Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
The Advertiser
5 days ago
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Actor Mel Gibson recalls the joys of making Braveheart
An emotional Mel Gibson has recalled fond memories of shooting the film Braveheart in Ireland 30 years ago. The Oscar-winning director and actor posed for selfies with fans and signed posters before attending a musical performance of movie songs in Co Meath. The American-born, Australian-raised Gibson starred in Braveheart as Scottish rebel William Wallace, as he sets out to challenge King Edward I of England. The film won Oscars for best director and best picture. Speaking after the score from the 1995 film was played by an orchestra in a tent in Trim on Saturday, Gibson told the audience that composer James Horner was inspired by Celtic music. He said this allowed him to relive parts of his Irish heritage, and Gibson became emotional as he spoke about Horner. "This film was a joy to make, and my mother was born in Longford so I was raised on this kind of music myself, so it was a real treat for me to explore this culture and the sound of it," he said. "In the Braveheart score, you can hear bits and pieces of old tunes that he borrowed from. He drew from a very rich source of music and poetry that's part of this country, as well as Scotland." He also retold a story about meeting three of the four Beatles at Abbey Road, where the score was recorded. The Scottish epic was mostly shot in Ireland after the Irish government lobbied and offered to supply 1600 army reserves as extras. Gibson said that while filming in Scotland was "fantastic", the ground was not firm enough for the big battle scenes. He said that then arts minister Michael Higgins, who is now Ireland's president, made the film possible. Fans travelled from all over Ireland to get a chance of meeting the Lethal Weapon and Mad Max star. People queued at Trim Castle Hotel to meet Gibson and other Braveheart cast members, including Angus Macfadyen, John Murtagh and Mhairi Calvey. Maksim Okhotnikov, eight, dressed up as William Wallace in a costume created by his mother, who also sketched a charcoal drawing of Gibson. "I didn't watch all of the film, I just watched pieces because it's (rated) 16+," Maksim told the PA news agency. Adam Walker and his son, Nathan, seven, from Dublin, were among the first people into the room to meet the cast. "Obviously, he's too young to watch the full movie, so I was trying to show him the quotes, the big freedom speech at the end of the movie. We were watching that, we were watching the mad Irishman of course, David O'Hara who plays Stephen of Ireland," Walker said. "We were looking for a wedding venue 12 years back and we were looking everywhere and we found here. It was lovely, the prices were great, and then I read at the end that the castle was where Braveheart was filmed. "I said to my wife: 'We're doing it', so we got married in the room just there and we had the castle as the backdrop. So it's very interesting to be able to come back 12 years later and actually meet Mel Gibson here, and this little lad wasn't even alive at the time." Elaine Coyle, who travelled with her mother from Dublin, said watching Braveheart was a family tradition. "My dad would be a big fan; it's what we grew up with. It's a Christmas tradition in our house," she said. "It definitely opened the door to the Irish economy around films, it completely changed how the industry worked going forward, but I think in general people recognise that it made such an impact on Ireland, and we can also relate to the history of it. It's generational." An emotional Mel Gibson has recalled fond memories of shooting the film Braveheart in Ireland 30 years ago. The Oscar-winning director and actor posed for selfies with fans and signed posters before attending a musical performance of movie songs in Co Meath. The American-born, Australian-raised Gibson starred in Braveheart as Scottish rebel William Wallace, as he sets out to challenge King Edward I of England. The film won Oscars for best director and best picture. Speaking after the score from the 1995 film was played by an orchestra in a tent in Trim on Saturday, Gibson told the audience that composer James Horner was inspired by Celtic music. He said this allowed him to relive parts of his Irish heritage, and Gibson became emotional as he spoke about Horner. "This film was a joy to make, and my mother was born in Longford so I was raised on this kind of music myself, so it was a real treat for me to explore this culture and the sound of it," he said. "In the Braveheart score, you can hear bits and pieces of old tunes that he borrowed from. He drew from a very rich source of music and poetry that's part of this country, as well as Scotland." He also retold a story about meeting three of the four Beatles at Abbey Road, where the score was recorded. The Scottish epic was mostly shot in Ireland after the Irish government lobbied and offered to supply 1600 army reserves as extras. Gibson said that while filming in Scotland was "fantastic", the ground was not firm enough for the big battle scenes. He said that then arts minister Michael Higgins, who is now Ireland's president, made the film possible. Fans travelled from all over Ireland to get a chance of meeting the Lethal Weapon and Mad Max star. People queued at Trim Castle Hotel to meet Gibson and other Braveheart cast members, including Angus Macfadyen, John Murtagh and Mhairi Calvey. Maksim Okhotnikov, eight, dressed up as William Wallace in a costume created by his mother, who also sketched a charcoal drawing of Gibson. "I didn't watch all of the film, I just watched pieces because it's (rated) 16+," Maksim told the PA news agency. Adam Walker and his son, Nathan, seven, from Dublin, were among the first people into the room to meet the cast. "Obviously, he's too young to watch the full movie, so I was trying to show him the quotes, the big freedom speech at the end of the movie. We were watching that, we were watching the mad Irishman of course, David O'Hara who plays Stephen of Ireland," Walker said. "We were looking for a wedding venue 12 years back and we were looking everywhere and we found here. It was lovely, the prices were great, and then I read at the end that the castle was where Braveheart was filmed. "I said to my wife: 'We're doing it', so we got married in the room just there and we had the castle as the backdrop. So it's very interesting to be able to come back 12 years later and actually meet Mel Gibson here, and this little lad wasn't even alive at the time." Elaine Coyle, who travelled with her mother from Dublin, said watching Braveheart was a family tradition. "My dad would be a big fan; it's what we grew up with. It's a Christmas tradition in our house," she said. "It definitely opened the door to the Irish economy around films, it completely changed how the industry worked going forward, but I think in general people recognise that it made such an impact on Ireland, and we can also relate to the history of it. It's generational." An emotional Mel Gibson has recalled fond memories of shooting the film Braveheart in Ireland 30 years ago. The Oscar-winning director and actor posed for selfies with fans and signed posters before attending a musical performance of movie songs in Co Meath. The American-born, Australian-raised Gibson starred in Braveheart as Scottish rebel William Wallace, as he sets out to challenge King Edward I of England. The film won Oscars for best director and best picture. Speaking after the score from the 1995 film was played by an orchestra in a tent in Trim on Saturday, Gibson told the audience that composer James Horner was inspired by Celtic music. He said this allowed him to relive parts of his Irish heritage, and Gibson became emotional as he spoke about Horner. "This film was a joy to make, and my mother was born in Longford so I was raised on this kind of music myself, so it was a real treat for me to explore this culture and the sound of it," he said. "In the Braveheart score, you can hear bits and pieces of old tunes that he borrowed from. He drew from a very rich source of music and poetry that's part of this country, as well as Scotland." He also retold a story about meeting three of the four Beatles at Abbey Road, where the score was recorded. The Scottish epic was mostly shot in Ireland after the Irish government lobbied and offered to supply 1600 army reserves as extras. Gibson said that while filming in Scotland was "fantastic", the ground was not firm enough for the big battle scenes. He said that then arts minister Michael Higgins, who is now Ireland's president, made the film possible. Fans travelled from all over Ireland to get a chance of meeting the Lethal Weapon and Mad Max star. People queued at Trim Castle Hotel to meet Gibson and other Braveheart cast members, including Angus Macfadyen, John Murtagh and Mhairi Calvey. Maksim Okhotnikov, eight, dressed up as William Wallace in a costume created by his mother, who also sketched a charcoal drawing of Gibson. "I didn't watch all of the film, I just watched pieces because it's (rated) 16+," Maksim told the PA news agency. Adam Walker and his son, Nathan, seven, from Dublin, were among the first people into the room to meet the cast. "Obviously, he's too young to watch the full movie, so I was trying to show him the quotes, the big freedom speech at the end of the movie. We were watching that, we were watching the mad Irishman of course, David O'Hara who plays Stephen of Ireland," Walker said. "We were looking for a wedding venue 12 years back and we were looking everywhere and we found here. It was lovely, the prices were great, and then I read at the end that the castle was where Braveheart was filmed. "I said to my wife: 'We're doing it', so we got married in the room just there and we had the castle as the backdrop. So it's very interesting to be able to come back 12 years later and actually meet Mel Gibson here, and this little lad wasn't even alive at the time." Elaine Coyle, who travelled with her mother from Dublin, said watching Braveheart was a family tradition. "My dad would be a big fan; it's what we grew up with. It's a Christmas tradition in our house," she said. "It definitely opened the door to the Irish economy around films, it completely changed how the industry worked going forward, but I think in general people recognise that it made such an impact on Ireland, and we can also relate to the history of it. It's generational." An emotional Mel Gibson has recalled fond memories of shooting the film Braveheart in Ireland 30 years ago. The Oscar-winning director and actor posed for selfies with fans and signed posters before attending a musical performance of movie songs in Co Meath. The American-born, Australian-raised Gibson starred in Braveheart as Scottish rebel William Wallace, as he sets out to challenge King Edward I of England. The film won Oscars for best director and best picture. Speaking after the score from the 1995 film was played by an orchestra in a tent in Trim on Saturday, Gibson told the audience that composer James Horner was inspired by Celtic music. He said this allowed him to relive parts of his Irish heritage, and Gibson became emotional as he spoke about Horner. "This film was a joy to make, and my mother was born in Longford so I was raised on this kind of music myself, so it was a real treat for me to explore this culture and the sound of it," he said. "In the Braveheart score, you can hear bits and pieces of old tunes that he borrowed from. He drew from a very rich source of music and poetry that's part of this country, as well as Scotland." He also retold a story about meeting three of the four Beatles at Abbey Road, where the score was recorded. The Scottish epic was mostly shot in Ireland after the Irish government lobbied and offered to supply 1600 army reserves as extras. Gibson said that while filming in Scotland was "fantastic", the ground was not firm enough for the big battle scenes. He said that then arts minister Michael Higgins, who is now Ireland's president, made the film possible. Fans travelled from all over Ireland to get a chance of meeting the Lethal Weapon and Mad Max star. People queued at Trim Castle Hotel to meet Gibson and other Braveheart cast members, including Angus Macfadyen, John Murtagh and Mhairi Calvey. Maksim Okhotnikov, eight, dressed up as William Wallace in a costume created by his mother, who also sketched a charcoal drawing of Gibson. "I didn't watch all of the film, I just watched pieces because it's (rated) 16+," Maksim told the PA news agency. Adam Walker and his son, Nathan, seven, from Dublin, were among the first people into the room to meet the cast. "Obviously, he's too young to watch the full movie, so I was trying to show him the quotes, the big freedom speech at the end of the movie. We were watching that, we were watching the mad Irishman of course, David O'Hara who plays Stephen of Ireland," Walker said. "We were looking for a wedding venue 12 years back and we were looking everywhere and we found here. It was lovely, the prices were great, and then I read at the end that the castle was where Braveheart was filmed. "I said to my wife: 'We're doing it', so we got married in the room just there and we had the castle as the backdrop. So it's very interesting to be able to come back 12 years later and actually meet Mel Gibson here, and this little lad wasn't even alive at the time." Elaine Coyle, who travelled with her mother from Dublin, said watching Braveheart was a family tradition. "My dad would be a big fan; it's what we grew up with. It's a Christmas tradition in our house," she said. "It definitely opened the door to the Irish economy around films, it completely changed how the industry worked going forward, but I think in general people recognise that it made such an impact on Ireland, and we can also relate to the history of it. It's generational."
