Kermie grinning from an iced‐up wheelchair, sinking in its own tracks through a snow‐covered park.

Vicinity of a snowball fight, Hammersmith, February 2018.  Photo: A Whitfield.

Kermie Breydon

Introduction

Hi!  Welcome to my personal homepage.  I hope you enjoy your poke around.

For those who’d like to hire me — I’m pretty alright at public speaking; facilitating productions in the arts or media; and consulting on inclusivity anywhere.  If this sounds useful, or you rightly suspect there are other grouse things I could do for you, too, just sing out.

In a comic, a fish muses on its own wateriness.

Excerpt from FLUID DYNAMICS (2017).

If you are swotting up on me for whatever reasons, here are some of the sorts of things that you might find…

My work in visual arts has blended hand‐drawn animation, dark‐room photography, comics, sculpture, digital performance, and cartography.  As a writer, critically, I think a lot about physicality as sociological text: whether that be in textures of inhabitation; the kinetics to communication; infrastructural, industrial and agricultural manifestations of politics; or continua merging “beings” and “surroundings”.  In aural media, I especially love music, subaltern story‐telling, nudging techniques around, and to pick — as a nesting bird with a coir pot — at field–recording/–re‐forming.

Speaking of being out in the field, I love organic gardening (particularly bolstering indigenous habitat), bushwalking/rambling/hiking, city walking, and community radio.  I am big appreciator of super walkable urban design, dense and intense public transport systems (particularly through electrified, decentralised rail), and the treatment of roads foremost as community space and tram/bicycle/cart/etc. infrastructure.  When I say walking, I mean wheeling chair and such, too!  Appropriate provision of assistive technology is another passion; attitudes to this are so connected with issues of societal and environmental health.

Possibly the world’s first non‐binary athlete in elite football of any code, I am acutely conscious of the denial of safe sports opportunities to marginalised populations.  I would love to connect with others yearning to fix this.  And to play for play.  I enjoy skating (in chairs, on boards, or even on skates), am unreasonably fond of basketball, make an awe‐filled/awful swimmer, and am fascinated by dance.

At my most sensible, my engaging in the physical world is informed by musicality.  Formally, I am most at home on finger‐tickled string instruments, playing the acoustics of a scenario, or in abstract theoretical spaces.  Arranging is divine.  I play piano like someone who has paid too little intellectualisation to too many forms of art music, and atonal percussion like a poptimistic sound designer.

More than anything, I struggle to accept what my motor impairments have done to my precise manifestation of rhythm, although there will be something phenomenal to touch once I begin to, for sure.  Despite a preference for the irrefutably physical, I can get painfully earnest about the possibilities of electronic synthesis for microtonality, adaptive musicianship, sophisticated timbral innovation, interrupting the westernisation of recorded music, and of course stagecraft.  Music has far more to teach people about the universe and ourselves than we impart to it.  Still, what an extraordinary repository of culture.

Unsurprisingly, I am deeply absorbed in the interrelated nature of community, environment, and story.  I hope to continue to help nuture oral histories, support decolonising media (well, everything), and seeing about what better things might follow the field of “international development”.

And to examine works that inspire stretchy conceptualisations of theatre; to wax enthusiastic.

No doubt I have left everything out.  Please let me know if there is anything you would like covered on this website!

News Since Mid–Late 2020

Personally

  • Lately, life here has been dominated by dealings with the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  In my free time, I am building up an annotated set of machine stenography dictionaries for everyday communication, and trying to help my body to work okay.

  • Beginning to, in a sense, codify my idiolect has made for a vigorous period of intimately interrogating imperialist lexis and facing up to my unwitting linguistic role in legitimising colonialism.  Listening, collecting, dismantling and recurating is intense work — at times tedious, with which I may never get tremendously far — but phenomenal in effect… if only on my own critical thought and my physical capacity for moving through language in a generally legible manner.

  • Sometimes one’s first read of a particular book is such a special experience, it takes savouring to extremes.  It took me months to close Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.  Many years in, I have never even finished Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  Now, I am crawling — figuratively and literally — through Emily Coates and Sarah Demer’s Physics and Dance.

Publicly

  • Shared under To Locomote is a condensed assemblage of some of my hard‐earned, far‐too‐much wheelchair knowledge.  I hope you, your clients, or your loved‐ones can benefit!

  • Some old comics turned up recently: AFTER I UNDERSHARED AND YOU OVERTOOK and FLUID DYNAMICS.  For the latter, I have written you some historical context and recommended several pieces of exceptional further reading and listening.

  • After a few years of its magazine look, this page adopts a plainer format, that it will skip more lightly across the internet to you.  More pages are joining in, as they sprout updated content.

  • A whole new section has sprung up: on computing.  Trace a journey from weary technambivalence, to life-changing research waiting in the wings, over coming months in ’Puting.

  • The fifth issue of thoughtful, outdoorsy favourite, Queer Out Here is here… out… queer.  I tickle a goat (at the goat’s request) and interview a pig, partway through Side A.

The Most Lackadaisical Press‐Clipping Scrapbook

Recording Engineering

Erin Kyan’s Love and Luck is a gentle drama I recorded.  Even on hiatus, Love and Luck continues to attract acclaim and find special places in new listeners’ hearts.

Love and Luck has been included in the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia, was selected as an example of “the best Australian podcasts” by the Wheeler Centre and Audiocraft’s Australian Audio Guide, wound up a finalist in the Australian Podcast Awards multiple times, and comes recommended by a slew of critics in the meedja.

Charming and Interesting

A panel of four. There are beanbags and a small dog in the foreground.

Discussion of ‘Research and Lived Experience’, featuring Alison Whittaker, Kermie Breydon, Rosalind Moran, Chris Tse and Ernest the dog.  Awabakal and Worimi Country, September 2016.  Photo: National Young Writers’ Festival.

“Everyone’s very hungover,” begins Julia Pillai. “Let’s not beat around the bush.” The Vinyl Café is scattered with a modest but attentive audience and the panel coax them in closer… Despite everything – the hangovers, the daylight savings, the unbearable whir of the coffee machine – this panel is engaged, thoughtful and surprisingly perky.

⸺ Bridget Lutherborrow (National Young Writers’ Festival Press Room)

Sporting Playing

After that odd episode in which I went from lapsed social basketballer to actual St. Kilda footballer, the club told fans that “Kermie Breydon… looks like they have the making of a fantastic forward”.

Patchwork Sitemap

A smattering of coverage, progressively revealing itself, as I do the place up.

Pronouns & Titles

In Englishes and adjacent languages, please refer to me by way of they, or the language’s normal equivalent.  For example: “I am reading what their pronouns are.”

Of course, second-person pronouns such as you are the sort to use when addressing me (whether individually or as part of a group).  For example: “Your shoelace is undone, you duffer!” or “What are yous lot up to?”

Use of no title with my name is appropriate.

For pronouns, titles, etc in any other language variants, please check with me directly.  Thank you!

Contact Me

K. F. Breydon
PO Box 107
Clarinda, VIC  3169
Australia

’dylike other contact information?

Résumé-bé, Bébé

A genericised and abridged CV

Acknowledgement of Country

Most of the work on this website takes place on land of the Kulin alliance; much of the rest, on Country of their fellow Blak nations.

⟤  Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.  ⟥

I would like to pay my respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of and living in these places — especially to Elders — and to all First Nations communities around the world to whose lands, waters or skies these words may extend.