THE HEART OF PUNCHBOWL

Australia’s ‘most delightfully wacky journalist’ Jackie Dent and highly-acclaimed photographer Andrew Quilty, have been profiling and photographing pairs of Lebanese people living in Punchbowl over the last few months. Their work will be revealed in The Heart of Punchbowl pop-up exhibition as part of the lead up to SBS’s series Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl.

“I’d had an interest in the Lebanese-Australian community in Sydney ever since the Cronulla riots in 2005,” says Quilty.

“I was in Cronulla that day as a photographer. It made a big impression on me and the way that I viewed many aspects of Australian culture thereafter, including the communities that suffered as a result. Punchbowl was certainly one of those.”

The area, southwest of Sydney, has attracted negative reporting in the last few years. This presentation has a more positive approach to the Lebanese population, many of which are immigrants who fled civil war between 1975 and 1990.

“Jackie Dent and I were welcomed into the homes of Punchbowl in a way that I’ve since learnt is typical of the Lebanese and Middle Eastern cultures. It was because of this that we were able to come away with an extremely intimate portrayal of a number of relationships with the community of Punchbowl.” (LK)

Nov 22 & 23, Bankstown Arts Centre, 5 Olympic Pde, Bankstown, free, ambushgallery.com

BY LYNDSAY KENWRIGHT