Fickle finger of farce

I had a digital mishap this week. On Monday morning at 11 am I plunged into Roselands outdoor pool without remembering to take a ring off my right ring finger. In the chilly water it immediately started wobbling about and threatening to descend to the floor of the pool. Surrounded by approximately 700 primary school kids either learning to swim or consuming their morning tea on the bleachers, I decided not to risk putting it on the edge of the pool and quickly transferred it to my middle (or 'rude' as the kiddies are wont to say) finger. I did my aqua class with the usual verve, grace and energy and thought nothing more about jewellery, except for quickly reinstating my earrings and necklace, before meeting my spouse for lunch in the ambiance-drenched Roselands' food court.

Fast forward to that evening. Oh dear, the ring will not budge. Oh dearie dear, it is stuck. Perhaps a night's sleep will relax its hold. Faster forward to the following morning, the ring is well and truly a fixture below my bulging knuckle. Any amount of baby oil, handcream, sorbolene, soap, cooking oil, Vaseline will not work it loose. Maybe the icy airconditioning at work will deflate the offending swollen digit?

Faster forwarder to that evening, what an attractive indigo colour the middle finger of my right hand has become. Soaking it in iced water does not help loosen the ring or reduce the swelling. Emergency department of Canterbury Hospital here we come...

Main entrance of Canterbury Hospital, Emergency is just to the right.

I was lucky, triage was over in a trice and a lovely African doctor who called me 'my dear' in tones of plushest velvet was attending to me. Off he went to get the ring cutter leaving me time to take in the atmosphere of the treatment room with its wealth of useful drugs, dressings, equipment and reference material, overflowing bins and chocked open fire door.


Reference books in the treatment room. What I thought was 'The Egg Made Easy' is probably 'The ECG Made Easy' - surely a good read either way.

 

Sign says 'Smoke Door - Do Not Keep Open' - the sort of OHS compliance that instills absolute confidence!

Turns out that this initial speediness produced an undue confidence that I would be home in under an hour, or two hours, or yet two and a half. My ebony friend had a fruitless search for the ring cutter. Someone who didn't work there any more had put it somewhere. You know how that happens... My spouse checked out 2 local medical centres - no, neither had a ring cutter. I returned to the waiting room to be distracted from the final pages of Stephen Fry's memoirs by more combinations of leggings, thongs and Supre T-shirts than I realised were possible and examples of maternal behaviour that made the ethical conundrum at the centre of The Slap seem entirely redundant!

I was recalled and Nathan* the senior nurse practitioner took over my case. For the third time I outlined how the ring had come to be stuck. Nathan thought we should not delay in finding another hospital whose emergency department had, and could locate, a ring cutter. He got on the line to St Bodolph's*, got cut off while being transferred to his opposite number there, then asked to be reconnected and finally got to talk to Liz*. Liz is apparently a sarcastic bitch! I had ascertained that from hearing one side of the conversation, but Nathan confirmed it, then quickly apologised for his lack of professionalism, after he hung up. We had a hearty laugh.

Nathan did not think that removing a ring from the finger of a 55 year old woman was a particularly appropriate use of the Fire Service's resources but what choice was he left with? Dialling triple 'O' seemed like overkill. We went to Nathan's office and googled the number for Campsie Fire Station. Nathan got their voicemail. I was glad I wasn't alight.

Nathan recounted an anecdote from his wife's working week. She fills a similar role to him at another hospital. Apparently a patient who breathes using a mask and an oxygen tank snuck out for a cigarette, lit a match and virtually self immolated. His face pretty much melted. What my son would call 'natural selection in action'. We had another hearty laugh.

Nathan said he would give finding the cutter one more try and I was left to take in the atmosphere of his office with its wealth of reference materials, safe practice charts and books, including a human anatomy colouring book which, if completed authentically, would employ a monotonous four colours (so no need for the boxed set of 72 Derwents that was the pride of my childhood for the sons and daughters of medical staff!)


I felt fraudulent not to require any of the 5 Ps but I will definitely try to remember them.

Hallelujah! Nathan checked the plaster room on spec and there was the ring cutter. Some people do not have the ability to look for things properly he said. As the matriarch of my household I could not but agree. I told him he was a hero, a marvel, a wonder, even before he set to work. Approximately ten minutes later we were returning to our car the severed ring in the side pocket of my handbag. My husband thinks he can smooth off the ends and I will still be able to wear it but I am a bit out of love with it at present!

My finger post ring removal (and a lovely view of our loo) imprint of the ring is visible

Well the drama is over and my finger is almost back to normal. Perhaps I am an alarmist. I start a weight loss program the second week in January and no doubt the ring would have fallen off if I just waited until February.

*Not their real names.

Choosing My Religion

The ABC program The Collectors has finished, at least for this year, perhaps for good. I guess there are only so many collections and collectors in the country they can showcase.  The penultimate edition of the program was given over to a tour of MONA, Tasmania's privately owned Museum of Old and New Art. That's the museum I had some difficulty navigating back in June.  The TV coverage made me realise that I had seen only about a fifth of its collection and whetted my appetite to return. It also convinced me I need to practise using iPhone technology a bit before I do.

Gordon Brown interviewed MONA's founder, David Walsh and asked him the 64 thousand dollar (considerably more in his case) question: 'why do people collect?'  His answer was a bit of a revelation to me. He said that surrounding ourselves with objects we invest with significance is a religious act.  I thought of Randolph Hearst's San Simeon,  Philip Adams's Egyptian artefacts, I thought of  the 50s fetishists, the tin toy tragics, the cricket cards of yesteryear collectors and I thought of my own preoccupation in recent years with finding objects that relate to my UK childhood - Sylvac figurines,  postcards of  holiday locations, pieces of Spanish Garden dinnerware that match my first 'grown up' cup and saucer.

I don't know whether Walsh's theory fits every kind of collection/collector, but it certainly has resonance for me. I can see the relationship between what I have been collecting, when I began collecting it and how that has fitted with my journey of identity and belonging.

 Above: 1970s Poole pottery with stylised Alphonse Mucha design - the height of pop art decorative kitsch. I found a  vase  in a bric-a-brac shop in Newtown some 30 years ago and now have 6 pieces.

In the 70s objects, cards, posters, books & clothing featuring the designs of Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham held an overwhelming attraction for me. I had posters of their art on my bedroom wall and even stole a couple of plastic brooches with Mucha's art nouveau maidens on them from Coles. I had no money and  kidded myself that because I knew the work featured I had some sort of entitlement. The slightly overwrought decorativeness of Mucha and the tendency to the grotesque of Rackham and Beardsley  must have put me in touch with a bit of old world decadence sadly missing in the world of tie dye T-shirts and lurid panel van art that was the Sutherland Shire. The day my Sussans Aubrey Beardsley design skirt shrank at the laundrette will forever stand as the end of an era for me.

Above: Japanese Marutomoware with Kookaburra & Gumnut design - vintage Australiana from the 1930 - 50s. Again I started collecting when these were considered junk, they are now highly collectible.

 In the 80s when we started our life as a couple and had our little gallery in Newtown all was gum leaves and native animals and appropriated Aboriginal imagery. My wedding ring is two gum leaves entwined.  I started buying pottery with eucalyptus and kookaburra motifs, I tried my hand at screen printing, my designs either pinched from indigenous culture or heavily influenced by Margaret Preston woodcuts. I was embracing the Australian side of my identity.

 Above: Richard Clements hand blown perfume bottles, these are the Powerhouse's, not mine, timelessly beautiful.

As I seldom discard objets d'art and pictures from previous eras, by the 1990s our environment was becoming pretty eclectic. Framed prints of Lautrec, Cezanne and Klimt adorned our walls and still do. We have also acquired a few original etchings.  William Morris fabrics covered our lounge suite and windows until they wore out and our budget didn't keep pace with Liberty's rising prices. Working at Craft Australia for 8 years I discovered the glass of Richard Clements and Setsuko Ogishi, the textiles of Barbara Rogers and Vivien Haley and the ceramic decoration of Stephen Bower and Jana Ferris. Some modest representation of these artists' work joined our burgeoning collection!

Above:  William Morris textiles, not one design is less than gorgeous. Our first sofa and armchairs were covered in Agapanthus.

 Above: Sylvac bunnies. I remember that my great grandmother had these on her sideboard and television set in the 1950s. Later a collector cheated her out of them for a few pounds.

Unlike most of the collectors featured on The Collectors my focus ranges widely.  I haven't even touched on owls which I have collected on and off since I was a teenager or on my passion for virtually anything connected with Alice In Wonderland. When I arrived in Australia from Britain in the late 1960s I put all my childhood postcards into 3 albums which I still have. They comprise chocolate boxy animal photos, Molly Brett woodland scenes, cutesy images by Mabel Lucie Attwell (and her imitators) and traditional souvenir views.  I still buy and send postcards when I am on holiday or in those shops you need to pass through at the end of art gallery exhibitions, but it only recently occurred to me that I could look online for postcards of my childhood haunts. Of course they exist and now I've bought 5!

In fact the focus of my collecting over the past few years has been making concrete and communicable my childhood memories. Many of the treasured things that didn't make their way out here with the family or which were lost in the mists of time even before we made the trip can and have been restored to me through eBay. Bugger the holy grail,  replacing my Midwinter cup and saucer was a transcendental experience for me!

Midwinter's Spanish Garden design. The shapes were designed by the Marquis of Queensbury , not the one who brought down Oscar Wilde, his grandson, and pattern is by Jessie Tait. Mum bought the cup and suacer to be exclusively for my use in about 1967.

You 'avin a laugh?

I've probably expressed my affection for British telly from the 60's & 70s more than once in my blog. At a recent press conference, John Cleese, in Sydney for the Just For Laughs festival (which I sadly missed because of study, disorganisation and poverty, though not necessarily in that order) damned the current state of British television as a sharp decline from its status as the 'least worse television in the world between to the 50s and the 90s'.

The UK TV of my childhood certainly provided a nourishing diet. I cut my comedy appreciating teeth on The Frost Report, The Worker, At Last the 1948 Show, The Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son. I was also, much to my mother's horror, a stalwart fan of the Carry On series of films. I must have seen them on telly as I can't imagine being taken to the cinema to see such coarse, crass entertainment unless my maternal grandmother became my enabler for this 'ever so common' form of entertainment as she did for seaside amusement parks and panto.

Somehow I recently became aware that the BBC had produced a series of tributes to the stars of this era, Legends of Comedy, and quickly adapted my online buying skills, usually dedicated to clothes and china, to tracking down the DVDs. The search became particularly tantalising when I discovered that its highest rating dramatisation, The Curse of Steptoe, had been withdrawn from sale because of a successful defamation action by the family of Harry H. Corbett's second wife.

Well Amazon came through for me, at least I found second hand copies of the DVDs on their site, but then there was some palaver about not being prepared to ship them to Oz. The tyranny of distance had not impressed itself so strongly upon me since 1969 when we arrived and it took 2 -3 weeks to receive an aerogramme and you couldn't buy Callard & Bowsers butterscotch or Branston Pickle for love or money.

The long suffering Harold Steptoe, Harry H. Corbett with a brindle pup that
looks uncommonly like our Stella.

Kind friends in the UK took delivery of the parcel and re-directed it to me here so I have now watched 'Hattie', a biopic of Hattie Jacques starring Gavin and Stacey's/Little Britain's Ruth Jones, 'Rather You Than Me', featuring David Walliams as Frankie Howerd and 'The Curse of Steptoe' with its inspired casting of Jason Isaacs as Harry H. Corbett and Phil Davis as Wilfrid Brambell. This review from The Guardian captures its tragic magic better than I could. If I have one tiny qualm it is that their lives look so unrelentingly miserable. They must have had one or two moments of fun being in the best written and acted comedy of the day and earning all that money. Maybe not, they certainly both seemed to have been lugging huge, mortifying albatrosses around with them!

The real Hattie Jacques and the divine Ruth Jones who recreates her with stunning aplomb in 'Hattie'.

Less depressing and a must-see is 'Hattie'. Behind the smirkiness and stereotypes of her Carry On roles Hattie was one classy, sensual broad who had the bittersweet fortune to fall passionately in love/lust with her driver (played by the delectable Aidan Turner from 'Being Human') while still in an affectionate but lacklustre marriage to John Le Mesurier. Ruth Jones strikes just the right note - mixing the excitement of newly realised sexuality with a thoroughly kind and admirable desire to harm no-one and see that everyone is looked after. Too tall an order of course. Your heart breaks for her and Le Mesurier trying to be civilised while living in the most unorthodox of domestic situations.

All the performances are great and the recreation of scenes from Carry On Cabbie, with a subtle commentary on the appalling limitations placed on roles for women, be they 'lookers' or matrons, work beautifully!

Must track down Eric and Ernie next.

ROFL (well, chuckle with) Roiphe

Just finished reading Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements - Seven Portraits of Married Life 1910-39. I can honestly say I romped through this book, my interest in what made these people and their relationships tick never flagged. Amongst the unions caught in Roiphe's amber are Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, Jane, H.G. Wells & Rebecca West and Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge & Evgenia Souline. All her studies reveal exceptional, creative early 20thC minds consciously reshaping or replacing the institution of marriage. H.G. Wells was as much the charming complete bastard I had been led to believe, Radclyffe Hall was one controlling, tory mother f*cker and Vanessa Bell was a surprisingly coy boheme. The relationships that most challenged my received knowledge were those Vera Brittain had with her brother Edward, fiance Roland Leighton, husband George Catlin and long time companion Winifred Holtby.


My understanding of Vera Brittain's suffering in love, emerging pacifism and feminist pioneering came straight from the 1979 BBC television dramatisation of her book Testament of Youth in which the delightful Cheryl Campbell created her as the most disarming of heroines. While there was lots to like and admire about the real life Vera Brittain, Roiphe, as she does with all the personalities examined in this book, paints a thoughtful, psychologically credible and drily amusing portrait of a complex human being. It is by no means always flattering but we certainly glimpse the myth making, compromises and to some extent, the self obsession, that can go into becoming a literary and political icon.

I thoroughly recommend Roiphe's book to anyone fascinated by the Edwardian era and the emergence of modernism in British society. You will enjoy hobnobbing with DH Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, discovering their noble and nastier traits and maybe Roiphe's dry humour will make you ROFL or at least enjoy a wry inner chuckle.

Here is a bit of light verse I dashed off after reading Roiphe's portrayal of Vera Brittain:

In youth Vera Brittain was terribly smitten

With brooding, bright Roland who died in the war

From his death, her brother’s and (implied) many others

She created catharsis

In her Testaments - one, two, three and four

(Last unfinished)

Passion less rattling she found with George Catlin

But privately thought him a great bloody bore

A new minted text she preferred much to sex

And domestication she came to abhor

Spared it thanks to Winifred Holtby

Vera’s fuelled tragic jollity

Gave her a persona the UK could adore

Freed from love’s dreary fetters, this left lady of letters

While a true self made woman, slightly chills at the core!

A Tree Grows in Fairfield

I've been to Fairfield three times this year. I think I had previously been to Fairfield only twice in my life. Once in the 70s, when I was about 13, my siblings and I were taken to Fairfield to meet my Auntie Elva and Uncle Arthur, and John, the only one of their four boys who still lived at home. My main recollection of that visit was that they had a sulphur crested cockatoo that shrieked 'Arrr... thur' in perfect imitation of my aunt! Then, in 1990, I went to Fairfield Library for the launch by the Hon Gough Whitlam of my mother's Fairfield - a Pictorial History. That she wrote a history of this south western Sydney suburb suggests some connection or relationship with the area, but in fact she just happened to be the freelance writer commissioned to write the book.

Mum's book published in 1990 for Fairfield's centenary and dedicated to the memory of my brother Nicky.

Facebook is the reason I've started visiting Fairfield more often now. Through Facebook I have re-connected with a branch of my family I hardly knew. So now I go to Fairfield to see my elderly Uncle Arthur in his nursing home and recently I went to see him with his youngest son, my cousin John. This is the same cousin John who was at home being an introverted teenage boy strumming his guitar while the cocky summoned his Dad so melodically back in the 70s. He now lives in Alice Springs. When he was last in Sydney we went together to see Arthur and to find a tree! In one of life's peculiar but abundant coincidences I had given John Mum's book to look at and amongst the memory jogging images he encountered therein was one of an enormous oak tree in Fairfield called Bland's Oak.

It turns out that back in the 60s when I was rambling about in the fields and woods behind our house in the Essex village of West Horndon, climbing the odd diminutive tree and occasionally falling in streams (subject for another posting), my four male cousins in NSW were hooning around the streets of Fairfield and climbing Bland's Oak. This tree is ENORMOUS, and it is enormous because it is really old. Not Californian redwood really old, but colonial-remnant-planting-on-previously-clear-felled-land old! It was planted, probably from seed, in about 1850 on the estate of prominent Sydney doctor and politician William Bland ( 1789 - 1868).

A West Horndon field and bit of vegetation.

To quote Brenda Pittard in Fairfield - a Pictorial History:

Mark Lodge was built by Captain John Horsley in 1814... and stood on the site now occupied by Fairfield Hospital...William Bland bought Mark Lodge from Horsley to use as his country estate... (On his death) his estate was broken up and by the 1930s all that remained of the magnificent property that had once been Mark Lodge was the oak tree that Bland had planted. In 1930 during a violent storm the tree's trunk was split because of the enormous weight of the wet leaves. Fortunately the knowledge and careful attention of a tree expert saved the tree though now supported by metal bands and frames.

And so it still stands, heritage listed and protected, propped up by iron struts on Bland Street, Carramar in a reserve beside Prospect Creek and on the site of Mark Lodge, called Oakdene Park. Despite being split asunder it is still a sprawling giant approx 13 metres in height and 30 metres in spread.

Bland's Oak

The official heritage listing that can be viewed on Fairfield Council's website (click on link under photo) notes that this is not the common deciduous British oak tree but a rarer species, Quercus Virginiana, that may have been a the gift of one of Bland's botanically minded friends such as William Wentworth. Interestingly, to again quote Mum, '(this) evergreen oak is found mainly in southern and central England'. And so, the inter connectedness of things continues...

Cousin John up Bland's Oak, 2011.

I must be into a life (with a foppush bottom)

Thinking of making this my new blog ID (from the ENGRISH site)

Thank god we got "The Kennedys"

Barry Pepper & Greg Kinnear as two charismatic, over achieving, highly sexed Irish boys watch 'Leave It To Beaver' to get a few tips.

So, Sydney finally got to see 'The Kennedys' (Sunday nights 29 May, 5 & 12, June). There are two versions of the story behind its delayed screening. Both acknowledge that the US/Canadian History Channel commissioned the series, filmed over two years, at a cost of $25 million US, but abruptly dropped it in January of this year with the statement: "this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand", The first story says they responded to pressure from Kennedy associates and admirers to walk away from the series. The other version is the same except that the reason given by its proponents for the History Channel abandoning their project is that they realised the series was 'completely f***ing terrible' and that the Reelz Channel who eventaully aired it did so because 'they didn’t care that it is completely f***ing terrible' (source: Best Week Ever TV).

Casting doubt on the first explanation is the fact that the series contains nothing that hasn't been public knowledge for aeons i.e. Joe Kennedy was anti semitic and not above rigging a ballot or two, Rose Kennedy was a manipulative and controlling fanatical Catholic, JFK had a bad back yet consistently put it about a bit (well, a lot), Bobby was uber fertile and unflinching, and, in cleaning up one of his big bro's messes, pretty tough on Marilyn Monroe... None this is exactly bombshell material, but perhaps still heresy for canonising Cameloteers.

The charge that the series is simply bad TV centres both on the characterisation and on the dialogue, lampooned as clunky, melodramatic and pregnant with 'prophecy'. This seems a little harsh. 'The Kennedys' isn't a documentary and let's face it no aspect of the actual story of the dynasty, the Rat Pack, the Mob, Cuba, the USSR, the civil rights movement, Dr Feelgood's magical injections, J. Edgar Hoover, the paparazzi etc and of course, the shocking assassinations, themselves is easy to downplay. I expected a certain chilling profundity of tone for these BIG themes and subjects and that's what I got. And what if some of the writing and the portrayals are a bit self conscious? Setting out to capture iconic figures and moments it would be hard to be otherwise. However perhaps that is easier to feel that way when I come to the series as an Australian via the UK and was 6 years old when JFK was assassinated. I wonder if I would be so ready to suspend disbelief if the story were part of my national heritage, perhaps a dramatisation of The Dismissal with say, Garry MacDonald as one of the reporters on the steps of Parliament House. Hey, wait a moment... .


Basically, like US critic Linda Stasi in the New York Post I experienced the series as 'one of the best, most riveting, historically accurate dramas about a time and place in American history that has ever been done for TV'. And as well as being riveting historical drama, the series was a wonderful showcase for some fine character acting from Diana Hardcastle, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Kristin Booth and, most of all, the wonderful Tom Wilkinson. Katie Holmes was even surprisingly adequate as Jackie but I wouldn't put her in their class.

Mean cartoon from US satirical TV Review Publication Best Week Ever TV).

So, thumbs up for 'The Kennedys'. Damn fine apple pie in its own right and definitely superior to its main competition on those Sunday evenings, that tedious re-evocation of 'Upstairs Downstairs', 'Downton Abbey'.

M'lud experiences a twinge of angst or dyspepsia when a telegram tells him that The Titanic has sunk, the domestics want a living wage and he will need to install a safari park to meet death duties.

L'IL OLE MO(A)NA ME

Is it the best of museums, is it the worst of museums? It is certainly the quirkiest of museums!

I visited Hobart's new and much lauded MONA (Museum of Old & New Art) on Monday. Actually I visited it on Sunday, but that isn't as alliterative. Mid long weekend, with an extra injection of tourists because of the volcanic ash cloud, we should have expected queues. What we didn't expect was that they would be longer at the coffee shop than for admission! Just an aside on the cafe industry in Hobart, it is best to phone ahead if there are more than 4 of you. Large numbers of paying customers upset the staff. They make this clear by being disdainful or agitated or both.

Any way, we posted two of our outrageously huge group of 7 in the entry queue and went to order takeaway coffee. In the next 20 minutes our advance party twice relinquished the opportunity to enter MONA to stand in the brisk breeze awaiting their cappuccinos.

MONA - popular!

Visitors are admitted in lots of 14 so again, when we reached the head of the queue, we and our scouts stood back until we could proceed en masse. Inside we were given an orientation talk by one of MONA's youthful staff to the effect that there is no signage in the museum, you use a touch screen MP3 player and headset to locate yourself and access information about the exhibits. You relinquish these when you leave so forgive the lack of any identifying details about the art and artists in this post*.

I have been able to find little online about the building, its site or history but a security guard told us that a European immigrant planted a vineyard on the land (at Berriedale, beside the Derwent) some time in the 20thC, that in the 1980s a house designed by the 'architect of the National Gallery of Victoria' (guess that could be Roy Grounds, Mario Bellini or Peter Davidson & Donald Bates) was built and that MONA's impressive central chimney/spiral staircase structure is part of the original house. At some point all that became the property of enigmatic billionaire David Walsh who has excavated around and under the house to create his subterranean 'anti-museum' or 'subversive adult Disneyland'!

Crikey's coverage of MONA's opening in January 2011 emphasised that the museum echoes Walsh's Darwinianism and belief in life's essential randomness. We all experience, but generally fail to confront, at least in a public gallery, just a few constants i.e. that 'we seek sex, we defecate and we all die'. MONA, with its mixed media, un-labelled, un-chronological exhibits that include Egyptian mummies, taxidermied and skeletal animal remains and a simulated giant human digestive tract certainly make these shared facts inescapable.

Descending 3 floors from the ground level entry to the basement, where it is suggested you begin your tour, juggling your MP3 player and headphones (and in my case your spectacles as well) you notice two more beverage/food outlets whose existence causes you, appropriately enough, to begin an acknowledgement of randomness that will continue for hours to come.

MONA is almost totally underground. That means that there is no natural light. It has an eccentric floor plan and a feeling of being outside time, disorientation sets in quickly. This arguably puts you in the right frame of mind one of the first installations you encounter, a version of Roselands' raindrop fountain propelled into the nihilistic 21stC with the words like "mafia", "Jesse James" and "American Idol" forming in its cascades.

Nearby, between heavy burgundy velvet curtains, is a stuffed raven suspended over a real or reproduction 18thC cabinet containing an urn of human ashes - my MP3 player said human hair was also involved but I couldn't spot any unless it was of a Rapunzel-like strength and supporting the raven.

Then I was mesmerised by a video depicting a young woman undergoing various ophthalmic, surgical, immersive and electronic procedures in a kind of laboratory/conservatory/natural history museum setting - later another woman dismembered a piano and another showed great flexibility on a trapeze. The imagery recalled Paul Delvaux and Louis Bunuel. I would like to have made a note of whose work I was viewing and to record a reaction a little more complex than 'LOVE'/'HATE' but my full hands, the limitations of the MP3's programming and, I'm sure, Mr Walsh's intentions, made that impossible.

The diversity and unorthodox juxtaposition of works I saw over the next 2 hours proved both exhilarating and frustrating. The no signage policy meant I completely missed a Brett Whiteley painting in one of the only parts of the gallery with natural light. I stumbled upon a Russian video triptych quoting mannerist paintings and delivering a truly poignant and chilling Armageddon message. I loved that (and could tick 'LOVE' in all conscience) and also a work I have since heard is called 'Cunts and Other Conversations' which comprised casts of over 100 sets of female genitals. I didn't ever find the much publicised excreting digestive tract or any animal carcasses which form exciting parts of the MONA collection.

MONA is must see. It is very probably unique; there are some amazing exhibits with promises of additions and changes to come. I'm over 50 and do not consider myself a complete luddite. I did however struggle with the touch screen MP3 player as I hadn't used one before and found the earphones competed with the MP3's lanyard about my neck. I only remembered to consult the floor plan when I found a stray copy on the floor towards the end of my visit. I know I was being conceptually challenged and asked to experience art in a fresh way without curatorial interpretation but I can't discard my existing art knowledge and wanted to make connections. I would also rather put my energy into experiencing the art itself rather than into trying to operate the technology. I kept thinking of the Powerhouse where technology is used more sparingly and is much more interactive and user friendly. I don't know what they do for people with actual disabilities but the glasses on, glasses off thing I had to do to find out where I was and what I was looking at was an effing pain.

You can't see the collection in one day nor is it desirable to, but I do feel a bit as if I have only rehearsed for my visit and now need to have the real experience. As our departure from Tassie was not delayed by the ash cloud that opportunity won't come for some time.

Really keen to hear what others who've visited MONA have to say.

*Post script - I am informed I could have saved my tour and tracked it later. Oh, well, I'll know for next time.

Everything more is more again in Dusseldorf!

It's Eurovision time again. We just watched the second night's broadcast, billed as the semi finals. The finals are on SBS 1 tomorrow night (15 May). Last year Eurovision was disappointingly bland but this year the excess and tenuous musicianship we have come to love were back in spades! Here is a run down of some of the acts that made the biggest impression.

There is always a strong soft porn aesthetic to the pop music business and Eurovision presents its own special version. Maja Keuc of Slovenia went the bondage/thigh high boot route with her costume for 'No One' (or 'No Win' as I prefer to think of it) and had a group of girl backing singers that look like a Supré window display come to life. One of these young ladies appears to be adjusting herself in the pic above.

Former (1998) Israeli winner transsexual Dana International seemed a strong contender when her song 'Ding Dong' was announced, standing as it does in a long line of silly Eurovision song titles: 'Boom Bang-a-Bang' (UK, 1969), 'A-Ba-Ni-Ba' (Israel, 1978), 'Bana Bana' (Turkey, 1989) and 'Bourn Badaborun' (Monaco, 1967). Perhaps on reflection though the choice of consonant may be ill advised. Any way the song, her performance and couture were so dull (see below) that they made one long for Fran Drescher's sense of style and vocal projection!

From Romania came Hotel FM with their clicky, clappy, catchy 'Change' a contender despite its un-Eurovision defeatist lyric 'I can't change the world alone'. We liked their Romanian pianist much more than their English lead singer so here (below) is the only picture I could find which shows he snacks healthily as well as vamping appealingly.



Almost all the songs we heard tonight were sung in English which I know is often contentious in the competing countries. But it matters little as most lyrics were incomprehensible any way. Thank goodness for SBS's Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang and their elucidating commentary.

Each song's title at least was generally left ringing in the ears. This was definitely so with the subtle 'I Love Belarus' (yes, Belarus's entry), Moldova's quirky 'So Lucky', Ireland's 'Lipstick' and Estonia's Rockerfeller Street. Rockerfeller Street was performed by 18 year old Getter Jaani (left), she is delightful, can really wear magenta and started her performance with a magic trick. The number's art direction was pretty cool using a graphic model cityscape, perhaps a bit too cool to be real Eurovision material - don't recall many lighting effects or pyrotechinics at all.

Irish entrant Jedward are twins John and Edward Grimes. They are very BOUNCY, suggesting Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon on acid. Their personal stylist clearly disdains gravity and has an open ended budget for hair spray. The way this hyperenergetic, Warholesque pair perform Lipstick is described quite accurately in Wikipedia as 'a dayglo wad of electroglammy bubblegum' (I'd love to credit that but Wikipedia didn't). They are a lot of fun and are through to the finals. Also high in the quirky stakes is Moldova's Zdob si Zdub with 'So Lucky' - their usual pub rock image altered by donning tall hats which the Eurovision website calls 'cosmic antennae' but looked more as if they came straight from the gnome section at the Garden Centre. However their ska influenced song and their unerring unicycling made them one of this year's more memorable acts!

While members of Zdob si Zdub were prepared, for their art's sake, to look as if home was Dingly Dell, we saw no costumes as grotesque as those of 2008's winner Finnish Heavy metal band Lordi's. Remember them? Sort of dinosuar bikers!

Pretty boy and barbie doll lead singers did abound however. Macedonia's Vlatko Ilievski is right out of a menswear catalogue but our focus readily wandered from his chiseled profile in disbelief to his stumbling Zorba-style backing dancers one of whom inserted an accordion solo seemingly randomly into the performance. More twins, female this time, from Slovakia teetered on 8 inch heels, the wind machine causing their golden tresses to play about their even more golden fake tanned shoulders and cleavages. Despite the fact that their song contained only 5 notes the girls managed to avoid all of them!

I could go on but I am spoilt for choice (and we only saw a fraction of the acts, go to http://www.eurovision.tv/ for the full catastrophe). There was the impressive lap of honour, guitar in hand and presumably still being strummed, done by one of the 3Js, boarding school pupils from the Netherlands who've formed a boy band. (Maybe some sort of Chariots of Fire homage?). There was Ukranian Mika Newton replete in angels wings, singing, appropriately enough, Angel, whilst projected behind her were images of pathos trickled from the hand of 'sand artist' Kseniia Simonovia. There was Musiqq from Latvia comprising a chubby boy (I think he is only 17) and an early Elvis Costello look alike - the ill fitting waistcoats there wore looked vaguely better on the Elvis clone. And did I glimpse the Swedish soubrette suffer a tiny wardrobe malfunction a la Janet Jackson towards the end of her act?

Definitely a return to form by the teeming mass of celebrity wannabes and pop chart hopefuls from the northern hemisphere. The electricity bill for special effects and online voting (or 'woting' as one of the Dusseldorf anchors referred to it) would take about 1,000 earth hours to offset and the ostentation of makeup and costuming on display means that none of us need ever feel overdressed again! And the winner is... who knows or cares? Eurovision has already delivered.

Jedward, like Ardal O'Hanlon on acid.

Stop Press: Ell/Nikki from Azerbaijan has won the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest with 221 points (pronounced 'pwants'). We didn't see this entry last night so just Googled the You Tube clip which begins with a lot of 'ooh, ooh' noises and a Golden retriever leaving the set. We know how the dog felt!

Ellis massively unreconstructed

Bob Ellis and I are in disagreement. I usually have a lot of time for the old grouch with his loverly libertarian values and his delicious turns of phrase. But Mr Ellis, Bob, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy and Hepburn-Tracey movies are not real life. They are not the appropriate paradigm for making a judgement about gender politics or ethics within the armed forces. They are in fact the very opposite of an analysis of these things in that they are creative products which deliberately treat some of the more fraught aspects of the human condition with humour and optimism.

Comments in your Drum article on the recent ADF Sex Scandal are really sloppy thinking. You seem to claim that because sexist behaviour has been a constant in society and the army, a female cadet who finds herself filmed in a private act of sex, who did not give her consent for that act to be broadcast and humiliatingly distributed and who is then further publicly embarrassed with an ill-timed unrelated disciplinary hearing should content herself with tearful phone call to Mum and then just get over it.

Perhaps it has escaped you, Bob, but we accord different levels of approbation to men and women when they are caught en flagrante. Whatever advances feminism may have made, a twenty something young woman stands to lose a whole lot more in terms of self respect, the respect of others, credibility, confidence, the ability to pursue her career (the list goes on) if she is at the centre of an event like this than do male footballers, cadets, entertainers and sundry 'larrikins'! It is not, to coin a cliche, a level playing field.

On this topic, your heart and mind are closed and your arguments are glib. Must try harder.

Growing middle-aged disgracefully?

On a day when I have made the words 'hornier' and 'jism' in 2 separate (online) Scrabble games I am wondering what my vocabulary reveals about my unconscious. My family still treasures the serendipitous juxtaposition of 'anal' and 'splurges' in one of our Scrabble games some 3 decades ago. Who doesn't enjoy the occasional smutty word in Scrabble? The thing is, I have been having erotic dreams too. Quite graphic. Almost every night. And I managed to offend my peers at book group this weekend by mentioning the (supposedly) African maternal practice of sucking the snot out of a baby's nostrils to aid grooming and assist the infant to breath easy.

Does my lack of inhibition challenge ideas of propriety? I ask (rhetorically).

I was a very proper child (in the UK) in the 60s. I wore gloves and went to Sunday school. I didn't say the word 'damn' until I was eleven. I was desperately looking for my school shoes and my total recall of the exact context in which I uttered this profanity is proof of my immediate sense of self reproach. Even at fifteen, circa 1971, I thought if any man saw a mole about 5 cm above my cleavage we would be duty bound to marry.

Then there was the 1980s when I became a vigilante for feminism and social re-engineering and completely failed to notice when I was being flirted with and missed a lot of other subtle human interaction that makes life a joy.

How have I evolved into a fairly forthright, even libertarian middle-aged woman? (Rhetorical again). Well obviously experience changes our perceptions and alters our thresholds. There has been quite a bit of water under the bridge since my pious girlhood: love, lust, birth, death, encounters with all manner of achievements and addictions, my own and others'. Stuff like that makes its mark, and not in a bad way (take note, Pontiff). I still define myself as someone who generally wishes the human race well and upholds its rights and dignity. However my recipe has changed. I now believe in harm minimisation and Buddhist style non attachment. That probably sounds as rigid and joyless as my 1980s doctrines. What I actually mean is I no longer think the perfection of society is possible or even desirable, humans can be both magnificent and frail, we can not change this by endless regulation and we can not project our own yearnings and ideals onto others and expect anything but bewilderment and disappointment.

That is probably why I didn't experience the royal wedding as fairytale made flesh and I am not cock-a-hoop that Osama Bin Laden has been killed in a slick US military operation.

I do like a larf though and as well as Princess Beatrice's hat, a concept aired in one of my Uni lectures has tickled my fancy this week. I got the giggles when I heard about an organisational theorist, Gabriele Lakomski, who looks to birds' flocking behaviour and termites' mound creation as evidence of 'epiphenomenon' i.e. the false appearance of led or directed behaviour that parallels what occurs in organistaions within human society. Now is it just me, or is even what goes on at City Rail or Maccas a bit more complicated than following a pheremone trail and trying not to bump into your peers? That one's rhetorical too.

Anyway time for repose. I wonder what's on the soft core porn channel tonight?

Below: naughty postcards another shame of my youth and delight of my later years

Above: Jo Brand - I love her to bits and think 'Getting On' is the epitome of grown up complex telly!

School's In

The last few months have been an education. Or more accurately, they have been an experiment in education. At some point late last year I got the notion that the abandoned/thwarted ambition of my teen years of teaching secondary English and Art needed to be rekindled. I made enquiries with the Arts/Social Sciences/Education faculties of numerous universities, applied to 4, got offered places by 3, rejected any distance/online program as inappropriate for learning to teach actual live adolescents and enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of NSW.


My first day was at the height of the late February humidity. At about 10 am I wedged my Magna in between 2 other cars in the only remaining space in St Peters in a narrow street outside a council works depot I never knew existed and walked to the bus stop. Despite an ice cold bus ride to Kensington the weather was so muggy my hair didn't dry all that day. Also, despite wearing my Dr Martens adjustable air cushioned sole sandals, I got blisters. I didn't get a chance to have coffee until after midday and when I did, it and the accompanying sandwich were 30% dearer than they are in Haymarket where I work. My daughter's school counsellor rang me on my way to afternoon lectures. I heard the words 'scaffolding' and 'focci' more times in 24 hours than I had heard them in the preceding 53 years. By 7 pm when my day concluded, I had severe misgivings about the choice I had made. I was a good 25 years older than even the oldest of my fellow students, and about 15 years older than most of my lecturers. None of my peers seemed to be trying to work while studying (except maybe as casual waiters). The lecture on adolescent cognition and identity completely replicated my discoveries as a parent and from reading Barbara Strauch's Why Are They So Weird? What's Really Going on in a Teenager's Brain. The compulsory 6 weeks of prac teaching would put the kybosh on plans for my husband's 60th and my sister's 50th! You get my drift.

That night I became convinced I had made a mistake. I had a sleepless night unlike any I had experienced for ages. I got up at 3 am to look on the UNSW's website to see what other courses I could do via the School of Education. By dawn I had a plan. I would see if I could transfer to the Masters of Educational Leadership - a course that described itself as suitable for someone working in the educational field in a school or 'other organisation'. To cut to the chase, I un-enrolled in all my learn to be a teacher subjects and am now 7 weeks into 'Evaluation of Educational Programs' and 'Leadership Theories & Practice'. In these classes I am only 20 years older than the oldest of my peers, only about 15 years older than one of my lecturers and only about 5 years older than the other. I have heard the words 'scaffolding' and 'focci' a mere once each, but do feel a little over exposed to words and concepts such as 'efficacy', 'triangulation', 'outputs' vs 'outcomes', 'rigour', 'robustness' and 'validity'. I can apply what I am learning to my work without too much of a stretch but am constantly struck by the gulf between the ideas of evaluation and leadership refined and pored over in academic discourse and the rough and ready practices of the state public sector. I find the level of detail you are required to absorb and regurgitate to prove you can do something to a university standard at odds with what my commonsense and my many years of experience tells me will work.

I have just handed in my first 2 assignments and am yet to find out how I went. (Thinks: hope my lecturers don't dicover my blog). I am enjoying exercising my brain and the extra time with my family and at the pool that part-time work affords me. I do a fraction of the reading set because it is distressingly serious and boring and I don't want to sit down for as many hours a week as work, lectures and doing ALL the reading would require. I am already rethinking whether I want to persevere with the Masters Ed at UNSW or to see if I can transfer to UTS's Master of Adult Ed in 2nd semester. It looks as if I may be terminally dilettantish and restless but I will have to design a logic model describing the sequences of my behaviour identifying expected short, medium and long term outputs and design an intervention to test whether these in fact contribute to a desired outcome if I am to expect to be published in any reputable journal. Thank god for me blog!

The Summer Knows...

Observations on Sydney summer 1 month and 4 days into 2011…

Weather: Does anyone actually like this stifling heat? Temperatures in Sydney have been up to 41 degrees and doing even the most rudimentary things is stressful, inelegant and exhausting. It is scandalous that ANY un-air-conditioned trains are scheduled at peak hour. The fact that we had one cooler day that coincided with Opera in the Domain is a miracle for which I am highly appreciative. Carmen was wonderful!

Contemplating starting uni in late February- if this heat persists - fills me with horror. Perhaps all tute rooms and lecture theatres are air-conditioned these days. They weren’t in the early 80s. Motivation to go to my aquarobics classes is NOT a problem.

Surely the climate change warnings are being proved frighteningly right? Extreme weather in the form of floods and a cyclone has hit Queensland. The citizenry are copping a beating but why is EVERYTHING reported on and mulled over to the enth degree? A guy at work told me his cousin was cleaning up his property in regional Qld after Yasi hit when a Channel 9 crew poked a microphone under his nose. He told them to ‘fuck off’. What an excellent response to the voyeuristic, prurient hacks! If only others weren't so set on their 5 minutes of fame.

Fashion: What is it with those pants some young people are wearing with the crotch at approximately knee level? They look like they are wearing a nappy that is long overdue for changing. The maxi dress has made a comeback and for the most part looks cool and comfortable however spaghetti straps are not for everyone. It turns out that 'budgie smugglers' have not been completely eradicated (blame Tony Abbott); they still seem to be the swimwear of choice for some over 5os men. Sad, sad, sad.

The heat interferes with one's grooming

Reading: What a joy to read David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice straight after Christmas! Every review I'd read said Sedaris makes you guffaw in public. They were so right. His account of working as an elf at Macys is hilarious. The day he and the other elven brethren realised 'satan' was an anagram of 'santa' and started urging the queuing customers to 'step this way to see satan' or reminded them to 'thank satan for the Baby Born he gave you last year' makes side splitting reading. I have just received his Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim from the US. Will try to defer opening it until I have finished the letters of the combined Mitford sisters which are a joy of another kind.

Socialising: At two gatherings I have been to my hosts have been gracious enough to train a fan on me out of doors. It was the only way I could cope with the heat. Sizzling one's steak and snags on a barbecue though is cruel and unusual punishment in 30 degrees plus! The cold collation comes into its own in summer. While lumps of protein have fried, tempers have flared. My book group has fractured. Characters have been analysed with little or no charity. Reproaches and ultimatums have been published online. It is all very wearying. In a heatwave where effort is required to do almost anything such bickering is a powerful disincentive to retain my membership. A few 5 Seeds ciders or a nice bottle of Screaming Pig or Sacred Stone with friends at the pub is however a very pleasant way to pass the time!

Telly: When it's been bad it's been very, very bad but when it is good it still gets me in. Enjoyment has been had with Robbie Coltrane in Murderland, everyone in Ashes to Ashes and with the return of Big Love. QI is almost always a hoot. Looking forward to the new Matt Lucas and David Walliams series Come Fly With Me.

This is blog lite. Hard to be profound when it is hot enough in here to boil a monkey's bum in here, your majesty!

Next post: surrogacy, cancer and conduct at work! Please follow.