Photojournalist Dean Sewell explores the story of artist Andrew Nichols who escaped ‘art-washing’ by moving aboard an ageing yacht with his dog Norri.
Andrew Nichols rises most mornings at around 6:30am, awoken by the passing RiverCat as it hurtles past him en route to Barangaroo on the edge of Sydney’s CBD.
For the past year, he has lived aboard a 32-foot ferrocement yacht moored in a Drummoyne cove, on the southern side of the Parramatta River.
“It’s like being at sea some mornings, you’re constantly being tossed around,” he says.
“Some mornings, you feel as though you’re on a hobby-horse. It all depends on the prevailing winds and the position of the boat.”
Struggling to secure affordable housing and studio space for his artistic career in the then looming shadow of the COVID pandemic, Andrew purchased the ageing and barely seaworthy yacht.
Years later, he’s still living here.
The rise of boat living
As rental prospects grow increasingly dire, Australians have been forced to become resourceful in where and how they live.
Among the alternative living is the emergence of people choosing to live at sea when they find themselves without a roof over their heads.
While laws differ from state to state, it is illegal to live aboard a moored yacht in NSW where Andrew resides.
Boats also cannot be anchored for more than 90 days in any calendar year, or for more than 28 days in one place per year.
For this reason, statistics on the lifestyle are basically non-existent.
But anecdotally, more and more people are resorting to this mode of living to circumnavigate homelessness.
From Sydney to the Tweed and right across Australia, people like Andrew are quietly etching out a living aboard moored yachts — keeping below the radar to avoid punitive measures.
Art-washing Sydney’s creative underground
Life for Andrew wasn’t always like this.
Back in the late 90s and the early 00s, Sydney was in a renaissance of artist-run spaces and collectives.
Struggling artists were able to exploit a brief twilight period left in the wake of a departed manufacturing industry.
And Andrew found himself in the height of it.
Throughout the 90s, he moved among Sydney’s underground artist networks, shunning the commercialism of the mainstream art scene for artist-run spaces and collectives that inhabited the Chippendale warehouse precinct.
Artist studios such as Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque, The Wedding Circle and Space 3 were all eponymous with the Chippendale precinct.
Andrew secured himself a spot in the experimental live-in studios and exhibition space of Space 3.
For the next several years, he honed both his artistic and carpentry skills — by painting and curating exhibitions, assisting in the organisational day-to-day running of the gallery and contributing to renovation works.
Today, such spaces are mere postscripts to a time of more affordable rent and freedom for emerging artists.
What followed the artist oasis in urban Sydney was a flood of “economic refugees” priced out of the Eastern suburbs.
“Well, it’s the artists who create the culture,” Andrew laments.
“They make places exciting. And those people who move in there don’t contribute culturally.
“They want what they can’t buy and call it ‘lifestyle’ — but then that lifestyle disappears.”
Andrew labels it “art-washing”— a growing practice of enticing artists into a place to make it look hip only to later throw them out.
“They’re afforded cheap rent, studios and the like. Then there are people looking to invest in property,” he says.
“They’re excited about the prospects of moving into a cool and edgy neighbourhood and the forecasted profits it promises.
“But they bring nothing with them.
“They move in, force the real estate prices up and then the artists are forced to move on.”
Life adrift in the Emerald City
Late-night toilet runs, flea infestations, AWOL dinghies and leaking hatches are all part of the daily tribulations Andrew now faces aboard his yacht.
“On the surface, people might think, well, it seems like an idyllic lifestyle, you know? But it’s much harder than what it looks like,” he says.
His voice is strained as he scrapes barnacles from the hull of his yacht while standing aloft his dinghy as though finding his balance on a longboard.
“It’s pretty confined. You got your space. But I only kind of used half of it because the other half of it leaked,” Andrew adds.
And it rains, and it floods, and… It’s hard work, you know?”
“And then there’s storms.
“So half of your time is probably occupied in just trying to keep afloat.”
Andrew also has to take Norri to shore three times a day.
“You still have to take the dog in the rain to go and do a wee because he refused to wee or poo on the boat,” he says.
“I even laid some turf down on the deck for him.”
In his yacht, Andrew’s mind functions in an abstract, yet quicksilver manner, that clearly informed so much of his earlier art.
One moment his shirt is off while he scrapes barnacles.
The next he has a pair of shears in his hands and is giving Norri a light summer groom.
Later, he emerges from the galley holding a half bottle of top-shelf scotch whisky — found while rummaging through bins onshore.
“Arrr, can I offer me matey a wee tipple of Drummoyne’s finest?”
Fastened between the mast and shroud, strips of beef flutter in the wind clawing its way up the harbour.
Andrew says they will supplement both his diet and that of Norri’s.
” Much better than the crap you can buy in Woolies, Schmackos and that garbage,” he says.
“I just buy a piece of meat, cut it into strips and hang it out to cure it in the sun and salt air.”
He cuts down a piece and throws it to the dog.
Then, he throws another piece into his own mouth.
‘We’re killing the artists’
For Andrew, life on the river is not an existence conducive with creation.
“Getting through the day, I mean, you’ve gotta go ashore three times a day to take a s*** or pee, or blah, blah, blah,” Andrew says.
“Even just going to the laundromat is half a day’s work, you gotta carry all your stuff up to the laundromat, carry it back.
“If I were a writer or something, I could just sit there and write, you don’t need as much space to write.”
But after a lifetime of struggling to survive as an artist, it’s also nothing new.
“You don’t understand until you try and do it,” Andrew says.
“If you try to hold down a job, rent a studio space, buy materials and have the means to pay all your bills…….you know, it’s exhausting.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got no energy for that sort of stuff, which is a form of oppression in a sense.
“So the artist is to go home from work, exhausted after a day’s worth of meaningless, tedious work, [doing] something unrelated to their practice and then be expected to paint, draw, be creative.
“You get caught in that cycle.”
Andrew says the situation is worse for neurodiverse artists, like himself, who often find themselves in a “black hole of debt” or only a pay cheque away from “living on the streets”.
He believes it could all be changed if the government renewed investment in secure studios so artists had permanent spaces to work.
“Quite frankly, I can’t remember much at all that Creative Australia has given money to that I’ve actually seen or enjoyed, and there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars every year,” he says.
“We’ve got plenty of artists that want to work but they’ve got nowhere to paint.”
Until then, he remains on his yacht, struggling against a growing frustration he’s been forgotten.
“We’re killing the artists,” he exclaims.
“The amount of time I’ve spent looking for studio space and trying to survive.
“It’s been the majority of my life.”
Credits
Words: Dean Sewell
Photographer: Dean Sewell / Oculi
Production: Tessa Flemming
The Great Crumbling Australian Dream
This independent photo essay is a part of a larger photojournalism project examining the state of housing in Australia.
The Great Crumbling Australian Dream is a collaboration between Oculi photographers and ABC News, with support from National Shelter.
The series was made possible with a grant from the Meta Australian News Fund and The Walkley Foundation.
Oculi is a collective of award-winning Australian photographers offering a visual narrative of contemporary life in Australia and beyond.
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