Alice Writ Large

Reasons to be writing - Part 1

2012-01-06T22:28:00.000+11:00

I think I have bloggers' block or at least chronic lack of originality. The only ideas I've had have in the past couple of weeks have already been comprehensively covered by someone else. One, influenced by the unveiling of the newly cleaned Central Station clock tower, was to be about clocks on public buildings. David Marr wrote on this subject in his article Their Number's Up in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January particularly looking at stopped clocks and their effect on those who may rely on them.

The other was to be about the ludicrous way menstruation is treated by advertisers. However two highly enjoyable blogs I found while surfing the crimson topic on the net, Ayshfi and Southern Belle Feminist, already have good, comprehensive posts about menstruation - I recommend them. Gruen Planet (nee Transfer) has had lots of good stuff on absurd adverts for 'sanitary products', as tampons and pads are euphemistically known, and I'm sure will revisit the topic if only for some gorgeous Jane Caro eye rolling or withering looks to use in the promos.

I did find lots of great imagery and links to funny videos on the 'net, including, on YouTube, a clip from that wonderful episode of Red Dwarf when Kryten enjoins Kochanski to Have a Fantastic Period.

The 'angle' I had intended to take on the subject was the love/hate attitude society's have had, and still have, to this aspect of 'womanliness', assigning to menstruating women magical powers or judging them unclean and not fit to worship or take part in other social activities. What got me thinking about the subject this time was a friend posting on Facebook a link to a Sydney Morning Herald article Drag Queen Tampon Ad is 'Transphobic' about outrage at a Libra tampon commercial that contrasts the 'manufactured' femininity of a drag queen/ tranny with the 'real' article, a tampon wielding young woman! I suppose it turns penis envy on its head but I think we did that while ago, didn't we?

Of course menstruation does preoccupy most women quite regularly and ironically, contraception, while liberating us from serial pregnancies has condemned us to a lifetime of more periods than all our foresisters! The folklore and superstition around periods just goes on evolving, in India in some sects women wear a red neckerchief when they're having a period and in the 1990s western women were encouraged to wear all white outfits or swimsuits and frolic around a lot! At school in the 1970s an 'educational' booklet (published by Tampax I think) was distributed that told us (seriously) to avoid washing our hair when we were menstruating! Any way the fact I have now filled 3 paragraphs about how I'm not going to write about menstruation shows what an all but inexhaustible subject it is (to me at any rate).

All creative writing classes though, remind us to 'write what you know'. So maybe if I want to avoid being derivative or gazumped I should stick to writing about stuff that is unique to me and my world. In which case watch this space for:

My precocious acting brilliance as manifested in my accurate impressions of a cat and Cliff Richard at childhood birthday parties.
Visiting service centres on the M6 motorway in the 1960s and why I associate them with chicken manure.
Developments in Sydney suburban retail in the 1970s and 80s with a particular focus on commercial cake types available in Caringbah, Pru Acton and Pot-O-Gloss cosmetics and cheese shops run by Christians/sporting legends.
Footwear & underwear - the sensible vs fashionable dilemma - my own lived tragi-farce.
Why although Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso are acknowledged geniuses and creatively (including genetically) prolific I don't actually like very much of their work.
People I wish had been my father, or at least an uncle, including Eric Morecombe, Michael Gambon and Peter Sallis.
Where are they now? Ursula Andress, George Lazenby, Clive Robertson, Jimmy Carter and Muffin the Mule.
My own experiences of pareidolia* contrasted with those of Pooh and Christopher Robin and examples offered for sale on eBay.
My answer to Dr John Clarke's best seller, 'Working with Monsters' which is about psycopaths in organisations, 'Working with Saddos' a history of working with peculiar people in the public sector.
The collected doggerel verse and song parodies of my family over 5 decades including 'The Lagamorph School Song', 'The Lovely Dog/Schöner Hund Song' and 'The Essex Carol' (that sounds only a bit like the theme music from Softly, Softly') - they're really very good, truly!

*seeing faces in things

Fickle finger of farce

2011-12-01T21:20:00.002+11:00

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

2011-10-03T23:10:00.000+11:00

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?

2011-09-03T19:55:00.044+10:00

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

2011-08-03T14:59:00.024+10:00

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

2011-07-27T17:46:00.053+10:00

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)

2011-07-06T12:35:00.003+10:00

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

Thank god we got "The Kennedys"

2011-06-18T19:42:00.045+10:00

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

2011-06-15T12:41:00.045+10:00

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!

2011-05-14T21:53:00.055+10:00

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

2011-05-14T19:04:00.010+10:00

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?

2011-05-03T22:40:00.029+10:00

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

2011-04-13T19:40:00.048+10:00

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...

2011-02-04T21:01:00.012+11:00

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.

Not fade away

2010-12-30T06:01:00.045+11:00

The Death of St. Joseph, c. 1740, Piazzetta Giambattista. (St Joseph, Jesus's earthly dad, is the patron saint of peaceful death and of anti-communism)

What does it mean to 'make a good death'? Media reports state that Dame Joan Sutherland 'died peacefully in the early hours of (the) morning after suffering a long illness' and that she 'died at home with her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, and son Adam at her side'. She was 83 and appeared to have achieved all her ambitions. She died at home with those she loved around her. She had been able to convey her wishes to her family about the kind of funeral she wanted and (not surprisingly) the music she would like at the funeral.

It would appear that Dame Joan's death met many (and may have met all) of the British Medical Association's Principles for a Good Death:

To know when death is coming, and to understand what can be expected.
To be able to retain control of what happens.
To be afforded dignity and privacy.
To have control over pain relief and other symptom control.
To have choice and control over where death occurs (at home or elsewhere).
To have access to information and expertise of whatever kind is necessary.
To have access to any spiritual or emotional support required.
To have access to hospice care in any location, not only in hospital.
To have control over who is present and who shares the end.
To be able to issue advance directives which ensure wishes are respected.
To have time to say goodbye, and control over other aspects of timing.
To be able to leave when it is time to go, and not to have life prolonged pointlessly.

How many deaths meet these criteria? None in our family has. It is just not possible that a hospital, however humane, will be sufficiently attuned to each individual patient's decline to alert family members in time for them to make it to the bedside for their final moments. I heard too late to be at my grandmother's bedside and got to my mother's about half an hour after getting the call with the news. To die at home may be a fond wish for many of us, however, dying at home alone and lying undiscovered for days as my Dad did is a godawful way to go.

Knowing when death is coming and understanding what to expect implies a level of acceptance. My mother and my mother in law both felt angry and cheated to know that death was imminent when they, at 65 and 72 respectively, still had a few things left to do and were not ready to leave their friends and families.

Then there are the suicides - my grandfather and my brother. Maximum control over the circumstances and means of their deaths, exercising the ultimate in pain and symptom control but completely bereft of dignity and support.

In his 1951 poem Do not go gentle into that good night Dylan Thomas urged his father/us:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan beseeches his dying father, and by extension all of us, to express our indignation at death and to leave an indelible impression of our vitality with those left behind. Not for him reclining in the arms of Jesus and Mary and fading away as St Joseph is depicted as doing.

As an atheist, the modern tendency to celebrate a life at a funeral rather than to seek comfort by proclaiming the existence of continuing meta existence in some ethereal hereafter obviously appeals to me. But the new ceremonial is by no means send off 'lite'. I was at funeral recently that was planned and conducted in difficult circumstances. It was another died at home unexpectedly and not discovered for some time situation. The police were involved, an autopsy performed and an inquest required. The person himself was reclusive, moody and obsessive and had had fallings out with several friends and family members. He was also a committed gardener and environmentalist, the compassionate rescuer of a stray dog and a custodian of our local history. In his eulogy the dead man's brother did not omit references to his some of his prickly qualities but his words and the reminiscences he invited other's to contribute all struck a note that was both tender and reverent to the man's memory and that truly celebrated the value of all life. To be one of that gathering was to feel a sense of community, of human connection and of wonder at what can be contained in this 'brief hour in which we strut and fret upon the stage and then (are) heard no more'.

The ideal of a 'good death' is a rarely realised. The good marking of a passing is eminently achievable.

LOL cats remind us of the reverence with which most aspects of life (and death) should be treated.

Footnote: Not only was Dylan Thomas anti death with good grace, he was, according to Socialism Today (the monthly newsletter of the Socialist Party of England & Wales) 'a thinker with a grounding in Marxism, and a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist'! Perhaps Thomas is a candidate to become the patron (anti) saint of wealth redistribution and shamelessly shambolic death? Weren't his own last words: 'I've just had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record'?

Expendable Women

2010-11-28T21:15:00.026+11:00

The ultimiate eroticised felmale victim, Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.

In the past few weeks I have finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and seen the Swedish film of the novel, watched the last two episodes of series 2 of Breaking Bad and seen In My Father's Den , a NZ/British co-production of 2004. Something that strikes me about all three of these dramas is the extent to which the vulnerability and potential or actual victimhood of women is key to their plots. Our book group voiced real concern about Mikael's and Lisbeth's decision to leave the series of sexual tortures and murders unreported at the conclusion of the first Millennium novel and I hear, from those who have read ahead, that this decision does not sit easily with the protagonists in the next instalment.

In the NZ movie, an adaptation of a 1970s novel, the character of Celia is at once the personification of freshness, hope and the will to transcend a stifling, brutal, closed culture and the fated victim, sacrificed to the tawdry, melodramatic conflicts that bedevil the family at the centre of the plot. The film is very dark but the most distressing element is undoubtedly the confirmation of Celia's death. I think the film maker, realising how completely devastating and demoralising this denouement was, played with the chronology so the last shot shows her walking confidently toward a new future.

The seductive magic of Breaking Bad has been that whatever new low Walter White has sunk to we have had a grudging or even a right on, sympathy for him. From the moment he stood and watched Jesse's girlfriend, Jane choke on her own vomit without raising a finger to help her because her death would cement Jesse's dependence on him, it has been a whole lot harder to like Walt. As the concept has gone on to Seasons 3 & 4 I can only wonder at what the writers, and Bryan Cranston, who is superlative in the role, will do to make me give a solitary damn about him from now on.

Even Lynda La Plante, queen of the telly crime thriller genre and creator of feminist icon, Jane Tennison, peppers her plots with plenty of tortured and mutilated women. While Wire in the Blood also originally the work of female crime writer, Val McDermid, at least distributes the sexual voyeurism around by showing Robson Greene strung up, the helpless, hapless victim of a sadist at least once.

I am not trying to be a political purist here. It is because women and girls are vulnerable and because rape and murder are crimes primarily perpetrated by men against less powerful victims that they become the stuff of crime drama. Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy has been hailed for giving us a strong female heroine and the film adaptation of the first novel in no way exploits its subject matter. Our perspective is always Larsson's, Lisbeth's, Mikael's, Harriet's - we are never titillated by the situations or recounted incidents, even with the addition of film imagery. It will be interesting to see if , the entirely superfluous, Hollywood remake can tread such delicate path.

Caption Contest

2010-10-15T19:47:00.005+11:00

This photo of the late La Stupenda was just crying out for a caption. Winning entry from Boolomo "Ai, yi, yi yiiiii, Get off my taiyil". Runner up, Wol with "Adam, if I've told you once, glassware goes on the top rack"

Is TV's Top Gear secretly a witn(l)ess protection program ?

2010-10-10T17:00:00.044+11:00

According to Wikipedia the first name of Stieg Larsson, author of 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', 'The Girl Who Palyed With Fire' and 'The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets' Nest'...' crime thriller trilogy, was originally Stig, the standard spelling, but in his early twenties, he changed it to Stieg to avoid confusion with his friend Stig Larsson, who went on to become a well-known author before he did.

Now isn't this an all too convenient story? I contend that it has been fabricated and put about to disguise the writer's actual career move in the years 2003-04 immediately before his purported death from a heart attack.

Larsson's anti right wing activism is well known. He and his partner Eva Gabrielsson were subject to frequent death threats and required police protection. Surely a chance to adopt new identities would be irresistible? And who would be more likely to offer this duo of democracy champions an opportunity to assume those new identities, to 'hide in plain sight' so to speak, than the internationally renowned humanitarian and playful host of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson?

My exhaustive research suggests it may very well be so.

Study these images:

Stig Secrets
Is it possible the crusading Swedish couple have been
morphed into the cast of Top Gear?

In the press at least two famous racing drivers - Perry McCarthy and Ben Collins - have been rumoured to take the role of The Stig in Top Gear. The Stig is a character whose face is never seen and whom Clarkson and his producer allegedly created and named for the nickname given to new boys at their boarding school. There have been law suits threatened when either of these drivers has attempted to take credit for portraying The Stig. But now, how likely is it that Clarkson and his producer, Andy Wilman, would have indulged in teasing and name calling at an English public school? Or that they would think that a silly fictional character from their childhood would even vaguely capture the imaginations of their viewers? Ockham's razor - my explanation is both simpler and more feasible!

While I am asserting that Stig Larsson IS The Stig I am not suggesting that James May and Eva Gabrielsson are actually the same person, just that it has been arranged so that Ms Gabrielsson can slip seamlessly into his spot on the show (thus earning an income and remaining near Larsson). What else can account for May retaining that humiliating and completely outre hairstyle?

The ultimate proof: in a world where celebrities - whatever the source of their fame - constantly rub shoulders on all sorts of occasions (e.g. Naomi Campbell, Nelson Mandela, Liberian President Charles Taylor and Mia Farrow all at the same dinner in 1997), The Stig and Stig Larsson, Eva Gabrielsson and James May have never been photographed together nor are there any recorded witness accounts of their ever being in the same place at the same time!

All the speculations about which professional racing car driver is behind the full face helmet on Top Gear are just (Swedish) red herrings... No wonder the Brits wanted Clarkson for PM, he is a genius!

Roselands We (I) Love You!

2010-09-06T21:18:00.075+10:00

The Fenwick Estate, 1800 (Lakemba, now Roselands)

When it was built in 1964 Roselands was probably the first, and was certainly the largest, shopping centre in the southern hemisphere. What has since come to be termed a 'mall' was a new phenomenon back then, an attempt to create a 'city in the suburbs', enabling south west Sydney residents, by a short drive or bus ride, to reach a retail precinct that offered more delights than they could have previously imagined. The original Roselands contained hundreds of variety shops and was dominated by a Grace Brothers department store. It had the country's first food court (Papa Guiseppe had his genesis there), a ladies rest room - the Rendezous Room - where one could relax and shower and even iron a frock before seeing a film at the Roselands Cinema Beautiful or dining & dancing at The Viking licensed restaurant. And of course, Roselands had the famed Raindrop Fountain (below left) a series of nylon wires down which a mixture of water and glycerin trickled into a faux rock pool at its base!

When the Premier of NSW, Robin Askin, opened Roselands in late 1965 (a view of opening day appears below), he declared that Roselands was a ‘million dollar spread of merchandise… bring(ing) the city to the suburbs in a glittering way that must rival even the fabled Persian Bazaars’. He also referred to it as the essence of 'the motor age' - a quaint description to use just 4 years before we landed on the moon! But however you looked at it, Roselands was the stuff of dreams! A quaint blending of nostalgic and futuristic vision*. It had contemporary art, CCTV coverage of the childminding centre, illuminated signage (mermaids & pirate ships that lit up on the seafood outlet), held massive trade promotions and civic functions and offered live entertainment as well as having its unique boutique cinema.

People flocked to its opening - cars were bumper to bumper along the approach roads. Their interest was maintained and many developed an abiding loyalty and affection for the centre.

There were dozens of variations on it's signature tune the 'Roselands we love you/need you' jingle. The one I particularly recall from 1970s 2SM is - 'Roselands we love you - we think you're Christmas'. At about the same time Edna Everage (yet to be made a dame) went one step further and said she imagined heaven as 'one big Roselands'. Even if heaven was/is more delightful than Roselands in its heyday, Roselands could not have been much more heavenly! Apart from all the attractions I've mentioned, I remember the amazing animal sculptures for kiddies to climb on up in the Leopard Spot play area on the roof. My archive trawling reveals that the ground level boasted a wishing well/water wheel as well as the so 60s chunky copper the Rose Fountain (pictured below).

Roseland's funky Rose Fountain - the height of hip in south west Sydney in the era of Graham Kennedy, Charmian Clift and Bandstand.

Roselands had the most extensive and convenient parking lot a shopping centre had ever had (no customer need walk further than 100 metres from their vehicle to retail bliss) - it pioneered the colour coding of levels. And although praised for its compact 3 tier car park, Roselands had more than enough land around it for the additional parking lots that have appeared since the 1980s.

Roselands was built over (and named after) a 9 hole golf course (that was a sub-divided 18 whole golf course) owned by local mayor and business man Stanley Parry. Before that the area was known as Fenwick's Paddock recalling the Fenwick Estate (see top picture) established in the 1880s by a tug business operator. It's homestead Belmore House became the golf clubhouse and stood on the site until the 1940s. Before all that the region was the traditional land of the Daruk (or Darug) people.

Roselands was first refurbished only 5 years into its life when it was damaged by a spectacular fire allegedly caused by fireworks Grace Brothers had in stock for the Queen's Birthday weekend. It has since been remodelled and 'made over' out of recognition with each passing decade. Most of the innovative features, including the fountains and the cinema, that made it remarkable when new have now vanished. I think the remnants of the Viking Restaurant remained until the 1990s as I vaguely recall eating schnitzel there when my kids were little.

Ironically Roselands has gone from being the biggest mall in the country to being one of the most human in scale. The extensive spread of land around it (which contains several houses, a bowling club, a memorial rose garden and an aquatic centre) contrasts pleasantly with complexes like Miranda Fair and Chatswood which loom too large, dominate their locations and where queues of cars can build up at the entry points. Entry to Roselands is via one of three leisurely stretches of road and I have never known it to run out of parking spaces (even at Christmas time).

Back in the 60s, as a newly arrived pommy immigrant, Roselands enticed me with its scale and modernity. Now it has won me over anew with its proximity, manageable size, variety of goods and services (I went to Weight Watchers there and now I go to aquarobics at the Roselands pool) and its rambling setting that, with a little imagination, can still evoke Fenwicks Paddock (below) .

* chronicled in Michaela Perske's meticulous 1998 broadcast on the ABC radio program Hindsight, an MP2 of which the staff at the ABC very generously created and provided to me.

POSTSCRIPT:

Right is a lovely sharp focus picture (particularly for a mobile phone image) my daughter took of the ugly rusted sculptural evocation of a rose (?) that dominates the memorial garden in the grounds of Roselands adjacent to the pool and opposite the auto service centre. Circa 1960s I'd say.

It is in the centre of what must have been a pool of reflection but which is now an empty litter collector. Does anyone know anything about its history/origin? Will do a little more research.

The Dorriteers show their vesatility

2010-08-26T15:26:00.037+10:00

Being a charming, worthy Mr Nice Guy is so boring - do you mind if I play a control
freak wife abuser? (Fine, Matt, see 'Criminal Justice' 2008)

As far as Matthew Macfadyen goes I seem to be a late convert - I found 'Spooks' portentous and totally lacking in credibility. I somehow missed him playing D'Arcy to Keira Kneightly's Elizabeth Bennett in the 2005 film version of 'Pride & Prejudice' (but I, like everyone else, was in thrall to Colin Firth then any way). The trailer for the 2004 NZ film 'In My Father's Den' looked good, and he looked good in it, but I haven't seen it (one for the Quick Flicks list). I thought he was a competent, pudgy, but hardly charismatic, straight man in 'Death At A Funeral' (2007).

'Little Dorrit' (see last post) was the breakthrough for me - Macfadyen brought to Arthur Clenham (so boring on the page) wonderful humanity, warmth and humour. I'd put him up there with James Stewart in 'Harvey' for making niceness* acceptable and admirable on screen.

'Little Dorrit' was full of fine performances and I was tantalised to see three of its stars, Macfadyen, Eddie Marsan and Maxine Peake, reunited in 'Criminal Justice' which the ABC has just run as a 2 part drama over the last two Sunday nights (but which was actually filmed to be shown as a 5 part series in the UK the same year as 'Little Dorrit', 2008).

I have enjoyed Eddie Marsan's work since I first saw him in as the hyper tense driving instructor with stalking tendencies and anger management problems in 'Happy Go Lucky'. His Pancks in 'Little Dorrit' was a wonderful blend of grotesquery and zeal. He outdoes them all for wearing his east end Jewish heritage like a badge, making Bob Hoskins seem like Ralph Richardson by comparison. In 'Criminal Justice' he was clerk of chambers in the practice where MacFadyen's character worked as a barrister and god father to his daughter. We saw him seemingly callous, 'I've go a nice rape for you in Manchester', but also touching in his obvious regard and love for his colleague and when recounting how his character's father came to London in WWII as part of the Kindertransport.

When I saw Maxine Peake as the enigmatic and manipulative Miss Wade in 'Little Dorritt', I thought 'I know that face', then I read her screen credits but nothing rang a bell until I saw she was Twinkle in Victoria Woods' Dinnerladies. Hard to believe it, but her recent performance surpasses even that sublime creation! John Preston in Britain's Daily Telegraph called her work in Criminal Justice 'a marvel' and so it was. To quote him further, the production suceeded in:

ratcheting up the tension with 'Hitchcockian precision' and (using) the weight of the character's dilemmas to drive the narrative forward

Can't omit reference to the performances delivered by Sophie Okonedo and Alice Sykes either - all the cast were just outstanding. Superlative telly!

* Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in 'Harvey': Years ago my mother used to say to me, she`d say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me".

Don’t call me that!

2010-07-25T20:27:00.038+10:00

'Little Dorritt is such a silly name, mind if I call you Fanny Chuzzzlewit?'


They call me 'Hell'

They call me 'Stacy'

They call me 'her'

They call me 'Jane'

That's not my name

That's not my name

That's not my name

That's not my name

They call me 'quiet girl'

But I’m a riot

Mary, Jo, Liza

Always the same

That's not my name

That's not my name

That's not my name

That's not my name

The Ting Tings 2009

I just loved it the Sunday night before last when Claire Foy (as Amy Dorrit) snapped at Matthew Macfadyen (as Arthur Clennam - above) “Don’t call me that” when he addressed her by the absurd sobriquet ‘Little Dorrit’ just once too often?

Dickens’s penchant for creating mawkish models of immature womanhood (whether dolts or angels) was never more cloyingly demonstrated than in fashioning ‘Little Dorrit’. I struggled with the novel, and with that epitome of selfless, sexless devotion, Amy, when reading it as an English Lit student in the 80s. Once again, I pay tribute to Andrew Davies for having breathed new life, and not inconsiderable mojo, into the characters of a ‘bonnet drama’ with this adaptation for television. And good on yer, Claire, for making 'Little Dorrit' a spirited and likeable heroine.

During the following week my 19 year old son also had occasion to insist ‘don’t call me that in public’ when I farewelled him thus: 'goodbye, honey bun’ on the steps of my office building after we'd shared a delicious Yum Cha lunch.

All families use pet names, don't they? The Mitford sisters were 'Decca', 'Nardy', 'Bobo' etc. My sisters and I are known to one another by similarly absurd terms. But when and where you use a pet or nick name is obviously a matter of judgement. When referring to sports stars the use of an epithet seems almost compulsory - 'Shark', 'Tiger', 'Brick with Ears'... for some other public figures too - I have no idea what 'Weary' Dunlop's or 'Chopper' Reid's given names actually are!

The above are all nicknames conferred on their bearers by others as distinct from an adopted name under which one chooses to perform or publish; Prince, Phiz, Madonna, Englebert Humperdink, Guillaume de Gnome de Plume come to mind. The difference being that it is presumably NOT embarassing to declare loudly and publically 'It is I, the Scarlet Pimpernell' while it is probably cringe-makingly awful to be greeted with 'Oi, I thought it was you, Silver Bodgie'. Unless of course you're Richard Roxburgh in which case you might be quite chuffed!

Coming soon: Guillaume Gnome de Plume's Reminiscences of Cooks River Vineyards

2010-07-09T19:33:00.008+10:00

The chronicling of Marrickville-Sydenham's lost wine industry is long overdue...

In an interview soon to appear here, Guillaume Gnome de Plume reminisces about the acradian charms of the Cooks River vineyards.

The rich sullage content of the Cooks River combined with the run-off from the many wool stores lining the river along Canal Rd created incomparable soil for the cultivation of grapes.

Guillaume explains that there were two renowned vintages - the Vin Extremely Ordinaire and the Vin Barely Palatable.

The first had a nose of long-concealed frommage, notes of honeysuckle, melon and nuclear waste and left a calcium buildup and an almost indelible high-tide mark on the back palate. But with a plate of head cheese and a packet of Gauloise, it was without peer.

The latter was voted for three consecutive years by the readers of Joggers' World magazine as the best Australian wine to run away from.

MORE TO COME...

(With thanks to David Latta)

How do you write a blog about Maria?

2010-06-20T19:42:00.040+10:00

...how do you catch a wave upon the sand?

After being bored and slightly irked by the 1965 film as a child, The Sound of Music barely entered my consciousness again for 45 years. Like everyone I was regularly exposed to those aerial shots of Julie Andrews whirling in Alpine meadows in Oscar presentations or programs about cinema history. At some point in my adult life I came to realise that there are people who are quite obsessed by the film. A friend knew all the lyrics by heart, a colleague showed me a video of her large family re-enacting the So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, goodbye number, I saw a cabaret artist deconstruct the entire plot in his act. However, nothing prepared me for the impact the choice of The Sound of Music as the school musical would have on this family's life!

Some time in February it was rumoured that my 15 year old daughter was likely to be cast as Maria. Weeks of suspense and conflicting emotions followed. She did have the best voice in the school, didn't she? She'd demonstrated that and her acting ability in previous productions. Would they consider her mature enough to 'carry' the show? She was pretty iffy about that responsibility and about playing an ingenue nun with a bizarre belief that singing about deer, goats and copper kettles cured most of life's ills. Weeks passed and she greeted the music teacher's secret assurance to her that she would be cast as Maria with a mix of dread and derision, while we greeted it with skepticism* without something more concrete like a note home.

When the casting was confirmed and the arduous rehearsal schedule began our relief let us become foolishly complacent about our child's actual attendance every time she was required. Shrill phone calls from the director commenced. 'Must do better' we resolved. Huddled conferences with the director, music teacher and the school counsellor occurred. I was asked to become my daughter's 'personal assistant' and to remind her of each and every rehearsal. They offered to send cabs to collect her when she was exhausted or off colour. Could she really cope at all? They suggested she play a lesser nun. We convinced her to hang in there. Her School Certificate exams were rescheduled so that she could concentrate on learning all her lines and blocking every scene!

They were aghast that she had never seen the film. We hired it. She hated it. She became determined to create a Maria as unlike Julie Andrews as she could. We started making jokes about the script and lyrics. 'What is it Maria, you c*nt face?' How do you solve a problem like Maria? You marry her off to God or if that doesn't work to a randy old Austrian millionaire. The self consciousness kicked in. Various Von Trapp kiddies were taller than her, thinner than her, the Baroness had all the jokes, she had nauseating sweetness and unfounded optimism.

Above: Julie Andrews and the baggage my daughter wanted to shed.

We trawled the op shops for garments that were demure but not hideous. The smell of nylon that had encountered much sweat over many years remained in our nostrils. We got a pair of pearlescent cream high heels for the wedding scene for $2! Then we found a convincingly Laura Ashley/30s Austria like floral number on eBay... It would be an improvement on the checked rag of a dress I'd already had to darn twice. But would our bid win it? And would it arrive in time? At $14 we paid over op shop odds for it but it was just the ticket and arrived in time for the two public performances.

Then in the actual week of the performances, with a masterstroke of bureaucratic absurdity, the school suspended her for skiving off after an excursion the week before. Which days did they choose to have the suspension take effect? The days of the first two performances. Did they tell us? Yes, by snail mail that arrived after the suspension was meant to occur. (Our daughter had been handed a copy of the letter too but found it all too silly and distracting to contemplate and just buried her copy in the depths of her school bag). Blithely unaware that we were contravening a Department of Education direction and could be inviting police action, we ferried her to and from the performances, went through lines one last time, applied make-up, moved scenery and helped her struggle through costume changes. When we became aware of the suspension we were livid.

Any way, that idiocy aside, the public performances went ahead gloriously on 18th and 19th June. Our girl is a prodigious talent and acquitted herself brilliantly.

The Sound of Music remains a very silly story (and an atrocious departure from far more interesting real life see: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/winter/von-trapps.html ) The values of the film are wildly artificial and anti-feminist but to give Rogers and Hammerstein a bit of credit, the stage version does contain two very droll numbers shared by the Baroness, Max and Captain Von Trapp and the anti Nazi theme is explored more fully (arguing over collaboration is actually what breaks up the Captain and the Baroness).

This production was far from silly in its quality and effect and we are proud and thrilled to see how our girl has grown, quoting Maria she can now declare:

Strength doesn't lie in numbers.
Strength doesn't lie in wealth,
Strength lies in nights of peaceful slumbers,
When you wake up, wake up!
It can be all I trust I leave my heart to,
All I trust becomes my own!
I have confidence in confidence alone.
I have confidence in confidence alone!
Besides, which you see,
I have confidence in me!

Well done little Diva, clever Belle Starr!

*Once bitten you see, my high school music teacher planned a production of HMS Pinafore and offered me Buttercup only to snatch away our chance at fame and acclaim by telling the class that God had told him in a vision not to proceed with the show (for 'God' read the Principal and the school's accountant, I suspect).

Memories of the Sydenham 'push'

2010-05-15T18:23:00.024+10:00

The Cobb & Co Diner Princes Highway, Tempe in its heyday, 1964

My recent archival trawling has led to a lot of interesting discoveries about the Marrickville - Canterbury area where I live. Unearthing the 1964 picture (above) of the now sadly reduced Cobb and Co drive-in diner on the stretch of the Princes Highway that approaches Sydney airport led me to seek out locals with memories of the era. Meeting Guillame Gnome de Plume* (below) has been a revelation. I had no idea that this region of the Marrickville municipality had a French Quarter (the 'Paris end of Sydenham' as Guillaume refers to it) or that it was a hotbed of radical politics. I reproduce fragments of an interview with Guillaume about the Tempe - Sydenham region below. I hope his recollections will delight readers as much as they did me.

My informant - Guillaume Gnome de Plume sporting his beret (and Blunnies -not visible)

As we sat down to talk in one of Marrickville's many chic cafes Guillaume enlightened me that back in the 60s the Cobb and Co Drive-In, (which he still insists on calling 'Le Cobb avec Co'), although best known for its speedy late night service of burgers and 'foot long dogs', actually also housed a little known private dining area frequented by French expats and the intelligentsia of Tempe.

Guillaume:

It is true, there was this romantic little dining room off to one side that had an understated decor of pinball and cigarette machines. Very, 'ow you say, 'post-moderne'. Reminded me of the Left Bank. On many nights I could be found there in my beret and striped boat-neck t-shirt reading Flaubert, teaching the truck drivers to play boule or discussing philosophy with the radical students.

Me: So the Cobb & Co diner was a centre for the Sydenham - Tempe avant garde? Is it true that it fomented subversive political thought and even action?

Guillaume:

Ah, oui, I remember it well. There were plane trees along the Princes Highway in those days (that stretch we knew as the Paris end of Sydenham). It was May and they were shedding their leaves, carpeting the asphalt where the autos stopped to get their burgers. There was a chestnut seller who had his little oven on the island in the middle of the Cooks River nearby, he rowed his wares across to buyers... he was, 'ow you say, the 'chain smoker' and always cursing the rising price of Gauloises.

It was May of '68 when the infamous Tempe student uprising occurred. The local youth rose in solidarity with their French counterparts and tried to take control of the electricity sub-station near the bus depot. Tempers flared when it was found the fence was too high. The streets ran yellow with Passiona* that day.

Me: Passiona?

Guillaume:

Coke was regarded as capitalist, Fanta, bourgeois, and le Cobb avec Co did not have a licence to serve anything stronger.

Me: So how close to achieving 'le revolution' did the Sydenham push come?

Guillaume:

Well, inevitably, in those early days of the revolution, difficulties, setbacks arose. At the announcement of the manifesto, there were those at the back of the group, standing close to the rumbling lorries travelling along the Princes Highway, who had their attention momentarily distracted. Chapter XI, dogma 6 makes reference to youth rabble-rousing. Several of the more fervent students must have misunderstood. They disappeared for days. It was said they had spent that time searching the areas around Tempe for small fluffy bunnies and for a long time afterwards, many of the local rabbits appeared unreasonably agitated...

At this point Guillaume launched into a lament in broken English on the hardships of conveying the revolutionary message to the proletariat and to naive young students and the unfortunate consequences of misplaced zeal for 'les lapins emigre'. We finished our cafe au laits and bid each other adieu. I feel it will not be the last time I speak to this incredible old gentleman about his memories of Tempe political and cultural life.

*Thanks to David Latta for sharing Guillaume's insights.

The Time Traveller's Riff

2010-04-29T20:33:00.053+10:00

I have been thinking about the transient nature of social institutions - the way we seek our entertainment, commemorate our dead, travel around our city - all are subject to fashion. In the 1930s we flocked to elaborate picture palaces but 3 decades later most were demolished or converted to other commercial uses. Between the world wars we replaced many of our simple, poignant early memorials with big enduring edifices modelled on the obelisks and pyramids of the ancient world. In the 1950s we ripped out the tram network that had served the city & suburbs effectively for years and introduced greenhouse gas belching buses, and so on. As I've mentioned, I was distressed to learn that Sydney's Town Hall and Central Railway Station are built over graveyards where convicts, free settlers and Aboriginal people (above) were buried. Scant attempt was made to relocate remains or headstones or even to chronicle the names and other details of those disinterred or simply submerged.

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am not religious so my objection isn't that such redevelopment disturbs 'hallowed' ground a la Poltergeist (the 1982 Steven Spielberg film where a house is haunted and finally subsumed because it is built over native American burial grounds). Although the fact that respect for ancestors is common to most cultures suggests it really is something the human psyche requires. What really pisses me off is that we have casually eroded so much of our history. First we (Europeans) decimated traditional Aboriginal lands and then we razed the evidence of our own early settlement. The monument in Rookwood Cemetery (right) to those whose 'resting' place was once the old Sydney Burial Grounds (where Sydney Town Hall now stands) records the name of the serving mayor of the time but not those of anyone whose grave was disturbed. The siren song of progress coupled with shame or indifference about humble or criminal origins prevailed. Were there historians then who thought the manner in which these building projects were executed a bit rash? Were there any - apart from the clergy - who raised the alarm some 100 years later when Camperdown Cemetery was resumed as public park land and its headstones crowded around the newly erected walls of St Stephens to crumble away?

Browsing the pictorial archive sites is a form of time travel. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I found the pictures of my childhood haunts that I wrote about in my last posting. The same thing happened when I found the Tivoli shots and the 1953 photo (below) of a tram running alongside Belmore Park (following the same route as the modern light rail I pass every day). I am not quite sure why. I wasn't born when the pictures were taken and, despite attending the odd political rally there, wasn't really familiar with Belmore Park or Hay Street until recently. I think it is the idea of 'those feet in ancient times' having trod the same pathways that I tread today and the reverberation of all those other presences that awakens a sense of awe and wistfulness in me.

The book The Time Travellers' Wife powerfully evokes our bittersweet relationship with the past. I suppose it is a paradox: all that we know, all that is familiar, everyone we love, only exist and have meaning for us because of what went before. As Henry DeTamble the time traveller of the novel's title learns when he repeatedly revisits the scene of his mother's death, we can not intervene to change the past. There really is no point crying over spilt milk but by viewing it from the different standpoints in our lives we can better accept the spillage. And, without being completely deterministic about it, there are certain inevitabilities about our lives and our task, should we choose to accept it, is to discover and enrich the events that will befall and have befallen us.

Time and chance happeneth to all people - Eric Bana as Henry DeTamble fades when his past self briefly visits his wife and child after the death of his contemporary self.

I guess you could call me a bit of an obsessive. Time travelling is what I am doing this month, maybe next month it will be all human rights as I work with my daughter on 'our' To Kill A Mockingbird assignment. Now there's another deservedly revered novel...

Shooting (and surfing) the past*

2010-04-11T18:17:00.066+10:00

I have been living in the past recently or, more accurately, I have been indulging in trips back and forth between the present and the early, mid and later 20thC.

It started with my discovery of my local council's photographic archive, spread to exploring the City of Sydney Pictorial Archives and thence to looking on the 'net for images of locations that are significant to me from my UK childhood (such as the one at left of The Kursaal amusement park, Southend-on-Sea). This posting is really an excuse to share some of them with you, dear reader.

Southend-on-Sea was the favourite seaside haunt of my Essex born and bred grandmother (whom we always called 'Nanny'). My sisters and I spent many happy hours in her company visiting the rides and stalls at The Kursaal and walking through
the landscaped parkland that I now learn is (Pythonesquely) called The Shrubbery .

The Shrubbery was the site of an eccentric precursor to the modern theme park, Never Never Land (see picture right). Never Never Land was nothing to do with Michael Jackson but was, to quote the Southend History website:

...truly a mystical place, a land of mythical castles, goblins, dragons, fairies and lights in the trees, and even a magical model railway with stations and mountains and bridges. The model castle was at the entrance and it had lights in the windows and a little rowing boat crossing the lake at the bottom. It was worth the price of pennies at the turnstiles to get in. During the 1950s, Never Never Land packed in thousands of adults and children each year...

Apparently business trailed off during the 1960s but that's when my siblings and I were Never Never Land enthusiasts. I have vivid memories of the animated illuminated models of fanciful creatures and the miniature train that traversed the cliff side terraces. I recreated the latter back at home forming chairs and cushions into carriages, populating them with my sisters, dolls and teddies and pouncing on Nanny as soon as she got home from work, insisting she don her special Never Never Land jacket and board the train to imaginary stations with names like 'Knives & Forks' and 'Eggs & Bacon'!

The other seaside setting for our youthful walks with Nanny were Lytham St Annes/Blackpool (home of it's own famed illuminations). The Esplanade at St Annes is pictured left in the early 20thC. The little shelter with the dragon on top it was still the when I visited in the 1980s (below right) but its setting was rather less exotic than I remembered. The pseudo Chinese lakes and garden beds surrounding the shelter seemed much more modest, and of course smaller, than they had seemed to me as a 5 year old (or whatever I was when I first encountered them).

What did impress me was that they and so many other sights and locations I remembered were intact and cared for, and in some cases even restored! A derelict 16thC church on the hill outside our village of West Horndon became something of an obsession with me in 1967-68 (the two years prior to our emigration). It was rumoured to have connections with Henry IV and Anne Boleyn and housed tombs of local aristocrats, the Tyrells, from the period of its origin. I did a school project on the church, named All Saints, East Hornden (pictured below as it was in the 60s), replete with copies of inscriptions from the tombs and brass rubbings.

Remembering it as totally disused, populated by sparrows and pigeons, its pews, rafters and bell tower steps all liberally coated with their droppings, I was astonished and very moved to find it in use for concerts and cultural gatherings (rather than for worship) when I visited in 1984.

I have also been tempted to seek out old photographs of sites closer to home, my current home, Sydney's south-western suburbs, and to my work, in the Haymarket. A plaque on the building where I work at 323 Castlereagh Street states that it is the former site of the Adelphi and Tivoli theatres although I've discovered that the Sydney Tivoli actually had its first incarnation at 79-83A Castlereagh Street where Skygardens now stands . A colleague tells me that state rail employees still refer to the part of the line just before Central that passes our building as 'the Tivoli Junction'.

In the photo above you can see the 'Tivoli' sign on the right. The mass of trees is Belmore Park then Central railway station is in the background. The Tivoli met the fate of most early 20thC theatres of ceasing to show live performance and being converted to a cinema, then, with the advent of television, ceasing operation altogether. It was demolished in the 1960s.

From the 1920s onwards most Sydney suburbs had at least one picture theatre. Some, like Campsie and Earlwood in the Canterbury area where I live, had several. My last indulgence for this posting is to show you two local extant cinema buildings that somehow escaped the tide of progress. I have also been looking for the locations of others that didn't survive at all or have done so in a drastically unrecognisable state. However that, and some information about Sydney's predilection for building over its cemeteries can wait for another posting!

Above left: The Orion at 155 Beamish Street, Campsie, built 1936 now a 'community function centre' and home to a local amateur theatre group. Above right: the old Mayfair, at 324 - 330 Homer Street, opened 1927 and closed 1958, now a Greek deli & wine outlet. Pictures from Pictorial Canterbury website

* this posting's title with apologies/acknowledgements to the excellent 1999 Stephen Poliakoff television series.

Suffer the little children*

2010-04-05T20:20:00.043+10:00

Paedophilia must to be the west's favourite focus for moral outrage in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We're talking the epoch that brought us the Mi Lai massacre, the Bosnian war, Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder, the Tutsi/Hutu slaughter, 'nine eleven'... you get my drift. I am not trying to trivialise child sexual abuse. Exploitation of and cruelty towards children is reprehensible, indefensible, sickening. It's just that righteous indignation about alleged interfering with kiddies seems to be the cause celebré for so many, including a fair share of misogynist, racist, callous reactionaries who don't normally give a hoot about human rights.

My attention has been drawn again to the topic by the current outrage over the pontiff's seeming complicity in covering up sexual abuse of children by the clergy in Ireland and Germany. Both atheists and disaffected believers are decrying Ratzinger and the priesthood (or selected members of it) for the blind eyes they have turned. But, at the risk of sounding cynical, should we be surprised? Sexual abuse thrives in institutions where there is a massive power imbalance and no avenue for victims to be believed, comforted and supported.

Allan Innman, cartoon originally published in the newspaper of the University of Mississippi, The Daily Mississippian, 2003

Perhaps one of the reasons I did not react to the incidents of abuse in David Hill's 'The Forgotten Children' (which we have just read for book group), with shock and horror (apart from the fact that they are quite sloppily and sketchily reported) is that the only surprises for me were (a) that it wasn't rifer than his account suggests and (b) that there was ever a time or a society that thought the odds were on a kid's side if you ripped him/her from family, friends and familiar environment and sent them to be 'cared for' by unqualified Imperialist exiles, nursing frustration over their lacklustre military careers, thousands of miles from scrutiny. It is a recipe for bullying and abuse!

My book group has also just watched Pt 1 of 'The Leaving of Liverpool' to more fully bring alive for us this sorry exercise in British-Australian child development via 'centres of care'. That 90s miniseries isn't set in secular Fairbridge Farm School like Hill's book, but in St Bedes - a (fictional, I think) centre run by the St Vincent de Paul brotherhood. Of course child molestation and rape occur, hard on the heels of verbal and psychological abuse and thwacking a boy hard enough across the head for him to lose his hearing (that incident back in the British orphanage).

One of our members who is from Chile expressed her disbelief that families could so readily submit to fragmentation without resistance - it would never happen, even amongst the poorest in Chile she feels, family and community bonds are too strong. Another, of Eastern European Jewish background, wondered at the notion typically identified with English Victorian society that children 'should be seen and not heard' suggesting that view inevitably ignores children's need for love and silences their voices when abuse occurs. We also talked about parallels with the Australian government's systematic removal of Aboriginal children of mixed race from their homes and families. There was no pretence there that the children were orphans or abandoned as was argued in the case of the British kids. Once institutionalised the treatment was similarly brutal with the added abuse of trying to expunge all cultural, linguistic and spiritual ties with their communities. Given the importance of land and kinship in Aboriginal culture it is hard not to see the practice as the attempted eradication of an entire people as has been claimed.

So, in complete contradiction of John Howard's view that we can not be held accountable for the actions of previous generations, we are ALL complicit. So alienated was British-Australian society in the 1930s-70s from an appreciation of the crucial role played by family and community in nurturing a healthy, happy child, that we gave policies and practices that included the most appalling neglect, isolation and exploitation a free reign.

The church is an archaic institution - is it any wonder that denial of the rights of children - no longer condoned by our secular society - has flourished for so long within its walls?

*Matthew 19:14 - I know this quote is misinterpreted constantly and that 'suffer' means 'allow' in this context, but its an irresistible title for this post.

A Single Opinion

2010-03-21T20:20:00.060+11:00

Spoiler alert: Contains details about the film 'A Single Man'.

I had to walk out of one of those swanky homeware places in Norton Street yesterday when the two 'children' behind the counter made dismissive comments about 'A Single Man'. They called the triumph of sensitivity and artistry I saw last Wednesday night 'boring'. I could start a tirade about short attention spans and being spoonfed ugly obviousness by the Hollywood machine here, but what's the point? A film that resonated so beautifully and totally for me didn't for them. We are different people at different points in our lives. Our tastes may never coincide. But I couldn't bear to hear the film maligned.

Despite subscribing, in principle, to the 'read the book before you see the film' philosophy mentioned in my last posting, I have not read Christopher Isherwood's novel. I hope to get around to it. However Tom Ford's film is a complete work of art in itself. The screenplay, performances, design, cinematography, the musical score all combine to create one of the most perfect experiences I have had in the cinema.

George and Jim on the beach in a flashback scene from 'A Single Man' - no Firthian nipple a la 'Genova' but infinitely more sensuality.

I saw it in the same theatre as 'Genova' and now that tawdry experience is purged. Where 'Genova's imagery was crass, unsubtle, insistent, 'A Single Man's is composed, yet fluid, raw, but painfully beautiful. Colin Firth plays an English-teaching academic in both films. In both films his life partner is killed in a tragic, freak road accident. In both films his rapport with a young student helps to lift him out of his grief. For a 'compare and contrast' exercise the parallels are obvious.

But, whatever the superficial similarities might be, for me, the films are poles apart in the authenticity of the feelings they express. Before I saw it I had been warned that 'Genova' was sad, upsetting. Before I saw it, I heard that 'A Single Man' was too self consciously styled to be fully affecting. I felt the opposite, that 'Genova' was gimmicky and shallow, the endless imagery of the girls walking down those menacing lane ways or of the older daughter experiencing libidinous oblivion riding pillion on that motorcycle were indulgent and voyeuristic. By contrast there is a lightness of touch in Ford's direction and Firth's performance in the other film. We are invited to experience, often through long held close ups, the nuances and complexities of each moment of George, the protagonist's unfolding day. Nothing is repeated or redundant. Everything is as spare and elegant as his suit and shirt.

The other great difference is the politics of these films. 'Genova's are hackneyed, the ghost of a lost mother both a comfort and a threat, European hedonism healing the straight laced pilgrims from the new world, the ungainly attempt in middle age of a woman to rekindle the Firth character's attraction towards her (though this too is occurs in 'A Single Man'!) The second film deals with something still fresh in cinema, the pain of exclusion experienced by an 'invisible' minority, gay men, in LA in the 1960s. Edmund White*, in 1992, called 'A Single Man' 'one of the first and best novels of the modern Gay Liberation movement'. It is quite a didactic film but its message is never emblazoned on a placard. It is alluded to in the classroom scene, depicted in the heart rending way George is firmly uninvited to the funeral of his lover of 16 years, explored in the wonderfully written encounters between George and Kenny, a student in his class, and between George and Carlos, the Spanish hustler whose beauty and charm so mesmerise George.

The aesthetics of the two films is another of many points of difference. The depiction of the actors in 'A Single Man' is not the generalised airbrushed flattery we are used to, it lays bare every pore of the skin, every blood vessel of the eye, it shows the allure and perfection of youth and the experience and vulnerability of middle age. The built environment of George's home and neighbourhood is similarly lingered over, and not just to showcase 1960s chic, but because Jim (George's dead partner) was an architect and Ford wants us to understand how the rooms they inhabited together say something about the intrinsic elegance, truth and subtlety of their relationship.

Ironically without this sensibility 'coming out' between the 1960s and now there would be no swanky homeware places like the one in Norton Street, Leichhardt to employ indifferent brats!

*"Pool in Rocks by the Sea: Isherwood and Bachardy." Artforum, February 1992. Reprinted in The Burning Library: Essays. Vintage, 1995

Book to film

2010-03-07T19:42:00.045+11:00

A picture paints a thousand words... Well, yes and no. Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland' while visually rich and imaginative with a script of some worth, is not as intellectually tantalising or delighfully 'curious' as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's original stories. But then little in supposed 'children's literature' (or film) is!

I must declare an interest, Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass are just about my favourite literary works and I have read both many times. They are quintessentially English, delightfully perverse, witty and irreverent and I ADORE (check out the title and signature image of this blog!) I would argue that they are almost un-adaptable. I loathe the 1960s Disney cartoon and a later American attempt which cast Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat (pulllease!- give me the suave Stephen Fry any day!) Johnathon Miller made a Cabinet of Dr Caligari-esque version (also in the 60s) with the Peters Cook and Sellers that intrigues, then there's a Martin Wesley-Smith musical, snatches from which I've heard and thought very un-Lewis Carroll. Tim Burton has done probably the only sensible thing one can do and taken the original stories (and some only of the original characters) as a point of departure for a new story.

This new story throws Alice into a Jabberwocky slaying role (where has the 'beamish boy' gone?) and, as seems compulsory in American cinema, is at least partly a parable of good conquering evil with more than a nod to the Narnia finale. But thanks to a prodigious array of talent, exquisite art direction, faultless special effects and just enough Carroll-inspired vocab e.g.'you have lost much of your muchness' - the film charms. It also gets some marks for its second, not terribly subtle, theme of attaining self directed adult/womanhood which appropriately parallels the earlier Alice's journey from childhood to adolescence and for creating a decidedly bleak, Burton-esque, post Victorian W/Underland.

The topic of book to movie was tackled on Jennifer Byrne's 'not the first Tuesday book club' this week. There was passionate discussion amongst guests John Marsden, Ana Kokkinos, John Collee and Margaret Pomeranz all of whom held strong & divergent opinions. They and our book group are probably microcosms of the broader reading public on this divisive topic. One of our group members completely eschews ANY book adaptation. She will either read the book or see the film (never both) and don't get me started on Mr Darcy loyalties!

I think Margaret Pomeranz and I may have been separated at birth - I agreed with almost everything she said, including hating the novel Perfume. That was a book I believed I 'ought' to read and appreciate for years before I actually bought a copy. While it displayed huge technical cleverness, detailing the alchemy of scent sourcing and distillation and evoking every nuance of the protagonist's olfactory world, I found it cold, mechanical and consistently repellent. I've yet to see the film, which Ana Kokkinos called a 'magnificent failure', but I don't think I could dislike it more than I did the book.

The same logic may yet lead me to see the movie of The Road, another book I disliked. Its one redeeming quality (for me) amongst the quagmire of manipulative sentiment, hackneyed gender roles and bad science, was its descriptive language. Highly visual and cinematic already, I guess it was just crying out to be made into a film but suspect the armageddon, father and son bonding and roaming zombie themes might have influenced Hollywood's decision to adapt it just as much.

The film I really want to see next is 'A Single Man' (Colin is making up to me for 'Genova' - see earlier blog posting). From the trailer it looks as if he should definitely have won the best actor Oscar for his performance. That too is based on a book, Christopher Isherwood's 1964 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. I wonder, as Jennifer Byrne's guests agreed (I think?) and my personal credo holds, I should try to read the book first? Obviously it will have to be a clandestine activity; now that it has succumbed to a celluloid interpretation it will not be one of our book group choices!

You avin' a larf?

2010-02-23T21:19:00.039+11:00

I recently watched 'Almost the truth...', the doco about Monty Python. It did my heart good. It's not so much that you forget how funny the dead parrot sketch or Mr Creosote are... it's just good to revisit them and giggle all over again. First time around in the public service I kept the lyrics to the Galaxy Song next to my desk:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

At the end of the documentary, Eric Idle's musical collaborator remarks, after Eric performs the song, 'of course the facts have changed now' - and Eric replies that the facts can't possibly have changed but our interpretation of them has.

Second time around in the public service the facts have changed very little but I hope my interpretation of them has. I think as an idealistic young trainer I believed in the perfectibility of human relations and of organisational life. I delivered sermons on equal employment opportunity with a zeal that sought to transform individuals and the workplace and tirelessly championed the rights of the complainant when accusations of discrimination and harassment were made. I still consider myself someone who values social justice and ethical behaviour very highly but my tolerance for gung ho activism and proselytising has gone.

This time around the narcissists I've encountered pushing their vanity projects and pet causes regardless of the stated priorities of the agency, good governance and economic constraints are completely pissing me off. I just don't think these jokers know or care about the damage they do. Their personal holy grail or hobbyhorse takes precedence over considerations of resources, relevance and rationality. Ego trips & chest beating either triumph or exhaust the reserves of the rest of us trying to out manoeuvre them!

There, that's my rant. I bounced back from my Christmas/New Year break all rarin' to go but one or two people keep putting spokes in my wheels. Eh, why should 2010 be so different? As Mr Idle says just before he breaks into song:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, and things seem hard or tough, and people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft, and you feel that you've had quite enough...

Just remember that you're standing... etc

Oh, brothers, Wherrett - thou little rippers!

2010-02-07T20:33:00.044+11:00

Our latest book group choice was Desirelines - the reminiscences of Richard & Peter Wherrett. Both bros sont morte now - this book was published in 1997. I knew about Peter's lifelong attraction to cross dressing - I think I'd heard an interview with him when the book was published. And I knew that Richard had died of an AIDS related illness - he knew he was HIV positive when the book was written.

What I wasn't ready for was the intensity of the Wherretts' struggle to survive their childhood with an alcoholic, violent, epileptic, cross dressing father! They suffered almost every indignity and shame the 1950s could throw at them. A mother who stayed in an abusive relationship out of misguided love for their father and because her economic situation would have been highly tenuous without the guaranteed full-time employment her husband's pharmacy business gave her. A father who initially scared the life out of them with his mood swings, abusive behaviour toward their mum and unexplained epileptic fits and wounded them with his distracted indifference to their talents and achievements. Inner battles with their sexuality/gender identification - Richard being gay and Peter compulsively drawn to expressing his 'feminine' side via cross dressing - and carrying their 'guilty' secrets for years. Class consciousness engendered by their father's shame at being the only one of 5 brothers not to qualify as a doctor, living next door to a pub at the height of the primitive 'six o'clock swill' and trying to cut it at a private school (Trinity) when their domestic circumstances were shabby and constrained - they lived above their father's chemist shop. A depressive aunt who had lost her husband in WWII, and her marbles progressively in the ensuing years, and so on...

Peter lived the last 2 years of his life as Pip.

Their story resonated with me. Their mum was a dewy eyed, devoted bride with no insight into her husband's 'issues', as my own mother had been. Their childhood neighbourhood, commercial premises in West Ryde, my own father grew up opposite the milk bar his mother ran in North Ryde. Their journey from puzzlement at their father's behaviour, to championing their mum, then to seeing both parents as somewhat pathetic in their choices. Their salvation via reading and recognition at school. Growing into their personalities, charm and personae. The evolution of left politics. Richard Wherrett's favourite EM Forster quote 'only connect' from Howard's End and mine being the same. Wherrett senior growing up in Marrickville (where I lived for 20 years) opposite the town hall (which I have visited often). See the once gracious 'Luscombe' by clicking here.

Desirelines is not a great book, but it is an honest and fascinating one. Peter's contribution is braver and more interesting than little brother Richard's who, having been a cultural hero of the Whitlam years/my youth, turns out to have hidden twee shallows. Peter is a flawed protagonist who undergoes a journey of self discovery and self expression, whereas Richard did really seem to have a charmed existence once he left Ryde. It was Peter who, as the eldest, confronted his father's rages head on and had to say 'enough is enough' and arrange his committal while Richard was discovering divine bohemia and coming out.

Richard Wherrett did give us the unforgettable Elocution of Benjamin Franklin and Nicholas Nickleby though - truly rich and exalting experiences in Australian theatre!

Vive les Wherretts - warts and all! Their memoirs capture a whole panorama of the Australian experience and their journeys toward self actualisation reverberate strongly for me and I am sure for many others. Their lives prove the old adage that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger; their survival and flourishing is an inspiration to us all.

Australians All Let Us Read Joyce

2010-01-26T21:58:00.027+11:00

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)

2010-01-11T16:49:00.029+11:00

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

2010-01-09T13:22:00.034+11:00

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...

Our Stella(r) Attraction

2009-12-31T11:45:00.025+11:00

Stella (the puppy formerly known as Odette/Beatrice/Bailey/Stephanie/Margo), December 2009

This is what TS Eliot had to say about 'The Naming of Cats' (from The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats):

The Naming of Cats

The naming of cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

...but the naming of puppies is equally hard it seems. Since we collected her from the RSPCA on Tuesday 29 December, this 8 week old brindle girl has had at least 5 different names. (If TS Eliot's theory holds true for dogs as well as cats she can probably hang on to two of those and invent one of her own). It may have bean easier if she, like most of the shelter dogs we looked at already had a name. We had toyed with adopting Jackson or Dennis and pondered at the couplings that produced Oprah and Larissa, but whatever challenges they presented, naming them would not have been one. We think the name 'Stella' has stuck, but watch this space for updates.

Stella's arrival ensures that we will be seeing the New Year in quietly at home, probably with the lovely (prerecorded) Shaun Micallef. We saw his 'Good Evening' recently; I'll comment on that in a separate post. Happy New Year, reader(s).

Gotta find out who's naughty or nice

2009-12-23T08:39:00.033+11:00

It was customary once in the lead up to Christmas to tell children that Father Christmas had been assessing their conduct over the year and good little girls and boys would receive a gift while those who had misbehaved would get a lump of coal. Hence the lyrics of Santa Claus is coming to town, 'he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake' etc.

Setting aside how annoying it is that the invention of the jolly fat guy doubles the number of omnipotent patriarchal figures judging us at Christmas time, and the fact that material reward has much more to do with Mummy's & Daddy's income than with getting your just deserts, I might just borrow from the conceit and award a few 2009 bon-bons and lumps of coal.

Firstly the coal, well Carl Sandilands obviously . 'Naughty' is too tame a word for him, 'repulsive', 'boorish', 'bigoted' - he can have a whole coal mine and a landslide - though metaphorically I think he's already got those! I'm afraid Kevin Rudd has been a bit bad too. He is showing a marked tendency to voice knee jerk opinions such as those on Bill Henson's work, and ill considered populist policies on internet censorship which earn him a lump of (clean?) coal from me as a reminder to behave better in 2010. Now little miss Kate Moss, you has been naughty with your pro anorexia uttering s so you can have coal for Chrissy too - but whether a lot - to keep you warm, or just a bit so you don't fall over trying to lift it - I am undecided.

Who would have something nice under the tree if it was up to me? Well Barack Obama has really had a bit of a bigger present than he deserves with the Nobel Peace Prize but given his humility in admitting he is not in the same category as most past winners he can get a few gift wrapped poll points from me. Generally speaking he is turning out okay and calling Kanye West a 'jackass' alone needs to be rewarded! A personal choice, Nam Le, for giving me the most memorable gift of my reading year in The Boat, I want to reciprocate. Again there has been plenty of well deserved formal recognition, but I have to say Nam Le is a prodigiously talented writer which equals being good, very good. Now a contentious choice, someone usually placed firmly in the naughty camp, John Saffran. John you were hugely courageous to publicly confront so many of your demons in Race Relations and you did it with a mixture of hilarity and poignancy that made the program compulsive viewing in this household. Have a Hannukah trinket on me!

These are just a few names, I will be making a full list and I will be checking it twice! Seasons greetings, reader(s) - doubt I'll blog again till December 26th.

The night I burned our shammy down…

2009-12-14T13:05:00.007+11:00

It was last night actually. Call me a stick-in-the-mud, or an alarmist, or both, but I have long been wary of the concept of Facebook. I worry about privacy and about being (more than usually) boring and self absorbed. My sisters have been badgering me and cajoling me for some time with invitations to become their ‘friend’ (too little too late if you ask me) and last night I succumbed. I thought I was just responding to an invitation to look at the tree changer/hugger sister’s latest pix of her renos and chooks but before I knew it I had created a Facebook account. And Facebook accounts are the Olympic flame of on-line record creation – they blaze forever and can not be extinguished – apparently!

Any way, I did not even attempt to undo what I had done. Partly because I thought there was an inevitability about what was happening, like abandoning BETA videos for VHS and learning how to use You Tube (which I did last month). But also because there IS something seductive about all these rellies and chums suddenly appearing in cosy little photographs beckoning you to ‘chat’ with them. Even as I mentally calculated the hours I might spend in this pursuit and playing scrabble with the other sister, I was being lured by the virtual, colourful intimacy that Facebook promises.

Then paranoia struck. There are some people with whom I do not want this added dimension of communication. Bad enough that they send me god-bothering, maudlin chain emails! I began to envisage them now being able to comment unbidden on any aspect of my life, sending me silly games and quizzes and links to photographs of their drunken revels and ghastly social occasions! Then there are people I really never want to have any contact with again. What if they found me on Facebook?

Although it was gone 8 pm and I was trying to organise dinner, I needed quick advice on how to block anyone in these categories. I put the chips on, started the salad and sought advice from those savvy but cavalier sisters of mine. Only one person on my blacklist has a name of the ‘John Smith’ variety so we found and blocked the others quickly. It did command my attention a bit though and I forgot I had put the frypan on for the schnitzel - until smoke assailed my nostrils. Oh, my god, (not the chips) but a tea towel and our brand new magic ‘shammy’ (faux chamois) cloth were alight. This conflagration lacked Olympian qualities though and a few flicks from another tea towel put it out. The ‘shammy’ is ruined. The dinner was very ordinary with dry and overcooked (oven) chips. The salad was unsinged and rather good...

We have to live with our mistakes. I hope joining Facebook isn’t one of mine and that I get the hang of it and use it in moderation. I know I will remain at heart a committed blogger though – it’s easier to get the tone of spontaneity just right when you can draft what you write first!

Farewell Waldorf

2009-12-05T09:32:00.023+11:00

Waldorf's time on earth was limited but he used it to his utmost.

Our bunny of less than a year, Waldorf, was last seen at 3 am last Sunday. After several short- lived attempts to join the feral rabbits over the road he succeeded in leaving his genetic legacy there about 2 weeks ago (we saw him in congress with the little brown one). Then, presumably on a return visit, he must have succumbed to a dog or fox or even an owl. There is not hide nor hare (sorry) of him to be found...

Here is his farewell song (to the tune of '*Raggle Taggle Gypsies' - with apologies to 'Trad' - oh, and he had an Irish accent)

Three bunnies stood at our front gate. They jumped so high, they jumped so low

Waldorf sat in his hutch quite late. His heart it melted away like snow

They smelt so sweet, they bounced so cute that fast his tail began to twitch

As he lay on his lucerne bed, he started to feel a ceaseless itch.

He slipped the latch of his high class hutch all made of treated wood-o

He hopped to the street all stealthy like & went out in the weather & the mud-o

Avert yer eyes, leave open the gate, to roister and frolic is my intent

I’ll ne’r return to my hoi class hutch – till I secure moi heart’s content..

So oi’m off with the raggle taggle bunnies-o! (so I am)

He hopped high and he hopped low, he scampered the length of Bellbird Street

Until he came to a neighbour’s lawn and there spied a-laydee bunny-o

She nuzzled his head, she looked in his eye, and this is what she said-o:

"What makes you leave your hutch and lucerne & your golden bunny muesli-o?

What makes you leave your human slaves to join us raggle taggle bunnies-o?"

"What care I for my hutch and lucerne? What care I for my humans-o?

What care I for my buckwheat treats? I'm off with the raggle taggle bunnies-o! (So I am)"

"Last night you slept on a fluffy towel, with a layer of lucerne spread o’er – o

Tonight you sleep in a grotty ditch along with some raggle taggle bunnies-o!"

"What care I for a fluffy towel, with a layer of lucerne spread o’er-o?

When I can sleep with a laydee bunny - the best of those raggle taggle bunnies-o!"

Farewell, Waldorf - I would never have thought a bunny could be so delightful, mischievous, clever, infuriating and loveable!

* Click here for The Chieftains version.

Why we get cynical about politicians

2009-12-04T20:31:00.033+11:00

Is it just me or has this week given us a monumental amount of evidence that most politicians are ambitious, disloyal, reactionary, self -interested, self justifying bastards? I am going to stop short of saying I feel sorry for Malcolm Turnbull. There is something about Malcolm's self assured, smirky, well-heeled persona that precludes sympathy. But for all his arrogance and sense of self righteousness he was trying to be a leader, to take a principled stand and to bring to book moronic neanderthals like Wilson Tuckey. He was clearly unsuccessful in persuading rednecks and conservatives in the Coalition that climate change is an authentic and pressing issue for the planet, and one that the electorate expects its political leaders to grapple with. Perhaps had he been more consultative or indulged the loonies just a little he could have done so. Instead the Liberal party has licensed the wonky world view of that Jesuit educated zealot, Tony Abbott. Rudd must be in 7th heaven - who in their right mind is ever going to vote for Abbott?

Below: Leunig proffered a number of candidates for federal Liberal leadership more inspiring than T. Abbot in last weekend's Herald.

In NSW the movers and shakers in the right faction of the ALP thought they'd ape the antics of the federal conservatives with death wish tactics of their own and before we even had time to recover from the national Coalition's circus act they staged a parochial one to rival it. Poor Nathan Rees (I do expend some sympathy on him). He'd shown some balls and announced the major reforms of outlawing donations from property developers and enabling the Premier to choose his own ministry only to have the thugs and bullies of the right do him to death. Does Kristina Keneally feel easy wading through all that spilled blood? How long will she last?

Firth among non equals

2009-11-27T22:07:00.012+11:00

Oh dear. It was so long since I'd been to the Dendy that my loyalty card had expired and what did I waste tonight's precious visit on? A vapid load of old bollocks called 'Genova'. Colin, Colin, Colin what were you thinking? School fees? New car? Enormous donation to your favourite charity? It is hard to imagine what could have persuaded you to grace the limona that is Genova! Grief has been done so much better (Truly Madly Deeply). Grief with sinister intimations of further tragedy has been done so much better (Don't Look Now). Ambiguous ghostly presence has been done so much better (The Others). Middle aged academic fancying younger student has been done so much better (Elegy).

I could go on and mention any film that involves a slutty anorexic American teenage girl, a parent frantically searching for a child who has wondered off or a widow/er making a fresh start in a new city. They would almost all inevitably be better than Genova which is always dull, largely cliched, often nasty and when it touches any emotions at all does so with blatant manipulation.

Colin Firth's talent is worthy of much better material and the themes the film is supposedly trying to tackle also warrant a more subtle, thoughtful vehicle. Maybe Michael Winterbottom, like Woody Allen when he made Vicki, Christina, Barcelona in that city, had to be in Genova for some reason and thought 'how can I quickly cobble together a movie set here?' Unlike Allen though being entertaining didn't seem to figure in his plans, oh, and he also ran out of film before he gave his story any kind of conclusion!

Mr Darcy incognito hoping to sleep off this unappealing project

Obituary (?) Ashes to Ashes

2009-11-24T22:27:00.011+11:00

More please!

16 part dramedy series that is born of superior original spine tingling drama starring the impeccable John Sims hath but two seasons to run and they are full of cheesiness. Lo, yet doth the viewer not become fond of Raymondo, Chris and Bolly and elevate Philip Glenister's Gene Hunt to a pedestal hitherto reserved for James Spader's Alan Shore and James Bolam's Jack Ford? Yes, she, and a few million other viewers do, apparently. Reports of Ashes to Ashes demise are greatly exaggerated! I just checked out the Official Philip Glenister site and a third series is in production! Suspending disbelief will be a very big ask indeed but for a few more serves of the Gene Genie I'm prepared to give it my best shot!

Compost loving vegetation hugger arrested!

2009-11-20T21:40:00.012+11:00

Peter Cundall was among 50 demonstrators arrested at rally held outside Tasmania's Parliament House to protest the building of a Gunn's pulp mill in the state's Tamar Valley yesterday.

Peter is one of my heroes, an all round sensitive and gentle man who appreciates and fights for the things that enrich our existence on the planet. I had the good fortune to meet him in the restaurant at Hobart's Botanic Gardens (home of 'Pete's Patch') a couple of years ago and to shake his hand and tell him what a positive influence he had been in my life and continues to be in this country.

Like David Bellamy before him, I hope this high profile 'tree hugger' garners the publicity needed to counter Tasmania's greedy, wilful sacrifice of it's exquisite natural heritage.

A domestic spy checks out

2009-11-19T22:22:00.016+11:00

Who would make a good small screen spy in late cold war Britain? Edward Woodward would!

The anti-hero of my youth has passed on. Edward Woodward died this week aged 79. Long before he was the Breaker (1980), long before he did a guest cameo in Hot Fuzz (2007) as a fanatical member of neighbourhood watch, and long before I became aware of his early success in the quirky cult classic, The Wicker Man (1973), Edward Woodward was Callan (1967-72). That is where and how I discovered him and fell for this alienated, ruthless loner, very probably a small screen version of Harry Palmer but with a safer more domestic sexuality than Michael Caine.

Those gritty credits with the swinging light bulb were the prelude to a weekly dose of angst and nastiness that held a strong and furtive appeal to my budding sexuality. What ardent 17 year
old girl doesn’t yearn for a brooding Byronic type forced by circumstances to remain lonely and unfulfilled whose troubled brow she could smooth with her caresses?

First step in learning to separate the performer from the character he played was purchasing tickets to see EW in Male of the Species at the Theatre Royal in Sydney. A newcomer to professional theatre, I was rewarded by a capable, entertaining, if not virtuosic, performance in a jolly British play that wasn't as broad as Whitehall farce a but not Orton or Bennett either! The creeping realisation also began for me that Edward Woodward was not a tortured soul but just another amiable thespian bonking his leading lady (Michele Dotrice, who became his second wife). The mystique was unique to the Callan character!

After that my obsession with EW gradually began to fade, but not until I had committed the bizarre act of spending most of the income from my first part-time job on buying his entire recording oeuvre! I've followed his career intermittently. I liked him in Common As Muck (1994-97) but completely missed him in The Equaliser (1985 – 89). I've still never seen The Wicker Man and I wasn't aware of roles in Eastenders and The Bill which I don't watch. And I actually found his bully-boy dignity in Breaker Morant a bit corny and his casting a touch of cultural cringe!

But, by all accounts, Teddy Woodward was a good natured, generous spirited, workman-like actor who was not at all up himself! Bruce Beresford and Simon Pegg say so and I have no reason to doubt them.

His death marks the end of my relationship with his Callan persona and with an era of British television that dominated my youth. It also disconcertingly reminds me that the truly alienated, lonely figure of my girlhood was my father who once barked at me in drunken self pity that I cared about Callan and his bleak existence but not about him, who, he claimed, had endured real manipulation and enforced secrecy at the hands of British intelligence. I seriously doubt he was talking about anything more than working on a defence force aircraft contract and having to sign a confidentiality agreement but the angst and regret were real.

Yes, Julian, yes!

2009-11-11T08:11:00.004+11:00

Watch the 2009 Andrew Olle Memorial Lecture delivered by Chaser Executive Producer, Julian Morrow last Sunday evening. He is very witty and also makes good sense.

High Tea in Kingsgrove

2009-11-08T20:52:00.024+11:00

The petits fours after we had tucked in.

Blackamoor Confectioner and Tea Rooms on Kingsway, Kingsgrove was mentioned in the Herald a few weeks ago as a hidden gem. My husband surprised me with booking high tea there for my birthday this week.

The place is amazing! Like a portal into another world, completely at odds with the surrounding post WW2 suburb. It occupies one of Kingsgrove's few terrace houses and is a series of little rooms decorated in broadly French provincial style but incorporating china, mirrors, books, prints and clocks from the 19th, 20th and 21st century as well as some Dali references. The main room is festooned with swathes of orange and aquamarine chiffon.

We were the only patrons.

High tea started with champagne then we were brought a two tier stand of mouth watering savouries and sandwiches (including the obligatory cucumber). There was a short interval and we had a pot of Russian Caravan tea and more tiny sweet pastries & confections (including fresh raspberries and cream and tiny lemon meringue tarts). Everything was freshly made on the premises and completely delicious. There was much more than we could eat. When my husband sheepishly asked for a 'doggy bag' we were assured that no-one has ever been able to finish the spread!

At $47 a head our high tea was as expensive as a meal out but worth it for the experience and the ambience of Blackamoor's. A cheaper delight can be had by purchasing their exquisite hand made chocolates!

Sculpture By The Sea

2009-11-03T22:24:00.007+11:00

We finally got there after years of meaning to. We went late, at twilight, and darkness descended before we saw everything, but it was exhilarating to experience such a diversity of imaginative works against the back drop of the ocean!

Double the points, double the oppression!

2009-10-30T21:58:00.018+11:00

My son the geek says there is an explosion in the numbers of middle aged on-line gamers. Second life has had a lot of publicity and I can see the allure of a virtual world where you can be spectacularly rich or attractive or achieving. What staggers me though is something a colleague told me she is spending 2 to 3 hours a night playing. It's called HK Cafe and here are its Engrish instructions on how to play:

Cook the food as people order as quick as possible.
If food is not done and being drag out it has to be throw to the rubbish bin and cook again. $50 will be deducted for wastage.
Once food is drag on the plate/bowl, you can not move them no more. If you want to change to other combination, throw the whole plate/bowl to rubbish bin and cook again.
If people getting angry $100 will be deducted.

Is it just me or does this sound a tad demoralising? Remember the 'politics of housework'? In a 1988 article on the topic in The New Internationalist Debbie Taylor argues that 'women are trained to take care of their loved ones' and that 'domestic labour has become fused in our minds with love' which no-one wants to set a limit on, and that housework is by its very nature a Sisyphaen labour, that a 'woman's work' is literally never done.

If the food in HK cafe 'is not done' off it goes into the garbage and you start again. You don't even get the satisfaction that the family is sated until the next meal time! Once food is on the plate/bowl, 'you can not move them no more' - talk about the washing up from hell! And rubbing your diners up the wrong way costs you $100 so no scope to be a Basil Fawlty here!

Perhaps I am drawing a long bow to equate a simulated hospitality industry game with thankless domestic labour but give me Scrabble and a meal with real people in a real cafe any day!

The elusive holy grail for caffeine fanciers

2009-10-30T15:41:00.014+11:00

Saw The Graham Norton Show last night and giggled at David Mitchell's blast against coffee obsessives. It was really funny but I thought perhaps a bit hyperbolic until I got in the lift at work this morning.

A man and woman, clearly work colleagues, were engrossed in a coffee appreciation dialogue as follows:

Petite well groomed woman (PWGW) looking up at lanky colleague holding paper cup:Where do you get your coffee?

Lanky authoritative man (LAM) nursing lidded paper cup of coffee: I go to that little place in Campbell Street, not the really trendy looking one, their coffee is undrinkable...

PWGW: Oh so, you go the place on the corner? Is their coffee good?

LAM: Yeah, the place just near the corner. The African woman who used to work there made really good coffee; there's a French guy there now and he's not quite as good.

PWGW: Really an African barista? She made good coffee then?

LAM: Well, I drink long blacks and half the time they just give you this watery stuff... See this one (inviting her to peek under the plastic lid of his cup) you can still just see the creme. On a proper long black the creme should last for at least 3 minutes, there's just a hint still there....

You get the idea - I had to alight at that point.

Just googled a few Surry Hills cafe reviews. One referred to 'Melbourne-style coffee' and another one said to try and catch a day when George was there as he was the better barista. So David Mitchell is right, almost all of middle class western society appears to be obsessed with the search for 'real' coffee and can elucidate it's quest endlessly.

For years our kids have teased us about our need to find somewhere that has 'decent' coffee whenever we're out or on holidays so mea culpa too I suppose.

So random

2009-10-22T15:11:00.017+11:00

Hester 1996 - 2009

Life is 'like so random'. In our sorrow at losing Cassie we were taking comfort in still having Hester, our brindle staffie who was three years Cassie's junior. But as John Lennon sang shortly before the cosmos threw a bit of a surprise his and Yoko's way: 'Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans' (Beautiful Boy 1980).

This week, in a matter of 4 days, Hester went from giving us some concern about her lethargy and weight loss to joining Cassie under a shrub (a grevillea) at the end of our garden. Intestinal adenocarcinoma with lymphatic invasion. She had the good grace to go to sleep of her own accord - at about 1 am this morning. We are polaxed. Enough already.

Postscript: Got some great comments on this to my personal email here's my favourite:

Sorry about the dog, but I'm not much of a pet person. At least your life will be simpler.

Hey, I wrote a long poem on the death of our canary in 1970. It does hurt. And if it doesn't, it should.

Right Neighbourly

2009-10-17T21:55:00.017+11:00

There was a very assertive rap at the door this morning. At first I thought it was our neighbour from across the road seeking redress for my perfunctory call on them of the previous afternoon complaining about their kids’ pranks. (More about that later).

But no, it was two Jehovah’s witnesses with accents like the restaurateur in ‘Lady and the Tramp’. Their conservative suits and the copies of The Watchtower they flourished gave them away before the older of the two told us that he had ‘a vair-ee e-special a-message’ for us. I was sitting at the table eating my cereal, my unruly slept-on new hairstyle protruding maniacally from my skull (more about that later) and my husband made it to the door before me. Before the ‘vair-ee e-special a-message’ could be delivered he informed our visitors that we were a household of atheists. ‘You donor looka like atheists’ replied Jehovah’s Witness senior just before wishing us a ‘nice-a day’ as the door swung closed on him, his colleague and their publications.

What do atheists look like? we wondered. Admittedly I look nothing like Julianne Moore or Uma Thurman, two of the more prominent contemporary female atheists (more’s the pity). My spouse does however share facial hairstyle preferences with Hemingway and Darwin! Perhaps he just meant we didn’t have obvious horns or cloven hooves!

I am a person who earns her living in the world of personal development. I usually pride myself on taking a win-win approach to conflict resolution and not subduing the other party with bombast. What price my principles? The detonation of six ‘fart bombs’ on our front veranda it would seem! The little wretches over the road have been regularly setting off these putrid things outside our front door for the past two weeks. Usually I’ve only heard about it after I got home from work and although we’d started collecting the wrappers as evidence I was never home to catch them in the act. Our son had, and chased them for a block a few days ago. On Friday the little imps failed to connect the presence of my car in our driveway with my presence in the house. Early afternoon came the ‘pop’ sound that my kids tell me heralds the emission of the rotten egg gas and then the farty discharge itself. White splashes on our tiles also accompanied the eruption.

I sped across the street fuelled by indignation, knocked very hard and repeatedly on their door and when it opened, blurted out ‘Can you tell your kids to stop letting off joke shop fart bombs on our veranda? Once we might consider a joke but not six times!’ The poor woman’s smiling face crumpled and she said ‘Yes, yes, I’ll tell them’ and went in. I heard her ‘balling them out’ seconds later. My kids were delighted and suggested that I do present as a tad formidable in full flight. Perhaps I can harness this righteous fury to help in the battle against global warming or whaling ‘for research purposes’ next.

Oh, the haircut. I have thin greying hair and a fat face. I do not have anyone giving my tresses the daily attention that Julia Gillard and Juanita Phillips so clearly enjoy. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve decided that a short layer cut is the only practical coiffure for me. Last week I succumbed to delusion again and asked to have it left longer, in a sort’ve bob. (My fantasy is to have hair like Betty Churcher). No amount of fiddling and ‘product’ replicates the way it looked when I left the salon and after sleep I resemble Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges). Vanity, vanity all is vanity! More on foil foibles and the politics of greying in a future blog posting!

Snorty little secret

2009-10-08T13:11:00.068+11:00

A few weeks before poor old Cass went for her big sleep I went for a sleep study. My family has commented on my snoring over the past 18 months, I wake several times a night, hardly ever feel rested in the mornings and take every opportunity to have an early night or an afternoon nap. I mentioned this to my GP and she wrote me a referral. The study involved an overnight stay at a sleep laboratory, the Woolcock Centre, Glebe. I chose a Friday night because I expected to feel pretty washed out the next day and didn't want to have to front up to work. As the doctor I saw today maintained I slept for 6 hours (not the 2 it felt like) that may have been a self fulfilling prophecy.

Before I left work on the night of the study I mentioned where I was going and a colleague said she ought to go to a sleep lab, that she knew she stopped breathing several times a night and was too scared to have a day time snooze in case she did so permanently. I immediately felt like a complete alarmist as my symptoms are trivial compared to hers. I had to check in at 7 pm - not enough time to go home and cook dinner first so I convinced my husband and daughter it would be nice to have a meal in Glebe. We cut it fine and I had some trouble getting access to the Woolcock Centre carpark, so we opted for a restaurant a few doors away.

The dashing waiter (he had a waxed moustache and new romantic ringlets a la Adam Ant) asked why we needed to be out in a hurry and I told him what I was doing. 'Why?' he enquired 'I snore' I replied. 'In that case, I should book in' he said as he topped up my merlot ('to help you sleep') and confided that he snores so badly his wife regularly exiles him to the couch.

At 7.10 my family farewelled me as if I was about to undergo serious surgery not sit in an Ikea style visitors' lounge sipping green tea until a delightful Indian research student ushered me to a comfortable bedroom (with en suite) to start the first phase of my wiring up. Mohatma (I'll call her that to protect her identity and because I can't recall her actual name) could not have been clearer, more considerate or thorough. After attaching the first set of wires she suggested I might like to go and relax in the lounge. Glancing at my tendril exuding reflection in the mirror I said it might be hard for me to relax in a public setting looking as I did. We were all in the same boat Mohatma said, so there was no need to feel self consciousness. Off I boldly went. During my 3/4 hour in front of the huge plasma screen watching an SBS doco on Robert J Oppenheimer only 2 of the other 'inmates' scurried in and hurriedly departed. Clearly looking like a pasty complexioned, pyjama -clad android in the repair shop themselves or thinking I was one does inhibit social interaction!

At about 8.45 Mohatma summoned me for my final wiring. It was basically as depicted here but a bit more intrusive as I also had electrodes gummed onto my scalp and taped to my arms and legs, belts around my chest and midriff and a peg thing on one finger of my left hand. My hair was definitely a tad mussed up too - not like this guy's smooth coiff.

At 9.50, when I was all plugged in, Mohatama went to the observation room down the corridor to check she was getting readings. She asked me to raise first one leg then the other, each of my arms in turn, to look up, down, right and left and to blink, then, apparently satisfied, she popped back to bid me good night and explain that the microphone in the room would pick up any calls for assistance during the night.

When I called out 3 times seeking permission to swap the peg thingy from my pinkie (where it was pinching) to my middle finger and was unheeded, I took the initiative and swapped it myself. Luckily nothing else required their intervention overnight. I managed to avoid a visit to the loo (which would have required some unplugging) but did need to take ibuprofen for back pain (that mattress really agreed with me though, I woke up twinge free, must check what it was). I was woken up promptly at 6 from what I thought was my only episode of deep sleep. As I was unaware of any snoring and my mouth felt decidedly undrooly I felt I had spent quite an atypical night and that they would learn nothing or I would be pronounced just a bit restless or stressed.

After being sprayed with delightful jets of tepid water to un-gum my attachments I was allowed a shower and was released. By 7 I was on the road home. I noticed how many denizens of Glebe were already up and about at dawn. Perhaps they have trouble sleeping?

Well today I got to hear the results of the study and got a diagnosis of mild sleep apnoea. No mouthgards or breathing apparatus recommended at this stage but my weight and alcohol consumption definitely under scrutiny. I don't know if I was in denial before or hoped for a 'magic bullet', but I feel rather despondent. Perhaps that's why people endure appalling quality sleep and don't get the study done. They won't have to confront their unhealthy habits!

If the mere mention of what I was doing elicited poor sleep confessions from 2 people (and I've since heard more sleep stories), how many people have a snorty little secret I wonder?

Postscript: the stories keep on coming. One friend literally did not sleep a wink for his sleep study but then dozed off after he was told he could leave and was woken by the cleaners that afternoon! Another is on her second breathing machine and has slept with a mask for years! It seems people talk about almost anything else they do in bed but their sleep habits are taboo!

The Big Sleep

2009-09-27T10:12:00.020+10:00

Cassie. She was 15. A good dog.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable:

Sleep (Anglo-Saxon slaepen).

To sleep off. To get rid of by sleep.

To sleep away. To pass away in sleep, to consume in sleeping; as, to sleep one's life away.

To sleep on a matter. To let a decision on it stand until tomorrow.

To put to sleep. Commonly used as a euphemism for painlessly putting to death pet animals.

We had our aged staffy, Cassie 'put to sleep' on Friday afternoon. That is she received a lethal overdose of anaesthetic and died swiftly and hopefully peacefully.

We are fortunate that we can exercise this judgement in relation to elderly, unwell dogs and cats. Anyone who has watched humans suffer the final stages of cancer would have at least considered the desirability of such an option.

There was no moral conundrum for us but that still didn't make it particularly easy. Cassie timed things well - her rapid decline occurred on the afternoon of the last day of the working week. We got home from the vet's surgery with her at about 5 pm so there was no digging in savage sunlight. The only hiccup was an unfortunately timed phone call from my employer hoping that everything was 'okay'. We buried her in the still twilight (luckily there were none of the wild winds that have characterised many of the last few days). Her plot is home to a fragrant boronia we bought at the nursery 5 days ago without this destination in mind. My green thumbed sister says boronias are notoriously hard to grow so it may not be her long term memorial shrub.

All in all not a bad death. We feel sad and drained and I have been doing quite a lot of 'sleeping it off' however endorphins from aquarobics and sympathetic hugs from the aqua women and from my dog walker/book group friends and reminiscing with the family about Cassie's traits and adventures have all helped. No 'anger' stage of grief with this one!

Sometimes I've read a poem or piece of prose or a song lyric when saying goodbye graveside to a pet (we've said a few goodbyes over 34 years) but Cass needs no other epitaph than this quote from my son's Facebook posting for that evening:

Just buried (my) dog of 12 years, Cassie. She was 15. A good dog.

Damn Spot is outed

2009-09-16T20:24:00.018+10:00

The canine bard in authentic Elizabethan garb

Debate has long existed about whether William Shakespeare is actually the author of the many plays (and presumably poems) attributed to him. It is generally asserted that a village boy who left school at 15 would not have had the vocabulary or the knowledge of the classics, the sciences and humanities that his canon displays. Rival candidates usually cited are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Dead white males all! In 'A Room of One's Own' Virginia Woolfe posited a genius sister for Shakespeare, who perished in anonymity because of the circumstances an Elizabethan woman of letters would have faced. But no-one has gone beyond questioning the sexism of assuming Shakespeare was a man to consider whether he or she was human at all!

Now with the discovery in rural NSW of The First Bonio any doubt about where the foundation stone of the British literary tradition originated has vanished! This precious manuscript was found in 2004 lining an abandoned kennel in Gulargambone when the community embarked on the massive clean up that won it that year's Tidy Town award. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that 'Shakespeare's' works are by a dog!

Just consider these titles:

All's Well That Smells Well
Julius Schnauzer
Muckbreath
Two Cattledogs of Verona
As You Lick It
Prince, Great Dane of Hamlet
Corgi Ole Anus
A Midsummer Night's Walkies
The Distempest
Measure for Muzzle
The Taming of the Shi-tszu
Love's Labrador Lost and
Richard the Turd

Only arrogant human plagiarism explains how they have been mis-attributed for so long! It's time to laud the doggy bard, Wilhelmina Wagtail, not to view her as 'a beast that wants discourse of reason' but to acknowledge her thusly:

What a piece of work is dog! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable.
In action how like a wolf. In apprehension how like a dog. A dab paw with the thesaurus.
The paragon of animals!

Living Rock Aquarium & Tailoring

2009-09-15T12:56:00.002+10:00

The Campsie/Canterbury area where I live is highly multicultural and burgeons with the enterprise of immigrants. Earlwood shops cover every facet of the bridal industry: bombonerie, page boy & flower girl outfitters, florists, solariums, manicurists and businesses offering deluxe wedding photography and video packages. It also has two serious Greek Tavernas. Campsie has halal butchers and Turkish coffee and nut shops, Vietnamese bakeries and Fijian grocers as well as purveyors of saris, sushi, kebabs, Indian spices and DVDs and twee kids' fashions from Taiwan &Hong Kong.

Canterbury Road specialises in appealing to renovators and petrol heads with most automotive services offered, car dealerships inBMWs, minis and Japanese imports and three car seat cover businesses. It has lighting, plumbing and tile emporiums aplenty and shops selling both new and second hand furniture.Ausland Furniture is not, as I first thought, a store specialising in furniture for the deaf, but one that sells the flashy bedroom suites and gigantic ceramic leopards beloved of some of our middle eastern neighbours.

However, by far the most original experiment in commerce on Canterbury Road was Living Rock Aquarium and Tailoring where in a single visit you could be measured for a bespoke suit and pick up a couple of guppies for your lounge room tank. This combined business lasted for about two years until piscatorial supply nudged out budget couture and we now need to go a bit further to get a pair of pants altered. The tropical fish business has also relocated but the sign proudly announcing this bold entrepreneurial venture remains. See photo below (we have enhanced it a bit).

We are abject - we can no longer order a suit and top up our aquarium at Canterbury's one-stop supplier of tailoring services and tropical fish.

Post script: If you go looking for the original Living Rock Aquarium & Tailoring sign you will be disappointed. It was painted over a week after I posted this!

TOFU SNAFU

2009-09-05T20:16:00.016+10:00

Tonight I made my first attempt to cook tofu. I decided my stir fry needed a bit of protein and that defrosting chicken fillets would take too long. We had a packet of tofu in the fridge from when one of the kids' vegetarian friends came to stay that I thought would be just the ticket. Don't be fooled into believing that tofu's bland appearance and taste infer simple preparation! A site called vegetarian.about.com provides a helpful video that stresses that before you do anything with tofu you need to squeeze all the moisture out of it. Their recommended method is putting it on paper towel with a board and two tins of tomatoes on top of it. However, in my case this method did not result in a neat rubbery block like the man in the video held to camera but more of a white squishy mess reminiscent of cottage cheese but gelatinous! I did use tins of soup, not tomatoes, so that may have been my mistake...

Appearance isn't everything so I soldiered on and attempted to fry fragments of the mess in the wok in sesame oil with ginger and garlic. The tofu did not go brown & firm like those perversely yummy wettex-like lumps you find in laksa. It stayed basically the same except that it was now covered in tiny specks of burnt ginger and garlic! Oh, well taste is the ultimate test so I tried some. Yuck! It was pretty much how I imagine mixing warm cooking oil with plain yoghurt would taste. It went in the compost and I defrosted the chicken!

I am completely open to critiques of my method and hints for future attempts but in the mean time the only tofu I will be eating will be cooked by experts in Asian restaurants!

If I could be you, and you could be me...

2009-08-17T20:54:00.068+10:00

Above: Everyone's favourite doppelgangers (and such sound genetic science!) 'identical cousins' - Patty & Cathy.

Alter egos, parallel universes, out of body experiences - there has been something of a recurring theme in my telly viewing over the past two weeks.

Starting with 'Drop Dead Diva' in which the 'soul' (for want of a better word) of bimbo model Deb, gets a second chance to make something of her life in the body of lawyer Jane who is on the operating table having just taken a bullet for her adulterous boss. The twist is that while shallow Deb is a toned, blonde size 8 slinking about in a body hugging sheath of a dress, Jane is a fat, virtually make-up less supposed frump who, despite an addiction to self help books, is quite intelligent and gives a damn. I was ready to be un-amused but did find it mildly entertaining. I'd probably give it a second go if it didn't clash with 'Ashes to Ashes' (see below). The 'net is full of reports about its poor ratings and imminent axing so a third chance may be out of the question.

Now 'Ashes to Ashes'* is not 'Life on Mars' II. Except that's exactly what it is of course but sans John Sim and sans the wonderful poignancy and unease that gave the hairs of the back of my neck and my tear ducts a regular work out. This time the protagonist is female, DI Alex Drake, and she goes back in time to 1982. And who does she encounter but the still delightfully un-PC Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and his team, now based in London. It isn't 'Life On Mars', but it does get you in, not least because of the sassy and sarcastic commentary Alex (Keeley Hawes) maintains on what she assumes is a shock-induced fantasy world and then there's all the lovingly fabricated 80s popular culture references. Think I'll stick with it - which, I've just read in the Herald Guide, means sticking with 2 series and 16 episodes!

'Wire In The Blood' has been transplanted too, but not just from north to south England, it's gone stateside, to Texas to be precise (shamelessly evoking Ry Cooder's music at every opportunity). The formula had started to get a bit tired in gritty old serial killer capital of the UK, if not the world, Bradfield, and is really just a bit too wheezy and predictably gratuitous now. Robson Green is milking his Tony Hill character to get every last drop out of the franchise but at least he is still Tony Hill and it isn't a ghastly US remake a la The Office, Kath & Kim etc (Wikipedia has a list of US remakes - it is telling how many say 'cancelled after 2 episodes' or 'pilot only made' - Kirstie Alley as the Vicar of Dibley, pulease!)

'Our' Toni Collette gives a virtuoso performance as Buck, Alice and T, multiple personalities (or manifestations of dissociative identity disorder as we've all learnt to correctly call the condition) of the eponymous heroine of 'United States of Tara'. I feared this Spielberg produced series might be smugly & self consciously 'out there' but in fact it achieves a directness and believability in its dialogue and situations rare in US TV productions. It reminds me of Spielberg's early films like 'Poltergeist' where family dynamics and conversations were so authentic. I believe this is down to Diablo Cody, the screen writer, whose work I haven't seen before but will look out for in future. The support cast is all excellent especially Keir Gilchrist as Tara's knowing, gay son Marshall. He gets my award for TV quote of the season: "I think I know my literary boners" asserting his interpretation of an E M Forster (I think) novel to his English teacher in class.

The silliest ever showcase for comedy actors to show off and explore alternate versions of themselves remains 'Red Dwarf'. I caught one of the 'Ace Rimmer' episodes last night where Chris Barrie gets to be marginally attractive (if also a bit of a 'smug git') as an Indiana Jones type hero for a few scenes. This classic sci-fi spoof has explored the concept of parallel universes and different realities in many episodes perhaps most strikingly in 'Parallel Universe' where the crew meet alternate versions of themselves: the analogues of Lister, Rimmer and Holly are female and they inevitably hook up with their counterparts, while the Cat is revolted by his alternate, a scruffy dog lacking all grace and finesse.

My absolute favourite out of the body, walk a mile in my (high heeled) shoes, psyche swapping, gender bending TV comedy drama though has to be 'Boy Meets Girl'. In this ITV series a man's and woman 's identities get transposed by a freak lightning strike. I just love it! Rachael Stirling deserves a BAFTA or three for a knockout performance as Veronica Burton, a yuppy fashion journalist suddenly 'inhabited' by morose, breakfast cereal addicted, conspiracy theorist, Danny Reed. Martin Freeman (already doing a lovely job of voicing Danny's thoughts trapped inside Veronica) will no doubt get to flex his acting muscles a bit more in coming episodes. I can't wait!

*Footnote: Having been an incredibly daggy teen I didn't know that 'Ashes to Ashes', like 'Life on Mars', takes its title (and its recurrent clown figure imagery) from a David Bowie song & video clip. I only learned as much on this week's 'Spicks & Specks'! A spooky Mulder coincidence or a triumph of cross promotion?

Buy polar bears

2009-08-08T21:59:00.025+10:00

Just for a change, instead of talking about my pets, I’m going to talk about an important toy animal. Brumas is a toy polar bear cub I’ve had all my life. I’ve just dug out a picture of me (above) with him taken when I was about 3 (so around 1959). He must have been given to me at birth or soon after as Brumas toys would only have been on the market for a few years.

Created in 1949 to commemorate the birth, at Regents Park Zoo, London, of the first baby polar bear successfully reared in the UK, these toys were one of the earliest instances of a public institution merchandising its attractions. (Brumas holds the record for bringing the most visitors to the zoo in any one year of its existence, 3 million people!) Research reveals that Brumas shaped soaps were common Christmas presents in 1950 and that Brumas and Mum, Ivy featured on advertising posters for Fox's Glacier mints!

'Brumas' is a portmanteau word combining the names of two of her keepers, Bruce and Sam. The cub was initially misreported as male in the media. In those pre -feminist days even when the mistake was corrected (see Pathe News announcing her actual gender with a series of quaint anthropomorphic gags) no-one really took much notice, so my Brumas remained 'he'.

The zoo was a favourite haunt of mine so I may have been taken to see the real Brumas, I don't remember. It would have had to have been before I was 3 because by the time this photograph was taken the real Brumas was dead. She only lived until 1958.

My Brumas has endured partly because he has been loved and treasured and importantly because my husband was kind enough to have him restored at the Dolls' Hospital in Kingsgrove for my 40th birthday!

And the moral to that is...

2009-07-21T20:34:00.029+10:00

So much for that pretentious rave about Candide/Voltaire. The refrain "You have been a fool and so have I" still applies - we had learned nothing until life imitated art! We just spent $1k plus to send our 14 yr old to a Department of Sport and Rec winter camp at which she lasted a mere 48 hours of the intended 7 days! Too depressing to relate the details here but the morals to be drawn from this experience are:

never select an activity reactively - because you think you ought to or because all the other kids are doing it; ask is it right for my kid?
don't dismiss your empathy/gut feeling about issues like homesickness, feeling they don't fit in etc; if you believe that's how you would have felt at 14 there's a good chance that's how your offspring will feel
don't use your child's life to try to expiate/redress shortcomings in your own childhood
don't clutter up school holidays with elaborate plans - just hanging out is all important
often planting a veggie garden and visiting the local pool are more satisfying than expensive junkets.

So, neither pure, nor wise, nor good, and $1K the poorer, we'll tend our home and prune our trees, we'll make our newly established veggie garden grow, we'll relish each others' company and that of our little furry charges and do the best we know.

`Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. `Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.' And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice's side as she spoke.

Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was VERY ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her chin upon Alice's shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.

`The game's going on rather better now,' she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.

`'Tis so,' said the Duchess: `and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"'

`Somebody said,' Alice whispered, `that it's done by everybody minding their own business!'

`Ah, well! It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, `and the moral of THAT is--"Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."'

`How fond she is of finding morals in things!' Alice thought to herself.

Chapter 9, Alice in Wonderland

Non sequiter: check out these wonderfully altered episodes of the classic anime series Yugioh. My son introduced me to them today. They are really funny!

On being human

2009-07-12T09:31:00.011+10:00

Voltaire is my kind of guy. I am ashamed to admit I haven't read 'Candide' but it's adaptation as a musical by Leonard Bernstein is a delight!

Here's the finale, 'Make Our Garden Grow' which is the characters' conclusion, after all sorts of tragic, fantastical and testing ordeals, that all we really have is this flawed existence and we should try our best to be good and productive:

CANDIDE
You've been a fool
And so have I,
But come and be my wife.
And let us try,
Before we die,
To make some sense of life.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
And make our garden grow.

CUNEGONDE
I thought the world
Was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But, now I'll teach
My hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

CANDIDE AND CUNEGONDE
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
And make our garden grow.

(ensemble enters in gardening gear and a cow walks on)

CANDIDE, CUNEGONDE, MAXIMILLIAN, PAQUETTE, OLD LADY, DR. PANGLOSS
Let dreamers dream
What worlds they please
Those Edens can't be found.
The sweetest flowers,
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

ENSEMBLE (a cappella)
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!

To me this is not only Voltaire's damning of Dr Pangloss's foolish philosophy of optimism (that we live in 'the best of all possible worlds') but an antidote to religion's promise of a sublime hereafter and to man-made hierarchies of worth.

A bit of on-line research and I've found out that Voltaire was not an atheist but there's no doubt that his championing of reason and civil rights and his rejection of nationalism and a corrupt church and aristocracy make him a founder member of the secular humanist team that I bat for.

And on the subject of being human, with all the tedium, pain and ecstasy the condition implies, check out 'Being Human' - refreshing, clever and stylish television with a level of enlightenment I think Voltaire would condone. It's writer, Toby Whithouse, has done for my relationship with werewolves and vampires what Annie Proulx did vis a vis cowboys!

Mrs Slocombe’s pussy - more than just 9 lives!

2009-07-06T20:37:00.009+10:00

Vale Mollie Sugden who left us at the respectable age of 86 last week. Hearing about it on the radio news I commented on her passing and my daughter asked ‘how come everyone is dying?’ An impression she had gained from the reported deaths of Farah, Michael, Karl Malden and Mollie within a few short days more than from the 140 or so casualties in rioting Xinjiang which have received rather less coverage.

I don’t know how many members of the show business world pass on in a typical week but it does seem like it’s been a bit of a bonanza for the eulogy writers lately! Of course these 4 celebs are not all from the deep end of the talent pool. It seems universally acknowledged that MJ was the ‘King’ of Pop and that Mr Malden put a few high quality performances on celluloid before paddling in the shallows with American Express and The Streets of San Francisco. Ms Fawcett seems to have been considered a ‘nice person’ who endured a lot of suffering with cancer but I can’t actually recall ever seeing her do any (good) acting.

Now, Mollie Sugden is a different phenomenon altogether. Graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she may have been, but her cult status rested firmly and solely on her creation of Mrs Slocombe in "Are You Being Served?"

This joyously contrived, formulaic, smutty tour de force of stock characters enjoyed an initial seven year run and then countless re-runs and brought John Inman and Mollie Sugden adulation of the sort today enjoyed by the Little Britain artistes. Which is fitting as they further immortalised Mollie in a series of sketches where David Walliams (in drag) insists loudly in public on every possible occasion that she was Mollie Sugden’s bridesmaid. I believe there is an episode in which Mollie herself contradicts this. I will have to Google it.

Mrs Slocombe’s haughty demeanour, frequently fraying to expose some North Country vulgarity, her hair, bigger and more wisteria coloured than Dame Edna’s at the time, and her undying solicitousness for her ‘pussy’ were all hallmarks of the ultimate pantomime dame. But, as a real woman, rejoicing in projecting a self parodying persona, she won genuine affection from audiences.

Her ‘pussy’ will of course remain immortal – it is already enshrined in the title of Stuart Jeffries’ excellent book of reminiscences about British telly between the 60s and the 90s. Its plight, whether ‘frozen solid’, ‘soaking wet’ or ‘tearing at the walls’ because she is late home, will be referred to for years to come. See http://tvblips.dailyradar.com/video/mrs_slocombe_s_pussy/ for a compilation.

Ladies Who Lunge

2009-06-28T20:21:00.004+10:00

This blog is one place for me to process everything that occurs in my weekly round. Another is my aquarobics class. We women of a certain age (approx 35 – 55) gather a couple of times a week to keep up our fitness and to pool observations (sorry about the pun) on everything from health, travel, kids, cooking, theatre, botox and bereavement. Today’s topics obviously included Michael Jackson and the fate of the two Prince Michaels, I and II (aka ‘Blanket’), and Paris. We didn’t get much past ‘it’s the kids I feel sorry for’ and acknowledgement of what a sad and twisted life the undoubtedly hugely talented MJ led. Our discussions, constrained as they are by vigorous gyrations, are necessarily succinct. Today the ‘lunge’ and the scissor kick featured prominently…

A virus and other commitments have kept me from my aquarobics classes for almost a fortnight and I forgot how energised and just damn good I feel after them. Today I have caught a rabbit, pruned vines, vacuumed, walked the dogs, done and hung out 3 loads of washing, cooked roast beef and Yorkshire pud and am just about to tackle the ironing while watching ‘Marple’ as they have pretentiously retitled ‘Miss Marple’. I must say Julia McKenzie is doing a sterling job! I thought Geraldine Mckewan was a bit shrill or overly penetrating. I ADORED Joan Hickson. It must be one of those roles that is such a gift almost any actress makes a good fist of it. I can’t remember how Margaret Rutherford did (more eccentric than any recent casting) but undoubtedly she was delightful too. There’s something about the nostalgia and elegance of the Christie milieu – David Suchet is superb as Poirot and I was quite distressed to see him in a contemporary role recently, body hair rampantly apparent.

Oh well, time to tap the last vestiges of that lunge-induced energy and clear up from dinner before basking in the all star ensemble of tonight’s ‘Marple’.

Woman obsessed with rabbits?

2009-06-20T13:18:00.008+10:00

It has been brought to my attention that some of my readers (well, 2 work colleagues in particular) think I am a woman obsessed with rabbits because of the number of times Waldorf features in this blog and in my conversation. Now while I am very concerned with Waldorf's welfare (he’s got out again as I type this), I am not a woman obsessed with rabbits, Miriam Sakewitz is a woman obsessed with rabbits!

An Associated Press story reproduced in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald (19 June 2009) states that Miriam Sakewitz was arrested in a hotel room in Oregon with more than a dozen rabbits, eight adults and half a dozen babies, ‘some caged, some roaming’.

The story went on to say that she had a history of consorting with bunnies and had been arrested in 2007 for living with more than 250 rabbits ‘in squalid conditions’. In a plea deal she was released but forbidden to have the animals for five years. She was arrested four months later when, unable to endure such privation, she stole back one of her pets from a holding pen.

Presumably she is now sans lapins and in ‘the pen’ herself!

I am fond of animals, there is no denying it. In my time I have raised mice and kittens by dropper and taken in stray cats and dogs either as additions to our household or until we could find homes for them. Since becoming a parent nurturing my children and our pets has probably taken on new dimensions. However, rabbits do not have pride of place in my menagerie. I had 2 as a child and they were antisocial, unpleasant creatures that kicked me incessantly. I was quite pleased when they escaped!

Perhaps it is time I profiled the staffies and the moggies in my blog?

Alice/Miriam trying to self actualise by chasing the white rabbit!

Grasshopper Comes A Cropper

2009-06-10T19:33:00.021+10:00

I am spoiled for choice! I was going to write about The Chaser's 'Make A Reasonable Wish' sketch (or 'skit' as some commentators insist on calling it) and indeed I have just heard on the ABC news that the manager who passed it for broadcast has been stood down, possibly after being named and shamed on Media Watch on Monday night. But rivalling that lapse in the immaculate good taste The Chaser usually displays was the story that broke on the weekend of John Carradine's unfortunate demise by his own hand in a Bangkok hotel room.

Left: The media was more of a friend to David Carradine in the 70s.

'There's nowt queer as folk' as my Yorkshire countrymen used to exclaim before their native wisdom was appropriated by the makers of first a UK and then a US series about gay people. What they meant is that truth is stranger than fiction especially when it comes to imagining bizarre human behaviour. Why the SMH and that crappy freebie MX newspaper feel free to publish allegations about Carradine's cross dressing and sado-masochistic predilections but kept relatively schtum about what Michael Hutchence might have been into is anyone's guess. Was the INXS singer more deserving of our reverence than Grasshopper himself? Anyway, even though his demise was not very zen, he died at 72 years of age still clearly in full & vigorous command of his faculties and probably feeling fairly euphoric! We could all do worse!

Ground control to Major Tom: you've lost us!

2009-05-31T20:36:00.019+10:00

Our weekend has revolved around seeking medical and veterinary attention for our daughter and our rabbit respectively. Thankfully neither has swine flu!

Our bunny, Waldorf, has a torn ear and has been inoculated against myxomatosis and the calicivirus; our daughter has tonsillitis, had a severe migraine and has had a penicillin injection! Waldorf hopped the coop on Friday and was missing in hellish cold rainy weather for hours. We only recovered him, bloody eared, from a neighbour’s garden 5 minutes before the last episode of the US version of ‘Life On Mars’ was shown at 10.30 pm.

He must have squeezed out under the side gate (and grazed his ear in the process) at about 9.15 that morning when I left for work. Then, unbeknown to us, he had roamed the street – being spied by various neighbours throughout the day - and finally made his way to the house over the road (where Lesley came from and where 2 of Lesley’s siblings still roam free) in search of company and a chance to do what bunnies do best.I wondered, if cats have 9 lives, how many do rabbits have? It would have to be fewer I think and he is courting disaster by breaking out like that. My husband took him to the vet for the aforementioned inoculations and to have his ear tended to on Saturday morning

Within about an hour of his return to the bosom of the family our daughter was suffering visual disturbances and searing pain in her head that no kind of analgesia would touch. 1 GP visit and 1 penicillin injection later she was still in great pain and it was RPA Emergency here we come. It was 8.30 pm when her dehydration was finally overcome and the series of painkillers I’d administered earlier kicked in. My husband went in search of fish and chips which was what she fancied after eating virtually nothing all day. We consumed them while ‘Mr Blandings Buil(t) His Dream House’ (on ABC2) for the umpteenth time! Today she is feeling much better and Waldorf has been hiding under the house all day in protest at our curtailing his love life.

Shame about the ending of the US ‘Life On Mars’ – although not in the same league as its British inspiration we had been enjoying it. The dénouement was extremely silly. You had to feel for the actors neatly and sentimentally making twee sense of the series engagingly implausible premise. I am no enemy of the pun, but 'this is going to be one successful gene hunt'! Pulease!

Philip Glenister and Harvey Keitel (UK and US Gene Hunt respectively) look disappointed in the final episode of the US version of Life On Mars which was all wrapped up too cutely.

No saccharine for me!

2009-05-19T21:21:00.012+10:00

I am not diabetic. I know because I had a glucose tolerance test at the weekend. A dear friend pointed out that I must be relieved to know that I am overweight completely as a result of greed and not any kind of imbalance! Of course I am; now I know that all I have to fall back on is my willpower (or a non-existent entity as I prefer to think of it).

The Eurovision Song Contest was a huge disappointment this year. I rely on it to provide me with endless cheap laughs at the expense of the gauche and tacky acts it generally showcases. Well, blow me down if most of them weren’t fairly ordinary and inoffensive. The only ripple of delight in the time I stayed with the broadcast came from the larger than life appearance and lack of musicality of one of the Israeli entrants (she was like an unflattering caricature of Paul Capsis in drag!) It was mild in comparison to the paroxysms of laughter I have experienced in past years. Globalisation has a lot to answer for!

Separated at birth?

Post script to my Perth visit: daylight saving has been defeated in the 4th (?) referendum on the subject and a Green candidate has unseated Labor in Fremantle after they had held the seat for some 80 years! I took an interest in these news items having been in WA so recently. Apparently the Fremantle outcome was the result of a protest vote where the only alternative to the incumbents on offer was the Greens; the Liberals didn’t field a candidate for some reason. Two of my hosts while I was in Perth explained why most Westralians don’t want daylight saving. One said they already have ample daylight all year ‘round and putting the clocks forward stuffs up early morning swimming and crayfish pot checking. The other said they’ll be damned if they do something just because the eastern states do. I suspect both are true.