Category Archive: AUSTRALIANIA
Wheels and Dollbaby Get-Togethers are Evil
At the Thrift Shop Bar. Image courtesy of Natasha Buccella
If you do not know that ‘Dita’ is both a burlesque artist and a cardigan; if you do not believe in cleavage, and if you think that leopard-print is old-fashioned, read no further. This post is for Annabels who say “yes!” to black satin pencil skirts and plunging necklines, who want a mermaid tattoo and love faux fur. Wheels and Dollbaby is an Australian women’s clothing brand with an instantly recognisable, sexy and sleek look, a retro vibe, a rockabilly hint. The brand’s creator Mel and her muse (the Dita von Teese) know their audience and do the same thing season after season with panache. I had only two Wheels items –…
Continue Reading →Peter Allen – Not the Boy Next Door
A match made in Heaven
The final stages of this TV two-parter are a salutary reminder of that dreadful scourge of the homosexual world in the 1980s – the music of Peter Allen. Oh yes and that AIDS was, in those days, suddenly rampant and absolutely untreatable. This is a paint-by-numbers production. But that doesn’t mean it is bad – just mediocre, glitzy, watchable and non-threatening. Like Allen himself. The audience is told what to think at every stage, from the obligatory hard-scrabble childhood (cleaning Dad’s brains off a wall), to fame, fortune and an opportunistic marriage to American music royalty. Sigrid Thornton looks surprisingly like Judy Garland but is stretched by a script which…
Continue Reading →Faster and More Furious
"Just...be better."
1986 S.A.N.F.L GRAND FINAL – GLENELG v NORTH ADELAIDE This was to have been North’s revenge year. The Roosters had been put to the sword by the Tigers in 1985 and ahead of the Big Replay, the Roosters’ Coach Michael Nunan (a man popular with Bay fans as a bubonic plague) stated that “we want to level the scores.” The North fans settled in the Spring sunshine of bleak Football Park, licking their chops and rubbing their hands, channelling Madame DeFarge, wanting to be in at the kill. Glenelg was not quite the same team as 1985. One young fellow*, who…
Continue Reading →Pride of the Bay
The Story of the Glenelg Football Club (Peter Cornwall and John Wood) (1999) Why be a Glenelg supporter? Why indeed? Objectively, it seems less a badge of pride than a sentence, a millstone, a curse from the abyss of Hell. We started life with a vote down at the Glenelg Council Chambers, when Glenelg was a half days buggy ride from Adelaide, on March 10, 1920. It made a debut in the SAFL, then the second tier, beating South Adelaide by a single point (for the uninitiated, the narrowest winning margin) in its first game. Then it entered the Big League, the…
Continue Reading →A Picnic in the Folly – Step 1
Some day soon I shall have a picnic (with cakes and champagne) in the folly, deep within the TVC gardens. First, practise the decoration…
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