“Lucy Merritt and Ann Martin were kind of creative directors of this whole project in 1991. They had gallery spaces in the street as well. They had all these amazing ideas. The Star was the main thing that actually happened, amazingly – you know how hard it is to organize a week of performance not with a lot of money – but it was good. And after that we organized two or three more, two-night/weekend sort of things and that was kind of it …

“I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve revitalized Port Kembla. The Star Café was one of the earlier attempts. When you’re here at night after a certain time it’s pretty quiet apart from the odd element. And this sort of thing would be going on back then and you’d look out the street and it would be dead quiet, there was nothing. It was sort of like, you could do anything you wanted, there was no restrictions, as long as we didn’t make too much noise. I think we had the police come out a few times, we weren’t too loud, we had no sound proofing or anything it was just a curtain over a glass bloody window, it was very ad hoc you know.” 

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

Image: Nina Kourea