Kate Hennessy : Freelance Writer

First published on Mess+Noise, here.

It’s been two years since Machine Translations were in Sydney to launch ‘Seven Seven’ at The Gaelic Club. This time they’ve traded a pub setting for the creature comforts of Newtown’s jazz, blues and roots venue, The Vanguard. What a relief. Yesterday, after walls of rain for weeks, Sydney copped a tornado. Our city is sodden. Our umbrellas are defeated. Water seeps from every imaginable crack and overhang, and the appeal of a warm, civilised dinner/show combo burns as bright as a hearth fire.

J. Walker (Machine Translations). If this photo is yours, please tell me and I'll credit you.

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A CAREER GAZING INTO THE FAR REACHES OF THE GALAXY AND BACK TO THE WONDERS OF THE TINIEST MOLECULE HAS BLESSED SPACE ARTIST JON LOMBERG WITH UNIQUE INSIGHT.

“Thirty-two years ago something extraordinary happened to me,” wrote American artist Jon Lomberg in 2009.

“I was sitting in the viewing stands at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, watching the launch of NASA’s Voyager 2 mission to the outer solar system and beyond.”

Lomberg had reason to be watching Voyager so keenly. Something he’d laboured over very hard was on board. It was August 20, 1977, and in the six weeks prior to take-off a small team selected by NASA had created the Voyager Interstellar Record, a 12-inch gold-plated phonograph record that contained the best account the team could summon of our world to date.

Its intended audience? Extraterrestrials.

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It’s a hostile 43 degrees outside and even the locals are wilting. We are at Broken Hill’s tourist information centre and having no trouble getting service. “Our quiet months are December, January and February,” says the representative primly. Ah, I think. She means Summer.

She needn’t dodge the obvious. Unlike most January holidaymakers in Australia who flock beachside to unwind, we’ve willingly turned toward the country’s centre, rather than away from it, seeking a different kind of holiday.

Darling River bed

[See more photos here]

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WITH A RICH HISTORICAL HERITAGE AND FINE WINE AND DINING EXPERIENCES IN THE PRESENCE OF BREATHTAKING NATURAL SCENERY,  MUDGEE IS A LITTLE SLICE OF PARADISE FOR ANY TRAVELLER.

“Some winemakers go along in a tractor spraying the vines and never getting dirty — we call them ‘windshield viticulturalists’.”

It’s six in the evening at Thistle Hill organic winery in Mudgee. The January heat still shimmers across the vines and, in the distance, rise the picturesque hills that give the area its Wiradjuri Aboriginal name — Mudgee means “nest in the hills”. We’re sitting in low, dappled sun, sipping on a prize-winning 2009 Riesling.

The road from Mudgee to Gulgong

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THE WARMEST STATIC: GLEAMING SHARDS OF MELODY

“Dreamy and blissful electronica rife with glockenspiel and melodicas, possessing a sort of embracing energy.” The Brag (Indie album of the week)
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