We’re almost through with the Dog Days of Summer. Hopefully, for those of us who live in towns and cities where access to nature’s arrangement of cooling-stations: things like lakes and rivers, woodlands and oceans, are difficult to reach, temperatures will begin to come down soon. Since late May, the heat in New York City has been unrelenting. NBC’s “Storm Team 4” says it’s the city’s hottest summer on record. High temperatures have been accompanied by even higher levels of humidity, driven by La Nina’s southern oscillation.
There is a cumulative quality to this kind of heat: it becomes seared into the fabric of our being, to be worn in uniforms of torpor. Meanjin (Brisbane) is a city that knows this kind of heat intimately. With its subtropical climate, Meanjin summers can span up to five months, arriving early in late November and not leaving in full until April. When the heat properly settles in, the city, as if by instinct, slows and slows and finally reaches a full stop. A camaraderie develops: expectations of efficiency are lowered, decisions of consequence are postponed. There is a collective hibernation, everyone bunkers down, sprawled out under ceiling fans or blankly staring into the middle distance in air conditioned bars and clubhouses, patiently waiting out the somnolence.
This is no mean feat: Meanjin is a city of nearly 3 million people, which has produced some of Australia’s most important cultural moments and institutions. Two of Australia’s premier literary magazines, Meanjin and Overland were founded in Meanjin. Australia’s (and possibly the world’s) first and finest ever punk band, The Saints, formed in the inner-suburb of Petrie Terrace in 1974, contemporaneous to the Ramones in Queens, NY. More recently, Meanjin based artist and Kamilaroi/Bigambul man, Archie Moore, won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at this year’s Venice Biennale, with the Australian Pavilion being curated by Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator and Meanjin resident Ellie Buttrose. The win was a first ever for Australia at the Venice Biennale, and underscored Meanjin’s outsized importance to the nation’s arts scene.
All this makes you wonder what else Meanjin might be able to produce if the city functioned at full capacity for more than seven months of the year. Or perhaps it is the enforced cessation, the resigned acceptance of the suspension of normalcy and the embedded tolerance of idleness in these months that allow for such impressive creative works to emerge.
Rain or Sweat is a short film by the artists Charlie Hillhouse and Sebastian Moody which captures the lethargy of a Meanjin summer. It follows a Queensland man (the architect Dirk Yates) over the course of several summer weeks with long, considered frames that are memetic of the kind of melting and lengthening of time that sustained heat can produce. We are shown the glaring, sunstruck days, nights so thick and loud with insects they are palpable, the growing pressure of an approaching storm and the force of release of a subtropical downpour. The shots are accompanied by an equally considered narration by Yates, who remembers summers past: “When summer is at its hottest, I sometimes think of my father. When we were kids, when it was really hot, he would take off his shirt and lay in the hallway on the tiles, these ceramic tiles, because it was the coolest part of the house. It was kind of like what a dog would do. It’s what I would do if I had that.”
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Author: Thomas Moody
