You’ll recall, of course, I’ve been learning Swedish on a Tuesday night for the last few months? It’s been great fun and has become a regular and much-anticipated part of my week. Well anyway, we had the week off, due to some other previous commitments by our lecturer. And so when my friend Kate called today to ask if I’d like to attend the opening of a new exhibition at the Damien Minton Gallery, I said yes straight away.
It was an exhibition I’d really wanted to see, featuring a range of artists (both indigenous and non-indigenous) largely around the theme of Aboriginal diggers (it’s Anzac Day on Friday), and in support of planned memorial at Redfern. The exhibition features well-known artists including Clinton Nairn, Euan McLeod, Reg Mombassa and many others, as well as emerging artists. If you can attend, I’d recommend the exhibition to you, as the works are both meaningful and well-executed.
Anyway, it just so happens one of the guys I’m learning Swedish with, Mark Hetherington, is featured in the exhibition. We had a great chat about art and Swedish. And then I saw a woman I used to work with, and a number of people who regularly visit my workplace. And then Damien Minton told me a close colleague of mine had opened his last exhibition there.
So all of a sudden, my life was flashing before my eyes with a number of different elements all combining in a series of conversations An interesting coincidence, I thought. Or maybe as Tom says, it’s just because I’m “inner-city meedja person“?
In other news, I went to the opening last night of the new Australian film, Cactus. It’s okay, I thought. Having spent a lot of my adult life living west of the Great Dividing Range, I found myself sometimes a little more interested in the scenery than in the storyline. Not that it’s one of those films where the scenery is more important than the plot, but it’s just that I love the great flat areas of inland NSW.
As for the plot? It’s about a bloke who kidnaps another in exchange for $20,000 to support his wife’s medical condition, and how he and the bloke bond over the course of a seemingly endless road trip to Broken Hill.
I agree with the comment made by Andrew Mercado on 702 ABC Sydney today that, like many Australian films lately, the script was a little underdone and could have been done with a few more years in the script-development stage. Still, good on ’em for having the guts and the enthusiasm to make a feature film in Australia.
Afterwards, we moved on for the after-party at one of my favourite places in Sydney, Opera Bar.