Eric Bana at YOTS-Interview with John Cleese

Father Chris Riley & Eric Bana

Youth Off The Streets held their 20th Year anniversary black tie Gold Dinner on Saturday at the Hilton Hotel. YOTS, for short is the brainchild of Catholic priest Father Chris Riley who has been beavering away now for two decades assisting homeless, disadvantaged and abused youth.

Riley has some high profile supporters including Murdoch Books publisher Matt Hanbury and it's special ambassador is actor Eric Bana.

Among the guests were Premier Barry O'Farrell, patrons Sir William and Lady Helen Deane, TV host David Koch and wife Libby, Sony Music heavy Denis Handlin and actress Paula Duncan. Entertainment was provided by Diesel and Mahalia Barnes.


Bana has been back in Australia for two months, and plans to stay on with wife Rebecca and children Klaus and Sophie, reducing his film work to one project a year. The thriller film Hanna in which he stars is currently showing in Sydney and he has two more due for release-By Virtue Fall and Blackbird.

Sen. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells
   and Premier Barry O'Farrell

Sir William & Lady Deane

 Let's hope Sony's Handlin took notice of some of the ladies who work for YOTS. They read the interview with young singer Jack Vidgen who said he wished to participate and help YOTS out and they are excited.
 Sony signed Vidgen after his Australia's Got Talent win and his debut CD, Yes I Am is going gangbusters.




From 702 ABC Sydney :

John Cleese & Richard Glover (ABC Radio 702)

Comedy legend John Cleese is in town for the Just for Laughs comedy festival at the Sydney Opera House. Richard Glover caught up with John to talk Fawlty Towers, Monty Python and how he feels about political and social changes in the UK.
 Go to The Drive Show website here to listen to Glover's excellent interview with Cleese.

Go to the Sydney Opera House website here to book tickets for Just For Laughs which is hosted by John Cleese and features Martin Short, Dylan Moran, Demetri Martin, Russell Howard, Margaret Cho, Louis C.K and more.

Art'n About

Joanna Braithwaite's 'Royal Mount' from the Sulman exhibition

Now in its 90th year, the Archibald Prize is one of Australia’s oldest and most prestigious art awards. JF Archibald’s primary aims were to foster portraiture, support artists and perpetuate the memory of great Australians.

There was little controversy this year. No-one is suing anyone as has happened several times in the past - once over a claim a charcoal drawing was not a painting. Although the Archibalds thrive on controversy and out of hundreds of entries only 40 get hung as a twelve trustees of the NSW Art Gallery-led by the president Steven Lowy (his family own the world-wide chain of Westfield shopping centres) finally decide on a winner after much debate.



Margaret Olley &  Ben Quilty



This year's winner of the $50,000 prize was Ben Quilty with his portrait of Australia's doyen of art, 88 year old Margaret Olley acclaimed as our greatest living artist who was also the subject of the 1948 winning work by William Dobell.

Richard Goodwin won the Wynne Prize for his sculpture of a vertical motorcycle titled ' Co-isolated slav.'and the Sulman Prize was won by Peter Smeeth for his painting 'The artist's fate'.

Hugo Weaving admires a painting of his pal Richard Roxburgh

All the works  go on public exhibition from tomorrow until June 26 at the Art Gallery of NSW and will then tour regional NSW and Victoria.



Rodney Pople with his family portrait



round the world sailor Jessica Watson by Tom McBeth

Judy & Ken Done with his self portrait

Nicholas Harding's portrait of actor Hugo Weaving



Gallery director Edmund Capon, new NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell , Steven Lowy



Song Ling's self portrait

Peter Ikin Accused Gets Bail

ALEXANDRE DESPALLIERES the French husband of the late Australian music identity Peter Ikin has been granted bail in a French court.
As we reported recently a bail application in February was refused but now Despallieres has walked free from Fresnes prison but must report to police each day.

John Reid,Alexandre Despallieres & Peter Ikin

Ikin was the former head of Warner's Music Australia and had re-ignited an affair with Despallieres with the pair marrying in a civil ceremony. Shortly after, Ikin fell to his death down a flight of stairs. Despallieres gained probate on Ikin's $20M estate in a London court and moved into his Chelsea home but that will was successfully overturned by Ikin's family.

 Elton John's former manager, John Reid an old friend of Ikin's hired detectives to investigate the manner of his friend's death and not long after Despallieres's was charged by French police.

 As our picture shows, in former days Reid and Despallieres appeared to be good friends.

Prince Alfred

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# A telephone call reputedly from the new premier Barry O'Farrell's office informs us that Henry James O'Farrell who attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred in 1868 was "not a relation of the premier although Mr O'Farrell remains fiercely proud of his Irish roots".

Asked to comment on Prince Andrew's "appointment" as NSW Governor (our invention) he responded : "I have nothing to say about that ". Strange.

exclusive : HRH Prince Andrew To Be Appointed Governor of NSW

The fun-loving but  troubled British royal HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York is to be appointed Governor of NSW by the new premier Barry O'Farrell, taking up his appointment in November this year when the current incumbent Marie Bashir retires.

The official announcement is expected to be made by HRH The Queen when she visits the country in October for the CHOGM conference. And the O'Farrell family and royal family have been linked by an incident from over 140 years ago (see below).

O'Farrell has always said that Government House, perched high above the Opera House with it's sensational views of Sydney Harbour would be rightfully restored as the Governor's home if he won the election. With his convincing win on Saturday when the Coalition swept into power with 68 seats to Labor's 20, the new premier has a mandate to implement most of his policies.

It's been 15 years since former premier Bob Carr closed the Governor's mansion . Since then it's been available for everything-weddings, parties , barmitzvahs and so on. The Coalition has always claimed it was a scandal and the Monarchist's League has been outraged that NSW Governors would live in their own homes rather than the official residence.

Although ex-convict architect Francis Greenaway was originally commissioned to design Government House it was eventually built by English architect  Edward Blore and finished in 1890.

 Blore working in the romantic Gothic style, produced a mock castle which matched the crenellations of the existing nearby Greenway stables. The new building immediately became the talk of the town and helped establish the romantic Regency style in residential architecture which became popular in the colony over the next twenty years.

Prince Andrew, a man used to luxury and who has been the butt of numerous scandalous tales in the British media over his association with the New York millionaire Jeffrey Epstein should feel right at home in his new abode. It has style and plenty of space and beautiful gardens for entertaining on a large scale. With maids, butlers and 2 Royal Equerries plus his own staff and several official limousines he will want for nothing.

There are 28 rooms and the large reception area is a richly decorated two-storey hall with a musicians gallery. Government House also reputedly introduced the first modern water closet to Australia. The porte-coche was added in 1873, and the two front rooms extended about 1900. Although there had been earlier proposals (c.1900) to move the vestigial Governor into more modest premises, it was not until 1996 that this finally occurred under the premiership of Carr.

Numerous Royals have stayed there in the past including The Queen and Prince Phillip and Prince Charles and Diana when they were together and Pope Benedict slept there for 2 nights in 2008.



Jane & Sarah

It's been long rumoured amongst royal circles in the UK that Andrew would have to packed off somewhere sensible to re-create his crumbling public image. A spell as Governor of NSW for the normal 4 year appointment would seem the ideal solution.

And he should feel right at home. Sister-in-law Jane Ferguson lives a short drive away in Bondi and ex-wife Fergie is a regular visitor.

There are plenty of nightclubs and attractions for the Andrew's fun loving daughters should they visit and if Andy wants a casual drink there's always the Lord Dudley pub in Woolahra, a favourite of Prince Harry.

Andrew's appointment follows in a tradition of packing off Royals to the colonies for further education and royal duties.



a depiction of the attempted assassination: National Gallery



The

1867 visit of Queen Victoria's son Prince Alfred to Australia was the first by a member of the British Royal family and was tumultuous, to say the least.

It produced an outpouring of national exaltation and then of national shame following an assassination attempt on the Prince.

 On 12 March 1868 an  ancestor of the new premier-Henry James O'Farrell shot the Prince in the back at a public function in Clontarf, Sydney. O'Farrell was immediately arrested, and was convicted and hanged on 21 April that same year.

A "When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife ?" Moment

The verdict is in and Labor has been removed from the NSW political landscape having captured a probable 21 seats while the Coalition have at least 64 seats. There are oddities as usual in this state election. Although the Greens picked up over 10% of the vote they won no seats while the Nationals with just over 12% win 17 seats.

For all the doomsday predictions in the media this isn't too different to the '96 John Howard election when he crushed Federal Labor in a 'landslide' which reversed itself within 3 years with Labor winning over 50% of votes in '99 but still failing to take office. It does mean however that it will be a probable 8 years before Labor has a hope of winning although the voters belief that the Coalition is going to deliver them Paradise has the power to backfire badly.

 Common wisdom is that huge landslides really mean little in the way of a party's power to govern but do mean the electorate expects much and heaven help those who don't deliver. The claims of a mandate complicate matters when no-one actually knows what the Coalition intends to do apart from widen one highway as they announced. Labor had 11 new young MPs elected which gives them a chance to quickly re-invent itself.

As usual the local media-particularly the giant News Corp tabloids have performed woefully and spoken in soundbites that resemble Liberal Party press releases and have let new premier Barry O' Farrell slide into office without revealing one single policy.

The Fairfax Media, publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne's Age newspapers seem desperate to descend to the same levels.

One report we noticed in the last days before polling was this piece about a well known personality who features on the Shuttle often-private investigator Frank Monte who stood unsuccessfully for the NSW upper house.

The Shuttle spoke to Monte yesterday and he was still annoyed. The previous week he had mentioned to us a tale of how the Herald had phoned him and asked why he was standing for politics.



Frank Monte







He gave them a quick run down of his policies and revealed that in the past he had worked for two state premiers and believed he could do a better job himself

The journalist's reply was "oh everyone around the office says it's only so you can get your hands on the electoral rolls."

Monte scoffed at the idea and responded that the majority of his work is now corporate investigation where local rolls are of little use and indeed, he spends more time working in the USA than Australia. And the very idea of spending $30,000 on a political campaign to get a copy of the electoral rolls was pretty silly.

Having set up the scenario (as our headline explains) -the Herald duly printed the outrageous slur without one scintilla of proof apart from some hacks in the Herald office deciding that must be the case. Office gossip became news.



Solomon Lew

 When the DJ's harassment case broke last year Monte announced (and it's presumed that it was a deliberate strategy by the client) that he was investigating the girl who made the claims which were eventually settled with no admissions made by the ex-DJs boss Mark McInnes who was recently described as the "disgraced" former DJ's CEO. Disgraced ?. Who says so ?. Certainly not Solomon Lew who just hired McInnes for a salary of $5.5M to oversee his fashion empire.

As we reported last year- during the infamous Versace court case, Donatella Versace said in an Australian High Court witness box in 2001 while being questioned by Monte's barrister, that she had never, ever taken drugs but just 18 months later revealed in Vogue that she had been addicted to drugs before and after Gianni Versace's murder.

Learned legal minds say that had Donatella told the truth about her drug use the trial's outcome may have been entirely different and in Monte's favour. The Herald amongst other newspapers got stuck into Monte at the time and have used every opportunity to bash him in print ever since.

They have gone strangely silent since the new verification that Gianni was indeed murdered as Monte had originally said-by the Mafia and which concurred with local confidential Miami police reports at the time that voiced the same suspicion .

Going Out In Style

One guest who hit the red carpet at last week's world launch of the new musical Dr Zhivago-A Musical was the American born and accented New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally.

 Immaculately dressed, tall and elegant Keneally is one politician the camera does not do justice. She is extraordinarily beautiful and charismatic in the flesh, And that is one reason that despite the unpopularity of State Labor, Keneally has spent the last year visiting every electorate in the state to press the flesh.

As the Shuttle accurately predicted 6 months beforehand, Kristina was elected by the Labor Caucus as Premier in December 2009. Although she has become highly popular in the top job, that popularity isn't translating into percentage points for her ruling Labor Party which is expected to be defeated at the polls in 5 weeks time although the rumoured Coalition landslide is highly unlikely. While Labor languishes in the polls at anything from 23 to 27 %, Kristina stills comes in at just under 50%.

At a televised election debate with Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell this week the audience overwhelmingly declared the unflappable Keneally the winner by far.

 A party in power for 13 years was bound to suffer from the tiredness factor and although media speculation at the time was that it would be Keneally's role to stench the flow of blood from the coming defeat. there have been more concrete plans in the wings.

Born in Las Vegas and brought up in Colorado, Keneally cut her political teeth as an intern for the US Democratic party working for the Colorado Governor. When she emigrated to Australia with her Aussie husband in 1998 she joined the Labor Party and after being elected to the state seat of Heffron in 2003, her rise has been meteoric albeit quietly in the wings. Those granite jawed men who run the party had their eyes on Keneally from day one and marked her out as leadership material.

Brought into Cabinet on the strength of Emily's List that promotes greater numbers of female politicians, Keneally joins the growing list of Labor Party women who are going places.

Now with Julia Gillard as PM , Quentin Bryce as Governor General, a state Governor in Marie Bashir and with QLD premier Anna Bligh's approval rating soaring 35 points since her handling of  the flood catastrophe, when Kristina Keneally is re-elected to her seat at the end of March it will be for a short time.

When the country goes to the polls in the next general election in 2013, expect Kristina Keneally to be standing side by side with Julia Gillard as a star candidate.

When have we ever been wrong ?