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‘My dad had a big heart attack. I was 13 and I had to drive him to town in the car. I’d never driven the car before but I’d played with the pedals and the gears while it was in the shed. After the heart attack he couldn’t drive anymore and I had to drive my mum around. It was war time and a lot of kids had to do a lot of things they’d never done before. I used to have to take mum to the town so she could see dad in the hospital. I lived in a small town of only a few hundred people so I drove under the supervision of the town policeman until I was old enough to get a licence.’

This story and image featured as part of a series highlighting the housing affordability crisis in Sydney. Although he had six children, he lives alone in a converted garage (the room was not much bigger than his bed) in an old terrace house in the Inner West.

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‘I’d broken up with my fiancée and suddenly realised I was by myself. It was just me and I thought, well, I don’t need much. At the same time I was also dealing with stress anxiety from working a lot and the lifestyle that comes with that. Even though nobody was pressuring me in the slightest, I felt that way. I felt that you’ve got to live a certain way to make your parents proud and your friends happy.

‘I studied a bit of art when I was a teenager and had left it for about 20 years. When I started it again about two years ago, I found it very meditative and felt very stress free. I realised how much I missed it and that this is my real love.

‘I left all my jobs. One of the biggest challenges of doing that was the fear of whether I would be good enough as an artist because you honestly don’t know. It’s not always about skill level in art either – it’s about finding your own voice and your own style and telling a story through it.

‘At my age, it’s hard to get back in to paid employment – trying to apply for a job when you’ve left it for two years – they’ll take someone who’s currently working in the field and a younger person as well. There was always that risk. If I had kids and a mortgage I wouldn’t do it because you do it for your kids – you work. I can be a little bit selfish because it’s just me. I can’t go out every night with friends and go to fancy restaurants but I get to do what I love every day.’

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‘When I started out, I was just a really enthusiastic person that saw they needed help wrangling zombies. Seven years later I’m the head zombie of it all. I’m a bit of a horror buff so I love the gore but I also love the fact that it does raise money for a good cause – The Brain Foundation.

‘The Brain Foundation studies brain and neurological disorders and illnesses and so it covers things like brain cancer and stuff like that but they also look in to things like dementia and that sort of thing so it’s quite broad.  I’ve had friends who’ve been affected and I’ve seen how much it can impact a family.

‘Every year the number of zombies doubles so we need as many zombie wranglers as possible. When it started out around 7 years ago we had about 100 zombies and it basically just multiplied every year and so now we’re one of the biggest walks in Australia for it. It’s really cool. Being a zombie wrangler is not a difficult job but we need all the help we can get.

‘Zombie Walks take place all over the world. Some of the earlier ones started in San Francisco but not all of them are fundraisers. I think that we’re the main one in Australia that does fundraising but the rest of them are more for horror buffs and for people who want to just get bloody and messy and scare the general public.’

www.sydneyzombiewalk.com on Saturday 31st October.

Email kat@sydneyzombiewalk.com to help wrangle zombies.

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‘This project has been in the making for my whole life. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s my favourite style of eating.

‘I grew up in inland Argentina. We weren’t by the sea so it wasn’t like fresh seafood or anything so the food you got was usually out of a can. My mum’s background is Italian and my dad’s Polish so it was always cold cuts, olives, olive oil and cheese and all the good stuff.

‘I just want to bring good food; good times to people. I’ve lived in Newtown for around 15 years. I always say if I won heaps of money in the lotto, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I just love it here.

‘Newtown is a community where people collaborate on projects together. You don’t really hear about it happening anywhere else. It’s always been like that, that’s what I like about Newtown. Everyone always helps each other out and supports each other which is amazing.’
Continental Delicatessen opened yesterday on Australia Street.
@continentaldeli
http://www.continentaldelicatessen.com.au

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‘I feel scared. Who’s going to protect me at the end of the night? I don’t know if they’re watching me, or not. My family gets scared when they see things like this. They don’t want me to work anymore. They said what if they come next time and you’re there and they know I will defend myself and things will be worse.

‘Last night about half an hour after I finished work I received a call from security. They told me you have a break in or something through your windows. I was at the city with my friend having a cup of coffee and relaxing after work so I had to come straight back and found the police here. I saw my whole front door is smashed and I was surprised and shocked and really, really upset about it.

‘Also on the Friday my window cleaner told me to come and see what they’d scratched on the window. They’d written “F*** Arabs”.

‘I don’t know why this guy or guys think I’m the leader for Arab people or I’m the leader for Muslims – they’re calling me to abuse me about what’s happening overseas or something like that which is not my fault. I’m not doing nothing wrong here.

‘This is not the first time. For the last 7-8 months, every month, 2-3 calls were received threatening and swearing – talking in a racist way. I’ve been here 14 years. I’ve never had problems like this before.

‘I don’t want to know who did it. God will forgive them one day. I will forgive them if they stop doing this but I’m a bit surprised about the media. Usually if a Muslim guy does something, they put it on the TV next half an hour but if something happens to a Muslim guy, they’ll think about it a hundred times before they put it on.

‘I need the police this time to take it more seriously. It’s happened before, (they take a) statement, things happen but they never come back to me. I never heard from them again.

‘The whole community (here in Newtown) – the people, they’re really nice. They’ve been supporting me all day today – calling me, saying sorry – I love Newtown, it’s a beautiful place.’

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‘When I was a kid I loved to draw. I loved creating stuff and imagining things but slowly over time it disappeared and I stopped drawing.  When I hit my 30s, I decided to start getting up 15 minutes earlier before work each day. The first time I did it was really strange because I was just sitting there with this blank piece of paper and didn’t know what to do. It just grew bigger and bigger and now it’s about 1½-2 hours a day.

‘I used to see these two older men outside this café in Glebe. I drew them and imagined a story that perhaps they’d fallen on hard times but really they secretly controlled all the money in the world. I became friends with one of them and discovered he was a fine arts student back in the 70s or 80s. He’d actually been an artist all that time so it was a cool moment where the story I’d imagined came in to clash with a reality.

‘I always thought that I was normal as a kid – the way I thought – until I started talking to people and then I realised that maybe I’m not so normal – maybe I’ve got a slightly different perspective. I’ve always connected dots A & G rather than A & B. There is something inside me that just tries to connect things that are seemingly unconnected and so I love creating stories about the people I draw.

‘This whole process of rediscovering art has changed me a lot. It’s shown me possibilities and it’s helped me to connect with a whole bunch of people that I wouldn’t have before. It expands the world and it makes me much more empathetic for people. I’m now more patient and humble in how I try and understand them.’

Oscar Finch will be holding his first Honesty Box Gallery Exhibition at the HON Live launch event on Saturday 5th September. He will be also roaming the crowds incognito drawing people and creating stories about them.

Further info: www.oscarfinch.com/pages/honestybox and www.oscarfinch.com/blogs/art

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‘Creativity means coming up with something from almost nothing. If you want something original then some of that is going to happen with you being an ordinary person working with unusual concepts. But some of that is also going to come from your own individuality – you will look at an ordinary thing but bring your own perspective to that – the way you formulate the story for example because of your background. I think we all need to embrace our inner weirdness. We need to keep it weird.’

Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect.

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‘We were just bankrupt in the end – there was so much debt. There were just no more windows of opportunity anywhere. We exhausted everything. We were always trying to find a way. It got to the point where we just couldn’t pay the bills.

‘We took over the Annandale Hotel in 2000 and quickly realised it was foolish not to have live music on. That was the heart and soul of the place and so live music became part of our lives. But it was never not a drama there – from the minute we bought it we were in court for various reasons. If it wasn’t for the absolute passion that we had for the place and the people there’s no way in the world we could have lasted that long.

‘One day in 2013 we realised that there’s just no way out of this anymore. We told a bunch of friends to come down and we got one of our favourite local bands in the back bar one Sunday night. We drank the bar dry and walked in the bank the next day and handed in the keys.

‘You see people bad mouthing pubs or live music festivals that go under – people don’t go in to these ventures to try and rip people off. They go in to it because they’re passionate or they think it’s worthwhile. You look at things differently once you’ve been through it.

‘When we went bankrupt, it was relieving. There was a big fear of losing the pub but the stress that was on our shoulders was just so intense. It comes with its challenges too. I’ve got another couple of years of bankruptcy.

‘But the freedom of having no money is quite liberating because you can have a go at anything and what have you got to lose? It’s a really different way of looking at things – it’s a very freeing type of mentality.

‘I love Newtown – I’ve been in the area now for 15 years. We’re organising the King Street Crawl which is a celebration of this area. The goal of it is to shine a light on the space and celebrate its diversity as well.’

Further details, check out:
https://www.facebook.com/kingstreetcrawl?fref=ts