Cyborg Music: the ultimate merging of wo/man, art and machine (2022) Any philosophy that denies creativity to machines is nothing more than a security blanket of romantically sanitised, carefully curated, historically inaccurate, self-indulgently misguided tom foolery thrown up to ward off the possibility that composers and musicians will become unnecessary and irrelevant for the vast […]
At the start and end of each day, our long-haired, whippet thin guide Elijah would announce it was time for a “Map Chat” and we’d gather around to learn where we had paddled or where we going to paddle as we wended our way around a couple of the northern-most Yasawa Islands. If you don’t
Sea- kayaking in Fiji: Type 2 Fun. Read More »
Pictured above is the bust made in Truganini’s likeness that is held in the Australian Museum in Sydney. It is a copy of an earlier one made by Benjamin Law but there is an obvious difference between it and the original. In the copy the sculpted shell necklace, a prominent feature of the original, has
Truganini’s Necklace Read More »
Harry Julian Onsman On her 32nd birthday in 1951, Elisabeth Onsman gave birth to her second son, naming him after her parents. Grandfather Harmen Visser was an introverted realist; grandmother Jeltje Heerema was a socialist activist. On the paternal side, grandfather Edzer was a football fanatic and grandmother Geertruida was a non-nonsense individualist. Inevitably Harmen
Harry Onsman Eulogy Read More »
When I came home late one afternoon, early evening really, there was a letter lying on the kitchen table. Neither the kind with a window that inevitably brings a bill or something equally as uninteresting nor a handwritten one that demanded to be read sitting down with a cup of tea, this one was an
from “A Foreigner in the Goldfish Bowl” Read More »
“What does it mean to move out of the present tense?” – Blessed City There exists a contention that without the context of time and place, existence is meaningless; that if we live, “in the present moment but without a sense of the past or future … that moment is devoid of meaning or moral
Exile: Truganini and Gwen Harwood in Oyster Cove Read More »
“He was the most beautiful man,” my Aunt Dora told me wistfully, more than sixty years later. She was thirteen when she first met her new brother-in-law. Her sister Elizabeth, known as Lieske, had left the rural north of the Netherlands the previous year to work as a doctor’s receptionist in Amsterdam, where she had
Bigamy and Shiny Buttons Read More »
The Love Song of Richard Wagner’s The Valkyrie. Good evening and welcome to this chat about this evening’s program. My name is Andrys Onsman and I am an adjunct at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University. Before I begin, I must firstly acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we
The Love Song Richard Wagner’s The Valkyrie Read More »
I was born a Frisian – a statement that usually causes snorts, sniggers and hilarious comments about cows. I have no idea how the cows feel about the jokes but I’m over it. It’s not that I can’t take a joke; it’s just that they’re not funny. But of course, it’s not really about cows.
On Christian Names Read More »
After a year teaching in China, one of my colleagues gave me two beautiful scrolls. One was a calligraphy alphabet she had drawn herself on gold-coloured paper and the other was a scroll of a famous poem, hand made by her calligraphy teacher at art school. At more than a meter and a half in
Humility in translation. Read More »