Blog Archives
City dreaming – an interview with Badaude
‘It seemed to be a hybrid of London and New York.’
That was Joanna Walsh’s first impression of Melbourne upon her arrival. Walsh, aka Badaude, is a writer and illustrator of graphic fiction and non-fiction. The Friday just past she was one of MWF’s Artists in Residence. Over three hours in the Atrium, with her progress projected on the big screen, she began creating a new work specifically about Melbourne and her experiences here.
Badaude’s Melbourne piece is unfinished, but you can click these pictures for a closer look at some of her other work.
‘Everyone knew this was my first time being here,’ she says. ‘Both people I’ve left behind in Europe and people I met when I got to Melbourne. They were all really anxious that I should give them my impressions of Melbourne right away, especially what I found different and what I found the same in contrast to where I’d lived in Europe. So I spent my first day walking around Melbourne full of anxiety, trying to discover the differences.’
It was a bit discombobulating, she says, not only because she was quite jetlagged, but because Melbourne actually seemed very familiar to those cities she already knew. ‘It seemed to me a very European city, or even a lot like New York. You have a lot of iron framed buildings. And, like the city of London and like New York, you have these big contrasts between Victorian and nineteenth century buildings and modern steel and glass buildings, all jumbled up together in the same place.’
The noise level rises steadily in the tiny and crowded MWF Green Room where we are talking. Walsh speaks louder to make sure the microphone catches everything, and it adds an unexpected but rather apt layer of tension to her story. ‘I walked around desperate to discover some real difference. I was feeling really anxious and really disappointed with myself when suddenly a bird flew down and stopped in front of me. I was very excited because this was a bird I’d never seen before. I had to go back and look it up afterwards, and I found that it was an Australian magpie. In England, they’re black and white but it’s a completely different kind of black-and-whiteness. They have formal bits of black and white rather than random blotchy bits. So I grasped on this difference with great joy and delight.’
Walsh’s work, it seems to me, conveys a quintessentially urban aesthetic, with a focus on crowded streetscapes and a unique ability to convey a sense of bustle and noise. I ask her about this, and she pauses and considers the assessment for a moment. ‘Yes, I think that’s true,’ she says. ‘Above all I’m interested in people. I’m interested in surfaces. I’m interested in surfaces as an expression of what people feel and think. Surfaces are quite helpless and we have a limited palette. For instance, I’m interested in fashion and the way we dress. We can only choose from the clothes we can afford, and that are available in our size. But within those constraints people come up with the most extraordinary combinations.’
There’s a strong focus on line as well as language in Walsh’s art, and so many of her pieces include rich segments of text filling every spare inch of space on the page. ‘They’re a bit like personal essays made with pictures as well as words,’ she explains of her larger pieces. ‘So there’s a lot of texture in it. Even when I’m just getting one point across I try to put a lot of other sub points in it. There’s a lot about structures and reflections in this piece on Melbourne. Also the way the cityscape is quite dwarfing to the human frame. Again, there’s that feeling of being overwhelmed by the experience or indeed what’s asked of you in that experience. That ties back into that idea about subjectivity, objectivity, and whether everywhere you go just reflects yourself.’
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You can find more of Badaude’s work on her website, or follow her on Twitter and Facebook. On Tuesday 28 August she’ll be featured on the Drawn to Stories panel with Bernard Caleo and Oslo Davis as part of MWF Schools’ Program.
Best Cafes for Readers
If you’re anything like the Festival team, you love a good cup of coffee. During this high-caffeine-intake phase, known as the “campaign launch”, we thought we should share some of our favourite coffee spots with our equally caffeine addicted fans.
Thousand £ Bend
361 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000
1000 £ Bend (Photo via Time Out Melbourne)
Based in an old motorcycle repair garage, Thousand £ Bend is part cafe, part gallery and part cinema. While we loath to use this cliché – this café has a decidedly vintage charm with its mismatched chairs and op-shop artefacts.
The League of Honest Coffee
8 Exploration Lane, Melbourne, VIC, 3000 (entrance on Little Lonsdale Street)
The League of Honest Coffee (Photo credit Shaun Lee via Meld Magazine)
The large square tables at The League make this spot great for groups wishing to partake in some intense discussions (read: festival program meetings). On the other hand, if you’re after a bit of privacy to finish the last few pages of your book, the cosy corner tables are an equally good option. Their coffee, which was included in The Age’s Coffee Army Top 25 Melbourne Cafes, is served in handleless mugs (or more accurately, mini bowls) .
The Moat
176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000 (The Wheeler Centre basement)
The Moat (Photo via Time Out Melbourne)
Our next-door neighbours, The Moat offers festival staff a little patch of green grass to rest on after a hard day in the office. The Moat also plays host to the odd Wheeler Centre event and literary do. Bookish types are definitely welcome.
The Journal
253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, VIC , 3000
The Journal (Photo via Time Out Melbourne)
Located in the same building as CAE and the Melbourne City Library, The Journal is a good option for students and Flinders Lane lovers. Their hole-in-the-wall canteen makes getting a mid-library session snack easy. As an added bonus, if you have a Melbourne City Library account you can access their free Wi-Fi over lunch.
Manchester Press
8 Rankins Lane, Melbourne, VIC, 3000 (off Little Bourke Street)
Manchester Press (Photo via Time Out Melbourne)
There’s normally a little wait at Manchester Press, the busy café tucked into a laneway off Little Bourke Street. After you’ve had your name written with chalk on the entrance wall’s bricks you’re free to enjoy your book until you’re directed to a free seat – normally at one of the large communal tables. Truth be told, we’re just amused by their latte art which can be anything from pirates to bunnies.
Reading Melbourne
I’ve been home now for a few days. After spending some weeks prodigally gadding about with other cities, I’ve needed some help against my post-holiday blues. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always lived in Melbourne, and it has my love for now and ever. But its welcoming embrace has been winter-chilly, its kissing cheek cold, and I have needed a bit of encouragement to fall back in love with it.
Luckily, Melbourne has no shortage of storytellers to assist with this reunion. In particular, there have recently been a few future-Melbourne books, extrapolating on existing geography and concerns to imagine a city strange and yet familiar. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Meg Mundell, who was born in New Zealand but has lived in Melbourne for over a decade. Meg is the author of Black Glass, which envisions a near-future Melbourne (although AFL is still in evidence as the favourite sport, characters remember Cate Blanchett as an actress of yore).
I read Black Glass a few months ago, but it popped up in my head again and again on my travels. A common topic in travellers’ conversations is politics; I did some patient explaining about the 2010 leadership spill to New Yorkers in dive bars, and I saw the church in Iceland that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi disliked enough to suggest it should be bulldozed. Among all this talk of politicians, I couldn’t help but recall the government that Meg predicts for us in her novel. People who don’t have identity documentation, including children like Black Glass protagonists Tally and Grace, are unable to work legally, so they are forced into dangerous work on society’s fringes.
Not only is the government inhumanely blind to these people, but it also operates much like a corporation with a lot to lose. One character, Luella, a government official, trades newsworthy tidbits for control over how new policies will be represented by her reporter allies. When I asked Meg what Luella’s government wanted, she said: ‘To be re-elected’. This comment brought to mind not something from our possible future, but something fixed in our history: last year’s national election, in which Labor’s pre-election performance was criticised for its hollow tactics. But it’s not all doom and gloom in Black Glass. Lost as they are, Tally and Grace meet some people who help them along the way.
And it’s this idea of support and friendship for marginalised — indeed, homeless — people that first sparked the idea for Glenda 
Millard’s A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, a young adult book that has been shortlisted for and won many awards. Young Skip runs away from school only to find himself in a city suddenly besieged by war. He befriends a homeless man named Billy, and an even younger boy called Max. Together they help each other to survive the onset of planes, soldiers and isolation.
Though A Small Free Kiss in the Dark is set in a city that is never named, it contains hints that a Melburnian would easily take. I was moved by the little band’s pursuit of refuge through underground train passages, in a state library and in a fun fair that I had no trouble imagining as an abandoned Luna Park.
In non-fiction Melbourne reads, I’m looking forward to Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne, due out in August.
What are your favourite Melbourne books?
MWF 2010 authors on… Melbourne
If Sydney is the loud good looking kid in class who everyone gravitates towards but who you eventually discover has ADD and an eating disorder, Melbourne is the quieter, more measured kid who you don’t really like at the beginning of term but who is interested in the same things that you’re interested in, and whose parents own a really kickarse record collection.
A city that still strikes me, a lifelong Sydneysider, as unaccountably foreign and exotic. Every time I hear a tram bell I close my eyes and brace for impact.
I see myself living in Melbourne. Vividly. I do, no doubt, in a parallel universe. It took me too long to get there for the first time, but when I did the city was like certain people you have just met but seem to know already in some special, intuitive way. As if you’d dreamed them. I’d already discovered the landscapes of Clarice Beckett by then, so I had dreamed Melbourne.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Good times and hot toddies
Three's a litcrowd.
I took a break after Textual Fantasies to have a drink at Madame Brussels with a little crowd of MWF guests and supporters. Above, Angela Meyer, Fiona Wright, poet and publisher at Giramondo Press and Josephine Rowe. Good times and hot toddies!
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 