Category Archives: sip a daily zine

in 2018, am setting aside time to blog a zine review and drink something delish

drink’s everywhere but in me

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note: I’m sorry it took me so long to make this post live…it’s something of a relic given what the world went through in 2020, and it was written in April 2020! Enjoy!

zine: Paper and Ink #13: Tales From The Bar Side by various contributors
drink: Gimme Da Loot! (7%, 16 fl oz, can) brewed by Revision Brewing Company (Nevada, USA)
music: Jan Jelinek avec Les Exposures, La nouvelle pauvrété (2003)

This afternoon, after making what can only be called the world’s worst bastardisation of a quesadilla, I had somehow managed to make the perfect cup of tea. I use my Red Hill Brewery stein, used THREE teabags of Madame Flavour’s Melbourne Morning blend, put in the perfect dash of milk, took my sad brunch and fabbo brew upstairs…

…then spilt the whole blasted thing because I put down the stein for a minute. Heart: broken.

As I write this, I’m currently waiting for the review beer to thaw out. It was right at the back of the fridge on my shelf (been hiding it deliberately for matching it up to a zine), so more on that later.

a beer can sits upside down inside a glass, draining very slowly

I chose this particular not necessarily for this specific beer, but because at the moment, no one has ‘tales from the bar’. At least, they shouldn’t in my state (Victoria – the isolation restrictions have been stricter than the national ones). Despite this, there was an outbreak at a healthcare location I frequent during a certain time period, so guess who consented to getting their nose…violated. The COVID test isn’t fun but they did give me my (confirmed negative) result in less than 24 hours.

an empty beer can with an illustration of Lenny from The Simpsons, and to its left, the front cover of a zine with an illustration of people playing pool in a pub

The intro by editor Martin Appleby, given this pandemic-stricken world we’re now living in, sounds like utopia to any alcohol wanker:

As you can probably tell from the title of this issue, the theme is bars and pubs. Specifically dive bars, shitty pubs and back alley boozers. Intended as a celebration of these places and the characters you find in them…

Realistically, it’s only been a month and a half that social isolation has been in place, but it feels like five, honestly. Christ, I miss my pub trivia crew. I didn’t even think I’d get to a place of ‘normal’ socialisation to even have one (I’m awkward and unwell, okay? why do you think I drink…? Don’t answer that!)

back cover of a zine on a blonde wood table - photograph of the front of a bar, with a bartender in white's back visible

The beer is fucking amazing. It’s the colour that hazy NEIPAs (New England India Pale Ales) are supposed to be, and I guess in it freezing, the citrus hops retained their flavour, so so juicy. It smells like a mix of orange – specifically blood orange? – grapefruit* rind and the of the fruit just under the surface. Half of the beer is still frozen in the can, by the way.

handwritten beer tasting notes in purple ink in a pocket-sized notebook on top of a zine

Passed the halfway mark of the zine, and pretty impressed with the entries – there’s a lot of poetry, and some really good short fiction pieces which go in places you weren’t quite expecting. For some reason, I thought this theme would attract a lot of try-hards playing up how drunk they can get, but so far, the seediness in many of the pieces feels authentic. My favourite piece is about a woman who lures attractive young men to her local, same time, same place, every week. The selections do celebrate rather than (pun intended) take the piss out of the dodgy familiars at bars or pubs that perpetually smell of urine and cigarette smoke. The contributors are generally from the US or the UK, and it makes me happy that the gender balance seems to be about 50/50. It’s also great to see some names that aren’t typically Caucasian!

The beer still isn’t melting all that fast, and given that it’s autumn proper, I’m not really surprised.

a beer placed at a tilt, filling the glass it's partially in with beer, next to a kitchen stovetop

Bloody hell, this is like waiting for Godot…I’ve finished reading the zine and my recommendation is check the website and see if there are still copies…or perhaps I just did that and sadly, looks like stock is all gone.

a beer can on an oil heater/radiator in front of a chest of drawers where books and other alcoholic paraphernalia can be seen

I guess the best endorsement I can give the zine is it really makes me miss reading at my local/s (I’ve got two in walking distance!) with a damn good book, and sneaking in a pint…or three. It also reminded me a lot of Patrick deWitt’s novella Ablutions which is a pretty 80s bloky bartender with various addiction issues and dysfunctions.

The remaining bit of the beer eventually melted…into beer-coloured water. It took forever to melt because in this part of the world we’re hitting autumn proper. (please don’t judge me on my thawing method or the messiness of my room.)

I love that the ‘loot’ on the cans are sacks, labelled with the hops used in this beer (Mosaic, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Citra). I’m trying not to go all beer wanker talking about this beer because I’ve been more about the spirits and cheap red, and christ, there are squillions of hop varieties that do all sorts of things to make the beer taste the way it does (self-promo! I found out when researching for the Australian and New Zealand chapter of this book; internationals are super keen for the hops in this region).

Omg, did I totally miss an opportunity to make a Corona beer-Coronavirus joke?! Yes, yes I did. My dopey humour is out-of-practice: must be all that work trying to finish Hilary Mantel’s 900-page finale to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (she is one of the few authors to win the Man Booker Prize for her previous two) before May starts. I FKN DID IT.

*if you’re on medication that you take regularly, make sure you can have grapefruit and/or its juice if you’re lucky enough to be drinking swanky cocktails in isolation – it can be listed as a contraindication. This beer doesn’t have grapefruit juice in it but worth mentioning because I totally forget and am supposed to avoid it

there better be a better Blak future

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zine: Blak Blow: The Blak Women’s Edition (#40, Dec 2018)
drink: Nature’s Organics beetroot latte mix with honey
music: Alessandro Cortini & Daniel Avery, Illusion of Time (2020)

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I can’t in good conscience charge for this Patreon for post so it’ll go live on my blog (eatdrinkstagger.com) at the same time as Patreon folx can read. Patreons are getting a keg-load of content this month anyway 😉 I started writing this way before the TLB…’stuff’ emerged, so please don’t crucify me. I took ages to read this issue to do it justice. And don’t judge me – that beetroot latte mix is delicious! * * * visual descriptor: 1. a blak woman, illustrated, sticks out her tongue on a pink magazine cover that says ‘Blak Brow’ 2. a black ziplock packet of organic beetroot latte powder mix 3. a quotation on the back cover of the mag 4. the ingredients lists at the back of the beetroot latte powder mix * * * https://eatdrinkstagger.com/there-better-be-a-better-blak-future

A post shared by Gemma E. Mahadeo (@eatdrinkstagger) on

You don’t often realise that a year, a month, or a week is going to be the best or the worst of your life long after you’ve survived it.

Or haven’t.

Going to the The Lifted Brow issue launches are always a…how to put it? Someone like myself never quite feels at place. It’s too cool, everyone is talking about what they’re working on (but not giving away too much) and pretending. Or perhaps that’s just me.

At the Blak Brow launch, I met people who I had no idea would become part of my life thereafter. Footscray Community Arts Centre was packed: it was different, being in a crowd where bodies of colour were the default. It was still socially daunting, due to the number of folks there, but not ‘I urgently need to find a blank corner to sneak a diazepam and lack of stimuli’ threatening.

I am terribly slow reading periodicals, and I find TLB hard-going generally. This time last year, I lost the ability to read as my body began to unravel seemingly not in sync with my mind. Though I thought the worst year of my life (2016) was behind me, at least I’d had the luxury of hospital and specialised care. Last year, I was irresponsible and put a job before my health. I figured if I could afford my medication (some of which is expensive – as of Mar 2020, one is $140 AUD for a month’s supply), took it diligently, everything would improve. I was stubborn and didn’t go to hospital. I feel that ultimately cost me my job this year.

However, I met people all through 2019 who I could not have imagined would hold me together, just long enough to do things I didn’t want to do but had to. Sure, it’s become almost cliche to give space and voice to minorities, to those we would hardly have heard or seen even fifteen years ago.

Some voices should never have had to fight to be heard in the first place. My voice is not one of those. The ancestors of some of the oldest voices in the world reside in this part of the world (this still knocks me for six every time I think about it) and for so long, were silenced through genocide, invasion, erasure or ignorance. So grab a large mug of tea, sit down and get ready to read about Blak voices, finally being centred.

The works show the complexity of Aboriginal women’s lives and shows up the wooden and pedestrian one-dimensional narratives that blast out of Sunrise ‘talent’ and other purveyors of White Australia (can we please ban commercial television from hospital waiting rooms – it’s bad for our health).*

from the editorial of the The Blak Brow Women’s Brow Collective

There’s a really moving interview between mother and daughter called ‘The Walk and Talk’ with Rosie Kalina and Paola Balla – they have the sorts of conversations I can’t even have with cishet or queer white friends, let alone my mother. It just feels like a really surreal concept. Anyway, another quote:

Dort: …All these bloody plane trees aggravate me.
Mum: Isn’t it full on how colonisation not only stresses us mentally, but literally irritates your skin and body?
[…]

Dort: Migrants and settlers have been sold the lie of the lucky country. It overrides what we have been fighting for.
Mum: Multiculturalism is a planned construct too. The plan has been to breed us out, assimilate us, destroy us or silence us.
[…]

Dort: Where’s the outcry for the violence against our women? Painted to be a race thing, but where is the outcry for our women?
Mum: We know the horrible truth that white women’s lives are more valued in this country. My nan used to say, “If you’ve a pink split, you’re right.” She knew what the reality was for us. White feminism’s liberation was not tied up with ours.

The interview even goes as far to document how Western doctors want to sterilise Blak women, while white women were/are for fighting for the right to choose to have terminations. Dort’s mum adds that:

…Also, our sons and cousins and nephews need to know if they have kids with a non-Aboriginal woman, that we want those babies to come into the world with the same (birthing program) support.

Yugambeh poet and author Ellen van Neerven and her mother Maria van Neerven-Currie also get to chat in ‘Because of You I Can’, and it’s about how Ellen has inspired Maria to explore and extend her own creativity and its potential outlets. Also maybe don’t talk to me if you haven’t read Heat and Light or Comfort Food. I always get so nervous whenever I bump into her at readings or festivals and am chuffed she has a new poetry collection out!

Of course I’m going to be biased but this issue is so lucky to have poetic contributions from Evelyn Araluen, Natalie Harkin (worth reading her Dirty Words published by Cordite), Vicki Couzens, Jeanine Leane (whose book you can also get from Cordite), and Charmaine Papertalk Green (who cowrote False Claims of Colonial Thieves with John Kinsella…I still don’t know how I feel that a white man was partially involved in this project but that’s another issue), and Lisa Bellear.

However, I’m going to quote from a work by a Badimaya/Yamatji woman who wrote a poem called ‘Fractured Souls of Angels‘, whose work I was not initially familiar with.

A glistening blade, a dangling noose
Density of the tempting pills
Calling you to a secret place
(…)
We whisper “help” while shouting “go away”
To make us feel better

‘Binak’ by the Koorie Youth Council is absolutely a standout piece that I reckon high school kids should be reading, and is most definitely enhanced by Jacob Komesaroff’s comic panel illustrations.

I know this is getting long so now I’m just going to be listy, sorry. Other excellent standouts:

  • ‘Creators and Colonisers ‘Naarm City Lights’, (2008) a description of Savannah Kruger’s installation depicting the decay invasion has wreaked upon the stolen land (at Footscray Community Arts Centre), and her poem towards the end of the issue
  • ‘Blak To The Future Statement’ by curators Rosie Kalina and Hannah Morphy-Walsh, as well as Walsh’s separate statement ‘Blak To The Future’ immediately following
  • all the Pop Quizzes!!! They’re feisty as hell, and rightfully so
  • Timmah Ball’s ‘Imagining Lisa: Dreaming In Urban Areas‘ about Naarm (inner Melbourne)
  • Celeste Liddle’s take on Trevor Noah being an arsehole (he is; he still hasn’t apologised for his demeaning jokes about FN women)
  • Lidia Thorpe’s speech full stop
  • lastly, ‘A Room With A View’ by Vickie Roach which should be made required reading to anyone who is not Blak. I do not say that lightly. The way this country treats its Indigenous folx, one of the oldest races in the world, and pretty much world treasure given that status is more than shameful. It is proof that so many of us still are devoid of both sympathy and empathy, and paints a bleak picture of the future to come.

But here I sit, a queer nonbinary British citizen, Australian permanent resident of Spanish-Filipino and Indo-Guyanese heritage (if you try to tell me that a. I’m South Asian Indian and/or b. South American, I will kick you in the fucking ‘nads; fair warning), with a blanket covering my legs, typing away on my 2012 Mac Book Pro, chugging down organic beetroot latte mixes with equally ethically produced milk in my Red Hill Brewery beer stein from the comfort of my couch and more than adequate sharehouse as I read and wrote this.

The multicultural dream my family were sold are part of the problem. We still are. We are never going to know what it’s like to be arrested for being drunk, die in custody due to the endemic negligence of ‘the people supposed to protect us’, and many of us ‘settlers’ and ‘migrants’ (euphemisms for invaders) will cling onto the fairly achievable dream that if you work hard enough, even from nothing, you can succeed in this shitty capitalist world. Even I am not without my privileges. My retired father pays for me to have private health insurance so I will never see the inside of a public psychiatric ward. He has worked most of his life in one (England, and here) and jokes that the private ones these days are as plush as hotels.

WE ARE STILL ON STOLEN LAND. SOVEREIGNTY WAS NEVER CEDED. I PAY MY RESPECTS TO ALL WURUNDJERI FOLKS, PAST, PRESENT, EMERGING, AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I AM PART OF THE SYSTEMIC TRAUMA OUR FIRST NATIONS FOLX FACE AS A ‘SETTLER’ OR ‘MIGRANT’. I WILL DO MY BEST TO KEEP DECOLONISING AND TO ELEVATE FIRST NATIONS CAUSES AND VOICES WHEREVER POSSIBLE BEFORE MY OWN COMMUNITY OF COLOUR.

*omg why is it that whenever I have ECT, I NEVER forget Sunrise being on in the waiting room and I’m always last to be treated? IT. IS. ABSOLUTE. HELL.

**full disclosure: I’ve performed with Savannah Kruger before, so knew her, but hadn’t known Hannah Morphy-Walsh, who I now also consider to be a friend and have done and will do activism work with

NB. Fri 10/4/2020: it pains me to have to disclose this but it is essential to you, the reader, and as respect to all previous contributors, interns, and staff at The Lifted Brow. Please note that this not reflect my personal opinion on the matter as I am not privy to enough information.

Many thanks to fellow disabled creative Pauline Vetuna for her feedback prior to publication of this piece. I met her at the Blak Brow launch, and consider it a privilege to now call her my friend and colleague, as well as someone who always has my back.

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an everyday problem

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zine: Archer Magazine: The First Nations Issue (#13, 2020) by various authors; edited by Bridget Caldwell-Bright & Maddie Clark
drink: lots of peppermint tea with honey
music: The OOZ & Man Alive! by King Krule

Said with more than a token dose of sarcasm, but isn’t it great when each year, Invasion (‘Australia’) Day comes around and we all pretend to give a shit about how we’re on stolen land? On a non-sarcastic level, I almost envy the ignorance of the people who think that ‘civilised’ Australian history starts in 1788, and use the day as an excuse to get pissed because that’s what ‘mateship’ is.

Can you beat someone to death with a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu? Purely theoretical question…

I find a lot of shame in not being able to participate in Invasion Day protests, but this being the third year, my personal alternative protest to dedicate Jan 26th to reading literature produced solely by First Nations. Traditionally in Jan, I’ll try to review a zine by an Indigenous author. I’ve been relying on current stockpiles and didn’t have any, however, I do have the latest issue of Archer Magazine. 

It took a week to read, and it’s not really something you can do justice to by speedreading with a tinnie. I read it on trams on the way to health appointments, absorbed. It blocked out thoughts of whether or not I was entitled to sit on the disabled seats of the tram. It stopped me from being jostled around by white people and men of colour who often assume I need to move out of the way for them.

The cover is really hard to ignore. Laniyuk, a poet and activist gloriously fills the cover, long hair draped down her back, and maybe wearing a hint of lip colour. The only things she wears are a shell necklace and shell earrings.

I’ll start with Laniyuk’s piece because I can’t read it objectively (I also read it greedily as soon as I got a copy of the mag). Crossing paths with her at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2018 was one of many fantastic connections made during that festival.

It’s hard to read about someone who you consider a friend and have the extent of their trauma detailed for everyone else to read.

Australia does not have a great track record with Indigenous folks, and as someone who is a migrant, it’s becoming clearer to me that we are part of the invasion narrative that has and still does traumatise so many of this country’s first inhabitants.

Laniyuk was also one of the people who was there for me mid-last year in a period of acute distress. She was able to make time for me despite. She is one of the bravest, most fearless, and most talented people I’ve met. Her piece in this issue illustrates this to the letter (pun intended). She is of mixed heritage – her mother is French, and her father is a Larrakia, Kungarrakan and Gurindji man.

As a mixed-race migrant, I’m part of this invasion narrative, whether I like it or not. Both my parents come from or have heritage in places colonised by the British, and the Spanish. But me and my family are trespassers. I know my parents and brother would not think about this at all. I can’t make amends on their behalf. I can always try on my own though.

This doesn’t mean the magazine is trauma porn – quite the opposite: a lot of it details the creative practices of Australian Indigenous creatives, even when not in Australia. There’s photo editorials, Q&A interviews, a fashion shoot, showcases of visual art. There’s some upsetting narratives about navigating and acknowledging one’s queerness, and gender identity – this includes genderqueerness, wondering if you’re non-binary and/or trans, and transitioning if it’s a choice the narrator makes, and of finding chosen family as many queer folks do (thank goodness).

This is not much of a ‘review’ post, but I hope if you have the means, you’ll consider acquiring a copy of this issue, especially as Archer’s government arts funding was not granted this year.*  If you happen to be in a financial position to support them staying in print, then donate to their Pozible campaign – read about what they do with the money they make & have and here.

I’m sorry this is a short and not-beery post…it didn’t seem appropriate to review beer. I’ve also been pretty sick the last fortnight (mind-sick) but this week it’s been actual ‘socially acceptable’ sick with some kind of chesty cough that had me spend two days in bed.

I drank and still am drinking lots and lots and lots of herbal tea, with honey to force out the illness, and have kept warm, layering like the consummate Melburnian inner-city savvy I am. It’s the only way I’m savvy!

Please try to remember, ‘Australia’ Day is not the only day where issues of sovereignty, dispossession, genocide, and intergeneration trauma are brought to the forefront for Indigenous Australian folks.

For some, it’s about surviving every fucking day in a system that punishes them for being themselves. I can only imagine how hard it is to celebrate culture and heritage in those circumstances. Change the fucking date. Read more Indigenous literature: if you can’t find any, you are simply not looking hard enough. Elevate Indigenous creatives! They’re probably more talented than you (look, that means me too so don’t be offended).

I also highly recommend supporting Indigenous X on Patreon. They are the only Patreon I support – if you know of other Indigenous folks creating content on Patreon, let me know so I can sign up to support them too?

For this reason, next up, I’ll be reviewing The Lifted Brow’s ‘Blak Brow‘ issue which I’m hoping to get to you soon, and will probably be drinking lots and lots of tea again.

Thanks again Patreons, I know I’ve had epic radio silence a while, due to circumstances outside my control x & cheers to my new supporter Felix for making this post possible! promise there’ll be beery content soon x

*No, they are not paying me to say this, but full disclosure: they have published me in the past (to my eternal glee).

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