Paper Radio: FM: Fiction

In some modern societies, the economy has achieved the status of a living, breathing human being. Often it is afforded greater protection and rights than the communities it is supposed to support. Although all-knowing and all-powerful, the economy still struggles, fails and sometimes, even ‘hurts’. To some, these conditions make it even more holy.

As our society’s most powerful contemporary deity, don’t we owe it to the economy to not only sacrifice our time, our loyalty and our children’s future, but our very spirit? This guided economic meditation will harness your conscious experience, allowing you to finally become one with the most supreme being of our times.

By some estimates, there are as many as 150 ‘big things’ strewn across Australia. There’s the Big Banana, the Big Merino and even the Big Magic Mushroom. In this story, Ballina’s Big Prawn casts a long shadow over the imagination of a young girl, as she hits the road in search of the mythical crustacean of her childhood.

Forget minimalism. There’s a new kid on the block: hypotheticalism.

Grounded in complex ideas and elegant concepts, it’s a movement that’s challenging the way we think about visual art and what, exactly, constitutes an artwork. But is it more style than substance?

The second part of this special feature focuses on two leading local exponents of hypotheticalism – Anna Barclay and Damien Lee. Barclay talks to us about her contentious sculpture, ‘The Role of Sight in the Age of its Metaphysical Reproducibility’, while Lee details his reappropriation of colonial imagery for ‘Untended Meadow’.

In Me and Run Like A Dream, from Melbourne’s Elizabeth Reale, our protagonist gives us a candid first-hand account of the power of animal magnetism — reminding us that sometimes when you place all your bets on love, you can win big.

The third and final episode of Thomasin Sleigh’s Weather trilogy. In a world plagued by the sudden absence of its weather forecasters, these unexplained disappearances become absorbed into the minutiae of everyday life.

Listen to: Weather #1, Weather #2

The second of Thomasin Sleigh’s three part Weather series. In a world mysteriously absent of its meteorologists, people begin to study details of the weather themselves.

Listen to: Weather #1, Weather #3

In a surreal pop renovation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic musical, The Sound Of Music fuses familiar and familial characters as it grapples with who we are, and become, in love.

The Sound of Music is taken from Tom Cho’s book Look Who’s Morphing, published by Giramondo.

The first story in a series of three, Weather #1 chronicles a world in which all meteorologists have vanished suddenly and without explanation.

See also: Weather #2, Weather #3

Played out against a backdrop of pre-teen animal husbandry, Calf Club 1989 is the story of a sister and brother grappling with an unexpected familial revelation.

A teacher’s classroom of restless, indifferent students becomes suddenly reliant on his seemingly worthless field study on drowning.