A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.
Then on the last day we all celebrated Meg’s birthday and a song was made to mark the day.
But before we bid you adieu for now, we hope you enjoy this short film about our time here. Until next time, signing off, The Artist as Family.
The lady behind the counter of the kiosk at Newcastle Main Beach told us that the local council asked them not to sell any drinks in glass as they are likely to end up smashed and injuring someone. So instead they only sell plastic bottles that get left on the sand or placed into one of the many bins that go straight to landfill sites without being sorted. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Today as we navigated the beaches and streets, we were very impressed at how many water bubblers we came across – a fantastic council initiative to encourage people to rehydrate without having to pay money for a disposable bottle.
Around the corner from that café is a laundromat we took our washing to this morning. Outside it are some planter boxes in which the owners have planted vegetables and herbs. “Why have flowers when we can grow vegetables?” They asked us. “Why don’t more people grow their own food?” We wondered back.
We found other food today. Though unfortunately not all of it was edible.
Mostly we just found rubbish. I guess because that’s what we were looking for.
At one point in the afternoon we found some trash that was a little out of our reach.
So we had to ask some of our feathered friends to help us.
Normally nimble Zephyr would have climbed that fence in one swift swoop and retrieved the rubbish from atop. But today Zephyr spent the day at the local primary school where he joined a class of other grade ones. School holidays have already begun in Victoria, but being the sociable kid that he is, Zephyr jumped at the chance to hang out with some peers and talk about his experience as one third of the Artist as Family. Here is some of the work he did today:
Although we’re meeting lots of people, kids have an innate knack of social warming wherever they may be. And Zephs’ brand new school was no exception. When we went to pick him up at the end of the day, we were invited over for a play at Perry’s house, one of the kids from his class.
We ate delicious cake and drank tea (Meg’s first good cuppa since we arrived)
and helped out with another art project: making Xmas tree decorations to be sold at Perry’s school’s upcoming school fair.
But not everything is always fair. Zeph declared it was most unfair that we couldn’t move to Newcastle so he could play with Perry and his other new friends every day.
Meanwhile, our own project continues to grow.
As we bobbed up and down on the sand filling our bags with plastic, we joked that those lifesavers were for the humans and we were for the ocean; for the birds, the fish, the seaweed.
We spent the majority of the day picking up junk, singing, laughing, having competitions to see who could pick up the most lollipop sticks in the shortest amount of time (five in a single minute).
We looked high.
We looked low.
We looked like happy holidaymakers when we took this photo of ourselves.
Then we took the day’s wealth of waste back to the exercise yard at the Lock-Up. Underneath our collection are two holes in the concrete, where two tall poles once stood. Legend has it that the dangerous prisoners were tethered on a short chain to one, and the slightly less so on a slightly longer chain, to the other. Society used to dump their social waste here, so it’s a fitting site for our project’s exhibition.
After we dumped our waste, some visitors came in to see what we’d been doing. One of them said that it looked like someone was camping there. Patrick made up this sign to leave nearby in case anybody tried to remove our goods, as the cleaners did at this little show a while ago.
