Essays and Articles

'One-track minds' (The Weekend Australian Magazine, 18 July 2010)

Interviews

'Fighting for Adventurous Documentary Making: An Interview with Tom Zubrycki and Richard Harris' (RealTime, Iss. 97, June/July 2010)

PERFORMING ARTS

Essays and Articles

'Still Not There: Dylan on Stage and Film' (RealTime, Iss. 97, June/July 2010)

TRAVEL

Essays and Articles

'Postcard from San Francisco: Cocktails and Suicide Spots' (The Punch, 15 June 2010)

There are a lot of churches in San Francisco—the city leaves Adelaide in its religious architectural wake—but only one of them held any interest for me when I was there last week. Uncharacteristic though it may be for me to actively seek out a house of worship, this one seemed a worthy exception: Mission San Francisco de Asís, the oldest surviving structure in the city, was founded on June 29, 1776, and has survived fire, war, the 1906 earthquake, and even secularisation. It has stood on Spanish, Mexican and American soil and continues to hold services to this day.

I went looking for the mission quite late in the afternoon: I had spent my day wandering aimlessly around Golden Gate Park, where bands played impromptu music and teenagers weaved around cones on rollerblades, and through the de Young Museum. There, in a travelling exhibition of Impressionist paintings from the Musée d'Orsay, I unexpectedly came across James Abbott McNeil Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, which is arguably the greatest painting ever executed by an American artist. Better known by its colloquial name, Whistler's Mother, the painting is currently in San Francisco for only the second time in its history. (I could have spent half an hour or more in front of the thing, as I did last year in front of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at MoMA. But it was one of those keep-'em-moving, exit-through-the-giftshop-type exhibitions, and I felt I was getting in the way of those who wanted to have their requisite three seconds with the image and move on. So I allowed myself only fifteen minutes.) My visit to Mission San Francisco de Asís was to serve as a grace-note to that experience.

I did a lot of walking in San Francisco, covering some ten miles on the first day and about six on the second. After leaving the de Young and Golden Gate Park, I wandered up Haight Street. The Haight, as it is popularly known, became famous in the Sixties as the unofficial birthplace of the Summer of Love, and with it of the counterculture's drug-addled side, and indeed the smell of pot remains a common one throughout the city. Back then the area was known as Haight-Ashbury, named for the intersection of the two streets at its centre. I always thought it was pronounced "Height," or at least "Hay-eet," but everyone in San Francisco pronounces it "Hate," so that when you hear them talking about its various sub-segments you hear mention of places like Upper and Lower "Hate". (I can't help but be reminded of Britain's Upper and Lower Slaughter, which are villages in the Cotswolds. Upper Slaughter, despite its name, was one of the few villages in England not to lose any men in World War One.) At the end of Haight Street, I crossed over into the Mission District. Eventually the turrets of the mission's adjacent basilica appeared over the tops of the buildings, and then the mission, too, modestly situated down a side-street, came into view. It was all shut up by this time: the tours had ended an hour or so before, and the door was locked. But I wasn't disappointed. The idea of going on a tour of the building and exiting, as I had the de Young's exhibition, through the giftshop, seemed vulgar compared to what I actually did do, which was sit and look at the building for a while before touching one its adobe walls and walking away. I didn't get a chance to visit the Muir Woods or its giant, old-growth redwoods on this trip. (No "Here I was born, and there I died" for me, I'm afraid.) But this enduring product of human labour was really just as impressive. As with Whistler's Mother, I could have stood in front of the mission for half an or more, and for many of the same reasons.

But I was getting hungry and so started making my way back to the Haight. It didn't take me long to realise that the path I had chosen ran straight through the Castro, which I knew only vaguely from Gus Van Sant's Milk. The first thing that alerted me to this fact was the sudden, near total absence of women on the streets; the second was the fact that the men I was passing were all very well-groomed indeed. I was looking pretty well-groomed myself and by time I noticed the third thing—that every second building seemed to house a gym or fitness store—I had started to become aware that I was drawing quite a few curious, even slightly impressed, looks. Even men who were walking hand in hand seemed to be checking me out through the corners of their eyes. It briefly occurred to me that I might have been imagining all this—big-dealing and deluding myself with the idea that I was the best-looking person on the street—but I wasn't sure so assumed that I wasn't. I began adjusting my behaviour accordingly, meeting my admirers' eyes over the rim of my sunglasses and smirking ever-so-slightly in the knowledge that I possessed power over all sexes and persuasions. I might even have started strutting a little. But then, without precisely knowing when, I crossed the Castro's invisible northern border, started up Market Street, and was suddenly meeting the eyes of straight men, who probably thought I was the one checking them out. And logically so, I realised, if only because, for whatever self-absorbed reason, I actually kind of was. This made me feel less powerful than before, and much weirder, so I stopped.

Then you get on the plane. The pilot's always got to come on the PA system. Give you his whole thing of what he's gonna do. "And here's how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take it up to twenty thousand. Then I'm gonna make a left by Chicago. Then I'm gonna go south by…" And we're all back there going: "Yeah, fine. It's…you know, just do whatever the hell you gotta do. I don't know what the hell is going on. Just end up where it says on the ticket, okay? Can you do that ?"

– Jerry Seinfeld

I really wish I'd booked that direct flight. On Wednesday morning I commented flippantly: "The next seven hours will take twenty-one." In fact, the next fourteen took closer to thirty. I made that comment at four-thirty in the morning and was due to arrive in San Francisco, on the other side of the International Date Line, at eleven-twenty the same day. By the time I finally got to the place I was staying, a couple of blocks from Golden Gate Park on Third Avenue, it was half past six in the evening.

My troubles started in Sydney, where Qantas started boarding my flight, stopped boarding my flight, kicked the already-boarded off the plane, forced me to read The Daily Telegraph for twenty minutes while we waited to hear what the hell was going on, put us on another plane, and then finally got us off the ground about an hour-and-a-half later than they were supposed to. Only to find, upon our arrival in Brisbane, that there was no one present at the gate to operate the aerowalk for us, leaving us stranded on the plane for fifteen minutes while the pilots embarrassedly messaged for help. On my international flight, I was tactfully reminded by a flight attendant about Qantas's RSA guidelines after I finished off most of the Australian sparkling on-board and started having a particularly nice steward bring up glasses of proper Champagne from First Class.

But at least that flight took off and arrived when advertised, not to mention where. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of my American Airlines flight, which was due to take off from Los Angeles at five-to-ten and arrive in San Francisco about ninety minutes later, and which failed to meet any one of those criteria, except for the one about taking off from Los Angeles. First they told us that our flight was to be delayed by roughly fifty minutes. Which would have been fine had they not then boarded us at the rescheduled time, made sure we were all in our seats, and then told us that wouldn't be able to take off for at least another forty-five minutes. And even that might not have been too bad—people were at least able to get off the plane and walk around while we were still on the ground, after all—had we not then finally reached San Francisco, circled it for a good twenty minutes, and then flown across San Francisco Bay to San Jose, where we were told that we hadn't been able to land in San Francisco due to fog. Which, by the way, was the only thing they seemed to know about what was happening at that point: that we couldn't land due to fog. They certainly didn't know—and certainly weren't willing to estimate—when we'd be able to take off again.

A small but perhaps understandable revolution broke out among the passengers at this point, with many of those travelling without checked luggage opting out of the cursed endeavour altogether and choosing instead to try their luck with buses and trains to Oakland or Berkeley. With Rogan Josh tucked tightly away, however, I had no choice but to stick around—the bags, the airline's people were adamant, were not coming off the plane until the damned thing had landed where our tickets said it should have—and so finally disembarked at San Francisco International Airport with fewer hours remaining in the day that I would perhaps have liked.

After arriving at San Francisco's Civic Centre on the BART at around half past four, I wandered around trying to find Third Avenue. I didn't have a map on me, but was vaguely aware of where I was going. Unfortunately, my awareness was a little too vague, and by the time I finally reached the house—an airy Italianate place with a decidedly frat-house feel—it was around six-thirty and my body was beginning to give way. But the sun was still relatively high in the sky—it doesn't begin to go down until about quarter past seven in these parts—and my host was keen to go eat something. "Remaining debonair," Irwin Shaw once wrote, "means that one must always be ready to go to the next bar or the next war, no matter how late the hour or how unattractive the war." I took a much-needed shower and threw on a jacket. I didn't wake up the next morning until late.

I started Hitch-22 in Port MacDonnell, where I read about half of it. (This was after I devoured Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, which only helped to confirm the feeling that resigning from The Australian was the right thing to do.) Then it was back to Sydney, where the city's film festival was in full swing, and where there were personal matters to attend to, and where there was an international voyage of indeterminate length to plan for. (It's been an expensive week, to be sure, what with travel insurance and luggage to buy, haircuts to have, and movies to see.) It was only in the last two days that I endeavoured to actually finish the book: with a newly-purchased goat-leather duffle bag (which my vegan girlfriend has derisively christened Rogan Josh) filled with several volumes of Hemingway, and with Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March in my shoulder bag in anticipation of a month making my way across the Midwest, the last thing I wanted was to be lugging Hitchens's book across the Pacific with only twenty or thirty pages of it to go.

Without saying too much about what I thought Hitch-22 (I liked it a lot, for what it's worth, though thought some of its sections seemed hastily written), I would like to quote the one sentence that, while perhaps not especially striking to others, rather caught my eye when I read it. "If ever I was going," Hitchens writes, "it was time for me to go."

This is more or less exactly how I'm feeling this evening. My emotional nerve endings may be exposed—I have nearly burst into tears several times, including once in front of my girlfriend, who cooked me a marvellous farewell dinner, and again on the phone to my parents—but my resolve and commitment to what I'm doing has never been as great. There's nothing quite as fortifying, it occurs to me, as a heady cocktail of nerves and ambition.

Hitchens's line—the last sentence of a chapter about his early international reporting assignments and a nice introduction to the one that follows it about his moving to the United States—reminded me of similar passages from the memoirs of Alan Moorehead and Robert Hughes. As those I have shared them with already will know, these extracts have long inspired me, and I quote the latter of them here because, this evening, I can't get it out of my head.

Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know, p.214:

Alan [Moorehead] and I had arrived at a compact. I would have to leave Australia, just as he had done, if my work was ever to go anywhere. "If you stay here another ten years," Alan pronounced, looking at me rather owlishly, "Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer." Luckily, I had the sense to realise that he was right. But then, it was what I had been wanting to hear.

Hitchens's sentiments are somewhat shorter than Hughes's, but nevertheless manage to capture something of the latter's flavour despite their seeming economy. Or maybe I am just responding favourably to the idea that it is time for me to go, too. After all, it is what I have been wanting to hear—and waiting to hear—for a while myself.

Film Reviews

Eagle vs Shark (Capsule Review) (Review, 15 May 2010)

TRAVEL

Essays and Articles

'The Tale of Two Cities' (The Best City in the World, 21 May 2010)

A number of old, pseudonymous and previously unavailable pieces have also been uploaded.

FILM

Essays and Articles

'Film of 1896 Melbourne Cup finally tracked down' (The Australian, 3 November 2009)
'Sights and sounds of 1927 a royal film find' (The Australian, 19 August 2008)

Interviews

'Online Life, Downside and Up: An Interview with Ondi Timoner' (RealTime, Iss. 92, August/September 2009) (as Oscar Michaels)
'Boy from bush's Hollywood kudos' (The Australian, 18 February 2009)

NEW MEDIA

Essays and Articles

'Netizens and radio join bushfire telegraph' (The Australian, 9 February 2009)

VISUAL ART

Essays and Articles

'What happened when an artist changed a light bulb' (The Australian, 14 August 2008)

BOOKS

Book Reviews

'Expanded Screen Writing, Expanded Cinema' (Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice by Steven Maras) (RealTime, Iss. 91, June/July 2009) (as Oscar Michaels)

POLITICS

Article Series

Community Cabinets:

'Put a lid on it' (Strewth, 27 August 2009)
'Call to look to independents' (The Australian, 27 August 2009)
'In-demand ministers face local grilling' (The Australian, 27 August 2009)
'Cabinet meets Campbelltown canaries' (The Australian, 18 February 2009)

Barnaby Joyce and New England:

'Joyce "unlikely" to challenge Windsor' (The Australian, 19 January 2009)
'Barnaby's mum says don't run' (The Weekend Australian, 17 January 2009)
'Joyce "would fail" in seat bid' (The Australian, 16 January 2009)

Lyne By-Election:

'Major parties "scared to run"' (The Australian, 29 September 2008)
'Nationals consider going it alone' (The Australian, 8 September 2008)
'Victor ready to get cracking on positives' (The Australian, 8 September 2008)
'Nats tipped to lose Vaile's seat' (The Weekend Australian, 6 September 2008)
'Nationals attack "Labor stooge" in Lyne poll' (The Australian, 1 September 2008)
'Nationals face Lyne in the sand from sea-changers' (The Weekend Australian, 30 August 2008)

Essays and Articles

'Always behind the eight ball' (The Weekend Australian, 11 July 2009)
'Gough still has that old charisma' (The Australian, 5 June 2009)
'Costello stays tightlipped on Spectator's Brutus view' (The Australian, 20 February 2009) (with Imre Salusinszky)
'Costello outsold by a cookbook' (The Weekend Australian, 27 September 2008)
'Would alternative PM cringe over Kirribilli?' (The Australian, 26 September 2008)
'Whitlam, 92 not out, still pushing reform' (The Weekend Australian, 12 July 2008)
'Friendly family feud with cousin Ehud' (The Australian, 24 June 2008)

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Essays and Articles

'Rights and wrongs' (The Australian, 10 December 2008)
'African daylight kidnapping leads to Australia' (The Australian, 22 September 2008)
'Attacks on cyberspace preceded Russian tanks' (The Australian, 15 August 2008)

I was running my final filmmaking workshop with a group of kids at once both well-behaved and characterful (a combination somewhat rarer, unfortunately, than one might like or think). At each of the schools I've visited, I've had the kids make chase films: using one of The Third Man's many pursuits—that of Holly by Popescu's goons through the Viennese rubble—as a model, they have run off and wrought havoc on their corridors and ovals in the service of their miniature masterpieces. Most of the films have been very good—I have already mentioned the Justin Bieber film and the ideas have only improved since then—and I have been consistently surprised and delighted by the students' originality. (Today we had a Bourne-like action film, a Benny Hill parody, and a silent film with piano accompaniment, to take but three examples.)

Today's workshop, though, proved especially thrilling. I was working at a college that, to its credit, starts teaching its students video editing skills while they're still in primary school. (By comparison, I was still shooting in chronological order on VHS-C until I was fifteen, at which point my school purchased a single capture card that I had to teach myself how to use.) None of the other schools I visited are doing this yet, though they should certainly think about starting. The results speak for themselves: the students' awareness of form and how it can be manipulated to achieve certain effects—in short, their level of cinematic literacy—was to be envied, and indeed was a little, by me, who would have killed to have had classes like that at high school. (I should stress that having seen a lot of films does not necessarily have anything to do with knowing innately how to put them together. The students weren't cinephiles or anything like that. They'd just been making films for a long time.) It certainly made me wonder, as I left the school at the end of the day, what the very youngest students at the college—those wide-eyed creatures who seem a hell of a lot smaller than I remember being at their age—will be able to do by the time they're as old as the students I was instructing. I wondered, but I wouldn't want to guess. If students who are ten or twelve years older than they are, but only six or seven younger than me, are already making films that would put Paul Greengrass to shame, then any attempt to predict what the next generation will be making is positively doomed to failure.

My parents recently moved into their new home in Port MacDonnell, which they've been planning and building for a couple of years now. It's a huge place—much larger than the spacious home I grew up in—ridiculous, as I have taken to saying, in both size and amenity. In fact, it's essentially two houses, the one stacked on top of the other, like a layer cake, with my brothers, Tom and Josh, in the "downstairs house" and my parents in the "upstairs" one. One can enter either of these "two" houses without at all needing to pass through the other: the building has a foyer that allows the upstairs residents to ascend to their level without ever having to cross the paths of the downstairs denizens, who in any case have three separate entryways of their own.

The idea is that my parents will one day be able to rent out either of the levels or else operate the downstairs one as a bed-and-breakfast. (It has its own bathroom, kitchen and three double bedrooms.) For the time being, however, four people are living in a house that could easily accommodate twice that number, and those of us who live in its lower depths need to pack a water bottle and a fresh pair of socks just to walk from our bedrooms to the pantry.

It's worth the hike, though. The view from the upstairs space is stunning: the house sits across the road—a mere twenty or so metres—from the great expanse of the Indian Ocean at one of its most easterly points, which, through the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows on the building's façade, can be viewed more or less panoramically, so that one can discern the curve of the earth simply by sitting and staring a while at the horizon. In the other direction, from the back balcony, one looks inland towards Mount Gambier and, at dusk, can watch the fog as it rolls in across the pastoral landscape. The view is reminiscent of David Davies' Moonrise, Templestowe.

I have been working in Mount Gambier most days and so haven't had much of a chance to walk around Port Mac. (Which, by the way, was where I shot most of The Cow Hunter of the South Seas, the still-incomplete short film that was the catalyst for me starting my first blog eight years ago.) My first chance came on Saturday evening, just after I'd finished watching the first season of Underbelly (my brothers are obsessed with the show) and just before the guests started arriving for a dinner party my parents were hosting. It was a fine thing to do. Everything seemed so intense and vivid in the rapidly fading light of day: from the deepening pink of the sky (which I was seeing free of skyline for the first time in eighteen months) to the combination of coastal and rural smells (that of the ocean mixing with those of wood fires and farmland) to the couple having awkward-looking sex on an exposed patch of grass near a children's playground. I think I might come back here one day and write for a couple of months.

I have been making money in Mount Gambier, too, running filmmaking and journalism workshops at the local high schools. I was at Tenison Woods College today, running a one-day journalism program, and will be at St Martin's tomorrow, running a filmmaking one. (Featuring clips from The Third Man, Raging Bull, La Chinoise and Vivre sa vie, the filmmaking program is by far the more confronting of the two for the students. They balk when I put on a black and white film and again when I put on a foreign one. The look on their faces when I put on a foreign black and white film is priceless.)

I spent the first three days of this week at my alma mater, Mount Gambier High School, running a filmmaking workshop on the Monday (the students made a film about Justin Bieber being pursued by his fans, an unconscious homage to Hard Day's Night) and a two-day journalism workshop Tuesday and Wednesday. The journalism workshop was especially entertaining. I was working with about twelve students, who I came to know and like very much over the course of the two days (they've been contacting me endlessly on social media ever since), and the paper they came up with, The Student Voice, was actually very impressive. They wrote stories about rising canteen prices ("The canteen manager said that students put pieces of cake in their hoods and iced coffees down their pants"), improper use of the school's recycling bins ("'It would be so much easier if the rubbish and recycling bins both had holes in their lids, because it is too much of a hassle to lift them,' stated one year ten student"), the school's decision not to put on a musical this year ("A drama teacher, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: "Performing, directing and making a musical is a labour of love. I just don't feel the love,'") and about how Formspring is being used by cyberbullies ("Many people choose to write things like, 'You're a greasy, chubby, unattractive wannabe dyke and your hair is SHIT!").

The front page story, about a student who was suspended after pushing over an old man who lives near the school, was a particular highlight. "There have been a number of tedious rumours circulating the story, such as the student brutally killing the old man's beloved dog and disposing of the remains in an unsanitary manner," it reads. "The majority of these rumours have been proven false. The dog is alive and well."

The story ran alongside a picture of the old man, which two of the students got by staking out his house (albeit for all of five minutes) until he came out to collect the mail. It's a blurry image, and the man's face is indistinguishable through the foliage of the bush the girls were hiding behind, but the fact remains that they got the shot. I was terrified and proud all at once. It was not my intention to create a pack of tabloid journalists, but I least I created a pack of dedicated ones.

I will have been at The Australian for two years and three days. That might not seem a particularly long time, but in fact it will have been the longest I have ever held the same job, and if the last six years have taught us anything it is that I tend to get a little itchy around the two-year mark. It's time to shake things up again, as I did when I moved to Melbourne in 2006 with no work lined up, nowhere to live, and only twenty dollars to my name, or when I wrote a cocky and presumptuous e-mail to the editor-in-chief of the national daily in 2008, basically demanding he give me a job, which, to everyone's surprise, he did. I hit San Francisco on June 9.

After travelling across the US between June and September, visiting a number of people I have been promising to visit for years and trying to get some writing done, I will be heading across the border with Austin Andrews for Mexico's Bicentenary of Independence in September and Centenary of Revolution in November. We are currently submitting article proposals to various magazines and have set up an IndieGoGo page so people can contribute to the project. (In addition to producing a long-form feature article, we're also beginning to entertain the idea of producing a book in the vein of Steinbeck and Capa's A Russian Journal.) I want to start writing a novel, too, and have a number of screenplay projects I am currently working on (or not working on, as the case has been for far too long). I will be attempting to blog more or less every day.