
The mess around: ‘Clean’
Lachlan McLeod’s absorbing documentary about trauma cleaner Sandra Pankhurst considers how traumatic experiences leave their markMarch 2009
Arts & Letters
‘Shots’ by Don Walker
Two years back I spent time with Don Walker in the manner to which we’re both accustomed: meet in a lobby, jump in a van, drive to a show, play, drive back, avoid morning duties with shaky resolve. I was intimidated, not merely by his prowess as a songwriter but by his steady gaze. Come 4 am we were talking of Iran and Farsi, tales of exploration as intoxicating as almost everything in Shots, a memoir of sorts.
The ‘shots’ from a childhood in northern New South Wales are presented with a detachment recalling Hal Porter’s tales of youth. There’s no lament for a world hurtling by, because it’s just a raised thumb on an unmarked road away. At the dinner table Don’s father tells of “a world where all walls crumble before a balanced, enquiring mind”, and it’s surely not simply a revisionist memory that equates “Newtonian cantilever physics” with barn-dance sexual politics. It’s the balanced, enquiring mind of a man ballpein-hammering at a piano in a soulful rock band from the Adelaide suburbs, his head cocking up every 36 bars to check all are present and accounted for.
As he enters university, with its lecture-dodging charlatans and the submarine presence of music constantly threatening to break the surface, our protagonist appears a man out of time, as if the experimentation of the era is mere folly. The joy in this book lies here, in the same way that a solemn description of a truck-stop coffee and soulless toasted sandwich burnt my lips without howls of hyperbole turning them into a cat’s bum. Juxtapositions abound: aerodynamics and rock ‘n’ roll, sex and loneliness, drugs and unforgiving sobriety. The coolness in recollecting the formation of a great band is no pose – the hipster is 16 bars ahead, knowing that all is transitory. As his life turns menacing and tragic, it’s this acceptance that keeps him observant in the eye of the storm.
Rock music is populated with many of the duller characters to have graced the globe, but a handful of restless romantics know that at its heart is a truss of darkness and furious light into which anger, love and desire can be flung. Don Walker does it as well as anyone, and in the absence of a tune his stories have greater weight, an ache that has me packing a bag, wanting to chance my arm at something a way up ahead.
The mess around: ‘Clean’
Lachlan McLeod’s absorbing documentary about trauma cleaner Sandra Pankhurst considers how traumatic experiences leave their markAdjust your expectations: ‘Indian Matchmaking’
While it’s refreshing compared to other reality dating shows, the second season following matchmaker Sima from Mumbai and her clients is less satisfying than the first‘Losing Face’
George Haddad’s latest novel surveys the confronting world of male interiorityLine call on Spring Creek
Development hits a roadblock in the regional town of TorquayFrank recollections
Remembering Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022)The bureaucracy of evil: ‘The Conference’
The horror of Nazi officialdom is laid bare in Matti Geschonneck’s latest film‘The Old Man’ and the CIA
Jeff Bridges faces his spycraft past in this Disney+ espionage thrillerThe dream machine: The 59th Venice Biennale
Curator Cecilia Alemani’s long overdue Biennale overwhelmingly features female artists and champions indigenous voices and other minorities‘Marlo’
Author Jay Carmichael revisits 1950s Australia where, for a young gay man, escaping from a small town to the city comes with its own complexities‘Losing Face’
George Haddad’s latest novel surveys the confronting world of male interiority‘Irma Vep’
Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film in a delicious palindromic limited series, in which a frazzled director remakes his ‘Irma Vep’ film into a TV series‘Trust’
The American novelist Hernan Diaz audits the silence of great wealth in a story of four parts presented as novel, autobiography, memoir and diaryThe mess around: ‘Clean’
Lachlan McLeod’s absorbing documentary about trauma cleaner Sandra Pankhurst considers how traumatic experiences leave their markAdjust your expectations: ‘Indian Matchmaking’
While it’s refreshing compared to other reality dating shows, the second season following matchmaker Sima from Mumbai and her clients is less satisfying than the firstWas that it: ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’
This loving portrait of the indie scene of the early 2000s will likely mean little to those who weren’t thereForecasting the future
What is humanity’s destiny in the Anthropocene era?