ART is some kind of mark making response to the moment, to the swirling observations, thoughts, emotions, mysteries, traumas, beauty and silences we live immersed in.

More than one friend has said to me “O you’re a bit arty are you?” or “O my wife does that kind of stuff to help her while I’m away” or “Now that I’m retired I’ve decided I will do something arty.”

South African artist William Kentridge describes his art practice: “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending – an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.” Instagram: @williamkentridgestudio

John O’Dononue suggests convincingly that we are all artists with imagination and so we are all constructing a world from those centres that continue to add to building and breaking. I am convinced that nothing is ever finally built or broken as all existence is in a never ending flow.

“We can speak beauty into the world or poison it with our words; we can build things up or tear them down; we can dream of a world that is vast, alive, and interesting, or reason it to be small, hard, and empty. “We are each an artist”, said the poet, priest, and philosopher John O’Donohue, “We each possess an imagination. Everyone, whether they like it or not, is involved in the construction of the world”. Every action we take and every word we speak builds or breaks the planet.” Nick Cave Red Hand Files Issue #315

Identity Crisis Ink, red pencil, guache, graphite, gesso on found dictionary pages. Artist: Peter Breen 2017

Dried aerosol paint chards on a plinth. Approximately 16 years aging. Jugglers Art Space 2018

The Folly of Certainty – Waste no Time #2 Charcoal, ink, red pencil on paper 2023 Artist: Peter Breen

City Lights – a Mile Up Charcoal on arches paper Artist: Peter Breen 2024

The Near Present Opportunithy Guache, ink, charcoal, gesso on found encyclopedia page. Artist: Peter Breen 2025

All of the above works are an attempt to observe, listen and respond to the life I am immersed in. The moments each work concept arrives, triggering the work as a note in a journal or a list or a mark on a scrap of paper on the bench. Each work is within a moment in time, a response. And then it evolves or is the door latch to a new draft and as Kentridge says that it is the “less good idea” that often gets up!

Artist: Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is an installation artist based in Scotland. This work of his was my profile image on Facebook for a couple of years. Evocative of “kicking against the pricks” – a well worn biblical phrase – and for years it communicated a subtle sense of comfort. It seemed to me that this artist was looking out through my eyes into my life’s thorn infested pilgrimage in the flow of living.

Each of my works above evoke memories and further questions. They invite me to sit with them a bit more. To find their soul and mine. And I wonder about Andy Goldsworthy’s inner path to his installation.

What is going on with these works?

The multitudes of possiblities are scratched onto old pages in Identity Crisis, grief’s stamp is on the beauty of 16 years of open graffiti studios, The Folly of Certainty, Waste no Time #2 is a call to find a path in the brambles of overwhelming words and noise, nostalgic reminiscences flying into Narm in City Lights – A Mile Up as I listen spell bound to composer Stuart Greenbaum’s piece of the same name on ABC radio and then under the spell of Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky I sit with him and refect on the multitudes of possibiities in The Near Present Opportunity. What do I give myself to? What does existence mean? The honest never ending search for meaning is as open ended as anything can ever be.

These works are autobiographical, narrative chapters in a complex life of complex choices and experiences. Moments caught as marks. Making marks is a human thing, a way of being, acting and acting out and recording. As an artist I spend time, hours and days finding my mark making genre and honing eye hand fluidity. I look foward to the creak of the studio door, the space on the bench, the brush and ink, the charcoal and paper, the guache and pencil, the founation pen. The draws of paper and progress and completed works, collections and books stored away from moisture and moths. The space as a place of home.

Reflection:

Which one of these works would you consider you have some resonance with?

Why?

In the next ALSO – ART essay I will look at Art’s appeal – aesthetics and decor.

Next week: March 12, 2025 The second ALSO word: Love

Peter Breen March 5, 2025.

Artist: William Kentridge “Sunlight on a leaf”

As we wait for cyclone Alfred to land here in Brisbane, “Sunlight on a leaf” has future possibilities.

Art, Love, Spirituality, Oneness

A.L.S.O.

I am keen to continue writing, to explore my world – in my head and outside of it – with stories, images, reflections, opionions and reviews, to share with you, my friends and reading audience.

ALSO is an acrostic outline around the four areas of inquiry – Art, Love, Spirituality and Oneness that came to me in a dream last year and it has anchored me since as a ritual of sorts. It leads to reflections, meditation and mark making in the home studio.

What does art mean and why do I need to make marks?

What is love in good times and bad?

What is spirituality after experiences of religious disillusionment and never ending aggression?

What does human oneness look like when peace seems impossible in families much less in nations?

My life is full and given the state of the world, which in my life time as a privileged white male, has never been so fraught and tentative, I need some kind of framework to enable me to consider what is in and what is out, what I feel impelled to respond to and what to let go as the overwhleming nature of its impact increases.

I hope that this can be of some assistance to readers and friends and I will respond to all replies.

I look foward to some kind of loose community of thinkers and inquirers.

Peter Breen

Guache, collage, glue on paper. 21 x 29.7 cm Artist: Peter Breen

Leitir Fraic, Connemara, Eire Water Colour on paper. Artist: Peter Breen

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President Trump and fantasy

THE LION, THE WHICH OR THE WARDROBE

There’s a story that was read to us as kids and then we read it to ours and now they read it to theirs and so the story goes on. It is, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – by Oxford don C S Lewis. It is a great christian based myth/allegory but it’s beautifully crafted and in the end the wicked witch is knocked out, the lion [ Aslan] dies and comes back to life and the wardrobe children are more than minions – they are princes and princesses and saints if you will.

Let’s fast forward from Narnia to Washington D C and the inauguration of President Trump today.

Feels like….?

Along with Trump and his billionaire minions are the prayers of Franklin Graham. Some of you will have no idea who that is but he is the cloned son of a once fauned and famous protestant evangelist – a salesman ostensibly – Rev Dr Billy Graham who was like the Protestant Pope in the heady days of Nixon and ML King.

After my swim this morning with Maeve [ necessary after her repaired broken hip and surgery – & doing really well!] I was showering and had this idea and as David Lynch says, when you have an idea WRITE IT DOWN!

Let’s play with C S Lewis.

The snow storm and a never been done before inauguration inside [ in a wardrobe??] where the magic light and the descent into the golden age of dark dawn reversals – cold hearted glee with which witch? The magic turkish delilght is a reject shop copy and the theories of a good world are elevated unapoligetically to replace love, social justice, grace and humilty by billionaires, a cloned evangelist [with a narrowly skewed literalist gospel ]and a narcissistic yellow lion look alike fake news saviour. The people cheer outside in the snow and we wonder who the saviour will be. The light just outside the wardrobe shines a yellow beam on snow and despair while in the wardrobe of doom the jingle of bit coins rings loud in the pockets of glazed eyed scrooges.

Lewis’s “resurrection” of the lion and the salvation assistants – the wardrobe children born of the light on the path – will be the people for “The people have the power” [ Patti Smith ]. The people slowly frozen down to almost down for the count will find the power in their collective born again vision for democracy, decency, humanity and justice born of necessity, born of despair, born of humanity while wisdom will arise in the stress of extremity. And it will be born again over time, times and half a time again and again while despots will die, money will rot and mother earth will roar.

Peter Breen

I have never followed or been that interested in David Lynch. His prominence came about in my tightly controlled religious years – controlled by me and others – and so now as he has died and I discover his genius as a surrealist artist, I am playing catchup.

It seems that he was indeed a mystic, a surrealist and a genius. This is the current view by fans and critics both and I am strongly drawn to mysticism of all kinds.

I am partcilarly drawn to three statements of his I have listened to over the past week:

On death:

“I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we’ll all meet again. Otherwise I don’t see how anybody could ever, once they see someone die, that they’d just disappear forever and that’s what we’re all bound to do. I’m sorry but it just doesn’t make any sense, it’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”

On ageing:

“Inside, we are ageless…and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around the ageless centre.”

On music:

“Music can swell the heart till it almost bursts – you can’t believe that beauty that comes….and it comes from these notes…”

David Lynch, Hands Up, Cowboy!, 2020, mixed media painting on wood, 41 3/4″ × 37 11/16″ × 4 7/8″ (106 cm × 95.7 cm × 12.4 cm) © David Lynch. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles

William Blake as an English outsider artist and poet [28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827] was dismissed by the church and the arts community as off the wall and crazy and then, as sometimes happens in history after the death of such a person, he became seen as a significant and highly influential poet and artist in the so called romantic school eg William Wordsworth. His mysticism had various iterations including a so-called visit from God at the window of his bedroom when he was a 4 year old and exposure to the Moravians and Count Zinzendorf. No doubt film and social media were big on the influence and popularity of David Lynch before his death and now he has joined Blake. I will be researching the primary influences on Lynch but surmise it will be at least, the father of surrealism, Salvatore Dali.

Artists are not always this influential and the seeking of influence is the curse [ and sometimes, maybe, small blessing] of social media. The artist who wants to paint and draw and direct films for the pure joy and struggle of mark making might become a Lynch or a Blake or most likely, not at all. They might at least and best have some sense of being in a place of purpose and meaning. This is becoming my experience now that I have some sense of condfidence in my own intentional mark making after hundreds of hours of making marks over the last 10-15 years. One needs to be determined and disciplined to be an artist and to write down any ideas that come as David Lynch used to say: Don’t rely on your own memory if you have a good idea – write it down however small or big it might be or become – a painting or a script for a film – write it down!

Blake’s apprenticeship as a young print maker developed his obvious draughtsmanship seen in such works below. [ The Sun at his Eastern Gate, Water colour over pen and ink, illustration, 1816-1820]

There is talent and then as “they” say, it’s all about perspiration. If one has some interest in and love for visual arts then get going and keep going – talented, young, old or disabled. It IS work, work, work, make, make, make that makes the artist and the place in his/her/their own story.

Blake and Lynch were huge talents, gifted and influential in their own and aligned worlds. They also tapped into another real but unseen mystical world, the imagination alive and the sense of the other as a regular visitor made alive in the making and in the final works we have to revisit.

Music as mind altering or God tapping on windows or strange groups of spiritualists doesn’t fit with rational thinking or scientific impiricism – albeit there is a huge upswing in qualitative research now – but it is a place where the spiritual is impinging on open hearts and minds. A breath, a silence or something akin.This is not a call to cultic exclusivism not a return to fundamentalism but rather is driven by my own intense interest, imagination and experience and one that I am convinced ties us all to the spirit/spiritual and to ancient and modern mythology, inexplicable inspiration, ideas and art beyond consumption and decoration.

Suggested Reading:

William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience,

Dr Martin Shaw Smokehole

Out of Office, Out of Mind Charcoal, guache on Arches Water Colour Paper 2024. Artist: Peter Breen

Peter Breen, January 2025. Brisbane Queensland Australia.

Photo Credit: Peter Breen at Goomburra Valley on Unceded Bungalung Country

For a while now my first activity of the day after a few stretches and coffee is to draw. I make quick sketches of plants on the back deck and around the yard. Small sketches – usually 2 or 3 to an A4 page with a fine tipped Mitsubishi black pigment ink pen, or occassionally with an old Parker fountain pen. The paper is an inexpensive 160 gsm 24 page pad I found in Big W for $3. The paper is exceptional with a slight textured surface and an off white tint.

This new ritual has been going for about two or three months now but last week I had one of those mornings where two of the drawings on a page were not going well. The more line I added the less sexy they were! I brushed in some Indian ink which made both drawings look like graffiti tags and not the kind of sketch I wanted – as per the above. I developed this daily ritual for eye hand coordation and to keep learning to draw! It’s also become a meditation for the day’s beginnings.

I tore out the two failures and threw the torn page segment in the bin. There was one satisfactory sketch on a third of a page with a ripped edge. After an hour or two I began to reflect on the idea of drawing/art as story where the story is attached to the process – including the frustration, the tearing and the binning with a ripped page remaining and in the drawing itself. The affect and story building of the drawing on the viewer, including the aesthetic appeal or otherwise, is part of the mystery of art for viewers, gallerists, collectors, critics and artists.

Then a new story began to form for me around the binned drawings. I pulled them out and began tearing up the page around and through the failed drawings. I began arranging these bits on found printed encyclopedia pages [ Encyclopedia Britannica] and finally I drew the opening words of a recent Bob Dylan song on two pages: I contain multitudes. The bits of discard became random collage pieces glued to the old print pages telling a story about me , my drawing that morning and the recreation of something new.

I am interested in what kind of story or experience this might trigger for others who read this “art as story” of mine.

It’s important to keep making marks if for no other reason it makes us into better artists so that we can make marks that are good! But it is also important to reflect on the failures and to let an emerging idea out of the failures grab us, find a story evolving around that emerging idea and make work in those moments that leads us to rework bad work – or sometimes to discard it altogether. We will know how to find the path in those moments. This example from my daily ritual is not about a commission or the preparation of a body of work for a group show. It was part of my daily drawing ritual and so this meant I was under no pressure or high expectations that often sits with me when I am preparing for an exhbition or a group show. Because I was able to take more time and did take a more inutive reflective approach to what might be done with the discard, I found I was able to follow a small idea about reworking the “bad art” by listening with intution into working up something entirely different that I am happy with. Inspiration comes and “doors open” when we least expect them to but we must be working and failing and succeeding and being still all in a flow that has us in its gentle grip.

Peter Breen

This is a work in progress [WIP] but probably done now. I prepared this is a hurry after hearing Stuart Greenbaum’s composition “City Lights – One Mile Up” on ABC Classic FM and my response was a memory of flying into Narm. It seems that my drawing habit is to leave the work as if finished and then return to finish it off – sometimes weeks later which is the case here. I added the horizon line which divided the drawing into 3. I back filled the black charcol random shapes and shaded the sky after adding white charcoal, added a sole tree in the window and high volage towers in white charcoal. This now works better than its earlier face. [ Charcoal on Arches paper]

Image: Water Colour on paper. #untitled Artist: Peter Breen

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British Mythologist Dr Martin Shaw tells stories, makes up stories, revises stories, translates myths and talks about them. Incessantly. I find his spoken word and books a new discipline revealing a new path of spiritual and cultural forest exploration. And it is as if I am in a hall or under a tree listening intently. Recently I watched a short video of controversial New York composer Philip Glass talking about what is required for the arts. For visual art it is looking and for music performance it is listening. Overstating the obvious but nevertheless it was a refocus reminder. My world, in and out of family, is around and outside and inside music and visual art. I have had a switch turned on in my head recently that has taken me beyond the aesthetic appeal of art as I struggle and wonder what on earth art making is for and about. My looking has changed to see that the works in our house, on walls and in draws, on desks half finished and pinned on boards as stories in process, chapters, phrases, moments. And so too are those at GOMA, NGV, QCA and MONA and on trains and subway walls. Stories and myths that invite us to look and then to listen as if it was a performance giving voice to the still small voice of the artist finding and telling her/his/their story in a mysterious darkness that we interpret and wonder at in an “ah-ha” moment – eventually – or in a dissonant disiplined looking and wondering that leaves us maybe judging the aesthetic or modality rather than wondering about the artist and the story.

The following are some visual stories of mine from about 2020.

What stories are hidden in these?

These – below – are quick drawings responding to some of my experiences in Cambodia in 1974/75 at the height of the Vietnam war with its Cambodian and Pol Pot Killing fields knocking at the door.

City Lights – A Mile Up Charcoal on Arches Paper Artist: Peter Breen

Out of Office, Out of Mind Charcoal, guache, collage on Fabriano Paper. Artist: Peter Breen

He being dead, still speaks Ink, collage, charcoal, guache, pencil, glue [liquid nails], found book cover. Artist: Peter Breen

These works have all been completed this year – 2024. 

The Martin Luther King Jr mixed media drawing is on the book cover remains of a 1950’s Funk and Wagnells Dictionary. I have used all the pages over the past few years in this book to draw and print on. Mixed media included black and white ink, charcoal, red pencil, and gouache. This is a work for the invitation only Vacant Assembly Block Show in December 2024 where artists are asked to prepare a work in the general dimensions of a besser block. The book cover has been secured by using liquid nails to adhere two strips of wood on the back with options for hooks to hang it with. I’m interested in the use of old books, old book pages and old book covers through the work of William Kentridge and Sam Lock [ a British minimalist abstract painter].

The office worker drawing is for an invitation only group show at Flying Colours bar in West End. The theme: “Out of Office”. The idea of desperation of the masses who grind away on the treadmills of living in a capitalist society at breakneck – and break the spirit – pace to fund the growth myth leads to starved souls, vacant eyes and a longing for the flowers of beauty and renewal. “Out of Office, Out of Mind” I posted a work in process as well as the finished work in the back end of the studio.

The first charcoal drawing:

“City Lights – A Mile Up“

“This work was drawn in response to Australian composer Stuart Greenbaum’s work “City Lights – A Mile Up.” I drew this in my home studio with the paper pinned to the wall. When I heard Greenbaum’s music i imagined flying into Melbourne [Naarm] my birth place. I sketched the first idea in my journal with fountain pen. Flying into Melbourne is always a joy with rolling hills on the approach, mostly dark skies and at night, lights and roads scattering and moving, heaving and dropping away. This work is about that anticipation and the inherent beauty of lights and industrial constructed impacts on once pristine space, landscape and country. My regular ritual is to draw daily, with pencil, ink or fountain pen in my studio or back deck and I have a print making practice relief print [ lino – cut] and monotype.

What is a work of art

if not to be a squeeze of something inert untouchd

and unable to be assessed by smart logic

a kind of smart not felt but deduced outside of intuition and affect

while small marks and loud, colours and movement of charcoal

splashed with bent brushes finding not a design but a final resting place

that births a song in slow sincopation

Peter Breen 2024

In 2012 when the former LNP Leader Campbell Newman came to power as premier [for one term] he came with the same kind of mantra as this guy. It is classic Machiavellian rhetoric that convinces the general public. You’re being robbed – we will fix it and lock ‘ em up. Then under Newman and Bleiji – it was graffiti writers and bikies. On the first Saturday after Newman came to power Jugglers private property was invaded by two plain clothes QPS officers when they saw two young artists painting in the tunnel. On private property! And parking their vehicle over the driveway on the footpath and having been enboldened by the new Premier they marched in waving their new found popwer. What ensued was a frigtening experience for the lads ending up with my going to the Crime and Misconduct Commission about the incident. Now under this government it is [largely] young aborigial kids. At the time Newman came to power, I was running Jugglers Art Space and had been working with a New York model Diversion program experiment in the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court [ Court #1] with magistrate Christine Roney with some contact with Sisters Inside Inc ‘s Debbie Kilroy . It was set up to assist with a new way – diversion instead of incarceration – of dealing with law and order issues in a way that would both help the arrested person to find new pathways, reduce recidivism and reduce the impact of imprisonment on the state – among other things. We were working with that court with young people arrested for graffiti misdemeanors as were the The Salvation Army Australia and other groups around other social misdemeanours. Within the first month of the new Newman Government the new Attorney General – Jarrod Bleiji – yes the same Deputy [who would be premier] Premier sworn in today dumped the Masistrate Court #1 Program. “I don’t believe in diversion programs and they don’t work” he was quoted as saying. We need and must push back against this draconion cruel and just plain dumb approach to law and order. I am not advocating for riots and law breaking without consequence. I am advocating for intelligent, compasionate and long term belief in humanity, family systems and better approaches to the crime among young people. The current new idea – it isn’t! – by this new government will fail and will not make us a better or safer state around this issue. Just a more fearful one.

Peter Breen, Co-Founder, Jugglers Art Space Inc

Queensland LNP’s ‘fresh start’ for youth detention is just a cruel repackaging of failed punitive policies 

‘Beneath all of the fancy footwork and buzzwords, it’s just another punitive approach that punishes children for the failures of the state.’

The Queensland Liberal-National Party’s so-called “fresh start” for Queensland’s youth detention system is anything but fresh. Over the weekend the LNP released its detention reform program as part of its “Making our Community Safer Plan”, citing their “Detention with Purpose” program as a fresh start for Queensland. However, what we really got was a rehash of the tired, punitive measures of the past dressed up as rehabilitation — where words like “discipline” and “purpose” were being trotted out to mask the root causes of so-called youth crime and the very nature of rehabilitation.

The plan claims to reform youth detention by focusing on discipline and rehabilitation through compulsory education, behavioural management programs, and a zero-tolerance approach to violence. Under this proposal, privileges like TV and social time would be earned through good behaviour, while violent behaviour would result in enforced periods of isolation (solitary confinement). The plan aims to reduce “recidivism” by imposing consequences for both good and bad behaviour, alongside a 12-month post-detention support program to supposedly help kids reintegrate. But beneath all of the fancy footwork and buzzwords, it’s just another punitive approach that punishes children for the failures of the state.

Put aside the fact that we do not have the kind of “youth crime crisis” that LNP Leader David Crisafulli would have you believe. This was aptly debunked by criminologists this month, who offered data demonstrating a dramatic decline in youth crime rates in every state across Australia. Children are being used in this election as electoral fodder to win votes, and Crisafulli is so desperate to be elected that he seems prepared to throw our kids into hard cells to get the top job.LNP is set for an easy win in Queensland, but its first term may pose a much greater challengeRead More

The reality is, children’s prisons have become the default response to all of society’s problems — poverty, lack of housing, inadequate access to education, and the absence of proper healthcare. In blaming children for these failures, the LNP has created a policy that is not only unjust but will also be cruel and ineffective.

Let’s be clear: youth detention centres are not and will never be places of rehabilitation. They are children’s prisons. They are designed to punish, isolate, and control children, many of whom have already suffered at the hands of the state through racist policies of child removals, over-policing, surveillance and systemic neglect. And yet, the LNP wants to sell the voting public on the idea that locking a child away in a prison will somehow “rehabilitate” them — as if the state, as the commanding force in the child’s life, can be the correcting agent to “turn the child’s life around”. For many of those children, the state has been a violent and racist abuser. 

This is a plan built on a false premise: that children in prison are there because they need discipline and consequences for bad behaviour. The LNP conveniently sidesteps the state’s role in producing the conditions that lead to criminalisation in the first place. Compulsory education, framed as a solution in this plan, feels more like a band-aid for a gaping wound. 

If the LNP truly valued education for our children, why would they rip kids out of classrooms to lock them in cages? Why not pack support around our kids to keep them in the community? How can we expect kids to engage meaningfully with education while the trauma, instability, and abuse they’ve experienced goes unaddressed? Schools often fail these children long before they are imprisoned. Once they’re inside, the LNP offers no plan for individualised support, no resources for trauma-informed care, and no pathway to genuine healing.

Education inside a prison is not a solution; it’s the state’s admission of failure. If education were truly a priority, we would not need prisons to deliver it. Forcing children to learn while isolated from their families and communities, under the psychological pressure of confinement, is nothing short of cruel.

Moreover, we must acknowledge that many of these children are victims themselves — of abuse, neglect, systemic racism, and social deprivation. Imprisoning these children is a grotesque act of victimising them all over again. It is the state’s attempt to erase its own culpability by shifting the blame onto the very children it has failed.In the 50 years since I was locked up as a kid, nothing has really changed in AustraliaRead More

The LNP’s plan to use solitary confinement — a form of isolation known to cause severe psychological damage and considered by the UN as a form of torture — is presented as a way to “reform” these young lives. But the reality is punitive measures like solitary confinement and behavioural management programs do nothing to reduce reoffending. These practices, in fact, make things worse by compounding the trauma that led many of these children into conflict with the law in the first place. 

Instead of rehashing punitive measures, the LNP should be focusing on social policies that build up our communities. We need more resources for public housing, education, mental health services, and opportunities for children to heal and grow in their communities, homes, and classrooms — not in prisons. Growth and development cannot happen behind bars. It happens in safe, nurturing environments where children are supported, not blamed and punished for circumstances beyond their control.

The LNP’s “fresh start” is a fundamental failure right from the beginning. Its so-called plan to reduce the criminalisation of our children will only increase the harm done to some of the most vulnerable in our communities. Under this policy, the real victims will be our children — criminalised, punished, and abandoned by a party more interested in slogans and soundbites than in genuine solutions.

The state must be held accountable for the well-being of every child, especially those in its care. It’s time to stop pretending that prisons are the answer. Children deserve better. They deserve real care and support, not just a new name for the same old punishment.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Debbie Kilroy

CONTRIBUTOR

Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent more than two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers.

Tabitha Lean

CONTRIBUTOR

Tabitha Lean is an abolition activist, writer and story teller who organises to disrupt and dismantle the colonial project, abolish the prison industrial complex, and annihilate racial capitalism.

From Crikey http://www.crikey.com.au

Tracks of History: Railroads, Train Art, and Cultural Narratives

One of the things I have learnt over the past 27 years since Jugglers started in Brisbane is that the evolution of art and mark making is a phenomenon with a life of its own. There is a constant in the human imagination, an endless movement in minds, souls and the visceral subconsious that creates a hunger for mark making, a hunger that needs to be asuaged and that is so once marks are made, however naive and undeveloped.

People have said to me: ” I love the mural kind of art but not the tags on fences and trains.” My usual reply is: “How do you think the process unfolds to where you enjoy the aesthetics of pubic murals?” A child’s early marks are restricted into something she must unlearn over a lifetime.

That a train museum would hold a street art event on site in Queensland was another indicator of the evolution of this life. An embracing of the unstoppable life of art and artists. Someone has said “Graffiti is the last bastion of freedom of speech” and yet this bastion will never be silenced. Street art in Queensland is alive and well and so too are tags and throw ups on QR trains. I have seen more train graffiti in Brisbane in the last couple of years than I had in the previous 20 – except after the 2011 Brisbane floods when trains were unguarded and accessible away from the Bowen Hills train yards.

There are tidal waves of crack downs and graffiti activity on trains and buildings in Queensland over the years that is indicative of the hunger for mark making and control of its aesthetic and application. Murals and street art are not replacing graffiti and one could say that there is an attempt at the gentrification of the art of graffiti. Mark making has for centuries had graffiti interations with names and tags while graffiti and tagging with aerosol was a new public art phenonmenon kicked off in New York on trains the 1960’s. It has been famously captured in the 1983 film Style Wars and by photographer Martha Cooper in her bible of graffiti Subway Art . A film by Brisbane film maker and Jugglers friend, Selina Miles – Martha tells some of the story. A TAG Conference was initiated in 2017 in Europe to consider the history and current practice of tags and graffiti. https://www.tag2024.org/

Campbell Newman the 2012-2014 Queensland Premier came to power on the back of a few slogans with one very clear one being his mantra to eliminate graffiti and graffiti mark makers from Queensland. His attempt included bullying and intimidation but clearly this has not worked. The argument around cost to the public is understandable while graffiti as the bastion of freedom of speech is as much about politics as art. It won’t go away soon and my view is that it may well emerge as something hungered for as social media infects the synapses of this generation.

Train art at Brunswick Street Station, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. September 2024

I was asked to facilatate a panel of 5 artists who were painting at the close of this all day event around the theme: Tracks of History:Railroads, Rail Art and Cultural Narratives. The artists were public street art muralists with a range of experiences in street art and graffiti. The conversation did touch on the illegal experimentation but mostly it focussed on the evolution of street art that now postively includes aboriginal and female artists that was once in Australia a young white male only collective.

Despite the heat of the day – it was Ipswich after all – there was a strong sense of good times and the plan for it to be repeated in 2025. The event was initiated by the Museum of Brisbane and curated by Yonder Festival and Super Ordinary in Brisbane. All artists and panel participants were paid – as was the facilitator and even though it was not an hourly rate it did cover some basic costs for travel and some paint. Boards and all preparation were supplied by the museum.

Peter Breen, October 14, 2024.

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”

– Alfred North Whitehead

“I searched for Buddha – the wise one who sees and knows the true nature of reality, the one who understands the cause and solution of suffering, the one who walks in peace, serenity, and liberation. I searched for Buddha but I could not find him. I only found this enlightenment inside myself.

I searched for Guanyin – the mother of universal and indiscriminate compassion, the one with motherly resolve to liberate all her children from suffering. I searched for Guanyin but could not find her. I only found this boundless compassion inside myself.

I searched for Jesus – the one who unifies his divinity and humanity, the one who transcends the dualism of God and man, the one who knows no separation between heaven and earth. I searched for Jesus but could not find him. I only found this great completion inside myself.

I searched for Socrates – the one who questions, the one who investigate all things curiously, deeply, critically and introspectively, the one who ordered his life according to virtue and love. I searched for Socrates but I could not find him. I only found this wisdom inside myself.

I searched for Dr. King – the one who would not claim freedom for himself as long as his fellow human beings languished in isolation, suffering and oppression, the one who fearlessly championed the cause of the victimized, marginalized, maltreated, and forgotten. I searched for Dr. King but I could not find him. I only found this calling inside myself.

I searched for a God – the fundamental nature of reality, the ultimate ground of all being, the primordial essence of all that is, the wholeness and completeness at the heart of all things. I searched for a God out there somewhere but I could not find him. I only found this ultimate reality as the nature of all things and the essence of what I am.”

Jim Palmer

From Jim Palmer – Facebook Page – Founder for Non-Religious Spirituality

The personal is personal! And sometimes there’s a memory lapse as I go on and write or talk or draw as it always comes back to making sense of living, and now, impending death – I’m well at the moment and have no life threatening diseases – and God/god! And the church/religion! I spent 52 years flat out in it and now at 74 I have been flat out out of it for 22 years!

I read a book by a conservative activist in the 1970’s Oz Guiness “Doubt – Faith in two minds” and it helped me put doubts on the back burner and ostensibly come back to them. They, doubts, are all I have at times and yet the closed systems I hung onto needed and have been pushed away, abandoned and questioned. This is my journey and in finding Jim Palmer on Facebook was an interesting discovery. Strong dominant male leaders have sucked me in over the years and so I am a bit wary. But there is a pattern of his kind around. My own thoughts, readings, children and various authentic social media accounts post my exit from the church/religion continue to lead me to similar positions as Palmer [cited above].

Two excellent books from a pile of excellent books – and one that quotes Alfred Lord Whitehead – is by American theologian Catherine Keller – On the Mystery – Discerning Divinity in Process. The other is Courting the Wild Twin by the wonderful mythologist Dr Martin Shaw. Keller’s style is very demanding to read with a style that I need to re-read to get the gist of. But I get what she is driving at and it’s good to read a woman theologian’s work! Shame on me. Here are strong words from my favourite chapter – Sticky Justice: “Agapic or compassionate love has seemed sentimental, inffectual, patronizing. It prefers charity to structural change. In response we can only insist : those who are oppressed don’t want our compassion, they just want justice. They want a shift in the stucture of power that block their possibilities, that shut down their life process. ” P114

Trying to get there with this.

Peter Breen.

Nicole Tate – Stairwell Project Harpist, Cancer Ward, RBWH, June 2024

As you know The Stairwell Project and You Can Make Some Noise Workshops are two small live music initiatives we started at the Royal Brisbane and Womens’ Hospital – The Stairwell Project in 2015 and the YCMSN Workshops in 2022. It seems we are, with both of them, “punching above our weight” in respect of the the calming and other positive affects on patients, staff and musicians.

I had a phone call last week from Nicole Tate who plays harp in one of the general cancer wards at the RBWH each Saturday, being unavailable during the week. In school holidays however she plays there on weekdays. Patients are coming and going a lot more with clinics open and consultants in the wards. Last week during the school holidays she was in the ward midweek. There was no crisis or roster problem – it was that she wanted to share a bit of that day’s experience with me – a spontaneus group singing with her as she played , the smiles on people’s faces, the positivity from staff. I gathered from her report that that day was a high point in her regular weekly visits.

Getting the balance right in this live music preject in hospital wards continues to be part of our prescriptive considerations. What times are best, when do we leave, what if there is an emergency, is this music distracting for staff, what is the right repertoire, what instrument would be out of place? And then there are moments like this one that Nicole shared with me that sometimes just happen, that a flow arrives that carries something magical into the ward and hearts, minds and maybe even bodies of everyone for a few moments.

Dr Michael Knopf and a passing patient on level 4, Joyce Tweddell Building, RBWH, September 2024.

“This photo is from a few years ago. I spoke with this gentleman after he had been listening for some time. The photo was taken by a SWP team member. We all had a lovely chat and he was really happy to have music where he was having treatments.

This past week at SWP in the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital:

This is one of the areas the SWP musicians perform for patients and family, staff and visitors. It’s in a little niche across from 2 sitting areas near the elevators and down from the entry way in Oncology. Some of us also play in the chemotherapy ward for patients and staff.

People are all different of course- as individuals and coming from many parts of the world. I’ve met Aussies from everywhere, but also Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Kiwis, Brazilians, Paraguayans, and also many from North America and Europe.

It’s good to keep in mind that often the patients are quite ill feeling from their disease or medication. I play Bach, improvisations, Beatles, Bossa Novas and classical repertoire too. This week I played much softer than I normally do as many were unwell and closing their eyes to deal with the pain and discomfort. They do hear the music and will very often thank me as I get up to go to another spot.

This week we had: the lady so ill that she never opened her eyes in a grim-and-bear it face; the lady with the scarf on her head cheerfully chatting to the snacks gentleman but in turning her head to one side in the conversation one notes the red and tear filled eyes; the lady from Papua New Guinea who claps carefully but enthusiastically when I finish “Love Me Tender” and who later when I’m in another part of the ward walks by to tell me I’d buy your CDs!

The old gentleman who sits quietly munching a cookie while his wife sits next to him reading and, hilariously, the old fellow from Eastern Europe who, as I am playing, makes a blowing noise from his mouth. I turn to see what’s going on and apparently there was part of his sandwich caught in his dentures. He had taken them out, was holding them and blow the debris away!

It was not appropriate for me to laugh aloud.

A little while later, I place my guitar under my right arm and pick up my foldable chair and depart. Around the ward to the hallway and exit, several nurses smile and say “thank you” or “beautiful”. (I think they meant the music?)

Live, sensitive and caring music is denied most patients in the world. It seems to me to be a highly impactful accompaniment to medical treatment.”

Words by Michael on his personal Facebook Page

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