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Recreating our stories in a new land

Over 150 years have passed since Ford Madox Brown painted The Last of England, the famous painting that portrayed the artist’s family along with others voyaging towards an uncertain future in Australia (Figure 1). Australia is now much more vibrant and multi-cultural since the time of first white settlement and the European Immigration Movement in 1840s.

Events such as BrisAsia, in my view, open effective platforms to enhance Australia’s art industry to a much richer space…

Notes in the key of Quan

As a part of the BrisAsia Festival event, Yum Chat, Quan Yeomans of the band Regurgitator, gave the following key note address, providing just enough f*cks to kick the evening off perfectly.

For the mild of heart, we have have made some small editorial amendments to this transcript of his keynote address.

Obviously, they’ll fool no one…

No one sees the same thing

I’m sitting in my cousin’s house in Union City, just outside of San Francisco, where I am waiting to attend my aunt’s funeral, when I read these words. I’ve just returned from meeting Abigail in person for the first time, after a number of years of reading Hyphen magazine on-line. The magazine, the byline of which is “Asian America unabridged”, is one of the many inspirations for Peril’s work, and an award winning not-for-profit print and online magazine founded in 2002 in the San Francisco Bay area…

Noted Festival

In March 2015, Canberra will welcome the latest independent literary festival in Australia.  Some five years after the last readers and writers festival held by the ACT Writers Centre, Noted is an initiative of You Are Here (also featured as a part of our Festivals Q&A series last year) describes itself as Canberra’s first-ever experimental festival of words. Here, we connect with Ashley Thomson, one of the producers of the festival, which also includes Farz Edraki, Lucy Nelson, Duncan Felton, Yasmin Masri, Chiara Grassia, Andrew Galan and Zoya Patel in its curatorial and production team. The program runs from 20-22 March in various venues in Canberra. What does your festival see as the role of the arts in supporting (or otherwise) diverse representations of Australian culture? I hesitate to say anything too definitive. Noted is less than eight months old, from genesis to its first-ever incarnation; the simple fact that it’s happening in a few days’ time is remarkable. Read More »

AADC Logo

Not so strange bedfellows

Collaborating in 2015 with the Asian Australian Democracy Caucus Understandings of the relationship between art and society, and the role of the artist in civic life, differ depending on a range of perspectives and backgrounds. The notions of political art and the art of politics have changed greatly over time, morphing as we develop our ideas of how art is made, seen and consumed, and as notions of citizenship are tested and reshaped to societies in a constant state of flux. Providing a comprehensive or even comprehensible redux of the various definitions of these terms represents a kind of interdisciplinary minefield, and is probably beyond the patience of anyone’s Friday evening. But before you disappear into the weekend’s social or practical haze, we would be happy to devote just a little time to thinking about the way that art and politics will be mixing at Peril in 2015. In the Read More »

In conversation with Pete Emptage and Max Ryan

Pete Emptage lives and works in Melbourne as a disability support worker, English teacher and musician for groups such as Paddock, Where Were You At Lunch, Sweets, Hello Satellites, Hotel Echo and Open Swimmer. He also happens to have a growing passion for Chinese translation. Max Ryan is from Newcastle, on extended leave in northern NSW, his father’s country. His book, Rainswayed Night, won the 2005 Anne Elder Award and his chapbook Before the Sky was joint winner of the 2010 Picaro Poetry Prize. Together, Pete and Max have collaborated on the project, Before We Lose Each Other Again, which featured settings of Max’s poetry by the trio, Where Were You At Lunch, was launched at the 2012 Queensland Poetry Festival. More recently, however, Pete and Max have explored poetry through translation. Three poems, originally by Max, appear here in translations produced by Pete in collaboration with two colleagues from the Read More »

Owen Leong solo exhibition til Dec 20

Over next few weeks, we will be releasing work from Edition 19 – Elderspeak and, as always, we are interested in your feedback and interaction with that work. But perhaps you are the kind of person who likes to interact “in real life” rather than on the internet. And you might even be based in Sydney right now, in which case you might like to check out one the exhibition of Peril’s (broadly defined) elders, Owen Leong, which opened recently at Artereal Gallery in Rozelle, Sydney. Owen’s work engages spans photography, sculpture and installation, often employing blood, milk and honey to provide a visceral and viscous transmission between the body, culture and politics. For those curious to see contemporary photography that engages explicitly with questions of race, gender and identity, with delicious, complicated eroticism, then this exhibition would be well worth exploring. WHAT: Bloodmilk by Owen Leong WHEN: Opens Wednesday, 3 December 6-8PM. The Read More »

Crack Theatre Festival – Q&A

Continuing our series of festival chats – we talk with Finn O’Branagáin and Hannah Strout, Co-Artistic Directors Crack Theatre Festival, 2014, which is on right now in Newcastle as a part of This Is Not Art – due to a miracle of scheduling this post was accidentally going to go live next week after the festival closes but we got in just in time so you have one more day to get the heck down to Newcastle to check it out! —- What does your festival see as the role of the arts in supporting (or otherwise) diverse representations of Australian culture? The Arts have a responsibility to look further, think harder and hug longer. We see the Arts as an important way towards education, inclusivity and thinking outside the sphere of our own experience. While Australian culture on the ground is as broad and hard to define as the Read More »

Movies of Interest at MQFF2014

It’s festival season here in Melbourne, and the next festival on the calendar is the Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2014! This year it runs from 13 – 24 March, which is just 7 sleeps away! I’ve put together a brief viewing guide of potential Asian interest for Peril readers, so you can get in there before they all sell out. Noor, 6pm, 21 March. Pakistan. Urdu and Panjabi, English subtitles. Shagiq (Noor) no longer feels a part of Pakistan’s transgender community, and sets out to find a particular lake, where he will find his true love. Quick Change, 4pm, 15 March. The Philippines. Filipino and Tagalog, English subs. Dorina makes a living selling home-made cosmetics to transgender women, and makes a run for it when one of her clients suffers a bad reaction to her treatment. Schoolgirl Complex, 2pm, 15 March. Japan. Japanese, English subs. A poetic coming out story Read More »

Poet’s House Emerging Writers Program

Over the coming months, in addition to our regular Asian Australian-focused content, we will do a little “looking outwards” to better focus inwards/in words, considering some of the programs, professional networks and development opportunities that other literary communities use to support typically marginalised or under-represented voices. It is hoped, with a little bit of enthusiasm, that we could continue this “extrospection” throughout 2014. Please feel free to suggest a program, publisher or opportunity that we at Peril could connect with on your behalf! We’re always open to ideas. The first program that we are going to look at is the New York-based Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship Program. Poets House is one of only a handful of dedicated poetry libraries in the world and features some 60,000 + volumes of poetry works. Although Poets House is not specifically mandated to support Asian American or other specified writers groups, its broad Read More »

Hyperreality & A Wife’s Revenge

Opening this Friday 21st February for the Australasian Chinese Theatre‘s summer season are two short plays – Hyperreality by Lian Low and A Wife’s Revenge by Moni Lai Storz. In this double bill of monologues directed by Wolf Heidecker, taking centre stage are two Chinese-Malaysian-Australian women characters. Hyperreality was a monologue that I wrote 19 years ago, when I was just coming to terms with my lesbian sexual identity.  At the time, the only training I had into a playwriting craft was a devout attention to diarising my day-to-day experiences, which I began when I was 14.  At 14, I was a new migrant to Australia, and through various interpersonal interactions at school and university, I was constantly reminded of my foreigness, my un-Australianness.  Writing out how I felt enabled me to make some sense about how chaotic, confused and displaced I felt.  Just out of high school, through pure Read More »

Interview with Nikki Lam. Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots / 落葉歸根

Interview with Nikki Lam. Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots / 落葉歸根

Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots / 落葉歸根 On the glimpse of this land they seek, its purpose, its stories, its authenticity. The past is corroding; the future is unknown. The present lingers questions of belong. Here they found Spirits running through rivers and sounds Into the currents, where none stayed calm. The land of luck does not have a name Be anonymous they can in this imaginary land. – Nikki Lam Nikki Lam is a young and emerging Melbourne-based artist, curator and self-described “curious other”.  Working across photomedia, video and installation, her practice deftly negotiates the unstable terrain of identity, migration, and belonging. Her performance video Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots (2013) is a response to Max Dupain’s silver gelatin photograph Sunbaker (1937). One of the most iconic photographs of the body in sport and nature, Dupain’s Sunbaker is loaded with the symbolism of an archetypal (read: White Read More »

Ugly is the new beautiful: Editorial/Poetry

Despite their often-limiting qualities, common binaries like male/female, day/night, good/evil, nature/society, black/white etc, continue to confound and fascinate me, although perhaps perversely so. I’m often curious about the male in the female, the female in the male, the evil in the good, the good in the evil and so on. I’m a sucker for ambiguity. As Prose Editor, Lian Low, foreshadowed in her editorial, this double edition of Binaries/Dualities invited submissions, paired or otherwise, on the theme of binaries, dualities, opposites. After some 70 or so submissions, I’m not sure of my up from my down, my in from my out, my write from my wrong – or my Asian from my Australian. The themed nature of the Peril edition format always presents some challenging questions when considering which works to include and which works to omit. Time, space, money and quality are all factors when streamlining the many, varied Read More »

Writers Victoria CALD Mentorships 2013 mentee: Fatima Sehbai

“CALD, MT and kite flying” Have you heard of the reluctant fundamentalist? I’m a bit like that- not the fundamentalist part but. I had resisted all feelers, creative shenanigans and poetic stirrings. Not to mention my genetic make-up. I kept squashing them annoying flies. I was a computer programmer and poetry was merely a frivolous pastime. Then Migration happened and a logical thinking, equation quoting, programming junkie was unable to solve this Rubik cube. Two years in and I was full on hating my life in Melbourne. I kept looking back and turning to stone. I missed the dust, the cows, the rickshaws, my cousins- squelching heat and my school friends. In desperation and with some reluctance I started writing poetry. Then sprouted some migration pieces, a few short stories- turmeric stained and filled with nostalgia for mangoes and rope swings. Before I knew it, my writing genes had taken Read More »

Race Politics Lives!

The election is over. The Coalition won, amassing a formidable majority in the House of Representatives. The 44th parliament will welcome one, maybe two parliamentarians of Asian Australian descent, both from the far West. Ian Goodenough predictably won the WA seat of Moore, taking over from Liberal predecessor Dr Mal Washer. Goodenough was born in Singapore, migrated to Australia when he was 9 years old, and comes from mixed English, Portuguese and Chinese stock. He is an accountant, property developer, and has been a local councilor in northern Perth since 1999. He is the first Asian Australian to hold a House of Representatives seat since Michael Johnson left under controversial circumstances in 2010. The big surprise has been the Palmer Uniting Party’s  (PUP) Zhenya (Dio) Wang, who last week leapfrogged both the Greens Scott Ludlam and the Australian Sports Party’s Wayne Dropulich, to potentially claim the highly contentious final WA Read More »

Queensland Poetry Festival

We’re well into arts festival season here at Peril, and it’s always nice to know how festival organisers, directors and production teams consider Asian Australian creative and audiences. As a part of this, we’re chatting with festival directors and organisers about the way that they approach issues of diversity, representation and engagement, particularly in relation to the Asian Australian community. Sarah Gory, Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival, is the first respondent to our questions about the role of the arts, program development, and audience feedback. The Queensland Poetry Festival runs from August 23-25 in Brisbane, Queensland.  — What does your festival see as the role of the arts in supporting (or otherwise) diverse representations of Australian culture? I think it is important for the arts to support diverse representations of Australian culture for a number of reasons, not least because failing to do so means that the arts, and hence it audiences, Read More »

Does feminism speak for all women?

On March 18 this year I took part in a panel at Melbourne Town Hall organised by the Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health. The event brought together feminists from multicultural backgrounds to talk about the relevance of feminism in our lives: myself, a Shanghainese-Melburnian writer and media-maker; Durkhanai Ayubi, a freelance journalist, first generation Afghan-Australian and Senior Policy Analyst for the Federal Government, discussing feminism and Western imperialism; and Dr Odette Kelada, a lecturer in the University of Melbourne Indigenous Studies Department who spoke about feminism, race and whiteness. You can listen to an abridged podcast of our talks here thanks to Women on the Line, a program on 3cr Community Radio in Melbourne. The text of my talk is below. I want to start by acknowledging again that we stand on Aboriginal land, on what is, always was and will forever be the country of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, no matter how hard colonisation Read More »

Spirit Worlds Editorial – Prose

Every now and then, I wonder about the year of my birth, the year that my grandfather died.  His A4 framed black and white portrait looked on benignly in our family hallway, and while there was nothing scary about his appearance, as a kid, I’d be scampering from one end of the hallway to another switching on all the lights so that I was never left in the dark for too long.  His absence fueled my imagination of a ghostly world, this supported by growing up in a Malaysian culture where there were a proliferation of ghost stories –spirits lurking under the table, up the banana trees ready to lure you into doom.  To scare these ghosts away, I remember brandishing my Christian cross acting as a protective shield for my grade one friends, convincing them that this would protect us from the toilet block ghost.  I wasn’t Christian and Read More »

Do you dance like you’re Chinese?

I wrote a series of reflections on visibility, belonging and passing throughout 2011 and 2012. This version was edited for a reading during Lisa-Skye‘s Midsumma spoken word showcase, The Invisibles. My recent trip overseas has made me think about all these experiences again – I’ll write more about that as I continue to unpack how people interpret my body and style in different situations. * * * In Malaysia, I sleep with a Nigerian man who tells me I am basically white. And it’s funny because in this winterless country my skin is browner than than it’s ever been. But I’m also an Australian thinking three ringgit is just one dollar, my only functional language is English, and among all the people here only the Anglos are paler than me, so I guess he’s kind of right. He asks me about my friends so I tell him about the American and Read More »