Luxville 5 Opening Speech By Lynden Baxter
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land; the Wathurong people who breathed life into the land and first spoke its stories. I pay my respects to their elders past and present.
1 metre Or 50 centemetres
That’s the amount of personal space Australians need to feel comfortable in public. The minimum space between you and me. Between you and the person next to you. In the wide, open countryside the full 1 metre applies. In crowded cities we get by with the bare 50cm.
I reckon as we’re in a regional city, we can split the difference and settle on 75cm. 75cm of socially constructed empty space.
An invisible interpersonal architecture that protects our individuality while at the same time fitting us into the society we traverse. It keeps us safe.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs describes the things we need to flourish.
1st are physiological needs; air, water, food, sleep. Then there is our need for safety; for shelter and security. 3rd are our social needs; to be accepted and respected. To belong. Once all these needs are met we need to self-actualise and self-transcend. These are the highest needs.
In a word our greatest need is creativity.
Creativity is how we express our unique personalities in a social way.
It links us to the world.
The ancient Greeks celebrated the 9 muses of creativity. The ethereal muses are depicted as sublimely knowledgeable, beautiful women dedicating their lives to the Arts. They weren’t interested in everyday life. The Greeks believed the muses secretly channelled the power of creativity by breathing into humans’ ears. The muses’ out breath, (their expiration), was taken in, ‘inspired’ and art was born.
And it is art that brings us here tonight. Here to the gleaming splendour of the Marble Room for the revelation of Luxville.
Luxville.
A city once golden, now tarnished. Its radiance dimmed. Luxville, once luminous, prolific, exuberant, and richly diverse has fallen on hard times. The petticoat of Luxville’s grandness is dragging in the mud.
Civilisations are constructed primarily from our dreams and fired with our creativity. It’s what makes them great. But as we know from history greatness is a fragile creature. Susceptible to power and greed.
John Steinbeck wrote in 1952, that the “free, exploring mind of the human is the most valuable thing in the world.”
The free, exploring mind.
Well I guess he’d know. After all he won a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Steinbeck said that creativity is “ a kind of glory” that “lights up a mind”. Creativity, he said, is a force “ you can feel….like a fuse burning towards dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight in the nerves….The skin tastes the air and every deep drawn breath is sweet.
[creativity] flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes.”
Steinbeck warned us against valuing productivity over creativity. While he acknowledged the efficiency and bounty that result from mass production he thought that any society that focuses primarily of our base needs was in danger.
He cautioned that when “our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.”
Yes, we need food and clothing and housing, but we also need to foster free, exploring, independent minds. Creative minds. Minds lit up with glory.
As Steinbeck said “If the glory can be killed we are lost.”
I don’t know if Steinbeck ever visited Melbourne, but had he just a few short years after writing his passionate exhortation against the mundane he would have seen his fears confirmed in the vision of another artist; John Brack.
Brack’s 1955 painting “Collins St at 5pm” hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria. Do you know it? It gives us a vision in brown and grey of a society where commerce has extinguished the glory of free minds.
It is a stark vision.
A city populated by drab, emotionally shut down office workers with pinched, closed faces marching in regimented monotony.
Luxville though tarnished is definitely not beige!
Its glory is faded, but remnant. Its citizens are a kaleidoscope of colour and hope.
Tonight we will meet 5 of its 10 muses.
Tonight they speak to us from photographs and film.
But Luxville is not just one place, or one form.
It has many aspects; film, photography, interactive story writing.
Beyond tonight we will have many other opportunities to visit Luxville.
We can visit its website.
You can send Madame Yum (aka Erin McCuskey) a picture of ‘faded glory’ and she will write you a story.
And Luxville citizens are invited to participate in filming another segment of the Luxville story this October.
And we are all citizens of Luxville, because we all have stories.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have not been any societies that did not need to tell stories.
Think of the song lines of Aboriginal Australia that sing the land to life. Think of parables, and fairy tales, myths and folk songs.
Author Phillip Pullman says “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the things we need most in the world.”
We all tell stories. We do it all the time. Maybe out loud. Or in writing, in music, on film. Perhaps in the homes we make and the relationships we nurture.
We tell the stories of who we are.
And whether our stories are bold and shining, or like Sylvia Plath’s, fragile stories making beauty out of sorrow, we use them to create meaning and purpose in our lives.
Alice Munro said a story is like a house.
You can go inside and wander about. Sit down. Stay a while. You can go from room to room and figure out how the house relates to the world outside.
You can look out the windows and see how the world is altered by being viewed from the perspective of being inside the house.
And it alters you too, being in the house. You begin to see things differently. And if stories are like houses, it is certainly true that they can take up residence inside us. In our hearts and minds; changing what we think and feel.
The Luxville muses have stories to tell us. Stories that glimmer and burn. Stories that might change our perspective.
One of the muses is no longer amongst us. Erin’s mother, Mary McCuskey.
Queen Mary!
We miss her, but she is not lost to us. I remember often driving along in Ballarat and seeing Mary setting a cracking pace as she bounded along the footpath. She set a cracking example too of how to live a life that is bold and brave, pulsing with energy and creativity.
She grew beautiful roses, and even more beautiful children. She gifted laughter and love to all around her.
She had the ‘glory’. Like Luxville she was a ‘beacon for wonderful’.
It is said that we should carve our names on hearts not tombstones. That a legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they tell about us.
Vale Mary. Luxville is dedicated to your memory. Born of your example.
Luxville is one story in many places.
We can enter it anywhere. Here, or on the web. And we should. Cities, buildings need people to hear their stories. Standing here in our 75cm of personal real estate we have surmounted Maslow’s hierarchy of base needs.
So, I ask you…….
What if we were to push out from our epicentre?
To move beyond the security of the mundane and to reach for the profound?
If we open our senses and our imaginations?
What might we discern in the soft shadows of the velvet drapes?
Or in the gleam of marble?
In the shimmer of a sequin?
The bounce of light off glass?
A glimpse of something?
A shade dancing there?
Or there?
Might we feel a soft, warm breath against our ear?
Luxville has stories to tell us.
Stories that ask questions.
Stories that celebrate our capacity to find answers.
Answers in the creativity of our own life stories.
Luxville challenges us to tell our stories out loud. To move outside our security. To have bold ideas. To follow our dreams. To make connections.
TO BE GLORIOUS.
So, welcome to Luxville. The house is open. Come right on in. In fact…storm the joint.
Run down the corridors.
Roll up the rugs.
Dance on the table tops.
Peak in the cupboards.
Throw open the windows and SHOUT.
LUXVILLE!
It will make you laugh.
It might make you cry.
It will intrigue you.
Perplex you.
It will fill your head with questions.
And your heart with quests.
And that IS how it should be.
by Lynden Baxter
Erin & Lynden in pjs. There was whiskey in the cups – promise!
Will you come and play?
