Steam- punk · 2016. 12. 5. · K.W. Jeter, who wrote some of the Star Wars books and Blade Runner sequels, is credited with coining the term. In an April 1987 letter to sci-fi magazine

Steam-punkKatherine Wilson

22 m e a n j i n q ua rt e r ly in colour

On his immaculate porch, Cliff Overton isn’t wearing his fob-watch or his waistcoat, but he still looks dapper. The bright home he shares with his wife, civic planner Tanya Young, turns out to be a museum of sorts, but nothing like the gothic Wunderkammer you might expect. A new

weatherboard perched on a modest precipice of bushy Melbourne exurb, it houses sheeny homewares displayed uniformly on clean surfaces, like specimens. The only concession to Overton’s fetish is the odd rusty apparatus on display. ‘There’s this,’ he says, lifting an antique camera from a cabinet.

Until recently, the 36-year-old industrial designer-turned-firefighter didn’t know he was part of a globally burgeoning subculture. ‘It wasn’t until I was at a friend’s house,’ Overton recalls. ‘He showed me Datamancer [a technofetish website]. I found that there was a genre in which I could contextualise what I’d been doing.’

As a boy in the 1970s, he busied himself making things with off-cuts as he waited backstage at The Basin Theatre, not far from Dandenong, while his dad built stage sets. Into adulthood, Overton continued to mix theatre and invention—with a dash of inspiration from sci-fi. Playing the trope of the heroic lone inventor, he stepped into character as ‘Mad Uncle Cliff’, a neo-Victorian, top-hatted dilettante. Mad Uncle Cliff reimagined contemporary technologies—computers, webcams, desk lamps, radios, mobile phones—as if they’d been made in the nineteenth century. He tinkered with these gadgets and refashioned them into elaborate contraptions. With shameless disregard for the form-follows-function simplicity that once guided his alter-ego’s industrial designs, Mad Uncle Cliff heeded no laws to civilise the ornate tangle of cloth cables and copper wires, of dials, brass fixtures, cogs, pistons, mahogany and leather casing or blown-glass triodes. In short, what he was doing was steampunk.

By meme or coincidence, so were hundreds of like minds across the globe. Hundreds, then thousands, of unsung triumphs of creativity were unleashed from lone inventors’ back sheds and projected online to an international gaze. When Overton discovered this, he was ‘intrigued . . . and also quite relieved that I was no longer on my own’.

When you start following this online party of makers, it soon becomes apparent that many have almost identical stories to Overton. In Massachusetts, for instance, lives the pseudonymous Jake von Slatt, a prolific tinkerer who became steampunk’s biggest luminary in 2008. The Boston Phoenix reported that von Slatt had ‘accidentally unearthed Steampunk’s online community. He came into it not realizing there was an entire subculture to define both his DIY habits and the visual aesthetics he’d long appreciated.’

Steampunk is an industrial devolution, of sorts, but it has literary roots. The subculture is said to have first taken shape in early 1990s sci-fi, in defiance of (or as a

pre-history to) cyberpunk’s distopian futurism. Where cyberpunk was about software hacking, steampunk is about hardware hacking: a more material and tactile kind of punk.

K.W. Jeter, who wrote some of the Star Wars books and Blade Runner sequels, is credited with coining the term. In an April 1987 letter to sci-fi magazine Locus, he wrote: ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing . . . Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steampunks”, perhaps.’

Three years later, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine described ‘clackers’—the Victorian equivalent of hackers—who deprogram the steam-powered Analytical Engine with punch-cards, the closest steampunk comes to software. And so a subgenre of gonzo-historical sci-fi was born, paying homage to the gaslight-and-airship sensibilities of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Jules Verne’s Les Voyages extraordinaires.

More recently, explains Overton, the movement has bounded into the ‘real’ world, with the biggest Australian event being 2008’s ‘Euchronia’ ball at the Victorian Trades Hall. Although this ‘first major Australian steampunk event’ was largely fashion and affectation (‘there was debate about whether we could take our ray-guns or not’), the technofetish side finally saw its first world convention in November 2008 in California, featuring steampunk ray-guns, spark generators, ‘time machines’, a wind-up laptop, ghostbuster gadgetry, flying machines, navigators and musical instruments.

As he pours tea, Overton chats eloquently about his pleasure partaking in a movement that is edging into the mainstream with viral force. For him, steampunk is as much a sensibility as a movement. ‘It’s not so much low-tech as slow-tech,’ he

wilson s t e a m p u n k 23

Figu

re 1.

Fix

ed Fa

wn,

200

7. T

axid

erm

y Fa

wn,

mix

ed m

edia

with

cl

ockw

ork

com

pone

nts.

Pho

to: L

isa

Blac

k, L

isa

Blac

k cr

eatio

ns


says, adding that he plans to design a ‘W-phone’ — capital ‘W’ being an altogether more steampunk kind of letter than lower-case ‘i’. But what makes steampunk tricky to peg down is its amorphous nature. You may have a feel for it, but describing it as ‘neo-Victorian’ isn’t enough, as it can just as comfortably slip into Edwardian or even psychedelic clothes. When people refer to films, books or comic strips as ‘steampunk’, they might be talking about Mad Max, Delicatessen, Wild Wild West, Brazil, Wallace and Gromit, The City of Lost Children, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Golden Compass. They might be talking about gypsy strings, vaudeville cabaret, chamber music or industrial goth.

Overton leads me to his makeshift study, a room that he and Young hope to turn into a nursery once their adoption application brings them an addition. The room is small, white and sparse, except for a reproduction provincial-style bookcase housing a few toys, a wooden box on the grey carpet, and, on a small table, Overton’s latest behemoth contraption. He calls it The Communicator.

It’s wondrous. And weird and intricate. And so very heavy and impractical. The Communicator’s innards are a PC motherboard, drive, monitor and keyboard, but its armour is a feat of over-engineering and parlour tricks. Its base is a heavy disc ‘from the back of an old tractor’; its central column a find from the Mount Evelyn junkyard, a jackhammer that now sprouts a series of pipes and pressure gauges and copper gear-wheels. Overton had removed the outer plastic from computer cables and ‘resleeved’

Figu

re 2

. Win

d-up

clo

ckw

ork

lapt

op b

y D

atam

ance

r in

woo

d, c

oppe

r, le

athe

r and

bra

ss. P

hoto

: Dat

aman

cer.n

et

them in a mesh sheath. To make The Communicator’s cloth cables, he used a technique steampunks call ‘bootlacing’. ‘You get your standard bootlaces, cut the flugalbinders [aglets] off the ends, and you find inside here is a black core which you can strip out, and you’re left with the sheathing, and you sleeve your leads down the sheathing.’

He doesn’t generally do case-modding—a case-modder will ‘take a computer case, and they’ll modify it. But I like to go completely from scratch.’ Typically, whether steampunks are reverse-engineering, case-modding or inventing, they’ll share methods and knowledge with other makers through blogs, YouTube and Flickr. ‘If you meet a steampunk craftsman and he or she doesn’t want to tell you how he or she creates her stuff, that’s a poseur who should be avoided,’ speculative fiction author Bruce Sterling told Enschede’s 2008 Gogbot festival. Frequently, steampunks will share tips on how to rewire, re-engineer or reassemble existing technologies, or even sometimes run them on alternative operating systems.

Does The Communicator run on steam? No. Purists on forums such as Brass Goggles and Design Observer argue that if it doesn’t run on steam, or at least wind, pedal-power or clockwork, then it ain’t steampunk. And the movement’s greener shades insist steampunk machines should be made only with old parts and found objects. In the spectrum of steam ethics, Overton draws the line at using plastic. ‘Part of the steampunk aesthetic is weight, heaviness.’ And he wouldn’t make anything twice. ‘It has to be unique.’ As von Slatt summed it up: ‘Steampunk is a backlash to the sameness of design.’

With its ‘Love the machine, hate the factory’ motto, Steampunk magazine champions a movement that ‘seeks to take the levers of technology from those technocrats who drain it of both its artistic and real qualities’. Various corners of the steampunk movement also claim a certain neo-Luddism. For some, reports the Boston Phoenix, steampunk is ‘a thrilling revolt against the evils of mass-production’.

By ignoring warranties, hacking into industrial design, reverse-engineering and refashioning gadgets to suit themselves, makers such as Overton feel they reclaim decision-making far beyond the ‘customised’ ‘choices’ their Macs or PCs allow. For some, this is a political act. ‘For me,’ writes sci-fi author and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow, ‘the biggest appeal of steampunk is that it exalts the machine and disparages the mechanization of human activity.’

Luddism has received bad press over the years, and many historians have gone to lengths to disabuse people of popular understandings of the term. Literature professor Steven Jones, in Against Technology, points out that the original Luddites were themselves skilled and enterprising technologists—they used complicated looms, heavy hand shears, and large cropping and weaving machines. In his elegant book Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, Kirkpatrick Sale argues that the Luddites of Regency Britain were never opposed to



technology, but to ‘Machinery hurtful to Commonality’. Nor, he argues, was Luddism a conflict between old and new—it was one between custom and commerce. Weavers, combers and dressers of wool and cotton didn’t set out to be machine-breakers—they simply objected to being reduced from ‘self-respecting artisans, with long traditions of autonomy and status, to dependent wage slaves’.

According to this argument, the Luddite movement—much like today’s steam-punk technofetishists—was a collective that stood for individual autonomy and agency.

Of course, there’s no shortage of reasons to be suspicious of steampunk’s lofty claims of moral authority akin to the Luddites. Pondering these claims, you’re left wondering whether making the Heckeshorn Schaltzentrale Sequencer or Hildebrandt’s Telecalculograph can do anything to address the various shades of the digital divide, or the tangle of inequalities in a globalised technocracy. Especially when your machine’s operating system is still licensed by Bill Gates and your power source is owned by the state or an overseas multinational. And especially, too, when your software is also licensed and your motherboard was made in a fume-filled Asian sweatshop whose version of ‘scientific management’ makes those dark Satanic Mills of Regency England look appealing.

And really, how seriously can you take a movement that gives more airtime to a steam-powered vibrating dildo than it does to carbon-offset technologies? (The vibrator’s creator, Ani Niows, explained that when in operation ‘it got really hot, you have to wear like welding gloves to hold it and even then its [sic] almost too hot to handle.’ One enthusiast helpfully observed: ‘too hot for the goonies’). More, how revolutionary is a movement whose ‘inventors’ buy stuff, take it apart, and replace it with other stuff bought at Bunnings and Reece Plumbing?

When Overton shows me his ray gun, he says: ‘It’s like in Star Wars the Jedi must make his light sabre.’ In steampunk, if you want to get your brass wings, a ray gun you must make. To a fledgling steampunk inventor, a ray gun might be what a wooden box is to an apprentice carpenter. ‘Or what a horseshoe is to an apprentice blacksmith,’ suggests Overton. We ponder this in silence for a few moments. ‘It’s the iconic item you make to demonstrate your skills,’ he says, adding that goggles are, too (Overton made his using tea-strainers). He turns the weapon over, and despite the questions whooshing through my mind (What for? How is this political?), I’m awestruck. It’s a beautifully crafted device, set in a custom-made velvet-lined wooden box, with paper instructions rendered ‘vintage’ with tea-dye, written in Victorian vernacular. There are even decorative ‘spare parts’.

‘There’s a fair bit of whimsy and absurdism in steampunk,’ says Overton. It’s no compromise of values, either, that the movement has ‘achieved the level of a cottage industry’, as one critic scornfully put it. As Sale describes them, the original Luddites


were cottage industrialists and libertarians. Modern-day steampunk makers like Overton are free-market entrepreneurs, seeking lucrative commissions (Overton is working on two) and embracing an almost utopian idea that their movement will soon be incorporated into the mainstream through market populism.

The joy of creating self-determinedly and the sense of real community are difficult things to commodify. You can’t sell one-off assembly-line products, but you can sell the romance and DIY thrill (if not the illicit gravitas) of hardware hacking. Technology marketers, who once regarded hardware-hacking almost as a treasonous crime, even as iconoclasm, are beginning to drop the lawsuits and instead promote hacking as a value-added way to engage with their products, with support from websites such as Lifehacker. This practice, according to Melbourne technology engineer Andrew Peel, is already ‘widely accepted as being clever marketing: it increases the user base . . . and locks customers into your product once they come to rely on their own add-ons’.

Perhaps, then, scorn about the movement’s purported compromise with petty-bourgeois values is misplaced. That the movement is more subcultural than countercultural has rankled critics such as Design Observer’s Randy Nakamura, who describes steampunks as ‘mediocre hobbyists’ whose creations are ‘merely a threat of bad taste’. ‘In its essence,’ he writes, ‘steampunk seems suburban in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent past, politically quietist, and culturally insular hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled anachronisms that let in no chaos or ferment.’

Simply to tinker, play and fantasise at home in the burbs: it’s an ambition whose nerdy modesty, when projected to a global gaze, rouses ridicule. Those suburban IT geeks, history’s grave-robbers, stripping the past of meaning, dressing the present in petty-bourgeois drag—how dare they pretend to be bohemian artists.

In his 1997 essay ‘Loitering with Intent’ (Seams of Light, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998) culture observer Robert Dessaix traces the passage of the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante’—words ‘pronounced approvingly’ in pre-industrial times, but that now denote ‘frivolous dabbling, ridiculous passion, and moral failing’. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, as time became divided between work and leisure, and as the expanding professional classes traded in certified knowledge, ‘nothing annoyed the upper middle classes more than the self-taught expert’ in the suburbs, as opposed to the aristocratic status of the intellectual or ‘professional’ artist in the polis. ‘It is in the suburbs that amateur activities are thought to take place—those middle and lower-middle-class areas of a city where neither the artistic aristocrats nor professional intellectuals are concentrated.’

Steampunk may be largely centrifugal and amateur, but this may be what gives it its great reclamation edge. Make editor Mark Frauenfelder told Wired (29 June, 2007):


The Victorian era was the great age of the amateur, where nonprofessionals could contribute to the advancement of science, and because these amateurs were most often well-heeled gentlemen, great emphasis was placed on ornamental beauty in their equipment.

Thirty-year-old photographer Kate O’Brien lives in a seventies brown-brick house in the outer fringes of Brisbane, with two petulant cats and her husband, Darren Joy, an auditor at QBuild (the state’s department of public works), whom she met online and married in her early twenties. When she greets me, she’s wearing head-to-toe black, black beads and crucifixes, and her stark black and white hair sits at odds with her full face, which I’d seen online in a blond wig, surrounded in flowers in saturate colours. She insists it just happens to be how she dressed today; she is working on a series of coffin shots for a group exhibition at a funeral parlour, but these are ‘peaceful, not vampiric’—she hates the ‘creepy goth girl thing’.

We sit in her dim den—I breastfeeding my infant in a rococo armchair while a grey cat eyes us, and O’Brien settling in a black Chesterfield sofa to continue her needlework with moire ribbons. Against the crimson Victorian wallpaper there is taxidermy, religious iconography, a large flat-screen television, a new Blu-ray disc player perched between art books and an epic collection of DVDs; there is an antique typewriter covered in incense dust, Freemason paraphernalia and war cockades and feathers, and plastic farm animals. Some comically baroque picture frames O’Brien picked up from a Chinese dealer are propped next to the seventies built-in bar. Amid it all lurks a second peevish cat. As we chat, O’Brien has a warmth and self-effacing wit that invites instant rapport. She speaks with distaste about ‘steampunk by the numbers’.

‘Bunging a few cogs on a corset is a very pedestrian idea of steampunk,’ she tells me. To O’Brien, steampunk isn’t necessarily any one aesthetic. Her own portraits range from fifties noir to Romanticism to pop art. Steampunk, she explains, is largely about the way we look at the world and make art; about a heroic, Victorian sense of awe and discovery and possibility—botanical, mechanical, intellectual, artistic and scientific.

We talk about the photograph that graces the winter 2009 Fiend magazine cover. Learning that this was the first Australian magazine issue dedicated to steampunk, I’d ordered a copy for $18 and excitedly awaited its arrival, only to find its oxymoronic tagline—‘Australia’s Ultimate Dark Alternative Magazine’—pretty much indicates the depth of its content. And conversely, steampunk practitioners far and wide, being quixotic types, routinely reject the ‘dark’ label, though many grew into the movement from goth. ‘We’re goths in brown,’ Omega Howell later quipped to me. Former goth Dan Turner-Chapman also told me later: ‘Steampunk hits a more optimistic note, embracing the role of artisan.’


The steampunked woman on the Fiend cover, a stereotypical nubile uncommon in O’Brien’s work, wears corsetry, leather, lace, tweed, copper, a fob-watch and goggles. I compliment O’Brien on her prowess with Photoshop effects—the steam and Victorian industrial backdrop look real. ‘They are,’ she says, adding that she doesn’t use Photoshop to doctor her images. She does use the program’s filters to make them flat and painterly: ‘I try to use colour palettes that reflect the time period I’m trying to depict. I’d never go so far as to say I have synaesthesia, but I feel colours strongly, and think different palettes belong to different times . . . For instance, I think my thoughts about the thirties come down to limitations in printing methods and age. The ephemera still available was generally printed on poorly calibrated presses and due to age is often foxed and stained.’

For her shoot, in warm and green coppers, leathery tans and smoky silvers, she used a steam machine, and when we tour her studio, a large room cluttered with theatrical props from every imaginable era, I recognise the wall of coppery pipes and bolts she built for this single shot. She tells me it often takes weeks or months to

Figu

re 3

: The

Avi

atrix

by

Kate

O’B

rien.

Kat

eobr

ienc

reat

ive.

com


orchestrate a shoot, as she usually single-handedly makes props, builds sets, sews or sources costumes, scours op shops, applies make-up, designs lighting and generally has auteurship over production. ‘I usually spend much more on it than I make from it.’

O’Brien’s ‘slow-tech’ process of tinkering and free-range fossicking is the antithesis of the factory model of efficiency, specialisation and management that pervades contemporary commercial studios. It is, in other words, steampunk. Like the traditional hunter-gatherer, or the original Luddite artisan, there’s no clear separation between work and leisure for O’Brien.

Crossing Melbourne’s King Street with her twelve-year-old daughter Melody is Omega Howell. She’s wearing an elegant black Victorian couture dress with bustle and red trim, and her hair is gathered behind a smart fishnet hat. Melody is spruce in head-to-toe red: hat and dress coat. Among many roles, Howell is a re-enactment specialist and technology educator. Howell put the word out on the League of Temporal Voyagers site, arranging for us to gather at the LockWorks, on the first floor of a building in Hardware Lane. I imagined the LockWorks was a bar or lounge or café: it turns out to be a hairdressing salon.

At the counter, Howell introduces me to 37-year-old LockWorks proprietor Cass Edwards, all cleavage and cinched waist and dreadlocks, like some kind of punky Dickensian barmaid. She greets me heartily, and I remember reading her name: she organised the Euchronia ball at Trades Hall.

Soon history graduate Dan Turner-Chapman arrives in a dapper ensemble of checked trousers, grey herringbone waistcoat and frock coat, a tie in a William Morris design, and what he describes as ‘chunky vegan Doc-lookalike shoes’. At twenty-three, he’s eloquent and recently married. ‘She’s not steampunk,’ he says of his wife, ‘but she does good Victorian.’

John D’Alton, forty-nine, arrives in a snappy Sherlock Holmes outfit. An IT consultant and history masters student, he looks a fit thirty. He produces an ornate musical shadow-box he’s working on for his goddaughter.

After him is 33-year-old Josh Orth, in a red-blazored military outfit with metal epaulettes and rank badges. These, and the fobs in his pocket, are made from salvaged computer parts, ‘an occupational perk for me’— as Orth is the IT manager at the pathology department of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Of his clothes he says: ‘I am going to have some embroidery done with unit markings and the like, all fictional and home grown. I have been thinking of names for it, and I may have settled on The Third Imperial Viators.’

We sit in a circle discussing steampunk in what rapidly becomes less an interview and more a salon: in the Parisian—not the hairdressing—sense.


‘I suppose my take on steampunk’, says Turner-Chapman, ‘is cultural, as a combination of historical and “punk”, that is, socially critical literature, and of finding practical applications of those same principles.’ Authentic steampunk, to him, ‘has to be in some form an exploration of technology and its past and potential uses’. In keeping with the optimistic side of steampunk, it has to be sustainable and efficient. Steampower with the right fuel, for instance, is much more efficient than internal combustion.

Then 21-year-old Connie Chen shows up. She’s doing a double degree at Melbourne University, majoring in Law and Media Communications. She’s also a web designer and Lewis Carroll fan. Chen is monacled and punky, she wears an underbust corset over her shirt. She produces a homemade plastic ray gun that generates sparks, and everyone coos over it as relatives might fuss over a newborn. ‘Awesome,’ someone mutters.

Most at the salon are makers—not all of gadgetry, some of garments. ‘I’d challenge anyone to draft a bustle gown and tell me it’s not engineering,’ says Howell. ‘In steampunk’, smiles Turner-Chapman, ‘there’s no division between high and practical art’.

I’m wondering whether it’s rude to ask whether Chen’s metal-painted plastic ray gun is practical art or sustainable engineering, when 28-year-old Bree Frost joins us, eating a hot lunch out of a take-away container, looking equal parts hippie and cyberpunk. At some point 32-year-old technical writer Anna Vesperman has also slipped into the salon, in a full-length violet velveteen skirt. Her pale face is obscured behind sunglasses, while another pair of glasses perches on her head.

Most of those gathered have, at one time or another, been involved in goth or historical re-enactment. Most work in IT, most live in the outer suburbs, most have postgraduate qualifications and have made dramatic career-changes. All are sci-fi readers. Only about half have met before, but there’s easy camaraderie, as they’re familiar from online forums.

The way this salon tells it, steampunk is a rough beast whose hour has come at last. You can see it everywhere: the ‘steamy’ ideas, ‘steamy’ aesthetics or ‘very steamy’ styles that are now mainstream (William Morris wallpaper, cloaks from Sportsgirl, distressed typography in graphic design, Liberty fabrics, the Tesla car).

Think like a steampunk, and wherever you look in recent history, your goggles will cloud with steam. Gandhi, for instance, said steamily: ‘The poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production: only by production by the masses.’ Polish-American Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz said some pretty steamy things about our ‘uniform worship of science and technology’; economist Ernst Schumacher, in his famous Small is Beautiful, mounted a mightily steamy argument for accessible, small-scale, decentralised and customised technologies. Think locally, act globally; power of one and all—all so very steamy, steamy kundalini.


What’s steamy about online technologies, says Turner-Chapman, is that artisans can now use them to reach a global market from their lounge rooms. ‘Cottage industries’, adds Howell, ‘can now be sustainable, as they can sell one-off items to a global market.’ Free trade, to Turner-Chapman, ‘is different from capitalism’, because it has allowed the development of fair trade, an idea that ‘is very steamy’. Howell agrees. ‘It’s one of the sustainable philosophies seeping into steampunk.’

‘What attracted me to the steampunk community is the sharing of DIY knowl-edge,’ says Orth, and there’s an absolutely! all around that feels altruistic and uplifting. The salon doesn’t always deal in absolutes, though: when Orth nominates Abney Park as steampunk music, Frost and Chen snort and then high-five each other. Our merry hour-and-a-half is too quickly over, so I arrange to visit one of them a few days later.

John D’Alton’s home is perhaps a kilometre from Overton’s (though they have only visited each other’s online addresses) in a muddle of cul-de-sacs populated with colossal new brick houses on small blocks. But happily, his home backs on to an expanse of national park bushland. He recently moved in with his wife, Lyn, a former surgeon who now paints watercolours and works as a counsellor, and their daughter. The family spent several years in India, where they worked in community health and education. There, D’Alton worked with locals to build solar power for a village hospital ‘out of old fluoro tubes and tin and black paint etcetera. It was fun. It inspired me to live more sustainably.’

Once a Greens campaigner in Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, D’Alton is a techno DJ and he also manages a city IT business part-time. On top of this, he’s an Orthodox Christian priest and a chaplain at La Trobe University, and he speaks with the soothing upbeat assuredness you’d expect of someone in such a position. Amid all these he’s doing a history masters degree at Monash, about dialogue between Christianity and Islam. He’s been involved in re-enactment movements, and sees steampunk as an extension of these, as it ‘allows people to live their historical fantasies, rather than act them’.

He leads us to a room housing sets of encyclopaedia and space and nature books. (Later, in the downstairs games room, I spot Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, plus an epic collection of IT engineering books.) ‘Oh yeah!’ he recalls, when I express amazement at the salon’s artful conversation among people who’d barely met in the flesh. ‘Most of us early adopters are like that. Increasingly as the movement becomes mainstream, there will be less of that. In terms of mainstream awareness, it hasn’t really hit in Australia, but it’s pretty close.’

He says he’s been steampunk ‘since I was a kid making things and collecting Victoriana and steam engines. I made a mechanical computer when I was about fifteen, and then at sixteen built a kit home computer when there were only about ten of us in the whole country with home computers, in 1976.’ At present, he’s working on a six-wheeled cycling contraption. He usually buys components from Savers op shops.


The Victorian era, D’Alton says, was full of optimism and hope, a time when anything seemed possible. ‘We haven’t had that culture since the late sixties and seventies, when, after Woodstock and Nixon, hope for the future was lost. I remember when Gough got in, I remember when conscription was stopped . . . all the hope of that era went away somehow.’ With the dismissal, perhaps? ‘Yeah, with the coup,’ he corrects me, not unkindly. ‘That and the counterculture falling apart. Really, there hasn’t been any broader social conscience to replace it.’

What about recent anti-consumerist movements and the return of large demonstrations? ‘It’s all angry,’ he says.

There’s a valid anger, but it becomes all-absorbing and unproductive, and a lot of the counterculture has gone to angry victimhood and powerlessness, and unhealthy identity exclusivism. Whereas steampunk is an optimistic and inclusive counterculture. The DIY rebellion is the happy radical as opposed to the angry radical, with an optimistic vision of the future. I don’t think we’ve had that in a long time.

This is a movement, says D’Alton, where collectivists like him ‘have much in common’ with libertarians. ‘Some tinkerers are very right-wing libertarian.’ Like many other makers, D’Alton embraces the idea of steampunk as a form of neo-Luddism, but he says some makers don’t view the movement politically: they simply like the psychological sanctuary afforded by tinkering.

‘The one defining characteristic about steampunk is doing stuff,’ says D’Alton. ‘Making and upcycling. More than recycling: re-using things from the past and making them better than before. It’s saving the environment from all that junk, and making it more beautiful than before.’ What about Bunnings purchases, or plastic ray-guns? ‘It’s also a pragmatic movement,’ he says. ‘There are always trade-offs between beauty, functionality, time and resources. As long as the broad world view stays there, it’s steampunk.’

Here among these interminable cul-de-sacs, I want to believe what D’Alton tells me. I leave his home moved and uplifted, as if we’ve hit upon some kind of satsang. A collective of individualists; an apolitical political movement, an ahistoric re-enactment, an anti-consumerist industry, a fictive reply to truths, a whimsical response to serious issues. A belief that tinkering in your home can somehow change society, the world. This steampunk business is either grandly deluded or quietly cunning.

Opening spread imagesPage 20. Departed Vervet Half Skull, 2010Vervet monkey skull, mixed media with clockwork components.Photos: Lisa Black, Lisa Black creations

Page 21. Homage to Caesar (homage to American artist Ray Caesar) by Kate O’Brien. Kateobriencreative.com

Steam- punk · 2016. 12. 5. · K.W. Jeter, who wrote some of the Star Wars books and Blade Runner sequels, is credited with coining the term. In an April 1987 letter to sci-fi magazine

Documents