Australians All Let Us Read Joyce

What's in a name? A public holiday by any name should be as sweet. However today, 'Australia Day', is one with which I have particular difficulty. My pommy origins and my anti-nationalist politics make the 'founding' of this nation by British colonialists a very uncomfortable reason to celebrate for me. I notice that there is an increasing inclusion of indigenous ceremony and story telling in the day's events but I know many, many Aboriginal people consider this day 'Invasion Day' or 'Sorry Day'. The legacy of dispossession, disease and despair Europeans have visited upon this country's original occupants is still having appalling impacts in 2010.


So if no celebratory activities were indulged in, how did I spend my day? Well the run up was fine. I am so enjoying Desirelines -the memoirs of Peter & Richard Wherret - which I am reading for our book group, that I read that for 2 hours in bed, until midnight last night. But when today dawned our kitchen renovations beckoned or at least my role as supporting actor to my husband's cutting & nailing of cladding did. We should be up to sarking and undercoating by now, but bugger me, if we didn't find an infestation of termites in our teenage son's bedroom and as a result spend about 6 hours completely reorganising and cleaning the room to make access to (and hopefully extermination of) the blighters possible.

Today in Sydney has been a soggy scorcher (if that isn't a contradiction in terms). Both very humid and with the sort of summer heat that fries vegetation and makes walking barefoot painful (for chubby northern hemisphere types at any rate). Very ungreenly, we had 2 air-conditioners running all day, but we all still quickly became irritable and sweaty and spraying anti termite gunge under the house almost killed the ageing pater familias.

I would like to say my new addiction to posting photos & comments and playing Scrabble on Facebook took a back seat, but whenever the heat and dust (our son had not vacuumed or let me vacuum in his room for months) became too bad I retreated to the PC for a fix. It was interesting to see via their postings that one niece is a champion of 'Don't change the Aussie flag' and the other joined me in 'Invasion Day' unease.

A second shower and letting the local Chinese restaurant provide dinner enabled a dog walk and some semblance of relaxation after 7 pm but all in all I would rather have been reading. Perhaps to satisfy my protestant work ethic it should be something more demanding than tales of the Wherret's evolving sexuality. Australians all let us read Joyce on 26 January? No wait that's got to wait until 16 June!

Pete 'n' Dud (not Shaun & Steve)

Publicity shot for Good Evening

I grew up with Not Only But Also. Like quite a few other audience members at Shaun Micallef & Stephen Curry's Good Evening, I could mouth the words of most of the sketches along with the performers. I thought they made a sound decision not to imitate Cook and Moore and indeed one of the most successful 'transpositions' was the Art Gallery 'bottoms follow you around the room' sketch which was quintessential 'funny, I thought funny' Pete 'n' Dud in its day and which Shaun and Stephen played as 'pretentious, moi?' Sydney queens to great effect.

However not all of Good Evening was that good. Reviewer Jason Blake in the SMH said it pretty well:

Originality and spontaneity are the lifeblood of live comedy, which might explain why it's hard to find a pulse in this amiable, handsomely staged homage to the wit of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

There was a certain clunky, strained quality about much of the program which I think stemmed from the problems inherent in resurrecting the 1960s material of other artists. Moore's Little Miss Britten and '..and the Same to You' Beethoven parodies felt particularly dated. Also, however good a singer and pianist Mark Jones is, he is not Dagenham Dud and it would have behoved Micallef & Curry to use far less of Moore's musical material! The Bedazzled number was particularly overlong and tedious.

A decided success was One Leg Too Few (in which a 'unidexter' auditions for the role of Tarzan) which had already proved its adaptability by having been revived by other comedians in one of the Policemen's Ball fundraiser shows. The interview scenarios (long live Cook's pompous creations of all stripes, especially Sir Arthur Streeb Greebling) and the more situational/physical cabbie sketch also worked very well.

The 'real' Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

I'm glad we went because I am delighted that my kids have seen one* of their comic heroes perform the work of two of mine (and because I caught my 14 year old daughter chatting to Andrew Denton in the foyer praising Hungry Beast - a very proud parental moment for me!) Overall though I think spontaneity and wit are at the very heart of Micallef's comic talent and he is best when he can riff and quip without too many constraints (as he does in Talkin' 'bout Your Generation), or when he has creative control of the whole vehicle (as with the delicious Newstopia). His New Year's Eve special fell quite flat for similar reasons, the guests were just not in his own Dadaist realm.

I am looking forward to Shaun Micallef's future projects - the more autonomous the better I suspect. I will satisfy my appetite for classic Pete 'n' Dud with my 2 vinyl LPs and a CD of the obscene Derek & Clive while occasional viewing of the delightful Not Only But Always teleplay will indulge my need to revere and sentimentalise my childhood memories of this outstandingly clever pair!

* this is not to underrate Stephen Curry whom we had only seen before in the Graham Kennedy biopic. He acquitted himself brilliantly in that and was a complete match for Shaun in Good Evening!

Southern Exposure

We exposed the kids to Melbourne last week and got reacquainted with the city ourselves. I had very idealised memories from a winter visit to the city when I was a fine arts student in the 80s. The trip was organised by Sydney Uni where I was studying Victorian (the era not the city) art and architecture. We looked at the National Gallery of Victoria collection as well as visiting St Pat's and other C19th buildings. In keeping with the rest of my university days, I was quarantined from the authentic student experience. I was already in my present relationship and was also travelling with a friend who worked at the Hilton and managed to get us cut price rooms there. The whole deal - meals, shopping, sight seeing etc - was pretty swanky. We had a silver service dinner in the Melbourne Hilton's most exclusive restaurant. I got my first and only genuine Italian leather handbag. We went on a guided tour of the flamboyant Princess Theatre and heard about the ghost. We came back via Eaglemont, where the Heidelberg artists had made camp. I was besotted with the whole Victorian excursion.

20 years on I was still anticipating the sense of glamour and sophistication I felt then. (I have visited a couple of times since but for very brief periods only). In the mean time our kids had come to equate Melbourne with an intellectual vibrancy and arty edginess they thought Sydney lacked. We all thought the shopping would be good.

Tram on Bourke Street - view from the Quest apartments where we stayed.

Here is a little summary of the high and low lights of our visit:

• Laneways and arcades - Sydney has nothing like them - they're fantastic, full of original shopfronts and intriguing merchandise, often with real cobbles.
• Clothes and shoe shopping - we were there for the January sales which helped but Myer had a great range of stuff for the 'fuller figure' and I discovered Mountfords which stocks my fave Joseph Seibel shoes, on my last day there. My daughter's favourite boutique Quick Brown Fox has two branches and we spent considerable time there.
• Suzuki night markets - vibrant chaotic, combines Eveleigh craft markets with Paddington markets with performance with food and new age. A must see.
  
• Toilets (public & in retail outlets) a disgrace, filthy and in disrepair, smelt and seldom had soap and often even lacked toilet paper!
• Tram services - a cypher, thank goodness I met up with an old work friend who gave me some tips.
• Food and beverage prices - pretty good.
• Young & Jackson Hotel. Uncrowded and pleasant on a Thursday evening. Saw the famous 'Chloe' again. Very limited wine list.
• Fitzroy Gardens - good cafe, overpriced admission to Cook's Cottage, nice conservatory, signage on statuary and fountains illegible and/or uninformative.
• New wing of the state gallery, known as the National Gallery of Victoria, a bit like a parody of the actual National Gallery in layout but spacious and well lit with an excellent Indigenous collection.
  
• The little penguins on Phillip Island. Touted as award winning eco-tourism. The food and facilities commercial and tawdry, the presence of over 500 Girl Guides the night we visited unfortunate. The little penguins themselves - priceless!
  

I was plagued by a respiratory virus that wouldn't quit while we were away so I am quite proud of myself that I did as much as I did. St Kilda and Heide and going to a comedy venue will have to wait until next time. Came back via Canberra and saw the Musee d'Orsay collection (which we had also seen before, in situ in Paris, in the 80s) and the new National Portait Gallery and thoroughly enjoyed both.

Promise I'll write about Shaun Micallef's 'Good Evening' soon...