Spilt Milk - Justin Time (Demo)

Matty in Spilt Milk. This is the only image I have of anything to do with the band.

 

When I was 15 years old I got a drumkit for my birthday. I wasn't hugely into music at this point but I wanted to play in a band with my friends and everyone needed a drummer. The music of the time at Cranebrook High was Nirvana, Metallica, Pearl Jam, and any number of American grunge/metal bands. It was 1995. 

Then one day I was at my new school, St Marys Senior High, and some other students had put together a skate punk band called Linoleum. They performed in the playground at lunchtime and played a cover of a Spilt Milk song called The Simpsons. I thought it was the greatest thing ever... the lyrics were hilarious, the music seemed accessible enough to play, and it was fast and energetic. Plus the band who actually wrote the song, Spilt Milk, were locals!

This was the moment I knew that I wanted to play punk music. 

Anyway, this is something different for this blog but hey, it's my blog so I'm just gonna roll with it. 

Spilt Milk were a Western Sydney-based punk band that started in 1994. The original lineup consisted of Matty Albert (bass, vocals) and three other guys - Warwick McGee-Wright, Daniel Paterson, and Steven Kittney. Everyone except for Matty left or was kicked out sometime not long after formation. Marty Durkan then came on board on guitar and Lee Graham joined 6 months after that on drums. After another 6 months, Lee was replaced by Damiem Elliot... this was the most stable lineup and the one that I think most people probably remember when they think of Spilt Milk.

Adam Check (AKA 'Checky', previously bassist and vocalist for the band Detox Unit) joined as a second guitarist in 1998 and left about ten months later... the band only lasted another 3 months after that, breaking up in 1999. 

In their five years Spilt Milk brought out two demo tapes.

Justin Time (1997)

1. The Simpsons
2. Sandwich
3. Kissing Cousins

It Would Suck to be a Duck (1998)

1. Service Station Food
2. Wanker
3. Exploit Me
4. Nah Fuck It

They also had some various tracks on comps and stuff. They played a lot of all-ages shows in Western Sydney, a lot of pub shows in Sydney, and toured Melbourne twice. Says Matty, when I asked him about his time in Spilt Milk back in 2008, "It still spins me out that after all this time people ask me about this band, ask me if we could reform and even yell the name out at me in the street."

Matty and Damien went on to form Unpaid Debt after Spilt Milk. Matty has also played in My Therapy, Columbia's Pain (also with Damien and Checky), Toe to Toe, and a bunch of other bands. Checky went on to play bass in One Dollar Short.

A while ago, in 2012, Matty gave me permission to make the first Spilt Milk demo available online. Here's what he had to say:

MATTY: Okay, this was the first demo Spilt Milk did and it was paid for on the back of winning a band comp in Richmond after rehearsing once and getting 3 songs together. The main prize was a $500 voucher which was used at Zen Studios. With this we managed to record with Geoff Lee, press 500 demo tapes with black and white covers, and a few posters. Justin Time was the name settled on for the demo. Spilt Milk was started by myself on lead guitars and vox with a mate Warwick McGee-Wright on guitar. We were joined by Daniel Patterson on bass and Steven Kittney on drums. These are the first songs I'd ever tried to write and the lyric content wasn't exactly groundbreaking but fuck it, it was fun.

1. The Simpsons (Click here to listen/download)

MATTY: OJ is about the stupidity that the Aussie media had such a large coverage over a story about a guy we didn't give a fuck about. Not even the sport he played and his shit appearances in movies. Remember there wasn't any ESPN or pay TV at all.

2. Sandwich (click to listen/download)

MATTY: Sandwich is a piss take on munchies and Aussie vegemite.  

3. Kissing Cousins (click to listen/download)

MATTY: Kissing Cousins is a true story like a lot of my later punk writing about dirty, wrong people in the world. Especially the West of Sydney.

Bonus Track 1: Hot Stuff (click to listen/download)

MATTY: Hot Stuff is a Donner Summer cover. We were asked by Fox (Nancy Vandal) and the boys to be involved in the Bust a Move compilation in a tribute to 80s disco. We scored the second spot on the CD because Fox apparently liked it so much. At this time we had the longest and probably most well-known line-up as a three piece with Marty Durkan on bass and Damien Elliot on drums. The latter moving on to Unpaid Debt with me. He's also in a few other bands, with the most recent being Between the Devil and the Deep.

Bonus Track 2: Sex Me Hard (click to listen/download)

Editor's Note: I'd found this song at the last minute so wasn't able to get any words off Matty at the time about it. I believe it featured on another compilation.

Sources: This was pulled together from two main sources, a blog I used to write for the now-defunct Orble Network called Music Australia, and retired counterculture site called Duderocket. Many thanks to Matty for chatting with me both times and allowing for the songs to be posted. If anyone connected with the band has any corrections, suggestions, or retractions, feel free to let me know and I'll adjust the blog accordingly.

Mountains of Stories: The Role of Creative Writing in the West

High Street, Penrith. The horizon that sits above the buildings is the Blue Mountains. This elevated horizon allowed me to always know which direction was 'west' when I was a kid.

It's perhaps undeniable that the Blue Mountains exist as a kind of nexus point for artists and teachers. I've heard it said that there are more school teachers living in the Blue Mountains per capita than anywhere else in Australia, and my wife and I have crossed paths with more famous artists in this area than anywhere else we visit. Living in Penrith, I've come to appreciate being equidistant from both the mountains and the city. The opportunities my geography has afforded me hasn't gone unappreciated and, no matter how often I may feel despondent at some of the attitudes I've grown up around, I know that I will forever remain tied to this town with some degree of belonging. But being a writer here isn't a way of life that I have come to easily.

Yesterday my friend Kira and I travelled up to the Springwood Learning Hub for the Mountains of Stories creative writing workshop run by Cymbeline Buhler.

This was the advertisement for the workshop. It was $25, which is incredibly inexpensive considering it went for 4 and a half hours.

It was a fantastic day in that it focused on letting us write. Cymbeline used prompting activities to encourage creativity (new activities that I hadn't really had any exposure to before) and we experimented with synaesthesia, unreliable narration, and grounding our writing intentions in figurative analogies. 

It got me thinking about this writing game and why it's important.

I have to admit that, having grown up in Western Sydney around the practicality of 'working class' concerns, I often struggle with a certain inherent tension that arises from wanting to write. I hear this nagging voice that tells me that delving too far into creative pursuits is a waste of time... art has its place in enriching society but there's just so much of it. There are so many people who want to devote their entire life to writing - how could they all be worth listening to? How do I know that I'm worth listening to?

It's insecurity but I can also recognise that it comes from being enculturated by those around me. So many of my peers, my friends, my neighbours, my extended family live their lives in the pursuit of creating a foundation of security and comfort for the generations to come. Writing about feelings and the senses just doesn't come into it; how does one earn a living from that? How can people in this community connect to each other over discussions of the abstract?

I've spent a lot of my life thinking about the role of the intellectual in a world of sport, cars, trades, and family. I worked in retail for ten years because I wasn't convinced of the value of an ideology grounded in thinking and writing. I played music in a handful of bands and wrote countless film reviews, but it never felt like a real thing to do. Becoming an English teacher at the age of 29 was my first step in accepting that education and academia had an important role to play in the West.

Cymbeline Buhler brainstorming word associations during the 'Mountains of Stories' workshop.

So why write?

I've come to realise in recent years that the extension and development of a beautiful and extensive vocabulary allows us to put increasingly complex thoughts into words. Words are the backbone of symbolism; each letter represents a sound, each combination of letters becomes a word that means something. The denotative and connotative possibilities of each word means that these small collections of symbols have great potential for meaning. 

The more combinations of letters we know, the more shades of meaning. The more we can express in language, the closer we get to articulating the endless complexity of thought. 

Regardless of whether every aspirant writer becomes professional or well-known in this field, the pursuit of increased lexical expression can only serve to improve the depth and breadth of our communication with one another. When teaching my classes, whether it's a low ability Year 7 group in need of extra support or a Year 12 Advanced English class, I spend a lot of time teaching vocabulary through explicit instruction. The exponential development of individual vocabularies allows for more nuance in language.

Even if some students walk away from school unable to write an essay, or completely unmoved by the works of Shakespeare, I would hope that they have at least achieved two things:

1. Improved the lexicon from which they draw upon when communicating.
2. Acquired the skill to continue building their vocabulary by using the materials around them (conversations, TV shows, news stories, etc.) to expand on their ability to think.

This is creating active, intelligent citizenship. By achieving a mindset of growth in relation to language we can instill the foundation for life-long learning that will enable future generations to advocate for themselves.

I've always written. When I was a student I wrote extensively - I loved 'Journal period' where, once a week in English, we could write our own stories in our journal book. After school I studied journalism and went on to write a range of published and unpublished materials but nothing extensive. As an English/History teacher I've rediscovered my love for writing through the creation of texts for student engagement and it's been an empowering experience. I now find myself working unprecedentedly close with language after a long and winding journey to this point and I'm voracious to know and learn more. Creative writing workshops like Mountains of Stories have been instrumental in reinforcing my role as a 'writing English teacher': IE. Someone who engages directly with creative language in order to model sample texts for students.    

Word associations. Cymbeline had us brainstorm words in relation to a central term and then we had to describe the central term on the other sheet using the words from the first one.

 

 

Here is the piece I wrote in response to the brainstorms above. The brief was to describe 'Hope' with words relating to 'Sweet' in just a few minutes. I found it tricky to get my head around at first but I found a bit of a groove after thinking about it a bit:

Hope is sugary. Its saccharine, ebbing through the bloodstream to cause intense emotion. It flows across my gums, soft and watery, and leaves a sticky residue that is hard to shift. The high leaves me exhausted. My jaw aches as if it has been closing around the fibrous stem of sugar cane, my teeth working against something essentially inedible yet fraught with potential for sweetness. Hope is like love. Hope defies us with our experience of it and it never, truly leaves us.

Anyway.

The vast majority of our students won't become professional writers. In fact, you might not ever have a student who becomes a (successful) professional writer. So what does this mean for us as English teachers? How do we teach creative writing authentically if it's not going to be an authentic experience in the sense of a post-school career for many of our students? 

The answer is that creative writing provides a forum for the extension of our vocabulary. We can use creative freedom to experiment in word choice without the restrictions necessitated by other text types, and through this students can exercise their imagination with increasing complexity. With a wider variety of terminology a person will be able to better express what's going on in their heads or respond to the language used by others.

For more on Cymbeline Buhler's creative writing workshops: Big Stone Creations

Teaching: The Demographic Approach

In the words of my city council, "Penrith is here"

English is all about context. We look at the context of authors, the context of their texts, the context of a text's intended audience, the context of our students in responding to said text, and the context of the teacher teaching the text and how it fits into the syllabus. But really, thinking outside of the KLA, isn't everything about context?

"I want to give you $20".

If someone said that to me, then I would want to know why. What is the context? I would want to know who's giving me this money, why they are giving it to me, and what they expect me to either do for it or do with it. 

Then I would accept the $20. Most likely. Well, it depends on the context.

I teach in Western Sydney at Glenmore Park High School; a fantastic comprehensive government school full of great students who will no doubt grow into our proud future. Like all schools, it comes with its own context - both in terms of the immediate community and the wider demographic of Western Sydney - and these are things that bear some examination for a couple of reasons:

• If we know where the child is from, we'll have a better idea of where they're going.
• If we know what their parents expect and want, we'll be able to better cater to the needs of our community.
• If we know the sort of priorities and attitudes that have been passed on to the students from their community, we'll know how to better implement the kind of change that will have a generational effect and foster increased positivity towards education in our demographic.

In my case, Penrith City Council have a wonderful website with data on the city's demographics called Penrith Progression. There are some caveats that need minding when looking at statistics, such as not drawing direct conclusions when data could be correlating with certain observed trends. This simply means that if I see a percentage in the numbers then I should be careful not to say that this automatically proves a hypothesis I may hold. That would be an opinion, rather than a fact. 

I can, however, use the demographic data as a basis for assumptions. I can assume certain things as a means to explore pedagogy. This should be a design process rather than a solution. I can use the information gleaned from Penrith Progression (or any other set of figures related to demographics) to support ideas I want to test out. If these ideas work; hurray! If they don't; look at the data again and perhaps craft a new hypothesis - try something else. Perfection is impossible and pedagogy should therefore be flexible and fluid; constantly shifting and improving to make things better. In short: it's a design process.

For those who teach in Western Sydney, here are Penrith's demographics (as of 2015):

Housing

• 50% of families in Penrith have children, which is equal to the rest of Sydney, however, Penrith has a 25% higher proportion of single-parent families.
• The average personal income for an adult in Penrith is $632 per week - better than Blacktown or Liverpool, but less than Sydney and Camden.
• 10% of Western Sydney's population is concentrated in Penrith.
• 22% of Penrith residents own their house outright, with a further 42% paying off a mortgage. A further 26% rent. This compares as similar to Blacktown and Liverpool, however, it does constitute a drop compared to Penrith in 2005, where 32% of houses were owned outright. There has also been a shift towards increased renting in Penrith (something that has not occurred in Blacktown or Liverpool).

 Education

• In all of Western Sydney, Penrith has the highest proportion of adults who finished school at Year 10 (32%) and the least to complete Year 12 (38% - compared to 50% in both Blacktown and Liverpool). 
• Penrith is a 'leading skills city', with 22% of adults having vocational certificates (trades). In contrast, 10% go to university - which is less than other Western Sydney areas (Liverpool has 17% of their Year 12 students going on to university). 

Other

• People in Penrith are much more likely to go on to work in their hometown. 56% of workers in Penrith also live here, which contrasts with 38% in Liverpool and 44% in Blacktown.
• In the next 15 years, demographic models currently predict that the amount of Penrith citizens under the age of 15 will increase by a whooping 42%.

Some ideas I've assumed from this information were that:

1. Due to such a relatively high proportion of Penrith students staying on in Penrith to work, this may mean that attitudes towards work and education are more likely to be entrenched and generational. 
2. The increase in the number of Penrith-dwelling teenagers in the near future will mean that schools (particularly those in growth areas, like Glenmore Park High School) will continue expanding towards capacity.

You might be wondering what I do with this information. In my personal teaching context, the main idea is that it supports a Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) approach that favours the building of positive relationships through extrinsic recognition of desired attitudes and actions. If I want to affect generational change then it becomes important to teach students (especially those who might be at risk of long term disengagement) that school can be a positive experience and that, even if they leave with the sole purpose of picking up a trade, they may therefore pass on positive opinions of schooling to their own children. This may, in turn, then improve the percentage of students primed for university enrollment in the next generation.

It's a long game, but I've always preferred to play the long game. And, at the end of the day, I shouldn't really need an excuse for having a PBL focus in my pedagogy, but it certainly helps to reinforce it if I can see what the data says about my city. I can use this information in my design process for catering to my community better.