Back in Melbourne, when friends ask How’s your French? I say that I sit down to my French class each week, and I can get through my chores.
I can check for my allergens on packaging. I can read menus at a bistro and signs on the metro. At the beach, I understand children speaking to their parents about poisson in la mer. I understood the drunk man on a bike telling me about the bon chien across the road. Though, I can’t converse back or listen to much, I tell them. Everything’s scrambled together at speed, and I can’t untangle it.
Or, I say, I’m fluent and laugh.
They look unimpressed at the former and confused at the latter. Why is she laughing? Shouldn’t she have picked it up by now?
Let's stay in touch (intellectually).
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.