Helen Martineau's Blog

Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...

Sometimes during Melbourne’s Summer, it doesn’t rain for weeks. That’s why after a thunderstorm you notice things like the lovely way raindrops on a spider web scintillate in the emerging sunlight. The picture weaves into your dreams, like the night I dreamt I was in my garden peering into one watery orb to see what was reflected there. Suddenly I noticed that it was night. The raindrop became like those photos of earth taken from space, with the darkness of the globe’s surface scattered with the lights of a host of cities, dense in patches, less so in areas with few inhabitants. I leaned even closer and could see now spaces between even the densest clusters. Then something beautiful happened. The lights became miniature dewdrops with fine threads spun out like spider-silk clothing the planet in an exquisite fractal-like garment. And along all these delicate threads I saw human souls moving in each direction as if along highways. Somehow, I knew they were living souls ( n...

How can you be original? That’s a question visual artist Abbie Heathcote was asked at the 2017 Castlemaine State Arts festival (March 17-26). Her heartfelt response included the unexpected. Here’s a paraphrase of what she said : Find what enlivens you and put all that life and feeling into your work. It lives there, and when viewers come to the artwork they absorb the feeling and they are enlivened. This is a potential outcome from any activity we undertake. When artworks are created with love and commitment to truth they certainly touch a viewer with their life and originality. Imagine the beauty and richness to be discovered from such a relationship. Meaning grows from that. Stephen and I spent the weekend at the festival. If you don’t know Castlemaine, it is a country town in the central Victorian goldfields region. It’s rocky, dry and still speckled with gold. There was so much to see and hear, including a powerful opening night dance-drama by kids from Castlemaine ...

My first meeting with Sheila. In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable. My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual. Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name). Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being...