But it is certainly worth reading this though-provoking article form Jared in this context.

This article is from http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html - it is copied from there and pasted in below.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts -- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

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Screening Information
Digital File and DVD PAL/NTSC available
Running Time: 80mins (Main Feature 55mins)

This City is a Body is the kind of film that generates discussion.

It is available for screenings at schools, religious institutions, community organisations and private residences. Screening rates are affordable and tiered to commercial, non-commercial and community needs.

Please contact us to discuss further.

Shakthi Sivanathan
c/o CuriousWorks
shakthi@curiousworks.com.au
(02) 9281 2570
402/11 Randle St Surry Hills NSW 2010 Australia

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by James

Spider Man, Spider Man. I get this at least five times a day, on the packed wet subway, in bars, eating baozi on the street in Beijing. At first, it was a completely unnerving experience to be approached by complete strangers demanding that I am a spandex-clad super-hero underneath my button-down Peter Parker work clothes. However I’ve always fantasised about being an undercover vigilante. I’m quite chuffed really that I’m finally being recognised en masse (even if im riding the coat tails of legitimate fame).

I don’t actually think it’s because I look that much like Tobey Maguire. My half Greek friend in India has been called Spider Man too. It’s a combination of things, my face, obviously, and my hair. But also in some literal way, the ability when walking around here to draw an almost super-power awe at my western mannerisms, my subconscious disregard for minute social conventions, my default egalitarianism, my bounding enthusiasm. People would much prefer I was Spider Man than the reality of my actual western-ness, which is way too audacious for any one with regular human powers.

I would much rather be Spider Man too, than the alternative cast: a sensationalist, overbaked cynical White man, already jaded and drunk on my own intellectual arrogance. I’ve seen some tired expats wearing this around, and I want to avoid this at all costs.

Middle ground is so difficult to find, and every assumption I’ve made has been wrong. No, humour isn’t an effective way. No, trying too hard has made it worse. No, shutting up simply shuts me out and shits me off. No one here has asked about me, who I am, where I’m from, what I do, who my friends are, do I play a musical instrument, whats my favourite foods/colours/songs. To do so would be an attack on my privacy, and would display a curiosity unbecoming.

So for the moment I’m Spider Man. I’m the powerful, the unknown, the untouchable. Mystery has built around me in my work place like some kind of visiting dignitary. No one has seen the real Spider Man.

And for now I think we’re both exceptionally happy with this arrangement, for now we’re actually doing all we can to fortify these positions. And at least in this, we’re sharing a common purpose.

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by Matt

When I think of dangerous border crossings, I tend to think of those horror stories one hears about stolen passports and ludicrous bribes extracted deep in foreign jungles or at gun-point somewhere in Siberia. Over the past five years, I have begun to see that, for some, Australia’s borders are just as dangerous. Need I say more than Tampa. Little did I know that I would be engaging on a little dangerous border crossing of my own.

I am currently in Canada and trying to bring my partner, who is also male, back to Australia to live with me. As queer men, we are used to dangerous border crossings, albeit of the more gender-bending, transgressive social and sexual variety, but not one so immovable and unfair as that of world-wide immigration. We are two people who have fallen in love. We met at Mardi Gras, when both of us were working as volunteers, and have travelled each other’s countries and now want to start making a life with one another. In Canada, this may lead to marriage. I’ll be able to arrive at a border and tick “SPOUSE” and I’ll be in like Flynn. In Australia, he has no box to tick (which some people, including some queers, are just fine with) and he’ll have to enter as a tourist and go home after three months. One year in to our relationship, we can claim an “INTER-DEPENDENCY” and he may become a temporary resident. The word inter-dependency is the furthest representation of what we have and speaks nothing of the affection and love we share for one another.

The concept of immigration is strange to me. Why do we erect these borders in the first place? Why do we try to legislate against love? Right now, in Canada, we live as others do and have the rights that others do. In Australia, we could end up on either sides of a barbed wire fence, fingers outstretched to one another, me and my inter-dependent.

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by Stuart

Oh, the idealism of youth. Of course, we agreed with our lecturer, teaching English in Thailand would make us better at teaching English to migrant Australians. Goes without saying. We would give superb lessons in Thailand, and we were going to Change the World.

But something intervened. The World Changed Us.

Those of you who assumed that a degree in Primary Teaching wouldn’t be a ticket to the jetset life, stop sniggering. Some thirty of us aspiring teachers found ourselves preparing lessons in forty-six degree heat on the outskirts of Bangkok, albeit only metres from the end of the international runway at Don Muang Airport.

Were those lessons superb? Er…no. We sweated through hours of classes with primary students, sang songs with tertiary students and even injected a certain Australian je ne c’est quoi into proceedings at the Royal Thai Airforce Academy. Our students learned very little.

But our lecturer was right: the experience would make us better teachers when working with new migrants to Australia. How? By placing us, however fleetingly, in their shoes. Like many migrants, we were living in a land where we couldn’t speak the native language.

It became clear that one could survive in outer Bangkok with a woefully small Thai vocabulary. I’d be surprised if I learned more than about twenty phrases: enough to buy food (aroi ma — very delicious!), say my name, and catch a bus going in completely the wrong direction. It became clear that one could live in a place where one didn’t speak the language: but that one’s life would be superficial and disconnected.

After living in a very multicultural place like inner Sydney, outer Bangkok was alarmingly monocultural. Everyone except us was Thai. Not to say there weren’t stark divisions between religions, jobs and wealth among the Thai people: we were surrounded by appalling poverty and ostentatious wealth, piled one on the other. But nonetheless, us pasty Australians stood out like the gangly, perspiring ferang we were.

Wherever we went, we felt like the centre of attention: I quickly learned that the woven-bamboo sunhat I’d blithely chosen to wear denoted me as a delivery person: a cyclist earning a tiny wage as a messenger. A friend had, unknowingly, opted for a hat associated with market gardening, and the spectacle of us walking to school aroused lots of comment and mirth from the locals, all in a language we didn’t understand.

Not to say that the attention was unwelcome: we were treated with such extraordinary generosity wherever we went. A young assistant in the supermarket assumed I was German, and practised her best danke schoen on me. I replied in my politest schoolboy German, so as to not offend.

As obvious outsiders, we were welcomed, and treated with warmth and affection: really the reverse of the government-sanctioned response in Australia. Nothing we could have done would have repaid the dignity and warmth of our welcome in Thailand. (And just a tenth of that dignity and warmth would restore credibility to Australia’s immigration system).

The language barrier didn’t divide us from the Thais, but it did cause another strange change in us.

My own language, even living amongst other Australians, became impoverished. We were so used to speaking simply, and in concrete terms, to be understood by our classes, that we began to speak and think that way all the time. “I am going to the garden. Would you like to come?” See Dick and Jane. Within a matter of weeks, my ability to communicate (in English or Thai), felt limited to the most obvious and literal level. Through heat or laziness or otherwise, subtlety and nuance had been stripped from our language and our lives.

I haven’t ever migrated to a country where I can’t speak the language. I don’t know if this dislocation of thought and language is a common experience for migrants, or if I can presume to generalise based on my experience. But I hope that it made me just a little more attuned to the experience of Australia’s newest arrivals.

Was it a World-Changing experience, as our idealism had hoped? No, not at all. Were we changed? Immeasurably.

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A poem by Raj Arumugam
Visit his website

What do you make of me
that you issue me these letters and forms
and make me wait endlessly and give
good circumspect chatter if I ask what I
should do next?
What secret conclusions
form the basis of your dealings?
What do you intend to make of me?
Perhaps you visualize my future as a
mute tight-lipped nodding Indian
in his convenience store,
neatly put out in the
quietest lane
of a distant suburb. Pleasant and agreeable
you will have me, smiling and ready to serve,
immobile at the counter, briskly walking
to the shelves to serve you
when you deign to come on an odd
shopping spree
to get exotic spices and newly-heard of condiments
that you will probably store for long in
your kitchen and throw away anyway.
You will not have me out of your
collection of stereotypes, will you?
No, I shall not allow you to
insinuate me into worthlessness
with your cold and bureaucratic silences
and ready-made answers
for I know my worth
as you yours.

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by Xavier

I’m a Basque, which I suppose makes me something like an European  aborigine, or at least belong to a group that was in this land long  time before many others came.

Those are my roots, of which I have a strong sense of pride (one of the basic ingredients for cultural survival). And for example make use of Euskera, our unique language, as often as I can so that it can be transformed from a treasure kept by just a few of us into an everyday tool used by many more.

But I have always loved to travel and find out what was out there. Those travels have taken me to Australia a few times, having spent a year and a half in Sydney in the most recent one.

My time in Sydney has given me the opportunity of meeting and learning from an incredible array of people with the most diverse cultural backgrounds, an eye and mind opening experience! I believe it was a quite well balanced interchange, as I was exposed to all influences during the week and had the chance of going on Sundays to our club where I could share a sense of belonging with fellow Basques and any friends that wanted to share a meal with us.

I have also noticed that in Australia other cultures are tolerated (and not necessarily respected) under the umbrella of an Anglo-Saxon system. That tolerance, even if imperfect (remember the Cronulla incidents and how it was just a few of us a week later rallying against racism), is much better than what you can find in many other parts of the world. However, and belonging to a nation that struggles for its survival, I found specially disgraceful to find absolutely no trace of the presence of its first inhabitants, their way of doing or their knowledge and connection to the land in everyday Australian life (seeing a few people playing the yidaki – didgeridoo is not enough). I must admit here that I probably didn’t do enough to approach them, and even if they have my absolute respect as native people, in the end my personal connection with them was close to non-existent. I wish things were different or at least I had done a bit more.

Oh, before I forget, I tried to extend my stay in Sydney (migrate) where I felt really comfortable enjoying all this cultural interchange. But even if I tried hard, as many others, I didn’t succeed overcoming all the difficulties posed by the Australian migration policy, and had to leave the country a few weeks ago.

Now I’m back in the Basque Country. Back to my roots? Not really, my time out of here has shown me that this is where the source of my roots are, but that identity, those roots, are part of me and come
with me wherever I go.

It seems I will be never be able to satisfy this need to travel and learn from others but I’ll keep trying … soon, in a few weeks time, I’m going to Central America … pack my roots … and leave …we will see
what I find there.

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We had an intimate, private screening of the film work in late 2009 with participants and colleagues from the CuriousWorks community.

It was an amazing night, with delicious curries from Shakthi’s mum, Anandavalli – and the film had a brilliant reception.

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Artwork by Aimee
Poem by Shakthi

this city is a body remembers what it felt like to arrive
here for the  first time, curious and displaced. 

she wonders at the roots of our fears:
those assumptions which make islands out of people. 

as she breathes, her lungs fill
with the ghostly sediment
hovering above our cleanest streets.

she knows what forces us out of safety.

she watches us belonging – again and again and again –
and she recalls once more
the feeling of arrival,
of being a traveller
in her own city. 

she isn’t so good at tolerating, integrating and winning the values debate.
she might not even pass her own citizenship test.
she’s been too busy
talking to people
and charting one of those maps you might find of us,
stitching our ways across the city.

and all she really wants
is to share her map of sydney, with yours.

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by Shakthi

For the first time in a long time, we can take a breath.

Our sold-out season of This City is a Body at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum is over – and we can honestly state that CuriousWorks has never done something which generated so much stunning, positive feedback from so many different people before.

It’s not often you get to put on a show in one of Sydney’s oldest and most beautiful buildings – a show that challenges and celebrates what the city is built on. It’s even more rare to be able to share your
creations with so many different, appreciative people from across the city – from Koori aunties to recent migrants to attentive groups of eastern suburbs school kids.

One punter even wrote to the organisers of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, stating that we’d set such a high standard, he was worried the rest of his festival tickets might be a let down!

A HUGE thank you to everyone who came along and helped make the final installment of The Migrant Projectsuch a success – especially the Historic Houses Trust for being open to bringing the cultures and
traditions of many Sydneysiders into one of the city’s most beautiful spaces. It means a great deal to us and was the perfect final installment to our live outings.

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This City is a Body was at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in 2007.

This package contains the following press:

• City Weekly Interview – Josie Gagliano
• SX Editorial
• MX Preview – Karina Dunger
• InnerWestern Courier Preview – Rashell Habib
• Drum Media Interview – Jack Tregonig
• Liverpool Leader - Anita Maglicic and Domenica Acitelli

See the full gallery on Posterous

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A contemporary dance piece about longing and memory.

Dancer: Paul Cordeiro
Filmed by: Vincent Tay, Iqbal Barkat, Elias Nohra
Editor: Shakthidharan

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A video layering the experience of William Dawes on the first fleet to Australia with more recent migrant experiences to the country.

Dancers: Jenni White, Paul Cordeiro
Editor: Shakthidharan
Filmed by: Vincent Tay, Iqbal Barkat, Elias Bakhos

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by Arvijit Sarkar

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Original article can be found here.

Spinning outside the artistic – and racial – boundaries
By Clare Morgan
March 22, 2006

The artists and performers who have spent the past year devising a
show about the migrant experience certainly haven’t been short of
material. From debate about Islamic culture to the Cronulla riots,
issues of race and national identity have dominated headlines for
months.

Those issues have found creative expression in The Migrant Project, in
which artists and performers with cultural heritages from around the
world have come together to weave music, dance, theatre, visual media,
sound, light and installation.

After 12 months in development, the project culminates this week with
Grounded. The first instalment, Standing, played at the Performance
Space last September, and Drifting, was part of the National
Multicultural Festival in Canberra last month.

The man behind The Migrant Project, Shakthidharan, says he wanted to
create art that moved away from compartmentalising migrants. “I have
seen some really amazing shows, often from quite mainstream
companies,” he says. “But I was thinking about it and realised they
are all very much about one particular culture, one particular issue.
I was worried that while they were fantastic shows, in a way they were
supporting the very thing they were criticising. They would be outside
everyday Australian life, and people would come and see it as being
outside Australian life.

“We wanted to explore what happens when these
things come into contact with each other. We talked a lot about that
and what came out was the idea that everything we have in common in
Sydney is our identity as migrants.” The 23-year-old set up the group
Curious Works to bring together “people who don’t usually meet each
other, ideas that don’t usually come together and community groups
that don’t normally speak to each other”. “To the extent that we could
manage it, they are a bunch of strangers in a room trying to find out
common points between each other. It was about people stepping outside
their boundaries, artistic as well as cultural.”

That has meant some creative friction: “The dancers want to know that
the whole story can be told in movement, and the musos say you can’t
do that. It’s about being co-dependent, and working that way is really
hard. We argue a lot but it’s all really good argument.”

The Cronulla riots inevitably get a mention, although Shakthidharan
says it is not in the context of an expose or laying blame. “With the
Tampa and the Cronulla riots, they’re all about this idea that some
group somehow possesses something,” he says. “If you start from the
viewpoint that all of us travelled here, and none of us own this
place, I think it would help things a lot.”

Conscious that some might regard the project as a leftie love-in,
Shakthidharan says: “It’s not about having a show that says ‘Howard’s
an arsehole’ or a show that says ‘Aren’t people beautiful?’ We want to
bring those things together to see them in contrast with each other.
There are parts of the show where people who are ‘left’ will be
challenged.”

He admits that whatever audiences take away from the performance, it’s
not going to change the world. “It’s a show, so it’s not going to
create legislative change. But unless you’re a superhero politician or
a really good leader, the arts is one area that can bring different
groups together.”

Primarily, he wants to celebrate Australia’s diversity. “It’s
unfortunate how desperate our need is to do that now. We are built on
migration – if we can just get that idea across, I’d be so happy. The
whole argument about who is Australian and what makes somebody an
Australian is a waste of time. What makes us Australian is what makes
us human beings.”

Grounded opens at the Seymour Centre on Friday.

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This film was made by the Villawood Koori Kids with the support of CuriousWorks as trainers, mentors and facilitators. Their work was part of The Migrant Project performances and is part of This City is a Body: The Migrant Project Film.

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Images from the shoot:

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