dad got into a fight with some guy who came speeding over the hill in a car, almost knocking me off my bike. I remember thinking England couldn’t possibly be like this, because all I knew of it was from comedies like On the Buses and Benny Hill, which I loved. Anything British from the 70s I just lapped up, so desperate was I to imagine this far-off place where my brother and sister lived, siblings that I never knew and had never met.

+ Read the rest at the Sleepy Brain archives.

‘The Perfect Day: Melbourne’ by Simon Sellars, published in The Perfect Day, Lonely Planet Publications, September 2006.

Melbourne’s parks and gardens do the trick most times of the year, and the CBD is ringed by choice examples. I do a lot of work in the city, and on the walk in I like to procrastinate with a detour through the Fitzroy Gardens. These gardens are popular with wedding parties – with English elms and colonial flowerbeds lining the paths, it’s bliss, wedded or not. Despite the brides, grooms and preponderance of peach- and pink-coloured outfits, I still have the opportunity to hide from lovebirds and glory seekers, with trickling creeks and hidden walkways all about. I pull up a nook and take the opportunity to read the newspaper in peace; after all these years, I’m still amazed that the city is just 10 minutes away – you can’t see it; you can’t hear it; it doesn’t exist if you don’t want it to. Handy for flashers, admittedly, but also for solitude seekers; just pick your turf…very carefully.

Sadly, there’s not much in Melbourne’s papers these days so I throw the wretched tabloid away in disgust and make a snap decision to hit Chinatown for an early lunch. There are a lot of restaurants in this condensed neighbourhood and a lot of brazen touts – ignore their bleating and just follow your nose. Chilli-oil dumplings or any kind of Szechuan dish usually suffices for this little duck, but it’s not just the Chinese food that’s beyond reproach. Finally I settle for sizzling Mongolian beef, vacuuming it down before reflecting on how unbelievably bone idle I suddenly feel. Alright, that does it: work can get knotted for the day. I hit a bar, Rue Bebelons, just near the State Library, with its Latino decor, laconic staff, smart music policy and cheap spirits. I pull out a book, something by JG Ballard no doubt, sit at the bar with a scotch and a beer chaser, and watch the seething masses pass by the floor-length front windows. Only a few hours till dinner time – and the agony of being spoilt for choice (and of blowing yet another deadline) all over again.

Bluelist is a fairly newish title from Lonely Planet. It collects the hottest travel trends from around the world, based on suggestions from LP readers, and extrapolates them into top-ten lists and feature articles. I worked on the title firstly as a consultant, testing out prototype formats and templates, adding feedback and future directions, and writing mock copy in order to see what would fit and how. With the testing complete I then supplied around half the lists (17,000 words) and five country profiles to the finished product: Australia, Japan, Iraq, Slovenia and Croatia.

Following is the Japan profile.

‘Country Profile: Japan’ by Simon Sellars from Bluelist 1, Lonely Planet Publications, January 2006.

JAPAN

Name this country…
When you think of Japan, do you think of a place that’s too expensive to visit, too remote to get to and too difficult to get around? There must be a few of you, because Japan attracts just 5 million tourists per year, placing it in 33rd position in the ‘World Tourism League’ behind much smaller nations like the Ukraine and the top attraction, France (with 77 million visitors annually).

But actually, it’s shaping up to be a good time to visit Japan. Now that the Japanese economy is into its second decade of decline, the government is aching to redress the balance after years of neglecting tourism in favour of pumped-up banking and manufacturing sectors. While the rest of the world has been in the throes of a long-standing love affair with tourism, Japan now wants a piece of the action. Better late than never.

Wising Up to the World
The current Prime Minister Koizumi is the first PM to bother with tourism, and he’s pledged to get 10 million visitors per year into Japan by 2010. This is good news for travellers, because it means that a few crucial areas will be rethought and redeveloped in the near future, like the lack of foreign language-signage and information kiosks at airports and key tourist attractions. Japan also suffers from a surfeit of first-class hotels (two-thirds of Japan’s visitors are on business trips), and there’s a drive to increase the number of budget and mid-range options. Tourist boards will be standardised, a relief for those travellers who find that the current system, split between multiple government agencies, means that information is often contradictory and out of date from region to region.

Japan is also starting to realise the marketability of its enduring influence on Western popular culture; there may come a day sooner than you think when Astroboy, Godzilla and manga museums take pride of place in tourism brochures alongside geisha girls, sake and Mt Fuji. Japan’s rich tradition of incredibly diverse and colourful regional festivals is also being promoted, rather than an exclusive focus on the hoary old national tradition of cherry-blossom viewing. And the tourist board is starting to push its attractions that lie beyond the main island of Honshu – like Okinawa, with a culture developed often independently of mainstream Japanese life, and Hokkaido, home of ice festivals, the Ainu race and yet more untapped tradition.

The Song Remains the Same
But for those that already know and love Japan, it’s the same as it ever was; the country, as always, is a glorious contradiction, a sprawling, untameable beast that consistently wrong-foots the unwary. Sure, there’s all that wonderful tradition – samurai, geishas, the whole bit – but layered over the top is a furious modernism, where trends appear and disappear in months, weeks – sometimes days. It’s easy to forget that Japan has only had its borders opened to the rest of the world for less than 150 years; it’s had a lot of catching up to do, and (in Tokyo, especially) the place seems on permanent fast forward (as in the Japanese obsession with bleeding-edge technology, so often associated with Tokyo). Elsewhere, you might stare in amazement at replica Statues of Liberty that perch atop many business hotels, or contemplate the surrealism of the Seagaia Ocean Dome, a 140m enclosed ‘beach’, with its own ocean, under a permanently blue, artificial sky.

Pack an open mind when you visit Japan. Now, more than ever before, it’s highly advisable – for all sorts of reasons.

VITAL STATISTICS
• Population: 127 million
• Visitors per year: 5 million
• Unit of currency: yen
• Cost of a cup of coffee: ¥350 to ¥500
• Capital: Tokyo
• Language: Japanese

DEFINING EXPERIENCE
Posing for a photo with a schoolgirl who is dressed as Little Bo Peep while listening to Japanese noise-punk band The Boredoms on your iPod as a group of little old ladies dressed in traditional kimono race past you to catch the bullet train.

RECENT FAD
For her, the ‘Boyfriend Pillow’ is a pillow with a difference – it’s a life-sized replica of a male torso, complete with outstretched arm to snuggle into. For him, the ‘Lap Pillow’ is shaped like a kneeling woman’s lap. The makers claim the pillows ‘fulfil a primal need’.

FESTIVALS & EVENTS
• Wakakusa Yamayaki; Nara, January. The ritual burning of the grass on Wakakusa Hill, during which the whole 342-metre hill is set ablaze.
• Golden Week; the agglomeration of Green Day, Constitution Day and Children’s Day, from April 27 to May 6.
• Hanami (Cherry Blossom Viewing); February to April. A beloved institution, as Japanese of all persuasions gather to celebrate the blooming of the country’s famous cherry blossoms.
• O Bon (Festival of the Dead); July 13-16 and mid-August, countrywide. Lanterns are floated on rivers, lakes or the sea to signify the return of the dead to this world, supposedly to visit their relatives.
• Tanabata Matsuri (Star Festival); July 7, countrywide. A romantic festival based on an old legend concerning two lovers who lived in the Milky Way and turned into stars.
• Hounen Matsuri – March 15, Komaki – and Kanamara Matsuri, Kawasaki, late March or early April. During these celebrations, two among Japan’s many fertility festivals, giant wooden penises are paraded through streets to the local shrine.

HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY
Increased leisure time – many Japanese are beginning to question the national obsession with unyielding, unceasing work.

DO MENTION
The World Expo of 2005, a recent source of Japanese pride and seen by the nation as the perfect showcase for the country’s newfound attitude towards its natural environment and towards the world outside of Japan.

DON’T MENTION
Japan’s poor showing in the 2002 World Cup, which it co-hosted with South Korea – it’s still a sore spot.

RANDOM FACTS
• The Japanese associate the number four with death, and therefore refrain from buying products in packs of four. You might occasionally find the number four missing from hotel room numbers.
• In feudal Japan, women blackened their teeth to beautify themselves.
• German prisoners of war during WWII are credited with introducing sausages to the Japanese palate.
• Japan is the world’s biggest manufacturer of zippers, with around a quarter of global production.
• Japanese superstition teaches that if you whistle at night you’ll be attacked by a snake.

MOST BIZARRE SIGHT
The Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo, the world’s only museum devoted to human and animal parasites.

THINGS TO TAKE
• Cash – despite its technological prowess, Japan still hasn’t fully embraced ‘plastic money’.
• A strong stomach: you’ll need it for visiting the Meguro Parasitological Museum (see ‘Most Bizarre Sight’), and in case you are offered one of Japan’s more unusual regional dishes: raw whale sperm.

HOT TIP
• Invest in a Japan Rail Pass, for slashed discounts on Japan’s notoriously expensive rail system.
• Two websites for two different views of Japan:
1) Quirky Japan (http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv), for those who are ‘tired of shrines and temples, reconstructed ferro-concrete castles and tea ceremonies’. As the site says, ‘Japan, behind the conservative grey suits and formal bows, is a country quirkier than you can ever imagine’.
• 2) The Japan National Tourist Organization (http://www.jnto.go.jp), for shrines and temples, reconstructed ferro-concrete castles and tea ceremonies.

‘An Introduction to Subterrain’ was originally published in Subterrain magazine #1, December 2005.

In modern welfare work, it’s rapidly becoming clear that ‘homeless and marginalised’ people need more than simply food and housing. Everyone wants to find meaning in their lives, to find freedom of speech – to find a voice. Artistic expression can give the sense that a person’s ideas and viewpoints count for something, and that’s how we’ve designed Subterrain, a not-for-profit publication for the benefit of the clients at Ozanam Community Centre. OCC is a ‘drop-in’ establishment that provides support for homeless and marginalised people, and while it’s not the case that all of the contributors in these pages are currently using the Centre’s services, it’s certainly true that most have passed through at some stage.

In 2004, one of the Centre’s most requested programs was for some kind of writing group. Some clients had never written but wanted to, while others were already outstanding writers but just needed a push and a shove to get the juices flowing again. Often, though, people couldn’t commit to regular meetings; the hassles and hardships of life got in the way or sometimes they simply felt shy about writing, or that their experiences were just too powerful to articulate for the moment. So we decided to work one on one: if people didn’t feel like writing, we’d start the tape rolling and just talk. We’d transcribe the tape, edit it, pass it back to the subject for additions and corrections, and a piece would sometimes evolve like that.

In all cases, I was deeply moved by the honesty and bravery of all concerned – but also shocked, awed, disturbed, amused. I had a bike accident and broke my nose and front tooth during the project and when I tried to elicit sympathy from one of my interviewees, he laughed in my face and squished his nose under his thumb like it was a Nerf ball, explaining that he had no cartilage because he’d broken his nose so many times in prison fights he’d lost count. I stopped whingeing after that.

What’s it all about then? Given the Centre’s charter, you could say Subterrain is about the life experiences of homeless people, but that’s not entirely accurate: many of the contributors are in some kind of housing now, whether it’s transitional, in a rooming house, or in independent lodgings. Still, the fact remains that all have experienced homelessness in some form (I don’t think many would consider prison to be ‘home’, in the traditional sense).

So, in many ways the magazine is about what happens next. It’s about family, community, addiction, incarceration, isolation, crime, drugs, punishment, illness, violence, technology, surveillance, mental health, sport, food, willpower, triumph, redemption, having a laugh, self-respect… It’s about ‘life’ and its peaks and troughs and that’s terribly corny but I can’t for the life of me think of another way to describe it.

Subterrain is also about the therapeutic power of writing. The magazine’s title evokes the ‘Underworld’, but that’s a bit of licence: this isn’t Melbourne Magazine you’re reading. It’s something buried deep down, out of sight and not by choice. I don’t reckon any of the people who worked on this publication have any clear ideas of how to solve the problem of homelessness, or of drug addiction, or of rising crime.

We do believe in the power of the word, though, and what we now know through experience is that people who have suffered extreme hardship in their lives often feel a compulsion to record their life story, because writers can control their destiny by shaping and moulding negative memories into positive future action through constant revision and editing of the written word. Ozanam clients have told me that writing (or relaying their story) has given them self-esteem and confidence, that it’s given them a voice and the means and the impetus to try and change their life. What more can you ask for, really?

As the project went on I decided to interview other people who have worked in similar areas and who hold similar views. The project subsequently widened to become not just a showcase for the writings and stories of homeless people, but a social snapshot of the homelessness problem as it currently stands. I felt it was important to provide a broader context, to go beyond the ‘art as therapy’ mandate. For example, I came into contact with people who believe in the therapeutic power of sport and recreation in the same way that others believe in the influence of the arts – because sometimes you just need to feel primitive power surging through your body once again, especially when it’s been bruised and battered for so long.

Another theme emerged; a belief that funding for creative and recreational projects needs to be ongoing. For me, it’s not enough to sponsor a one-off program. Many of the people who participate in arts and recreational projects simply don’t have ‘normal’ lives to go back to once it’s all over. You get a glimpse of a different way, but then it’s snatched out of your reach. Maybe depression and deflation then sets in, because there’s seemingly no way to reach that high again – and that goes for the teachers and mentors, too, not just the participants.

Ozanam Community Centre has received City of Melbourne arts funding for various projects over the last few years, and we’ve just heard that Subterrain will be funded for a second edition in 2006. I’d like to therefore take this opportunity to express my absolute gratitude to the City of Melbourne and to everyone involved with their Community Arts Program for giving us a wonderful opportunity to create an ongoing, alternative media. This is an extremely forward-thinking view because some organisations, although undeniably well meaning, take the view that helping the homeless means knitting them a beanie in winter.

On the opposite, extreme end of the scale, a vocal proportion of the general public think that the homeless problem is beneath contempt. Of course, you can’t help everyone. Some people don’t want to be helped. Some people choose the ‘life’ rather than the life choosing them. But that doesn’t mean you take leave of your senses and tar everyone with the same brush.

Let me leave you with a challenge: Google the phrase ‘Bumfights’, and after reading what you’ve found, let me know if you think our way is a better way.

I know what I think is the answer.