You might have noticed, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately. Well, for the last 6 months or so anyway. Something really BIG has taken up my time. For the best part of two years really… The biggest creative project of my life. I’ve been working with sound since the late 1980s, and working in radio most of my life – from the early days at 3RRR, to triple j, then on ABC Local Radio and Radio National too. Radio’s always been my “first love”. When I relocate to Berlin in 2015 as a freelance media maker (and as a newly-minted meditation teacher!) I add “podcast maker” to my suite of skills. It seems a “no brainer”. Helping set up…
Stories from inside life’s big top.
Posts tagged “megan spencer”
Megan Spencer, Guardian Australia, Radio National 1. Honeygiver Among The Dogs (Dechen Roder, BHUTAN) Called the first ever “Buddhist film noir”, this is a breathtaking film set in the mountains of Bhutan. A policeman is sent to investigate the disappearance of a Buddhist nun, presumed murdered. Tailing the suspect – an impossibly beautiful woman deemed a “demon-ness” by the village bigots – the film becomes an ethereal treatise about the nature of reality – and our relationship to what we ‘think’ we know. The natural and ‘sacred’ worlds crisscross at every opportunity. A profound, unpredictable, and thrilling cinematic achievement. (Panorama) 2. Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves (Mathieu Denis Simon Lavoie, CANADA) An uncompromising, confronting…
Tagged: berlinale, megan spencer
Berlin balconies are spectacular – especially in summer. Look up and you’ll witness some of the city’s most creative spaces. You don’t have to be a poet or painter to live here: being a keen home gardener will do just fine. Balconia: part-urban balcony, part-Narnia – a fantasy land just outside your window (instead of down the back of the wardrobe). A magical space to cheer you up on grey days (and there are many in Berlin), and on long, hot summer nights a paradise where you can find a cool breeze, a grill going and friends over for a feast. In all likelihood Berliners like dogs more than they do people, but they dig their balconies, taking great pride in both their…
Tagged: balconia, balcony garden, berlin, flowers, gardening, megan spencer, urban gardens, veggie patch
Human rights journalist, magazine editor and social storyteller Vanessa Ellingham seems to regularly be mistaken for someone else. It’s something which has beset her for the past five years, since “Jasmine Cooper” first got glasses. “Jasmine Cooper” is one of the characters on New Zealand’s most famous soap opera, ‘Shortland Street‘. It seems Vanessa and the actress who plays the troubled teenager share eerily similar features: honey-brown hair, perfectly-manicured bobs and cat’s eye glasses, framing heart-shaped faces and delicate smiles. Both call New Zealand home. And as I discover soon after meeting Vanessa at a writers group in Berlin (where she now lives), it’s a case of mistaken identity the 25 year-old is wont to write about in hilarious, excruciating detail.…
Radio has been my first love FOREVER. I made my very first program in the mid-1980s. It was the time of gargantuan shoulder pads, John Hughes movies and elbow dancing. Thankfully by then I’d discovered ska music, black Levis and brothel creepers. In my second year of university, one lunch time I stumbled upon an “extra curricular” workshop paid for by my Student Union fees. The good folk at the Union had kindly put it on for misfits like me, desperate for distraction from what I was finding to be less-than-fulfilling paramedical “yoonee” studies. Radio production and reel-to-reel tape decks it was! Run by a guy called “Paul” (veteran radio trainer Paul Vadasz as I later found out), he was recruiting…
Tagged: berlin, megan spencer, podcast, samantha wareing, three wicked women, wasp summer, women
“Australia-born, Berlin-based photographer with a fetish for metro systems, giant strawberries and punk rock.” With characteristic word economy, this is the sentence Kate Seabrook uses to describes herself in her photographer profile. It’s spot on. And characteristically again, just as humble. Since beginning her photography journey in 2009, Kate has had work published in a slew of Australian and international publications (Mess+Noise, Berliner Morgenpost, Tagesspiegel, Couch, Tip and the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ among them.) And her epic, independent ‘Endbahnhof’ passion project (photographing the iconic underground stations of Germany and Europe), was recently featured in Berlin-based, literary travel publication, ‘Elsewhere: A Journal Of Place’. In addition to ‘rockumenting’ music stages on two continents, Kate has a soft spot for…
Sam Wareing and I first met when I visited Berlin in July 2014. It was the height of a stinking hot summer, extremely humid, and glorious as Berlin summers are wont to be. I remember being shocked that a Central European city could have such capacity for a ‘Darwin summer’, a place I’d also lived, with weather I’d been equally astonished by. My husband Oliver and I spent 10 days soaked in sweat zooming around the cobble-stoned streets, getting to know the city. At the back of our minds we were scoping it out hopefully, as a potential place to live. Meeting Sam, and listening to what she had to say about it, helped clinch the deal. I was also there…
A long distance relationship made it possible for Hanna Nordqvist to leave her home country of Sweden for Berlin – plus a few magical nights when as a teenager, she visited the ‘City of Dreamers’. Hanna is one of the women featured in my photo series for Circus Folk + Flower Punks, the photo exhibition put together by myself and Kate Seabrook. It opened this week and Hanna was at the vernissage, along with around a hundred other people… Living in Berlin as an adult, she has moved through academia and publishing to find her way to studying the Grinberg Method, a particular bodywork therapy currently on the rise in Europe and the US. This year she will to graduate as a…
I literally stumbled upon Tim Anders and his music in a tunnel, en route to a rendezvous at the “Berliner Siegessäule” (Berlin Victory Column.) As the Victory Angel towered over me gleaming in the sun, I heard Tim’s voice way before I saw him. It seemed to float up from the underground and into the busy street. Descending the stairs his music echoed around corners and filled the labyrinthine, ‘otherwordly’, fluorescent-lit space, like a cloud that had somehow escaped from the sky above and had taken a wrong turn. Many metres later I spied him from a distance, singing his heart out for no-one in particular and anyone who would listen. I asked if I could take some photos of…
Tagged: berlin, berlin music, Berliner Siegessäule, busking, megan spencer, tim anders
One of my favourite people in the world is Amelia Jane Hunter: stand up comedian, TV producer and NT Bush Walking Tour Guide extraordinaire. We first met ten years ago, when we were both living in Sydney, Australia. It’s been a while since we shared the same continent, but now we do again: she in Manchester, me in Berlin, the latter being her real home – that is of course, after the Northern Territory. Amelia is an ADVENTURER. She has a gypsy heart, a rambunctious rebel spirit, and tells stories like no-one else I know. She is also incredibly funny – coughing fit funny. Call an ambulance: it’s hard to breathe when she gets started, whether on stage or around…
Tagged: amelia jane hunter, circus folk, comedy, flower punks, megan spencer, photography