What’s so sweet about being 16? “Freedom, experimentation, fun,” according to Brian Ritchie, Artistic Director of Mona Foma and ex-Violent Femmes bassist, as he describes Tasmania’s summer festival of music and art’s sixteenth edition.
“It’s such a long time to be doing a festival and have it still relatively fresh and vibrant,” he says. But while the festival’s goals remain the same – mixing genres of music and art – this year’s iteration has a particularly international flavour. Across 17 days, two cities and three weekends, a global contingent of over 500 performers and artists, including Queens of the Stone Age after a six-year hiatus, will amp up the early 2024 event.
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selection of articles, interviews, blogs et al.
Edwina Preston’s Bad Art Mother (2022) is a narrative about motherhood leading to an artist’s withdrawal from the arts industry and vice versa. Veda, an ambivalent housewife and zealous poet in 1960s Melbourne, grants legal guardianship of her young son to a wealthy couple, the Parishes, to allow her more time to write. As implied by the title, this exchange isn’t so simple. She’s a complex figure in a world where sexism and artistic precarity overlap, and motherhood and creative labour remain mutually exclusive. The book is a historical mediation that endures: even if doors look open, gendered expectations still often freeze women out of full participation and recognition in the arts.
“The way I write feels like a stream of consciousness,” says Melbourne-based singer, songwriter and producer Jessie Hill, explaining that she often relies on setting and mood. “It’s like the song already exists and it’s just about channeling it.”
. . . TJAKA are more than ready to celebrate Elevate, the band’s energy-pulsing debut EP, at their upcoming headline tour.
The self-produced EP sees the band – made up of two Fabila brothers, Geoff and Jake, plus their cousin Luke, and close friend Felix Fogarty – put their music into recorded form after years of gigs and festivals.