This blog post is a rumination on a possibility raised by a bunch of conversations with farmers I’ve been having over the past fortnight: the idea of bringing cattle and sugar cane into a mutually beneficial integrated system. Cattle and cane together also gives us the opportunity to accompany this story with a Go-Betweens soundtrack: […]
“The future of sugar cane is not purely sugar cane”. This quote comes from a discussion I was having on Friday with a young canefarmer called Scotty, along with his father Allan and my main sugar-guru, Simon. We were sitting in the tray of a ute after having “done the rounds” of the farm. It […]
On Tuesday morning I joined more than 50 farmers at the Walkerston Leagues Club to hear a “breakfast talk” on the importance of soil health in sugar cane growing. The event started at six thirty in the morning. Six thirty! That’s way too early. An artist like me should still be dreaming at six thirty. […]
Last November when I visited Mackay, Simon Mattsson’s first ever dual crop of sugar cane + sunflowers was in its prime. Here’s Simon with fellow canefarmer Alan McLean, posing among the flowers: At the time, I made this short video about the experiment: This week Simon showed me the next generation of his dual […]
As I learn little bits each day about the life and times of sugar, en route to becoming a Cane-Nerd, I’ll post them here. Today’s “thing wot I learnt” is this: Sugar cane is a grass. It grows a bit bigger than the average lawn, but yep, it belongs to the same family. According to […]
En route to Mackay, we stopped in Rockhampton. There, perusing the local newspaper, I noticed this article. Across 140,000 farms in Australia, 90% of which are family-owned, the average age of farmers is 58. When they retire, many of these farmers will not be replaced by their children. What then?
On August 12 I was invited to attend an event called Arts, Science, Oceans, at the Sydney Environment Institute, bringing together artists, scientists and humanities scholars. Here’s the original publicity about it. The event was convened by esteemed historian Iain McCalman, who wrote a wonderful book called The Reef: A Passionate History a few years […]
This week the new edition of Artlink Magazine, themed ART LAND was launched. It contains my discussion with LATITUDES, a Barcelona curatorial collective (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), who are well known for the wonderful book LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, and many more things besides. The discussion took place in June-July 2016, […]
This week I arrived in Mackay after seven days on the road with my family. We left Wollongong in our trusty Hyundai pulling a trailer load of bikes and books and camping gear, bound for the deep north. Well it seems like the deep north to us, but it’s still only half way up the […]