Table of contents for Spring 2018 in Smith Journal

This was not by choice – or at least, not by my choice. Looking to render themselves childless for a few hours a week, my parents had enrolled me in Scouts: an organisation whose knot-tying and tent-erecting lessons I would one day come to appreciate, but which at the time as I considered a distraction from playing video games. I had assumed that folding flags and reeling off the Scout Promise every Monday night was payment enough to the good lord Baden-Powell. (If anything, he owed me for my time.) But apparently there was fundraising to do – those flags don’t come cheap – and as one bean-counting Scout leader had clearly noticed, plenty of free child labour to do it. Which is how I came to spend those early…

PANICUM DECOMPOSITUM A species of grass endemic to inland Australia. Also known as native millet, it produces a mild-tasting seed that can be turned into damper when ground and baked. SEMECARPUS AUSTRALIENSIS Found in the monsoon forests of Queensland and the Northern Territory. Its seeds taste similar to the occidental cashew, though its sap can be irritating to the skin. BILLARDIERA SCANDENS Commonly known as the apple berry, for its taste. Flowers from September to January, when the summer flush produces oblong green berries covered in fine hairs. THEMEDA TRIANDRA Also known as kangaroo grass, it is found in every Australian state and territory. Seeds can be ground into flour. Indigenous Australians used the plant’s stems to craft fishing nets. MICROSERIS LANCEOLATA The edible tuber of a dandelion-like herb, also…

IT’S A FREEZING, HORIZONTALLY RAINY AFTERNOON WHEN I VISIT GARAGE PROJECT’S WILD WORKSHOP IN DOWNTOWN WELLINGTON. I EYE OTHER PEOPLE’S WARM, WATERPROOF JACKETS AS I MAKE MY WAY THROUGH THE CITY STREETS. IT SEEMS EVERYONE IS PREPARED APART FROM ME. “Nice day to wear a down jacket,”the receptionist says.“I know,” I say. “I think it’s ruined.”“Throw it in the dryer with a tennis ball,”she advises.“A ball? Why a ball?”“It fluffs it up again, somehow.”A man sitting behind her looks up.“Oh, I thought you said ‘bong’.”“Yeah, throw it in the dryer with a bong,”she says. “That’ll sort it out.” The thing is, that’s actually the kind of seemingly nonsensical advice one might expect around here. Over the past seven years, Garage Project has built a name for itself by being experimental,…

THE SECRET PORTALS LURK EVERYWHERE, IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK. A freight train rattling along the tracks at 3am. A plane parked across the tarmac with its doors flung open. A ship bobbing on a dock, destined for who knows where. Modes of transport invite visions of adventure: the promise of something different; the opportunity of somewhere better; the thrill of latching on to a ride you shouldn’t be on… but then again maybe should. Welcome to the mindset of the stowaway. “It’s not for everyone,” admits Brave Dave (not his real name), a British adventurer who posts videos of his freight train-hopping escapades on YouTube. “But for those who don’t mind getting out of their comfort zone, sneaking away on something without knowing what’s ahead is a great…

ESCOLAR IS A SPECIES OF DEEPWATER FISH THAT IS SOMETIMES REFERRED TO AS ‘THE LAXATIVE OF THE SEA’. Its flesh contains an oily compound that can cause problems in the human digestive system. The medical term for the ailment is keriorrhea, which in Greek means “flow of wax”. Violent diarrhoea is the trademark symptom. Even the most ardent seafood lover would probably agree that this trait should disqualify escolar from a healthy diet. But the fish is consumed more regularly than one might think. In 2013, the non-profit ocean protection group Oceana published a study that showed escolar was unwittingly being bought and sold across the U.S. The organisation came to the conclusion by DNA testing 1,215 pieces of seafood from restaurants and retailers, and found that 84 per cent…

CELEBRITIES AND MODELS WERE IRVING PENN’S BREAD AND BUTTER. Between 1943, the year of his first Vogue cover, and 2009, when he passed away, everyone from Duke Ellington to Kate Moss would pose before his camera. Seen by millions, these glamorous shoots count among the New Jersey-born photographer’s best known works. But for a brief stint in the 1950s, Penn turned his lens on some altogether more down-to-earth subjects, and created his most personally fulfilling series in the process. Titled Small Trades, the series features over 200 portraits of ‘ordinary’ people in their work uniforms, set against Penn’s signature plain backdrop. Inspired by Les Petits Métiers, a work by photographer Eugène Atget that focused on workers on the streets of Paris, Penn set out to capture the cross-section of tradespeople…

ON PAPER, IT SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD DEAL: MORE PLEASURE, LESS PAIN. That’s the simple and appealing proposition underpinning Epicureanism, the philosophy established by a guy named Epicurus who lived from 341 B.C.E. until he succumbed (presumably quite painfully) to kidney stones in 270. Before his demise, Epicurus spruiked this philosophical bargain throughout Athens, where it competed with the other heavyweights of ancient thinking, Platonism and Stoicism. Since then, though, the Epicurean brand has been dragged through some (very nice-tasting) mud. Today the school of thought is commonly associated with the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and sensuous indulgences in good food and wine. Epicurus’ original ideas are more nuanced than all that, encouraging people to curb rather than sate their desires. Still, the basic principle of less pain and more…

“IS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE ME?” I’ve been hearing those words in response to things I’ve written – books, TV shows, sketches – for 35 years. I’m aware that my job is supposed to be making stuff up, but as we know, when it comes to occurrences big and small, real life trumps the invented every time. I have written thousands of words crafted to sound like something my mother would say, yet not a month goes by where someone doesn’t remind me of the time, 26 years ago, that I quoted her actual mantra, “Not with the good scissors!” Raymond Carver warned writers against using too much of their own lives in their work. “A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best,” he said, though by all…

BORN: December 21, 1949, Yako, French Upper Volta DIED: October 15, 1987, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Joseph and Marguerite Sankara had hoped their son Thomas would become a priest. He was smart, disciplined and compassionate, his teachers praised his eagerness to learn, and the local Catholic clerics commended his regular church attendance. Happily for all, a a life of prayer, proselytising and abstinence looked in the offing. But Sankara had a higher calling than the seminary. It was the 1960s, and the Republic of Upper Volta’s autonomy was over before it had begun. Just as France relinquished control of the West African nation, a native colonial administrator named Maurice Yaméogo grafted himself into a one-party dictatorship. What followed is a tale as old as postcolonial time: while Yaméogo busied himself holidaying,…

THERE’S A SCENE AT THE BEGINNING OF MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III WHERE TOM CRUISE’S CHARACTER, ETHAN HUNT, IS LOOKING THROUGH A GLASS DOOR INTO THE KITCHEN AS HIS GIRLFRIEND CHATS TO A GROUP OF FRIENDS. ONE ASKS HER WHERE THE COUPLE FIRST MET. “LAKE WANAKA,” HUNT SAYS, DESPITE BEING OUT OF EARSHOT, ASTOUNDING EVERYONE WITH HIS LIP-READING ABILITY. “No, no, no, it doesn’t work that way,” Consuelo González says. “People think that if you can read lips, you can just see someone and know what they’re saying. But it’s not true; there are so many factors that go into comprehending.” The Seattle-based woman, whose hearing loss “goes right off the charts”, is an expert on these kinds of things. As one of the few professional lip readers in the world, for…

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1896, THE SECOND-BIGGEST CITY IN TEXAS WAS CRUSH, 23 KILOMETRES NORTH OF WACO. Crush had a population of perhaps 40,000 people, and most of the accoutrements of a town of its time: shops, wells, lodgings, bars, a funfair and a jail. One visitor described the place as being “fairly alive with humanity, representing every section and calling of people”. But on September 16, Crush no longer existed – just as it had not existed on September 14. In fact, Crush was conjured into being for just one day, to be the site of a train crash. The idea belonged to one William George Crush, a passenger agent for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company, formally abbreviated as the MKT, colloquially known as ‘the Katy’. By way of attracting publicity…

IF YOU’RE A WHITE AUSTRALIAN, THERE’S A CERTAIN STORY YOU’VE LIKELY BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF OUR COUNTRY, AND IT’S ALMOST ENTIRELY FALSE. The story goes something like this: somewhere around 65,000 years ago, the first modern humans arrived in Australia. They spread all over the country and split into innumerable tribes, living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where all they took from the land was what it already provided them. When white settlers arrived in 1788, they found the land essentially untouched; this was a fundamental strut of the terra nullius legal doctrine that they used to justify their dispossession of Indigenous people. If the land wasn’t being tilled, then how could anyone own it? While terra nullius as a defence of colonisation is no more, the assumptions behind…

MAKE SPACE FOR YOUR PLACE I grew up in Rosebery, a tiny mining town of less than a thousand people in the midst of what was the southern Tarkine on the remote west coast of Tasmania. A great, ancient wild land. Just up on Mount Black was one of the oldest living things on the planet: a 10,500-year-old Huon pine. One night in 1965, as we were driving on a lonely road through rainforest, a Tasmanian tiger, supposedly extinct since 1936, ran out in front of us and then disappeared back into myth. At a time when everything that I would become was being shaped, I glimpsed another world and its magic, its grace, its terror, and its infinite, indifferent tenderness. Only when I grew up did I realise how…

FOR YOUNG DOCTORS, THE STETHOSCOPE CAN BE A BADGE OF HONOUR, WORN PROUDLY AROUND THEIR NECKS FROM DAY ONE. A conduit of bodily sounds, it’s a simple instrument that symbolises something profound and reassuring: an attentive doctor who can translate the unseen into words we can digest. But what happens when our hospitals are too noisy for doctors to listen properly? How might that sonic frenzy affect a patient’s recovery? Vic McEwan wanted to understand the chaos of intensive care units. It occurred to him to start thinking about sound in hospitals musically. “Noise is irritating until we understand it properly, and can receive it in a different way,” the Australian sound artist explains. Following his ears (and artistic intuition), he ended up at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool,…

How did you come up with the idea for Shit Gardens? Brennan: James and I developed a keen eye for the eccentricities of the suburbs when we moved to Melbourne from the NSW coast. I began photographing the inexplicable gardens I’d see on my commute and uploading them to Tumblr, but it really took form when James came over for a beer and started writing ridiculous captions for them. What criteria do you use for assessing a garden’s shittiness? Hull: A truly shit garden is usually the product of someone scoring 10/10 for ingenuity, but only 2/10 for execution. We’re not interested in spaces of neglect – we prefer places that have had a lot of effort go into them. What draws you to these botanical failures? Brennan: How fully…

“WHILE MANY OF US WILL GO ON HOLIDAY HOPING TO SEE WILDLIFE, FEW CONSIDER THOSE WHOSE WORK ENSURES THERE REMAINS WILDLIFE TO SEE.” SEAN WILLMORE Former Ranger and Founder of The Thin Green Line Foundation I’d been working as a wildlife ranger in Australia for years when I attended an international ranger conference and got a severe reality check. A bunch of us were sitting around a fire, sharing beers and trading tales, when one ranger from Malawi pulled back his hair and showed a machete wound he’d received at the hands of a poacher. Then a guy from the Congo rolled up his sleeve to reveal a bullet hole. The following day that same ranger gave a presentation that included a group photo of around 30 rangers. About four…

I COME FROM A VERY MODEST FAMILY IN FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND AND BRISBANE, AND WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, NEARLY EVERYTHING WE BOUGHT WAS FROM SECOND-HAND SHOPS. THAT’S WHERE I FIRST CAME ACROSS WHAT I CALL ‘ABORIGINALIA’: ASHTRAYS, COASTERS, TEA TOWELS AND OTHER OBJECTS WITH IMAGES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE ON THEM. As an Indigenous person who’d never seen images of Aboriginal people anywhere else, these objects really captivated me. I assumed the people on them were famous; surely having your face emblazoned on something meant you were special? I started collecting Aboriginalia when I was about six, and over time the collection grew to over 3,000 items. There’s still a part of me that looks at these objects and sees what made me fall in love with them as a…

STAR WARS TOYS Were you ever the disappointed owner of a Star Wars figurine that didn’t seem quite right? Was the head of your Han Solo too big? Your Snaggletooth more blue than red? Your Jawa’s cloak fashioned from vinyl instead of cloth? If so, good news – you could now be in the galactic credits. Back in the late 1970s, few predicted George Lucas’s space opera would become a cultural juggernaut. Even those who stood to gain from its success were reluctant to back it, including Kenner, the toy company responsible for manufacturing the film’s figurines. When the movie finally hit screens in 1977, consumer demand for all things Star Wars quickly outpaced supply. Kenner increased production, but had to skip a few quality control measures to meet its…