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“The Belles of Hell continue asking the hard questions about life, love, identity, sexuality and how to get the proverbial two bits.”

You’ve seen poetry in the pub, up on a stage, in the back of a bookstore. But in a hair salon?

Betsy Turcot and Eleanor Jackson are The Belles of Hell, a local word-making duo whose powerful presence and razor sharp language weave tales of love, family, heartbreak, and everything in between. After a sold-out run in 2013, The Belles of Hell return to Anywhere Theatre Festival with a new story to tell. Shave & A Haircut is an intimate poetic play told from the hairdressers’ chair. For three nights only, Betsy and Eleanor are asking the big question – just what does it take to be the man?

If you’re new to the world of spoken word art, an evening with Betsy and Eleanor is the place to start. Combining a playful irreverence with a cutting streak, Shave & A Haircut will be a poetic play unlike any you’ve seen before.

By Sophia Skordilis

There were eight children in our family and I was number seven. So, by the time my mother had my younger brother, Pauly, and me, even though she wanted us, she was sick of kids. Mum never rejected us but the drudgery and monotony of keeping a house going often threatened to break her spirit. But she was always a trouper, even though you ran for your life when you knew she was ready to tilt.

She felt extra pressure because we were Greek. Dad had left his Greek village in the mountains and came to Australia when he was sixteen and after experiencing other cities and towns, settled in humid and hot subtropical Brisbane, Highgate Hill in the 1940s. Mum was also Greek but she was born here.

There’s a big difference!

Dad was always working at his café in the city, the Star Milk Bar, and he was always on Mum’s back, ringing her to say someone saw my brothers or my sister doing this or that, or that I was up to no good.

Everyone said I was a tomboy because I had six brothers and only one older sister. I doubt it, I just was. My sister, Antonia, was named after Dad’s mother but for some reason, I can’t remember why, I called her Ansy. She was femininity personified and we were all proud of her style and model good looks. I loved slingshots, bows and arrows, goannas, Astro Boy, Shintaro, skateboards, Dragster bikes with flower-power banana seats and fighting. “Quicker than quick, Stronger than strong” that was my motto just like Gigantor, the robot. I always looked for a good fight.

World Championship Wrestling was one of my favourite TV shows in the sixties. My younger brother Pauly and I would tear home from church like ‘Speedy Gonzales’ (the fastest mouse in all of Mexico) to be in time to see the wrestling. Watching it at twelve o’clock on Sunday was a must and, if my brothers dared to say that wrestlers Spiros Arion, Mario Milano, Killer Carl Cox or Brute Bernard were just pretending to fight, they had better watch out!

We would watch and wrestle and, because I was bigger than Pauly and even though he would try and wriggle out of my grip, I could easily get him into the ‘sleeper hold’ or knock him down on the mat for the count one … two … three … with one of my ‘trip from behind’ moves.

I didn’t like my brothers, especially Bulla, teasing me and calling me ‘“Tom”. I was comfortable being a girl, but wanted to do all the things that boys were allowed to do. I didn’t want to be a boy but rather a gunslinger like Annie Oakley and I was always practising my draws.

I didn’t like being called Tom as I actually liked my name ‘Sophie’ as it meant ‘wisdom’. Greeks would stop me in the street to animatedly share the significance of my name. It just wasn’t about good old average wisdom it was “God’s wisdom”.

They were also keen to enlighten me that western civilisation, democracy and philosophy can be traced back to Ancient Greece. Even though Dad only went to school for a couple of years (he really learned to read by reading the Bible), he would tell me about these wonderful and profound themes and ideals – all Greeks do, regardless of their background.

He was also, proud of his Peloponnesian heritage and loved to tell me about the greatest hero of them all, brave and mighty General Theodoros Kolokotronis (when Dad said his name he said it in a deep and fierce voice) who led the charge against the Ottoman (Turks) Empire to help liberate Greece in the Greek War of Independence, surprisingly not all that long ago in the early eighteenth century.

Well, I was into super heroes and liked hearing all about Kolokotronis. I had seen pictures of him in encyclopaedias and thought he looked very much like my proud and strong Papoú Bellas as he had a similar chiselled out face and stance.

When Dad would hug me sometimes he would sing my name like a religious liturgy  and prayer … Sor … phi … aaa … as it must have been chanted throughout the centuries in all the great orthodox churches, such as the most famous and revered Ayia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople (Istanbul) before the Turks turned it into a mosque.

I was drawn to thinking about my name and its various meanings.

Somehow, I think I was a little bit wise as I was interested in understanding people and the world around me, but I certainly had my share of folly – like grabbing a swarm of bees with my hands to listen to their buzzing sounds when I was showing off. Yet, I imagined myself as mythological Goddess Sophia in ancient Grecian clothing, wearing a helmet, and holding an owl in one hand and a sceptre in the other. Or I would have imaginary conversations with Plato and Socrates about philo-sophia – the love of wisdom.

I felt honoured to be given such a divine and immortal name. In Greek, I was called Sophia but I liked being known as Sophie.

During my first visit to Brisbane many moons ago, I asked a local geezer at a pub in New Farm about West End.

“That’s where they have all the hippies, smoking their incense and loving peace and shit,” he said.
I felt some of his facts were probably askew, but as it turned out, not by much.
In fact, so plentiful were the West End hippies, they gave rise to a unique collection of specialty boutiques catering to the alternative lifestyle.
The Westender spent an afternoon among the weird and wonderful with Andrea and Lachlan, owners of local weird emporia Crystal Earth, Ecclectica, and Atticus Finch.

Hi Andrea, how long have you and Lachlan been in West End?
We opened Crystal Earth in 2005. It will be 9 years in October.

Did you live in West End before opening Crystal Earth?
We didn’t, but we’d been doing the Green Flea Market (now Davies Park Market) for several years and we knew we wanted to open a business, and we knew West End was the only place we wanted the business to be.

Why only West End?
It’s the alternative energy of the place. It’s not mainstream by any stretch of the imagination. For us, coming from a more spiritual place, we were always really drawn to the river and the big beautiful trees.
Everything we do is guided. We do our own readings on our decisions. Everything we’ve done is from what our spirit has told us.

It seems to be guiding you pretty well. Coming up for 9 years – how has the place changed?
It has changed a lot. The nightlife has changed significantly. You get a lot of outsiders now, and unfortunately not all of them respect West End.
West End has always had a cosmopolitan feel during the day, but at night time it would be dead quiet. Now it’s different. There’s some great little bars, they are very cool.

What is the oddest thing you’ve seen?
Odd is our everyday. I have met the most amazing, bizarre, strange people here in West End. It has been fantastic – odd people are the thing that keeps me going.
The most important thing I’ve learned is never judge a book by its cover. Greet anybody who comes in just like anyone else, and you will get the most amazing stories out of the most unlikely people.

And what do you see in the future over the next 5 years?
We need to keep the ‘different’ side of West End alive. There’s a lot of change coming through, but West End can’t be all cafes at day and all bars at night. That would be really sad.
There’s a lot of development restrictions being lifted and you can see more and more buildings going up around West End. New people are coming in, and while it’s good to bring new people into the area, we don’t want the place to become sterile.
Being ‘different’ is what has made West End unique and desirable. Being ‘different’ is why people want to live here. We can’t lose that. We have to keep our unique feel, our unique look, our unique ways of living.
What would you recommend for people visiting West End who’d like a little more weird in their lives?
Come in and talk to us! We love meeting new people, so come in and say hello.

I have a confession to make.  I am a closet hoarder.  I have too much stuff.  I think most of us do.  I have not escaped my poor student/artist mindset.  I have always had the habit of saving and storing things that might be useful later, might come in handy, that seem like they are good value if free and a bargain not to be missed.  Therein lies the problem.  The poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have.

“Stuff” has become a lot cheaper, but our attitudes have not changed.  Quite simply, we overvalue stuff!

I recently worked with a client who felt like he needed to be organised to get his business running.  When I entered his home office I realised that clutter was really impacting on his professional persona.

Here are the Top 4 reasons the Clutter is bad for business:

1. Clutter makes you waste time looking for things.
   When you need that document, scissors or business card, a desk or drawer that is cluttered can render them invisible.  And in the process of a search, you can be distracted by the things that you find on your quest.  Paper is one of the top clutter items in the office. Go paperless!. Scan your papers and then back them up. If you must store paper, have a system (other than piling) to store them in an organized manner. Digital files are easier to search by words, names and content.
2. Clutter consumes your energy.
   Things are energy.  You consume energy moving them.  They consume your emotional energy. In Paul Graham’s essay about having too much stuff (www.unclutterer.com) he says:
   And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.”
3. Clutter is a constant and visual reminder of all the things you haven’t done or still have to do.
   Rather than using a developed technique of prioritising or organising this can be distracting and exhausting.   Piles do not equal productivity.  “Someday maybe” should not be in your visual space.  You may say, “I know exactly where everything is.” But, what you are really saying is, “I don’t have the discipline to put things away.”
4. Clutter makes you the slave not the leader.
   Think about what your space says about you?  Are you all over the place?  Are you overwhelmed?  Are you putting off some things?  Are you putting out fires rather than seeing the bigger picture?  If your working day ends at 5:00pm then make it end at 4:45pm.  Use those last 15 minutes to clear your space ready for the working day and setting a list of things to do.  Put away work that is completed.

Email or call us if you’d like some strategies that help you take control of your time and your office environment.

So until then, be kind to yourself, take time for yourself.

 

 

With the introduction of ‘social bonds’ and a range of other initiatives backed by a combination of governments and private money, the notion of ‘impact investing’ is creating increasing interest among super funds in Australia and other big investors around the world. Ben Thornley, a former investment journalist in Australia, who is a director of the consulting arm of a community finance company in San Francisco, is delivering a presentation to a conference in Melbourne next week. Westender is republishing this interview by Greg Bright with permission.

If you are just starting to feel comfortable with your understanding of the definitions used in the many investment strategies which go to make up the universe known as the hedge fund world, you can now graduate to a new and arguably more diverse world – that of impact investing.

Impact investing, in a sense, is at the pointy end of the ethical investment and ESG spectrum, with a particular emphasis on the E and S. It involves making an investment which carries the two simultaneous aims of making a positive social contribution and making a reasonable return for investors.

According to Ben Thornley, who has worked with the Insight consulting arm of Pacific Community Ventures for the past four years, research on the sector is still in short supply and discussions are ongoing on matters of theory and definition. Even the age of the sector is not clear cut.

For instance, if you include micro finance companies and projects – where firms aim to make a difference in poor countries by issuing large numbers of very small loans to people to start or develop businesses – then the impact investing sector is at least 30-40 years old.

“There are some more mature operations which represent the origins of the sector,” he says. “You have the community finance sector in the US, which now includes more than 1000 community development finance organisations, and the microfinance sector, which date back 40 years, and have essentially been rolled up into the definition of impact investing. Then there is the newer work of the broader philanthropic sector community finance sector, economically targeted funds by some pension fund, and the newer, still, social impact bonds.”

Thornley was one of three lead authors of a report published last year called ‘Impact Investing 2.0’, which followed a two-year research effort designed to identify the main common factors in the success of 12 leading funding firms in the sector, using data from 1981 to 2013. The research was undertaken by three organisations, including Pacific Community Ventures. The researchers identified about 350 firms around the world that it could potentially study, refined this down to 30 for further vetting and then to 12 which they thought were among the best. Those 12 had impact investments totalling US$1.3 billion. The report identified four main common practices among the successful organisations which it termed:

> Policy Symbiosis – Impact investing is grounded in deep cross-sector partnerships, including with the public sector. Impact investing intersects with all levels of government, consistent with the public sector’s strong interest in maximizing social and environmental benefits to society, and the promise that impact investing can deliver these benefits at scale.

> Catalytic Capital – Investments that trigger additional capital not otherwise available to a fund, enterprise, sector, or geography can be transformative, generating exponential social and/or environmental value. Catalytic Capital can be instrumental to a fund, from providing early funding to driving reputational benefits.

> Multilingual Leadership – Those responsible for making investments must execute with unshakable financial discipline, but successful fund leadership is about more than simply effective money management. It requires cross-sector experience and fluency both at the institutional and individual level.

> Mission First and Last – As opposed to being “financial-first” or “impact-first,” successful funds place financial and social objectives on equal footing by establishing a clearly embedded strategy and structure for achieving mission prior to investment, enabling a predominantly financial focus throughout the life of the investment.

Thornley says that many investors still have a “black-and-white mindset” about how they should invest, meaning they see good returns and social good as usually being mutually exclusive.

“Funds have to understand that both financial and social goals can coexist,” he says. “The successful funds have the social impact fall out of their traditional processes. It’s almost like ‘finance plus’. In terms of investment style, it tends to be a thematic play.”

A New Zealander by birth, Thornley grew up in Australia and, after graduating from university, started his career in the late 1990s as an investment journalist at InvestorInfo, then publisher of Investor Weekly. He moved to New York as a correspondent for InvestorInfo’s various titles, especially Investor Daily, returning to Sydney in 2003 to take up the role of editorial director. He resigned to return to New York in 2005 and joined the Invest Australia arm of AusTrade.

“In a sense, [at Invest Australia] we were doing something similar to what we’re doing now: we were a public institution trying to use the private sector – fund managers – to generate economic development… We had some good wins. One that I’m proud of being involved with is bringing AQR Capital to Australia and setting up here, which was good for Australian investors,” he says.

He followed this role with some full-time study in California, completing a Masters of Public Policy at the University of California Berkley, working part-time for a Californian Democratic legislator, and then taking the job at Pacific Community Ventures in 2009.

“When I joined there were just two of us in the InSight team,” he says. “The firm had won, five years earlier, its first consulting contract, with CalPERS. This led to other work including research into what is best practice in economically targeted investing. Now there are seven of us in the team.”

Thornley says that there is still some wrestling going on with definitions by the various industry participants but points of consensus are starting to emerge. For instance, there is broad consensus that impact investing incorporates two key elements:

> Intention – as you are preparing to make an investment, you are specifying an intention for a social outcome too, such as creating jobs in a low-income community, and everything flows from that.

> Accountability – you are able to measure what you are promising to deliver.

There are many more points of disagreement, however. For instance, take the jargon term “additionality”. This term refers to the argument that once a market reaches a point of maturity, there is nothing more that can be done that traditional investors are not already doing. In the US listed equity market as an example, the question is whether an impact investor can do anything additional to make a difference.

Thornley doesn’t go along with this argument. He believes, along with some others, that every market can be made more impactful. In public markets, examples of possible impact investment results are activist investing and shareholder engagement which can affect a company’s outcomes in the community.

Related to the outcomes from income investing and, in particular, the involvement of governments and philanthropists, is the notion of catalytic capital. As the “Impact Investing 2.0” report says, successful impact investors usually use the involvement of various categories of investors in their projects, including those which have different goals for their money, such as governments and philanthropists.

“These types of investors can take more risks,” Thornley says. “They can make something which is uninvestable investable.”

An example of this can usually be found in various government social bonds, including the two which have been issued by the NSW Government. In an early one issued by New York City, which aimed to reduce recidivism among people convicted of crimes, the investors’ capital in that fund was effectively guaranteed by Bloomberg Philanthropies, with the core investor, Goldman Sachs, getting its investment underwritten. With the latest NSW bond, which aims to reunite fostered children with their mothers, investors, including, Christian Super, have had a floor put under their returns. In both cases, if the social outcomes are met, the returns to the investor are higher.

The size of the impact investing market around the world is also open to conjecture. A report published last year by the World Economic Forum put it between US$15 billion and US$28 billion. The forum estimated that there were about 250 global impact investing funds (which can be invested in my mainstream investors, such as pension funds).

Participants like Ben Thornley are hopeful that the figure will rise, with the increasing involvement of pension funds, to at least 1 per cent of all institutional assets in time. That would equate to about $500 billion around the world, and A$10.7 billion in Australia.

Thornley says that the US pension funds which are leading the way tend to be public pension funds, urged on by the trade unions representing beneficiaries. He is hopeful that Australia’s industry funds, which often have 50 per cent union representation at board level, will also lead the way and demonstrate to others that you can simultaneously do the right thing by members’ money while doing the right thing by the broader society in which we live.