Ladies Who Lunch

B/W Chair Susan Diver * TV news reader Natarsha Belling * Mem Fox * Julia Baird * Dame Marie Bashir * Kate Carnell

 The Black and White Charity Committee raises funds for Vision Australia to provide support services for children and their families.  Each year they hold the Women Of Achievement lunch at the Four Season's Hotel at Circular Quay.
This is a great event: every penny raised goes to the charity as the ladies on the B/W Committee, cajole, beg, borrow and steal every aspect of the day. They are all unpaid volunteers and it's a pretty good achievement in itself to be able to draw over 500 attendees as they did this year, to pack the hotel ballroom.
Three distinguished ladies of "achievement" give a speech outlining their career and how they got there. Most started from humble beginnings This years speakers were Mem Fox who is married to the billionaire trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, ABC TV presenter Julia Baird and Kate Carnell former Chief Minister of the ACT and currently the Ombudsman for Small Business.
Among the guests, Gina Rinehart arguably the world's richest woman with a mining fortune and Dame Marie Bashir former NSW Governor, Professor Ross Steele, one of world's great experts on the French language and Olympian Jessica Gallagher.

Judith Crawley * Daniel Trelease * Maria Finlay * Professor Steele* Jessica Gallagher * Mike Levendi

Dame Edna Everage is Pregnant !

B & W president Susan Diver with Dame Edna

That's the stunning disclosure Dame Edna Everage revealed yesterday at the Black & White Charity's Women of Achievement lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney.

Mrs Barry Humphries-Lizzie Spender

The Dame was in top form as she gave the audience some unique insights into her life and made some other stunning revelations.

We heard about her daughter who has shacked up with another female, her son who is a fashion designer and has a very close male 'friend' and for the first time Dame Edna told us of the daughter she had named Lois whom she has never spoken of before.

a big favourite-Governor Marie Bashir (left) arrives

Before she was famous Edna and her husband Norm went on a holiday by the sea. They left Lois in a cot on the veranda of their holiday home and forgot about her. In the morning they discovered that Lois had disappeared and the awful truth soon became clear. Lois had been stolen by a rogue giant Koala and was never seen again.
 And on and on it went with an audience of 600 in stitches.

One poor elderly lady came in for the Edna treatment when she was  asked where she was from and replied that she had come for a day out from a retirement home just to see Dame Edna. Edna asked if her security guards were close by.

B & W regulars : Baron & Baroness Boyd

Sadly copyright restrictions prevent us from posting the film we made of Dame Edna's talk today-the show was filmed for a Qantas in flight film. So you need to take an international flight to see her and that may be difficult at present as flights have been cancelled yet again due to ash cloud from the Chilean volcano.

 And the Dame saved the Shuttle from mistakenly purchasing a very expensive rug when we waved to a friend during an auction and it was accepted as a $2800 bid for a floor rug. She bid $2850 and saved the day !. One bidder also paid $6000 for the chance to dine with Edna at the restaurant of their choice.

An amusing moment: as Dame Edna posed on the grand staircase of the Four Seasons to record an introduction for the Qantas film surrounded by helpers and a film crew, an American tourist asked the Shuttle "is that Julia Gillard ?".