It’s not often that I reflect on the years between now and when I started the Curb, but with today being the seventh anniversary of the sites launch, it makes for as good a time as any to take a squiz at some of the history of the dinky little cultural website, reflect on the now, before I take a gander at some of my favourite pieces we’ve published here.
I’d been writing film reviews, running podcasts, and dabbling in video game coverage for my own website – now defunct – and for other similarly defunct publications since 2014[1], but after a period of immense personal upheaval, I decided it was time to sift through the rubble of the past and try build something new. Something that was a place for the kind of culture coverage that might not make it past the pitch stage at most publications.
In the mid-2010s, I found that a lot of the coverage for Australian films was skewed towards the negative or the films that had a pocket money for publicity. While Filmink, IF.com.au, and Cinema Australia were delivering regular coverage of Australian cinema, I felt like there was space to give the short films and free range independent films a bit more traction. As a Boorloo-Perth local with not much in the way of media competition, I felt that I was in a fairly unique place to be able to sidle in and make a seat for myself at the non-existent table of Film Criticism ™.
So, way back when in the pre-pandemic land of early-2018, I drafted about thirty names for a website, bolding the ones I particularly liked, only to strike them off when they came up nought on domain registries. I was left with a handful of names, some better than others, but all with domains available.
Inspired by the King & Queen of Aussie film criticism, David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz, and influenced by local Boorloo-Perth writer Matthew Eeles’ essential bible Cinema Australia, I knew that whatever would be conjured out of the soil of my then sanguine mind would need to be dedicated to supporting Australian films of all kinds; from the shorts, to the short longs, to the long shorts, to the three hour long epics shot from the back of a car commuting home through peak hour traffic. Any modern Aussie film that I could find a way to cover, I’d wanted to give a shot somehow.
So, I settled on a name for the site: Not a Knife.
Not long after, I was in Naarm-Melbourne catching up with some friends. After more than a few drinks, I found myself on the streets of Collingwood in the early hours of the morning, a notion this Fremantle Dockers supporter gladly didn’t realise until post-fact. My flight home was due to ferry me away on the tail-end of the red eye. Lo and behold, I encountered local legend Leslie Morris, and in the back of an Uber I spilled my idea of a film website, telling him how it’d be called Not a Knife and be a space for Australian films. Thankfully, his movie marketing mind was salient enough to see the connection to Aussie films, but also, how having a website called ‘Not a Knife’ might, shall we say, push away some publicists from wanting to engage with it.
So, the Paul Hogan association was nixed, which is not a bad thing given my lack of enthusiasm for Crocodile Dundee to begin with.
While I’d love to say that there was some memorable moment of me standing on the kerb at 3am outside The Tote pondering the future of my nascent website while I waited for my taxi to the airport, leading me to think of what I was standing on and remember that one of the not-bad titles on the list was available, causing a cry of ‘I know, I’ll call it the Curb!’, the truth is that I hopped on my mighty-cramped Tiger flight home in various states of gruntle, feeling as if the whole thing had done its dash before it even got going.
When I returned home, I crossed off the remaining names, finally deciding in a rather unmemorable moment that The Curb would be an ok name for a website. I’d deliberately opted for the American spelling of the word for no other reason than it was the most common spelling of the word[2]. It’s these kinds of unceremonious things that makes me appreciate the absurdity of moments in cinema like when Han gets given his completely administrative surname of ‘Solo’. Sometimes these kinds of moments aren’t meant to have trumpets and parades. Sometimes they are as simple as just crossing off a name on a list til you’re left with the only one that you feel you’d be happy enough to live with.
If that sounds defeatist and desolate, then rest assured, that’s completely intentional.
Using the framework of the previous website, I built up a version of the site that was akin to many other review websites on the tinterwebs. I tapped the great Simon Blackburn[3] on the shoulder to see if he could create a logo for me, and away we went. Before my Victorian trip, I’d already commissioned a logo for Not a Knife, one that I ended up using briefly when I started my podcast back up, before swiftly retiring it months later.
This is what the site looked like back in 2019-ish, the earliest image I’ve got of it. It’s not bad, but it sure is a bit cluttered.
Over the years, I’ve personally published over 1,000 pieces, from reviews to interviews to articles about hot dogs, living a child free life, death and dying, and the continued question about what it is exactly that I’ve built and how to stay relevant in the social media age. I ask myself ‘what is this place about’ on a daily basis, trying to make sense of this creation and moving in a fluid motion to both keep true to the roots of what The Curb was built for and what culture in Australia needs today.
I love The Curb. I’m proud of the work that my fellow writers and I have been able to achieve over the years. It’s become a small sanctuary in the wilderness of the internet, giving space to creatives, filmmakers, and fellow writers to spill the beans on culture that might not get covered elsewhere.
If there’s one example of what I’d like The Curb to be known for, it would be my interview with Jelena Sinik and Nicolette Axiak for their two-minute animated short film 101 Days of Lockdown. I chatted with Jelena and Nicolette back in 2022 when their short screened at the Sydney Underground Film Festival, and that fifty-minute conversation introduced me to two of the most wonderful creative people I know in the world. That conversation had two friends talking about their creative influences, their bond with each other, and how important their joint creative process is. I’ve gone on to see their work continue to inspire budding animators through the courses they hold, while elsewhere, their creativity has flourished as part of the 2024 Olympics coverage, and, less prestigious, but still impressive, is their cover art for my second book, Lonely Spirits and the King: An Australian Film Book. As a full circle moment, I finally met Jelena and Nicolette at the 2024 Sydney Underground Film Festival when I launched my book at Better Read Than Dead bookstore in Newtown.
In the old world of pitching articles to publications, this interview with Jelena and Nicolette is the kind that would not get past the email stage. You’d be lucky to get a ‘thanks, but no thanks’, and it’s not because of the quality of their work or who they are as people; it’s the reality that back in the late-2010s, those kinds of stories weren’t the ones that grabbed attention. Things have changed a lot, and that’s something I’ll reflect on in a moment.
One thing I’m grateful for is the time with creatives from around the world that I’m gifted. I’m rewarded with deep insights into their creative work, their worldview, and their practices, and even better than that is being able to share it with people. When I sit down on a Zoom to chat with someone, they don’t know the stranger that’s hopping on the other end of the screen who will ask them questions for an hour, some of which are immensely personal; but they do it because they, somehow, someway, trust the process and trust the person.
But – insert mournful out of tune violin music here – it’s also bloody hard. I won’t lie and say that running an independent website is easy; it’s not. There are more days than I care to admit that I resent it. It’s on the days where it feels like work that I get frustrated, like I’ve got an itch in the middle of my head that I can’t scratch or that my brain has been replaced by cotton wool, irritating my mind to no end.
I’ve spent more money keeping The Curb going than I’ll ever earn back. I’ve published two books about Australian films since The Curb began, and both have cost me money to put out into the world. The Curb as a website only earns enough from Patreon support to pay for website hosting costs. I used to have Google ads on the site, and that pulled in some money[4], but I’m repulsed by the idea of having data-scraping things on a website I control, especially one that tracks as much information and data as Google does. I know it’s impossible to escape that grip, but if I can limit it as much as possible, then I will.
This is not a complaint. It’s a privilege to be able to talk to the people I do and it’s a privilege to share the writing of people I greatly admire on The Curb. It's just a need to be open and transparent.
If you’ll humour me for a moment as the violin continues wailing, running The Curb does come with limitations and constraints that cause me to continually question its continued existence.
As I write this, I’ve once again pulled myself out of the mental pit of feeling like I want to metaphorically take The Curb out to a farm in Bullsbrook and tell it to ‘be free Lenny’. This feeling of having a dwindling passion for doing what is, ultimately, a passion project is something we’re apparently not encouraged to talk about, or otherwise, not encouraged to bring into the open for fear it’ll scare people away or because it doesn’t exactly make for compelling reading material.
But ignoring that feeling isn’t exactly great either.
In early 2024, I started quietly shopping The Curb around to a few people to see if they’d be eager to take it off my hands. To free me from this creation. But, thankfully, they either didn’t respond or simply said ‘no thank you’. And hey, I get it, taking a money losing entity that’s built on the personality of one person isn’t exactly an attractive proposition.
And I’m grateful that nobody took me up on the unsolicited request. After all, The Curb is part of who I am now.
I’ll never forget attending a screening at Luna Leederville where a stranger tapped me on the shoulder at the end of the film and asked me, ‘excuse me, are you The Curb?’ I mean, it’s not exactly my birth name, but I’ll take it. We had a great chat about Australian films, they rattled off some of the titles that I’d covered that they’d checked out, and we carried on our way. I’d forget my name if it wasn’t stitched on, so unfortunately I can’t remember this kind souls name, but I do remember the feeling of their tap and what it meant to hear that they knew who I was and what I did.
Embracing an unknown future, at the end of 2024 I gave the site a refresh and a new logo[5]. It looks clean and spiffy. The focus is on the reviews and the podcasts, not intrusive pop ups or images that cover text or ‘click me’ links. It is, hopefully, an antithesis to the ‘sell sell sell’ format that so many major websites have nowadays. ‘Sign up to this.’ ‘Click on that.’ ‘Make sure to sign in to read this exclusive thing.’
https://bsky.app/profile/infinata.bsky.social/post/3lsr7to2q7k2o
There’s a post on Bluesky which shows what the current state of website accessibility is like, and it rings so darn true:
But, media in 2025 is much more different than media in 2018 was. Many of the writers who would usually make a living on major publications have had their livelihood ripped apart, shuttered, or at the very worst, overtaken by AI drivel. So, they shift to paid newsletter subscriptions like Substack, Ghost, Buttondown, or whatever other mailer is the flavour of the month. No doubt if I’d kicked off the Curb a year or two later, I’d have started a Medium account before shifting to one of the many different options out there. But, this website is a home of sorts; or more importantly, it’s my home. I’m not beholden to the drive of other organisations that might or might not feel it’s ok to platform Nazi’s, suddenly throwing my entire membership into disarray.
A lot of those writers are then able to pick and choose what they want to write about. Dive into the world of newsletters and self-hosted publications, and you'll find everything from perverse poetry to underground queer stories to deep dives into 16th century attire and how it influences the state of the world. When you own your own platform and run your own voice, you can cover what you want to cover. For many of us, if there is one other person in the world who enjoys that same subject, then you've just found your own favourite website. Running a site like the Curb means being comfortable with knowing that some of the pieces you publish will only reach tens of people rather than thousands upon thousands. (Full disclosure: the average readership for the Curb varies between 40,000 - 45,000 readers a week.)
Another issue is that social media reach is absolutely rooted, with the continual pivot-to-video merging with pivot-to-newsletters merging with pivot-to-Tik Tok to create some kind of Substance-esque behemoth that vomits referral links and reels at you until the morning magpie sings its song. It’s harder and harder to get eyes on articles thanks to the enshittification of search engines and the proliferation of AI slop, while Facebook, Instagram, and The Bad Place smother links and posts from followers, making it harder and harder to simply get some kind of awareness that we’ve posted anything at all. I’ve fallen victim often enough to the mindless flick flick flick of the Insta-reel roulette, turfing whatever little videos it feels will activate the kneading cat in my head to make biscuits in my mind and curl down to sleep, purring an unhealthy sound. We like the machines that go brr because they make us feel good with the noises and the lights and the dancing ponies, but they don’t do anything to enrich us. Instead, they keep us distracted.
And that in itself is one thing I’m desperate to not do. I don’t want the Curb to ‘pivot-to-video’. As I say to my guests when I interview them ‘I’m just recording audio, nobody needs to see my face’.
Then there’s that AI vomit that I can’t help but get stuck in my shoes. I’m nauseated by the rampant tacky creative diarrhea that spews out of these soulless machines, and I’m even more nauseated by the filmmakers who say ‘welp, better get used to it because change is coming’ while they turf a prompt into the plagiarism machine and make themselves an Aussie Tarkovsky flick that lacks any sense of creativity. The future fucking sucks.
On 1 Jan 2025, the Curb ticked over with its new look. When I redesigned it to look how it does today, I knew I needed a tag that outlined exactly what this site is about:
‘Film and culture. Not content.’
It's as succinct and clear as anything else. We cover films. We explore culture. We reject the idea of content as a vessel for creativity.
The work that we do is not content. It’s a film review. It’s an interview. It’s an essay. It’s unearthing filmmakers, poets, artists, creatives, curators of culture, and listening to how they see the world.
What we cover is not content. You do not spend years of your life conceiving, writing, planning, networking, casting, set dressing, production designing, shooting, editing, sound mixing, distributing, and proudly shouting into the world that you’ve made A Film, for it to be called ‘content’.
Content is disposable. Content is soulless. Content is inhuman. Content is a tick in the algorithm box for the information eaters to churn through as they build large language models that regurgitate advice about how many rocks you’re supposed to eat a day. I quickly found out as a toddler that rocks and sand does not agree with my constitution and can proudly say that I’m now 37 years sober from rock consumption, which is more than I can say for other folks.
As I’ve reflected on the reviews, articles, and interviews that I’ve personally published over the years, I’ve noticed that one of the consistent aspects has been my reflection on the mental health of people or how mental health appears in stories. Many of my questions in interviews are about the mental safety of cast and crew, or how storytellers process their mental state of mind.
Part of this is driven by the precarious nature of arts industries around the world, especially in Australia, and partly it’s because I want to run a values-led website that checks in on people, that provides a safe space to discuss mental health, to give people of diverse backgrounds the chance to safely talk about their work, lives, and culture in an uncritical manner.
It’s also important for my mental health. I’m not sure how many more years the Curb will keep running, but as long as it does, I need to safely look out for myself, my fellow writers, and the people whose work I support and amplify. I’ve not been great at putting up boundaries and have certainly overcommitted myself, especially in the past six months where I’ve accumulated a backlog of interviews and emails that I’m still working through months later. If you’re reading this and you’re one of those blessed people wondering where our chat is, rest assured, it’s all I think about and it will be published soon.
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m complaining – if it’s not clear, I absolutely love what I get to do and the people I get to talk to – it’s more that in the midst of my ever increasingly busy life where I work a full time job, live a life, and am the co-chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, running a website in the minutes in between becomes tight. Throw in the spanner of the five-minute attention span of the internet and the need to push out something new every day of your limited existence, well, you can't help but feel exhausted, even when you do make sure to run outside every 45 minutes to touch your prescribed amount of grass.
But this is also quickly becoming the reality for many cultural writers in the world, and the artists too. It is simply not possible anymore to make a living wage being an artist, a film critic, or a cultural writer anymore, so we have to find means to make our money elsewhere.
I wanted to avoid as much of a hard sell as possible in this piece, but hey, if you’ve made it this far, then thank you. We’d love it if you could chip in and support the Curb on Patreon or maybe buy a book or two. We have two extensive reads about modern Australian cinema that we think you’d like, in particular our latest book Lonely Spirits and the King: An Australian Film Book. Buy a copy, won’t you?
And hey, if you already support us on Patreon or have one of our books, then we’d love it if you could share the Curb with any of your friends or fellow creatives. At the moment we’re active on social media, and of course, post regularly on this here old website, but by the end of the year we aim to have a functional newsletter of sorts going. Sure, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do since, well, 2018, but I it’s becoming more urgent than ever to find a way to stay connected with you, our readers.
This piece has been distinctly me focused, but it’s important to know that the Curb would not exist without the work of my fellow writers, including my mainstay friend and colleague Nadine Whitney. Without Nadine as a sounding board or creative force to work alongside, this website would have folded years ago, and I certainly wouldn’t have published two books. I’m grateful for everyone who has written for the Curb over the years and I’m beyond grateful for anyone who might write for the Curb in the future. This website is not a solo endeavour.
I’d also like to shout out one of our longest supporters: Tim Leggoe. Tim has supported the Curb from its early days, and I’m grateful for his continued championing of our work.
So, that’s seven years of the Curb. Thank you for sticking with us and supporting us throughout the years. Head on over and continue this dive into the reflection pool as I take a look see at some of my personal favourite articles that we’ve published on this here old website.
[1] Truth is it’s been much longer since then, but I’m not sure that early 2000s era Live Journal posts count as ‘film reviews’.
[2] Interesting sidenote is it’s also partially because there’s a local Perth band called The Kerb. I’d later go on to interview them when the film about the band, Maybe It’s Luck?, screened at Perth’s Revelation Film Festival.
[3] Simon Blackburn aka Precise Path does great design work. Make sure to check out his band Ivory Dusk.
[4] Fun fact: The main places I got money from through clickthroughs was always an adult shop adjacent company, and it was always in February that there would be the biggest spike.
[5] Less overt is the minor change from The Curb to the Curb. Don’t ask me why the lower-case t is there, it just is, and it makes me happy.