Check the TIMETABLE for details to come aboard a future TRAM OVERHEARD journey.

Come back here soon and you’ll be able to listen in to the dialogues via podcast.
(ah-hmm… we’re just ah, waiting for big brother to help operate the super dooper listening system.)

Tabla, harmonium and the cadence of Shoaib’s voice set off. Samosas and chai circulate the densely crowded cabin on this last improvised performance lap. Three High God People join in with chimes from the set of twelve brass hand bells – Melbourne’s special set of Federation Bells normally housed in the State Library. As the journey gathers pace, more and more High God People have hopped aboard at different tram stops, chiming bells, appearing in wonderfully strange head gear and body wear. The temperature is high, and a monsoon-like downpour is dumping on Melbourne. Passengers aboard are trickling with sweat; new passengers squeezing a way aboard enter in drenched clothes. As the mood reaches a visceral fever at journey’s three-quarter point our Yarra Tram company staff announce: “all passengers must exit and catch the tram behind us. This tram is temporarily going out of service.” Confusion abounds. “We want this tram, not that one!” The tram’s rear doors won’t close, so passengers oblige by exiting, perplexed with the state of their excitement being interrupted. The tram continues on. A maintenance man hops aboard, fixes the doors, and by three stops later the W11 is densely crammed with a new crowd of passengers aboard, dancing their way of the tram isle. W11 Tram zindabad!

Photos Karen Trist

Is a global rise in the legal and bureaucratic structures shaping life matched by a loss of personal manners and etiquette in interpersonal relationships? Is the maintenance of strangeness between people integral to finding harmony with difference and a civic ethic? Dialogue between these two strangers departs with faith in friendship between foreigners. The conversation unravels the mutually affirming nature of the guest and host relationship and its broader implications. Guests are not simply recipients of hospitality – they also teach their hosts about this relation of hospitality. Leela finds formal etiquette advantageous. Mick advocates for a lack of overly mannered formality in friendships. Their journey arrives at a shared value for surprise in personal and public life: that friendship allows the surprise enabled by not holding a pre-existing agenda. And a surprise came in the form of a monsoon-like downpour on this Melbourne summer afternoon.

‘Are you warming up, or is this it?’ one passenger asks of Snawklor. Two men and twenty metres of sound cables, pedals, trumpets, Indonesian string instruments and field recording samples drift in and out amongst passenger chatter and electrical hum of a tram lapping the city. Like an extension of environmental infrastructure, Snawklor build a soundscape experience that loops with echoes, overlaps and punctuations. The 50minute city circle lap falls into smaller sound patterns, loops and resonances. We move through three sections, somewhat evocative of, firstly, an urban pattern of technological habitation; secondly an animal-world habitation; and thirdly a contestation of sound patterning. On the last stretch of the city lap the ambience is ruptured: gunshot… gunshot… . the sound of human violence incorporated into a rhetoric of contemporary urban life, for better or worse, for parody or pleasure. This journey found a way to sound out something of ‘Melbourne-ness’ in the zoo of contemporary globalised cocophonies.

Photos by Ceri 16 Mar 2007

Since the fall of the ‘White Australia’ migration policy, waves of coloured migration have repeatedly presented existing Australians with the new challenge of confronting the visibility of difference amongst people, at the same time as finding it impossible to distance new migrants as so different as to ignore them. In the 1950’s as a new migrant Vin experienced a trusting Australia, confident in its post-war life, but now it seems Australians have become spooked and lost their nerve. For Michelle, there is an inconsistency in facing the question of belonging in Australia that is ripped by the tensions of relationship with indigenous Australia. Whilst some Australians may feel able to show hospitality toward refugees, the nature of shame makes taking responsibility for indigenous displacement more problematic. Michelle recalls the Jewish tradition of inviting a stranger off the street to come into your home and share Passover Seder whilst Vin shares his experience of growing up with a father who adopted children in need and shared their home with a stream of the Indian diaspora. A rich range of passengers hop on and off the W-11 tram as the dialogue seeks out hopeful ‘movements of the heart’.

Photos 17 Mar 2007 by Ceri

Ria’s striking voice lifts passengers and carries them away. Chris has the strings of the oud rumbling and writhing. Joined by the drone and shrills of even more strings, the tram is enchanted. Makes one wonder of the potential sound from all the taught strings that wrap this cities skyline in its web of tramways overhead wiring.

Photos 9 Mar 07 Karen Trist

The artisan practice of transport vehicle decoration stands at the other end of the spectrum to the Moghul court painting practice in which Nusra is trained. She speaks with admiration for the possibilities of colour demonstrated by the W11 Tram. The conversation explores the process of making in layers – in vehicle decoration, in Nusra’s painting practice and in Suzie’s exhibition practice – that builds up relationships between placements to construct space. For Suzie the W11 Tram is vibrantly intense environment, one that is a wonderful mobile insertion into the fabric of the city. Nusra speaks of how the vibrant colour, together with music, makes people simply seemingly so happy as to smile when boarding the tram. Suzie proposed the atmosphere of the tram affects us at a subconscious and sensuous level, and even spreads out to the street where those walking by bring a smile to their faces. A passenger adds: “it is like travelling in a large jewellery box”.

Photos 9 Mar 07 Karen Trist

What happens when two passengers get physical in a tram? Yumi and Tony command the isle, swing from the railings, throw and turn themselves into extraordinary passengers and ordinary travel into extraordinary passage.

Photos 02 Mar 2007 Karen Trist

Stepping into the W11 tram is a step into transnational space. Sudesh speaks of how cultural surface affects travel easily, of how there is an interrelationship between India’s current 9% economic growth and rising global distribution of Bollywood. Phillipa notes how practices of the body like yoga and ballet are organised by the specificity of place – yet they also move from that place and take on new inflections in new places. This process can be both positive and negative. Sudesh proposes there is less value in hybridity as an easy fusion of this and that, simply producing part of global commodity culture. Rather, we may look for mutual contamination between the strength of existing forms to produce value of greater depth. For Sudesh all forms are already hybrid in formation, it just may be that we forget the range of informing influences. Nationalism feeds off forgetting our own contaminated geneology – yet we are all the other to ourselves. Phillipa and Sudesh take their conversation to the limit point of what it means to be human and have relationship to human beings, and to the reality of genocide, to the conversion of a people to something that cannot be talked of as human. At journeys end they leave us with the troubling situation of how ‘Muslims’ are currently being negatively constructed in the global imagination

Photos 02 Mar 2007 Karen Trist

Simple yet complex rhythms flow from the hands of Brahim on the skin of his drum.

Photos 23 Feb 07 Karen Trist

People move through the city from A to B, but do we take the time to experience its richness? For Andrew the city is like an encyclopedia, where our own biographical relationship toward a place builds strong feelings. Yet even having written an encyclopedia of Melbourne, he is still ever surprised by the city and traces of life evidenced in it. Roberto tells of how the tramcar has long brought together the ‘jungle of humanity’, cross-pollinating communication between people, and the role the tram conductor once played in this. The conversation moves through the great cultural diversity developed in Melbourne since the gold rush - a diversity that has existed since, but which has been expressed and dealt with in different ways.

23 Feb 2007 photos Karen Trist