Dianne
Dempsey

Author • Journalist • Book Reviewer

A dive into various articles and reviews.

An Embarrassment of Riches: Andre Sardone’s flourishing arts practice

The nesting boxes are all around us, housing kookaburras and robins, sugar gliders and even vulnerable brush-tailed phascogales. Before continuing the tour of Andre Sardone’s studio we get fixed on the brush-tailed phascogales. How can you resist them? The male dead by 12 months from too much, well too much “frenzied mating”.

We look up into a tree and see a tawny frog mouth – the pseudo-owls of the forest. I ask why this abundance of life about them? Sardone says he and his partner Bridget Finch don’t rake and burn around the trees as their neighbours do. The forest creatures love the undergrowth.

The artist’s Mandurang mudbrick house and studio sits unobtrusively in the state forest and as everyone knows it’s been a wonderful time of rain and abundance. “There’s been plenty of snakes this year as well as spiders,” Sardone says cheerfully. A walk around his studio reveals a jacky lizard curled around a sculpture. “Sometimes at night, when we’re lying in bed the bats fly in over our heads.” (I let that comment go by). We move to the settees on the large undercover veranda to drink coffee and talk about his work but before doing so Sardone considerately checks under the settee for the brown snake that was seen last week worrying his dog. I notice for the first time a giant wood moth which must be about 10 centimetres long. The wind nudging its fragile wings.

That the environment is constantly influencing Sardone’s work would be stating the obvious. His latest theme, a profusion of shimmering orbs, are made of recycled materials such as mattress springs, steel rods and stainless-steel discs. The orbs, which hang in his studio, under the eaves of the house and from branches, are expressions of life, of energy, air and movement. Sardone wants everything to move. Walk up to any of his pieces and give it a tap, send it spinning or turning. Nothing rests and when it does, it settles into an agreeable shape.

Sardone’s artistic instinct is to make sculptures which are original. “I like to find a point of difference,” he says. “I don’t like doing multiples. I keep evolving and learning, I don’t know what the end goal will be. So many ideas occur to me and I only have time to fulfill maybe one in every 20. I experiment and learn. I have an idea and realise it.” As an artist, Sardone is suffering from an embarrassment of riches.

He didn’t go to art school and doesn’t refer to his work in traditional art theory terms. He says that he has a “visual aesthetic”. He says, “I have an idea and realise it.”

In essence his art belongs to his ability to change the shape of the material he happens to be using. A roofing plumber by trade, Sardone comes to his art with the skills of his trade. Skills which have exponentially increased according to the demands of the re-cycled material he happens to be using. A turning point for him came some 18 years ago when he was at a building site sheltering in his ute from the rain, reading the Herald-Sun. (There was no mention of a pie or chocolate milk).

“I saw a picture of Albert Tucker’s ‘The Futile City’ and I thought, I can replicate those colours and lines. I worked with colourbond, I was a tradesman and I was bored.” Sardone’s first step into the art world still hangs in his studio. He would never give it away as it’s too significant for him. The colorbond version of “The Futile City” – with its eerily precise match between material and concept earned Sardone much recognition but not necessarily acceptance by the art world. He exhibited in Melbourne in 2003, 2004 and 2005, but he always returned to his work as a roofing plumber; although not so much these days.

In 2006, he and his wife and three children travelled around Australia in a bus. “We came to Bendigo in 2007 and happened upon the land in Mandurang, or rather the land found me.”

In 2013 he re-partnered with photographer Bridget Finch with whom he will be sharing his next exhibition. “She will sit for hours under a tree amongst that undergrowth waiting for a bird to come her way. Bridget started by drawing birds but she has a great eye for photography.” Together the couple have a richly textured life. Of an evening, Sardone enjoys cooking while Finch will play the piano or work in the garden.

Sardone’s work is currently in several galleries but his goal is to put bigger sculptures into bigger spaces. Amongst several projects he is working on are steel sculptures that can be taken apart and then reassembled for installation.

“My children are pretty much launched and these days I’ve got more time, ambition, skills, energy and ideas. I go can in different directions. It’s a wonderful place to be,” he says, smiling. He says he has been highly motivated by the experience of participating in the Emporium Creative Hub Incubator program. “It really gave me confidence; helped to realise that what I’m doing matters and is valued.

This year in the forest that surrounds his home there is more of everything and Andre Sardone is responding with joy to the abundance.

Publication: The Bendigo Magazine Feature - Autumn Addition, 2021

The Zeitgeist Throws up Two Timely Works of Art

The novel, The Family Doctor and the movie Promising Young Woman are two powerful examples of art reflecting the mood of the times.

View Article: The Zeitgeist Throws up Two Timely Works of Art

Publication: WR Law Regional Victoria

Date Published: 26/03/2021

The Family Doctor

Debra Oswald is a great example of the amazing versatility of some writers. Not only has Oswald written for television for years (Offspring is her most memorable drama series) but she has written for film, stage, radio and children. She has also written and starred in her own one woman show. Her latest feat is her novel, The Family Doctor, a timely story about the encroachment of domestic violence.

Debra Oswald published by Allen & Unwin

View Article: The Family Doctor

Publication: The Age

Date Published: 19/03/2021

Witness

Once more to the breach dear friends : the fight for women’s rights is far from over

How Robert Richter QC motivated Louise Milligan to argue for law reform.

View Article: Witness

Publication: WR Law Regional Victoria

Date Published: 14/03/2021

‘Brittany Higgins and the ‘whole horrible situation’

Brittany Higgins allegation of rape focused an intense media spotlight on the misogynistic culture that pervades our federal parliament.

View Article: ‘Brittany Higgins and the ‘whole horrible situation’

Publication: WR Law Regional Victoria

Date Published: 28/02/2021

When the coach doesn’t quite break the rules

Here’s the scenario: Damien Hardwick is a highly successful coach who has taken Richmond to the 2017, 2019 and 2020 premierships. Part of his shtick is to appeal to his players as a family man with strong values who fights the good fight; and he underlines this message by frequently referring to his wife, Danielle Hardwick, who he says has actively supported his coaching career.

So what happens when the coach suddenly waives the terms of his relationship with his players, as Hardwick did last month? When he says, well actually boys, that bit about values and strength and tenacity – I’ve given myself a get-out clause; and I’m now breaking up with Mrs Hardwick and I’m re-partnering with a much younger woman who works in our sales department at the club.

Hardwick’s situation was so tenuous that the Richmond Football Board had to formally announce that his relationship with the junior colleague was acceptable under the club’s policy.

WR Law’s principal, Rosa Raco, said on her regular Gold FM radio interview that legally, Hardwick hadn’t broken any rules. “Many workplaces actually have a policy where co-worker relationships are not allowed,” she said. “But in Richmond’s case, they didn’t have such a policy.” Ms Raco said the situation was still obviously a worry for the club in that a clear power imbalance existed which is why they met to sign off on it.

Ms Raco explained that the clauses prohibiting relationships in workplaces were there to prevent incidents of sexual harassment and subsequent litigation. She cited the case of David Jones CEO, Mark McInnes, who was successfully sued by a young female employee under the federal Sex Discrimination Act. And while no one is accusing Damien Hardwick of sexual harassment, he has almost certainly taken advantage of his position at the Richmond Football Club – taking what he wants, when he wants.

The much-esteemed AFL journalist Caroline Wilson says Hardwick has almost certainly undermined his credibility with the players. Speaking on the ABC’s Offsiders program she said, “this is a man who created a personal brand out of his partner, Mrs Hardwick…and I just reckon a lot of people at the club feel duped, the public feel duped, the supporters feel duped.”

It would appear that sometimes in the workplace, situations cannot always be seen through the lens of a legal clause but rather we judge it through another lens altogether – that of a moral compass.

Publication: WR Law Newsletter - Febuary 2021

St Aidan’s Orphanage has been seen historically as a benign, holy and bountiful presence on Bendigo’s skyline

St Aidan’s Orphanage has been seen historically as a benign, holy and bountiful presence on Bendigo’s skyline

However, its magnificent gates and imposing architecture hide a story of sexual and emotional abuse, suicide, beatings and solitary confinement.

DIANNE DEMPSEY spent three months talking to and researching the stories of nine “fallen girls” who found themselves in the care of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

The Dja Dja Wurrung people of Central Victoria described their land as merrygic barbarie – good country

And so it was: filled with game, fish,yams and rolling pastures.

Within their own nation, the Dja Dja Wurrung lived a life of natural harmony.

But in a terrible irony the “lush plains” which attracted the European invaders of the 1830s were the result of deliberate “fire-stick” farming by the Dja Dja Wurrung.

In his latest book, The Good Country, historian Bain Attwood references archaeologist A.G.L. Shaw who said, “this was not the land as God had made it but a land that the Aboriginal people had made.”

Apart from the impact of colonial pastoralists, Bain Attwood says that two smallpox epidemics, in 1788 and 1829, brought in by earlier invaders were responsible for the initial decimation of the Dja Dja Wurrung nation.

When the Europeans invaded their idyll in 1837, the Dja Dja Wurrung were nervous and suspicious.

Their attempts at preserving the rights to the bounty of their own land were rejected.

When attempting reciprocal arrangements with the pastoralist they shared their women who became infected with syphilis and gave birth to syphilitic babies.

Violence and mass killings erupted at places such as Waterloo Creek in 1838.

Professor Attwood estimates that by 1863 the Dja Dja Wurrung nation had been reduced from some 900 to 1900 people to a pitiful 38.

Most of these people were placed on a protectorate at Franklinford.

The Dja Dja Wurrung story is one beyond sadness.

Witnessing the demise of their culture, the deletion of food stocks and the domination of the pastoralists, the assistant protector Edward Parker said “there will be no place for the sole of their feet.”

And yet from those small numbers, Attwood relates the remarkable story of the revival of the Dja Dja Wurrung.

He estimates that there are now some 3000 direct descendents of the Dja Dja Wurrung people of whom 1,500 people identify as such.

The Good Country was written at the behest of Dja Dja Wurrung elders and essentially based on the archival material of the settlers and protectors.

Professor Attwood rarely editorialises but rather allows the devastating history of colonial invasion speak for itself.

The Good Country is by far the most significant and substantial history so far of the Dja Dja Wurrung people.

Publication: The Good Country - Bain Attwood