For Ramesh Ayyar and Rod McNicol, time flies by 32 years

In 1982 Ramesh Ayyar was a struggling actor living above a Fitzroy venue called the Marijuana House. And now?

TWAM 22 August 2015

Fitzroy 3065

Ramesh Ayyar was having the time of his life in 1982. After three years at drama college he’d dived headlong into the intoxicating world of Melbourne’s alternative arts scene, wide-eyed and up for anything. He performed at the Last Laugh and the Flying Trapeze, started a synthpunk band called Informatics, devoured books by Camus and Sartre and steeped himself in the ethos of Joseph Beuys, the former Luftwaffe pilot who covered himself in honey and gold leaf and whispered to a dead hare in the name of performance art. Fitzroy was the place to be — a “low rent, high life” milieu of brothels, sweatshops and artists — and Ayyar was living in the thick of it, paying $15 a week rent for a six-room unit above a venue called the Marijuana House. Fifteen bucks!

That’s Ayyar on the left, photographed at the time by Fitzroy artist Rod McNicol. And that’s Ayyar on the right, too, as he is now, shot by McNicol in the same studio. The pair hadn’t seen each other for 32 years until they crossed paths last year at the opening of one of McNicol’s exhibitions. The result was this remarkable diptych, a finalist in the 2015 Bowness Prize.

Ayyar works as an archivist at RMIT’s school of architecture and design these days. He hasn’t acted in years but he’s still playing with Informatics, writing and reading voraciously, and practising meditation — a link to his childhood in Kerala, India. He’s currently caring for a brother with motor neurone disease; a consolation for this sad task is his brother’s library of 10,000 books. “I just turned 60 and I’m really happy,” Ayyar says of his life. “I’ve done all the adventuring and the mischief; now a sort of calm has descended.” And his old stomping ground grew up and got all serious (and seriously expensive), so he lives in edgy, arty Brunswick now. “It’s the new Fitzroy,” he laughs.