Milestone

Storyteller and photographer William Yang is 80 and this presentation (‘show’ seems the wrong word) covers his complex, complicated and marvellously varied life from his childhood in rural Queensland all the way to the present.  He has done many presentations – beginning long ago with ‘slide shows’ in people’s living rooms.  This might be the peak.  His verbal narrative is accompanied by photographs – not quite all his own – that are an essential and inherent part of the telling.  As well, there is Elena Kats-Chernin’s music, performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra arrayed on stage behind him, and above them, his photographs are projected on a huge cinema size screen.

All of the photographs are important - some if only because they are important to Willie.  Apologies if I call him ‘Willie’, but it’s because, being almost as old as him, he’s a sort of fixture, and I’ve always thought of him by that name – first becoming aware of his name when he was also a playwright, working with Rex Cramphorne. 

Here, we see Willie as a cute kid alone, or with his brother, sister, Mum and Dad.  Willie was eight before he discovered he is Chinese and that was only as a result of a racial taunt at school.  It took even longer for him to discover that he is gay...  In a way, that’s indicative of a certain innocence that he retains to this day.  That’s not a naïve or blinkered innocence; it’s more a refusal to judge or moralise.  He is an eye that observes.  Nor is he deferential, awed, or amazed by the parade of artists, celebrities, the famous-for-being-famous, and the merely powerful that he has photographed.  (Without permission most of the time.)

Some photographs are flat matters of documentary record – shops, houses, dusty streets, dusty landscapes.  There are revealing self-portraits as he has aged.  Other images – those perhaps for which he is best known – show us the emerging gay culture of the 1970s and ‘80s’ – as wells as the AIDS scourge that swept through that community.  There’s an ecstatic hedonism and there are tragedies.  These photographs are more than mere record (although they are importantly that); some are very moving; others are simply strikingly beautiful.

And then, there is Elena Kats-Chernin’s music – with the composer on stage at the piano.  Her music does not exactly accompany the images.  It is as if the composer has taken off from them, been inspired by them – and added herself.  And the narration pauses while the music speaks for itself.  It goes beyond ‘incidental’; it creates more and different emotions.  Kats-Chernin resists the obvious (there is only one moment when the music refers directly to images of China); instead, it gives us a parallel, or another plane to the story.

Perhaps, for some of us, there are a few too many ‘happy snaps’ of Willie’s extended family.  But it’s Willie’s story, his autobiography and these pictures tell of the increasing importance of family, love and acceptance.

Milestone is both very simple and very complex at the same time.  Willie’s choice of telling detail across all the aspects of his life is exquisite in its economy, allusion and suggestion.  His life might be very different from the lives of many of us, but we are swept up in the story, carried along, and we find that we contemplate that life and are held and moved by it. 

After the show, some of us stood about outside, comparing impressions and emotions.  Willie appeared in the Hamer Hall doorway.  Characteristically, it wasn’t a display for the fans.  He was just going for a drink, or maybe home.  But we burst into applause for him – him, small, slight, eighty-year-old William Yang – as much as for the artistry of story we’d just been told.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Michael Pham