ausculture

Two nights ago, whilst partaking in my usual night time activity of sharing my every waking thought with my Twitter followers (eg. “Also, can @kanyewest stop shouting at me? My Twitter feed is full of his capital letters.”) I came across something far more disturbing that Kanye.

A Tweet from the lovely Sam Frost.

“To the fake accounts heavily trolling me online & into my personal life. If you wanted to break me.. Congratulations you have won. #broken ”

Alarms bells went off in my head almost immediately.

You see, Sam’s Tweet was scarily similar to Charlotte Dawson’s Tweets in the time leading up to her death back in 2014. Charlotte was always very vocal about her struggles with mental health however it was no secret that she was also a long-time sufferer of cyber bullying…eventually finding it all too much to bare.

I was more than a little concerned. I felt sick. 

After reaching out to Sam, both publicly and privately, I went to bed with a heavy heart.

When will this bullshit end?

I replayed Sam’s Tweet in my head. “Broken”. I know the feeling.

In fact I myself was upset only the night before after stumbling across some particularly cruel comments written about me on the Daily Mail.

For those who believe I might be crying wolf, allow me to give you just a small insight to the kinds of comments and messages I receive on a daily basis:

On an article about me being clucky, featuring a photo of me cuddling one of my friend’s new born babies: “Thank God no one is desperate enough to have a baby with her. And I’m thinking solely of the welfare of the child.”

On an article about me spending time with a male friend, who also happened to be on a reality TV show: “She is a cum-guzzling attention seeking degenerate.”

Sent to my blog message inbox: “You should probably go top yourself now. You’re going to die alone anyway. You do my fucking head in, I can’t stand you. Please shut up.”

And finally, one of my favourites, left on an Instagram photo of me and my ex-boyfriend enjoying a road trip: “I hope you both crash the car and die.”

Now I’m almost used to this kind of dribble. 3 years on from Big Brother and I’d like to think that I’d grown thicker skin…or developed some kind of invisible protective barrier. 

I’d like to think that…

But what really hurts, what really makes these kinds of comments penetrate through that barrier and infiltrate your brain, poisoning your self-confidence are those comments that play on your self-doubt. The ones that touch on something you already think or worry about, deep down inside. Those insecurities that you have because fuck, you’re only human.

They are the ones that are stick, the ones that make your heart hurt. The ones that put a lump in your throat that just won’t budge. The ones that make you feel like you just want to stay home, under the covers where it’s safe and you can’t accidentally “offend” anyone.

“Maybe I WILL end up alone? Maybe I don’t deserve to be loved?”

“Maybe I SHOULD just give up? Go back to a desk job, stop chasing my dreams, stop being a fucking idiot.”

And then you stop yourself and try to remember that these are faceless trolls, these are people who don’t know you personally (although they may think they do).

These comments come from cowards….bitter little people sitting behind their computer screens. Sometimes they don’t realise the power their words can have, other times they know full went and want to hurt you anyway.

So you try to remember this… but unfortunately the damage has been done. 

You’ve read the words, you’ve felt the hurt. Those irrational insecurities and the crippling self-doubt have already started to bubble and fester away in your brain- replaying on a loop, keeping you awake at night. 

I guarantee there will be people reading this now and thinking “Oh come on! You’re not even a celebrity? Why are you still talking?” or the classic: “You knew what you were signing up for! What did you expect?”

My answer to those people is that I wish this were only a problem for “celebrities” or people in the public eye. 

Unfortunately however I’m talking about the universal issue of online trolling…. the “bullying” of 2016. 

Nobody is exempt and this shit has GOT to stop.

Whether you’re Tweeting Taylor Swift or Jess from school…your words matter.

They might not mean anything to you, you might think you’re “just joking” or that the person you’re sending all this online hate to won’t even notice but I’m telling you- they will and your words are damaging. The people you are directing these awful comments at are human beings. 

It is not okay.

Now, this might seem like a really simple concept but clearly it’s not getting through to the masses:

If you wouldn’t say it to your parents…if you wouldn’t say it to your sibling or your partner…what on earth makes you think it’s okay to say it to a complete stranger? To somebody who goes to your school or who works in the next cubicle?

How would you feel if your little sister was the one crying herself to sleep?

How would you cope with losing a loved one due to online tormenting?

Enough is enough. 

This world is already such a troubling and scary place.

Let’s not add to the darkness.  

Evolution may have gotten a little too into the detailing on the Port Jackson shark. It’s a fish, not a Baroque cathedral, okay?

Happy Go Lucky.

Sundays in Summer, are radio days. Literally. I have a Summer fill, with my long-time friend and mentor, Peter Luscombe.

We play whatever we feel suits the moment, and that changes from that moment to the next. Occasionally, we have what we refer to as a ‘bike crash’, where one of us changes the mood in a drastic direction by playing something that in no way flows from the last track at all. It never fails to feel good, even more so for the aural zig-zag. We’re both fans of a bit of musical palate cleansing, every now and then in a set. For instance, following Sally Seltmann’s, Cheer Me Up Thank You, with Small Faces’, Stay With Me. We play them loud in the studio, and laugh a lot at the brashness of our choices. It’s time well spent. We catch up after the show, because surprisingly, you don’t actually get to talk to each other much in the two hours side in the studio. It’s a pretty comfortable way to hang out, and one we’re both fond of. But then, Pete’s and mine has always been a music connection.

We met at the Austin, Texas music convention, South By South West. In the wee hours of the morning, while everyone talked business around us, we found a corner and talked music.

We both lived on the south side of Melbourne in those days, and we spent a lot of our night owl hours, holding up walls together. We’d always be talking music.

Pete was one of the first people to invite me to sing outside of my band, Frente. He had put together an incredible group called, The Casuals. They had a residency at The Continental on Greville St, Prahran. You could sing anything you liked, although I found out much later that the songs that I had thought would be fun and easy for everyone, were always the most difficult. I didn’t have much of a clue about what keys were easy for a guitarist, or pianist, or if a particularly lyrically pleasing tune for me, was musically pleasing to play for anyone else. I just knew what I liked. The band took on the challenge and I was none the wiser, until much later. Ha!

When my relationship with my partner of four years dissolved, I called Pete. His response cut through the my sorrow, like a string through clay, “C’mon over, I’ll play records”. By the time I arrived at his ground floor apartment, he’d compiled a collection of the saddest songs he owned. “We’re gonna go there”, he announced. It was a proper rite, and go there we did. Bonnie Raitt, Dusty Springfield, The Band. They offered us their most painful days through song and we drank them in and nodded in agreement. We didn’t talk much that night. That’s something else I love about Pete. When we’ve got nothing to talk about, we don’t talk. It’s easy and it feels just as good as if we were solving the problems of the world (another of our favourite pastimes).

It’s been two decades now, and we’ve done a lot of talking, not talking, and we’ve put it all into action, by playing together a ton. Galvanising all those great ideas, that could have just been hot air, wafting out of beer necks, into the spartan musical alloys of our talents. They are made from what we have, our limitations and our virtues. The friendship we have, the talks, the silence and the music; are all gold to me.

I was very fortunate to be the Handsome Tours photographer for Frank Warren’s PostSecret show at the Astor Theatre in mid-April.

I had only heard of the project a few weeks before the show, despite it being around for many years.

It was an experience that is ingrained in my mind, both being part of the audience and as a photographer. Confronting dilemmas arose when audience members were invited to share their secrets to the audience.

Should I take a photo? Who are these people?

The secrets they share, are they mine to capture?

Incredibly heavy, incredible highs and lows for such a tight and free-flowing talk about people’s secrets.

As I spoke to Frank before and after the show, I could feel his accommodating and comforting demeanour. I’d told him that there were moments I could not capture, simply because it was too much for me to handle. I had never been in a position like that before.

He respected me and my decision to do so. It was like the guilt was lifted right there. This must be what it’s like to post a secret to him.

I look back at these photos and feel it all again.

Scientists have discovered a new ant species from the Philippines and named it the ‘pirate ant’ because of a distinctive dark stripe across its eyes that resembles a pirate eye patch.  Cardiocondyla pirata or the pirate ant has a bizarre pigmentation pattern in its eyes.  The female castes in the colonies of these species can be recognised by the dark stripe across the eyes that resembles a pirate eye patch, which inspired the authors to choose the name of the species.  “On a collection trip to the Philippines we looked for different species of the genus Cardiocondyla that is known for its astonishing morphological and behavioural diversity of male ants,” said researcher Sabine Frohschammer from Universitat Regensburg in Germany.  “Beside already known species we also detected a until then undiscovered species in the cleavage of big stones in a shady streambed.  “Due to the darkness of the rainforest and the translucent body parts of the tiny ants they were nearly invisible. Under bright light and a magnifier we detected the nice stripe across the eyes and therefore always referred to these species as ‘the pirates’,” Frohschammer said.  The adaptive significance of the extraordinary pigmentation pattern is still a mystery to scientists.  The poor vision and the fact that these ants mate in the dark exclude one of the most obvious hypotheses that the dark patch serve as a sign for sexual differentiation and thus a cue for recognition during mating.  A possible guess about the function of this bizarre pirate-like colouration pattern is that it serves as a tool to distract and confuse the enemy.  The combination of the dark stripes together with a rather translucent body when living could leave the impression in predators that the anterior and posterior body parts are in fact two separate objects.  The study was published in the journal Zookeys.

text by Bussines-standart

Greater Glider, Greater Gliding Possum (Petauroides volans)

Chrissy Amphlett, what a legend.  One of the greatest rock frontpersons of all time. Bold, sexy, unpredictable, provocative and a string of immortal songs to her name.

I was too young to see her back in the 80’s and early 90’s heyday, but i wish i had. I know Tony Mott credits the Divinyls with kick starting his photography career - shooting the aspiring Sydney band gave him his first ever published pictures.