fools are idiots

So I am trying to wean myself off facebook but what do I do when I want to point and laugh at some fool's fool spelling error all out there in public? I really need to show how smart and educated I am, by making some kind of a bully joke about how it's not that good if you can break it just with your hand, where I think the handle actually is, ha ha ha. 
 

addressing the people on the things that matter

I’ve been interviewed by ABC journalists/radio presenters three times in the last three days, and it’s been really interesting, sometimes awkward, occasionally frustrating.  

The first was on my birthday when I was at the dog park with Perry and I was contacted by an ABC journalist in far north Queensland who wanted to talk about community halls. He’d somehow found me because I had co-written a chapter in a book (which I also co-edited) about a particular, successful, valued community hall in NSW, about ten years ago. He hadn’t read the chapter (I wouldn’t have expected him to, necessarily) but he’d read the abstract of it. I am not entirely sure why he contacted me and not any of my co-authors but I suppose I didn’t need to know that either. This was for an online piece, not for radio, and it was as far as I was concerned a good chat. When I saw the final article, I didn’t feel misrepresented at all, but the article was essentially about how community halls were on the way out as a phenomenon and people these days had, I suppose, broader horizons than what happened in their little corner of the universe.

 

Six days later I got contacted by the ABC in Sydney to talk on the radio with Josh Szeps (son of occasional Homicide actor Henri) about the demise of community halls. It was weird mainly because I was never setting myself up to discuss why community halls were dying, but rather hold the opinion that, if communities can only find ways to maintain and retain their halls/community centres/neighbourhood houses, they do have value and they can be made to work – in my opinion. Well, in this case apparently I was there to talk about why community halls were on the way out. I understand radio producers are very stressed and overworked and just have to pump content into the system, so I resent no-one in this regard – I’m fine with it. But I do kind of think that maybe the final product would be a bit better if there weren’t these assumptions that were not revealed to interviewees until the very last minute. Josh Szeps told his listenership that I was interested in the demise of the community hall. But the opposite is true (or at least, I am interested in ways to revive and retain them). On top of that, when I say ‘I am interested’… it’s not something I have thought about for a long, long time, notwithstanding the fact that I was coopted into the Save Kendenup Hall facebook chat last week, or that I posted the Cockatoo Hall picture last week from Homicide, and also posted the same picture in a Cockatoo neighbourhood group on Facebook and got so many responses I had to turn off notifications (yes, I brought that one on myself). 

 

So yesterday the ABC in Sydney called me again, this time to talk about pub rock. I told them I’d been on only a few days before to talk about community halls and the prepping producer I spoke to seemed a little baffled but ultimately unphased by this – though weirdly, there are crossovers of which much could be made, except that of course radio like everything is bang-bang-bang ideas of which there can only be one perspective at a time, which I suppose is either ‘oh, no, a terrible thing is happening’ or ‘yay, remember a wonderful thing?’ 

 

So I was surprised to be introduced by the ABC announcer this morning as someone who loves pub rock, which I absolutely do not, and if I had been asked yesterday to go on the radio and talk about why I loved it, I’d have to say – I can’t, because I don’t. I’m a historian though and I’m interested in it. But I’m not here to celebrate it (let alone celebrate it because it’s Jimmy Barnes’ 76^th birthday ffs). I would note also that the announcer gave me the wrong title (that’s not really important but I did wonder where she had got her information from) and the right faculty but then said she didn’t know what my position/faculty etc had to do with pub rock to which the only answer (I wasn’t asked) is: that’s on you really. I was talking with Laura about this particular appearance last night and mentioned that the person who originally contacted me about this seemed a bit confused about it all and I joked that the thing you probably need to say in that instance is ‘don’t you know who I am?’ – the joke being I’m nobody, but at the same time, nobody wants to be misrepresented even in a little bit of pissant radio. Also, it is of greater value to them if they know why I’m there, which apparently they didn’t. 

 

Anyway, very predictably, and true to its demographic, the segment I was on was just people calling/texting to say that the early 1980s were the best years of their lives etc, and being dazzled by the groups they saw or could see on any given night in Sydney in (say) 1981, with the obvious response being – yeah that’s amazing to you because you’re the age you are and etc etc. But whatever I suppose you can pull anything apart and leave it a husk can’t you. 

 

So let people have their fun I guess. I do hate (most) pub rock though.*

*I was mildly gleeful though that I got them to play a bit of the Celibate Rifles' version of 'Hot Stuff'. I am not entirely sure why but let me have my fun too thanks. 

homicide s11 e24 'no rhyme or reason'

This episode of Homicide which was shown 9 July 1974 includes a few shots of Cockatoo Hall - possibly including interiors. I don't know where this building specifically was (it appears to be on a main road and next to some shops) but I do know that in 1981 the Shire of Pakenham was hoping to rebuild it. Don't know whether they did or not but the 1983 bushfire probably put paid to whatever was there in that year.* 

Age 9 May 1981 p. 103

The episodes from around this time are pretty good (if grim). Lots of interesting locations as well including (for instance) a block of flats on the corner of Thistle and Richardson, Essendon (episode S11 E23).

Clearly McBride St Cockatoo, but looking at it now on Google maps I can't see any - and indeed I can't figure out where there were ever - shops on McBride St. 

*update 27/4/23 - I posted that picture on a Cockatoo facebook page and a few people had firsthand accounts of seeing it burn down in 1983. 

perry's guide to dog parks of melbourne #2: alf pearce reserve fenced dog park, carnarvon road strathmore

 

A place to make new friends and be marvellous in general. There are two sections to the park, which is basically a sandy waste with a few rocks in it. The large section is for the larger dogs and there is a little enclosure for tinies. They can (and do) bark at each other through the chicken wire. A regular (name undisclosed) likes to grab other dogs' tennis balls and eat the white bit. 

Visited: Easter Sunday, very rainy, Easter sucks! 

Rating: 8 out of 10. 

the pip proud-homicide connection - 54 years ago today

It's all very well to say 'what I wouldn't do to see this episode of In Melbourne Tonight (7 April 1969) because, you know, I just love Lucky Grills lol. Well I don't hate him but of course what fascinates me is that this is the episode that my long gone and much missed friend, Pip, was on. I vaguely remember him telling me about this - that Preston tried to put him down and Pip turned the tables on him on live TV - don't know how. I was only dimly aware of who Mike Preston was when Pip mentioned this story - I think I was mixing him up with someone else. 

But I don't think I quite appreciated until a few minutes ago that MP was an actual celebrity, who'd had his own IMT for a long time, and that like Lionel Long, his tenure in Homicide was probably more of a 'get new audiences in with a famous face' thing than it was a 'here's a new guy for the long haul'. 

Anyway the NFSA, which as far as I know is the only real place for this kind of thing, has some Mike Preston's IMT from 1968, and a fragment from 1969, but I have to assume that the Pip episode is gone, gone, gone. Sad but real. 

*BTW (10 April) I thought to check up who else was on that show. Lucky Grills, already mentioned, was of course the comedian who later played Bluey in the cop show Bluey. Nelson (not Neilson) Sardelli was/is a Brazillian-born US-based singer of Italian descent, famous for having had a relationship with Jayne Mansfield (who had died two years before this show was aired). Elaine McKenna is/was a singer famously associated with Channel 9 in the 60s. Laurie Wilson was a TV personality. Ted Hamilton was in an episode of Homicide (Break Out, 1968) and also 227 episodes of Division 4. Overall, very, very conventional showbiz - Pip really needed gumption to be amongst those people. 

perry's guide to dog parks of melbourne #1: elsternwick park dog off-leash area, st kilda st

 

This park is not enclosed, but there is a lot of fencing on the west side, mainly probably to keep people / dogs out of the lake. 

Very cosmopolitan in terms of visitors. No real features to speak of apart from a lot of grass. 

The lack of fencing is the real problem. Hard to know where it begins and ends. 

Visited: Good Friday, still the shittiest most boring day of the year, thanks Christianity! 

Rating: 4 out of 10. 

the girl from the fiction department

I’ve just finished Hilary Spurling’s The Girl from the Fiction Department, a short life of Sonia Orwell, a woman who I essentially knew nothing about but everything I did know anything about hitherto was essentially negative. I can’t recall where these ideas came from but I do know that if I read anything at all about her it suggested that she was in some way a money-fixated fool who tricked George Orwell into marrying her in the last months of his life, which suited him because he would then have someone to look after his son. Spurling doesn’t really make it clear how in her view Sonia Orwell’s critics got to control this narrative, or indeed what exactly was in it for them, although I suppose haters don’t need to justify their hating, do they.  

Spurling depicts an extremely different person, a woman she only knew late in her (SO’s) life, but who was highly intelligent and extremely involved in at least two social circles (in London and Paris) where she rubbed shoulders as an equal with famous and interesting people of whom Francis Bacon and Iris Murdoch are merely two names that spring to mind (I’ve put the book in my bag to return it to the library). 

 

There is a horrible event described early in the book whereby three of Sonia’s friends drown before her eyes in a Swiss lake. I don’t know how anyone could really survive, mentally, an event like that. She had plenty more horrors to live through, as well, particularly living and working in central London during WW2. In some ways the hardest part of the book was the ending; the last years of SO’s life were dealing with the fact that she had been squeezed out of control of the Orwell estate by an unscrupulous accountant who she had trusted. 

Arguably hilariously if you go searching for pictures of Sonia Orwell on google images you get a lot of pictures of Cressida Bonas, an actor who once had a relationship with one of the english Princes, I forget/don't care which one, and who played SO in a 2017 play called Mrs Orwell. 

This is a picture of the actual Sonia Orwell nee Brownell, for what it's worth, a few years before she married GO. Clearly her marriage to GO (it lasted a couple of months, then he died) was just one of a thousand interesting things she did, but of course it came to define her, which was a shame. Spurling mentions SO mapped out a semi-autobiographical novel which would have been pretty fascinating I suspect but she didn't complete it.

flook april 1953

Wally Fawkes died a few weeks ago, aged old. Sad to lose him - he seems to have been a decent chap overall with well-defined interests and a great intellect. There was a Guardian obituary of him I stumbled across a few weeks ago, which was written by George Melly, gave me a bit of a start as I was sure Melly was dead. 'But there you go'. Then there was a footnote on the obit saying yes he'd died over a decade ago. 'There you also go'. 

You know what? This strip is actually from 31 March 1953, so I should have posted it a month ago, but I wanted to keep you in suspense. Not that there is any resolution of the suspense in the 31 March strip, so I suppose you will stay in suspense forever now but at least you've had a month to get used to it... 

So they can't imagine Americans understanding that cents are worthless in Scotland, but they have time for an obscure joke (?) in Scots Gaelic. I mean Flook is right, apparently, that genuinely is scots gaelic for 'Scotland for ever'. Anyway... 

 

I have a feeling that in the original of the second frame above Flook actually said 'Alwyn gu beath' as per the 31 March strip, but that this was too obscure for everyone at Gen'l Features Corp so it was translated into English and subsequently lost every semblance of funniness that might have accompanied such a callback.  

So after this is 28 - 30 April 1953 and those Flooks don't seem to exist (?). I'll keep looking. 

rabbit rabbit

 

Ferdie and unidentified individual, Barry on one leg. April 2018.