I'm on the road again – well, on the rails again at least. On Monday I caught the slow train from Canberra to Sydney, and today I’ve woken up in Surry Hills. I’m enjoying my days in Sydney – after all, I did live here for twelve and a half years. I’m mainly here to see the Yolngu Power exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, which finishes next week, but I’m also using the trip to see to other business.
It started badly when on the morning I left I tried to set the combination on the brand new suitcases I’d bought on sale and never used. The reset was a bit sluggish and I managed to lock the suitcase with everything inside it. Despite manually trying every one of the 999 possible combinations on the four hour train trip, I had no success.
When I arrived in Sydney I walked to a tiny down-at-heel hole in the wall called the Suitcase Repair Centre which was stacked with dilapidated suitcases of every variety. There they took five minutes to pick the lock by feeling when the tumblers clicked into place. They didn’t even charge me. I was hugely relieved – but it doesn’t make you confident about the security of your luggage.
The past and the futureThe trip is about the past and the future. This even includes the exhibition, because I used to manage two of the Indigenous cultural programs – one supporting culture and one languages – that funded the art centre in East Arnhem Land that produced the artwork in the exhibition. My Assistant Director and I were at the Garma Festival and we went to see the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Nhulunbuy. At the time it was supported by the program that funds the extensive network of Indigenous art centres in remote and regional Australia.
We looked at what they were producing and thought ‘why aren’t we funding this as well’ – so we managed to contribute some modest support from both programs. As a result, my friend Gillian Harrison, who at the time worked for Art Support Australia, managed to leverage off our contribution and wangle a far higher level of private philanthropic support for the centre. The State Manager for the regional network in the NT that delivered the cultural programs asked why we were funding the centre, since it was so successful, and I responded that the fact it was so successful was the reason we were funding it.
What had impressed us so much was the way the art centre had embraced digital media, taking an ancient but living culture into the digital age and providing expressive tools for younger artists to carry a rich culture into the future – just as ‘sand culture’ was transposed into painting on board and fabric in the 1970s. There are not a large number of multi-media works in the exhibition, but amongst the few examples is some stunning work.
‘Best of all I got to make use of the newish tram system, which has turned out to be a cracker. With just a bit of walking, I have been able to get around everywhere.’
I saw the exhibition on Tuesday and also managed to check out a couple of other exhibitions there. Best of all I got to make use of the newish tram system, which has turned out to be a cracker. With just a bit of walking, I have been able to get around everywhere. I went back to the glorious Osteria Mucca in Australia Street, Newtown to catch up with a friend over dinner and I took the trains and trams all the way. It was just as I did in Paris – public transport rules ok.
After seeing the exhibition I got my hair cut short, because I’d been too busy before I left Canberra. My barber, Marika, was a young woman who’d been in Sydney for seven years but originally came from Helsinki, where her Vietnamese parents still lived. Since I’d transited through Helsinki on Finnair last year on the way to Amsterdam, we had a long chat about visiting Scandinavia, where I am going next year.
‘It was an important period in Australian cultural history, when the rich expanse of Australia’s living cultural heritage was recognised and acknowledged and a suite of programs sought to consolidate the arts, creativity and culture at the centre of everyday life.’
While I’m here I’m going to the grand old Trades Hall building to talk about where all the Art and Working Life material from when I was ACTU Arts Officer in the 1980s should go. It’s a big issue for a fair number of us, because it was an important period in Australian cultural history, when the rich expanse of Australia’s living cultural heritage was recognised and acknowledged and a suite of programs sought to consolidate the arts, creativity and culture at the centre of everyday life. This ranged from support for the Arts Councils that had long fostered culture with regional communities to multicultural arts and community arts programs with Local Government.
Looking to a future without meThis week I’m also meeting with the Australian Society of Authors to discuss (eventually) establishing a bequest for older emerging writers. There’s quite a bit of support for young emerging writers, but as an older (slowly) emerging writer myself, I don’t see much encouragement for those people you hear about who unexpectedly get published later in life. I commented a while back that I was spending the kid’s inheritance, but then noted ‘wait, I don’t have kids’. Looking to a future without me, I’d like to leave something useful from all those years of work.
I’ve already met with the progressive think tank, the Australia Institute, to check out what’s involved in supporting a research strand into Australian culture and the cultural economy, since economic research is their stock in trade. I’m also looking at a few other possibilities. Between the various options, I hope I can do something useful for the long term.
‘Lately I’m been getting on with life and seriously enjoying reading and writing in my retreat in the sky over Canberra. The best news is that despite being old, I am happy to know that I am not (probably) close to death.’
Lately I’m been getting on with life and seriously enjoying reading and writing in my retreat in the sky over Canberra. The best news is that despite being old, I am happy to know that I am not (probably) close to death. This means any discussion of an eventual bequest is a long-term plan.
All’s well that ends well
Since I was due for a regular five year scan (groan), the doctor and I agreed I would have a battery of tests for virtually everything, to establish a health benchmark. I once said that old age is about getting tested until you finally get a bad result. I also regularly told my father that the key to a long life is over-servicing. After eleven scans and tests I am extremely relieved to find I have nothing wrong with me that can’t be laid at the door of age and heredity and that can’t be regulated with a bit of medication – well, quite a bit of medication – exercise and diet. Good news, so I’m getting on with things.
While I’ve been organising this trip I’ve also been booking a trip to Adelaide – after an absence of five and a half years – so I’ve been getting confused between the two. My old mentor and friend Wallace McKitrick (previously variously known as Peter Hicks and Joseph the Talking Cockatoo) died earlier this year and I heard there is to be a memorial ceremony for him in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
‘While I’ve been organising this trip I’ve also been booking a trip to Adelaide – after an absence of five and a half years – so I’ve been getting confused between the two.’
We worked together in the early days of both the Australian Independence Movement and community arts and many decades later reconnected when we both worked in the Indigenous cultural programs of the Australian Government. There we applied our old policy skills once again and worked closely together on Government policy and strategy to support the array of Indigenous community language centres reviving and maintaining Indigenous languages – that work was part of Australia’s first ever National Indigenous Languages Policy back in 2019.
There seems to be a lot happening, but at least it’s keeping me off the streets – well, since I went to the rally for peace in Gaza a few weeks back, maybe it’s keeping me on the streets.
© Stephen Cassidy 2025
See also
Walking with ghosts
‘Increasingly people I have known for a long time seem to be dying. In fact my generation is steadily starting to disappear. Who is replacing them? We shuffle along in a world that is unravelling, a world – that for both good and bad – our generation gave birth to. We are teetering in a strange balance between building on the achievements of the past and desperately trying to dismantle them. In many countries, the current generation is poorer than the previous one, upending generations of dreams by working class parents and migrants for a better life for their children. In this time of upheaval – both welcome and unwelcome – creativity is needed like never before’, Walking with ghosts.
‘I see the latest report on looming climate change has some pretty dire predictions – like a future of four times the length of heatwaves, up to five times as many deaths due to extreme heat, a massive drag on productivity, 1.5 million Australians at risk of coastal flooding and a potential half trillion dollar hit to property values by 20250 – and that’s just the good news’, Looking down on dire predictions.
‘From time to time my posts on ‘travelling light’ include references to restaurants we have eaten at or enjoyable places we have stayed. However, most of my regular writing about food, produce, restaurants and places we have stayed is on one of my blogs, tableland, which I describe as: ‘Food and cooking land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko’, Essen, trinken, tanzen – aber nicht rauchen.
‘In winter my mind turns to food, but since it is never turned away from art, cooking and looking manage to fill in the cooler months – or maybe that’s all months. I haven’t made hand-made pasta for a while but I have made sushi and sashimi – though only once in recent memory – as I resurrect all my food traditions. Cooking, eating and cruising around art exhibitions – that’s winter for me’, Cooking minestrone in an art gallery - pineapple fruit cake, hot soup and art on a cold day
‘Where I live a statue of French maritime hero, La Pérouse, looks out over the suburb as though to say: this, too, could have been France. For a period it seemed everyone who went to school in Australia studied French. Perhaps it was a belated attempt to acknowledge how much better everything would have been if the French had got here first. As I like to say whenever I’m in France, ‘j’ai étudié le Français pendant six ans à l’école’ and I would like to have had more opportunity to use that knowledge', Speaking in tongues.