The Talisman
Wednesday 31st of December, 2025
It’s New Year’s Eve. We fucken made it.
It’ll be a party of two this year, just me and my pal Jake the Cat. Together we’ll celebrate by reflecting on everything that happened in 2025 and making a few wishes for the year ahead. My cat-sitting duties have provided the perfect excuse for solitude as I commit to the difficult but necessary act of conjuring hope again. By this point, hope feels like an act of magic.
2025 tested us. Everywhere you looked there were reasons to retreat into cynicism, or accept that time is linear and only moves in one direction. Yet somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, people kept loving each other, making art, planting gardens, caring for animals, and imagining futures worth living in. The year taught me that hope isn't optimism. Optimism expects things to improve. Hope decides to continue regardless.
I treated the evening as a ritual. I lit candles and incense, cooked myself some good food, and wandered the apartment dancing to music with my little shadow cat in tow. The spell was working, and I decided I should commemorate the moment with a new piece of jewellery.
I’m a mild collector of precious trinkets. What I lack in capital, I make up for in chachkies. In the old days, my aesthete friends and I would joke that we invested in precious metals rather than property, as evidenced by the chunks of silver hanging from our necks and stacked across our fingers. This moment of newfound hope on New Years Eve required something special to add to the collection.
The image of the spider had been recurring to me ever since I started drawing it a week earlier. My friend Mel K had even sent me a New Year’s message featuring a huntsman creeping across her loungeroom wall and the terrified face of her daughter Vi. The symbol kept presenting itself. As I thought about the energy I wanted to carry into the coming year, I decided it would include that of the spider. My next piece of jewellery had to have eight legs.
Scrolling through possibilities, I came across the most beautiful organic spider pendant I’d ever seen. I immediately recognised it as an Australian huntsman. After speaking with the maker, the wonderful One Mile Smile from Central Tilba, I learned she had electroformed copper over a real huntsman moult and embedded a piece of labradorite in its abdomen that flashed with brilliant blue-green fire.
It looked almost untouched by human hands. Not crafted so much as discovered. An ancient artefact unearthed from some forgotten place where myth and matter remain aligned. After exploring more of her work, I settled on the huntsman as my necklace for 2026. Had I known what I was getting myself in for, I wonder whether I would have made the same choice. Truthfully though, I probably would have. To wear this necklace is to bear its presence. It packs a punch. Light as a feather, yet deeply connected to the body the moment you put it on. Some objects feel decorative. Others feel alive.
Northern Lights and Southern Frights
My amateur knowledge of Vedic traditions tells me that copper has long been valued for its healing and conductive properties. Across cultures it has been associated with the movement of energy, a bridge between worlds both physical and mystical. If silver belongs to the moon, the Vedics say copper feels like the sun and carries a similar current.
As for the stone itself, I learned from One Mile Smile that labradorite was first identified by European colonists in Labrador, Canada, though Indigenous peoples had known and worked with it long before. Among Inuit stories, the stone is linked to the Northern Lights. One legend tells of the Aurora Borealis being trapped within the rocks until struck by a warrior’s spear, releasing the lights into the sky and leaving fragments of their brilliance frozen inside the stone forever.
A good piece of labradorite doesn’t look entirely earthly. One moment it’s grey and unremarkable. Then the light shifts and galaxies ignite beneath its surface. Blues, greens, and golds appear from nowhere in electric flashes. It is a stone of revelation, a reminder that hidden magic remains powerful even when it cannot be seen.
People who are into crystals say labradorite enhances intuition, strengthens psychic perception, protects travellers between worlds, and helps the wearer see beyond illusion. They call it a stone of liminality, a companion for thresholds and transformation. As I said, I’m an amateur. I don’t know much about crystal magic, but I will say this; when you wear labradorite, something changes.
Timelines begin to synchronise. The past, present, and future become strangely entangled. Meaning accumulates around ordinary moments, and you start noticing things that previously slipped by unseen. Reality shifts between alternate perceptions. You’re not entirely sure where you are, who you are, or who else can see what you’re seeing. Yet somehow, through the wearing of the necklace, your perception of alternate realities becomes crystal clear.
So New Year’s Eve was a party of two. Just me and the cat. I waited with anticipation for my new jewellery, a spider talisman carrying captured starlight in its belly, lurking patiently at the edge of the year. Something to enhance the colour of my eyes and, perhaps, my psychic abilities too. Soon enough, it would teach me exactly what it meant to look beyond the veil.
GEMINI SEASON
Thursday 21st May, 2026 - Saturday 20th June, 2026
The High Priestess II : on the threshold
I’ve got mixed feelings about genealogy. Not because ancestry is unimportant, but because I suspect that bloodlines are only one of the ways human beings inherit themselves. There are other lineages that are passed not through DNA but from teacher to student, artist to artist, between friends and between souls. These lineages speak of the imagination, of devotion and artistic obsession. I found myself thinking about all of this during an adventure with a dollmaker.
During Gemini Season, my huntsman necklace proved so powerful that I had to remind myself to take it off from time to time. I wore it on the Venus and Jupiter conjunction, when I stowed away on the Spirit of Tasmania to visit my beautiful friends Tony, Fox (the doggy one) and Julia, and then wore it everyday on our trip together to Dark Mofo.
Julia is an artist. Some folks make dolls. Julia collaborates with souls looking for bodies. She understands what traditional cultures have always understood, that effigies, puppets and dolls occupy the space between object and being, memory and imagination, grief and healing. They hold stories that language cannot carry by itself.
At the beginning of my visit I gave her a book on the Japanese puppet master Jusaburō Tsujimura. We spent hours admiring each photograph of extraordinary puppet faces that seemed simultaneously ancient and unborn. The eyes in particular possessed that peculiar quality certain works of art have, the sensation that they are studying you rather than the other way around.
辻村寿三郎 - Kaleidoscope Flower
The next day Julia and I packed ourselves onto the bus bound for Hobart. Dark Mofo delivered exactly what it promised. A ritualistic spectacle bathed in red light, breathing a sense of hope and renewal up and down the city streets like healthy lungs. When we finally made it to MONA, one artwork lodged itself permanently in my imagination. The work was titled Coalface, as part of the Julian Charrière retrospective exhibition Hard Core. A great slab of hard coal polished to a mirror like finish, lit by the flame of a single suspended oil lamp. Scrying with the ancients.
The art of the festival was extraordinary, but the real magic was waiting elsewhere. One afternoon we drifted through the back streets near Salamanca Market and wandered into an antique shop that had caught our eye each time we’d walked by. Among an immaculate collection of treasures and artifacts, we found her. A Japanese mannequin of wood and cloth, perhaps made to exhibit kimono. The atmosphere changed immediately. Her face. Her eyes. The same cloth skin we had been studying in the Tsujimura book.
Julia looked deep into the mannequin, holding her gaze and the weight of her hand. The mannequin smiled. The deal was made, an offer that Julia couldn't refuse. Later, I told Julia that I imagined a craftsman from long ago, who had made the mannequin in the image of his own child. Julia told me she had received a vision that the mannequin’s name began with a “Ma” sound. We searched for Japanese names beginning with ま.
まいこ. Maiko. Of course it was Maiko. Japanese for Dancing Child.
The name arrived with the certainty of something remembered rather than invented. Maiko had not been waiting to be named. She had been waiting to be recognised. The dollmaker recognised a soul in an object. The artist recognised a companion. A lineage recognised itself.
舞妓 - Maiko - Dancing Child
During my friendship with Julia I’ve come to notice something. Whenever she speaks about the people who have shaped her life, she doesn’t describe influence in the conventional sense. She describes transmission. A current passing from one person to another. A flame lighting another flame. She’d crossed paths with artists, musicians, filmmakers, wanderers and eccentrics for decades. And suddenly I realised what I was witnessing. Creative lineage. An interconnected web of souls.
Modern culture loves the myth of the solitary, troubled creative genius. I’ve wrestled with that torture myself, but I realise that artists are made of other artists. Every poem contains ghosts. Every painting, every song, every tarot reading contains ghosts too. Even rebellion itself is often a conversation with an ancestor.
While out and about on our art adventures I made some lovely new friends in Bill, Deborah, and Ruth, who is one of Julia’s oldest friends. We all got along like a house on fire, swapping old showgirl stories and kajal brand recos. Ruth was celebrating that she’d recently secured the State Library of Victoria as caretaker for the estate of the artist Vali Meyers. Some people preserve archives, others preserve lightning. Ruth is one of the latter. She is also the filmmaker behind The Tightrope Dancer, her extraordinary portrait and loving tribute to Vali.
Julia had once managed Vali’s studio in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building, and listening to the stories that emerged from those years felt like sitting beside a campfire fuelled by love and chaos. Bill, Deborah and I laughed along as Ruth and Julia cackled the night away like naughty schoolkids, and it felt like being introduced to Vali herself. That leonine life force around which so many creative souls have orbited.
Certain people enter the world holding a mirror up for others. Vali seemed to exist at the centre of a kaleidoscopic web of transmission. Not because she was famous. Not because she was extraordinary, though she was both. But because she dared you to betray the expectations of your gender. She dared you to trust the creative impulse wherever it led, no matter the cost. She dared you to choose art over cynicism. To live mythologically in a culture determined to flatten the natural instinct. The influence of such people cannot be measured in awards, sales or historical recognition. It can only be measured in descendants. Not biological descendants, but creative and spiritual ones.
Magic Mirror on the wall - Coalface by Julian Charrière
When we eventually returned to Tony and Fox at the Gemini New Moon, Julia screened TheTightrope Dancer for me on her DVD player. I had never seen it before, and watched in wonder as Ruth’s visual language unfolded. I encountered the electrifying gaze of Gianni Menichetti through the camera lens for the very first time, as if we were making direct eye contact. I watched Vali blaze across the screen with all the ferocity and freedom of a wild animal. The film didn’t feel historical, it felt immediate, like squealing in the lounge with baby Julia as she watched it for the first time. Like sitting in front of the High Priestess herself, leaning forward and saying;
“Hi babe. I want to be a magical bitch.”
And hearing the High Priestess reply, “Mkay, Sissy.”
After Maiko entered the story, time itself became increasingly unreliable. Perhaps it was Gemini season. Perhaps it was Dark Mofo. Perhaps it was the huntsman talisman hanging around my neck wreaking havoc. Whatever the cause, Julia and I kept slipping through invisible portals. One moment we were drinking coffee together on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy in 2001. The next we were sweat drenched 20 somethings at a warehouse rave. Then we were fortune tellers and outlaws travelling dusty roads, reading cards and robbing banks.
Time wasn’t moving forward. It was shuffling. Different versions of ourselves kept arriving at the table to join the conversation. We had a tintype photograph taken by the artist Phillip England, and as we watched it develop in his studio, we saw evidence of two souls accidentally photographed while crossing between timelines.
When lineage becomes visible, chronology begins to lose authority. The dead participate. The past and the future collide. I suspect that becoming oneself is less a process of invention than of remembering. Remembering who your people are. Remembering which traditions claim you. Remembering which stories belong to your soul. Remembering which ancestors, living or dead, biological or chosen, have been quietly walking beside you all along.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that inheritance moves in only one direction. We inherit traits from family, certainly, but we also inherit from friendships, from artworks, from chance encounters, from teachers, lovers, filmmakers, dollmakers, poets and wierdos with wild hair who dare you to do it. We inherit from people we never meet. We inherit from ghosts.
Perhaps that’s why Maiko recognised Julia in the Antique shop. A lineage. The same current I glimpsed while listening to Ruth and Julia tell Vali stories. The same current in Tsujimura's puppets. The same current that runs through every artist who has ever passed a flame to another and trusted them to carry it forward. And perhaps this is what the huntsman talisman is teaching me too.
I thought looking beyond the veil meant seeing something hidden from ordinary reality. Some secret world. Some supernatural truth waiting just out of sight. Instead, it turns out the veil simply masks our view of the connections that are already there.
On the lam since 1909
A spider spins webs after all, and a huntsman never uses its web for entrapment. It spends its life drawing invisible threads between distant points. The huntsman around my neck didn’t teach me to see ghosts. It taught me to see relationships. The web that connects artist to artist. Friend to friend. Ancestor to descendant. The living to the dead. The remembered to the forgotten. Life is constantly offering introductions. A teacher. A film. A doll. A work of art. A spider carrying captured starlight in its belly. A lineage waiting patiently to be recognised.
The lineage of the magic maker is a vast web. Its threads connect through friendship. Its lacework is woven through art. And every so often, if we're lucky, the light catches just right and we’re able to glimpse that we are connected too, and that we always have been.
And deeper into the year we go. Now, the Tarot card I've drawn for Cancer Season is one of the most difficult to work with, and not one I approach lightly. Yet I'm comforted by the knowledge that beyond it waits an astrological signature that André Barbault described as the most hopeful of the 21st century. The web continues to weave like a basket. Happy Cancer Season, friends. May it bring you rest, nourishment, and the courage to follow whichever invisible threads are vibrating your name. Come back soon and I'll tell you what happens when the next card is turned over. I dare ya.
Cancer Season Coming Soon
