Circular Quay

• Simultaneously, the Sydney Opera House's sails were illuminated to feature the artworks of the late great Australian artist John Olsen.
• Vivid Sydney was a chance to be mesmerised by light shows, music and a cultural story about this place.
• Vivid Sydney Festival Director Gill Minervini said Vivid Sydney 2023 was the biggest program in the festival's history, and the opening night was just a taste of what's to come over the 23 nights.
• Staged across Sydney's city centre, Vivid Sydney festival locations include Circular Quay, the Sydney Opera House, The Rocks, Walsh Bay, Barangaroo, King Street Wharf, Darling Harbour, Darling Quarter, Darling Square, The Goods Line, Central Station, the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Wynyard Tunnels, Carriageworks, Taronga Zoo and more.

• The last time I saw Gabrielle Carey, who died this week, aged 64, was a couple of weeks ago in Sydney.
• She is still best known as the coauthor, with Kathy Lette, of Puberty Blues (1979), a book she wrote as a teenager.
• But for many of those who knew Gabrielle later in life, she was, among many other things, a “Joycean”, and more particularly, a “Wakean”.
• If you’re finding it hard to make a decision, you can say you’re in “twinsome twominds” and your fellow Wakeans will understand.
• She was in regular correspondence with the leading scholars; she was the author of numerous acclaimed essays on Joyce.

Authors were ‘living beings’ for her

• The first of these was Moving among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my Family, a book which won the Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2013.
• When she pressed him for more, he fell silent, and within a year, he had died.
• It’s also a study of an enigmatic writer who was once internationally acclaimed, but who has now almost disappeared from Australian literary history.
• Falling out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018), as the title suggests, is a similar combination of literary biography and memoir.
• The third of these, Only Happiness Here: in Search of Elizabeth von Arnim (2020), was completed during Gabrielle’s fellowship in Canberra.

‘She works for James Joyce’

• Gabrielle’s final book, James Joyce: A Life, is currently in press.
• As she quipped, it was her “fourth biography and the first about a writer who is still famous”.
• Two of Gabrielle’s acclaimed essays, Waking up with James Joyce and Breaking up with James Joyce, give an indication of the conflicted relationship she maintained with this writer who inspired and infuriated her throughout her life.

Reading groups ‘like jam sessions’

• They would gather over food and wine and take the Wake a page and a line and a word at a time.
• If they got really stuck, they’d turn to Fweet, an online guide to the Wake with more than 90,000 explanatory annotations.
• If somebody came up with a new insight, she’d painstaking note it in even tinier pencil between the existing marginalia.
• Her reading groups were more like jam sessions than scholarly seminars.

The art of living well

• Gabrielle was a teacher of the art of living well.
• Every evening, no matter where you were, Gabrielle would always step outside for a few minutes to watch the sun set.
• A keen gardener, she made tiny pots of fabulously precious jam, that she playfully labelled “Jams Joyce”, from rose-petals harvested from her garden.
• Instead of going to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as I’d planned, I went to the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay.
• In her last year, Gabrielle had been taking classes in the art of bookbinding, a creative outlet to add to gardening and rose-petal jam, not to mention writing.

• SYDNEY, AU, Mar 30, 2023 - (ACN Newswire) - Australia's largest festival, Vivid Sydney, today announced that it will add a first-ever activation of the Wynyard railway tunnels to the festival's upcoming program with the world premiere of Dark Spectrum.
• Presented by Vivid Sydney, Sony Music, Mandylights and Culture Creative, Dark Spectrum will premiere at Vivid Sydney on May 26, running until July 16 before touring the world.
• Dark Spectrum will be a ticketed experience with entry via Wynyard Park Rooftop between York and Carrington Streets, Sydney.
• For more information and to purchase tickets to Dark Spectrum and full details of the Vivid Sydney 2023 program, visit vividsydney.com.

• Vivid Sydney 2023 will take place from Friday 26 May to Saturday 17 June and will feature for the first-time dedicated food programming - Vivid Food - which will sit alongside Light, Music and Ideas.
• "Vivid Sydney provides a mid-year boon for restaurants, bars, cafes and retail in the central business district (CBD) and along the festival's footprint.
• Vivid Sydney 2023 Expressions of Interest (EOI) for Light, Music, Ideas and Food will open on Saturday 18 June.
• For all the latest information on Vivid Sydney 2023 sign up to receive MyVivid updates here .