The last time I attended an ABBA-related event in Melbourne it was the Australian premiere of “Mamma Mia.” It was a star-studded event that culminated in having a photograph taken with Bjorn.
There were fewer celebrities at the opening of ABBAWORLD. There was Anthony Callea who stood next to me for quite some time who was actually taller than I’d imagined. There was Ross Wilson who was conversely shorter than I’d imagined. Judith Durham was there also, though I didn’t actually see her. I also saw a bloke whose face I recognised but whose name and identity slipped my mind until someone asked him, only to discover it was Belvedere from Good Morning Australia.
The opening for me wasn’t about celebrities. It was actually mostly about catching up with some fans who I haven’t seen for quite some time. It was a bit like a class reunion in some respects. “Do you think there’ll be any new faces here tonight?” I asked a friend… “or just the same old ones ten years older and fatter”, I added, joking.
Judy and James in the ABBA helicopter
It was also about the exhibition. Much, of course, has been made of the costumes in the exhibition. While it’s interesting to see them, I was far more interested in the music and the Swedish stuff. I actually listened to the Swedish commentary and was pleased it was simple and clear enough for me to mostly follow.
There’s a real sense of Swedishness about the exhibition too. There’s a style to some of the museums in Stockholm eg: police museum, dance museum that you can see and feel in this exhibition. It should be no surprise then my favourite room in the exhibition is the room where they have recreated the island shack where Bjorn and Benny composed many of the hits. As you stand in the room you look out to a moving picture image of the archipelago which is simply stunning.
ABBAWORLD Frida DressABBAWORLD Waterloo Costumes
Chatting later with one of the Melbourne fans I haven’t seen for years, he asked me what I thought of it. I told him, honestly, I wasn’t blown away by it, but that I thought it was very very good and that I loved that it was reasonably honest and true to the story of ABBA. Thankfully, it tells the complete story of their music, rather than concentrating on Mamma Mia etc in an effort to promote further sales. It’s good. I’d recommend it.
“You know about the P’s and B’s of journalism?”, I remember my friend and colleague Tony once asking. He and I were sharing a house at Bourke in Western NSW, where we both worked at the radio station, 2WEB. I was a young pup, and I learned much from him due to his age, seniority, and having previously worked as a journalist and professor in the United Kingdom.
“For the tabloids, journalism is about bingo, booze and broads”, I remember him telling me with a laugh. And, in order of reader/listener interest, the priority was “princes, prices, people, places and politics”, he added.
I asked him about “princes” and he told me, they weren’t only royals, but anyone famous, and sometimes, politicians could be princes.
I remember this conversation to this day, and it’s been wonderful guidance throughout my career in journalism.
In some ways, Diana was two of the p’s. She was both a princess and a person we all had an interest in, and all thought we “knew”. I’m guessing we’ve all had theories about what “happened”, ranging from “saint-like mother” to “troubled person” to “misadventure” to “they had her killed”.
The new film “Spencer” takes in a bit of all that, though the film doesn’t touch on what happened in Paris, focussing instead on a period of two or three days around Christmas some time in the 1990s, when Diana and Charles were separated, but not yet divorced.
Over the course of those days, you see Diana estranged from the Royal Family, always running late, not wanting to wear the right clothes or “play the game” any longer. There are some wonderful playful moments with her children, but also some disturbing moments that seek to portray the concern of William and Harry about their mother’s disturbed state. She seems deeply troubled, imagining a relationship with Anne Boleyn, is self-harming, and wanting to return to a simpler life. The film also imagines a close relationship with a female servant. Much of the film is imagined and relies on allegories.
This is not the kind of film you would find on “The History Channel”, “The Biography Channel” or midday movies. This is not “happy families”.
A few hours later, after watching it, I’m still not sure if I like the film.
As I left the cinema today my fellow patrons also seemed somewhat bewildered. You know how you normally hear people chatting, saying “oh that was good” or things like that? Today, there was just silence from my fellow viewers. Nothing.
And yet I know some people will love this film, and others will loathe this film, depending on their version of the Diana story. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good film with good acting and direction. I’m just not sure, at this stage, where it fits into the biographical story of Diana.
There were two genuine laugh out loud moments, as I watched the first heat of Melodifestivalen (now, appparently called “Mello”), the Swedish competition which chooses their entrant for the Eurovision Song Contest. As I’ve stated previously, I far prefer Melodifestivalen over Eurovision. Maybe it’s because I’ve attended Melodifestivalen a couple of times? Or maybe because it’s more fun/more interesting?
The only downside to the competition is their regular choice of a lame-arse Swedish comedian to either co-host or provide “comic relief”. The exceptions have been when they’ve included either Petra Mede, Bjorn Gustaffson or Per Andersson. Bjorn does terrific physical humour, Petra does wonderful, hilarious “show tunes” and I loved Per’s piss-take a couple of years ago of an “ordinary” Swedish family. Yes, you can watch this without a knowledge of Swedish.
But mostly, the comedians on Melodifestivalen are very un-funny. And this year it was the character “Fab Freddie” who accompanied the host (and former contestant) Davyd Lindgren.
As I watched “Fab Freddie”, I could tell from the look on Davyd’s face, the words going through his mind were clearly “Don’t say fat, don’t say fag”. Or at least they were the words going through my mind.
But to get to the laugh out loud moments. There was an odd moment involving one of the singers who, performing in a mask, found herself in the midst of a magic act. “Oh, please make it through to Eurovision, the contest needs it”, I thought to myself.
And then there was an “old fashioned” number designed to keep Mormor, Morfar, Farmor and Farfar (the grandparents) entertained called “Livet på en pinne” (“Life on a stick”) which featured some really terrific costumes. It was so “at odds” with so much of Eurovision now which includes artists who come through the Pop Idol “factory” of “generic” young singers. I thought it was great fun.
But “Life on a stick?” WTF? I asked a Swedish friend who told me…
There are a couple of explanations for this expression according to my research. I’ve always used it as “That’s life” or “That’s life in a nutshell”. For those situations where you just want to shrug at Life, Universe and Everything. But there’s another explanation claiming a more positive meaning, as in “aah, this is the (good) life!” I honestly think that the positive one is the correct answer. My wife has always seen it as a positive expression as well, so I think that I simply have misunderstood it.
In the midst of all the silly-ness, there were a couple of proper songs and performances, including Benjamin Ingrosso (a member of the Swedish House Family/Pernilla Wahlgren family of perfomers) and John Lundvik who, on the basis of the first performance, could be a serious contender to represent Sweden at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
I’ll keep you up to date as events unfold, as there’s three more heats, “another chance” and the final still to go before the Swedish entry for Eurovision is chosen. Hang in there…
There’s a problem with the laneway near home which has caused me a lot of grief. It’s the laneway I’ve walked through at least twice a day for the last twenty-five years.
At first, there was a problem with people pissing in the laneway. More recently, there was a problem with litter.
At the centre of my most recent concerns has been the “littering” of the wonderful art project, Village Voices by Astra Howard. Astra is a mate, and I have loved the tireless work she has done to bring the voices of people of my neighbourhood into a public art space. The variety of words and ideas expressed has been wonderful. I will often see people stand in moments of contemplation reading the words, and often taking selfies with the sign.
The latest work is by a young girl who goes to the nearby school.
In the last couple of years, people have begun to use the “shelf” below the work as a place to leave coffee cups, in preference to walking a few metres down the road to use the garbage bin. I mean, it’s not that far!
Thanks to the lockdown, there hasn’t been too much of a problem recently.
The problem has also been reduced, thanks to the change in the outside seating arrangements of the restaurant next door.
But in the last few weeks, the problem has re-emerged.
Tonight!
Previously, I’ve taken a more proactive approach to things. Previously I’ve spoken to the nearby restaurant owners, and have asked them to take more care about how they deal with their waste.
More recently, I’ve taken a new approach. I’m now just removing the cups from the shelf and putting them on the ground, so it becomes a “litter problem”, not a problem of “placement”.
As the local restaurants won’t be more proactive, I’ve decided it’s something for the City of Sydney.
Yeah I know, all pretty pointless. But let’s see if this approach works.
“These are the reason I haven’t worn a watch in about twenty years”, I told Sue, as we wandered around the ABC Studio at Old Parliament House, now the “Museum Of Australian Democracy”.
I was referring to something commonly known as a “bulk eraser”, though they probably had a more formal name. In the days before extensive digital storage, audio (and video) tape was commonly re-used. That’s part of the reason why many episodes of classic radio and television programs no longer exist.
“You must have it in the archives somewhere?” is a sentence I commonly here. “No”, I have to tell people, adding, “We never kept it”. We couldn’t afford to keep everything, and in a very practical way, there was never enough room to store it.
A big part of my early career involved recording things, putting them to air, and then recording over that item the very next day. To speed up the process you used a “bulk eraser” which, in effect, was a big magnet which erased the magnetic tape, allowing it to be freshly used.
One of the side effects of having a “big magnet” was that it played havoc with analogue watches. So, you either a) removed your watch while you used it; b) “did a dance” which involved keeping your watch hand as far away from the eraser as possible or c) stopped wearing a watch. I stopped wearing a watch, and in the years since, the mobile phone, of course, has replaced the watch anyway.
Bulk eraser at the ABC Studio at Old Parliament House
I think it was the first time I’ve been to the old ABC Studio at Old Parliament House in Canberra. The move to the new parliament house occured before I joined the ABC. And although I’ve visited Old Parliament House a few times, I don’t ever recall seeing that part of the museum before. It was fascinating to see the video showing at the museum of people like a very young Barrie Cassidy reporting from the studio there.
“It’s so much smaller than the new parliament house”, I said to Sue as we wandered around. There was an exhibition of political cartoons which we enjoyed very much, as well as an exhibition about press freedom which was also very good.
And of course, there were the chambers themselves.
House of Representatives at Old Parliament House, CanberraLocated outside Old Parliament House is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, and the wonderful “Sovereignty” sign
Our visit to Canberra was a brief one : less than twenty-four hours. I was really keen to catch up with a colleague who was recently made redundant, and a school friend that both Sue and I had known from Lismore. Awesome catchups. It was also part of our return to Sydney.
As we had both extensive knowledge of Canberra (Sue had lived there for three or four years, and I have visited extensively over many years), we struggled to think of what else we might do.
We both love the National Portrait Gallery, and so we visited there.
National Portrait GalleryNational Portrait Gallery
“I’d like to visit the War Memorial”, Sue said, noting that despite having lived in Canberra, she’d never actually visited it before. The last time I visited was in 2014. https://thelimbshift.com/2014/08/roll-of-honour/
Photograph taken by Kerry Alchin Order reference: PAIU2014/152.28 Contact: esales@awm.gov.au
In 2013 and 2014 (and later), I managed a project for the ABC (in conjunction with the Australian War Memorial) which saw school children from all over the country come into ABC studios to record the names of those who appear on the Roll Of Honour. Honestly, it’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done, as the children learned about the history of the names they were due to recite, how to pronounce them, and often travelled long distances to record them.
I was so touched the names were still being recited as we walked along the Roll Of Honour.
Roll Of Honour at the Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial is truly remarkable. In fact, it’s almost overwhelming. After about an hour of walking around, we realised we’d only touched the surface, had only just completed the area concentrating on World War I.
Australian War Memorial
Due to time restraints, we spent less time on the following conflicts which is a shame. “You could spend two or three days here,” I said to Sue.
One of the highlights for me of the Australian War Memorial was the current exhibition which looks at tattoos, and their significance for service men and women, particularly since the Gulf and Afghan Wars.
And with that, we went to the petrol station, filled up, grabbed some chocolates, and headed back home.
You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of a bad dream? Well, this morning I woke up in the middle of a good dream. It would have been nice to go back to sleep and continue the dream, though of course that wasn’t possible. It was a dream about my dad.
I was 16 (twenty-eight yeas ago) when he died from an awful condition called Multiple Myeloma (a plasma cell cancer). With the passing of time, sometimes it’s hard to remember some things about both mum and dad. And yet this morning’s dream was incredibly vivid.
Oddly enough, it had a Swedish connection. Yes, really. In the dream my dad and I were travelling in a car in the countryside. He was driving and I was using my mobile phone to take some video of us together to send back to my mum.
Minutes later we were climbing a snow-capped mountain in Sweden, and somehow we were strong enough to be dragging the car behind us.
It was an obviously very modern dream. And yet I as had the dream, I could almost feel my dad next to me. He was happy and healthy – pre-cancer – and we were having a wonderful time together.
Me and my dad, probably some time in 1966.
The last time I had such a vivid dream about my dad was several days after he died. Both my sister and I had similar dreams that night, and we had compared notes.
Throughout the day I’ve been thinking about what the dream meant, and why I had the dream right now. The conclusion I’ve come to is that it has something to do with my “wanderlust” at the moment with three overseas trips in two years. I can’t help but wonder how mum and dad would have felt, since they both lived most of their lives in Lismore, and only ever left Lismore to visit family and friends in neighbouring towns and cities. Or perhaps it’s not that literal? Perhaps there’s a deeper meaning?
My dad and me…
As I came home this afternoon, I went online to find out what dreaming about your father meant, I found these possible explanations here…
(1) For men, father may be a conscience figure. If this is the case, bear in mind that your father’s prohibitions and commands will probably represent either conventional moral options which may have no relevance to your true nature or ‘destiny’, or irrational fears and feelings of guilt that began to take shape in you in earlychildhood.
(2) For a woman, father may figure in a dream as one who generates affection.
(3) The presence of your father may be a straightforward representation of him, or of the way you see/remember him (which may owe more to your subjective distortions than to what your father actually is or was). In any case, the reason for your father appearing in the dream will be shown by the part he plays in the dream story.
(4) If your father features in the dream as a protector, it may be that you need to ‘grow up’ and rely on your own resources. After all, life can hurt you only if you let it, only if you identify with your emotional self instead of with that deep layer of yourself that is immune to life’s pains and perils.
(5) Father may be an animus figure (see Glossary of Jungian Termnology), representing a woman’s (unconscious) masculine qualities. In this case, the dream may be suggesting that she should cultivate this countrasexual side of her nature.
(6) Frequent appearances by either parent, or both, in dreams may be a sign that you have not thrown off an infantile over-dependence on them. Jung cites a young man’s dream in which the man’s father appeared as a drunken driver, smashing his car into a wall. This is the exact opposite of the real father, who was a most respectable person, rightly – but too too much – respected by the son. What the unconscious was doing through the dream was dethroning the father in order to enable the son to achieve a proper sense of himself as a person in his own right, with his own unique destiny and values.
I’m sure there are lots of other explanations.
Whatever the deeper psychological meaning, I just know it was a lovely dream about my dad, and one that made me feel good as I woke this morning.
As I left for work this morning I noticed the overnight emergence of some political billboards on telegraph poles around my neighbourhood. They weren’t there yesterday, so obviously someone’s been busy, as there’s quite a few down my end of Crown Street.
I’ve been through a few federal elections in the seat of Sydney (96, 98, 2001, 2004, 2007), and there’s usually always been a good showing by both the Liberals and the Greens on both street signs and in my letterbox. But in the letterbox so far there’s only been two flyers: both from Tanya Plibersek, the local Labor Member for Sydney. The first was one of those general flyers about how to make a postal vote, the second was more overtly political. So far, I’ve received nothing from either the Liberals or the Greens. And so far, it’s only Labor with street-signs.
I actually had to go searching online the other night to see who the other candidates were. As I recall at the last election “there was just a lone-Liberal in an overwhelmingly Green-Labor conflagration of people offering how to vote cards” at my local school. Also back then, “A sausage with the lot at my local school’s sausage sizzle meant a regular breakfast sausage on a bed of hommous, onion, BBQ sauce and some middle-eastern flat bread.” I’m hoping the sausage sizzle people will be out in force again on August 21.
The first campaign poster of the election in my area of Surry Hills
Speaking of food. Having bought a return ticket to China last night, it was only fitting that I had “Chinese take-away” for dinner this evening: braised pork dumplings from my favourite noodle and dumpling shop in the Burlington Centre in Chinatown. I’ve been going there for almost as long as I’ve lived in Sydney. And whenever someone visits me from the country, and we’re looking for somewhere cheap, cheerful and interesting, I inevitably take them there. It’s one of those great Sydney experiences for people visiting from the bush, along with a visit to the Opera House, to the Blue Mountains, to Manly, and to Bondi. It’s one of those tiny restaurants you find in Chinatown where the food is cheap and tasty, and where the customers are packed in like sixteen dumplings in a plastic takeaway container.
My favourite shop for dumplings in Chinatown in Sydney
The night ended on a political note, just as it started with #qanda. Tonight it was Julia’s turn to answer questions. Next week it will be Tony’s.
And the posters? Late tonight, and quite a few of them have been removed, and one is now hanging upside-down. No sign of any other parties yet though.
