Aubergine Paint Proof

Black walls, a black ceiling and a chipping black floor. The layers of black paint could tell countless forgotten stories, but here is mine. 

Happy.

They called it the “Cement Box”, which is a fairly accurate description. The walls were made of those awful, crumbly besser bricks and the floor was hard and cold. Objectively, you couldn’t think of a worse place to perform in. Dancers and actors are meant to perform on sprung floorboards, not cement, and there was some rumour about someone getting haemorrhoids from sitting on the concrete too long. Though I don’t even know if that’s medically plausible.

The lighting rig was a nonsensical mess of wires, and we always ran out of light bulbs. One day I took an old light into a technical theatre supplier and asked the guy behind the counter what kind of bulb I would need. A look of fear flickered across his face as he told me that the light was about 50 years old and full of asbestos. We kept using them, of course, but we stopped opening them after that.

The audience sat in blue and red chairs, which always seemed to go missing between shows. You’d have to crawl through the storage spaces and into the orchestra pit in the upstairs theatre to find them, and I was always determined to get enough of each so we could alternate. Aesthetics, you know? Important stuff.

We staged old classics and student-written work, some of it was god-awful, some amazing. But the most impressive part of all was that we did it all ourselves. Every play was acted, directed, costumed, designed, marketed and managed by amateurs, students... kids really. The company was called “Underground”, which was meant to be a joke, I think, because the theatre was semi-subterranean.

Backstage was my favourite place. You could go hunting in the depths and find all sorts of magic: working lamps, foam walls, dodgy doors and an office chair papier-mâchéd to look like a villain’s high-backed seat. You’d find actors sitting on broken audience chairs or on moth-eaten couches, an Assistant Stage Manager doling out props and the director smoking with some of the actors, trying to be relaxed. And then, watching over them, my favourite part of all: the graffiti. The name of every show that had ever been performed in that cement box was immortalised on every square inch of space on the walls and ceiling. Everything was covered, crammed with the names of people I don’t even know, shows that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. I spent enough time there to know that the oldest date was on the door. 1984. Before I was born.

The best graffiti by far though, was in the tech box. I spent countless hours sitting in there, so I would know. Every show, the stage managers and techies would leave their marks too. Though undated, they undoubtedly went back as far as some of the ones out the back did. But there were no names here, just an endless continuation of the same joke. “No actors in the tech box” one read, “no fuck ups in the tech box”, said another. “No farting in the tech box”, “No sleeping in the tech box”, “No scrub turkeys in the tech box” … “No holds barred in the tech box”. I wish I could remember more, because they were one of the first things to go.

The place was full of secrets, of doors you only discovered after a year of walking past them, of little-used rooms and unknown passages. It was full of fire hazards and broken things, full of dirt and possum shit. One night the resident possum made its theatrical debut, scaring the pants off actors and audience alike.

I became the keeper of the keys at the start of 2009. From the second I had stepped foot in there 3 years’ previously, I had wanted to know all those secrets. It was like knowing where the entrance to Narnia was, or how to get into the Lost Boys’ hideout. The guy with the keys in 2007 used to park his car out the back under the graffiti to save on university parking fees, and I had heard about people sleeping in the office, or having sex in the office, which was frankly disgusting. I knew where the good napping places were (NOT the office) and I often studied or ate my lunch in the foyer with friends.

Always start a relationship in a dirty, cement pit, would be my advice.

All my friends acted or teched in that place, I met my partner there, I had some of the best times of my life there. It was a safe space, a fun place, a filthy, grimy, ugly space. I wrote a third year paper about theatre spaces and how they impact on the theatre that is made in them. I researched theatre troupes in far off, exotic places like Melbourne. They all had whimsical, abandoned, amazing spaces, and it was only in writing about them that I realised I had one of my own all along.

And that’s when it got taken away.

Yes of course, the evil “man” came and ruined our bohemian dreams. That’s how this story always had to go. The union contacted us, and told us they were giving the Cement Box back to the uni, and then came a series of meetings with people in suits. I wanted protests, placards, fire, shouting, but what really happened is that we cut a fairly boring deal and got out of the way. They promised not to paint over the graffiti, and for the most part they kept their word, but they covered some of it with the same awful purple paint they covered the rest of the black with. Aubergine, a lecturer told me later, is the new colour for theatres. They renamed it after Geoffrey Rush and a couple of my friends stole the old Cement Box sign and hung it in their house.  Not to be outdone, I broke in one night with a tin of paint and in large blue letters proclaimed “No more Underground Productions in the tech box”. I thought I was very clever, but it was gone a month later.

In my essay that semester, I wrote thousands of academic words about art and space, about the impact of both on each other. I waffled on about creative safe-spaces, about the value of found spaces and designed spaces alike. I desperately tried to fit our little space into the essay, and I slipped it in there towards the end. But it’s only now that I realise that the Cement Box didn’t just influence the art we made, it was a crucial element of the people we became. The filthy, badly built Cement Box made us the loud, crude, funny, dirty, clever, self-made people that we were, that we are still. It lives on in the friendships around me today, in the life I share with my partner, in the terrible jokes we still tell. They painted over 30 years of stories, but this is mine, and it is aubergine paint proof. 

Thanks to Emily Rowe and Amy Randall for photos.

Floodiversary

Tuesday, the 11^th of January 2011 felt like just a normal Tuesday. Sure, I had to wear gumboots to work *again* but that wasn’t so strange, given I’d done so almost every day through December. It was a particularly rainy Summer, which was frustrating, but no one seemed to think it was weird. On Tuesday the 11^th I walked across New Farm Park to my work at the Powerhouse, sloshing through puddles, hoping that our regular Tuesday meeting wouldn’t be too boring. I don’t remember if we ever had that meeting, because Tuesday the 11^th of January, 2011 was the day Brisbane started filling with water.

I don’t remember how we first heard about the flood, but I do remember that work basically stopped happening after we did. I brought up news sites and twitter feeds and sat glued to them for about 20 minutes. Then we made the decision to move all the lighting and sound equipment up from the lower levels. I ran around with everyone else, moving equipment in an impractical dress. At some point my mum called. To be honest at this point I hadn’t really thought about my family home. My workplace and house were in New Farm, I was confronted with the issues in front of me, and I had no clue about the ones that were to come.

Mum and Dad were frantically driving back from a holiday in New South Wales, a holiday cut short by literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, worrying about my parents’ home in Sherwood. Mum asked me if I could go across town to rescue their dog from a kennel, the staff there weren’t sure if they could get all the animals to higher ground (spoiler: he was rescued, it was fine). I think that’s when I first started panicking. Later I found out that my response to mum, that unfortunately I couldn’t because I was needed at work, and my housemate and I were desperately trying to work out whether or not we were going to evacuate, was when mum started properly panicking too.

I ran home across the sodden park in my dress and gumboots. One of my housemates was overseas, but my other housemate and I sat on our lounge room floor and tried to make a plan. We still didn’t really believe it was all that bad, but we were worried about her car, and about what would happen if we got stranded. So I put my birth certificate and some other prized possessions on top of a bookshelf, we packed up a bunch of our food and clothes, and went to our friend’s house in Bardon.

Some parts of that week are completely etched into my brain, and other parts are a big blur.

Blur:

1.     How long we stayed, it was almost a week I think?

2.     What we filled the long hours with?

3.     Did we even talk about anything other than floods?

4.     Why did we think it was ok to go to that party in the middle of the week? That was weird. I had a panic attack.

Etched:

1.     Going for a walk near a swollen creek and being convinced that the guy randomly standing on it was going to get sucked under and die in front of me.

2.     Watching press conference after press conference featuring Anna Bligh

3.     People coming to visit us like we were some kind of flood coping epicentre.

4.     Twitter

5.     The phone call from my mum on the Wednesday.

You know how in movies, people sink into chairs after receiving bad news? Even as I was doing it I was conscious of how dramatic I must have looked, sinking into a chair. I’d last spoken to mum on Tuesday afternoon, there was water in their backyard and they were evacuating. I thought they were going to get water in the bottom storey, an area largely devoted to concrete, storage and washing machines. But on Wednesday morning my mum said she’d gone down at 5am and the water had reached the top floor, and it hadn’t peaked yet. The next day it got to about waist height on the top floor.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought this could happen. Even while watching other houses go under on the news, even though the area had gone under in 1974, even though I knew they had evacuated, I still somehow thought that it’d get a bit wet under their house and we could all move on. But no, actually this happened:

The water reaches the top story (the house is on a hill sloping backwards)

The water is slightly lower than it's highest point here

  

Our house in New Farm was unscathed, though we didn’t have power for more than a week. I went back at some stage, to get some things and to throw out the food we’d left behind. The whole suburb stank of rotting food, thrown into skips left around by the council.

We joined the clean up in Sherwood on Saturday. Me, my housemate Samara, our evacuee saviour Mim, my boyfriend Jeremy and our friend Chris. We couldn’t get there any earlier, and it took us more than an hour and a half to drive from Bardon to Sherwood. It was hot, it was stinky, but in some ways it was fun. Production lines of volunteers tried to remove the actual sewerage from the yard, walls were ripped out, photos were salvaged. I had to keep doing things; otherwise I think I would have cried. Everything was grey, muddy, it looked like a war zone instead of a suburban street. There was a pumpkin in my parents’ yard. A pumpkin. There was a metal barrel stuck in a tree next door.

Who needs walls anyway, right?

Clean up in the back yard

It’s the 13^th January 2013 today. It’s been two years and two days since the flood came, two years and one day since I dramatically sunk into a chair, two years to the day since the flood peaked. My parents have rebuilt, have repainted and returfed. They have replaced the things they lost, and are in many ways I think stronger for what happened. Sometimes I almost forget it happened, and other times I see a photo of floods and get all weepy. I know that we had it lucky, no one died or was seriously injured, the house is in a nice area and lots of people came to help and clean and be supportive.

I know that in poorer suburbs and towns, people felt neglected, felt forgotten and abandoned, and that this isn’t fair. But the flood was the hardest thing I’ve had to cope with in my short life and was one of the biggest things my family has ever gone through together. I guess I just wanted to tell you about it, because it’s kind of the anniversary, and I’ve never really spoken about it on my blog before. You can’t take much from this story except “well floods are shit” but I am glad you’re here, reading my blog, and I hope you stick around into the very exciting year that is 2013. I promise it won’t be this serious too often. 

Weather with you

Weather happens every god damn day, whether you want it to or not. Whether you weather the weather or whether you don’t, it’s always there. And yet we humans talk about the weather like it’s going out of fashion. Or more accurately, like it’s the height of fashion.  We can’t get ENOUGH of weather talk. It’s too cold, it’s so hot, can’t get over the frost this morning, did you hear we’re in for a storm? What’s with these clouds, eh?

There are a million, million jokes about talking about the weather; it’s the cliché, the standard filler, only boring people talk about weather. For some people it’s highly relevant; farmers, fishers, tornado hunters – they all need to know, discuss and go on about it. But what the fuck are the rest of us doing?

Sure, it’s easy small talk, the kind of stuff you can pull out with coworkers you don’t know that well, or neighbours, vaguely related family members and members of religious faiths who won’t get off your doorstep, but I think it’s more than that.

Since moving from my hometown, almost every single member of mine and Boyfriend’s families have mentioned that they look at the weather forecast for Dalby on a regular basis. We’re no longer in town, no longer united by Brisbane weather, so they keep an eye on our weather. There’s no logic to this, if it’s cold here, they aren’t going to call us up and remind us to wear a scarf, but they just like to know. I still check the Brisbane weather all the time; it’s comforting in a weird way.

I think we talk about the weather because it’s one of the few observable, unambiguous things that unites us. No one can say whether we all experience life in the same way; do we love the same way, hate the same way, find the same things funny? How can we be sure that other people even think the same way, or about the same things as us? We can’t. But we sure as hell all know what it’s like to get rained on, to feel hot, to scream and then giggle at our own fear when lightning strikes a little too close for comfort.

So every morning, you probably look up the forecast online, or catch it on the news. You probably make a comment about it to someone you live with. Failing all that, you at least stand on your front steps and judge whether or not you’re going to need a cardi. And once you’ve gleaned this information, you probably go to work or uni or whatever, and mention it to someone there. “I thought it was going to be freezing this morning, but now I’m boiling, damn it I did not need this cardi!” And in your mind you might think, “geez what a boring conversationalist I am” – but remember, you’re just connecting yourself to the rest of humanity. All you’re doing is saying “LOOK I AM JUST LIKE YOU. WE ARE THE SAME. HOW SHIT IS SWEAT?!” You’re just participating in the great small talk of life, and there’s nothing so wrong with that.

What’s with these clouds, eh?

33 Week Challenge Week 5: Sunrise over Sea

Challenge no. 15 – Watch a sunrise from Mt. Coot-tha

Well, I’ve seen a few sunrises in my time, but mostly from the wrong end. That is to say, in my youth* (for I am aged and nostalgic now) I stayed up late enough at parties to “shinerun” as some people I knew called it, to celebrate the end of a party with the sunrise. Most of the time, however, we were too drunk or too tired to actually watch the sunrise, and it was more sort of: “ok, the sunlight’s on the street, NOW can I go to bed?” I did once shinerun and watch a sunrise on a New Year’s morning once. That was pretty good.

*actually, I did this last weekend.

Again, in my youth, I worked in a Donut King and later at a coffee shop. Shifts started at 6am so depending on the time of year I may have seen a few sunrises, but a lot of the time I was in the shop before it happened, or on a train, and usually, still asleep anyway.

This Saturday just gone was the first time in my life I got up specifically to watch a sunrise. Now, in my more comfortable years, I have a job that starts at a normal time and a desire to sleep in as much as possible – it really has never occurred to me to *want* to get up for such a thing. I mean, how good can it really be? I’ve seen the sun. It’s all orange and glowy, how good can it really look when it comes up. And that’s the thing, it’s not really an event, we living in these modern times know it isn’t “coming up”, it’s not the gods deciding to let us live for another day by bringing the sun out of the underworld, it’s not a new sun each time. In fact, it’s not even going around us, we’re going around it, and we couldn’t see it earlier because we were facing the other way in our daily rotation. It’s the same sun as yesterday, as every day, it’s the same sun that’s currently weakly shining behind a bunch of clouds and doing nothing to warm my freezing house. Saturday morning wasn’t special, it was just another orbit, another rotation, in a cycle that’s been going on for billions of years. 6:35am was just the time that the sun shone on Brisbane again.

Can you tell I’m an atheist?

Look, the point I think you know I’m trying to make here is that it was still beautiful anyway. That’s what I love about not believing in stuff. I find the very nature of our orbit and our rotation and the sun itself beautiful. I don’t find it beautiful because god made it so; I find it beautiful because it is.

You know what was not beautiful? My face at 5:30am… which is when I woke up. Somehow, even though I knew I was getting up to see a sunrise, my body still couldn’t compute why it was so dark and why I was making it get out of it’s warm blankets, and then, much to it’s horror, outside to get my hoodie off the line. Before 7am my body and brain are two separate entities. This produces what I like to call my ‘zombie face’. It’s a sort of dry, yet drooling face, with whispy hair and a droopy eye. It’s the kind of face that makes my loving and long-term boyfriend say things like “for a pretty girl you really can be really very ugly sometimes”. Boyfriend has seen this face a few times. One time we had a flight to New Zealand that we had to get up at 5:30 for. When he tried to gently wake me, I punched him in the nose. The face had taken over.

This is a photo of me at 5:45 in the morning, I appear to have hidden most of the zombie face by raising my eyebrows and trying really hard, but I can see that it is still there, waiting to scare small children.

So I drank a tea in the dark, donned as much warm clothing as physically possible, and tried to wash the zombie away. Chris, my sunrise companion arrived and drove us to Mt. Coot-tha for my first, deliberate sunrise watching experience.

And yeah, it was beautiful. For those who know the geography, despite Coot-tha being a fairly poor excuse for a ‘Mt.’ we could see all the way out to Moreton Island and the ocean beyond. The sun came up there, and despite (or perhaps due to) the thick cloud cover, we saw massive beams of sunlight hitting the long white dunes out there. It looked a lot, as Connor, another sunrise buddy said, like Jesus was walking on the water out there. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong side of Moreton Island to stage his second coming, so no one will ever know. There was a mist over Ipswich and out to the Dividing Range that slowly lifted as we watched and a reflection of the sun’s light on clouds out to the West. It was genuinely, well worth the effort of getting up and subjecting others to the zomb.

Here are some photos I took on my phone:

And here are some actually good ones Chris took:

 this one is amazing

Connor and I looking at the thing

wow, right?

Good Morning!

An amazing added bonus was that I then had a whole day in front of me. We ate breakfast at the café at 7:30am and I was home by 8. I was so very awake for my karate class at 10 and by midday decided I would use the time to watch the entire Eccleston season of Doctor Who.

Which, I think, leads me into a couple of quick updates about some other challenges I have recently started.

Becoming a Doctor Who fan is coming along nicely. Ok, I’m fanatical to the point of being dangerous to myself. Since my last blog post I have watched the entire 5^th season. Here is my reaction to the final episode:

Episode 13: The Big Bang

Tiny Amy – hello!

If there’s no stars, is there a sun?

Time travel is fun!

Seriously, fuck off Dalek.

Ooooh, Sun explained. Thank you.

“It’s a fez, I wear a fez now.”

Ooooooooooooohhh

*cough* the bride’s gone crazy

Doctor in tails!!

I think that was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

After this, I fought with myself about going on to the 6^th, made the decision to instead go back to the start, watched the whole first and half of the second seasons. At this point, I sort of don’t want to do anything else and am wondering if there is some way to get paid for watching Doctor Who. I had to use significant will power to write this post instead of continue watching. I’m not too worried though, this sort of obsession is normal in me, the need to watch it at all the time will fade, as it did with videos of Neil Patrick Harris, Paul McDermott, The Doug Anthony All Stars and Harry Potter (the books, don’t worry). I’m still a massive fan of all those things, I just need to O.D. for a while and then it will become a part of me, like those things did.

Yes, I know.

Growing and looking after a herb garden nearly fell apart when I discovered that something had eaten all the tops off my seedlings. Seriously, the looking after part is so much more difficult than the planting them part. Like children, really. I put off dealing with this for a few days and then went to the hardware store. I wasn’t sure if it was bugs or possums/rodents but it seemed easier to try killing bugs first, so I got bug spray. Spraying this on my herbs led to the surprising discovery that there were a bunch of, now rather unhappy, bugs hiding in the dirt. The herbs are doing ok, but I keep forgetting to water them so we’ll see how they go.

Writing a blog every Monday for the NYWM is going fine; this is the second of four that I need to do in June, so half way there! I feel sometimes as though I’m cheating, as some people are doing things like writing 1000 words a day or finishing their novels. But at the end of the day, I actually love writing this blog, and this challenge thing has been really excellent for me. Making the commitment to NYWM has helped me stay on track and the Monday deadline makes me feel like I’m a real writer who has to produce material every week…. Even if it is about my zombie face and the earth’s rotation around the sun. I hope you’re enjoying it too.

Stay classy, bloggeroos, stay classy.