Category Archives: Melbourne cool

Perfect little bon-bons

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There’s a kind of story I particularly like. It’s short and based on some real-life episode, and has a certain tang. Nothing as blatant as a hook or a twist, which I find boring, but something … what? An unexpectedness is not quite it, nor an ambiguity – far too strong – rather, something like a small wrinkle. And it’s not an artistic wrinkle, you understand, but its antithesis, a wrinkle against all intentions including the author’s. And the story’s.

It’s a perfect little bon-bon, a palate cleanser, refreshing rather than nourishing, leaving one restored and primed, not sated. Unlike many lesser imitations and contemporary journalism, it refuses punch-lines and other cheap thrills, including resolutions-at-any-cost and rhetorical closing questions.

It eschews the authorial intrusion; yes, with these little babies, you’re on your own when it comes to working out what to think. It is scrupulous.

There is one such bon-bon in the current edition of The Monthly. Written by the crime author, Shane Maloney, it tells the story of the early life of the German cult photographer, Helmut Newton, the “king of kink.”

***

Newton, born Neustädter, was the “pampered son of a weathy button manufacturer.” At 13, already “besotted with photography and obsessed by sex”, he bought his first camera; at 18, a month after Kristallnacht, “he fled his beloved Berlin for the Far East.”

In 1940, he was shipped to Australia as an “enemy alien.” He picked peaches, “joined the army and spent the war unloading freight trains in Albury.” On discharge,

he changed his surname to Newton, took Australian citizenship and used his deferred pay to open a tiny studio.

One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne actress named June Browne, aged 23, walked into his small Flinders Lane photography studio, “looking to pick up some extra cash as a model.” As Maloney tells it, “when his standard pick-up technique failed, he recruited her as his sales assistant.”

Within a year, they were married. He told her,

Photography will always be my first love but you will be my second.

They remained together for the next 57 years, until Newton crashed his Cadillac into the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and died. By that time June had become a renowned photographer in her own right, using the ironic pseudonym, Alice Springs.

***

For a decade or so after their marriage, the couple lived in Melbourne, with Helmut photographing “baby outfits for New Idea” and oil refineries. Meanwhile, June “garnered laurels” as an actress, including winning Actress of the Year award for her Saint Joan at the National Theatre.

In the 60s, they moved to Paris, and Helmut became a celebrity. June, with no French, lost her acting career. One day, something new happened.

Newton, bedridden with influenza, suggested she cover a commercial job for him. The client didn’t notice and soon she was shooting for Elle and Depeche Mode. In need of a professional name, she shut her eyes and stuck a pin in a map of Australia.

As Alice Springs, she “produced memorable portraits of the era’s iconic faces – Catherine Deneuve, Dennis Hopper, Terence Stamp and Charlotte Rampling.”

She is now 88 and still going strong; still, Maloney says, with “a sharp eye.”

***

Images: Helmut Newton by Alice Springs (top); Saddle 1 for Vogue Homme by Helmut Newton, 1976 (second); Woman by Alice Springs (bottom)

Cafe Scheherazade

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Café Scheherazade operated in Melbourne, Australia for 40 years, from its opening in 1958 to its closure in 2008.

Its proprietors, Avram and Masha Zeleznikov, refugees from post-War Europe, created the famous café as a place for local residents, Jewish and Gentile, to remember and share stories. Continue reading →

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Part 2

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The story so far …

On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls and their mistresses went for a picnic to Hanging Rock in country Victoria, Australia. Three girls and one mistress vanished while walking on the Rock.

In the days following the disappearance, the police mount a search, to no avail.

Meanwhile, Michael Fitzhubert has become obsessed with the girls and their disappearance. The young Englishman decides to start his own search.

He scours the Rock, leaving markers on the trees. After several days of obsessive searching, he becomes disorientated and does not return. His valet, Albert, goes out looking for him.

Following the markers, he eventually finds Fitzhubert lying on the upper reaches of the rock, hurt and barely conscious. Albert gets help, and as they pack him off in a coach for medical attention, Fitzhubert, ill and mute, fixes his eye on Albert. Something is glasped in his fist, and Albert pulls apart his fingers to reveal a small scrap of white muslin.

Immediately, Albert sees its significance, and a new search is mounted for the girls in the area in which Fitzhubert was found. Then they find her, Irma, the “little, dark one.” She is lying unconscious under a rocky overhang. She is barefoot and alone, and has been missing for a week.

The renewed search finds no trace of Miranda and Marion, or Miss McGraw.

The Fitzhuberts put up Irma at their country estate so she can rest and recover and receive medical attention. After a doctor examines her, he talks with Mlle de Portiers. She asks tentatively, embarrassed,

Is she … intact?

“Yes, yes, quite intact,” replies the doctor.

Meanwhile, Irma has no memory of what happened to her or the others. As she recovers, she is coquettish with Fitzhubert who, uncomfortable and distressed at his failure to find the others, pushes her to remember. She makes a visit back to the school which is a disaster. The girls round on her, attacking her and demanding answers.

Very quickly, the school itself begins to suffer from the event. Parents withdraw their girls, and the iron authority of Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress, starts to break down. She is drinking heavily, and an orphan student whom she had routinely bullied is found dead after an apparent fall from the school’s tower.

A short time later, the voiceover informs us at the end of the film, Mrs Appleyard committed suicide by throwing herself from Hanging Rock.

The remains of Miranda, Marion and Miss McGraw have not been found to this day.

*****

The film got into the psyche of Australians for a number of reasons.

It featured a story that tapped into longstanding fears of Australians of European descent: the story of the lost child in the bush.

From the first days of European settlement in a land perceived as strange and hostile, the motif of the child lost in the bush had featured in art and literature. The fear was so potent that most Australian children, including those in my large extended family in the 1960s and 1970s, were taught what to do if it happened to them, ie, to call “cooee”. The call originated in the Dharuk language of the Aboriginal peoples living around Sydney at the time of European settlement, and is still used today to call to someone or cry for help across large distances in the bush.

The second reason for the film’s impact was the novelty of seeing our own stories and landscapes on the screen, and seeing them in their sublime beauty. The film showed an Australia that was dazzling, dreamy, deeply disturbing, resolutely non-prosaic.

The third reason was the air of sexuality which lay over the whole film, and centred on the incomparable beauty of Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert. Every teenage girl wanted to be her, every man and boy to possess her.

And then there was the music. The pan pipes, played by Romanian, Gheorge Zamfir, emanated from another world, a world of gods and shepherds and satyrs. They were eerily suited to a film about the meeting of European civilisation – in the guise of the young, well-educated girls of Empire – with something obdurate, pre-historic, impervious in the Australian landscape.

Depending on how you look at it, the pipes were either the sound of the most ancient epitome of European civilisation, or the sound of immortality itself.

For these reasons, and many others, Peter Weir’s film and the story of the missing girls got a hold on Australia’s soul and it has never let go.

*****

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Picnic at Hanging Rock: Part 1

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On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls and their mistresses went for a picnic to Hanging Rock in country Victoria, Australia. Three girls and one mistress vanished while walking on the Rock. A week later, one of the girls was found, alive but unconscious, and with no memory of what had happened.

The rest were never seen again.

The mystery of what happened that day was immortalised in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, and, most famously, by Peter Weir in his 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The film made stars of everyone involved, was a worldwide hit and promptly lodged itself deep in the pysche of every Australian. Today, all it takes is the first notes of the pan pipes from the famous soundtrack and a nation is transported to that drowsy day in the thick of the Australian summer long ago.

This post and the next tells the story of the girls as imagined by Peter Weir, and speculates about the reasons why his film acted so strongly on the Australian psyche.

*****

They got to the picnic ground around noon in Mr Hussey’s trap, hired from the local town of Woodend for the expedition.

One of the girls, seated on the box next to Mr Hussey, read from a book about the local landmark, “Hanging Rock is a distinctive geographical formation which is over six million years old.”

“Just think,” says another,

six million years, and waiting just for us.

They set up their picnic at the foot of the monolith and spend a few hours eating, reading and sleeping in the afternoon heat. There is another party further down the stream, a young English officer on leave, Mr Michael Fitzhubert, with his father and his valet.

Mr Hussey wakes from his doze with a start. He consults his watch, and finds to his surprise it has stopped. Miss McGraw, a middle-aged mathematics mistress, hearing his puzzlement, looks at hers.

Extraordinary; mine has stopped too.

Soon after, the darling of the school, Miranda, with her friends Irma and Marion, asks the young French mistress, Mademoiselle de Portiers, if they can go for a walk around the rock. “Yes, but be careful.”

As Miranda turns to go, Mlle de Portiers, glancing from her face to the art book she has been reading, gasps and whispers,

But, of course, now I know.

“What do you know?” asks Miss McGraw.

“That Miranda is a Botticelli angel.”

The girls, in their white muslin dresses, set off walking through the bush towards the rock formation. Edith, a plain and unpopular girl, follows them. Michael Fitzhubert and the valet watch them jump across the stream. “I like the little dark one,” says the valet as Irma jumps, but Fitzhubert is silent, staring as Miranda gathers her skirts, looks backward for a moment and then sails across.

The girls start climbing upward, through the grasses and rocks. Edith starts complaining, “Miranda, come back. I’m getting tired.” They keep climbing.

At some point, they lay down on the rock for a rest, and Edith, who has dozed off for a few minutes, awakes to see the other three heading upward again, this time without their boots and stockings which they are holding. Edith becomes frightened, and starts screaming at them to come back, but they keep climbing, silent and intent.

Edith becomes more frightened and turns back. A little while later, she emerges running from the bush, screaming and hysterical.

Mlle de Portiers slaps her to try and calm her, and asks after the others. She can get no sense out of her. And then she giggles,

But I did see Miss McGraw.

Miss McGraw?

Edith giggles.

Why are you laughing? What’s funny?

Miss McGraw was funny.

How? What do you mean, funny?

Edith giggles again, and whispers in Mlle de Portiers’s ear.

“What?” says Mlle de Portiers, shocked and confused, “she was not wearing … les pantalons?”

*****

Late that night, much later than planned, Mr Hussey drives the trap to the front steps of the girls’ boarding school. The girls, crying and dishevelled, are brought out and wrapped in blankets by the staff, and Mlle de Portiers looks up to find the Headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, in her bombazine and tight bun, waiting for her.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demands icily, and Mlle de Portiers must tell her that three girls and Miss McGraw are missing on the rock. “Greta McGraw,” Mrs Appleyard, says, astounded, “missing?”

To be contd …

*****

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Vienna in Melbourne sans pen, sans pencil, sans camera

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The Vienna of 1900 has come to Melbourne in the exhibition at the NGV – Vienna Art & Design – and it is spectacular.

Room after room is packed with exquisite paintings, furniture and household objects from the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire at the moment of its apogee: when Modernism was being born, when Freud was writing about dreams and discontents, when artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting real women and an architect called Josef Hoffmann, with Freudian brio, was burrowing his way into the most intimate recesses of the daily lives of the populace with his genius for beauty.

Hoffmann (1870 – 1956) is the star of the show.

Continue reading →

Who’s speaking whom?

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I’ve got a new favourite Landmark Education course: the one I did last weekend.

It’s called the Communication: Access to Power course, the first of two communication courses the course leader said they jokingly call The Curriculum for Loving (in contrast to the three more famous Landmark courses, beginning with the Landmark Forum, which together are known as The Curriculum for Living).

The course was packed with insights and revelations, and I’ll be dining on its intellectual and spiritual nourishment for years to come. Continue reading →

The age of prosthetic art

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Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.

~ Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents

To Montalto, the glorious vineyard and olive grove (is that not among the sweetest possible combinations of two words?) on the Mornington Peninsula, just south of Melbourne a few weeks ago.

It happened to be the opening of their annual Sculpture Prize. The finalists’ sculptures, together with previous winning works, were dotted through the landscape of pleasure, all rolling hills, glass restaurant, gambolling children.

Two sculptures were particularly interesting for being exemplars of two different strands in art, what I’ll call the “naturally-occurring” strand and the “prosthetic” strand.

One of the sculptures in question won the judges’ prize for 2011; the other won the prize awarded as the favourite of the Mitchell family, the vintners who created this lovely place.

*****

Among the 29 finalists there was the obligatory kangaroo, this one by Joanna Rhodes.


Yellow was a popular colour. Perhaps the kangaroo lost something. Dan Stewart-Moore’s Egg Cubed.

Roh Singh’s By the Night’s Sky was composed of white plastic bucket shapes, transformed at night on its hill opposite the vineyard’s restaurant into a starry constellation in the shape of a rowboat.

Greer Taylor’s well-named Cellular Memory was installed in the same location she had installed a work in a previous competition. And here, in the niftiness of her idea, we begin to approach the issue of prosthetic art.

This is Frank Veldze’s Dream Home, a work:

constructed entirely from discarded mattress frames, sourced from Melbourne’s Ozanam House, a home for the homeless. It is a life-sized classic Australian miner’s cottage, like the structures built by this country’s early pioneers, looking to make a home far from all they knew, to safeguard themselves from what they perceived as an alien landscape; yet Dream Home offers no protection from wind or rain, no shelter from the storm.

Now, OK, this is very clever. But with that final ratcheting up of the emotion in the “yet Dream Home … offers no shelter from the storm” I baulk.

This is prosthetic art par excellence. Art which needs an idea to live. Art which has no life outside idea. Art, above all, that extorts response. Ughhhh. I despise it for this extortion, even as I say “ohhhh, how poetic, how interesting.” It is art which mandates only one response and does everything to extract it.

And then what?

I’ll tell you. Nothing is what. Not a sausage. It sinks without trace. An idea surfaces, is represented in a medium or two, says its little party piece, and then vanishes.

In contrast, there is art that exists without idea. Art which achieves being on its own terms, not those of the artist, and not those of the viewer. Art which arises into being and takes its place among “the silent presence of things.” An art that doesn’t foreclose on response, but expands on it, opening itself to the world.

It is an art that Craig MacDonald, the judge’s winner of the 2011 Montalto Sculpture Prize, has created in his modest and intriguing Witness:

Hovering just above the surface of the ground, Witness appears as if from another time — aged and totem like, its presence and movement is a reminder that time is not static and what has been seen before can be witnessed again.

*****

Planning meeting for “People of the sock”

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We’re having a planning meeting for the People of the sock project next Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, and you’re invited.

Just to jog the old grey cells …

People of the sock is a community project.  It’s about bringing together experienced sock knitters and people who want to learn to knit socks in a knitting workshop.  The socks knitted as a result of the workshop will be distributed to people who are homeless as Christmas presents.

The project is about spreading the joy of making, and about nurturing and caring for others.

Inspiration

I was inspired to start the project after meeting a spry and youthful 80-year-old knitting socks outside a hospital while her husband was parking the car.  The woman told me she knits socks for a Sydney organisation that distributes them to people who are homeless.  Socks are particularly valued, she said, because they’re warm and easily portable.  When not wearing the socks a person can stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which has to be carried around or hidden while the person goes about their business.

The meeting venue

The lovely Tal at Morris and Sons is letting us use their space for the planning meeting.  Morris and Sons — if you haven’t already discovered this veritable oasis of craft in the middle of the city — is on Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

Everyone is welcome at the planning meeting:

  • people who may like to be teachers at the knitting workshop
  • people who may like to be students at the knitting workshop
  • people who like getting involved in community projects
  • people who like contributing ideas
  • people who knit socks
  • people who knit
  • people.

Remember, for the planning meeting …

Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, at Morris and Sons, Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

If you can’t attend the meeting and you want to be involved in the project, that’s excellent too.  Just contact me by email, Twitter or Ravelry.

Email: peopleofthesock [at] gmail [dot] com
Twitter: @sockppl
Ravelry: solidgold