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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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This week on The ABR Podcast, Kevin Bell addresses the crisis in housing in Australia – a crisis which he says is at risk of ‘turning into a social and economic catastrophe’. Kevin Bell is a self-described baby boomer who, in his role as a Supreme Court judge, wrote a number of influential judgments on human rights and housing. He is a former director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Listen to Kevin Bell’s ‘On our moral watch: The disgrace of homelessness in Australia’, published in the September issue of ABR.
On the door to Olive Cotton’s room there is a Dymo-tape label with the name ‘N. Boardman’. Boardman has no relevance whatsoever to Olive’s life story. His name is there because Olive and her husband Ross McInerney’s home – what they always called the ‘new house’ – was previously a construction workers’ barracks. Boardman was one of the occupants, along with Ken Livio and Chris Parris, whose names appear on the doors to adjacent rooms. Olive and Ross, who lived in the ‘new house’ for nearly thirty years, never removed the labels or modified their bedrooms, bathroom, or living areas. This fascinates and perplexes me. Why wouldn’t you erase the signs of those who lived there before you? Why keep them in your most personal, intimate space, your home? What does it mean to live like this? These questions are part of a much larger set arising from my desire to better understand Olive’s life and work, especially during the years when she and Ross lived in country New South Wales, mostly on the property they named ‘Spring Forest’. For much of this time, Olive was invisible to the photography world.
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