Wednesday 20 August 2008

From Clare

Hello There

The first weekend of this month was a very historic one for us.

On Saturday 2nd August, the Feeding Set and I went down to the GW McLennan stage at Splendour and performed what we all acknowledged was our last show together for quite a while. It was an emotional time, but drinking vodka helped. None of us know what’s next, except to say that Marty and I will be spending the next year back and forth between Berlin, and that Warren, Libby, Tim and Marty will continue following their creative adventures as always. Lib will be making films, French horning for the stars, and enjoying these early years with her daughter Bea. Warren (Father of three) will be concentrating on his musical project Stormy One (writing, producing) whilst also inventing Top Secret Things like “The Perfect Gadget” (he has the millionaire combination). Tim Harvey will of course be sinking himself into his post-post-modern-resurgence -rock-star lifestyle with his band Hot Little Hands. And Marty Brown – he’s just recorded and produced the new Andrew Morris and Jess Mcavoy albums, and he still absolutely stumps me with all he’s able to cram in to a day. I ask him how he does it. He looks at me like I’m the freak and he’s the normal one. My Beautiful Freak. He will, of course, be coming to Berlin with me to continue with the chaos that is “This Creative Life”.

You probably already know this, but these four precious friends have given this musical adventure most of their weekends and annual leaves for the past couple of years. They have been at the central heart of what it is that sounds like “Clare Bowditch”, interpreting their parts (and dance moves) in a way that I have never taken for granted. It’s an enormously generous gift, and I am a little frightened of being in Berlin without Waz and Tim and Lib. It means things are new and scary again.

Truth be told, I dearly wish I could take them and their families and lives over to Berlin with us. This was always my dream of dreams; that I’d somehow be able to bankroll an entire Australian ex-pat community in West Berlin with our own warehouse and roof-top garden and recording studio and musical library and café and play jungle. And we did try, actually, but in the end, each one of us have our own dreams to follow, and timing is rarely a friend in these regards. Maybe it will still happen one day.

Stand by.

WINTER SECRETS TOUR FINITO;

The Friday of that Splendour weekend I also finished my solo Winter Secrets Tour at the Tank Arts Centre in Cairns. I mean, who would have thought a gigantuan water-tank could scrub up so good? And feel so romantic-like! There were candles and palm-tree fronds everywhere.And everyone seemed to know everyone, and treat us (Hot Little Hands and myself) like they knew us too, which we appreciated very much. No wonder it’s (reportedly) Tex Perkin’s favourite venue! He’s played a few – he should know.

Let me say it straight out; this Winter Secrets Solo Tour has been more frightening, but also wonderful, than I dreamt it would be. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I have had the Vaudeville Time of My Life! I could not have done it without you of course. You shocked me. Thank you. Also, how classy were our Your Other Hand competition winners (For those of you who didn’t see the shows, the Your Other Hand winners were random strangers who entered a competition on my website to perform with me on stage, by sending me a copy of themselves doing a version of “Your Other Hand”. Entries started with a trickle, and ended with a torrent. It was then my job to listen to each and every one and choose a different winner, or series of winners, in each city (all twenty-one cities). For the record, this was hard, because in all honesty, every single version -even the joke-ones- were supercool. People went above and beyond the call of duty. You rock.) Unbelievable. And so random! We have a whole heap of amateur footage of these performances and we will try our very best to get some of it together for you. (I’ve noticed some winners have already posted theirs on You Tube…) It all added to the feeling that the tour was part of a grand old chaotic musical adventure (the same continuous one we’ve been on for a few years now). On a very personal level, it’s been restorative and invigorating. And I know Tim and Hot Little Hands-ville are feeling the same way. It’s HERE I choose to plug their new album “Dynamite in Black and White”, because, well, I love it. And I’m not the only one who thinks their great. Wrote a chap called Tim from Cairns just now, “PS: My wife wants to run away with Tim & James from HLH”. They will be sure to share this news with their lady friends.

ART AND MOTHERHOOD
(i.e. If you’ve never changed a nappy, and aren’t planning to, you might find this very boring and scary. Feel free to skip).

I like championing treasures; things that are rare and valuable (see example above). So I’m going to tell you a little bit about “The Divided Heart”, a new book by my friend Rachel Power. This book is probably the first of its kind; twenty-six insightful, wise, painfully thought interviews with a bunch of Australian female artists who also happen to be mothers.

It’s published by Red Dog. From their website;

Do women still confront the attitude that a dedicated artist will avoid having children for the sake of her career? In The Divided Heart, Australia’s most respected artists, writers and actors speak frankly about the wrench between motherhood and their artistic life. Includes interviews with Rachel Griffiths, Nikki Gemmell, Clare Bowditch, Sara Watt and many others.

It is completely fascinating actually. When we got our advance copy in June, Marty and I quietly battled over who got to read it. For two weeks we tried to share it, but in the end, I made him read it out aloud to me each night before bed.

A little bit of background here; Rach and I met at university (she interviewed Jeff Buckley, I thought she was cool) and then ended up becoming neighbours for many years at our Compost Community. We have spent many years solidly supporting each other in our real lives, so it is with my own eyes that I’ve watched Rachel spend the last three years piecing together this original, and rather brilliant book. In fact, this book seems to me like the perfect and welcome antidote to this insane obsession we seem to be going through at the moment with “Celebrity Mothers”. The transition from single-life to parenthood sees us at our most vulnerable and our most sacred; it is when we most need a good story to anchor our journey to.

Hey;here’s a thought. Imagine if we calculated all the pages and public space and hours we spend worrying about and discussing women and their body shape after giving birth, and then somehow magically sunk them in to a public discussion/debate on meaty meaty topics such as;

• The wisdom and long-term financial and health benefits of allowing women one full year of government-funded paid maternity leave in Australia (as in the U.K.). Would this help?



• The revolutionary act of allowing generous government-funded paid paternity leave to working fathers so than can spend more than two weeks (or no weeks) getting to know their newborn children (and their brand new world) and supporting their partner in the transition to motherhood (and breastfeeding, where possible. It is under-rated how much work this can take). In fact, did you know that the Sydney Theatre Company already offer this kind of flexible leave to their male employees who become fathers? STC, you truly are the avant garde.
  

• If we, as communities and governments, supported our new mothers and fathers by bringing them meals, babysitter their older children, or by employing a doula to move in to their house for the first few weeks after birth (as they do in the Netherlands), how much lower do you think our rates of post-natal depression would be?
  

• Why is it that for every non – Indigenous mother and baby that dies there are 5 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women that die and 3 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander babies that die? (www.birthquilt.org)
  

• Why won’t our Government fund qualified independent midwives to help women give birth safely at home, when this is much less expensive than giving birth in a hospital system (again, check out how the Dutch do it!)?
  

• How do we support or fail to support women in all of their attempts to bring their babies safely into the world?
  

• Why do hospitals so often tell healthy women who are giving birth that they have to have an epidural whether they like it or not? Why don’t more women stand up say “Ah, excuse me dude/dudette, it is, like, Mah Body! You can’t tell me what to do with Mah Body! It’s MAHN!”.(Note; don’t try to fight this ridiculous battle without the early advise of a very experienced midwife. Otherwise, too hard, too boring).
  

• The heroes journey that is parenthood. Why do so many couples break up in the first year after having a child, and what we can do to help prevent that? Or help prepare humans for the bigness of the event? What wise old stories could we be telling each other to help us through here?
  

• What are the long-term and wide-reaching benefits of generously funded public education, public housing, and enough good-quality government-funded childcare and kindergarten places (which we have known about this shortage for years. Why are we still behind the 8-ball here?)
  

• Why is Nigella Lawson so saucy? And hot? And why, when we compliment women, do we so often do it using “cookery” terms?

Bonne Notte,

CB x