A Nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse ….

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The swaggie was out of sorts, no doubt about it. Just released from Geelong Goal, the old bluestone

gaol, where he’d been sequestered for a few days over unpaid fines, he came bellowing into the

office demanding a reporter. And roundly cursing the long arm of the law.

The plods had rejected his offer to have them drive him home to his bush hideaway in the Great

Otways National Park behind Apollo Bay. Told him to catch a bus.

“You’d think I was a criminal or something,” he groused. “You can’t just throw someone out of jail

on to the streets.”

But that wasn’t Noddy Hill’s only gripe. He was filthy on the food he’d been fed while behind

bars. Pure stodge, terrible for the bowels, and he was in pain as a result of the injustice, he moaned.

“It’s the constipation. You put that in your paper! The prison system is constipating innocent people.

It’s not right. It’s just not right!” he railed.

And, yes, there should be a law against it. And the cops should give you a lift home, in case you

didn’t get that the first time. And what’s the world coming to? Just not good enough …

You get the drift.

Old Noddy was about 45 back then, three decades ago. Looked for all the world like a latter-day

swaggy. Wild hair, wild eyes, wild demeanour. In fact, he was a hermit who lived deep in the forest

with a wild independence that rejected society and civilisation, and a head full of ideas that

reflected a powerful but eccentric intellect. An alternative lifestyle, if you like. Undiagnosed, by

other assessments. 

The Otways harbour all manner of unusual tales. Noddy’s hardly on his own. Panthers, carnivorous

snails, Tasmanian tigers, UFOs, German wartime submarines, shipwrecks, dinosaurs, quolls, giant

ferns and yowies are just scratching the surface.

Cut across the southwest hinterland and you’ll trip over rain-gauge crater lakes, megafauna trails,

volcanoes, large open maar craters, caves, scoria cones,  mystery ships, bunyip bones, early

Australian discoveries by Portugal and China, floating islands, exquisite waterfalls — all manner of

weird and wonderful, of believe it or not. Fascinating place. National Geographic would go silly for

it.

But for all the area’s extraordinary otherness — and the fact a few of these have problems of their

own, too — Noddy’s tough to eclipse.

For years a local identity quietly celebrated for his differentness, he was considered a harmless,

amusing and, generally speaking, acceptable outsider. A hermit. A swaggie. An oddity, a bit out

there but okay.

However, beneath the innocuous eccentricity, a darker side to Noddy Hill was brooding. Scheming

and plotting nefarious plans no-one thought him capable of hatching. And his plans were rather

nasty.    

No one doubts his lot wasn’t helped by drugs — hallucinogens like LSD, mescaline and magic

mushrooms. Mix them with an evangelistic obsession, multiple internments in mental institutions —

and gaol — and an autodidact’s love for biochemistry, microbiology, endocrinology and toxicology

and, well, you’re on the road to somewhere.

But that road struck out into no-man’s land when Noddy decided to posted an image of a bomb on

the internet — what he called ‘bushfire bomb mark 3. Police were staggered by the detail he knows

of explosive devices and feared his mental health status might lead to terrorist attacks and

holocaust-type bushfires through the Otways.

Coming on top of emails comparing himself with mass murderers Julian Knight and Martin Bryant,

and with Jesus Christ, on top of suicide threats and references to Bali bombing, World War III,

holocausts, doomsday and nirvana, it’s fair to say they were a bit concerned. The swaggy seemed

pretty deranged.

Noddy had managed to email stalk some 600 people or agencies, including Premier Daniel

Andrews, in his mission and police saw his so-called ‘Placebo Park’ hideout with its dozen huts

and satellite dish as more terrorist bunker than bush retreat.

Eventually, after seven months in jail and a court case, and in a frail state of health, he was

transferred to a nursing home where the judge was happy to see him stay. 

So in the end, with his menace muted, his mental status noted, Noddy Hill found the care and

warmth he’d been missing since the 1970s when he went off the rails after two deckhands on his

abalone boat died near Portland.

Better late than never, I suppose. It’s funny but it makes me think of the old story of the

unexpected warmth nature has provided in another of the great southwest’s many anomalies, Mount

Leura near Camperdown.

Odd thing is that a holocaust might well have been in the wind there, too. For all we know, it could

still be so today. Vulcan mischief is commonplace across the southwest, as recent as maybe 4500

years ago. Hence the  Dead Sea-like salty crater lakes — great for a lazy Saturday afternoon’s beer-

drinking — the spooky Stony Rises, igneous outcrops, strange subterranean gurglings and more

you’ll find there.

Indigenous folk have it invested in their oral tradition. When volcanic bombs from the scoria of

Mount Leura’s cone were shown to one Aboriginal bloke, he said they were like stones his

forefathers claimed were thrown from the hill by the action of fire.

Back up a little to 1911 and you might get my Noddy-nature-nurture drift. That’s when

Geelong’s News of the Week paper reported “a strange occurrence’’ at the Curdies River:

“All the water became quite white, with froth upon it, which afterwards turned to green slime,’’ it

said. “Large numbers of fish in the stream died. The water gave out a peculiar odour and cattle

refused to drink it.’’

It wasn’t the first time the locals had witnessed such peculiarities. Same thing happened 20 years

earlier; all supposedly the result of a volcanic disturbance in Lake Purrumbete, not far from  Mount

Leura.

“It is said that divers were sent down into the lake on the previous occasion to investigate, but the

water was so hot that they could not stay in it,’’ the News of the Week reported.

 

The paper also reports that blokes humping their waggas through the district took advantage of the

heat around Mount Leura, reporting: “Swagmen frequently camped in such places to obtain

warmth.”

No doubt our Noddy, with his liking for self-sufficiency, would appreciate the fact. But a bloke like

him would also appreciate the many other mysteries and curiosities of the Otways and the

southwest.

In the early days of white invasion, it seemed a wild place. It landscape was bizarre, queer, crawling

with the unknown and the dangerous, with Aborigines and with unfamiliar wildlife. It drew only the

toughest of pioneers and even they battled to stave off the superstitions of bunyips and pookahs in

the region’s splendid isolation.

Yet artists such as Nicholas Chevalier were alert to that splendour early in the piece, capturing the

likes of Red Rock’s crater lakes in the 1860s with a dreamy pale green and blue vista. Similarly,

photographer Fred Kruger preserved Mount Leura to an 1880s moment in history with its lightly

timbered slopes high over the wide verandas of Camperdown. Artist Eugene von Guerard exercised

his draughting excellence to capture the flora and fauna of Koroit’s Tower Hill, outside

Warrnambool, presumably dodging its curious resident emus in the process.

A powerful sense of place and wonder lives on in the works of Otways laureate Gregory Day,

whose exquisite studies of life, love and environment along the Great Ocean Road are some of the

best documents we have.

Some time ago, Geelong Art Gallery exhibited the powerful work of several artists in a charming

essay on Lake Gnotuk.

Drawing on history, geology and indigenous stories, their combined opus was as exhilarating and

captivating as it was outworldly: bottles plugged with cork, stones, sand and water from the lake;

photos of tiny ostrocods; draughtsmen images from the 1850s; russet rock, soil, stone and granule

textures; sepia takes of the crater welded to ochre impressions; prehistoric fish bones; fossilised

shell necklaces, magnetic swirlings of rock and soil reflecting the lava tubs and underground

vortexes of the antediluvian landscapes.

Science meets art, environment meets art, palaeontology meets art; I don’t think it would have been

lost on someone like Noddy. I’m sure he’d wonder at the idea of clear hyper-saline water covering

the stumps of 2000-year-old trees. Maybe he’d think, too, that such volcanic dreaming of the

southwest is just an opening foray into a broader church of natural science, history, mystery and

folklore.

Maybe, just maybe, had his mental health issues been identified and acted on earlier — had he been

closer to the society he shunned — he’d have contributed differently to that oeuvre than becoming

the rather sad piece of folklore he is now.

Pity, really, that we’re all still a bit constipated that way towards such people.

Link: https://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/TranslateArticle.aspx?doc=NCGA%2F2019%2F10%2F22&entity=ar01703

Three decades of innovative, creative design

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Now here’s an interesting project: 70-plus stories on what it takes to build some pretty special new towns, suburbs and communities.

Think planners, designers, engineers, artists, landowners, bankers, investors, clubs and community groups, sales crews, marketers, maintenance crews, apiarists, traditional owners, mums, dads, kids …

Think also creativity, innovation, experience and a good bit of commonsense nous. Villawood Properties has the lot in spades.

This book, 30: Fun, Happy, Communities, marks three decades since Villawood’s beginnings in Bendigo. Over those years, it’s expanded across Victoria, Melbourne, NSW and Queensland.

All up, it’s 164 pages showing a vibrant developer who’s about creating lifestyle and community, not just blocks and houses. A few features:

. A block donated to the national forest system for every block they sell;

. A huge amount of support to community groups, including a house-and-land every year to the Good Friday Appeal;

. Getting people together through activities, facilities and under-the-bonnet design detail;

. Folko Kooper’s extraordinary artwork;

. Getting kids outside for healthy, adventurous childhoods in great parks and playgrounds;

. Sustainability with 70% water and 60% non-renewables cuts.

LINK: https://villawoodproperties.com.au/

 

Parsons, strathspeys and rough justice

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Well strike me pink, I’d sooner drink
With a cove sent up for arson,
Than a rain-beseechin’, preachin’, teachin’
Cranky bloody parson.

The old rhyme’s banging through my head like a tattoo as I try to concentrate on the tune at hand, an elegant strathspey the parson beside me is pumping out on his squeezebox as we labour away musically at Sovereign Hill.

Not that he’s a cranky bloody parson; a while back, in fact, he delivered last rites to an unfortunate infarction victim whose ticker didn’t quite carry him fully up the hill. Very white of him.

The poor deceased was in troublesome health and he’d been well warned about our goldfields precinct but, committed patron he was, he thought what the devil, you only live once.

Regrettably, you only die once too. Unless you’re one of the worthies from the Sub Continent who arrive with their orange beards, pink turbans, lurid purple and lime shirts and retina-burning white trousers. They come back all the time.

It’s an old hack’s maxim, too, that musicians don’t fear death because they do it so many times when performing. Yes, very droll but most neo-colonial fiddlers’ spiritual leanings don’t extend naturally to reincarnation and deathbed sacraments. They’re more, umm, secular.

That strathspey’s bouncing along with a sweet jaunt as one of the corpulent worthies feigns to park his carcass on top of mine to have his daguerreotype taken with a lumpy i-tablet camera. Or maybe it’s a phablet, I don’t know. All I know is he’s stopping me from playing and couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about it — not that I really care, that’s what we’re there for, our good looks.

They’re only human, of course. Who wouldn’t want their photo taken with a clutch of craggy, weather-worn, ruggedly handsome goldfield musicians? Pity they’ve landed us slack-jawed, rheumy-eyed, bewhiskered darlings.

I glance at my parson confrere, who’s seems inured to the intrusion. He’s had his day putting worthies and their likes in their place. Such as the magnificently named James Bond Moussaka — maybe it was Mousenka or somesuch epithet but I prefer the Hellenic tag.

The hapless, recidivist crook with the 007 title came up against the parson when the latter parked his carcass behind the bench as a magistrate in a Zimbabwe jurisdiction. James, in desperation, had robbed a postman on his bike. Together with his priors, it earned him a sentence at the governor’s pleasure, with a minimum of seven years.

He didn’t take kindly and bellowed his approbation from his cell beneath the court: “There’s no fecking justice!”
To my parson’s credit, he didn’t send James off to be flogged, they still did so in those days, but off to the high court.

Curiously enough, James had literary ambitions but probably cruelled his chances with a short story he penned about the jurist banging away on the accordion beside me; a pithy little fiction about torturing and ultimately despatching him. Seems he had a thing about cranky bloody parsons.

None of this, of course, is insinuating its way into the grey matter of the worthy spreading his plump, powdered anatomy across me. I smile diligently, with a thumbs up for good measure, but demur as he tries to snatch my fiddle for his amusement. Nothing doing sport, I smile. Insurance.

His grin assumes a rictus normally associated with too strong a curry and he finally separates himself, making way for a dozen more who take his lead.

We bound into a tune called The March of the King of Laois; seems kind of fitting but it’s awkward with your elbows cramped by visitors. The parson stares into the distance, another dimension perhaps.

Fair bet it’s not The Raj. Wherever it is, it triggers a story about another African encounter, one in which he imbibes a confiscated witchdoctor’s brew made from various well-fermented ingredients, including an unborn human foetus.

“A little like the Irish poteen,” he recalls, citing the illicit potato drop of preference in God’s green land.

“Fortunately, it tasted better.”

New home, new life, new hope

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It was once the cradle of civilisation. These days, there’s little that’s very civilised about the country that hounded Milad Butrus and his family from their home.

Bakhdida, in northern Iraq, became simply too dangerous for this Christian family, a Catholic family, and they fled to Jordan in 2014.

It was a harrowing flight to safety marked by hellish traffic jams in a baking desert, feverish passport negotiations with Baghdad bureaucrats, three businesses and a handsome double-story home left behind, friends, family too …

The alternative presented by Islamic State forces, who had been rocketing Milad’s Bakhdida home town for days, with shells landing as close as 500 metres away, was impossible.

“It was just like Baghdad, where most Christians left — some were killed, some were kidnapped, other had their properties stolen,” Milad says.

“I heard the same story over and over. They came in Hummer cars, they’d say ‘You’re Christian, sign these papers signing over your home or we’ll kill your son’.

“It happened with so many families, and it wasn’t only Islamic State, it was people from the government, the Iraqi army.”

Milad reveals two photographs on his phone that point all too vividly to the fear, anguish and horror of living in the shadow of IS.

The first is of a priest, dressed in brightly coloured robes, in his coffin. It’s Milad’s cousin. He was shot by IS while at Mass, trying to close the church doors against the terrorist intruders.

“They killed between 45 and 50 people in the church that day, some of them as young as two years old,” Milad says, raising his phone to show the second photo, of the church’s appallingly bloodstained and shattered interior.

Milad’s wife, Maherah, nods in agreement as he describes the anxiety of fleeing Iraq, hunkering down in Jordan for close to two years while seeking refugee status to just about anywhere that would take them.

They had their lives, their young children Neamah and Karam, now 11 and six, and they had prayers and hopes.

They’d left behind an IT services and internet provider business, a travel agency and a new furniture store. Their home was shelled but not obliterated. Milad’s father’s home was obliterated. Milad ponders whether he might be sell what’s left of his but he’s not sure if he can.

Fast forward five years and the Butrus family is resident in Geelong, infinitely safer than where they once called home. Geelong was their first stop after arriving at Melbourne Airport. They’re still pinching themselves about living in Australia.

Milad is working in IT at GHD, Maherah is studying English at The Gordon, the kids are lapping up school at Bell Park’s Holy Family Primary.

And they’ve just bought up at Villawood Properties’ new Wandana community between Highton and Ceres, where they’re planning to build soon and consolidate their new life in Australia.

Milad and Maherah grin shyly as they admit they’re even contemplating more kids.

Talk about turning your lives about.

Rattling good yarns on the track to ’Rat

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TRIPPED over an old map recently, showing Newtown’s Skene St as the road to Ballarat. You headed out Skene to Shannon, north to Autumn and up to what is now Hyland St, then down to Fyansford and onwards to the wild west goldfields.

Loads of yarns are attached to the old Fyansford, first watering hole on the road to the old Ballaarat — seabed fossils, sharks’ teeth, cement works, trains, Monash’s bridge, pubs, a re-routed river, Russell Rushton’s frenzied stabbing murder in the 1960s …

Geelong West pedalling oracle Rod Charles will tell you of cyclists coming off second best to bullocks driven up Hyland in days gone by.

All changing now, of course. New houses, estates, roads, drains. An arts and plonk precinct. The old Swan pub’s burned down. Even the Kombi graveyard has lost a lot of its tenants.

Co-travellers to the ’Rat bemoan the goat track highway, even with its recent upgrades. They fiddle with my radio, hook up their iTunes, pore over their phones … anything to avoid looking out the window at the landscape. Well, up to Meredith, anyways. After there, a bit of geographical mercy seems to ease their discomfort.

I get it. But at the same time, I don’t. To me, there’s a world of stories in each swale and saddle, each ridge and rise along that bone-rattling goat track.

There is the skillet-pan pub murder at Stonehaven, the Aboriginal massacre at Dog Rocks, the topless nymphs hanging out of cars on Black Saturday, Johnny Cash at Batesford’s Derwent pub, drag races along Friend-in-Hand Rd, the upside-down model TAA plane that had passers-by worried about a plane crash.

Keep moving west and you’ll be greeted by tiger snakes at farmhouse doors, by a sad memorial to the young actor Melanie Jewson killed in an awful head-on, by the rain shadow of the You Yangs, by rough dry stone fences.

There’s Anakie’s Three Sisters, willows weeping into farm dams, giant irrigation sprinklers, pretty bluestone cottages and abandoned concrete houses.

Stories resonate down the years. Victoria’s last Gallipoli veteran was Bannockburn’s Roy Longmore, a sapper drawing on intel the likes of which Monash learned building his reo-steel bridges to attack enemy positions. Still have a sprig of rosemary from his funeral. Keeps the witches away.

At the one-time Meredith Parachute Club, “kick the can” campfire hijinks were played with beer cans of burning avgas. All very funny until the flames started licking the knees of your jeans. I’m not sure if it’s where One-Legged Dave broke his good peg on a bad landing but wouldn’t be surprised.

Lethbridge Airport hosts a giant yellow Russian Antonov AN-2 biplane, the largest in the world and capable of flying backwards — if you consider it can fly as slow as 80km/h but remain aloft into a 120km/h headwind.

An infamous murder at the one-time Green Tent pub next door, once upon a time, saw walleyed Owen McQueeny hanged at Geelong’s Gallows Flat for killing pretty mother-of-two Elizabeth Lowe.

Across the road, World War I returned servicemen struggled to eke an existence from the Murrungurk soldier settler lots. These days, they’re weekend getaways.

Conman Harold Lasseter, of the Lasseter’s gold reef, gave up his first bleats as a baby at Bamganie, near Lethbridge. Ran away from home at eight, after his mother died. Coerced a government and the unions into funding his smoke-job. Died in the desert for his efforts, mind you.

Turf-smoking premier Henry Bolte was photographed beside his old refrigerator letterbox at Meredith. Cartoon in a Melbourne paper suggested readers look in the fridge, presumably to find the blood sample allegedly switched after a drink-driving incident where a woman sustained permanent brain damage.

Then there was the self-appointed Catholic bishop who powdered his bare buttocks on his porch, to the annoyance of neighbours. Someone spray-painted his sheep pink. Lucky that’s all that happened, I’d suggest.

It’s an odd neck of the woods. Rough as guts in parts but handsome in a scratchy, rocky, wiry way too.

Drop in at Russell’s Bridge and you’ll find alpacas splashing in the Moorabool — and one of the thickest thickets of peppercorns in Christendom.

The Coopers Bridge fishing hole on Sutherlands Creek is gorgeous. The Steiglitz Cemetery is bizarre.

Vignerons drawn to the Moorabool Valley’s dry, stony terroir have transformed the place with their cellar door diversions. Sharing panoramas like the one from Maude’s Bunjil’s Lookout, it’s no surprise. Fact you can see Bunjil and his six lieutenants on a clear night sky is pure magyk.

You want a real treat, though? I’d suggest the burgers at the Meredith Road House. On the right day, the girls will give you a dancing rendition of A-ha’s Take On Me. You might also trip over bikers chugging on lattes, a Good Friday highway re-enactment of the stations of the cross or a ragged crowd of music festival hangovers.

They’ll all have a yarn for you too.

TUNNEL VISION

GOOD to see Geelong’s tunnel addicts are as rusted-on as ever. A recent flurry of Facebook activity shows that belief in the purported female convict tunnel between the old Terminus Hotel and Cunningham Pier hasn’t waned despite nothing resembling evidence. Same goes for the supposed subterranean passage between the old Golden Age pub cellar on Gheringhap and the pier.

And if they’re not still there, well they must have been filled in, yeah? Hmmm … Sly grog, prostitutes, convicts, gold, contraband, guns, illegal immigrants … the tunnels were used for almost everything. Makes you wonder sometimes who was using the roads.

Peculiar thing about them, however, is they hark back to the dark days before streetlights. Given how black the nights were, except once a month at full moon, and with normal citizens holed up in their houses, you have to wonder why you’d need to hide from anyone in the first place.

NED’S GEELONG

Ned Kelly

LOVE the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series on at the Geelong Gallery right now. Been a day or two since old Ned’s been in Geelong. Actually, he wasn’t very old at all, only 15, but he was well on the way to infamy, “apprenticed” to gentleman bushranger “Harry Power” at the time.

Ned and Harry stayed at the Rising Sun Hotel on Ryrie St, after Power earlier ventured into the Easter Volunteer Encampment at Little River. Power’s real name was Henry Johnstone and he escaped from Pentridge in 1869. He met Ned through a Kelly relative he met in jail.

Ned and Harry embarked on a wild 20-month expedition across Victoria. In April 1870, Power made his way to Little River and on to Geelong. “Harry’s mother had lived in Geelong,” says Gary Dean, co-author of the book Harry Power: Tutor of Ned Kelly with Kevin Passey.

“I don’t know if she was still alive, but he had a sister who also lived in Geelong and she was still living there in late 1880s. Harry was obviously visiting his sister, her name was Margaret Melanophy.”

SLEEK CAT SIGHTING

GOOD to hear, too, that our big cat sightings continue — well, so long as you’re not part of their food chain. Freshwater Creek cockie Harry Cook says the area has hosted big cats, on and off, for years. His last sighting was a couple of weeks back, in the Dickens Rd area.

Harry says the animal was as sleek as all get out, well-muscled and a shiny jet black. Sizewise, it was somewhere between a domestic cat and some larger unknown cats he’s seen in the past. “Every year about this time he seems to show up,” Harry says.

“As far as I can tell, he’s visiting his girlfriend or something. I think he’s in a nearby dam full of reeds and stuff, but I’m not game enough to go have another look. He’s after fast food and I’m slow food!”

Facts first casualty in the truth wars

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If you think crying fake media is the first refuge of the scoundrel, you’ll be delighted to hear what might happen if you put artificial intelligence, revisionist history and political ultra-idealism all in the one room.

Yeah, yeah, should you really care? Maybe not, this is fiction after all, loopy theory at best. And it hangs loosely on the premise of an unnamed US president who rearranges facts into fiction at will.

If a galoot can ignore history and reality willy-nilly and get away with it, what might happen if some sharper tools in the sack decided to do likewise?

Like some shifty Holocaust deniers and US slavery deniers with a knack for picking holes in survivors’ accounts, and doing so in high-profile court cases. What might happen if, suddenly, the primary sources used to defend against such attacks disappeared?

We’re talking disappeared from the great libraries, museums and repositories of the world holding them, and from all the hidey-holes in cyber-space. A latter-day burning of the Library at Alexandria. Lots of smoke, lots of screen vacuums.

Without references, without the books and diaries and letters and official documents that hold our history, and without techno back-ups, did any of it really happen?

And what might happen if historians, academics, survivors and other high-profile figures are suddenly being killed off as well? And bookshops firebombed?

Maggie Costello is the poor sap charged with figuring the who, how and why of it all. A former special assistant to the president she’s whip-smart but a sucker for punishment.

She’s targeted by would-be killers, goes viral in a manufactured sex tape, has her voice replicated in fake conversations, half-frozen, half-baked and hung out to dry, by herself, as an emotional, lovelorn basket-case.

Frailty and courage face off with a clutch of semi-deranged college alumni convinced that the only way forward to world peace is eradicate the past. War, they argue, is simply a revenge fixation – which humans are happy to exploit back into deep time. Get rid of the official record and peace might stand a chance.

Deranged hippies with degrees, basically. But someone has a lot of money and a lot of high-tech nouse because the world’s libraries and museums are all going up in smoke one by one: in London, Oxford, Cairo, Moscow, Addis Ababa, Kolkata, Mexico City … and no amount of security seems capable of stopping the book-burning inferno.

Maggie very quickly becomes persona non grata but with the aid of a former love interest working in the shadows, deftly pokes into the right corners and spaces where such feverish plots might be hatched.

Armed with a college incubator checklist, she throws all caution and good sense to the wind as she homes in on her target. But wait, there’s a twist you don’t expect. And then another. And wait up again, there’s also …

Okay, go find out for yourself. This scoundrel’s not telling.

TO KILL THE TRUTH

By Sam Bourne

Hatchette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moi-yo: Magical queen of a golden age

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BERLIN 1939: The storm clouds of war are hovering dark and forbidding over Europe. The German capital, long known for its libertine ways, for its raunchy cabarets, is now known as the nerve centre of a Nazi juggernaut making its way across Europe.

For the world’s foremost illusion show, the renowned Dante the Magician’s company – a troupe that’s performed in faraway China, in Stalinist Russia, amid typhoons in Japan – the season might be just one more engagement amid a dubious political regime.

It’s not. War is suddenly declared on the fatherland by England and the show’s over. It’s time to get out. Fast.

For the young Geelong woman who is the show’s star, apart from Dante himself, leaving much of the company’s gear behind is a worrying proposition.

So too is being ushered to the border by Nazi SS troops. She’s not to know Gustav V, the King of Sweden, will invite the entourage into his Scandinavian refuge, from where it’s able to marshall its resources and eventually head to safety – and Broadway – in the US.

The woman, Moi-yo Miller, is as exotic a showstopper as you’ll see sashay on to a stage anywhere in this golden age of entertainment.

At 25 years old, she’s the apogee of elegance and widely considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. Moi-Yo Miller is Dante the Magician’s leading lady, his principal illusionista, and a world-wide sensation in her own right.

A dark, brooding beauty one minute in satin, silk and turban, she’s ethereal magic. Mysterious and stunning. Crowds gasp at her entrance.

A flashing smile and seamless dancer’s glide in the spotlight the next; she’s something between Dietrich and fairy. Beguiling, whimsical, arresting.

Moi-Yo’s name is emblazoned across posters from Peking to New York and helps draw thousands upon thousands to Dante’s magic shows – her high cheekbones and piercing glances the perfect foil to his mind-boggling illusions, his casual chatter and his trademark “Sim Sala Bim’’ exhortations.

Pity she’s about to be sawn in half.

In 1939, she’s still young. Eventually, her supple contortionist’s body is going to be shot, crushed, levitated, evaporated, reconstituted, squeezed into impossibly small boxes to magically vanish and reappear before hundreds upon hundreds of rapturous audiences across Europe, Asia, America and North Africa.

Eventually, she’s going to be sawn in half 11,800 times – everywhere from Hollywood, Broadway and Las Vegas to London, Moscow, Valencia. Dante’s nothing if not brutal, professionally that is.

“Fortunately, I was very acrobatic when I was a child and that played a big part,’’ Moi-Yo recalls.

“Claudia Cassidy, a society writer in England, came to the show I don’t know how many times and in the first write-up she said, `That girl folds up like a piece of Chinese silk’. I thought it was lovely.

Now, at the impressive age of 95, Moi-Yo is even more impressively limber; buzzing and bouncing about the Armadale home where she still lives independently.

She’s tiny, thin, perfectly coiffed and made up. The best part of a century hasn’t sapped her prodigious energy and she whips about the house scouting up scrapbooks, clippings, photos, chattering loudly with an American accent and a hint of the emeritus star.

She’s a great grandmother now, returned in recent years from California after her husband Arturo’s death to be nearer her faraway family. Magic might have made Moi-Yo famous but it kept her from Australia for too many years. She remembers that distant past acutely.

She was born Loretta Miller in 1914, the start of World War 1. But even way back then, a world away, she was someone else – someone known as Miki Miller. The Moi-Yo came later, in Asia where Miller was readily mispronounced. Dante pounced on the exotic tone and she was renamed.

Miki lived in Newtown’s Skene St and later in South Geelong’s Lonsdale St. She was one of four kids: Marnie, Bobbie, brother Frank and Miki. Marnie was actually Marion, Bobbie was really Juanita and Frank was, well, he was Frank. Moi-Yo remembers him dearly.

She still conjures up images of school at St Mary’s and, like many Geelong kids of the 1920s, swimming in the sea baths at Eastern Beach, visiting Johnstone Park, exploring the Barwon River, playing on vanished wooden bridges ….

“Oh, the beach was wonderful,’’ she says of Eastern Beach, years before its art deco masterpiece was built.

“There was this beautiful part of the beach we used to go, I think it’s still there, we used to go diving, a whole bunch of us. Of course I was the ringleader.

“We used to go to Johnstone Park and everybody would be taking pictures because of the glorious, green rolling lawns. At the top was a library of some kind as I remember it.’’

She remembers pies after church on Moorabool St, the hedonism of eating pure butter, and dancing, always dancing.

“Scotch dancing, Irish jigs and strathspey and reels … I can’t remember when I wasn’t dancing.

“We’d go to all the competitions. Mum would sit with the other mothers and they’d all be gossiping until they’d see us come and they’d be, ‘Here come those Miller kids!’ because we were all dancing in the competition and either I’d get first place and Marnie would get second or Marnie would get first prize and I’d get second. It never failed.’’

That dancing became a full-time occupation and Moi Yo was performing in Melbourne in 1933 when she met Dante’s son Bill, when the magic show came to town.

Dante senior pronounced himself smitten by the beauty of Melbourne’s females. He staged a revue looking for the most beautiful woman in Australia. Moi-Yo took out the honours and spent the next year studying the illusions.

She was known thereafter as the Most Beautiful Woman in Australia. She was also advertised for two decades – around the globe – as one of the most beautiful women in the world. She thinks it was an exaggeration but look at the pictures for yourself.

Young Moi-yo took to Dante’s show with a passion – and an eye for smartening up what she still refers to as an “awful’’ staging. She redesigned costumes, sets and music, vetted staff and in quick time become co-star of the largest touring show in the world at the time – the Dante Mystery Revue.

And there was magic. Magic behind China’s closed borders, in Stalin’s tyrannical empire, in Japan, Spain and Europe, Canada, America…

“Oh yes, we travelled all over China, we loved it,’’ Moi-yo smiles.

“Everywhere we went, of course, we had entree into the best of places. But we were not meeting people on the streets, so to speak, unless we met friends in the group and they had friends – then we’d get to meet someone that way.’’

Winning entry to different countries was not always a straightforward affair and often drew on Dante’s formidable renown and his extensive worldwide connections.

“First of all, we had to get the paperwork done, visas with all those countries, and we had to get entree by some very well-known people – the Strasbourgs or someone like that – and then we had a toe in and we had to work our way through.’’

Today, half a century later, the changing nature of touring shows have all consigned Moi-Yo’s star to the past. Yet, even 50 years after retirement forced by Dante’s death, Moi-Yo is still recognised by the magic world’s cognoscenti.

Last year she was subject of a special homage in the movie Women in Boxes – a tribute to magicians assistants cut into pieces, stabbed incessantly, set on fire, crushed, dismembered …

Says director Harry Pallenberg: “Moi-Yo Miller has an interesting position in the pantheon of assistants. Every single person we interviewed – both man and woman, magician or assistant, historian or magic fan – saw Moi-Yo as the pinnacle of the art.”

In 1993, she and husband Arturo were presented with a Dragon Award by the J. Marberger Stuart Foundation.

For a woman whose study is wallpapered with photos of her with such luminaries down the ages as a young David Copperfield and George Sanders, not to mention movie posters of Abbott and Costello, it’s perhaps not so remarkable that in the town where she was born, Moi-yo Miller might be largely a forgotten star to all but family and the closest of friends.

We shouldn’t forget. Luckily, the Nazis didn’t.

— Moi-yo Miller died September 18, 2018. She was 104 years old.

 

 

Suicide Freddie: Olympic daredevil, rake, gun-runner, diamond smuggler

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Dirty rotten scoundrels don’t come much bigger, better or more reckless than Aussie-born, international high-society gatecrasher Freddie McEvoy.

McEvoy was a swashbuckler, a daredevil race driver, world bobsled champion, Olympic medallist, a gambler, diamond smuggler, gun-runner, suspected Nazi spy … and one of the most expensive, most highly-chased male escorts in Europe.

Freddie supposedly killed a man in a Marseilles bar-room brawl. Coupled with his athleticism, humour, refined charm and extraordinary network of filthy rich and royal friends, it made him irresistible to women.

Rich and powerful women.

He married some of the world’s richest women: Standard Oil heiress Beatrice Cartwright – he was 33, she was 62 – heiress Irene  Wrightsman, and a wealthy French-Algerian fashion model Claude Filatre.

He might have married the world’s richest woman, old pal Barbara Hutton, in between but made the blunder of introducing her to a Russian mate, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy. It didn’t last.

Along the way he tupped with Nazi spy Sandra Rambeau and a raft of dripping-rich society and titled dames – they were a weakness. McEvoy was sought not just for his boudoir skills but as a status symbol. Stepping out with Freddie showed they could afford him.

Smooth operator, charmer, Lothario, rogue, philanderer, rake, whatever you want to call him, Freddie was equally a great weakness for women. Adjectives for this impeccably-mannered playboy included debonair, witty, charming, fascinating and elegant.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, his best friend was another smooth-talking Aussie satyr, Captain Blood himself, Errol Flynn.

Far from any celebrity hanger-on, if Freddie Mac was anything to Flynn it was a role model on how to develop and execute his wicked, wicked ways. They’d met as teenagers in Queensland then again in London in 1934 where they became thicker than thieves.

They were brawlers, drinkers, gamblers and womanisers par excellence. After Flynn hit the big time, they made the Hollywood Rat Pack of the 1960s look like choirboys.

When Flynn was facing prison on rape charges in LA in 1942, the biggest celebrity story of the year, Freddie was ready with car and hired muscle to break him from court and escape to Mexico. Flynn, with whom McEvoy has played bit parts in his movies, was acquitted and the two retired to his Mulholland Drive ranch to take up the cavorting and carousing where they’d left off.

Proudly a man of no visible means, the Maseratis, grand yachts, French Riviera lifestyle and tuxedos of ‘Suicide Freddie’ – as he was nicknamed for his speed freak addiction – were also part financed by a variety of his own means; from brokering meetings of rich wannabes with society to smuggling between LA and Mexico on Flynn’s yacht.

Guns, diamonds, whiskey, cigarettes, people … it was all great fun and adventure for Freddie. That is, until sailing a yacht from the south of France to the Bahamas with some ex-SS Nazis, he came unstuck.

Shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco, he and wife Claude were washed up dead, their heads so pulverised they were thought to be scalped. Two others were washed up, naked, while two more were washed off the yacht while it was being battered on rocks.

Three others, the Nazis, survived. They reported that Freddie had been fearless aboard the sinking craft, swimming 200 metres to shore for help and then back to the boat when he couldn’t find any.

He hauled his wife almost ashore but 20 metres from safety they disappeared in the crashing surf. So the story goes.

What really happened is anyone’s guess.

 THE SCANDALOUS FREDDIE McEVOY

By Frank Walker

Hachette

Africa: It’s a jungle out there, Nkosi

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Exorcisms, terrorist killings, people smuggling, illegal disposal of bodies, bigamy – a priest’s work in war-ravaged Rhodesia was never easy.

But Irish Anglican Fr Michael Gale is a practical preacher. It’s a handy talent when you’re sharing your congregation’s allegiances with tribal rivalries, superstition and witch-doctors.

That’s not to mention a devil’s telephone of villager intrusion, a highly-vocal mothers choir interrupting Mass at will or police special branch poking its nose where it’s not wanted.

Or a patchwork of Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Dutch Reformed confreres all too keen to overrule his activities. And your name on a terror death-list, just to top things off.

But Fr Gale, Nkosi, has military backing – he’s a captain with a detachment of sappers – as he tries to oversee his two parishes: the excitable African St Augustine’s and white conservative St Cuthbert’s.

It’s a handy qualification, up to a point, but not much help while he’s racing mothers in labour to hospital – especially when his gun goes off accidentally in the car. Or trying to play Solomon with an injured father seeking to return to his remarried wife and sons.

As the local terrorist body count rises, Fr Gale also finds himself seeking to preserve community calm while awkwardly contradicted by his religious scruples. It’s all a rather tough ask, something a lesser man might find overwhelming.

But with the help of a secret stash of beloved coffee beans, single-malt whisky and vinous collaborations with sympathetic colonels and bishops, and more than a few solid parishioners, he manages to find a middle path.

Nkosi lies somewhere in that fertile ground between The Little World of Don Camillo and The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. McCall Smith meets Guareschi with a Hibernian turn distinctly its own.

Its gentle humour and warm humanity in the face of clashing politics, creed and culture are wonderfully negotiated by the clever FitzSimons; himself a magistrate, parish priest and army chaplain in the former Rhodesia.

These days he’s a research fellow with Federation University, an historian and musician with Sovereign Hill and an author. He has written several titles, including Two Fat Ladies and Hercules Tom and The Unfortunate Endeavours of Charles Henry Brown: Aeronaut 1827-1870.

FitzSimons says the story and characters of Nkosi are fictitious and wholly imaginary although certain public figures, agencies and events are true.

With credentials like his, you’ll just have to take his word for that.

NKOSI: An African Adventure
By Terence FitzSimons
Mirador Publishing

Freeride world champ Huber retires

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Torquay’s Freeride world champion skier Lorraine Huber has announced her retirement  from the Freeride World Tour
after eight seasons. The Freeride World Tour is an annually toured series of events in which the best freeride skiers and snowboarders
compete for individual event wins, as well as the overall title of World
Champion in their respective genders and disciplines.

“I’ve had eight intense and unforgettable years on the FWT and I am
very happy to end my competition career on such a high note,” Huber said.

During the past 2018 season, Huber dominated the fourth tour stop in
Fieberbrunn in Austria with a win, followed by a second place at the
Xtreme Verbier in Switzerland, the finals of the Freeride World Tour,
putting her in third place overall.

In 2017, Huber achieved her big dream of winning the World Champion title. She also became runner-up
champion in 2014. She was awarded Vorarlberg Sportswoman of the Year
2017 and received the Golden Medal of Achievement in Sport from her home
state of Vorarlberg, Austria.

“Lorraine Huber is one of the best female skiers we’ve seen on the
Tour, winning a World Title and demonstrating one of the strongest
characters and commitment to her sport,” said Nicolas Hale-Woods, CEO of the
Freeride World Tour.

“Lorraine has been a major actor in the sport’s progression, she has shared her passion, and
is now willing to pass on her experience to future generations, which is
fantastic. Thank you Lorraine!”

Although Huber is retiring from freeride competition, by no means does
this suggest retirement from professional skiing.

“I want to put all my energy into new projects now,” she said.

“It’s especially important to me to pass on my knowledge and experience in the sport of freeriding to future generations –
particularly to female skiers.

“To this end, I plan on expanding my women’s freeride camps in Lech am Arlberg. I will also be busy with
the production of ski film projects. My next big goal is to complete my master’s degree in mental strength coaching at the University of
Salzburg. This will enable me to coach athletes professionally in
reaching their full potential.”

FEATURE:

DAREDEVILS are a funny breed. Some are clearly adrenalin junkies bent on scaring the daylights out of themselves for the rush it brings. Others are more methodical, analytical, driven for the thrill but exercising more care.

Talk to, say, base jumpers and you’ll note a supreme kind of confidence but also a deadly serious attention to detail. One slip and the game’s over. No second chances there. Same goes for highwire artists, F1 drivers, stuntmen and pilots, divers, speleologists, rock climbers, commandoes … blink and you might find yourself dead.

Torquay ski superstar Lorraine Huber talks about an ‘avalanche moment’ that very nearly persuaded her to walk away from extreme skiing — better known these days as freeriding — where she last month ranked number one in the world.

That’s number one in the world at throwing yourself over a precipitous cliff — a breathtaking sport many consider the scariest in the world. Forget bungee jumping and parachuting, this is a white-knuckler without a net and every chance of exiting this world at any point on the course between go and whoa.   

When that sport, your career, is all about jumping off a mountain, it pays to know everything you can possibly know about what’s underneath you; the type of snow, where rocks are, the angle of the slope, what line you need to take. Judges agree and detract rather than add points for reckless manoeuvres.

But avalanches, for all the planning, awareness and calculated risk, are just plain terrifying. It’s not you throwing yourself at the mountain, it’s the mountain throwing itself at you. Lorraine is well aware of the threat and at times it’s nearly prompted her to walk away from the sport she helped pioneer in the Austrian alps and where she has dominated international competitions for more than a decade.

Raised on the snowfields of Austria, in Lech am Arlberg, the nearest ski lift was 100 metres from her front door, Lorraine Huber went to ski school instead of kindergarten. Then at age eight, she moved to Australia, and Torquay. She studied at Newtown’s Sacred Heart College and grew up by the sea, but managed to get in six or so weeks skiing back in Austria.

She’s been living in the mountain village she grew up in, Lech am Arlberg, since the end of 1998 after graduating from Sacred Heart. It’s her dad’s home town and her family goes back there 400 and more years. The house her ancestors used to live is now the heritage museum.

Proud as she is of that, her mother is from Torquay, where Lorraine lived from age eight  to 18, and it still feels more like home to her than anywhere else, she says. She’s maintained friendships with girlfriends from primary and secondary school alike.

But in Lech, back in 1998, her world was about to change again. As she phrases it:

“My skiing world was all about making perfect, rhythmical turns straight down the fall line in all types of snow conditions, scooping tracks and creating symmetrical patterns in the snow in the true, traditional Arlberg style. Then, in February 1998, something remarkable happened …”

Avalanche warnings had locked entry in and out of Lech and Lorraine found herself, with her ski instructor buddies, skiing fast, long turns and dropped cliffs for the first time.

“Of course I bailed every time, but in the heavy snow fall, it didn’t matter,” she says. “On the fourth day, the sun came out, and I was tearing it up with my mates, headed straight for the cliff we sessioned, launched it, stomped it, and then arced four long and fast turns down to the bottom of the slope.”

And that was it. She was hooked on freeskiing.

A few years later, urged on by her instructor mates, she entered her first big mountain freeride contest — the Red Bull Snowthrill in Slovenia — and took out first prize. She’s been a professional ever since. And last season, 2014, saw her pipped for the Freeride World Tour’s top spot, running second to fellow Arlberg skier Nadine Wallner  — a prodigious achievement in anyone’s book.

She’s also a coach for prestigious KJUS World  events and Kastle Adventure Tours, a fully-certified ski guide and a director of freeride camps. Her sponsors include KJUS and Kästle, together with Scott, Garmont and ABS Avalanche Airbag. Just to drop a few names.

In fact, tap Lorraine Huber into Google and you’ll find a tidy 130,000-plus pages detailing her career as a professional freeride skier. Videos, articles, photographs … there are mountains of maneouvres and airborne escapades she throws herself through that will raise the hair on the back of your neck.

But as you might expect with a dangerous sport, it hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way. In 2007, she received a nasty reminder when she ruptured her ACL and MCL in a bad crash.

She underwent a ligament graft transplant — using a part of her hamstring to replace the ruptured ACL, which turns into a ligament-like tissue. The MCL was able to be sewn back together.

“I did eight months of rehab in Australia before getting back on snow,” she recalls. “My rehab didn’t go so well because I always had pain behind my kneecap, which consequently prevented my wasted muscles in my right leg from redeveloping. Due to this, I developed tendinitis in my right patella which, unfortunately, has become chronic.”

Did she find a strength she didn’t know she had?

“Yes, absolutely. I don’t think it is anything unusual though and I believe most people would have done the same. If life deals you some hardships then you just get through it because you have to, one day at a time. What other alternative do you have, anyway? The natural thing for me was to focus on my rehab and getting better.”

More recently, Lorraine struck further injury problem but tenacity and resilience saw her through.

“The season before, I came closer than ever before to achieving my goal of becoming Freeride World Tour champion. After a crash at the finals in Verbier (Switzerland), I placed second overall behind Arlberg local Nadine Wallner, who showed nerves of steel with a solid run that placed her in second on the day, and first overall.

“I had tasted blood, however, and was super-motivated to keep training and improving. During my off-snow training, my main motivator was the overall title. My thoughts returned to that title often.

“Come December, I was at the top of my game, feeling physically and mentally stronger than ever and also excited about skiing on the new Kästle BMX skis I had helped to develop. Then, on 26 December, disaster struck.

“All day we had been skiing low angle, grassy slopes and were having a ball. Suddenly, while skiing in the Seekopf area in Zürs, I hit a rock hidden under 30cm of snow and came to a complete stop. I broke my ankle on impact.

“I can tell you, it bloody hurt. When I heard my doctor give me his diagnosis of five to six weeks rest, my world started crumbling around me.”

Lorraine went through a learning curve, realising she’d focussed too much on the overall title the previous season, instead of directing her focus from one event to the next, aiming to just ski her best at each competition.

But within five weeks, almost miraculously, she was back skiing the Freerider World Tour, free in her mind, and finishing seventh overall and qualifying for the FWT 2016 and finishing fourth.

This year, Lorraine’s drive, determination and steely resolve saw her at last grasp the Freerider World Tour number one mantle.

“What drives me to be a freerider?” she says.

“I want to live a passionate life. I want to live a life that’s full of passion and a strong life and freeriding allows me to do that.”