An interview with Felix Ookean about his documentaries from 1985.

(Originally published in Antipodean Geographic, 6th August 1985.)

Q: You’ve just aired Monoliths From The Heavens – a controversial documentary series that suggests that ancient Australians were visited by extra-terrestrials. What lead you to embark on such a project?
FO: Unfortunately I am unable to talk about Monoliths due to a pending court case. Next question.

Q: Really? Can you describe the nature of the case?
FO: The indigenous peoples of central Australia, for whom I have immense respect, may I say, are unhappy about the central thesis of my series and are hoping to redress this in a legal setting. That’s all I can really say at present.

Q: Can you tell us about your earlier projects then, what precisely were you trying to get across with your documentaries? They always seemed to be just a little left of centre.
FO: Well, if I may begin at the beginning, let’s talk about Southern Oceans, my first series. I wanted to show a side of the ocean that is so ever-present and yet so infrequently focused on. The invertebrates. This is the most significant portion of our marine fauna and yet everybody seems to want to focus on sharks or seals or that sort of nonsense. Anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm. So we got the most high-tech close zoom cameras of the time and filmed around the Victorian coast and a couple of days in Tasmania. For the abalone footage.

Q: What was the highlight for you during these shoots?
FO: Probably the elephant snail shoot. Did you know that we were the first people to ever film mating elephant snails? Even today I meet malacologists who, once they find out who I am, are just overwhelmed with gratitude for what we did on that shoot. The amount of times I’ve been approached by marine biologists of a certain vintage saying ‘Oh, you’re the guy who filmed the mating elephant snails!’…you know, it still happens today.

Q: And how did you go about producing the soundtrack?
FO: That was my first soundtrack, so everything was a learning experience back then. I was just rather fortunate to have a lot of very talented people on board from the Melbourne jazz scene. I had written a lot of melodic themes but without very much structure and just sort of threw them to my players and we all worked it out in the studio through improvisation and modification. It evolved.

Q: There’s a great sound on that album.
FO: That was brought about more by coincidence and necessity than by design. I didn’t really have an overarching aesthetic for the sessions, it just kind of coalesced through the idiosyncrasies of the players and the equipment we had access to at the time. For example we had a very adventurous young guitarist by the name of ‘Savage’ James Bell who used an early precursor to the wah pedal – he had constructed the thing himself, as he had most of his effects gear – which lent the soundtrack a very distinctive watery sound. Also my old friend Rob Teal, who is strictly speaking a marimba player by training, found an old vibraphone, which he was eager to try out with us. It provided a great exotica sounding, beachy vibe to the whole thing. No pun intended.

Q: None taken. After Southern Oceans, you moved on to the birds of Australia.
FO: Yes, I had been doing bird surveys at the time and was struck by this country’s amazing birdlife and the connection that so many Australians feel with these animals. I wanted to delve deeper than the superficial portrayal of our native birds that was so common on TV in the late sixties. I wanted to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins. We had a wonderful time filming it and the public was kind enough to turn the series into a rousing success. It was a great experience. We were probably single-handedly responsible for raising the profile of the Ruddy Turnstone – everybody talks about them these days but before we made Feathered Lives they were really only known by ornithologists and hardcore twitchers. And the music was some of our best and was also really successful which is always gratifying.

Q: It’s definitely the album of yours most commonly seen around these days.
FO: Well it sold quite well. Very well for a documentary soundtrack. I had a much bigger budget allowed for the recording sessions but I didn’t actually change the process much because I was so happy with the sound of the Southern Oceans sessions. Many of the same players were involved and so it has a very similar sound but I was able to procure the services of a rather sterling string quartet, which gave it a soaring, orchestral quality. Particularly on Twelve Apostlebirds, I don’t think that tune would have worked without them. I think also we were being very obviously influenced by some of the more avant-garde musicians in the Melbourne music scene at the time. That looseness of structure that was being employed by some of the jazz players was actually perfect for soundtrack music because it flowed more naturally and organically and suited the non-standard movements of the animals. And then of course on Australis we got even looser and avant-garde. That double LP is considered by some as a fine example of early Australian ‘prog rock’! [Laughs].

Q: Well, the 24-part Antarctic Suite certainly springs to mind.
FO: Yes, I suppose that one is certainly befitting of such a description.

Q: Australis – The Other Half was probably your most ambitious undertaking, but it wasn’t as well received as your preceding series. Why do you think that was the case?
FO: I think the whole thing was just too ambitious. Basically we were trying to document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere, which in retrospect is just crazy. It turned into this Behemoth of a juggernaut and I simply had to see it through because there was so much riding on it and so many people involved… It was probably just too big, really. Perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere. The music was good though, and people appreciated it. I must say though, it was rather a perplexing response. People will speak to me today and tell me how much they respect the music and I feel like demanding, ‘Yes, but what about the series?’ – nobody approaches me and compliments the series itself. But a small dedicated clique of clandestine record collectors have put the soundtrack up on a pedestal and I suppose I can expect some sort of obscure accolade when I’m a half-dead octogenarian, honouring my contributions to music that no one listens to. Frankly, I’d rather have the money [laughs].

Q: Do you think perhaps that there is an inherent disconnect between music and nature? Is it possible that most people just find the combination incongruous?
FO: I couldn’t disagree more. Listen – music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin. What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph.

Seeking out the Crustaceous Stigmata.

(Originally published in Animus Animalium Volume 27, Number 3, 1977)

Jack Haldane apparently once quipped to a group of theologians that his study of biology had taught him that any creator thereof must have ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’. The fact that Haldane may never have actually said this appears to have deterred no one, in favour or against. Nevertheless, I’ll go one better than the old Cantabrigian and say this: if there is any sort of spiritual overseer of this planet (and there may well be) he is not only fond of coleopterans, he is an arthropod.

Consider the godly effort put into the stocking of this planet with suitable denizens. Given that arthropods comprise by far the majority of described animals – doubtless even more undescribed – what other conclusion can we draw but that this was the model that most interested the creator? Let’s say you enter a craftsman’s workshop; a wood turner or a shoemaker, and after seeing that 80% of their output comprised endless variations of the one theme, would you then point to an aberrant, one-off novelty and declare that this was his favourite design, above all others? Of course not! The breathtaking arrogance with which an obscure species of bipedal primate has erroneously declared that they and they alone were created in the great invertebrate’s image should be considered as evolutionarily excessive and unnecessary as their much vaunted intelligence*.

And yet this is what the ‘good’ books would have us accept. If ever proof was needed to show that the bible was an entirely man-made creation, it is surely the cavalier way its author refers to the creation of the bulk of metazoan life on this planet. The almighty, in his/her eternal creativity, and over a space of millions of years, creates infinite iterations of insects, countless classes of crustaceans, millions of makes of molluscs, and myriad other species of delightfully obscure and fascinating invertebrate phyla and how does the author of Genesis convey this? By describing the vast majority of life’s diversity as ‘creeping things’ and cramming them in amongst the equally uninspired groupings of ‘cattle’ and ‘beasts’ that were also apparently whipped up on the sixth day. It’s hard to imagine the creator’s hard work and artistic flair being described in such a pathetically understated and dismissive way if the book truly had any kind of authoritative input. The notion that cattle is a taxonomic division on par with the endlessly diverse creeping things of the invertebrata is an idea so obviously borne of ignorance; so obviously the product of a first-century mind bound to the immediate, prosaic concerns of an agronomic existence that it is astonishing to me that anyone ever reads past the first chapter of this mystic text at all!

Despite the celestial architect’s incontrovertible obsession with chitinous invertebrates, all we see of this in scripture is the woeful introduction in Genesis and then arthropods are barely ever mentioned again. Certainly, we are told that old man Leviticus warned us against eating shellfish (perhaps the only glimmer of real understanding of the almighty in the book?) but if we examine this verse we see that this is based on an instruction to avoid eating anything from the seas that ‘has not fins and scales’ – that is, anything aquatic that is not a fish. This is taxonomically lazy and theologically absurd. The eastern philosophies fare marginally better, but one still can’t shake the ever-growing understanding that organised religion is at best a comfortable refuge for those who would rather ignore the real details of the prime mover’s works. Go to the ant, o sluggards, and consider her ways!

So, why are these bookish aldermen pouring over dusty middle-eastern texts instead of scouring the beaches** for crustaceous stigmata, as I do? Why is it not considered blasphemy to remain so profoundly ignorant of the handiwork of a creator you claim to worship? These poseurs, on being invited to a comprehensive gallery of a master's life works, available for unlimited study, respond; No thanks – we'd rather read and reread a heavily edited biography of the artist's son written by men who never met him. For every Saint Francis, there are a million dreary Augustinians trying to achieve martyrdom by boring themselves to death through drudging catechism. These poor wretches will meet their maker in time of course, and when they gaze into his compound eyes, then will they realise their folly.

Only the ancient Egyptians (derisively dismissed by the monotheists as ‘pagans’) seemed to really grasp the empyrean nature of the beetles in their midst, stoically undertaking their Sisyphean task day after day. Where the vapid minds of today’s literalists see an insect rolling a ball of dung, the ancients saw rebirth and resurrection; sanctity and wisdom. We would be wise to emulate the Egyptians in their veneration of this dignified coprophage and its various family members; the insects, crustaceans, chelicerates, myriapods and the late trilobites. It is in their exoskeletal forms that you will truly see the face of god.

- Felix Ookean, 1977

                                                                                                      

*And, by the way, see how much that helps you if the cephalopods were ever to develop a colonial mentality. A slight rise in sea level (my friends in the Earth Science department inform me that this is inevitable) and we will all learn that while intelligence is a lovely thing, when coupled with eight arms and the physical flexibility that only comes with a lack of an internal skeleton, it’s nigh unstoppable.

** Another favoured design feature of the deities (particularly the native dreamtime gods of my adopted homeland) unforgivably and bafflingly underappreciated by organised religion.