Rada Priya

I went to meet Scott McDougall deliberately underprepared. This is not how journalists are usually meant to begin. We are supposed to research, cross-check, read the biography, study the exhibition history, arrive with neat questions and enough knowledge to sound vaguely authoritative. But Scott had been recommended to me by artist Hobie Porter, who told me he was someone I might find interesting. That was enough. I did not want to arrive with the internet’s version of him already sitting between us. I wanted to meet the man, see the work, stand in the room where it happened and absorb it without the corruption of other people’s opinions. I am not an art writer. Not really. But I am an artist at heart. A fashion designer by training. A lover of light, texture, form, fabric, structure, composition and the controlled drama of a perfectly judged line. Becoming a journalist has opened a new lens. It has also made me realise how often I underestimate people. My general disappointment in hum...

CEDAR CREEK, Australia - The road to Hobie Porter’s studio winds through dense green, the kind of layered rainforest that seems to breathe. It is quiet in a way that feels deliberate, as if the landscape is holding something back. Porter has built a career on that exact tension. I had known of Hobie Porter long before I knew him personally. His sweeping landscapes hanging at Tweed Regional Gallery had stopped me in my tracks. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise he was the same person I saw regularly at my daily café, Bastion Lane in Uki. For more than two decades, Porter has painted the Tweed Valley - its escarpments, shifting light and familiar outlines - but rarely in ways that feel settled. His works resist the easy beauty often associated with landscape painting. Instead, they hover somewhere between recognition and unease, inviting viewers to look again at places they thought they understood. “I’m trying to present a fresh perspective of something people are familiar...

There are people we grieve twice in a lifetime. Once for who they were. And once for who we were never allowed to know. My father is one of them. When I was a child, my mother told me he was a paedophile. She didn’t whisper it. She didn’t hesitate. She said it plainly, as fact. As warning. As control. When we misbehaved, she would drop us at the greyhound station and force us to spend sleepless weekends with him. I remember the noise of the station. The way my stomach would knot. The terror that would sit in my chest at night when the lights went out. I was absolutely terrified to sleep. He was a workaholic. Twelve-hour days. Long hours. Absence disguised as provision. He would leave cash on the bench, stockpiles of food in the fridge, and the television on - a wild luxury I couldn’t enjoy because fear had already moved in. At home with my mother, we weren’t allowed a TV at all. Looking back now, my father was unemotional, but never unkind. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer hims...

There are films you enjoy, films you admire, and then films that bypass your intellect entirely and go straight for the nervous system.  Strange Darling   did that to me. I didn’t just watch it - I felt located by it. From the title alone, the film announces its intelligence.  Strange Darling  sounds intimate and threatening in the same breath, and the opening scene honours that tension immediately. The colour blocking is not aesthetic flourish but psychological architecture. The cinematography is precise, deliberate, almost mannered - yet constantly vibrating with danger.  The chemistry between the leads is undeniable and unsettling. Not romantic, not safe - a charge that feels ferocious without tipping into fantasy. They are both extraordinarily talented and undeniably hot, which matters because attraction interferes with moral clarity. The film understands that beauty disarms suspicion and uses it without apology. Watching them together is confronting, hypnot...

I’ve already written about  The Wiiyaan   as a journalist. That piece lives in the Tweed Weekly . It’s careful, respectful, measured. It honours Bundjalung origin story, place, and the quiet authority of listening. It was written for a broad audience, many of whom - like me - come from settler families, carrying our own histories alongside the land we now call home. But after filing that story, I knew I wasn’t done. Some stories ask something back from you. This one did. So this is the version that doesn’t fit in a newspaper column. This is the version that explains why that exhibition cracked something open in me - why listening to Kyle Slabb speak about holding  one  version of Country, with care and restraint, felt like a mirror I wasn’t expecting. Kyle spoke about perspective. About how this telling is not  the  story, but  a  story - shaped by lineage, responsibility and law. He was clear, careful, and deeply respectful of other versions held...

 There is a quiet ritual in returning to an artwork a year after year-be a painting, a fashion monograph, or shadowy photograph once captured in a fleeting second. What once stunned me with surface beauty begins to find deeper things with time. These work don't fade. They gather. They become layered - like fabric worn in the elbows, softer, richer, more personal. The artists I return to, Alexander McQueen, Collette Dinnigan, Yves Saint Laurent, etc, never really leave. The work isn't just historical or trendy, it resists the very idea of expiration. These aren't seasonal moments, they are iterative legacies. The garments, sketches, philosophies, continue to reveal themselves in fragments - as I change, as the world does. This is the infinite life of art: it doesn't age, it ages with you. And in that shared timeline, you co-author its meaning. You respond differently at 22 then at 39. The heartbreak you hadn't yet lived, the maternal instinct that hadn't yet woke...