*Pic of Omar Musa from Crikey, here
Why is it important to speak the languages and voices of what we like to call ‘the suburbs’ in Australia?
OM – Well to me, in a way it replicates the battle against the cultural cringe. You know because we as Australians often look to London or New York and feel that we need to be validated by them, that we don’t have enough substance or creative vitality and oftentimes within Australia we think the same thing – that something is not of value unless it’s been validated by Melbourne or Sydney. We have a certain mythology within Australia that there are certain places that are of more importance than others. You know the coastal ideal, the dead heart, maybe the bush a little bit, and then there’s these stories from inner city Melbourne and Sydney, but I want to raise the stories of the flat blocks and people running around doing graffiti, petty criminals, migrants who are demonised and told to go back to where they come from in these seemingly boring suburbs. I want to raise that to the level of myth and say that these stories are full of grandeur and dignity and resilience and they are just as important as the stories that come from elsewhere in Australia. That’s really important to me. To paraphrase Werner Herzog, he’s one of my heroes, the great film director, he said that, “Part of art is extending sympathy where it has not been extended before, and finding stories where they have not been looked for before.” And I’m hell-bent on doing that.
