Land Ho! By Ferry from Tasmania to Melbourne

On this trip I was hosted by Tourism Tasmania and MONA FOMA.

I've visited Tasmania many times over the years - eight times, in fact - and yet I'd never travelled to or from the island state by sea rather than air.

It was time to fix that.

On the outward leg of my latest visit, to Launceston for the MONA FOMA arts festival, I flew. It's a quick flight from Melbourne, just 45 minutes in the air, but subject to all the usual hassles of reaching the airport, being tested for explosives for the 4,357th time at security, and being squeezed into cattle-truck conditions on the plane itself.

On the way back, however, I was boarding this entirely different vessel - Spirit of Tasmania I, one of a duo of big car ferries that sail between Devonport, Tasmania and Melbourne, Victoria each night:

Entering via the rear loading area of the ship, foot passengers head up escalators to Deck 7:

As you can see from the sign, this is the social hub of the vessel, with most of the dining and entertainment options, though there additional bars and kids' areas on Decks 9 and 10. On Deck 7 there's a reading room (oddly without books), a bar, two cinema screens, a gaming lounge, tourist info, a shop with souvenirs and sandwiches, and a restaurant which serves a fairly unexciting buffet meal:

Heading upward via the blue lift (there are also colour-coded stairwells to aid orientation), I walked all the way toward the bow to find my cabin:

Most of the sleeping accommodation is on Deck 8. There's a variety of options, including reclining chairs, berths in shared cabins along the lines of a hostel dorm, and private cabins for two to four people. A lot of family groups use the Spirit, taking their cars with them, so these multi-person cabins are popular.

(As an aside, a couple of interstate travellers I met in Launceston pointed out another advantage of travelling to Tasmania with your own car - you can load it up with great Tassie food and cases of local wine! Try doing that on a Boeing 737.)

I, however, had scored the poshest option, a Deluxe Cabin. Located right at the front of Deck 8, on the starboard corner, it was basically a hotel room with queen-size bed, chairs, TV, bar fridge and bathroom. Very comfortable indeed:

After dropping my backpack in my cabin I strolled around the ship, stepping out to have a look at Bass Strait after we left Tasmania:

After dinner I turned in and had a reasonably good sleep. Bass Strait is notorious for its unpredictably rough waters, but luckily this was a calm night. Once or twice I was woken by a loud clanging noise, which I suspect was a high wave breaking against the bow, but otherwise it was peaceful, though always with a slight sense of swaying movement.

The only problem about the crossing is the ungodly hour it arrives at Port Melbourne: 6am. I set my alarm for 5am so I could have a shower and repack my backpack. Then I headed up to Deck 10 to avail myself of the services of the barista at work there, then took my coffee outside Deck 8 to see the view:

Utterly beautiful. And with the terminus of the number 109 tram just 400 metres away, I was soon offboard and on my way home to Melbourne's city centre. A great experience, with vastly more comfort and character than an equivalent flight.

For more information and to make bookings, visit the Spirit of Tasmania website.

Review: Basquiat/Haring, Melbourne, Australia

I was hosted to this exhibition by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Image courtesy of the NGV

Melbourne's premier art gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, has had some interesting exhibition mash-ups in recent years. From Warhol & Weiwei to Escher & Nendo, the NGV's curators have had fun contrasting different styles, techniques and eras.

Their latest big two-for-one exhibition, Basquiat/Haring: Crossing Lines is less about contrasting origins, since Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were friends and both arose from the street art scene of 1980s New York.

Image courtesy of the NGV

Their artistic styles, however, couldn't be more different. Basquiat was best known for his "primitivist" works, with raw lines and colours, often depicting black figures and painted on planks, doors, or canvas stretched across poles.

Haring's art ran more to tight cartoon-like frames featuring humanoid figures, interacting with vibrant backgrounds that commented on issues in the world around them.

Image courtesy of the NGV

The exhibition is roughly chronological - the visitor enters through a faux-alley on which is projected film of Haring being arrested in the NYC subway after drawing on a blank advertising space, then rolls through the 1980s as both artists grow in stature, style and technique.

Image courtesy of the NGV

Other than a darkened room filled with Day-Glo works once exhibited at a New York gallery, there's not much additional tinkering with the exhibition space - and that's all to the good. The artists' work is strong enough to speak for itself, and the contrasts and juxtapositions as you glance around the rooms are stimulating.

It's perhaps Haring's work that is easiest to relate to in 2020, because (as the NGV's wall text points out), it seems a precursor to the emojis we're so familiar with now.

Image courtesy of the NGV

I was fascinated by a mock Egyptian sarcophagus on which Haring had drawn dozens of figures - as the text points out, hieroglyphs attracted him in their ability to summarise an object in the minimum of lines.

Having said that, Basquiat's work has the edge in my eyes. I love its bold colours, its raw lines, the feeling of power shrouded in mystery that's exuded by the crowned figures he created. I could look at his larger works for hours, puzzling them out.

Neither artist is still with us - Basquiat died in 1988, Haring in 1990 - but their work lives boldly on.

Basquiat/Haring: Crossing Lines continues to 13 April 2020, at NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Australia. Tickets $30 for adults, $25 concession. Make bookings here.

Street Art of Melbourne

Over the past few weeks I’ve been undertaking my first Lonely Planet research gig for a few years - updating sections of the Pocket Melbourne guide.

It’s an interesting experience updating a travel guide to your own city. In previous years I’ve updated overseas locations for LP, so typically I’d do several weeks of intensive research in that country, followed by several weeks of intensive data entry at home.

Because I’m doing this particular job from my own home, I can spread out the work and intersperse research days with data entry days. The results of my research will appear in the book, of course, but over the course of my walking I’ve noticed a lot of interesting street art as I’ve wandered through the inner-city streets.

Melbourne is famous for its colourful murals and other informal open-air art, so I thought I’d share some of what I saw here...

Day 1: Fitzroy and Collingwood

 

 

 

Day 2: East Melbourne and Richmond

 

 

 

Day 3: South Yarra, Prahran and Windsor

 

... and a side-trip to East Brunswick:

... and a bonus entry from Footscray (Go the ’Scray!):

Melbourne really is a city of murals. Keep an eye on its unassuming alleyway walls when you visit!

Review: KAWS, Melbourne, Australia

I was hosted to this exhibition by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Last weekend I had a look through the NGV's current big exhibition, KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness.

There's no avoiding it as you step within the gallery, as a huge new commissioned work by the artist (see image, right) stands in the middle of the central courtyard.

It's titled Gone, and depicts a figure with crossed-out eyes and a skull-and-crossbones head carrying a deceased BFF, one of the artist's repeated figures.

BFF also has crossed-out eyes, and a furry version of the skull-and-crossbones.

Now get this: Xs on the eyes in cartooning has always meant death. Characters depicted this way are dead. If they are mobile, they are the walking dead. The skull-and-crossbones motif seems to underline this.

So why does no-one mention it? On the NGV's website the commentary says "Through his works KAWS celebrates generosity, support for others and the deep need we have for companionship." And nowhere on the captioning in the exhibition does it mention death.

But they seem dead. They might be companions, but dead ones, at least emotionally if not physically. Narrelle and I walked around the exhibition, feeling that KAWS was really trying to say something nihilistic, pointing out the meaninglessness of existence... because we all end up dead.

The figures in this exhibition are colourful, bright, intriguing and subversive of pop culture... but at the same time, as Holly said to Lister in Red Dwarf: "He's dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave."

OK, now I've got that out of my system, what is the exhibition like if we acknowledge its macabre overtones?

Interesting stuff, especially the work from the early days when KAWS would hijack advertising posters and paint his cartoonish death masks over them. This is where the "We're all gonna die" visual cue really resonates, juxtaposed with the artificial vibrancy of the fit, alert figures found in ads.

Further on, we see KAWS' trademark adoption and reinvention of popular cartoon characters, such as Snoopy and The Simpsons - with his version seen here swapping heads because, I guess, they're dead.

There's a room of incredibly vibrant abstract paintings too, their vividness attained by applying multiple coats of paint. And at the end is a room full of big figures - classic KAWS creations, cartoon giants with their eyes crossed out, some with exposed inner organs.

To be honest, this later part of the exhibition didn't move me as much as the earlier work which interacted with real-world posters.

I can see the figures might hint at our need for companionship seeing we're all going to die, and have something to say about isolation and loneliness. But mostly I was spooked by those dead, dead eyes.

KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness continues to 13 April 2020, at NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Australia. Tickets $20 for adults, $17 concession. Make bookings here.

Lola Montez: Un-Victorian in Victoria (Part 2)

Lola Montez and Henry Seekamp,
depicted in Melbourne Punch in 1856.
Courtesy of State Library of Victoria

From last post: In 1855, the notorious courtesan and entertainer Lola Montez visited the Colony of Victoria, shocking many with her saucy 'Spider Dance'. Her story continues...

Moral reaction came quickly. In Melbourne, Dr John Milton, head of the City Court Mission, appointed himself as Montez’s arch-enemy.

After her first performance of the Spider Dance, he demanded a warrant be issued for her arrest, to prevent any repetition of the affront.

He was unsuccessful, perhaps due to mayor and theatre-builder John Smith being in the chair as presiding magistrate. Worthy citizens of Geelong also tried to shut her act down, without success.

Things were easier for Montez in gold mining country.

“Bendigo and Ballarat were turning into settled towns, but their goldfields still held large migratory male populations,” says historian David Goodman. “Entertainment was very welcome, so touring companies and other entertainers quickly got onto a circuit through the area.” Ever the canny self-publicist, Lola visited Ballarat miners at their diggings, and shouted them at local bars.

Her time in Ballarat included a violent incident that was reported in newspapers around the world. After a disapproving letter to the Ballarat Times described Lola as possessing “notoriety of an unenviable kind”, she laid into the newspaper’s editor, Henry Seekamp, in the bar of the United States Hotel, with a whip she’d just won in a raffle (see cartoon above).

Seekamp had been a hero of the 1854 Eureka Stockade revolt through his support for the rebel cause, and was known for his energy and temper; so he was unlikely to take the attack lightly. He replied with his own whip, and the two had to be separated by bystanders.

With highlights like these, Victorian newspapers used up plenty of newsprint on Lola. As they do now, the media loved a controversial woman for her ability to increase sales, whether they were praising or damning her. They were also happy to exaggerate existing stories about Montez, repeat unlikely rumours, and make new ones up, in an ever-expanding game of Chinese Whispers.

It was a situation that would suit her down to the ground. Lola thrived on controversy, often stoking the fires herself via letters to the editor, twisting facts to suit her public image.

She also gave the colony’s moral guardians a clear target, though they’d rarely seen the work they were complaining of, and the varied reactions of newspaper critics suggests the Spider Dance’s impropriety was very much in the eye of the beholder. But as we see today, outbreaks of moral panic have a lot to do with expressing the ego of the complainant, via the volume of his or her moral indignation.

Despite this sporadic resistance to her tour, accompanied by unsubstantiated rumours of intoxication and other unladylike behaviour, her audiences voted with their feet. They were happy to buy a ticket to be in close proximity to fame. They may also have sided with her dismissal of accepted authorities, not unlike the audiences who applauded Madonna’s critically panned West End stage debut in 2002.

Though Montez was only in the colony for a few months, she brought an air of international glamour to this remote part of the Western world. Did her success foreshadow the cultural cringe by which Australians sought validation from imported figures and culture?

No, says Goodman. “International entertainment was welcome, but ‘cultural cringe’ is anachronistic. Most of the population had only been here a couple of years, so they’re not thinking of themselves as Australian. Gold rush Melbourne is a very cosmopolitan society; more so than an English regional city like Bristol, for example.”

How significant was her visit to our developing colony? There’s no question that Lola Montez was one of the most colourful characters to visit Victoria, in the most colourful era of its history. But on the face of it, it’s hard to see her as anything more than a footnote.

Her outspoken commitment to liberal democracy was adopted for a New World audience, and her possibilities as a feminist icon are problematic. Though she was clearly a woman with a desire for an independent life, it was driven by her own demons rather than commitment to a cause.

Whatever her importance beyond the stage, Lola Montez is remembered. Even now, many Victorians recognise her name, some from history lessons at school. There’s even been a children’s book and a musical inspired by her tour. Why is she still so fascinating to the inhabitants of a post-modern era awash with celebrity scandals?

Maybe her memory lives on because, like Oscar Wilde, Lola Montez seems a contemporary figure trapped in an unforgiving earlier age. Or possibly, despite all our advances in equality between the sexes, we’re still fascinated by a woman who could break all rules of female propriety and get away with it.

Lola Montez: Un-Victorian in Victoria (Part 1)

Lola Montez. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria

In 2005 I researched an article about infamous courtesan and entertainer Lola Montez, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her tour of Victoria and other Australian colonies. As it never went online, I'd like to share it here. Enjoy!

Bendigo had never seen a night at the theatre quite like it. On the evening of 2 April 1856, residents of the thriving gold mining town had paid five shillings to see a performance of Asmodeus, or The Little Devil.

It wasn’t the play they were interested in, but its star, Lola Montez. Celebrated and condemned in the world’s media, she was a magnet for scandal and gossip.

However, she was about to be upstaged. As a thunderstorm raged outside, a bolt of lightning broke through the roof, darted toward the stage, and struck with explosive force.

Audience members screamed, actors ran wildly across the stage, and scenery smouldered in the aftermath. The Bendigo Advertiser, with a delightful sense of understatement, later described it as “a scene of real interest, not often parallelled on the stage”.

Montez remained in place throughout. After the confusion had abated, she calmed the audience and reportedly remarked that no stage effects would be required in the circumstances: “Only a little brandy”. The show went on, increasing Lola’s popularity with the punters.

Lola Montez was the original dirty dancer and bad-girl global celebrity. Although she visited Victoria before its connection to the world via telegraph, her reputation preceded her.

She was known primarily as a dancer, but not a particularly good one; so she was an early example of the celebrity who’s famous for being famous. In short, Lola Montez was the Paris Hilton of her day. Like the present-day staple of gossip mags, her fame was forever linked to sex and scandal.

She had certainly led a colourful life before her arrival here 150 years ago, in September 1855. Her 34 years had produced a biography of dishonour and outrage that would take most people a lifetime to amass.

Born Eliza Gilbert, she had grown up in India and England before eloping from a girls’ school with a young lieutenant. After a later divorce, she re-emerged as Lola Montez, an exotic performer of Spanish folk dances.

What followed was a dizzying adventure surpassing the most imaginative fiction. Careering across Europe, Lola danced before the King of Prussia and the Russian Tsar, and famously horse-whipped a Berlin policeman on horseback. She befriended composer Franz Liszt and writer Alexandre Dumas, then settled in Paris until her then lover was killed in a duel.

Arriving in Munich in search of a dancing engagement, she unexpectedly entered into the greatest role of her career: mistress to the 60 year old King of Bavaria, Ludwig I. But Lola lacked the discretion required of a courtesan.

Her flamboyance, uneven temper and young male entourage earned the hatred of the Bavarian population, though the king created her Countess of Landsfeld. After indirectly causing the fall of governments and the king’s abdication, and contracting a new husband who she soon abandoned, Lola left Europe for America.

This is where her fortunes finally started to turn. In a nation where acceptance was more contingent on money and fame than social standing, Lola was able to milk her sensational past without being fatally injured by it. After performing across the USA and settling in the west, she heard about Australia’s gold rush and decided to tour, visiting Sydney, Melbourne, Geelong, Adelaide and the goldfields over nine months.

Lola arrived in Melbourne to find the city still humming from the discovery of gold. With the influx of miners from all over the world, and with the Eureka Stockade rebellion a recent memory, Lola Montez may have expected a frontier society which would give her greater acceptance than she could hope to find in stratified Europe.

However, Melbourne University historian David Goodman says she just missed Melbourne’s wildest days.

“By 1855, Melbourne has settled down after the early gold rush years, when new arrivals were living in a tent city in South Melbourne. It’s a ‘miracle city’, in that it was built so quickly, but it’s also an established town familiar to someone from one of the newer English cities. It has all the trappings of civilisation: police, courts, churches and schools. It’s not a wild frontier town.”

So Lola did experience censure, focused on her notorious 'Spider Dance'. This was a faux Spanish folk dance which involved her energetically searching her skirts for an invisible spider, then stamping it to death. The local critics were hostile to luke-warm: The Argus described it as “utterly subversive of all ideas of public morality”; The Age was initially impressed, until a second reviewer decided the dance was “simply ridiculous”.

Next post: Backlash (and a horse-whipping!)

Reviews: Melbourne Fringe Festival 2019 (Part 2)

Narrelle Harris and I have seen more shows at the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Here are four new reviews...

1. Apex Predator
Reviewed by Narrelle Harris

Lucretia Mackintosh arrives on stage with her Disney princess eyes and smile and a bright red clown nose. She’s offering to do a stand-up routine for Elizabeth Davie, who's lurking fearfully behind the curtain, and takes to the task with gusto.

In fact, Lucretia turns out to be a kind of slasher revenge clown, a charming psychopath, and she deals with one unseen predatory male after another in very decisive fashion. There’s gleeful transgression in the audience participation after Lucretia mimes a decapitation, and glimpses of character motivation ("They say don’t fight back in case it makes them angry. But what if I get angry?").

Recently on Twitter, someone said the Joker should actually be a woman who was told by a man she should smile more - once too often. Elizabeth Davie’s creation feels like the prototype of that Joker.  

Apex Predator is playfully savage (or savage and playful), with some of the most horrific and blackly funny mime I’ve ever seen. The pacing between encounters can be a bit slow, but it’s wickedly funny. For anyone who has endured a creeper, a groper, or any unwanted sexual advance, it's disturbingly satisfying too.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

2. Side A
Reviewed by Tim Richards

In the late 20th century, before the arrival of CD players and MP3s, a kid’s identity was still wrapped up in tape: cassette tape. Amanda Santuccione is accompanied by a big reel-to-reel tape player, portable cassette players, and a stack of mix tapes. She uses these to intersperse tales of growing up in Geelong with snippets of music and the words of her family and friends.

It’s a warm, nostalgic trip through childhood, puberty and young adulthood accompanied by memorable tunes... until first a friend and then Amanda herself end up in abusive relationships. Music is a part of the healing process, bound up with her friendships and family bonds from start to finish.

It’s an enjoyable show, though the performer’s lines are sometimes lost to the music and the noise seeping in from the Trades Hall corridor. Audience members will find plenty to relate to in the way Amanda’s favourite music acts as the soundtrack to her life.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

3. The Kick Inside
Reviewed by Tim Richards

On stage, Kerensa Diball dons the colourful headdress of Athena; the Greek god who, as she says, was responsible for the creativity that led to the conquest of Troy via a wooden horse. Along with Helen Mirren, she’s one of the few role models for a woman who decides not to have children.

That’s what this show’s about, Diball’s decision not to have kids and her coming to terms with that. As part of that process, she does some '60s dancing in '60s gear, takes us through her history of work and travel, and responds to recordings of her partner and her mum.

It’s a good topic for a show and Diball is a likeable performer, but she needs work on her voice projection and other performance skills to give the act the snappy execution it needs. The script also feels a little slight - at 35 minutes’ actual run time it could stand fleshing out with more complex aspects of her child-free decision.

Having said that, the sequence presenting Diball as an egg-laying insect is a piece of prop-driven genius.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

4. Monster / Woman
Reviewed by Narrelle Harris

Medusa’s story is generally well known. An evil woman with snakes for hair, whose deadly look turns all to stone, fated to be decapitated by the hero Perseus.

That’s one version anyway, and not even the most original. Medusa’s mythology is full of dichotomies and contradictions about beauty/monstrosity. All of them are explored by Sabrina D’Angelo in this superb, engaging, thoughtful and funny black comedy.

The tale begins with Medusa’s severed head on a table in the afterlife. She’s naturally bemused (and a bit distressed about her lack of a body) while a prissy Afterlife Border Security officer (David McLaughlin) quizzes her about her life and death.

After some delicious snake puns as she introduces him to the individual snakes on her head, Medusa finds some old VHS tapes. These take her back through the ages as she re-learns her origin story and how she’s been reinterpreted through the centuries - almost exclusively as a way for men to frame their own interests and fetishes.

But there’s a feminist take on Medusa as well, one which happily reminded me that Luciano Garbarti’s 2008 turnabout statue of Medusa holding Perseus’ severed head exists.

D’Angelo is endlessly excellent onstage, flowing between vulnerability, comic delivery, femme fataleness and heroic poses, with splendid physicality and a marvellously expressive face. McLaughlin provides terrific support and some sly commentary on the Medusa myth as together they work through the changing symbolism.

Monster / Woman is funny, strange and wonderful. Go see it.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here] 

That's our final coverage for this year's festival. Hope you enjoyed it! Back to the regular schedule of travel-related posts next week.

Reviews: Melbourne Fringe Festival 2019 (Part 1)

The Melbourne Fringe Festival is on again, and Narrelle Harris and I have been seeing shows. Here's our first set of reviews from the 2019 program...

1. It All Sparks Joy
Reviewed by Tim Richards

As far as staging goes, It All Sparks Joy is an intriguing production. Crammed into a tiny room on the first floor of Trades Hall, its clutter of books and household objects allows just ten audience members to sit along one wall. Performer Dylan Cole stands within his character’s banked-up personal possessions, as if within a fort.

They do represent a fortification of sorts, an emotional one, which he’s vowed to break down in order to move on from divorce and related trauma in his recent past. Aiding him in this task is a pile of self-help books: the more genteel ones with “The Art of...” in their titles, the raffish newer ones with the word “F*ck”.

Flipping through them, starting with Marie Kondo’s volumes, he tries to discard items from his broken past, and fails utterly as nothing ends up in the discard pile. No matter how useless or torn the object, it has links with his history which he’s not ready or able to sunder.

In the meantime, an occasionally ringing phone hints at something so dark and traumatic that the experts’ advice becomes quite trivial. This is a moving performance, amplified by the compact venue, and a reminder that not every human hurt can be solved by the trite formulations of media-friendly gurus.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

2. Wednesday Morning 3am
Reviewed by Narrelle Harris

The tagline for this show is “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you," and that seems apt. Its likeable presenter, Doctor Thomas D Richards, begins by weaving a rich tapestry of theories of how the universe was created, adding his feeling that such a huge and sudden event probably happened on a Wednesday morning at 3am, when humans are at their most vulnerable.

That’s the show’s most coherent point, after which it clambers through aspects of pigeon taxonomy, the intersection of pigeons and background radiation,  moon landings, origami, and a strange and superfluous sequence of the Earth as a little girl and her inappropriate daddy, before winding down into a weird entropy.

The pacing is choppy though the blend of science, chaos and mysticism is engaging even when the slow pace undermines it.

It’s admittedly very Fringe, and there’s a sense of a stronger though still surreal show lurking behind the space dust. Richards has a gentle, goofy, knowledgeable charm which holds this odd act together better than you’d expect.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

3. Quite Drunk, Very Jesus-y
Reviewed by Narrelle Harris

In a world where social progressives and religious conservatives seem at irreconcilable odds, Grace de Morgan’s play takes a refreshing look at the challenges of Christian faith in modern society. In it, three friends are helping a fourth to celebrate a significant birthday. To make Agnes’ 30th just that bit more significant, it’s revealed that she’s still a virgin.

Quite Drunk, Very Jesus-y covers a lot of ground in its uninterrupted 85 minutes. With Australia's equal marriage plebiscite in the background, discussions encompass being gay and Christian, attitudes to pre-marital sex and virginity, different approaches to faith, shifting power in group dynamics, love, lies, honesty, loyalty, forgiveness, and growing up and apart from the friends of your youth.

Every character is nuanced, in turns being sympathetic and “a bag of dicks”. Their innate humanness makes them warm and funny, and the conflicts very real. I’ve had similar discussions on faith and modern society with friends and family, so the play's concerns feel immediate and credible. It approaches these topics with compassion as well as humour, so we feel engaged rather than preached at.

The performances lack a little confidence at the beginning, and need more confident projection. But the ensemble cast is excellent, and uniformly believable as adults who are now less certain of the friendships and attitudes formed in their youth group days.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

4. Sweet & Sour Dilemmas
Reviewed by Tim Richards

In the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in a Victorian country town, a chef is forming dumplings while chatting to us about his life. We can see he's doing the former, as his benchtop is projected onto the side wall of the room, with the dumplings being shaped in pace with the monologue.

Its subject is migrant life in Australia, as seen through the eyes of a recent arrival with Chinese heritage via Indonesia and Malaysia. It's complicated, but not so to his Australian customers, who see him simply as "Chinese".

Peter the chef (played by Brendan Wan) is a likeable character dropping observations on his strange new homeland one by one, and pondering whether his newborn son would fare better in Australia, where he might not fit in, or in Indonesia, where he'd have less opportunity.

Some of Wan's broader gags fall flat, and the actor's timing needs work to make the most of his material. But overall it's an enjoyable patter, with effective (and often funny) observations of Australian culture: including a curious origin story for the Westernised marvel that is sweet and sour sauce.

[Find details and buy tix for this show here]

More reviews next week. Enjoy the festival!