Latest news with #Snowtown
Sydney Morning Herald
44 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The film Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis tried to pull
In his early 20s, Warren Ellis stopped reading books. 'I was reading Bukowski, and I was like, I don't want to read about a drunk, I want to be one,' he says. 'If I'm gonna take drugs, I'm not gonna live it through Lou Reed's eyes, I'm gonna inject drugs. I'm not going to f---ing quote somebody, you know?' This reckless design for life has made and broken the Ballarat school teacher turned international rock star. No amount of reading could have informed his distinction as a musician, from the untethered attack of his violin in Dirty Three to his crucial role as Nick Cave's wild right hand and beyond. But drink and drugs brought trouble. So has the 'don't read it, just do it' thing. 'Justin [Kurzel] had sent me a synopsis of what he wanted to do, which I didn't read,' he says of the blueprint for Ellis Park, the documentary about his life and work that he had no intention or desire to make. The pitch he'd agreed to 'over a five-minute beer in Cannes' involved documenting his first visit to Ellis Park in Sumatra, the haven for wild animals rescued from trafficking he'd just helped to establish. Apart from a need for ongoing funding, Ellis was driven to highlight the inspiration of its remarkable team, led by Dutch activist Femke den Haas. But 18 months later, the day after he landed in Melbourne on Cave's Carnage tour in November 2022, the director of Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang turned up to collect him from his hotel. 'He's got the car there and I was like, 'Where are we going?' 'We're going to Ballarat'. And I'm like, 'What? Nobody f---ing told me'. He says, 'It was in the [synopsis]'. 'Well, you can't expect me to read it,' you know?' Like his volatile presence on stage, Ellis' intense, unfiltered style is plenty compelling up close. Seated in the foyer of a boutique South Yarra hotel in a shiny suit, shinier burgundy ankle boots and copious jewellery sparkling through his grizzled beard, he remains in constant, restless motion. 'I tried to pull the film the year after it was shot,' he says. 'I just suddenly wondered what I'd done. I had a camera on me at the most vulnerable time my life … I was going through a separation [he has two kids with French artist Delphine Ciampi], I'd been hooked on benzodiazepines for 10 years and I jumped off those. 'I had a breakdown after filming at the sanctuary and spent four months crawling around on my hands and knees eating peanut butter in an apartment, suicidal. I had to see a psychiatrist … The fact that the filming involved me being so personal was not part of my original thinking.' The trip to Ballarat to film his elderly parents and revisit scenes of his troubled early life had stirred some deeply buried trauma. In Kurzel and editor Nick Fenton's unwieldy final cut, those raw threads sit in jarring juxtaposition with the graphic horrors of animal trafficking in Indonesia. With its nod to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the idea of Ellis marching through the jungle with an enormous replica of Nina Simone's discarded chewing gum as a kind of totem of devotion — his book of 2021, Nina Simone's Gum, explains that obsession — looks decidedly unhinged. In the world of documentary filmmaking, he came to realise, such ideas are 'just a couple of pontoons you get to land on. And what happens swimming in between is anybody's guess. 'Music is like that, I find, in the studio. I've done enough of it to realise now a similarity. You can have an idea and when you get it done, it's really unfulfilling. Meanwhile, the stuff that you're not focusing on tends to develop of its own accord. 'These ideas Justin had, some were good. There's [unused] footage of me playing with Indonesian musicians and dancers and walking through the streets of Sovereign Hill and playing in paddocks full of cow shit and getting attacked by monkeys ... but the narrative, I think, only found itself in the editing.' And, ultimately, in the mind of the beholder. Ellis says he could only bear to watch the finished film once. In his reading, 'it's about this beautiful place that's being created in this community and about the good that people can do. 'Animals are like babies. They're born with their life, that's all they've got,' he says, dark eyes glistening. 'Most humans, we get a chance. We get some shot to make our destiny. Animals just have their life, and we need to stand up for them.' His life has been 'changed significantly', he says, by his dogs: a white German Shepherd and a Swiss Shepherd. 'Larry and Piglet. Piglet does therapy with me. They opened me up to something that feels like the closest thing to some sort of God – drawing the better qualities out of yourself, finding what's within you.' As awesome and humbling as it is, the Ellis Park sanctuary feels like an incredibly tenuous act of resistance against the overwhelming scale of the illegal wildlife trade: poaching, smuggling, habitat destruction, cruelty, corruption … But like hope itself, its existence is not negotiable. 'Hope is really fundamental,' Ellis says. 'At this point in my life, it feels like hanging onto hope is hanging onto life, and life is the greatest gift of all.' Loading It's a new way of thinking, he confesses, partly due to the unlikely intervention of a famous friend, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. 'He's an amazing human being. He's founded schools in Watts and Silver Lake,' Ellis says. 'When I was deciding this, it was not insubstantial expenditure for me and I called him, and he's like, 'Man, I encourage you to do this with all your heart. It'll open you up to something you never knew was possible'. 'The manager of a band I know, he's like, 'How much are the running costs?' I'm like, 'Dude, I don't f—ing know'. Now, probably a sensible person would have. But all my life it's been about not trying to understand too much. Just jumping. I mean, I was teaching and I gave it up to play in a band. I never really thought about the consequences.' For the sake of Ellis Park, its reluctant namesake has made his peace with the film that goes on general cinema release this week. 'What I love about the people there … they're being accountable for somebody else's actions, you know? That just feels to me fundamentally important. 'I've never wanted to tell my story, to sell my story. I don't feel like the world needs another boring musician's story,' he says, although these days, he admits, 'I do like reading some of them. I think there's just so many lives that are blown up to be something they aren't, and I didn't want to be adding to that. 'Justin really pushed me. He said, 'We can shoot it. We don't have to use it', and he allowed me to reclaim things, and in the space of that first day he became a true collaborator, like Nick or like [filmmaker colleague] Andrew Dominik: somebody you know has got you and that you can fail with. And it's OK. 'It's life. It's what happens. And I'm really grateful that it happened because it taught me I needed to confront stuff. I decided to go along with it the way I've always approached anything I do creatively. Just jump in.'
The Age
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
The film Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis tried to pull
In his early 20s, Warren Ellis stopped reading books. 'I was reading Bukowski, and I was like, I don't want to read about a drunk, I want to be one,' he says. 'If I'm gonna take drugs, I'm not gonna live it through Lou Reed's eyes, I'm gonna inject drugs. I'm not going to f---ing quote somebody, you know?' This reckless design for life has made and broken the Ballarat school teacher turned international rock star. No amount of reading could have informed his distinction as a musician, from the untethered attack of his violin in Dirty Three to his crucial role as Nick Cave's wild right hand and beyond. But drink and drugs brought trouble. So has the 'don't read it, just do it' thing. 'Justin [Kurzel] had sent me a synopsis of what he wanted to do, which I didn't read,' he says of the blueprint for Ellis Park, the documentary about his life and work that he had no intention or desire to make. The pitch he'd agreed to 'over a five-minute beer in Cannes' involved documenting his first visit to Ellis Park in Sumatra, the haven for wild animals rescued from trafficking he'd just helped to establish. Apart from a need for ongoing funding, Ellis was driven to highlight the inspiration of its remarkable team, led by Dutch activist Femke den Haas. But 18 months later, the day after he landed in Melbourne on Cave's Carnage tour in November 2022, the director of Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang turned up to collect him from his hotel. 'He's got the car there and I was like, 'Where are we going?' 'We're going to Ballarat'. And I'm like, 'What? Nobody f---ing told me'. He says, 'It was in the [synopsis]'. 'Well, you can't expect me to read it,' you know?' Like his volatile presence on stage, Ellis' intense, unfiltered style is plenty compelling up close. Seated in the foyer of a boutique South Yarra hotel in a shiny suit, shinier burgundy ankle boots and copious jewellery sparkling through his grizzled beard, he remains in constant, restless motion. 'I tried to pull the film the year after it was shot,' he says. 'I just suddenly wondered what I'd done. I had a camera on me at the most vulnerable time my life … I was going through a separation [he has two kids with French artist Delphine Ciampi], I'd been hooked on benzodiazepines for 10 years and I jumped off those. 'I had a breakdown after filming at the sanctuary and spent four months crawling around on my hands and knees eating peanut butter in an apartment, suicidal. I had to see a psychiatrist … The fact that the filming involved me being so personal was not part of my original thinking.' The trip to Ballarat to film his elderly parents and revisit scenes of his troubled early life had stirred some deeply buried trauma. In Kurzel and editor Nick Fenton's unwieldy final cut, those raw threads sit in jarring juxtaposition with the graphic horrors of animal trafficking in Indonesia. With its nod to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the idea of Ellis marching through the jungle with an enormous replica of Nina Simone's discarded chewing gum as a kind of totem of devotion — his book of 2021, Nina Simone's Gum, explains that obsession — looks decidedly unhinged. In the world of documentary filmmaking, he came to realise, such ideas are 'just a couple of pontoons you get to land on. And what happens swimming in between is anybody's guess. 'Music is like that, I find, in the studio. I've done enough of it to realise now a similarity. You can have an idea and when you get it done, it's really unfulfilling. Meanwhile, the stuff that you're not focusing on tends to develop of its own accord. 'These ideas Justin had, some were good. There's [unused] footage of me playing with Indonesian musicians and dancers and walking through the streets of Sovereign Hill and playing in paddocks full of cow shit and getting attacked by monkeys ... but the narrative, I think, only found itself in the editing.' And, ultimately, in the mind of the beholder. Ellis says he could only bear to watch the finished film once. In his reading, 'it's about this beautiful place that's being created in this community and about the good that people can do. 'Animals are like babies. They're born with their life, that's all they've got,' he says, dark eyes glistening. 'Most humans, we get a chance. We get some shot to make our destiny. Animals just have their life, and we need to stand up for them.' His life has been 'changed significantly', he says, by his dogs: a white German Shepherd and a Swiss Shepherd. 'Larry and Piglet. Piglet does therapy with me. They opened me up to something that feels like the closest thing to some sort of God – drawing the better qualities out of yourself, finding what's within you.' As awesome and humbling as it is, the Ellis Park sanctuary feels like an incredibly tenuous act of resistance against the overwhelming scale of the illegal wildlife trade: poaching, smuggling, habitat destruction, cruelty, corruption … But like hope itself, its existence is not negotiable. 'Hope is really fundamental,' Ellis says. 'At this point in my life, it feels like hanging onto hope is hanging onto life, and life is the greatest gift of all.' Loading It's a new way of thinking, he confesses, partly due to the unlikely intervention of a famous friend, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. 'He's an amazing human being. He's founded schools in Watts and Silver Lake,' Ellis says. 'When I was deciding this, it was not insubstantial expenditure for me and I called him, and he's like, 'Man, I encourage you to do this with all your heart. It'll open you up to something you never knew was possible'. 'The manager of a band I know, he's like, 'How much are the running costs?' I'm like, 'Dude, I don't f—ing know'. Now, probably a sensible person would have. But all my life it's been about not trying to understand too much. Just jumping. I mean, I was teaching and I gave it up to play in a band. I never really thought about the consequences.' For the sake of Ellis Park, its reluctant namesake has made his peace with the film that goes on general cinema release this week. 'What I love about the people there … they're being accountable for somebody else's actions, you know? That just feels to me fundamentally important. 'I've never wanted to tell my story, to sell my story. I don't feel like the world needs another boring musician's story,' he says, although these days, he admits, 'I do like reading some of them. I think there's just so many lives that are blown up to be something they aren't, and I didn't want to be adding to that. 'Justin really pushed me. He said, 'We can shoot it. We don't have to use it', and he allowed me to reclaim things, and in the space of that first day he became a true collaborator, like Nick or like [filmmaker colleague] Andrew Dominik: somebody you know has got you and that you can fail with. And it's OK. 'It's life. It's what happens. And I'm really grateful that it happened because it taught me I needed to confront stuff. I decided to go along with it the way I've always approached anything I do creatively. Just jump in.'
ABC News
16 hours ago
- Climate
- ABC News
South Australian drought sets low-rainfall records in farming areas
All of South Australia's agricultural areas are in a severe drought, with many locations receiving record-low rainfall over the past 12 months. The Mid North and the upper Eyre Peninsula have had the least rainfall and the majority of the record lows, although no place in the southern part of the state is unaffected, according to data from the Bureau of Meteorology. While farmers were able to harvest a good crop in 2024–25 because of sub-soil moisture from previous wet years, the ground is now bone dry. The Mid North town of Snowtown received a record-low amount of rain in 2024, and over the past 12 months the figure is even lower at 209 millimetres. Only 26mm has been recorded at the town's weather station since the start of the year. Snowtown sheep and mixed cropping farmer Andrew Michael has seeded in the hope of rain coming. "We have no sub-soil moisture left, which has got us through now for the last two-and-a-half [years] prior to this … but the loss if we don't get a grain year will be a massive impact," he said. His family also owns properties in Meningie and Willalooka, in the South East, which have also recorded extremely low rainfall. Bureau of Meteorology senior climatologist Jonathan Pollock said South Australia's drought was not particularly long-lasting or widespread like the 1997–2009 millennium drought, but it was quite deep. "It certainly is record-breaking in the sense that for a lot of the agricultural areas they have never seen a 16-month period from February to the following year's May with rainfall this low — and that's looking at data going all the way back to 1900," Mr Pollock said. He said it was caused by the atmosphere above the state being dominated by slow-moving high-pressure systems rather than cooler systems that brought rain with them. "Part of the reason why is we've seen a shift towards drier conditions across south-eastern Australia in recent decades and we're seeing more frequent periods of below-average rainfall and especially for the cool-season months from April through to October," he said. "This is due to a combination of natural variability on longer timescales but also changes in the large-scale atmospheric circulation largely driven by an increase in greenhouse gas emissions." The bureau's latest seasonal climate summary says the mean temperature across South Australia in autumn was 21.3 degrees Celsius, or 1.75C above the 1961–1990 average and the third warmest on record for all autumns since 1910. Better farming practices that make the most of sub-soil moisture led to a 5.2-million-tonne grain harvest in 2024–25. That was 40 per cent below the five-year average but 80 per cent above what was reaped in 2006–07 — another drought year. Department of Primary Industries and Regions (PIRSA) general manager for industrial partnerships and intelligence Matthew Palmer said the productivity increase over the past 20 years was "quite remarkable and a testament to producers and the research and development that supports the grains industry". "It's certainly been a very challenging season and it continues to be, but the result overall is quite remarkable compared with what would have happened in droughts in years gone by," he told the South Australian Country Hour. Ninety-year-old Vic Smith has kept rainfall records in Nangwarry since 1985, when he moved to the town to work at the timber mill. He recorded 102mm of rain until the end of May — similar to last year but about half the normal amount. He said he was worried about the conditions of plantation forests. "It's dangerously dry," Mr Smith said. Mr Smith started calling into the ABC in 1999 to report his rainfall records while at the same time promoting the Nangwarry Forestry Museum where he volunteered until last year. He has not given up his habit despite retiring. "It's something you can look back on and compare year by year, which I do. And, if I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't have realised how much drier it was this year than other years," he said.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jacob Elordi plays a WWII prisoner in The Narrow Road to the Deep North trailer
Jacob Elordi plays a soldier held captive as a prisoner of war in the trailer for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an upcoming Australian drama series on Prime Video. Dorrigo Evans (Priscilla's Elordi) is an Australian doctor who became a Far East prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma Railway in World War II. Told over multiple periods, Dorrigo once embarked on a passionate love affair with his uncle's wife, Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young), that changed his life. In the present, an older Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds) reflects on his life as a war hero with much sadness and grief. 'We all left a part of ourselves in that jungle,' Hinds' Dorrigo says in the trailer. 'Memory is the only true justice.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North's ensemble includes Olivia DeJonge, Heather Mitchell, Thomas Weatherall, Show Kasamatsu, and Simon Baker. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is based on Richard Flanagan's 2013 novel of the same name. Shaun Grant wrote the show for television, and Justin Kurzel directed the series. Grant and Kurzel have previously collaborated on 2011's Snowtown, 2020's True History of the Kelly Gang, and 2021's Nitram. Kurzel directed 2024's The Order, a thriller about an FBI agent's mission to stop a white supremacist group from overthrowing the government. In his review, Digital Trends' Alex Welch wrote, 'The Order is a gripping, haunting, and unfortunately necessary true-crime thriller.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a five-part series that will debut on April 18 on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The BBC will air the show in the U.K. Sony is still looking for a distribution deal in the U.S.
