When you think of the push against the establishment during the 60s and 70s Toby Zoates book chronicles a lot of the needless deaths to drugs and other abuse from people who couldn’t come together fully to drive a long-term wedge. Although a hell of a lot was achieved in the anarchy of those times. The establishment has clawed its way back through a number of means such as riding on the crest of the housing crisis into the jaws of comfortable oblivion. I wonder if the momentum which has some players here and there is working its magic in different parts of the world but left Sydney to its plastic fantastic fate. A number of years ago I got involved with some anarchists as an opportunity to exhibit art and in the end, I had a pretty crappy laptop disappear into the jaws of the desperate anarchist abyss. The laptop was the actual artwork which was scripted to speak digital text and play music and sound. It was just that I had a lot of old stuff on there which in the long run isn’t important but it taught me, don’t trust an anarchist and don’t leave anything on a computer to exhibit. It was such a crap laptop and I only kept it for art because you didn’t need much to get these things going.

I suppose I was disappointed but the great part was that my youngest got to show some drawings in a squatter’s art gallery at the age of 12 and it was a great exhibition. So many interesting artists and I feel like that place is now a burrowing corridor of WestConnex glory instead of a humble space for desperate artists to show their work. That corridor is now plastered with huge artworks like some kind of social realist money funnel that goes to the biggest and the best. It isn’t all bad though but like the idiot I am, I get sentimental.