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While so many members of the music industry have been bemoaning its decline, one socially-conscious singer-songwriter has found a way to flourish. For more than two years now Jack Stafford has been on permanent world tour. A digital nomad with an acoustic guitar, Jack has relied on a frugal attitude and the kindness of strangers to take his music to Europe, North America and Oceania. And while touring through New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia, he travelled by bike.

Jack much prefers peddling over other forms of transport. “You arrive at a venue feeling quite stagnant if you’re in a car or on a train,” he says. “And then you have to fit in exercise around it. When you’re on the road it’s incorporated into your day. You’re travelling and getting your exercise, and you arrive feeling refreshed.”

His many years of gigging with various bands have also given him an appreciation of touring by treadlie. “I’ve travelled with a band in a bus – you start living in your own filth, everyone gets hungover and moody and they sleep too much or don’t sleep enough. When you’re doing this much exercise it brings you into equilibrium; it’s a kind of cure-all.”

Cycling up to 100km a day also gives Jack plenty of time to think. He kept an iPod clipped to the handlebars of his hand-built Bob Jackson touring bike during his travels up Australia’s east coast, using it to record lyrics and melodies to work on later. He is incredibly prolific – there are nine albums currently available for download on his website that were written and recorded on this tour. Each leg of his journey has an album devoted to it, including one about his three weeks at sea travelling from Cairns to Darwin aboard the appropriately named Sabbatical. Some people keep a journal – Jack writes music.

His songs are about the personal and the political – “searching for wifi, liberate Libya, dangerous Australian roads, hills I’ve cycled up, things like that.” Collaborators come and go. For three months in Australia he toured with two other cyclist musicians, busking and performing at house concerts as the Peddling Troubadours. More recently he has been touring with Maria Rosaria della Pepa, a ‘dancing architect’ he met in New Zealand. The pair travelled through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand on a tandem. “It’s kind of a fluid thing, people come, people go, but hopefully she stays around,” he says.

Prior to embarking on this adventure Jack was living in Amsterdam, a regular guy with a job and a mortgage (a period of his life covered in songs such as ‘Ikea’, ‘Dear Shareholder’ and ‘Soulseller’). When he first set off on tour in August 2009 he gave up his apartment and put his belongings into storage. A year later he returned to Amsterdam and sold everything he owned. “I sold all my possessions and hit the road,” he says. “It’s the best way – you don’t feel homesick because you ain’t got a home.” He now finds places to stay through the international couch surfing network, or trades gigs for food and lodging. His shoestring budget is supported by busking, house concerts, and the occasional dumpster diving mission. All he carries is his stage clothes, cycling and camping gear, and his guitar.

In the early days of the tour Jack would book shows up to six months ahead, but now he keeps his itinerary loose and flexible. His motto is “make no plans, break no hearts”, but after a youth spent growing up in the chilly UK he has one simple strategy – follow the sun. “I just want to follow the good weather. It’s called migratory touring. I’m solar powered!”

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Fittingly for this issue of Treadlie, ABC journalist Jennifer Macey cites two literary references as the childhood inspiration for her cycling obsession. First, the bicycle adventures that featured heavily in Enid Blyton books; and second, the Sweet Valley High Super Edition, Perfect Summer, in which the Wakefield twins and their friends do a drama-filled bike tour up the coast of California. “My sister and I were obsessed with bike touring from a really young age,” Jennifer says. “It took a while before we actually went on our first tour – we were in our twenties when we went around the south islands of New Zealand. It’s so great. I guess that’s my main love – bike touring.”

Her other big love is husband Adam Hogan, owner of Sydney cycle store Cheeky Transport. The two Malvern Star-crossed lovers met at his shop when Jennifer returned to Sydney after working and riding in Germany for five years. Adam proposed while they were mountain biking in Switzerland (“Dad says he had altitude sickness”) and the two rode to their wedding together on Brompton folding bikes.

“We passed this group of boys at the milk bar and they said, ‘Are you getting married?’ And we said, ‘Yeah,’ and they said ‘Don’t do it!’ But we did it anyway!” Jennifer laughs. “The best thing was that the fifteen minutes it took us to ride to the wedding was the one time during that day that Adam and I had completely to ourselves. It was really romantic – the excitement of riding together to our wedding.” The ceremony took place at a school, so when they arrived they did a lap of the oval, Jen’s dress tied in a big knot above her knees.

Having a direct line to the supply chain allows Jennifer to feed her bike addiction. She has five treadlies (so far): the Brompton, an old Giant mountain bike for touring, a fixie, a “very beautiful double shock mountain bike which has all the bells and whistles”, and a road bike. She also has an impressive collection of tour stories, having ridden everywhere from Canberra and Kangaroo Island to New Caledonia and France. “It just feels so liberating,” she says. “I think car travelling is quite exhausting, whereas when you’re on a bike you’re just kind of taking it all in. You don’t need to stop as much because the scenery is right there all around you.”

Riding also comes in handy in her work as a reporter for ABC Radio National. Jumping on a bike is often a quicker and easier way for Jennifer to cover stories on the ground. While staying with her sister in Brisbane’s West End to cover the January floods, Jennifer would borrow a bike (“I think she has more bicycles than I do!”) to go and do her daily reporting. “It was good because I didn’t have gumboots,” she says. “I didn’t have to walk through disgusting floodwaters to get there.”

Jennifer usually commutes to work at least one way each day, loving the bike’s ability to clear the mind. “You come home feeling refreshed,” she says. “It empties your brain of all the busyness from the day on your ride home. Or in the morning it can trigger ideas, and then when you turn up to the editorial meeting you’ve got something to contribute.” She takes the back streets and the waterfront to avoid the traffic, but admits to a bit of risky behaviour. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I really like listening to the radio on the way to work,” she says. “It keeps me up to date, and if I’m on a day shift then I get to listen to my show. I don’t get to listen to it if I’m at work because I’m too busy.”

The next adventure in store for Adam and Jennifer is riding as a family. They’ve just welcomed daughter Billie into the world and are keen to show it to her by bike. “I don’t care if our kids aren’t into cycling, we’re going to drag them on long bike tours whether they like it or not!”

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It simply cannot be denied that Kate Rhodes has a beautiful bike. Her Grand 1888, a big glossy black Dutch coaster, has led strangers to chase her down the street to ask questions about her ride. And with a lengthy CV that includes curatorships at several major galleries and design centres in Melbourne and Sydney, a former role as editor of architecture and design magazine Artichoke, and current posts as Director of RMIT’s new Design Hub as well as Creative Director of Victoria’s State of Design Festival, it stands to reason that her treadlie would be something of a looker. But according to Kate, the definition of design goes far beyond aesthetics.

“Design is about the possibility of making the world a better place, doing things better, greener, smarter,” she says. It’s about systems, and finding answers to problems and challenges, and in that sense the act of riding a bike to work every day is a design solution. “I’ve always fantasised about running a design elective at RMIT about how you might get away with only riding your bike for a year,” Kate says. “What things would you need to come up with in order to move house or to have a huge party or travel to Sydney? How could we get the bike to replace the car at every point? That would be a pretty interesting project.”

Kate’s life might be pretty close to this ideal already. She has a driver’s license but doesn’t use it (“I have a fear of killing people”), preferring instead to ride to work, to do the grocery shopping, to get to parties and to visit friends. For Kate, riding brings freedom, as well as the chance to really observe her surroundings. “I know all about the best window sills and mail boxes and flowers on my ride because I go slow enough to take in those details.”

With a busy career to manage (she rarely has fewer than three jobs at any given moment), Kate’s extracurricular bike riding is limited. However she does make it out for the occasional special event, one of her favourites being the Cultural Transports Collective’s Ride-On-Dinners. Getting out for a group ride lets her tap into a sense of community. “There’s something about riding with others which is incredibly joyous,” she says. “I think you give off a lot of vicarious energy to people who see you. There’s something in the idea of being a mob that might encourage others to get on board or just follow along and find out where this big gang is going.”

Last year Kate was a panellist at Melbourne Bikefest as well as a judge for the Better By Bike competition. This year she has her own festival to run. The theme of this year’s State of Design Festival is ‘Design that moves’. “It’s about the revolutionary and the transformative, the nomadic, the modular,” says Kate. “It’s about transitional zones. We want to have lots of exhibitions in stairs and thoroughfares and bridges.” So can we expect to see some bike-related events in the program? “Absolutely! If I can get a bike involved in something, I will!”

And no matter what exciting new developments Kate’s career will bring, her love affair with the coaster is built to last. The Grand 1888 doesn’t have a name, but “she’s definitely a she”. “It wasn’t a cheap bike, but I’m working on the per lifetime cost – and maybe cost per comment,” Kate laughs. “I’ve got muscles from this bike because it’s so heavy. She takes up a lot of road. She looks out for me – we’re a team.”

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The latest tale to flow from the pen of zeitgeisty Melbourne playwright Lally Katz, A Golem Story, is an ambitious and compelling take on an old Jewish legend. It’s 1580 and the Jews of the Prague ghetto are being persecuted by Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. In order to protect his community, the Rabbi creates a golem – a fearsome being made of mud – to take on the Roman soldiers. After his soldiers are frightened away the Emperor strikes a deal with the Rabbi to destroy the golem in exchange for safety, but it is too late as the Rabbi discovers his creation has broken free of his control.

That’s the legend. Katz weaves another thread into the narrative – a strange girl, hair shorn, who wakes up in the synagogue without any memory of who she is or what she’s done and a deep emptiness where she feels God should be. This is her story, too, but no one will tell her anything.

Great performances by the actors are trumped by their even better singing. The show is punctuated by traditional Yiddish songs chosen and arranged by musical director Mark Jones, who also acts. It doesn’t matter that most of us don’t speak the language – the haunting, plaintive voices resonate regardless. The clever production design favours simplicity and is all the richer for it. The bare timber set lit with tiny candles achieves the right balance between modesty and ostentation. The golem, represented by a beam of light, is left to our imagination.

Interesting questions around creative responsibility and sentience in non-human beings bubble up through the mud. A Golem Story is a thoroughly engrossing theatre experience.

4.5 / 5 Stars

Directed by Michael Kantor, A Golem Story is showing at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne until July 2, 2011

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Produced in conjunction with the youth-oriented Arena Theatre Company, Moth is a play with a message. ‘Moth deals with a range of issues concerning mental health’, the program reads. ‘Here are some resources if you need someone to talk to’. Touching on depression, isolation, schizophrenia, and bullying in the age of the phone camera and Facebook, it has all the hallmarks of yet another clichéd story about emerging triumphant from a troubled adolescence. But Moth is in fact something far more intriguing – and devastating.

Two Year nine kids at the bottom of the social pecking order make unlikely best friends in the face of no better alternatives. Claryssa is depressed and goth-ish (‘I’m not an emo, I’m a Wiccan, you fuckhead!’), Sebastian is kind of thick and is annoying, poor and smelly. They get bullied for no reason other than that they are easy targets. While Claryssa wallows in life’s injustices, Sebastian obsesses over anime. Things could have just carried on like that until they both grew up and got the hell out of dodge, but instead a particularly ruthless bullying incident causes Sebastian to have a religious epiphany that leads him to believe Saint Sebastian is a moth in a jar telling him to blow everything up.

The structure of the play is layered – it appears simple but there’s some quite fancy narrative footwork happening. The heartbreak starts pretty early and only gets worse, but it’s tempered by lashings of humour. The actors are fireballs of creative energy. There’s no happy ending for the characters but luckily for the audience, there are those phone numbers in the back of the program.

3.5 / 5 Stars

Web copy published on Oxfam Australia’s Grow website, May-July 2011

Global food price spikes hurt the poorest

Food price rises in the Pacific Islands

Finding a sustainable pathway to food security in Nepal

How climate anomalies affect our food

Cost of staple crops rising with the world’s temperature

Food price scenarios: predicting the next two decades

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The other week I gave Fiona O’Loughlin a five star chuckle factor for her show about her battles with alcoholism. Well, Fiona, you might have to shove over on the comedy therapist’s couch because Brenna Courtney Glazebrook’s OC/DC, which dives into life with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, is fucking outstanding.

From the separation anxiety she suffered in childhood through to role playing stabbing her mother to death with her therapist, Glazebrook gives us the whole truth and nothing but in the story of her mental illness. At the time it was hell but she’s able to laugh about it now, digging out the jokes buried inside taking half an hour to lock a door or becoming obsessed with the idea of being raped by cartoon kangaroos.

Glazebrook makes being onstage telling a bunch of complete strangers all of her darkest thoughts look like the most natural thing in the world. She has confidence to spare and a great sense of fun that keeps the very heavy subject matter firmly grounded in the world of humour. The writing is sharp and her delivery is seamless. And she’s brave – very brave for facing her experiences head on and giving us an insider’s tour of her knotty mind.

You might need to have been a teenage girl in the ’90s in order to get a lot of the pop culture references, but other than that I can’t fault OC/DC. This show about hitting rock bottom is top stuff.

Chuckle Factor: 4.5 / 5

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Over the past four years Ben McKenzie’s Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour has become a fixture of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It’s a bit of an oddity, typically getting only average media reviews but frequently selling out nonetheless. It’s not exactly uproariously funny but it is a lot of fun – something about wandering around the museum after hours, treating the exhibits with irreverence rather than solemnity, is kind of appealing.

There are three sections to the tour, and the line-up varies from night to night. On the occasion of this review the audience was treated to a tour of the Children’s Gallery courtesy of Kate McLennan, a look at a room full of stuffed animals with Stella Young, and some serious nerding out over the evolution of planet earth with Ben McKenzie.

Kate McLennan does a convincing job of portraying six-year-old Sammy Simpkins, our tour guide for the Children’s Gallery. Sammy is on Ritalin due to an incident involving burnt tadpoles on sticks. She shows us the museum as a kid would see it, complete with potty humour, magic portals and mistaken facts.

Stella Young, formerly a Melbourne Museum tour guide in real life, leads us through part of the dinosaur exhibit (where she relates a story about going head to head with a prep kid on dino facts) and into a room full of taxidermied animals. (Did you know that taxidermy was invented by a vegetarian? These are the things you learn on a museum comedy tour). Young has a delightfully naughty sense of humour and revels in the weird sex lives of animals and the notion that giant pandas actually deserve to be endangered.

Ben is by far the biggest boffin of the trio, enthusing over fossils, red-headed dinosaurs and the use of fake Latin to name things scientifically. His resemblance to Graeme Garden of The Goodies makes him appear extra science nerdy.

The tour format is a bit shambolic and I imagine those at the back might have had trouble hearing. If you’re the curious type, and if you’re interested in this show you probably are, there’s also the constant threat of interesting exhibits pulling your attention away from the action. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable and silly evening for adults who miss school excursions.

Chuckle Factor: 3 / 5

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I went to the doctor the other day and ended up having to do a pee test unexpectedly. Being a bit dehydrated I had a bit of trouble, erm, getting into the flow of things. It’s too bad the comedians from the second round of Headliners weren’t there with me – they would have had me weeing myself in no time.

Marina Franklin, by her own admission, is ‘not a high-energy act’. ‘I’m like the Ella Fitzgerald of comedy,’ she says. ‘If I could tell a joke and then nod off, I would.’ Her chillaxed delivery and smutty material hits the spot but she seems a bit unnerved by the audience’s equally laid-back response. It’s okay, Marina, we were with you all the way!

The vibe of the room does a 180 when Matt Braunger hits the stage and drags us aboard his runaway train of thought. Barely stopping to take a breath during his twenty-five-minute set, motor-mouth Matt races through ludicrous gags about pirate kittens, the killer instincts of owls, Chippendales and crotch glitter, the time he went on a clown pub crawl (on acid) and why women have no sense of strip club etiquette.

Finally we meet Sean Patton, a New Yorker who is confused by our double-flush toilets and thinks that Vegemite is responsible for the Australian accent. He gives us a thorough academic critique of the work of Subway sandwich artists and some advice on what not to say when being strip searched by the police. After that things get quite dirty, and hella funny.

I daresay that the second line up in Headliners was even better than the first – three top notch comedians who perfectly complement one another and bring a whole lot of laughs. Here’s hoping they all return next year with full-length shows.

Chuckle factor: 5 / 5

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After years of being set in her ways, the nineteen year old Victoria Healy decided to step out into the world and start trying things out ‘for  the experience’. Victoria’s debut solo stand-up show is about the adventures she’s had in the effort to broaden her horizons in food, travel,  religion and work.

When she realised it was time to break out of her comfort circle, Vic canvassed friends and family for their own life experience wish lists. She found they often had one thing in common – a desire to re-enact love scenes from Patrick Swayze movies. Her own missions are a little more realistic – searching for the food high she experienced when she first tried coriander, or being titty hugged by an Indian spiritual guru at Pakenham Racecourse.

Vic may be one of the new kids on the comedy block, but she’s got skills. She has three years of performing with Impro Melbourne under her belt, which might explain her knack for character impressions. Her caricatures of the staff and customers at the witchcraft supplies  store she used to work at are hilarious.

She has bucketloads of potential, but For the Experience does carry a few of the hallmarks of a beginner. The material provides more of a gentle chuckle than all-out guffaws. A lot of it could be pushed harder to make the jokes a bit meatier. Vic relies heavily on memorising her lines rather than loosening up and going with the flow, which causes a few fumbles along the way.

File this lively new performer under ‘one to watch out for’.

Chuckle factor: 2.5 / 5