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Universal Stranger

~ on Alienation, Being and Belonging

Universal Stranger

Monthly Archives: July 2014

No town quite like Alice

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Rody in National

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Ever been to Alice Springs? If you have, and if you’re the kind of person who walks around with your eyes and mind open, you’re likely to agree that this small city in the dead heart of Australia can change not only your understanding of the country and its people but also your view of yourself, wherever you’re from. Somewhere in the Universal Stranger back catalogue there’s a song called “Shadows In a Landscape” written by yours truly and recorded by the legendary Steve Banks. It was one of five songs that emerged from a three-week trip we did with our respective families to the Outback, including Alice, many years ago. It’s about alienation – the alienation between black and white Australians, and between white Australians and the land – and much of it turns on the story of the brilliant, unfashionable and in many ways still controversial indigenous artist Albert Namatjira. I wrote it after we day-tripped from Alice to the tiny Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg, where Namatjira and his family had lived.

All this came flooding back yesterday when I stumbled upon a story on the ABC Alice Springs website about indigenous artists who are creating a mural for a local shopping centre. Those who haven’t been to Alice will probably think the story is a little cheesy; those who have been will understand that it’s a fragment of a larger, richer and more profound and complex truth. A number of the artists involved are descendants of Namatjira; below is an ABC pic of Peter Taylor – like Namatjira, a watercolourist – who designed the mural.

Alice Mural 25.7.14

Peter Taylor; pic by Alice Moldovan, ABC Local

Banksie’s demo of “Shadows” will be uploaded in due course; it’s one of a couple of songs currently bogged down in the copyright registration process.

 

Michele’s past comes back to haunt her (in a nice way)

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by Rody in Metro

≈ Comments Off on Michele’s past comes back to haunt her (in a nice way)

Part of Universal Stranger’s “mission”, if we have one at all, is to bring together like-minded creative people, so it was pleasing to learn that our June 3 profile of photographer Michele Mossop led to her re-establishing contact with long-lost former colleagues in the Italian media. One of the formative experiences in Michele’s career was the time she spent on Italian newspaper la Città, Quotidiano di Firenze during the early 1980s, a politically turbulent period, even by Italian standards. As part of our research for the piece, we tracked down the following video on YouTube – a photographic elegy to the people and ideals that once animated a paper which, like so many others, is no longer with us (Michele appears at 1.22, 1.23, 1.24 and 1.26):

Sigh; guaranteed to moisten the eye of many a former journalist and news photographer, especially in these post-print days (as Michele points out, the soundtrack – from Cinema Paradiso – doesn’t help). So what happened to la Città (The City)? Michele takes up the story:

“Just before I left the paper it was sold and changed masthead, then it became the bureau for the national newspaper la Repubblica, which is a fine paper, and an important one. For years it ran the same 10 questions to [then Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi every day [see note below]. Over time I lost touch with the people, and lost touch with the politics completely after the Berlin Wall fell. When I worked there we were all – apart from the editor and maybe a couple of others – in our 20s. The paper’s ‘rivers of gold’ was la Pulce – the flea – a classified ads publication just like the Trading Post. It’s the same in journalism everywhere.”

The 10 questions were in reference to Berlusconi’s alleged affair with an 18-year-old (more background here). The questions below were taken from la Repubblica‘s website; not sure why they address Berlusconi as “Mr President”: a sarcastic reference, perhaps, to the impression he once gave of harbouring ambitions to become the country’s head of state?

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