Lonely Planet job losses
Today at Lonely Planet, they announced 50 job cuts. It's been a horrible day in the Melbourne office with friends and colleagues made redundant as guidebook sales fall in the economic downturn. It's hard to say too much about this at the moment as people are still feeling the impact, but like many authors I'm sad to hear the news.
Drawn Outsider: Shaun Tan profile
Between words and images, illustrator/writer Shaun Tan has found a place for himself and scored some serious awards. George Dunford traces his rise.
It’s crowded and hot in a small chamber of Newcastle Town Hall for Shaun Tan’s illustration workshop at the National Young Writer’s Festival. The audience spills out the door listening to his thin dry voice: a napping pair of emo kids leaning on each other twitch with dreams fuelled by the writer/illustrator sketch of a Donnie Darko-esque bunny. The two-hour workshop has run an hour over but Tan keeps scratching at the sweet-yet-menacing rabbit on the flipchart. Every eye is still on him and every ear is listening and every face smiling – even as they doze.
This crowd has grown up with Tan from studying The Rabbits (his colonisation collaboration with John Marsden) to his recent wordless graphic novel, The Arrival. “That’s the disturbing thing,” Tan chuckles as the small crowd disperses in search of water, “when people come up to me and say ‘Yeah, we did the Rabbits in school’ and I think ‘Holy shit, how old does that make me?’”
As he’s packing up his charcoal, he looks at the picture, self-critically. “I don’t like pictures to be entirely finished so there’s a gap of recognition there. That’s where the reader has to come in and fill the gap,” he explains. Perhaps that’s part of the success of The Arrival which sold well as a kids’ book in Australia yet also charmed the NSW Premier’s Literature Award and was marketed overseas as an adult graphic novel. “I don’t really illustrate for kids, but in the back of my mind I do want to do something that a kid can relate to. It’s like a good guide for any artistic project – if a kid can relate to it… then you’re probably on the right track.”
In conversation Tan reminds me of an iPod – compact, neat and voicing the most wondrous things. He shuffles easily between kids and adults, text and pictures, high and low art (“A lot of the best illustration is actually in fine art, but I don’t see there being much difference between illustration and gallery paintings”). At some point while creating The Arrival, Tan decided to drop the words and tell the story of a stranger in a stranger land using only pictures. “The moment I started introducing language into it, it was like dropping a pebble into a still pond. It just created too much ripple and other interpretation. It was talking too loudly when the words were there. Speaking to the reader too loudly and I really wanted people to be able to bring their own reading to it.”
Tan’s style is essential. Not only do stories dictate their form, but objects express their characters to him. Growing up as a shy Chinese-Malaysian kid in Perth, Tan’s drawing was “a way of connecting”. “I’m not sure which came first – the obsession with drawing or the shyness. One can lead to the other, because it’s a kinda solitary activity, whereas if my obsession was with breakdancing it would be a little bit different.”
Tan is more at home expressing himself through his work. Speaking at this workshop “feels very unnatural to me, because the reason I got into illustration is that I felt I had something to contribute, but I didn’t want to perform at all.” Tan used himself as a model for The Arrival’s central character but the resemblance is not just physical. “It was a very self-referential thing about the artist communicating directly through pictures, because he can’t talk.”
When Tan’s adolescent drawing skills peaked (“I could draw things very accurately, not quite photographically, but near enough.”) he found himself getting creatively bored. “I was kind of reaching a deadend and it was like ‘Where do I go from here?’” The breakthrough came when he began to react with his drawings. He recalls seeing a grey boulder that “felt pinkish, pink-blue… maybe the temperature of those colours matched the rock”. His illustration style began to concentrate on the character of what he saw around him. Even now he points to a window and thinks about lengthening it in a sketch to make it more meaningful. “I feel more directly connected to… the somethingness of a thing. I can get into it really easy with drawing, with writing I’m grappling for the phrase or the words.”
Never one to stand still creatively, Tan is forcing himself to wrestle with words for his next book of illustrated fiction, Tales of Outer Suburbia. The book is a collection of short stories based on growing up in Perth’s northern suburbs, “in some ways a place of great boredom” which Tan has re-imagined. One story features a water buffalo that takes up residence in a spare block and acts as a neighbourhood agony aunt. It’s a Tan twist on the everyday, embellished to become supernatural.
As Tan races off for his next festival appearance with historian Henry Reynolds who Tan used as a reference for The Rabbits, he’s already thinking of illustrating again. “It feels real true when I get a painting right,” he smiles, “like it’s truer than anything I’m ever going to say or even do as a person.”
This piece originally appeared in The Big Issue.
It’s crowded and hot in a small chamber of Newcastle Town Hall for Shaun Tan’s illustration workshop at the National Young Writer’s Festival. The audience spills out the door listening to his thin dry voice: a napping pair of emo kids leaning on each other twitch with dreams fuelled by the writer/illustrator sketch of a Donnie Darko-esque bunny. The two-hour workshop has run an hour over but Tan keeps scratching at the sweet-yet-menacing rabbit on the flipchart. Every eye is still on him and every ear is listening and every face smiling – even as they doze.
This crowd has grown up with Tan from studying The Rabbits (his colonisation collaboration with John Marsden) to his recent wordless graphic novel, The Arrival. “That’s the disturbing thing,” Tan chuckles as the small crowd disperses in search of water, “when people come up to me and say ‘Yeah, we did the Rabbits in school’ and I think ‘Holy shit, how old does that make me?’”
As he’s packing up his charcoal, he looks at the picture, self-critically. “I don’t like pictures to be entirely finished so there’s a gap of recognition there. That’s where the reader has to come in and fill the gap,” he explains. Perhaps that’s part of the success of The Arrival which sold well as a kids’ book in Australia yet also charmed the NSW Premier’s Literature Award and was marketed overseas as an adult graphic novel. “I don’t really illustrate for kids, but in the back of my mind I do want to do something that a kid can relate to. It’s like a good guide for any artistic project – if a kid can relate to it… then you’re probably on the right track.”
In conversation Tan reminds me of an iPod – compact, neat and voicing the most wondrous things. He shuffles easily between kids and adults, text and pictures, high and low art (“A lot of the best illustration is actually in fine art, but I don’t see there being much difference between illustration and gallery paintings”). At some point while creating The Arrival, Tan decided to drop the words and tell the story of a stranger in a stranger land using only pictures. “The moment I started introducing language into it, it was like dropping a pebble into a still pond. It just created too much ripple and other interpretation. It was talking too loudly when the words were there. Speaking to the reader too loudly and I really wanted people to be able to bring their own reading to it.”
Tan’s style is essential. Not only do stories dictate their form, but objects express their characters to him. Growing up as a shy Chinese-Malaysian kid in Perth, Tan’s drawing was “a way of connecting”. “I’m not sure which came first – the obsession with drawing or the shyness. One can lead to the other, because it’s a kinda solitary activity, whereas if my obsession was with breakdancing it would be a little bit different.”
Tan is more at home expressing himself through his work. Speaking at this workshop “feels very unnatural to me, because the reason I got into illustration is that I felt I had something to contribute, but I didn’t want to perform at all.” Tan used himself as a model for The Arrival’s central character but the resemblance is not just physical. “It was a very self-referential thing about the artist communicating directly through pictures, because he can’t talk.”
When Tan’s adolescent drawing skills peaked (“I could draw things very accurately, not quite photographically, but near enough.”) he found himself getting creatively bored. “I was kind of reaching a deadend and it was like ‘Where do I go from here?’” The breakthrough came when he began to react with his drawings. He recalls seeing a grey boulder that “felt pinkish, pink-blue… maybe the temperature of those colours matched the rock”. His illustration style began to concentrate on the character of what he saw around him. Even now he points to a window and thinks about lengthening it in a sketch to make it more meaningful. “I feel more directly connected to… the somethingness of a thing. I can get into it really easy with drawing, with writing I’m grappling for the phrase or the words.”
Never one to stand still creatively, Tan is forcing himself to wrestle with words for his next book of illustrated fiction, Tales of Outer Suburbia. The book is a collection of short stories based on growing up in Perth’s northern suburbs, “in some ways a place of great boredom” which Tan has re-imagined. One story features a water buffalo that takes up residence in a spare block and acts as a neighbourhood agony aunt. It’s a Tan twist on the everyday, embellished to become supernatural.
As Tan races off for his next festival appearance with historian Henry Reynolds who Tan used as a reference for The Rabbits, he’s already thinking of illustrating again. “It feels real true when I get a painting right,” he smiles, “like it’s truer than anything I’m ever going to say or even do as a person.”
This piece originally appeared in The Big Issue.
Lameways, here we come
Melbourne is known for the intricacies of its laneways hiding all manner of dive bars, hard-to-find record stores, designer-owned fashion shops and enough coffee to drown the city. The St Jerome's Laneway Festival seems like a good extension of this - setting an indie soundtrack to the best back streets. But what do you do when it goes mainstreet?The day started late as the gates didn't open until well after 12 which ate into the set of WA wunderkind Tame Impala. Leaning heavily on their fuzz pedals, the Imps were Deep Purple in shorts. With their time cut by 25 minutes, the lads did a playful cover of Blueboy's Remember Me at the core of their set that worked the crowd just right, but missed a great chance to get originals to a new audience on the large Lonsdale St Stage.
One of the more comfortable stages was well out of the alleys on the lawns of the State Library. It was also free so the crowd were a lot more relaxed than those who'd forked out for 
tickets. Machine Translations brought their percussion-heavy line-up here that was only a timpani short of being Big Pig. Still J-Walker produced a set that wandered through acoustic folk to jazzy meanderings. Chinese New Year celebrations drowned out the odd chorus with cracker explosions. At one point Walker looked up at the audience which favoured the lawns rather than the library stairs directly in front and said: "It's like playing to a building."
tickets. Machine Translations brought their percussion-heavy line-up here that was only a timpani short of being Big Pig. Still J-Walker produced a set that wandered through acoustic folk to jazzy meanderings. Chinese New Year celebrations drowned out the odd chorus with cracker explosions. At one point Walker looked up at the audience which favoured the lawns rather than the library stairs directly in front and said: "It's like playing to a building."Two stages - Lounge and Red Bull - were inaccessible without a long wait (security shooed us away saying it had been two hours and they hadn't been able to let in any new punters). Ironically both were on Caledonian Lane, once home to the original 'intimate festival'.
Still the downhill view onto the Lonsdale St Stage saw good bands. Port O'Brien played their second show in the Southern hemisphere here - sounding like they'd eaten their fair share of Uncle Tupelo records. The poppy singalong, I Woke Up Today' went down a treat. They were followed by Deputy Lord Mayor Susan Riley who 'rocked' - you could tell by the number of times she told us Melbourne rocked and that the sanitation workers were positively mineralogical in their duties today (ie they also rocked).
There's no doubt the festival has outgrown its roots, but moving onto Little Lonsdale St was a bad choice. The uphill stage was obscured by a mixing desk that was in a pointy tent in the middle of a narrow street. Frustrated punters tried balancing on fences and pushing at barricades and many were turned away from Girl Talk.
International visitors, Stereolab brought their infectious Franco post-rock to Lonsdale St just as the sun was coming down. They were followed by a Augie March who rocked their way to the gentle finale of 'One Crowded Hour'. Lead singer Glenn Richards grumbled a joke to the crowd "Weird festival huh? Not enough tickets or too many?"It's a fair gripe. There were 8000 tickets sold at the laneway festival that's come onto the streets. Several stages were either inaccessible or unvieawable and Facebookers have been cranky about about paying over $100 to see a limited range of bands. Even with a press pass, local paper The Age pronounced it 'festival chaos'. The view seems to have been better at the Brisbane franchise. As Melbourne's laneways festival spills into more cities and onto the streets it's an idea that's too big for fans of intimacy and lurches between a streetparty and disappointment especially with so many other festivals competing for fan's hard-earned.
Number of post-ironic Ghostbusters' t-shirts: 9 - cue sequel to cash-in on cult status.
Stupidest anti-smoking badge: "Rock out with your butt out" - for a pun to work it has to be on two levels. The second meaning might refer to saggy jeans, but it's not an attractive image.
Most ill-advised cover: The Temper Trap finishing with 'Dancing in the Dark'.
