Gretchen Miller | Homeground

A living Harbour - Sydney Harbour.

Sydney Harbour is renowned the world over as a stunningly beautiful waterway. Its intricate and intimate coves, deep inlets and tiny beaches, headlands and islands are still lushly vegetated. Its period of industrial use was relatively short-lived, and industrial sites are now being reclaimed as reserves, or for residential development.
In this program we take five icons as a means to explore the Harbour's history as living, breathing entity, a waterway that people have always been closely engaged with.
Our five icons are: *The Aboriginal whale rock carving at Balls Head.
*An untitled watercolour by Joseph Lycett from his Views in Australia book.
*Lavender Bay  *Henry Lawson's poem 'Sacrifice at Balls Head' *Blues Point Tower, designed by Harry Seidler.

The silent forest: songbirds

A four part series for BBC World Service and ABC RN.
It’s Saturday morning in Pontianak in West Kalimantan in Indonesia, at a songbird competition. In every district across Indonesia you’ll find these, large and small. Here, there are sixty cages hung up above head height under the corrugated metal ceiling of an open-sided building.
It's hot here, right on the equator, and over a 100 young men are cheering and shouting, focused, on their birds, and on winning. It sounds like a boxing match with added birds singing at the tops of their voices.   
This passion for birdsong has swept the country since it was encouraged in the 1970s by a government keen to build a new leisure activity for Indonesians. No one could have predicted how out of hand it could get. What was once a solitary and poetic pastime, having a songbird in your house or garden, has become an industry in which real money can be made by training a winning bird.  
It’s known here as chirping mania and is one of the biggest threats to Indonesia’s forests which have gradually fallen silent as millions of birds every year are trapped and sold illegally. Can the forest survive without birds?
Guests:
Novia Sagita and Adam Miller, co-directors at Planet Indonesia Jonathan Beilby, Ade Imansyah, and Arfah Nasution, working at Cikananga Conservation Breeding Centre
  

Wreck

My very first freelance piece, is a short take - 3 minutes long, part of the Earshot series commissioned by my (now) dear friend, Russell Stapleton (sound engineer extraordinaire). 1997, I think?
When I was in my 20s, as I recall, I saw a car parked half way down the cliffs at Bronte beach. I can't tell the difference now between the memory I had and the story I told about it.
How I loved working with the sounds of the world then, and now. But then, it was all fresh. I still love this piece.
 

Undone

This piece was first written for performance at the Studio Theatre, Sydney Opera House, as part of a series of stories around the theme of dancing, called In Four Four. The series was produced and composed by me, and included writers Barbara Blackman and Brian Castro. This is my take on the theme, Undone is a contemporary take on the Greek myth which explains the creation of the seasons through the story of Persephone, daughter of the Earth Goddess, Demeter, who was kidnapped by Hades, King of the Underworld.
Demeter's grief at the loss of her daughter turns the earth barren and people begin to starve. Eventually Zeus intervenes and orders Persephone's return to Demeter - if she has not eaten since her descent into Hades. But Persephone has eaten - three pomegranate seeds - so a compromise is reached, where the girl is shared between the two gods. Hence, spring is when Demeter prepares for Persephone's return, summer is her time on the surface, autumn as she prepares to go back to Hades, and winter, for her time below. But how does Persephone feel about this transaction? In this contemporary telling, Persephone is coming of age, despite her mother's attempt to keep her in childhood. Persephone loves to dance, when her mother thinks she is sleeping. She dreams up a lover who carries her away, to the nightclub world of Undone, where the sensuality of movement is not out of place.
Written, composed and produced by: Gretchen Miller Sound engineers: Phillip Ulman, Russell Stapleton, Angus Kingston. Music performed and improvised by: Sandy Evans (saxophones), Alister Spence (piano), Brett Hirst (double bass) and Phillip South (percussion) Thanks to the Australia Council New Media Arts Fund and the Sydney Opera House for funding the development and performance of the original live production at the Opera House Studio.

A Short History of a River Cooper Creek part two

This is the second and final part of our history of the culture of water, using the path of Coopers Creek from the headwaters of the Thomson to its end at Lake Eyre, as our route through a watery obsession. Last week we looked at the mythology of the inland sea, the predilections of the explorers and we took a trip down the Cooper itself, meeting some of the pastoralists there. We finished with the birth of a new industry - hydro engineering, and the enthusiasm of 19th century artists and writers for altering river flow.
The deserts, however, remained deserts. In today's program we'll see how Australians attempted to use water to transform them into productive environments, for food and for settlement, and how we employed moral arguments to make water a political tool.
Alfred Deakin, the Chaffey Brothers, Ion Idriess and JC Bradfield all had grand schemes for making the deserts bloom - and in its own way, the cotton industry that's burgeoned since the 1960s has tried to do the same thing. So join us for another trip down Coopers Creek, following the combined history of rivers and irrigation.

Steve

This short story explores one of those life moments when just a few seconds in time catapults you into another space entirely.
Steve lives on his own in the suburbs. Though often surrounded by people, he is always on the outer. When he returns home from work late at night he finds himself helping another loner in a way he would never have expected.
'Steve' is part of the City Nights project. Written by Gretchen Miller. Electric bass written and performed by Dave Harding

The Rivers Project

We're winding our way today along two kinds of river: the real river and its environment and people, the Daly River in the Northern Territory; and the imagined or remembered river as contributed by ABC RN listeners to the (now defunct) citizen storytelling site, Pool. Rich and full-flowing, the Daly River has for over a century been a kind of fantasy river for the visionaries of the south, as a potential food bowl for the nation. But as we discover, the Daly is not for damming. Nor is it much for irrigating or clearing, and contemporary policy is ensuring this river will remain pristine for generations to come. And alongside our exploration of the Daly we hear your stories, of rivers lost and rivers remembered, reminding us of other less healthy waterways. Guests Biddy Lindsay Yingguny Malak Malak traditional owner whose country is around the Daly River Crossing area. Mark Kennard Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University Harold Sinclair Daly River resident Gary Higgins CLP candidate, Gary also runs the Mango Farm at Daly River Crossing Stuart Blanche Coordinator of the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory Chris Makepeace CEO Amateur Fisherman's Association, Northern Territory (AFANT) Rob Lindsay Co-ordinator of the Malak Malak land management group. Joye Maddison Co-ordinator for the Wangamaty (Lower Daly) Landcare Group Brad Pusey Senior Research Fellow, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University Peter Kyne Fish ecologist, Charles Darwin University  

Jack

Gretchen Miller happened on an old and musty book in the ABC library several years ago, and so began a long fascination to discover Ion L. Idriess. When Ion L. Idriess rose to the challenge of his mining mates at Lightning Ridge and submitted an article to the Bulletin magazine in 1910, no-one knew his playful paragraphs about life on the opal fields would spark off a career as one of Australia's best-selling penmen of Australiana and 'derring do'. Indeed, today's writers would salivate at the three million copies of over 50-odd titles that he sold. But you're either a great fan - or you've never heard of Idriess. Tim recalls the interview: 'He was a little man, wearing a knitted woollen beanie. It was winter. Young men were jumping off the cliff nearby (was it Collaroy? Northern Beaches anyway) with those para-glider wings, and soaring with the updraft. He said with some passion: "Did you see them flying? Gee I'd love to be able to do that!"' Producer Gretchen Miller Technical production Russell Stapleton, John Jacobs. Guests Ion L. Idriess, writer
Beverley Eley, biographer Readings Rhys Muldoon, Sharona Coutts Original music composed by Gretchen Miller Performers Dave Ellis - double bass
Jay Miller - double bass  Mitch Grainger - harmonica

Inland

It was with this dreamscape I entered the ABC, as artist in residence at the Audio Arts unit. I had six, blissful months to create an audio arts piece - writing, recording, composing. Inland is in four, elementally themed parts. In 2000 it was performed live at the Studio Theatre, The Sydney Opera House. 
Inland, is a dream of place in four sections. Immersion tells the story of the stowaway convict, who dreams of piping water through a mountain range, Flight tells of a woman whose fantasies of flight are also dreams of death, in Stonean alcoholic opal miner finds unexpected love underground, and Heat is situated at the Maralinga bomb site, whose beauty can be found in the naming of each of its artefacts. Inland was created during an ABC Australia Council New Media Arts residency in 1999. During the residency Gretchen made several recording trips to Lightening Ridge, through the tunnels of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme, and flying in a glider, using contact microphones to make uncommon recordings not often heard on the radio. She also revisited recordings from previous trips to the Birdsville track, the Gulf of Carpenteria and the Coongie lakes in Corner Country. Inland features the voices of Aboriginal elder and Maralinga witness the late Yami Lester, pilot the late Nancy Bird Walton, opal dealer the late Greg Sherman and aviatrix Sally McCosker. Readings are by Sherre Delys, Virginia Baxter, Yves Stenning and Gretchen Miller, and the music featured is by Daryl Pratt on percussion, Peter Jenkins on clarinets and Dave Ellis on double bass.
This program contains the voices of Aboriginal people now deceased.
 This residency project was assisted by the Australia Council.

Short History of a River Cooper Creek Part One

The first of two programs that explore the cultural history of rivers and irrigation in Australia. Rivers, irrigation, farming and the environment have not had an easy relationship for much of the period of European settlement. From the myth of the Inland Sea to the highly scientific approach to large-scale irrigation, rivers have offered the answer to our dreams of prosperity and development. But what rivers we have. Often dry, sometimes flooding extensively, they defy European desire for order and regularity. Since settlement Australians have wanted to alter not just the course of rivers but in so doing, fight against the very climate itself. There is one last major 'wild', river in eastern Australia, and it is named not a river but a creek. The 1,300 kilometres of the lazily winding Coopers Creek starts with the Thomson River up near Hughenden in North Western Queensland, and ends at Lake Eyre in South Australia. Aboriginal Australians used it as a livelihood and trading route. And it was where the explorers Burke and Wills starved to death amongst its bountiful plenty, and where the cattle kings lived out their dreams on the backs of the fattest cattle in the world. The Cooper flows through lands so flat that if not the Creek itself, its mate, the Strezlecki, will flow backwards. Like all the rivers that flow to Lake Eyre, the Cooper does not take a particular path but moves crabways across the land according to the amount of water it holds. The Cooper is also significant because it is the last river not to have its flow heavily modified by water harvesting or irrigation. So it is along the Cooper, with its myths and histories, old and new that we meander in these two programs, exploring the hold water has on our bodies and our souls.