What lies beneath this real-life horror story
But the real horror playing out beneath South Australia's normally pristine waters is far from fiction. It's truly terrifying.
Aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's hard to recall a crisis in our state of this scale and gravity.
A kilometres-long stretch of coastline is blanketed in thick brown foam and sludge.
Entire beaches — usually teeming with swimmers, walkers, frolicking dogs and kids building sandcastles — now sit empty (because, let's face it, most of us are avoiding them like the plague).
But dive deeper and the true devastation emerges.
Below the surface, marine life is suffocating. Choking. Dying.
Our ocean has become an underwater graveyard. Marine ecosystems so devastated, any sign of recovery seems to be drifting further away by the day.
The images pouring into the Channel 7 newsroom in Adelaide are nothing short of heartbreaking.
Our cameras are documenting the carnage and South Australians are sending us more every single day.
Photos and videos of fish, dolphins, rays, crabs, penguins and even sharks washed up lifeless on our shores.
And don't get me started on that poor fur seal found slumped gasping for air on the footpath in Brighton.
Was it was trying to flee rough seas or was it another casualty of the algal bloom?
We're told it's a natural event. We know it's a disaster.
But somehow, in this case, one plus one doesn't equal two. Canberra still refuses to formally declare this crisis a natural disaster.
The mind boggles. The blood boils and what about the South Australians whose livelihoods depend on the ocean? Our tourism operators, commercial fishers, fishmongers.
They're not just watching the environment collapse, they're feeling the financial impact. And they're hurting.
Will it get worse? Will our beaches be off-limits this summer? Can we safely eat what's left of the catch?
Will government inaction today haunt us tomorrow?
Past mismanagement, present crisis and a community demanding answers. What lies beneath? The truth, still buried.
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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Floods, dead bodies and lost phones: Melbourne's most unlikely bar
It's a bar which is under constant threat of being under water but that hasn't stopped Ponyfish Island from notching up 15 years' serving drinks under the Evan Walker Bridge on the Yarra River. Owners Grant Smillie, Andrew McKinnon and Jerome Borazio originally opened Ponyfish Island as a pop-up bar for one summer but since then, it has established itself as one of the city's most iconic places to have a drink despite its precarious location. Sitting in a patch of winter sun, testing out the bar's cocktail list, the trio say other challenges include the occasional dead body floating past and the need to employ overnight security guards 365 days a year at an annual cost of $750,000 because the bar can't be locked up. 'It's uninsurable as a venue because of flooding,' DJ turned restaurateur Smillie says. 'The first time it flooded, we went and put our claim in, and they said, 'OK', and the second time, they said: 'All the best'.' Smillie says there has been a huge increase over the years in the flooding that occurs in the Yarra so during the COVID-19 lockdowns, they redesigned the venue 'like a boat' to counter the worst of the flooding. Loading All power outlets and electrical wiring are now up high, they installed bilge pumps and made sure the floor and lower levels of the bar were made of hard, washable services. Now the regular floods, the most recent of which was last month, are not quite so devastating to the bar. Ponyfish Island opened in 2010 in what was formerly an ice-cream kiosk and was an instant hit with a queue of patrons lining up along the bridge to get in.
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
Floods, dead bodies and lost phones: Melbourne's most unlikely bar
It's a bar which is under constant threat of being under water but that hasn't stopped Ponyfish Island from notching up 15 years' serving drinks under the Evan Walker Bridge on the Yarra River. Owners Grant Smillie, Andrew McKinnon and Jerome Borazio originally opened Ponyfish Island as a pop-up bar for one summer but since then, it has established itself as one of the city's most iconic places to have a drink despite its precarious location. Sitting in a patch of winter sun, testing out the bar's cocktail list, the trio say other challenges include the occasional dead body floating past and the need to employ overnight security guards 365 days a year at an annual cost of $750,000 because the bar can't be locked up. 'It's uninsurable as a venue because of flooding,' DJ turned restaurateur Smillie says. 'The first time it flooded, we went and put our claim in, and they said, 'OK', and the second time, they said: 'All the best'.' Smillie says there has been a huge increase over the years in the flooding that occurs in the Yarra so during the COVID-19 lockdowns, they redesigned the venue 'like a boat' to counter the worst of the flooding. Loading All power outlets and electrical wiring are now up high, they installed bilge pumps and made sure the floor and lower levels of the bar were made of hard, washable services. Now the regular floods, the most recent of which was last month, are not quite so devastating to the bar. Ponyfish Island opened in 2010 in what was formerly an ice-cream kiosk and was an instant hit with a queue of patrons lining up along the bridge to get in.
The Advertiser
2 days ago
- The Advertiser
Eddington was meant to be divisive but the critics came out all guns blazing
A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?"
