Visionary Man - Harper's BAZAAR (Copy)

BENJAMIN LAW

Much has been said about just how prolific Benjamin Law is.Yes, the sheer volume of work the journalist, screenwriter, author, playwright, speaker, podcast host and book editor produces is enough to make you want to go back to bed, but to focus solely on quantity is to miss the point.The point is the stories.“If you’re missing stories, you’re excluding people from the conversation and that is incredibly damaging,”he says.“When you have a monoculture — especially in the media and the arts — it means some people don’t have a voice.

“I felt that when Parliament was talking about Asian-Australians and there weren’t any Asian-Australians in Parliament,” he adds. “Even with the same-sex postal vote [2017’s Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey], there was so much discussion about queer people, but there are very few queer people in Parliament.When journalists are writing stories about transgender children but don’t interview any medical specialists in that field or transgender youth themselves, it becomes a really dangerous discourse. I’m far more interested in stories that haven’t been told.”

Some of those recent stories: Waltzing the Dragon, a two-part ABC documentary about Australia’s history with China that sees Law take his parents back to their ancestral villages; Growing Up Queer in Australia, an anthology of stories from the country’s LGBTIQA+ community; Moral Panic 101, his Quarterly Essay about Safe Schools and homophobia in Australia; The Family Law, his memoir and its TV adaptation; and Torch the Place, his foray into playwriting that tells the story of a mother with compulsive hoarding tendencies (spinning dark family drama into comedy is a speciality of Law’s).

“When people are prevented from telling their stories, they’re easily dehumanised,” he says.“Sameness isn’t a prerequisite for treating one another decently.We’ve been a multilingual, multicultural country for 65,000 years or more, and I think we can embrace that part of ourselves instead of trying to steamroll difference. We need to celebrate the multicultural foundations we’ve laid.”

BARRIE BARTON

Barton is CEO of Right Angle Studio (a property development advisory company), Golden Age Cinema & Bar (a refurbished 1940s cinema) and Paramount Recreation Club (a decidedly anti-gym health centre).
At first glance, these seem like entirely separate ventures, but Barton’s vision for a more humane way of life for city folk threads them together.That and the fact all three can be found in the same beautiful Art Deco building in Sydney’s Surry Hills: Paramount House.

Barton and his brother Chris started Right Angle Studio in 2005 to provide strategic advice for owners of large and important pieces of land, a huge component of which involves anticipating how future humans will spend time in future metropolises.“It’s a combination of being a super-nerd and a mystic,” Barton says of how he predicts the desires of post-Gen Z communities.“When you design a new building or fix up an old one, what you do could last for 50 to 100 years,” he says.“We’re trying to encourage [owners and developers] to make property that doesn’t just make money, but that is also enriching for people.”

Eventually, the Barton brothers decided to start contributing to cities themselves.“We started thinking, We know so much about what city people are doing — what if we were to actually develop something?” Barton says.They opened Melbourne’s Rooftop Cinema in 2006 and then set their sights on reinvigorating Paramount House.“Whether it’s the cinema or a coffee or a co-working space or the health club, we’re trying to give people an experience that begins to pull back from the speed of the normal city and make it a more gentle and humane place to be,” Barton says. “In our industry, we’re the jokers in the pack. A lot of people in government and development forget that cities are habitats for humans, not just assets that sit on a balance sheet, and they’ve reconciled themselves to things growing the way they always have.

But we don’t accept that. Everyone always thinks about their rights to things and never their responsibilities for things, and it really saddens me.We’re hoping through our work to make people mindful of the fact that cities don’t happen by accident; we need to try hard to be good citizens.”

DR JORAN NGUYEN

Massive technological change brings with it anxiety, apprehension and plain fear. Dr Jordan Nguyen, futurist, biomedical engineer and founder of social business Psykinetic, understands this, but it takes less than a minute in his company to feel reassured about the future of humanity.“The way I see it, every technological advancement has a dark side and new ethical issues to solve,” he says,“but there are also beautiful and positive opportunities in there. I’m interested in how we harness technology to improve our humanity, not lose it.” While he was at university and early in his career, Dr Nguyen created technology for people with severe disabilities that allows them to perform everyday tasks using the power of their minds. Now, he works with robotics in aged and palliative care, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and cloud computing. His book, The Human’s Guide to the Future (Pan Macmillan), is out at the end of 2020.

“Looking to the future all the time is not always nice, but it becomes a responsibility,” he says.“We’re at the fastest rate of change we’ve ever seen, so I like to explore what’s coming next so I can have educated conversations with people and not spread fear.”

What does the future hold? “Artificial intelligence could be the most powerful technology we’ve ever created,” he says. “Obviously, there’s a lot of fear around it. Some of the tech has gone way beyond what a human can do, but it’s not sentient. If we utilise it in a good way, we’ll get a greater understanding of how to live in harmony with our world. Technology has the power to extend lives, but we have to look at the earth as well. It has to be a holistic approach.

“Believing in the next generation is very important.They’ve got the tools; now we have to drive them and let them harness their imaginations and creativity,” he continues.“Let’s think big. Let’s think about the next steps in evolution for humanity and how we drive forward a world we want to live in instead of letting it all crumble in fear.”

This story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine. Photography: Tim Ashton.