Missing In Action

On Wednesday November 5th (one day after the Melbourne Cup) a memorial service will be held for the late Gough Whitlam the former Prime Minister who died at age 98.
                                               

Word is buzzing around town that the venue, the Sydney Town Hall will not be nearly big enough for the crowds expected from former PMs, the current PM Tony Abbott , a host of show business faces and business names to ordinary members of the public including a large contingent of Indigenous Australians.
Former Fairfax scribe Mike Carlton has been on the blower to some Labor Party heavies and is  trying to organise a live TV link to the old Parliament House in Canberra to host an expected few hundred more mourners.
While Gough's extended family will be attendance one family member will miss the service Andrew Esteban Romero Whitlam is Gough's "adopted" son although it's never been confirmed by the late Whitlam if he actually adopted the Argentinian.
Baci as he is known to pals whipped up dresses in a Double Bay boutique for society ladies for a number of years before joining his family restaurant business in Rushcutters Bay.
It was there as we reported back in February that Baci was busted in an undercover sting while attempting to sell cocaine to police. He was sentenced to two years jail. Above is the only photo taken of the late Gough Whitlam and Baci together.

Seven Days - a Long Time...

Alan with John Serafino

It was British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who said : "a week is a long time in politics" but it could apply to many things.
Just last week the Shuttle was having celebratory drinks with a handful of guests including arguably Australia's most successful broadcaster Alan Jones at John Serafino's new city boutique.
Two days later his world crashed as a News Ltd reporter revealed Jones' distasteful remarks at a Young Liberals dinner, about the late father of Prime Minister Julia Gillard.  Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull immediatey condemned Jones via Twitter (completely unconnected with the notion he is after Liberal leader and Jones' supporter Tony Abbott's job).

Peter FitzSimon

And the trickle became a torrent with on-line petitions via Facebook demanding Jones' lucrative sponsors and Radio 2GB advertisers withdraw from his show. And they left in droves- Harvey Norman, Woolworths, Telstra, Coles, McDonalds, 7-Eleven and more.

Mike Carlton

Macquarie Radio (owners of 2GB) chairman Russell Tate condemned the call on advertisers as cyber-bullying after the network finally announced that advertisers would be suspended from Jones' broadcasts completely, a loss of around $24M a year.
 Sun Herald writer Peter FitzSimon demolished that argument in his column yesterday.
 On Saturday Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton who was a broadcaster on Radio 2UE when Jones was there (referring to him as The Parrot)  penned a scathing piece titled  Prissy shrieks of fear and loathing casting aspersions on Jones' claim to be an Oxford graduate and with these wounding words :" This is a man who thinks Jeffrey Archer is a great English novelist, whose taste in music screeches to a halt at Andre Rieu."  Jones is a great pal of Archer.

 Media and advertising experts have claimed Jones advertisers will be back eventually. But will they? 
Mercedes Benz have issued the most damning press release saying they have not only abandoned advertising at 2GB permanently but have demanded Jones hand back his grace and favour $250,000 Merc and if not, they will re-possess it.
Still there are plenty more luxury motors in the basement of Jones' luxury apartment in the famous Toaster building. Waiting outside John Serafino's was the latest gleaming Jaguar XJ with a chauffeur perusing the Daily Telegraph while he waited for the master. Unless of course, it's a loaner as well.

Missing AA Gill

baboon

Gill

The writer AA Gill is in town for the Sydney Writer's Week which concludes today. Infamous for once blasting a baboon to death to 'see how it felt' the grovelling to the scribe around town was embarrassing. The Shuttle missed his interview on Thursday (one of the few events that wasn't sold out) and we lost count of the number of restaurant workers phoning us to impart the news that "AA Gill is here eating "

Even at the launch party at Porteno for the second season of Foxtel's 'Spirited' a waiter collared the Shuttle and solemnly informed us that Gill was downstairs if we wished "to pop down and get a snap  ". We passed.

We did manage to hear him on radio being interviewed by local foodie God and long time Shuttle pal Tony Bilson along with American ex-chef Anthony Bourdain . When Bilson commented that large food corporations were colluding to force manufacturers to list ingredients and that he believed it was a conspiracy to drive small providers out of business Gill launched into a diatribe about the importance of those tiny lists on the side of products. Ten minutes later when Bilson defended vegetarians Gill railed against foodies who included endless claims about the ingredients their nosh was complied of.

Emma Forrest

Later when a female audience member asked a question and Gill interrupted, she scolded him with "oh shut-up Anthony, you're no better than some yapping kid at the back of the bus ". The applause was deafening.

We did make it to the small cocktail party given by the advertising agency BWM for American /English writer Emma Forrest. Emma has just published an autobiography Your Voice In My Head.

Forrest was diagnosed as a manic depressive (bi-polar!) at 14 and began self harming, slashing her legs and arms.

She became fascinated and obsessed by sex whilst being repulsed by it and remained virginal until she finally flung herself into a series of destructive relationships. Emma wouldn't confirm or deny that the 'famous actor who broke her heart' was the long rumored Colin Farrell-she simply told us that she 'knows and likes his work'.
Emma now writes movie scripts and lives between New York and Beverley Hills. 
"I couldn't handle the grey skies of London anymore "said Emma when the Shuttle commented on her breezy outlook for someone who had gotten off an 18 hour flight at 11am that morning.

"I love LA, no matter who bad it is the sun always shines. This morning I bounded off the plane when I saw the brilliant sunshine".

She told us of the interview she once did with Brad Pitt who told her obsessively of how he and Angelina Jolie wanted to have a 'surrogate' baby. The following day Pitt phoned and left a voicemail message asking her to phone him urgently. 2 more messages followed over the same number of days. She never called him back. She thought he may ask her to have his baby !

Murdoch : "you're fired!'

Your Voice in My Head  is to be made into a film. I asked Emma who she would like to play her in the film
"Cate Blanchet" she responded." but when I told the producers they said 'oh no'. It doesn't matter that Blanchet has won Oscars. They don't know her in Middle America. They only know 2 actresses- Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts"

Honourable mentions at writer's week : * Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson in discussion with Frank Moorhouse celebrating the return of the comic mode in fiction. Brilliant.
 *Elisabeth Wynhausen and Bruce Guthrie telling Mike Carlton about the shock and the fury of getting fired by Rupert Murdoch. Very funny.

"Debunking the myths behind the pontificating potty peer"

       tSS attended a lecture recently at the Sheraton On The Park hotel to hear Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley present his fascinating views on Climate Change-or the lack of thereof according to his Lordship, who insists it's all a lefty plot.

    

Nearly a 1000 crammed into the ballroom (at $20 a head) to listen intently to Monkton. It was as expected, a cross between earnest looking pensioners, a handful of right wing nutbags, a slew of rabid talk show hosts and an unexpected number of notable businessmen.  Noticably absent were any prominent representatives of the farming community. A conservative lot, those toiling the land aren't with his Lordship on this matter.

   The audience weren't all necessarily supporters of the peer but it was hard not to notice the sea of nodding heads that hung on every word as Monkton laid out his theory that it was all a dastardly conspiracy of the left who had fallen by the wayside after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and had found a new cause to latch onto by preaching doom and gloom about the climate.

    "It's all nonsense" said Monkton. "Let me tell you of the real conspiracy that is upon us !".

     Outside an ominous wind howled around the marbled porticals of the Sheraton's grand forecourt. Still encrusted in tiny crevices, as everywhere in this town, are traces of the red dust storm that swept into Sydney in September 2009 as city dwellers arose to find that an orange/red Martian landscape had blanketed the city. The outback, nearly 3000 kilometres away had arrived overnight. We were witnessing the result of 200 years of disastrous European style farming methods.

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     Let's hear from one of our favourite broadcasters and Sydney Morning Herald writer Mike Carlton as he dissects Monkton's claims :

The UN's climate change fraud is cover for a plot to bring about a world government : This world government codswallop began years ago with one Lyndon H. LaRouche, a conspiracy theory lunatic so far to the right he makes George W. Bush look like Hugo Chavez. A convicted criminal, self-styled "economist" and vicious anti-Semite, LaRouche also believes the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh head a Zionist cartel that runs the global drug trade. Monckton shares many of his lurid fantasies, which are staple fare for the knuckle-draggers who infest late-night talkback radio.

A UN ban on using DDT to control malaria has killed up to 40 million people: More LaRouche claptrap filched by the potty peer. They both loathe Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides. Monckton has blamed Jackie Kennedy for these imaginary 40 million deaths, claiming she read the book and pushed President Kennedy to ban DDT. JFK did no such thing.
Here in Australia, another right-wing nutter, John Stone, a former head of the Treasury and Queensland National Party senator, wrote recently: "It is now possible to say quite unequivocally that Carson's book has been responsible for killing more people than Mein Kampf."

Phew. In fact there is no United Nations ban on DDT for malaria control, only for spraying on edible crops. DDT is still widely used in the Third World, although it is being phased out because the mozzies are becoming immune to it.

Polar bear populations are increasing: Yes, but not because the planet is cooling, as Monckton and his barmy bloggers would have you believe. Bans and quotas on hunting have pushed numbers back up. But where the polar ice cap is melting, the bears are in big trouble. In Canada's Western Hudson Bay, for example, the population has dropped 22 per cent since the 1980s, and the animals are smaller and weaker.
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