Sydney

What happens to a cultural scene when making rent overtakes the urgency of making art? As Joseph Earp argues, this is the question posed by Max Easton’s Paradise Estate, a new novel charting the declining fortunes of the sharehouse coteries in inner-west Sydney.

On a long drive once, in a hot summer, on a stretch of the Hume where rolling, sheep-ravaged hills the colour of bone gave glimpses of a long train full of wheat, my father-in-law explained train wheels to me: how they ran, how they turned, how they stayed on the tracks. The rim on the wheel, he said, was less important than its shape.

These are the suburbs, the world we actually live in: the local beach or park, the corner shop, the servo, the pub, the bus seat in a street. The interiors of the fibro houses, those cupboards, wallpaper, furnishings, the venetian blinds, bedspreads, décor, ‘that vase’, are objects and spaces we know.

Iris reconsiders our official, public-record history – its absences and silences, its misshapings and misrecognitions. And it also offers a reconsideration of a woman whose position within this history is complicated, doubly, by her queerness.

The Bankstown Biennale is ‘making locality’ by bringing together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists from across the country whose practice is often in conversation with homelands elsewhere.

In this iterative writing and walking project, we have been making space to ask questions of each other about caring for Country, to share conversations about climate change, and to remind ourselves of the love that keeps us present.

Before there were call centres, help desks, delivery bikes and Uber, before labour hire firms and all the rest started offering young people new ways of working long and hard for doubtful return, before the term ‘gig economy’ had come into being – before all that the one way to make a quick, modest dollar was to drive cabs on the night shift. It was a Sydney thing.

As I was reading The Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodriques Fowler, I was drawn into the memories of that period when I navigated Sydney as a twenty-something bi-racial woman. I hunted down my old iPhone and read it alongside Fowler’s book, like a companion text, beginning a dialogue.

Run-down and on the verge of burnout, I will continue making art, imagining radically different futures during my best commutes, dancing, dog paddling upwards towards the clouds, doing breaststroke through the air, gliding. I pull into my driveway in Blacktown, the western suburbs where, as one young arts worker once said, we have the best sunsets.

When waiting for a train nothing more is required than presence. This is a stretch of time without additional expectations. Do something or do nothing. Compose thoughts, or don’t. Be attentive, be distracted, the train will arrive regardless.