I’ve been making this series for almost 12 months. 140k followers later and every day I still wake up thinking, what’s next.
I really don’t know yet.
A year ago I started putting Australian memory on a phone screen. Hills Hoist. King Gee. A HiLux that actually looks like the one in the driveway. Kodak Gold, not a filter. I was not trying to become an Instagram person. I was trying to see if a feeling this country still has in its body would land if you showed it straight.
It did. Then it kept doing it. Then the news shows called. Then a paper took a swing at it. That is the strange part of a year like this. You can have the thing work and still not know if the thing is the work.
I live on a bit of dirt in the hinterland now. I came back from the US. I make these clips between the rest of a life that does not care about follower counts. And still, most mornings, the first honest thought is not “we did it.” It is “what’s next.”
Nostalgia is a novelty.
I mean that in the real sense. A novelty is something that works because it is new to the person looking at it. The first time you see your childhood in 9:16, it hits. The fortieth time, you start needing a bigger hit. That is not an insult to the people who watch. It is a fact about the form. I have been selling a feeling that has a use-by date, and I would rather say that out loud than pretend I can do Hills Hoist forever and call it a career.
I do know this series will not last forever. I am on an exploration of what’s next.
I know I want to impact culture in this country. Not content. Culture. There is a difference, and this year taught me how easy it is to confuse the two. Content is what the app wants. Culture is what a kid remembers in twenty years when nobody is holding a phone up. We are at a pivotal time in Australia right now. You can feel it in the shops and the drives and the way people talk about what we are losing. Nostalgia was useful because it named the loss. It is not the same as doing something about it.
Nostalgia was step 1. Step 2, only God knows.
I am not being cute with that. I do not have a launch or a rebrand sitting in a doc. I have a year of proof that this country still cares about itself, and a quiet fear that caring about the past is the easy version of caring. The harder version is still forming.
If you have been here for the first year, hit reply. Tell me what you think step 2 even is. I will read it.
Sammy