A guest post by Jade Ella Trapp. Jade is a naturopath and midwife living sometimes in the NSW town of Lismore and other times in Central Java.  She developed an interest in jamu when she first moved to Java as a student in 2000. A late afternoon stroll through the heavily concreted inner-city suburb of […]

This is a book for travelers and observers of the world, especially people who are drawn to the challenges and contradictions of cities. Cities included are Hong Kong, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris and San Francisco, but author Kirsten Seale begins in Sydney, at the markets with which she is most familiar. The messy, kitsch, and undeniably atmospheric Paddy’s Market offers a great starting point to pose the deceptively simple question ‘What is a market?’

I am writing from Banjarmasin, in South Kalimantan, one of the four Indonesian provinces on the island of Borneo. Banjarmasin, ‘the city of a thousand rivers’, is an urban edge in itself, settled on a delta island near the junction of the Barito and Martapura rivers. Banjar language is a result of the fusion of […]

Last week I visited Katoomba to see The Visitors exhibition at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre. This is new work for Heidi and Hugo, following on from their focus on housing in Owner Occupy commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. It extends their thinking about inhabitation into the plant world, considering how humans can work for plants. […]

Cities in Java have many obstacles to walking. Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, is no exception: Footpaths are difficult to find, non-existent, or in disrepair. Traffic is ruthless. Maps are inaccurate. The weather is oppressively hot. Despite this situation, jalan-jalan (walking without a specified aim) is still the best way to explore the city and […]

Jakarta can feel oppressive for residents and visitors. If you’ve heard stories about the traffic, the reality is much worse. As in any city though, there are many people doing good things. Journalists Fergus Jensen and Rebecca Henshcke have been living in Jakarta for around 15 years. For the last nine of those they have […]

I picked up this book at Gleebooks, which still brings together a great curated collection at the edges of academic and general audience publications. It caught my eye because of some writing I am doing with Dr Kirsten Seale about typography and urban renewal. Tinkering has had a renewed interest in the past few decades […]

  I was recently in Hobart with a team from Frontyard for the Hobiennale. Hosted by Kickstart Arts, we spent four days making a book based on conversations emerging from our online image archive. We also did our best to get to know the site, St John’s Park. Across the road from our makeshift publishing […]

This post is not exactly about reading books, although books are present, but about reading an installation and a major art event through the lens of permaculture. The photo above is from the project Unpacking My Library at the 57th Venice Biennale. Inspired by Walter Benjiamin’s 1931 essay, this project allowed all participating artists (including dead […]

With a few recommendations, we went to the Sydney French Film Festival to see Tomorrow, a 2015 documentary by Melanie Laurent and Cyril Dion. The film presents five chapters, each telling a local activist story that addresses the global challenges of Agricultue, Energy, Economy, Democracy, and Education. Predictably, the agriculture chapter was most interesting to […]