Concrete Playground publishes a network of targeted websites and email newsletters, providing local event guides for culturally curious people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Our site is updated with new content daily, and we handpick the best of what's on to give our readers a shortlist of cultural inspiration each week via our email newsletters. To subscribe, enter your email address above.
Contributors
Bree Pickering / Contributor
Bree is a writer (or so she says). She likes kicking taxis when they drive too close to her bicycle. She usually misses. Allergies include magnolias, gluten (there goes all the fun stuff) and elastoplast.
Rima Sabina Aouf
Rima’s parents did not think it was important to tell her first grade teacher that their daughter was a new migrant who did not speak English, and she instead laboured under the assumption that the child was afflicted by a grave and mysterious learning disability. Along with setting the general tone for social interaction in Rima’s life, this incident made Rima focus very hard on improving her English. She has since been an editor for Sydney Uni’s Honi Soit, arts and culture editor for FBi Magazine, reviewer and general hanger-on at FBi, and has read Gravity’s Rainbow.
Amelia Groom / Editor
A freelance writer, editor and vegetable thief, Amelia recently experienced a minor catastrophe in the form of a stationary, celery and cabbage avalanche across her desk, but it's all under control now. Amelia is also the executive producer for arts & culture at FBi 94.5 and edits Big In Japan.
Rich Fogarty / Founder
The 1980s were heady days in the playground at Balmain Primary. Benny Elias and his Tigers found themselves in the grand final for two consecutive years, and younger versions of Rose Byrne, Alex Lloyd, Josh Pyke and Holly Throsby were kicking around the yard all hopped up on devon faces and apricot logs. Inspired by the talented midgets that surrounded him, a 6 year-old Rich vowed he'd one day do something to support creatively talented young upstarts.
Two decades later, Rich ditched his job, apartment and a fledgling mahjong career in New York and headed back to the bright lights of Balmain. Concrete Playground was born a few months and a few more sleepless nights later.
Rich is the founder and director of the business. You can contact him directly at rich@concreteplayground.com.au
Eddie Sharp / Contributor
Eddie Sharp is a writer, director and curator. He co-produces The Imperial Panda Festival, founded Erotic Fan Fiction Readings and creates theatre shows with his friends such as Wonka! and The Mad Max Remix. He is the resident art critic on FBi radio and president of The Noah Taylor Appreciation Society on Facebook.
Jai Pyne / Contributor
Jai Pyne likes long walks on the beach (really). After dropping out of art school twice - call it distraction, lack of commitment, youth and an increasing amount of time spent making music in his bedroom - he eventually started a band called The Paper Scissors: he is the main songwriter for the band and has devoted most of his life to for the past 5 years to producing, writing, singing, playing guitar, managing, and making two EPs and a full length album (he'd like to think of himself as a bit like Prince but much taller, less talented, and with less dubious a sexuality). In between TPS duties he has managed to occasionally freelance as a music and culture journalist for Lost At E Minor, Riot Magazine and others, make a solo acoustic EP as Pork Pies, and travel around the US and Asia.
Kate Jinx / Contributor
A freelance designer/writer/editor/etc based between Sydney and Brooklyn, Kate spends most of her life in darkened cinemas, which explains her rather pale complexion. She has designed maps for the government, albums for musicians and written about all manner of deadbeat/upbeats. The cat in her photograph is, sadly, not real.
Alexandra Meagher / Contributor
Alexandra is Concrete Playground’s intern and sometime contributor. When not helping out around here, you can find her pining after Mad Men costumes, gallivanting around Sydney’s inner east and plotting ways to move to Paris.
Joel Draper
Joel works in retail. And Hospitality. And is studying. So feel pity for him. He hates return plane flights. At the moment he likes the colour purple, and is just learning how great tea is. He hates that at 23 he would almost be considered a veteran in many sports and he loves rags to riches stories.
Emma Waters Freeman / Contributor
Emma Waters is contributing editor to arts and lifestyle magazine Kilimanjaro and writes for Dazed Digital, Urban Junkies, Pages Online and NYLON. She recently worked as a copywriter for Sony Europe, and has just moved back to Sydney from London.
Tom Melick / Contributor
Similar to many people Tom was born without a biography, and probably still doesn't have the material to justify an exciting one. To avoid this awkwardness he prefers to reiterate the futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who wisely articulated: 'I know I am not a category, a hybrid specialization, I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb - an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe, and so are you.'
Similar to many people Tom was born without a biography, and probably still doesn't have the material to justify an exciting one. To avoid this awkwardness he prefers to r
Evin Donohoe / Contributor
I love everything. I stay up late. I trained at acting school but have since forgotten all the classes and retained only the memories of good times and good people. It's better this way. My chief interests are these: standup comedy; plays and theatre and nonsense; writing; fun times; acting; drinking; drinking Dr Pepper; hair; novels. I enjoy films but my attention span and fidgetiness prevent me from digesting as many as I'd like. I exercise only semi-regularly. Despite some incredibly focused knowledge in a few areas of interest (and a faux-science-y mind of the type that retains everything that comes out of Dr. Karl's mouth, but nothing of high school chemistry), there are some significant gaps in my general pop culture knowledge (which means there is always more to discover).
Jimmy Dalton / Contributor
James is the new Vetruvian Man, but only if Vetruvian means "does a few different things with mixed levels of success". He has stage-managed musicals, directed short plays about dead babies and chalk circles (not by Brecht), performed as an amorphous singing human for a UK theatre company, manipulated chairs and blobs as a puppeteer in Sydney, pushed carts of rubbish around Penrith while dressed in Sydney Festival banners and, currently, he is contributing to the future of YOUR children as the co-author of multiple literacy educational aids.
Danielle Hairs / Contributor
Danielle once wrote an incredibly helpful book entitled "TURPS: The unsung hero of the cupboard underneath your kitchen sink" after discovering that turps can clean everything when moving out of a not-very-well-looked-after rental in Melbourne. Despite its promise, Danielle had to abandon literary success when she learnt that turps is in fact, carcinogenic.
Anna Harrison / Contributor
When she is not meandering along multi-limbed career channels, dabbling in dabbling and collecting job titles like baseball cards, Anna can be found absorbed in one of the following:
-Googling random rubbish such as "excessive consumption of almond butter resulting in death"
-Inhaling almond butter.
-Cultivating her relationship with the beach.
-Forcing a reluctant friend with a real job to take a 2 hour lunch break & listen to her grandiloquent plans of moving to Paris and planting herself in an absurdly kitsch boho apartment in Le Marais where she will make documentary films, pen her first novel and consume inordinate amounts of goats cheese.
Angela Bennetts / Contributor
Angela is a writer, illustrator and long-time fan of Shawn Corey Carter.
Millie Stein / Contributor
Millie moved to Sydney from Perth in 2004 and since then has attempted to write about, or at least think about writing about, almost everything she sees. Recently, Millie went to see WWE live and realised that working two jobs and going to uni is nothing compared to the amount of work that goes into winning the World Heavyweight Championship.
Rhiannon Sawyer / Contributor
Rhiannon has been writing ever since she can remember, carrying a notebook everywhere she goes just like Harriet the Spy. An inner-westie (and proud of it), Rhiannon is also a passionate theatre goer, and having worked on many plays, she understands the ‘fun’ of late night set painting. She is currently working on a children’s book, which she hopes will launch her career as a multi-millionaire.
Michaella Solar-March / Contributor
After hosting the breakfast program on FBi Radio for 3 years, Michaella worked as a music journalist, magazine editor, publicist and more until finding a home at Spunk Records. She was also one of the founding residents of the BJB Artists' Collective, and since leaving has had a printer named in her absence. She's never used it, but people have assured her it is a good printer. Things that she loves include roasted chestnuts, red wine, family dinners, 19th century literature, magazines, and long power-walks with her housemate Katherine.
Genevieve O'Callaghan / Contributor
Genevieve wants you to enjoy art in Sydney as much as she does. Her experience is in managing exhibitions, and while she continues to do that, Genevieve will take the time to see the shows that you should take the time to too.
Trish Roberts / Contributor
Trischelle is a writer, musician and resident of Brethren Just Below studios, a Sydney-based artists’ collective. She is inspired by grey rabbits, anime creatures, crochet, ponchos, magic, Nina Simone, the idea of Morocco and uncomfortable gaps in communication.
Sophie Tarr / Contributor
Sophie is a writer, editor and all-around media whore. Raised by an ex-hippy and a mild-mannered IT consultant, she’s a closeted consumerist and enjoys political chit-chat, nanna’s teacups, playing board games, and art rock from the late 90s. She’s less fond of potatoes, cats (and, let’s face it, many cat-owners), tactlessness and using smileys in written correspondence. If she were a boy, she wouldn’t mind being called Toby.
Alice Tynan / Contributor
Alice Tynan is a committed cinephile, relishing in everything from Armageddon to Antonioni. Her love of film, history and languages makes her dream up ideas which she likes to wrestle into screenplays.
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