Parties or babies?

Are we becoming a society of freewheeling, guiltless party animals, content to stave off inevitable adult maturity for as long as we can? Do we have to be married by the time we’ve hit the big 3 – 0, be burdened by a massive mortgage with a crippling interest rate, children, a full-time job, and relinquish our teenage fantasies? Playwright Tommy Murphy is asking these same questions, and channelling his inquisitiveness into a new theatre production, Saturn’s Return.

By Dom Alessio

The play revolves around a couple staring point-blank at the looming shadows of adult responsibility – babies, houses, marriage – and turning 30. It’s a production that flitters in and out of reality, as the two central characters draw out the ghosts of people from their past and travel to different locales and periods of time, trying to decide whether maturity is more fulfilling than adolescent freedom.

The impetus for their fantastical investigation is motivated by the female lead’s fertility anxiety, and the questions she’s asking herself about whether she should have a baby now, and whether she should have it with her partner. And if you’re wondering why she doesn’t have a name, that’s because she doesn’t have one… yet. “It’s just this thing,” Murphy sighs. “I always sort of stress over it, but it feels like you don’t really know the characters until you find a name that really sticks, so her name changes almost daily at the moment.”

Murphy first wrote a draft of the play where the characters were turning 40, rather than 30. “I realised no, there is something very particular about facing 30 and something very particular about it right now, and so it was that end of a prolonged adolescence and responsibility knocking that I wanted to write about. And hopefully also to write in a voice that I have quite a bit of authority on, being, you know, my age,” he adds with a laugh.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008

Saturn’s Return plays as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2LOUD program at Wharf 2, Walsh Bay from August 15, 2008. For more information, check out www.sydneytheatre.com.au.

Walking on thin ice

Everywhere you look you are slapped in the face with beauty. Your senses are electrified in one synchronised motion. Colours look brighter; touch is heightened. It’s warm and comforting. You remember the intensity of this by the way it feels, not by the way it happens. One smoking glass pipe holds the key to it all – methamphetamine, better known as “ice”, so called because in shards it is crystal clear.

By Erin Bell

“It hits you instantly where your heart beats straight away,” says 19-year-old Bruce.* “You are really alert and talkative and you just want more and more. At times it can completely take you over and you can end up in a place where you have this very skewered sense of reality. You know what you’re doing but you don’t consider the consequences because you’re so off your face.”

Bruce experimented with ice before it cornered the mainstream market and he has been a recreational user ever since. “I discovered ice under really random circumstances. One day I skipped school with a friend and went to her brother’s house. He was an ice addict. He offered it to us and we tried it. Ice was something I had wanted to try for a long time, and I was really excited about it,” he admits. “I started using ice when it wasn’t a widely publicised drug. Had I known more about it, I never would have tried it.”

At $50 a hit, the effects last him all night. And, given its 80 percent potency compared to speed’s 20 percent, it is known to inflict users with an intense charge that lasts up to 16 hours. The substance can be swallowed, snorted, injected intravenously, anally inserted or smoked through a pipe. Bruce prefers to do the latter before he goes out clubbing, taking it with a cocktail of coke and ecstasy because he doesn’t like taking ice on its own.

But ‘Ice Addict’ is an ugly term that Bruce doesn’t want to be labelled by. After all, he has come from a normal middle class background. He grew up in the southwest Sydney suburb of Casula, lived a typical daily existence, attended government schools and avoided the popularity game. He now works full-time in sales.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008. It also features interviews with two nurses who work in hospitals in Sydney’s west.

*Names have been changed to protect their identities.

Image by Marie Sinclair

The Block, Redfern

Photographer Dean Sewell’s job – his passion – is to crawl into the sorts of marginalised places we see each night on the news, to bypass the standard mainstream schlock and get the real story.

Interview by James Ellis

He moved to Russia in 1996 to cover the Chechen crisis when the rest of us were nestled at home enjoying Seinfeld in its prime, photographed battle-scarred East Timor in 1999, and faced up to the desolation left by the Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia in 2004. Life-altering experiences, sure, but neither the bloodied earth of Russia or East Timor, or the broken lives of Aceh are as personal to Sewell as the passion he has for The Block in Redfern. We caught up with Dean Sewell to chat about The Block, his photos, and what he sets out to achieve when he picks up his camera. [Read more]

Arthouse Superheroes

All eyes will be on The Dark Knight when it hits the cinema screens this year – but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. After Heath Ledger tragically passed away in January, attention soon turned to what was one of his very last roles: the Joker. It was in director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the edgy sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, which was a highly successful attempt to reboot one of Hollywood’s biggest film franchises. Shortly before his death, Ledger revealed he had struggled with the role of the sociopathic mass-murderering clown. While he called it “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have playing a character,” it also utterly exhausted him.

By Angus Paterson

Christopher Nolan says of Ledger: “Having seen the movie myself in such heightened and tragic circumstances… What I found in watching the movie is that you’re not looking at the actor, you’re not looking at the friend, you’re not looking at the colleague. You’re looking at the Joker.
He inhabits this character, and it’s an extraordinary icon, so it’s easy to enjoy it on that level, just as a great piece of acting.” [Read more]

The second coming of Cut Copy

Along with just a small handful of bands who’ve been most successful in bringing rock together with dance music, Australia’s Cut Copy are your quintessential indie/electro band. But don’t mistake that for saying they’re your ‘average’ indie/electro band. Instead, they’ve been responsible for creating the blueprint everyone else has tried to follow. It’s been a while between drinks, but in 2008 the ‘Cutters’ are back with a national tour to show the wannabes how it’s done.

By Angus Paterson

“We’re actually in Texas at the moment,” Tim Hoey says down the phone line. Hoey plays guitar with Cut Copy, and was largely responsible for bringing such an authentic indie rock sound to the group when he hooked up with vocalist, dance music producer and founding member Dan Whitford in Melbourne back in 2003 (drummer Mitchell Scott joined shortly after). But it’s where Hoey is located that throws me off just a little as we begin our conversation, because at the time of speaking, Cut Copy’s sophomore album In Ghost Colours is on the cusp of its Australian release. You’d expect that they’d be locked and loaded back home for local promotional duties. Not so. But this demonstrates just how international the band’s appeal is. [Read more]