In 2022 I was invited to provide an oral history for the State Library of Western Australia’s LGBTIQ+ history project. We kept having to put it off, so it was really good to finally film that in June 2023 this year. I was interviewed by Helena Cohen-Robertson of Know Your Nation inside the auditorium of the State Library and the final video and transcript can be accessed through the Library’s online catalogue along with other individuals also interviewed for their Community and Connections: LGBTQIA+ stories in Western Australia.

My Rearview Mirror posts are a remembrance of things I did in the past, which have come full circle to bite us. The exponential exposion of AI, and the launch of ChatGPT, has made everyone aware that AI has made a gigantic leap and left the test tube. Those of us in the margins of creative thinking who tried to warn policy makers over a decade ago perhaps feel less awful about that today. After all, they have ignored bigger fish like Stephen Hawking…

This is a digitised visual diary entry I made in 2005 and later used in my paintings for a solo exhibition called The Assassination of Judy Garland back in 2013. I have a lot of sketches and studies which never seen to see the light of day, and I’m turning them into prints in some cases, or adding them into my studies of the present. This one was scribbled Energize Mr Ellis on a print I found in one of my files. It was about fragmenting materiality, or disintegration such as dropping something in an acid bath, in this case, myths of American exceptionalism…

An amazing night with a repeat walking performance of The Lion Never Sleeps by Noamie Huttner-Koros at The Blue Roome theatre (well, we started walking from there) for which I was interviewed in 2019 for her 2019/20 season. It tells stories of Perth's LGBTIQ community during the AIDs crisis in the early to mid 1980s, part of the largely undocumented and overlooked history of Western Australia that wasn't considered 'acceptable' history for decades.

This post is a little drip-feed post of excerpts from my Dad’s unfinished memoirs. I’ll keep adding to it off and on. He died in 2018. Dad (Ramanathan Gopalkrishnan) was only 8 years old when war came to Penang in Malaysia in what we now call the ‘Indo-Pacific’. His father, my grandad, was assumed dead after not returning home after the 1941 bombing & occupation of Penang by the Japanese.

Happy 90th Birthday Dad. You may no longer be with us, and you were never perfect darling, but you’re still ‘too marvelous’ to forget. We all miss you Dad, and I know you’re sipping a great red and watching the theatre of the world relieved to be out of it. Love you too. Carl X