Me – I am always drawn back to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the sentences and their paragraphs.

Every autumn, for the several years I’ve rented a room on an elm-lined street in Carlton, I get an urge to read the novella. I want to read it sitting in my terrace courtyard in the waning sun; on a stool in the window of a busy café; on my grandmother’s old armchair in my room, looking out to the yellowing trees.

It’s an autumnal story, gentle and sad, lonely and tender, its scenes fluttering with falling leaves. It begins and ends in fall, and the narrator first meets Holly Golightly in September, on “an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it”. It barely wisps through winter and spring, and Holly “hibernates” in summer.

The narrator she calls “Fred”, after her brother, or sometimes Buster or Cookie, and who shares much with a young Capote – and something with me, too – says he doesn’t care much for springtime; autumns, rather, “seem that season of beginning”.

I’ve never thought about the book all that much, about what it means, or why I like it so. I just want to read it when the mornings are crisp.

But this year, I was drawn to it before the leaves alerted me, by the New Yorker, which carried a dismissive review of a new Broadway adaptation. The critic adores the novella, however: it is “so extraordinary a work,” he wrote, “that it incites not writerly envy but pride”.

Yes, I thought, that’s true. When it was published, Norman Mailer said Capote was “the most perfect writer” of his generation, who wrote “the best sentences, word for word, rhythm upon rhythm”. Mailer said he “would not change two words” in the book. Yes, I should read it again. Maybe its sentences will rub off on mine?

That was in early April. Normally, the leaves on my street would have begun to fall by then. One summer during the drought they fell at Christmas and we all worried it was the end for the trees. But the council installed all kinds of sprinklers and mulched around the trunks, and gradually they recovered. And this year, autumn arrived late. The hottest summer on record stretched deep into March and April: an extended, gelato-summer, my evenings still punctuated by the short walk across the park and around the corner to the ice-cream counter at Brunetti. Beneath those balmy days and mild nights the trees remained green. 

***

I do not know how many times I’ve read the book; less than ten, I’d guess. But I do remember when I first heard of it. I was in a crummy bar in Canberra, visiting an old friend, my first housemate when I moved there after university. He is several years older, a contrary character, alternately passionate and ambivalent about day-to-day life.

The bar has a sour smell, sourer every time I return. There were three of us: my friend and an old comrade of his – a socialist turned sensualist with a large tattoo of a rat on his forearm. We were drinking beer and talking about books; or rather, they were talking about books and I was listening. The socialist adored Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My friend agreed: “It’s a gorgeous story,” he said and his eyes grew moist, as they do in all the conversations with him I like best.

I thought it improbable. I’d never seen the movie – still haven’t, as a matter of fact – but I had the notion it was a swooning romance. I was suspicious of the book. Nevertheless, I bought a copy, one of those cheap, orange, Penguin classics. It contains the novella and three short stories, same as the first edition in 1958. It is pleasingly slim, enough to fit in your pocket.

The story isn’t a romance, I found out – not that sort, anyway. It’s all memory, belonging and loss, and a platonic kind of love. A decade on, Fred recalls the cycle of seasons he spent living above Holly Golightly in a New York brownstone; at first captivated, then burned and finally, warmed, by her reflected glow.

It was wartime, 1943, and young Fred had moved from the south with a fancy to be a writer. Before he’d even met her, the card above the girl’s mailbox nagged him “like a tune”:

Miss Holly Golightly

Travelling

Holly is a society girl, not a prostitute, though she understands the gossip; after all, she admits, “I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line”. Assorted unpleasant men exchange generous tips for her company; Capote described his creation as an American geisha. She’s only 19, escaping her past, but always remembering it – playing sad country songs in the fire escape while her hair dries – and then inventing herself anew.

I’m not one for recalling plots, and I know it. But even so, Breakfast at Tiffany’s surprises me every time. By the end, yet again, all I have is a shimmering sense of her, and an impression of the writer too, the outsider upstairs, sometimes writing, often listening in, wishing he were nearer.

This year, though, I noticed a few things along the way.

It’s the ’40s, sure, but Holly stumps for marriage equality. She’s settled down some by this stage, and tells Fred she loves her man just fine, but he’s not her “guy ideal”. And who is? Jawaharlal Nehru, say, or Greta Garbo: “Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”

Man o’ War was a famous thoroughbred horse.

This too: I discovered – again surely – that Fred’s birthday is 30 September, the same as mine. And Capote’s. Not only that, but it’s also the day on which everything unravels: “So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.” That’s how Fred described our birthday. It was really the three of us there, you know: Holly, Fred and me.

But most of all, I thought about Holly and the “mean reds”. Not the blues.

“No,” she tells Fred, slowly. “No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

Her only cure is to hail a cab to Tiffany’s and look in the windows. “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in the nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”

Holly yearns for a real-life place that makes her feel the way Tiffany’s does, maybe in Mexico by the sea, when her lost brother returns from the war. She went there once – they’d raise horses, and he’s good with horses. But even as she says it, Fred and Holly and me, we all know it’s an impossible dream.

***

In my street, the first heavy leaf fall came on May 1, the first day of the last month of the season: there was a cold wind and the yellow leaves fell like a storm. But then it got warm again, and once more I went for gelato. In most respects I’m an advocate for variety, but when it comes to ice cream, I’ve settled on my gelato ideal: two scoops in a waffle cone, chocolate and lemon.

This autumn Brunetti moved around the corner from Faraday Street, where it had been for nearly 30 years, and into the space on Lygon Street vacated when Borders died.

I visited the new store on a Saturday night, on a date. I had the mean reds that day, shot through with the blues: I knew well the cause. I’d been writing about climate change – the worsening disaster projections now, next decade, throughout my lifetime and beyond, together with the profound absence of either prevention or preparation. Nothing new, I know, but nothing tolerable either, when you think about it. In a recent journal article, a speculative “future history” by respected American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I read a throwaway line: “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.”

The store was alive, teeming and hollering like an old-time trading floor in a stock boom. As we entered, it became clear there were two kinds of people. Dozens of waiters strode after their errands, wearing bow ties and black waistcoats or else slim black aprons tied in a cross at the back, while all around the rest of us tottered, distracted and enraptured by the cakes, tarts, chocolates and macaroons, and the mirrors, the bonze trim, the patterned tiles and the blown-up, black and white photographs on the walls. We gaped alongside infinite desserts, we stared at the baristas on the central podium and we swept past pastries and savouries, croissants and paninis, until we stopped before a huge, tiled pizza oven.

I was agog. Sparkle-eyed. I turned to her and gestured toward all the people, sitting, talking, waiting, laughing, fattening: “Isn’t it wonderful?”

To our left there was a roped-off section commanded by a waiter in a headset. Straight ahead, the gelato, more flavours than ever before. “Maybe,” she replied slowly. “But it’s so much. It’s awful. It’s madness – it’s everything that doesn’t make sense.”

I agreed: awful. And wonderful. We slipped out of there, without gelato this time, and back into the autumn Carlton night.

***

I read the novella for a second time, writing this story, but the moment had passed. I’m done with wistfulness, for now. Everything – endless summer and falling leaves, apathy and indulgence, reds and blues, bad governments and worse; brown coal, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and humanity – it all has its season.

Read this article at the Wheeler Centre website

“Bugger it, I’m going north,” I decided. “Who knows what’ll happen?”

I cadged a lift with two bushwalkers on their way to the Grampians. There, I waited by the highway, smiling and waving at cars. Within minutes a taciturn Brazilian named Carlos, who delivers phone books for a living, stopped his small truck and drove me all the way to Adelaide’s central market. Whoosh! But it wasn’t until the next day that my brow really began to lift.

I’d been dropped at the turn-off to Port Pirie and I was standing in the dirt, head down, scribbling in my notebook: “Bobbi and Tim, maroon Mazda 323, nurse and plasterer, adult kids, Coca-Cola beanie, booze and bipolar, the golden rule tattooed on Tim’s left forearm…”, when a white van pulled up ahead.

It was Harm, a wiry fellow with a thin grey ponytail and great joy in his face. The joy is always there – I knew that straight away – but he was particularly elated right then, thrilled by my means of travel.

We enthused together. He reminisced about his wandering days after migrating from Holland, and showed me his gallery and home in the old shipwrights’ workshop in Port Germein. He made coffee and explained how, for more than two decades, he’d been growing tree seedlings and giving them to locals.

Later, I walked the town’s long jetty, one-and-a-half kilometres over the shallow Spencer Gulf, while the sun set on the Flinders Ranges behind me. I looked back and saw the once-barren port nestled in green.

From there I went north through the desert, gathering momentum, standing by the road and sitting in other people’s cars: Squizzy the resentful, racist roofer; Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, Arabunna mob on their way to a mine; Speeding Amy, the Vietnamese woman too tired to sleep; and Dave, who’d crashed into a tree and broken all his body, but found his backbone – he was moving north to make a better life.

Before long I was in the Alice, both attracted and repelled. Attracted by the rocky MacDonnell ranges and the sharp, generous people I met; repelled by welfare dependency and idyllic ex-pat cafes. Attracted by a football final with its mixed, lively crowd. Repelled by a day watching court. I was shocked by the nihilism of the drunks and the recklessness of a new government removing controls on alcohol supply. I was confused and spellbound by it all.

In Yuendumu, about 300 kilometres north-west, I volunteered at the community arts centre. I filled paint pots and took the artists cups of tea, listening all the while to the sounds of Warlpiri: the fast, rolling combinations of the consonants j, n, p and r, and the vowels a and u. I read a book by an anthropologist who’d lived in a women’s camp there. She learnt to abandon planning her days, to submit to the collective will instead. She gave up control, but gained a profound curiosity upon waking each morning.

Back in Alice, I tried my own brand of recklessness. Four days I hid at the freight terminal, ready to hop a cargo train. Four nights I trudged home, nine-parts despondent and one-part relieved – the trains either hadn’t come or lacked a place to stow away. I’d have kept trying, and might have fried like an egg on a hotplate, but for Macarena, a sparky Chilean traveller who offered to hitch with me the next morning instead. I went with Macarena.

On and on I went, north through hot springs and waterfalls, high-school visits and football games, canoeing days and speedway nights. Until, after two weekends of laksas and mangoes at Darwin’s markets, I turned around and came south.

John McDouall Stuart took five years and six attempts to cross the centre on horseback. He searched for waterholes and ached with scurvy. I hitched the Stuart Highway home from Darwin in just four days. I slaked my thirst at roadhouses and scanned the narrow ribbon of asphalt through seven different windscreens.

For Stuart, the desert brought purpose and quietude, an escape from the awkwardness and alcoholism that dogged him in colonial society. For me, it brought conversation and gratitude, and insight into the lives of people I’d never otherwise meet. Exactly 150 years apart, both of us yearned for salad.

After breakfast on a Friday, I walked to the highway near Coober Pedy. At lunchtime, a fitter-and-turner named Greg stopped for me in Port Augusta. He’d wrecked his fender – hit a dingo on the left side and a roo on the right. I said I was headed for Melbourne.

“You’re in luck,” he replied. He was from Cranbourne. He’d drop me to my door.

At 3 am we crested a hill on the Western Freeway and the big city’s lights sent shocks of surprise through my fingertips. I’d gotten into other people’s cars and put myself in Harm’s way: I was joyful. It was late, but my eyes were bright and my forehead clear.

“Who knows,” I wondered, “what will happen tomorrow?”

Read this article at The Age online, with three other great road trip yarns, from Cate Kennedy, Simon Castles and Fran Cusworth.

”I’m so excited I can’t get to sleep at night any more. I just want to go,” the 17-year-old said.

Foster-McLachlan, who has high-functioning autism, said he tends to worry too much: ”I get stressed about expectations and results a lot of the time. Sometimes I think I’m going from one stressful thing to another.”

That made his first night in the choir after his successful audition particularly nerve-racking. ”It was very scary at first,” he says. ”I was so nervous my voice wobbled and the conductor commented that I sounded like a pregnant turkey being strangled.

”But I learnt quickly and the last comment I had from him was a few months ago – he said I had too much of a cheeky grin, which was off-putting from a distance!”

The choir’s tour of Europe has been two years in the planning. For just over three weeks, 50 children – aged from 10 to 18 – will sing in several cities across Germany, Austria and England.

The schedule culminates with a performance at Canterbury Cathedral, where the group will take part in the International Children’s Choir Festival, singing with young choristers from six countries.

Choir director and conductor Andrew Wailes says he has been able to organise for the ensemble to perform in some remarkable venues – places far removed, and not just geographically, from the children’s normal base in Mitcham.

”It’s mind-blowing just to walk into some of the glorious Gothic cathedrals in Europe and know they are between 500 and 1000 years old,” he says. ”And when you go in there to sing, it’s the most inspirational setting. These spaces were designed all those years ago to make the human voice sound its best.”

Wailes says the tour party is excited and nervous – and that goes for the accompanying adults, too. Last week, he held the final briefing for parents.

”Suddenly one of the kids looked up to me with these forlorn eyes and said, ‘We’ve only got one rehearsal left!’ And I said, ‘Yes, you betcha. I’m acutely aware of that, young man’.”

The choir’s repertoire for the trip comprises 43 songs, including a Latin Mass and a few pieces in German, all learnt since the beginning of the year at twice-weekly rehearsals.

”It’s a huge amount of music for the kids to have prepared in six months, but they’ve got there. We’re ready and raring to go,” Wailes says.

”They’re going to come back different people, with a whole lot of experiences and wonderful memories to inspire them.”

Foster-McLachlan has felt restless for the past two weeks, but this time it’s out of anticipation, not anxiety. He has been daydreaming about walking in German forests, descending upon mediaeval castles and singing in thousand-year-old chapels with gilded walls.

”I could have spent my sleeplessness productively, packing my bag,” he admits, ”but instead I sit there imagining being inside the Canterbury Cathedral or how I’m going to talk with the American choirs we’ll meet.”

The year 11 student’s mother, Brenda McLachlan, says being in the choir has helped him understand the subtleties of communication and socialising in a group – scenarios that can be challenging for autistic people.

”Singing in the choir is calming and therapeutic because at times he can get quite wound up,” she says.

Wailes said the benefits of singing are clear for the young and the old.

”It’s the basic human form of relaxing that doesn’t require gym fees or expensive equipment,” he said. ”When you’re singing, that’s all you think about, you don’t worry about anything else. It’s good for the soul.”

Read this article at The Age online

BEFORE he takes portraits, photographer Martin Schoeller thoroughly researches his subjects. If they are actors, he watches their movies. If they are writers, he reads their books.

“A lot goes into each shoot,” the photographer told the Artinfo website in 2008. He brainstorms concepts, scouts locations and sources props. All of which seems curious, as each of his photographs looks much the same: a passport-style close-up, enlarged to epic proportions, with shallow depth of focus – the eyes and mouth are sharp, the tip of the nose and the lobes of the ears are not.

Close-Up, an exhibition of Schoeller’s portraits, is now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The gallery’s walls are lined with his large images, some the size of muscle-car bonnets. Almost every square inch within the frames bulge with the (mostly) famous faces they contain, from a grizzled Jack Nicholson and an alien Paris Hilton, to a waxy Christopher Walken and a crinkly Helen Mirren.

The Schoeller exhibition raises an intriguing question: is celebrity, blown up and unretouched, still just celebrity? Or does it convey something more substantial? Michael Desmond, senior curator with the gallery, admits to some initial trepidation as to how the exhibition would be received, before it opened in November. “I was a bit cautious,” he says. “I thought people were over celebrity. They’re so familiar with Brad Pitt’s face that they might not come and see this show. Interestingly, they’ve responded really well. Most people come in as fans. Some come in slightly cynically – as I did – and are then converted.”

Schoeller was born in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and studied photography in Berlin at Lette-Verein – a training more technical than artistic. At 25, he moved to New York to be an assistant to Annie Liebovitz, the renowned celebrity photographer. He has since described that time as very challenging.

“My English was not that good when I first came [to New York], and she’s extremely demanding,” he has recalled. “She doesn’t have that much patience. I got along with her very well after about a year, but the first year was very intense and not very pleasant.”

After three years, Schoeller became a freelance photographer and later began contributing to The New Yorker and other prominent magazines, including Rolling Stone, GQ and Vogue. Dissatisfied with the glamour and commercialism of conventional celebrity portraits, he devised his trademark technique. “They allow me to walk away with something for myself – a very honest, simple portrait that no publicist can say anything about. You can’t see what they’re wearing and they’re not having to do anything, so no red flags go up. Only three or four times have people refused to have a picture taken that close,” he told Artinfo.

Schoeller, who is still based in New York, uses a long lens and simple lighting in his portrait sessions. He takes about 200 frames, talking incessantly to put the sitter at ease while he seeks an expression between expressions: a moment when the subject is temporarily not posing.

His headshots are often praised for their ‘democratic’ approach. By presenting every subject the same way, regardless of their status, the photographs can invite reflection and debate on the nature of celebrity.

“The images are commissioned by high circulation magazines, so in that sense, they’re reinforcing the cult of celebrity,” Desmond observes. “But, on the other hand, the way they’re photographed undermines it. They’re not necessarily flattering. When you are confronted with the images you think about what makes these people famous. Why this person? What are the things you actually see? The size is a bait to make you question the notion of fame.

“The large scale creates a sort of false intimacy,” Desmond says. “You’re forced to make an emotional connection. There’s a feeling that the faces are really close to you. Normally people only get that close when they’re either in love with you or you’re having a fight.”

Close-Up also includes a number of portraits of Indigenous people from South Africa and Brazil, shot and presented in the same way. But given the bias towards celebrities, is ‘democratic’ really the right word for Schoeller’s approach? Arguably, it’s only democracy in the most corrupt form: a means of placating the many, while reinforcing the power of the few.

But Desmond argues: “Maybe it’s an Australian version of democracy, where we bring the rich and famous down to our level,” he says. “They’re imperfect. Barack Obama is one of the most powerful men in the world, but when you see his face in the exhibition you’re conscious of how misshapen it is. He doesn’t look particularly powerful. Even the rich and famous are mortal.”

Desmond also believes the portraits transcend notions of celebrity. “In the end, you’re conscious less of the fame and more of the physiognomy: eyes, noses, mouths. Some are beautiful, some are engaging, some are quite freaky. You see so many faces that you leave with a feeling of the breadth of humanity, which is not something you expect when you walk in.”

Close-Up is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until 13 February. See the article in The Big Issue for photos.

In the lyrics, a man calls his brother from jail, just before Christmas. He passes on his gravy recipe, together with an extra serving of regret. It’s the kind of taut, empathetic storytelling for which Kelly has been acclaimed throughout a career spanning 30 years and two-dozen albums and soundtracks.

Now he’s added a “mongrel memoir” to his catalogue – and it’s also called How to Make Gravy.

“The title suits the way the book mixes things up,” he explains, on the phone from his St Kilda home. “You’re cooking a roast, and you throw in a bit of this and that, and you make gravy. That’s what writing the book felt like to me: it was a by-product of something else.”

In 2004, when the Spiegeltent first arrived in Melbourne, Kelly performed a series of special shows. Over four nights, he sang 100 of his songs in alphabetical order, and leavened the one-man act with a selection of stories. Audiences gobbled it up, and he later toured the format around Australia and overseas.

How to Make Gravy follows the same A-to-Z structure. Each chapter contains the lyrics to a song, together with an anecdote. The result is something like a big, snug patchwork quilt, in which Kelly has stitched stories about his family history and song writing, together with pop music lore, literary references, band travel yarns, and hard-won life experience. There are even occasional puzzles.

“I wrote it in sequence, starting with the letter A. Some stories I had for a while, but generally, when I sat down I didn’t know what I was going to write. It was only when I got to the Ds or Es that I had the confidence to say, ‘I think I’m writing a book’,” Kelly says, sounding surprised he ever got through it.

“I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I just used the songs as a jumping off point to write in a different way. Love Never Runs On Time had one little mention of bad coffee in it, so I thought I’d write about the struggle to get a good coffee on the road.”

He strove for his writing to be “companionable” – and it is. It’s the kind of book you read with a smile on your face. You get up to make a cup of tea, and notice you’re still smiling, and humming too, and pondering some dusty escapade from your childhood.

Or you might be contemplating one of Kelly’s lists. The book is full of them: from Good Smells (Bakeries at dawn, Onions frying…), to They Don’t Make Names Like This Any More (Frank Necessary, Earl Scruggs…).

“I’ve been a bit of a lister,” he says. “I like list poems. Walt Whitman is the obvious example – the poet who lists. A few of my list poems snuck into the book, like Reasons To Wear Black (Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash…). And I would often use lists to get me started writing.”

In one sense the whole book is a list, an extended tribute to Kelly’s many collaborators and to his eclectic sources of inspiration, both musically and intellectually. The ‘Index Of People and Bands’ runs to eight pages of tiny type, and includes poets, playwrights, authors and activists, as well as musicians.

“I’ve always seen myself as a collaborative writer,” he says. “I’ve relied on other musicians to realise my songs – I don’t write bass lines or guitar riffs.

“Then there’s the invisible collaboration, which is the books read and the music listened to. And there was always letter-writing with friends and family.”

As the chapters roll on, Kelly reflects on friends who’ve influenced him and those who’ve died, on aging and the passing of time. In the chapter corresponding to the song Winter Coat, he describes listening to a Frank Sinatra album in the dark on the night Ol‘ Blue Eyes died. After surrendering to an overwhelming sense of loss and fading possibility, he emerged “refreshed by tears…and glad somehow to be sad”.

“Looking at the book at the end, I realised that it’s all about time, death and getting old. You get over 50 and you can’t help it,” he laughs. In any case, for him, the subject isn’t wholly grim. “No one can do anything about loss. But you can be attuned to it, respond to it, and derive some joy from it, because it’s part of life.”

Back at the singer-songwriter night in Newcastle, when the rangy singer sat down after performing the heart-rending cover, a punter approached him, bearing compliments: “Great song choice man – I love Paul Kelly. He’s a voice for the nation.”

“Yeah,” the singer replied. “Everybody loves him.”

As I listened in, I could scarcely believe my good fortune. But, of course, when I tell Kelly the story, he has none of it. “Oh, well, I think you tend to hear about it more often when people like you than when they don’t,” he says humbly, after stifling an awkward cough.

He does, however, admit to nerves about the way people will respond to How to Make Gravy. “My CDs are fiction,” he says. “This is like standing naked in the street.”

Published in Readings Monthly, October 2010.

The image comes from a new book of photography by Chris Payne, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. It is a room guarding burnt bodies and souls. Who were these people? How did they live? And why are they here, like this?

These themes fascinated the architect-turned-photographer for six years as he documented 70 decaying mental hospitals across 30 US states.

“I fell in love with the buildings and the places – the communities that the hospitals had been,” he says, “and with thinking about the thousands of people who had lived, worked and died there.”

Asylum is a grand, melancholy tribute to the lives spent in the institutions and to the astonishing scale and quality of the buildings themselves.

In 2002, when Payne needed a new project, a friend suggested he visit abandoned mental hospitals. The New York-based photographer drove to Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital ever built in the world – at its peak, it housed over 14,000 patients. “I was amazed to find this abandoned city just sitting there,” he says. “I quickly learned it wasn’t isolated to one hospital or one area. It was all over the country.”

From the mid-19^th to the early-20^th century in the US, nearly 300 institutions were built for the insane – often designed by prominent architects and always set in spacious grounds. The facilities were intended to offer calm and comfort, to treat inhabitants by means of fresh air and beautiful surrounds. The hospitals functioned as self-sufficient communities, including farms, workshops and auditoriums, and in some cases, even cafés and bowling alleys.

But care diminished as hospitals became overcrowded and pressed by tight budgets. Then, as treatment came to encompass extreme methods such as electro-shock therapy, ‘asylum’ became a by-word for squalor and abuse.

Payne’s elegiac photos, with flaking colour and tender light, show beauty in places we least expect. “Every society has its asylums, but I think there is a misconception that the buildings are bad and should be torn down. In a way, the stigma of mental illness has been passed onto the architecture of the buildings,” he says.

His previous book documented abandoned substations that had powered the New York subway. His photography shows the architecture of an optimistic era, a time when industrialism promised human progress. “I’m fascinated with buildings that really had purpose. We don’t build like that anymore,” Payne says. “And I think it represents a shift in the way we function as a society. It’s sad we’ve lost that faith in building.”

It is just before lunchtime at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. The 2009 showcase performance is just weeks away. In a stuffy rehearsal room, 14 final-year students listen carefully as the show’s directors give staging instructions for part of the act. The details are precise. Circus is a serious business.

Meanwhile, one of the muscular young men, Aidyn Heyes, bends nonchalantly into a handstand. He stays there, waggling his legs for a while, then shifts from two hands to just one. Minutes later, on his feet again, he amuses a classmate by putting a milk crate on his head.

“We’re all the kind of people who try to get everyone else to look at them,” Heyes says later. His speciality is balancing on his hands.

The institute – the only school of its kind in Australia – opened in 1999, and accepted its first bachelor students two years later. Each year it accepts 24 performers from the scores more who audition.

The students train five days a week, from nine to five, and miss out on the long holidays granted by normal universities. Even so, with the showcase performance approaching, Heyes says preparation time is short. “A lot of the stuff we do in our acts pushes our limits as far as they’ll go. Even though we rehearse and rehearse, no one ever feels like they have enough practice time.”

Heyes grew up in Rosebud on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and spent his spare time surfing and doing yoga. “Ever since I was young I could always jump up into a handstand and stay there,” he says, constantly stretching and shifting his limbs as he talks. “I’d chill out a few hours a day just doing handstands at home because I enjoyed it.”

Like other circus artists, the 22-year-old uses and experiences his body in ways that gravity-adhering members of the community could scarcely ever comprehend. “When you hit the balance properly, especially with one-arm handstands, it feels like something else is holding you there,” he says. “It feels light, like you’re floating in water.”

The showcase performance is the final step before the students try to enter the real circus world. Some aspire to joining international companies, hotels or cruise ships; others, to making a living from corporate gigs, events or busking. Heyes plans to set himself up as a freelance circus performer, mixing work and travel.

For now, however, he must train and focus for the show. “Hand balancing, like juggling and tightwire, requires single-point concentration,” he says. “When you’re performing, you’ve just got to block everything else out.”

Published in The Big Issue, to accompany a photo essay by Christina Simons.

Most of the year, Dublar Char is nearly uninhabited. The remote island lies at the southern end of the Sundarbans, a vast tidal mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Then, from mid-October to mid-February, thousands of fishermen sweep in from around Bangladesh. Hindu pilgrims come in their thousands too, for Rash Mela, an annual three-day festival with a 200-year history.

Last year, photographer Rodney Dekker joined the influx. “There were fishing boats everywhere. They are all connected and people walk over each boat to get to the land,” he says. The fishermen dry their catch on the broad beach, then bag and ship the fish to markets in the capital, Dhaka.

With the festival on, the island was vibrant. “There was dancing and singing, and people were worshipping clustered around a little temple,” Dekker says. “There was lots of energy and atmosphere.”

Situated in the fertile Ganges Delta, Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most densely populated and lowest-lying countries on earth. Exposed to rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers and increased cyclone frequency, the country’s people are critically vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A Bangladeshi rights organisation, Equity and Justice Rights Group, estimates that 30 million people on the southern coastline are already facing its consequences.

That’s the reason for Dekker’s journey. “Dublar Island will be one of the first places in Bangladesh to be affected by sea level rise and this culture will be lost as a result,” he says.

The 34-year-old photographer is a former environmental scientist. In Australia, he has shot series on droughts, floods and bushfires. “My photographic interests come from my interest in environmental problems,” he says. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to show people what is happening in the world as a result of climate change.”

In November 2007, Dublar Island was lashed by Cyclone Sidr. Development organisation Save the Children estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people died in the storm. “It was the most severe cyclone on record in the Bay of Bengal,” Dekker says. “Cyclones are becoming more intense and frequent and the timing is different now. One of the fishermen I interviewed and photographed on Dublar Island was wondering why cyclones are coming in winter. He doesn’t know.”

The fisherman’s prospects aren’t good. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 22 million people in Bangladesh will become climate refugees by 2050.

But it’s industrialised countries, including Australia, who are responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions. “The poorer countries are the ones who will feel the effects [of climate change] the most, and we’re the cause of it,” Dekker says.

Rodney Dekker travelled to Bangladesh with the help of a grant from the SEARCH Foundation. You can view an eyewitness account of his journey on the Oxfam website.

From its genesis as a humble shack to the cantilevered glass showcase of today, the beach house has long been an important part of Victoria’s architectural vernacular. Many fine examples are dotted around our coastal fringes but it is along the Mornington Peninsula – from the western foreshore to Port Phillip Bay – that our beach-house identity has been defined. By the 1950s, “nearly every architect of note who worked in Melbourne build a house there at some time,” wrote architect Robin Boyd in 1952 in Australia’s Home. “And in most cases they allowed themselves to experiment, to be freer and easier than was their custom in the city.” A new exhibition, opening Thursday at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, will track the journey from conception to creation of 35 of the most exciting projects, including the following.

Ranelagh (Ship House)

If a good beach house should evoke the sea, then Ranelagh is safely moored to success. The ‘Ship House’ boasts ground floor porthole-windows and an elegant steel spiral staircase leading to a sunroom and roped-off viewing decks.

Built in 1935 and still standing today, the Mt Eliza home is one of the oldest featured in the MPRG exhibition.

In May 1936, it graced the cover of The Australian Home Beautiful. The magazine praised its designer, “that very modern architect, Mr Roy Grounds”, and judged that the Ship House was “one of the most intriguing seaside houses Melbourne has ever seen”.

Grounds, best known for the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road, built the two-bedroom cottage for his family. It was an innovative structure for its time, built with pre-fabricated cement and steel panels. The ship shape and stark materials stood out against the open landscape, and the upper deck commanded a spectacular view of the bay.

As Home Beautiful declared, the Ship House, “is definitely a ship aground, but no wreck.”

Ryan House

Tucked behind a sand dune, this Somers hideaway was both eye-catching and unassuming. Designed by architect Peter Burns and built in 1963, the modest, elliptical Ryan House rested comfortably in a grove of tea-trees and banksias.

Unfortunately, like a number of buildings in the exhibition, the home has since been demolished. Doug Evans, former associate professor of architecture at RMIT, says the shack didn’t “attempt to swallow the view”. Instead, it was “an introverted little thing, a bit like a rowboat turned upside down.”

It had sloping cedar walls, with both bubble and vertical slit windows. Bedrooms curved along one wall. “In the centre”, Burns wrote in 1963, “a concrete volcano of a fireplace springs from a warm brick floor and is capped by a curving copper canopy and flue.”

“It’s certainly got that hippy look about it,” Evans admits. But it wasn’t a slapdash counterculture hut. Burns was interested in caves as an analogy for home. He wanted to create places of refuge and belonging away from the wars and economic upheavals of the twentieth century.

“It was all about enclosure,’ Evans says. “He hit on something that was interesting other architects around the world in the fifties and sixties – the insecurity of the modern condition.”

Sorrento House 1982

“Beach houses should be fun to be in,” says architect Col Bandy. And his early eighties getaway is just that. The Sorrento House is an informal, low maintenance escape from city life.

The three-bedroom wooden home has an unusual design. “It’s basically a pitched-roof house but it has pieces chopped out and bits added on that change it quite dramatically,” Bandy says. The weatherboards are set at opposing angles. “At that stage of my career I liked the idea of manipulating traditional forms.”

The home was built on a block thick with tea-tree and Bandy decided to keep as much as possible. He tried to create “a more natural object in a natural environment.”

Exhibition curator Rodney James describes a relaxed, playful holiday home. “It’s the classic weekender. It has flowing open spaces inside, so when extra people come you can find room for them. It’s about bringing people together rather than sending them to the outskirts of the house.”

St Andrews Beach House

Sean Godsell’s creation rises above the scrub and dunes in a standoff with the Southern Ocean. The striking 2005 retreat has caught a wave of prestigious awards, including the Australian Institute of Architects Robin Boyd Award in 2006.

The long, rectangular structure with a gaping mouth looks, strangely, like a beautiful shipping container. The building both protects from the elements and adapts to them. Its rusting steel skin shelters a three-bedroom home, with the living and sleeping areas separated by a weather-exposed deck.

Set on stilts, the St Andrews Beach House also reinterprets the older-style buildings of the area. In years gone by, there were many fibro-cement shacks on sticks along the peninsula back beach.

Despite it’s intimidating exterior, the interior is neither too formal nor too precious. “The purpose of going to the beach for the weekend is to relax,” Godsell says. “When you’ve just spent a day surfing, there’s nothing more boring than not going inside because you might destroy the flooring.”

Unlike beach houses further north, Victorian weekenders must be comfortable throughout very different seasons. Godsell says the winter wind at St Andrews Beach is furious and bitterly cold. “When a storm brews at sea it comes straight across that coast. [In the house] there’s a giant picture window and deck where you can sit and watch – it’s some of the best free theatre you’ll ever get.”

Platforms for pleasure

So far, peninsula architecture has been more progressive and experimental than its suburban cousin – that’s the inspiration for the MPRG exhibition. But what comes next? To find out, curator Rodney James commissioned the Platforms for Living project. Five firms each designed a speculative house for a different coastal region.

For their part, WSH Architects fashioned Platforms for Pleasure, an action-packed, tongue-in-cheek getaway for the bay beach at Sorrento. It’s a re-imagined shack for the 21^st century, radically different from a city home.

“Beach houses are becoming like normal houses,” says WSH director Andrew Simpson, disapprovingly. Instead, his team pictures a seaside springboard for leisure and pleasure. The outdoor space is designed for activities as varied as rock climbing and astronomy, while the indoor living area is simple and compact. It could be only 50 square meters – five times smaller than the current average home.

Simpson says the concept is meant to be both entertaining and radical, but also reflect the firm’s approach to sustainability. “We’re trying to come up with designs that respond to contemporary lifestyles but do so over a much smaller floor area.”

Michael Green sips a bittersweet cup in Buenos Aires, a city that has survived the best and worst of times.

On my first day in Buenos Aires I caught the trail of lost love: a friend’s love, not mine. But then the sultry city lured me in.

Not long ago, my friend lived here with his Argentine girl. They had an apartment in Palermo, just north of the centre. A wrought-iron balcony over a shady street. His favourite café, Café Nostalgia, on the corner. ‘They make the only decent coffee in Buenos Aires’, he told me, but he mustn’t have minded the bad coffee. He lounged for days on end in cafés and cantinas, watching the old couples leaning close, listening to the secret card games in the corner.

That was after they broke up. Immersed in the city and lost in confusion, he delayed his return for months. Finally, he went home, for good, and one morning soon after, my plane landed.

That afternoon I walked past his two apartments, the one he shared with the girl and the one where later, he lived alone. As the sun shuffled through the leaves of the knobbly-trunked trees I imagined my friend’s memories. I imagined being in love with the girl and the city. I felt his exhilaration at carving a new, unusual life and felt his uncertainty at its end. I arrived at Café Nostalgia with a list of his old haunts in my hand: travelling alone, with a bittersweet trail to follow.

Bittersweet suits Buenos Aires. Porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, are famously haughty and brooding. Thirteen million live in the city at the mouth of Río de la Plata and history lingers and threatens them like a heavy cloud in the distance. In the last sixty years they have seen dictatorship and despair, war and torture, poverty and economic collapse. But they are famous too, for their reputation as lovers.

At the turn of the 20^th century Argentina was rich. It sat among the ten richest countries of the world, and it’s capital bears the marks of wealth: boulevards, parks, plazas and opulent French architecture; tall, carved doors that lead to marble staircases; a blue art-deco spire growing between plain apartments.

But it isn’t so rich anymore. Another night, as I drank my coffee, a small boy hunched in the opposite gutter, ripping open garbage bags and pulling out plastic bottles under the yellow streetlights. In the café, the ceiling fans swirled, the football was on the television and no one paid the boy any attention.

After the peso crashed in 2001, the city changed. A new phenomenon emerged: Los Cartoneros. They are the ghosts pushing trolleys, scavenging the city’s rubbish from sundown, extracting anything recyclable and scattering the rest. It’s hard, long, degrading work for little return. My friend had told me about them before I came. ‘The city doesn’t quite know what to do with them’, he said.

In 2003, the government registered 10,000 cartoneros, but now no one knows the exact numbers. They come from the provinces and spread through the streets every night, catching the city in a great web of poverty, and maybe even sobering the rich and the tourists as they look out from their bars.

Tango, the tourist icon of Buenos Aires, was once the music of the poor. On Sundays, struggling Spanish and Italian immigrants dressed up and danced while the rich turned up their noses. Now, nightly tango spectaculars have become slick foreign money-spinners. At many community dance halls, though, young porteños are claiming it back.

‘On a Thursday night at Cochabamba 444,’ my friend said, ‘you can drink a few beers and watch the people dance tango.’ The doorway opened from a dark street to a narrow dance floor surrounded by simple tables and chairs. The crowd brought a change of shoes for dancing and hung their small bags from hooks on the wall.

With a flick of the eyes, the men asked the women to dance and the floor filled: firm bodies gliding, pausing, leaning; interlocking, kicking legs. They moved with eyes closed and impassioned faces, as though savouring the flavour of a fine wine.

The tango is heartbreak to a tune. Another night, in a small old bar called ‘El Boliche de Roberto’, two silver-haired tango singers played as a storm came down heavily outside. High up on the walls, the wooden shelves were stocked with antique liquor bottles now black and dusty. The young, fashionable crowd shared the anguished lyrics, mouthing the words and staring into their drinks. Then for one song, almost everyone in the bar sang along, and the sadness changed to joy.

Now I am back at Café Nostalgia, on my last afternoon in Argentina, already reminiscing. My plane leaves tonight. Here I am, looking out at the flower stall beneath the trees, daydreaming of the city. I followed my friend’s bittersweet trail, and I too, have fallen for his lost love – Buenos Aires. I never did meet the girl.