Melbourne Pride March 2020

Happy Pride, Melburnians! And happy 25th anniversary of the first pride march in Melbourne.

The backs of two people wearing body-length rainbow pride flags on their backs. The photo is taken in a large sports field with lots of other people in the background.

This year the Victorian bisexual community had the largest marching contingent ever!

A group of people are sitting, crouching, and standing in a large sports field. People are wearing bisexual pride flags colours are holding flags and signs that say things like ‘live and let bi’, ‘bi-fi’, and ‘not a phase’.

The weather was lovely, the crowd was great, and the march was lots of fun :)

A group of about 75 people are cheering as they post for a group photo. The group is wearing bisexual flag colours and are holding up flags and signs.

The biggest cheer of the march — and rightly so, particularly this year — went to this group, though: the Country Fire Authority.

Firefighters from the Country Fire Authority hold up large flags: one for the CFA and one rainbow pride flag.

Sadly, despite the plethora of dogs at today’s march, I only managed to photograph a few of them. So let me end with a photo of the adorable, friendly, and all-round good boy Charlie :)

A small brown poodle on a rainbow coloured lead.

Ludovico Einaudi at Sidney Myer Bowl

After a day at the Australian Open tennis, Nadia and I went to the the Sidney Myer Bowl to watch the fantastic Ludovico Einaudi on his Seven Days Walking world tour.

This is ten minutes before the performance started.

A large crowd is seated on a hill overlooking an open air stage area, the front of which is visible to the extreme left of the photo.

And here’s the man himself, along with his accompanying performers on violin and cello.

A stage showing a man playing a grand piano while two performers on the other side of the piano are playing a violin and cello.

My favourite bit of the performance, I think, was when the three musicians improvised what they were playing based on the outline of peaks of three mountain ranges in the Alps (where Einaudi was when he came up with the music for Seven Days Walking).

Three performers are stage on playing a grand piano, violin, and cello. They’re looking at a massive screen behind the stage, across which three coloured lines show the outline of mountain ranges. The musicians are each following one line and are adjusting their music based on what these overlapping coloured lines are doing as they’re drawn across the screen.

Even if you’re not into classical music you should check Einaudi out. If nothing else listen to ‘Night’, which is my favourite track from his 2015 ‘Elements’ album.

Australian Open 2020

It’s January, which means it’s time for our annual Australian Open selfie :)

Selfie of a man and a woman, both wearing sunglasses and straw hats.

This year’s Australian Open was fun. We didn’t wander around too much, but we got excellent seats at Court 3 and stayed there for most of the day. (The joys of getting there early and getting lucky with the day’s schedule of play so that most of the matches you want to watch are all being played on one court.)

A woman crouches low in front of the net on a tennis court while her partner - behind her, at the other end of the court - serves the ball.

One of the doubles matches we got to watch on this court included top-ranked Australian player Ash Barty. The queues to get in just before that match were the longest we’ve seen in a while.

Long queues outside Court 3 at the Australian Open in Melbourne.

Fortunately we’d arrived early enough to watch the match from a nice, shady spot :)

World #1 Ash Barty waits to receive a server from her opponent.

Also, we were sitting just below one of the Hawk-Eye cameras that tracks the ball during play. I only learned today that this ball tracking technology is accurate up to 3.6mm!

A camera mounted to a pole around a tennis court.

Celebrating Nadia's numerous 2019 achievements

Nadia does a lot of cool stuff, but she’s not the best at telling the world about it or at celebrating her successes. That’s where I come in :) Going forward, I’m going to write about all the fantastic stuff she gets up to.

To kick things off, here’s some of the fabulousness she’s been up to this year…

Writing

Nadia has had two publications so far this year — one creative, one academic.

August in Lahore

On 13 March ‘August in Lahore’ was published in Issue 4: Performing gender of Not Very Quiet (“a twice yearly online journal for women's poetry”).

Poetic encounters

On 1 May ‘Poetic encounters: Language, sound and poetry’ was published in Issue 9.1: Inhabiting language of Axon (“an international peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the characteristics of creativity and the creative process.”) .

Abstract

Sound is essential to poetry and poetry is an essential element of human language. As a simultaneous trilingual engaged in the study of multilingual poetic expression, I will use the development of my own plurilingual poetic ‘instinct’ to map the location of poetry within and between languages. I argue that poetry does not grow out of language so much as inhabits the basic aural building blocks of language, the potential for it existing always just beneath the surface of speech. This is tested by examining multilingual poetry as well as translations of poetry across languages to see what is lost and what emerges.

Publishing

Nadia isn’t just a publishee, she’s also a publisher.

Australian Multilingual Writing Project

On 6 May Nadia published Issue 2 of the fantastic Australia Multilingual Writing Project (AMWP).

AMWP is the first ever journal of multilingual writing that includes both the text and audio of the pieces published.

This project aims to provide a space to showcase some of the linguistic complexity that resists and persists in Australia today. Multilingual people often engage in what is referred to as ‘code-switching’, which means using two or more languages at the same time in the same piece of communication. Most of the time, this multilingualism is discouraged, seen as demonstrating a lack of proficiency, considered a ‘pollution’ of the dominant language (English), and so on.

This space is different.

Here, multilingual writers can mix their languages with English to their hearts’ content. The work we publish demonstrates the linguistic, aesthetic and creative reach of multilingual writing and seeks to interrupt, enhance, challenge, and generally complicate, the flow of English.

Events

Nadia participated in two events at this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF).

Future of Language

‘Future of Language’ was a “special mini-series collaboration with EWF” in which “four poets explore multilingualism in the many forms it takes”.

Since this was part of EWF’s digital festival, the output wasn’t the usual text and audio publication, but a video. This video was included in a poetry installation launched on 24 June and is also available online.

Multilingual Writing

‘Multilingual Writing’ was a conversation with Gabriella Munoz in which they discussed “the art and challenges of writing across languages”.

This was part of the National Writers' Conference (“Australia’s largest gathering of emerging writers”) on 22 June.

Poetry performances

Nadia performed her poetry at five events this year.

Black and White

On 23 January she performed at ‘Black and White (Clichés & Expectations: A Rebellion)’, a spoken word event organised as part of ‘Lisa Skye’s Harehole Takeover!’.

We're here, we're queer, and we're not simple caricatures of a lifestyle. We're a diverse group of disparate voices with unique stories and experiences. Screw the boxes seeking to contain us, this is a night to challenge the norm: hetero, homo, gender and anything else binary and boring.

Rapid Fire

On 29 January she was invited to perform at ‘Rapid Fire’.

With over 35 past incarnations under its belt, Rapid Fire is both the longest running spoken word event at the Hare Hole, and its most popular.

[…]

Rapid Fire's recipe for success is simple: give 12 writers 6 minutes each, draw the order from a hat and ensure that nobody goes over time. This formula provides the perfect platform for writers to refine, condense and edit a story, while providing ample time to display their literary brilliance. It is a win for writers and audiences alike.

Love Letters to Feminisms

On 9 March she performed at the Closing Performances of the ‘Love Letters to Feminisms’ series for International Women’s Day 2019.

Love Letters to Feminisms sees Footscray play host to an exciting series of events exploring feminism in its many complicated dimensions. The group exhibition presents selected works from twenty female-identifying artists – all based in Melbourne. They include artists from First Nations backgrounds, refugee and culturally diverse backgrounds, as well as current asylum seekers, newly arrived migrants, LGBTIQ artists and others.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an afternoon of talks, a special session on feminist life drawing, and will culminate in a live performance event at an accessible venue on Saturday 9 March to mark International Women’s Day.

Synthetic Heat

On 17 April she was invited to do a reading at ‘Synthetic Heat Reading Series 2.1’.

Synthetic Heat is an evening of performed poetry, prose, and graphic storytelling. The series centres on nonfiction, which can be understood as writing that is tied closely and referentially to the flesh-world our limbs are entangled in. Or, as Maggie Nelson’s describes it: ‘interesting prose that bears witness to fact, life, and the problematics of having a body in spacetime.’

Co-curated by Melbourne writers and artists Eloise Grills and Ellena Savage, Synthetic Heat throws into relief some of the most invigorating ideas-based lyric storytelling that is emerging from the outside the usual literary establishments.

‘these words’

On 31 May she was commissions to write for ‘these words’, an art exhibition at KINGS.

'these words' considers how artists incorporate language into their practices, challenging the dominance of English in a linguistically diverse country such as Australia. The exhibition explores how language acts as both a unifying force and a barrier; an integral tool for understanding our own culture as well as the culture of others.

Writing accompanying this exhibition is by Nadia Niaz, creator of The Australian Multilingual Writing Project. Nadia is a writer and academic whose work investigates multilingual creative expression, particularly in poetry, the practicalities and politics of translation, and language use among third culture kids and other globally mobile cohorts.

Narrator

One thing most people don’t know about Nadia is that she is also a narrator. She narrates short stories for EscapePod (“the premier science fiction podcast magazine”); PodCastle (“audio performances of fantasy short fiction and all its subgenres, including urban fantasy, slipstream, high fantasy, and dark fantasy”); and Cast of Wonders (“the leading voice in young adult speculative short fiction”).

This year so far two of her narrations have been published (another is in production):

Editor

Finally, Nadia is also an editor. Her biggest editing project this year has been on a major report for a local non-profit.

Lots more to come

But wait, there’s more! We’re only half way through 2019 so stay tuned for more of Nadia’s awesomeness to be featured here :)

Selfie with Nadia from June 2019.

Sunny Saturday

We’re heading into a rainy work week in Melbourne, but at least Saturday was nice and sunny.

Sunny Saturday selfie (with dog).

Maggie was not amused with all my photo taking, though. She wanted me to play tug with her.

What? Oh. You’re taking another photo of me. You could, of course, be playing tug with me. Right now. With this very toy. You know that, right? Right? But no. You’re going to be boring. Again. *sigh*

She did keep chewing on that rope toy quite happily, though — with only the occasional distraction.

And she followed me indoors afterwards.

Oh, hello. You’re at my level for a change.