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

Growing Old Outrageously with Prince

At the launch party for the 2012 Sydney Writer's Festival at the Hickson Road Wharf 2 on Wednesday evening the Shuttle's eyes were immediately drawn to the above tee-shirt.

And the wearer lived up to expectations. She's Elisabeth Davies and it's the title of book she's penned with her school day's pal Hilary Lindstead (pictured above)

Jennifer Byrne & the Chaser's Julian Morrow

Davies and Lindstead went to school together in England before parting company for 35 years and then meeting up again and discovering a shared love of travel. The eccentric pair embarked on a trial journey to Morocco. That tentative beginning has turned into a series of wonderfully unusual holidays, and Hil and Lis have been circumnavigating the globe ever since.
Among many other destinations, they have taken in Marrakech, Fez and the Atlas Mountains; Patagonia and the Galapagos Islands; Istanbul and Cappadocia. They've been on safari in Namibia, Botswana and the Serengeti, attended music festivals in Naples and Prague and made a pilgrimage to the western isles of Mull and Iona. Along the way they have encouraged, enraged and entertained each other, while living through countless adventures.

  In the preceeding decades Elisabeth went to Cambridge, studied economics and became a civil servant and journalist. Meanwhile Hilary had re-located to Australia where she has been a theatrical agent for names like Baz Luhrmann, Neil Armfield and Gillian Armstrong. These two are great fun and the book should be a good read-the Shuttle has just orderd a copy. After recounting their history the two minxs' were soon off working the party with writers like Professor Ross Steele, Roddy Doyle, Frank Moorhouse and Tom Keneally. Listen to the ABC Radio interview with Hil & Lis here.

## On Tuesday evening Prince wowed audience's at the Allphones Arena albeit with a toned down show  (he's found God or something) but the real action was at the after party at Ivy in the city where Prince jammed with Seal and Public Enemey's Flava Flav as the Shuttle's exclusive snaps show.

Pity the ballroom was packed to capacity but it was still better than the Allphones Arena and for a rock'n'roll party, fairly civilised.

In The Houses Of The Muses

Martin Browne, Susie Hagon,Ross Steele

Photographer Susie Hagon has published her second book of photographs: In The Houses Of The Muses.

It’s a collection of portraits of Australian identities and scenes from Alexandria in Egypt where Susie has been involved in the project Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the ambitious scheme to re-build the fabled Royal Library of Alexandria reputedly burnt to the ground by Julius Caesar in 48BC.

The project was the brainchild of Egyptian noble and Alexandrian born Prince Lorenzo Montesini, or to give him his full title : Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia and Baron Alexandroff.  

Hal Salter

John & Caroline Laws

A launch party organised by French language expert Professorr Ross Steele was held at the Wagner Gallery in Paddington and drew a diverse crowd including racing identity Angela Belle Sweeney, Prince Lorenzo, social figures like Robert Hampshire and Glen Marie Frost, renowned winemaker Brian McGuigan, artist Kerry Lester, folk song expert Warren Fahey, Caroline Laws (Susie’s mum ) and her step-father radio tsar John Laws. Antique dealer Martin Browne did the honours and launched the book.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (by Susie Hagon)

Kerrie Lester

Angela Belle McSweeney

Contact the Wagner Gallery on 02)9360 6069 or go to Susie’s website to enquire about copies of the book.

Black Is White

Let us cast our minds back to 1937.

Earl of Gowrie

Mrs Eric Sheller of Darling Point put forward, to a group of well heeled ladies, the idea of holding an annual charity ball. Soon the The Black and White charity committee was formed and thus Sydney's annual society get together began it's life with the then Governor General of Australia, the Earl of Gowrie,as the  guest of honour at the first Black and White Ball held at the Trocodero, the most glamorous event the city had ever seen.

The Town Hall

Lord Gowrie, late of the 3rd Battalion Highland Light Infantry, the Cameron Highlanders in Dublin, a companion to Lord Kitchener on his visit to Australia had been appointed by King George VI as Governor General to the former colony under the British born working class Labor Party Prime Minister Billy Hughes (later known as the Little Digger), the longest serving Australian parliamentarian in the countries history.

Fast forward to 2011 and last Friday night at the Sydney Town Hall where the 75th Black and White Ball was held with an impressive 450 guests.. One guest of honour was the interior designer Leslie Walford who has decorated grand houses from Belgravia to Beverley Hills and Sri Lanka.and is the son of the committee's founder Mrs Sheller.

Ita Buttrose & Professor Ross Steele

 And what a fab night it was. Like stepping back in time to an era of restrained elegance. They even rolled out the red carpet (only slightly soiled) while dozens of bemused (and confused) by-standers gathered at the foot of the Town Hall steps and gazed in awe at the spectacle unfolding before their eyes.

Leslie Walford & Susan Diver

They had no idea what it was all about of course but there was colour and movement, glamorous ball gowns and a Scots bag-pipe band to serenade the swells as as they arrived in line after line of limousines.

Up until the late 1980sw the B & W Ball was  the cities premier social event. Then a  sort of unfounded and ill-informed criticism was perpetuated in the popular media . Just who in the hell were these ladies, probably with too much time on their hands, many with wealthy husbands , organising these over the top shindigs where hundreds would gather to drink champagne, dine on fine fare and dance the night away all in the name of charity?.

Bronwyn Bishop MP & Angela Bishop

In light of the latest report here-where some of Australia's most well know charities have been exposed for spending up to 60% of donations on  "operating costs" one fact has been ignored. The ladies of the Black & White Committee work for free. They cajole, pressure, plead for every single aspect of the ball.

Caterers, waiters, alcohol suppliers, venues, entertainers, doormen, prize donaters and so on-not one single one is paid. Everything is donated and every penny raised goes directly to charity

The Town Hall looked as splendid as it can at times although sadly the great organ on the stage-the largest in the world -remained silent but a terrific 1940's style band belted out numbers from the past 70 years.

The traditional 'Derby' went off went off without a hitch (although we noticed one gent at a front table, an 87 old retired Admiral almost had a heart attack when the starter's gun was fired) and the throng were soon up and dancing a storm.

The Derby

One guest- Bronwyn Bishop MP who spent the first half of the evening in Canberra at the Parliament House reception for HM The Queen caught a plane to join her TV presenter daughter Angela Bishop at the ball.

Four former presidents of the committee were on hand but the current president, Sue Diver deserves a gold star stamp for her superb efforts. Having survived 75 years, the Black and White Ball looks assured of a future for many years to come.

Ita Ignites A Storm with Rupert Murdoch Claim

What was Ita Buttrose AO OBE thinking ?. Was it a carefully planned statement or a throwaway line ?. Certainly three of Sydney's top society gossip snoops believe the former.

Ita Buttrose and Prof. Ross Steele

Ros Reines ( Sunday Telegraph), Andrew Hornery ( Sydney Morning Herald) and Annette Sharp (Daily Telegraph) were speaking yesterday at the Secret Women's Business charity lunch at Quay restaurant and basically inferred that Ita had known exactly what she was doing when she made the claim about Rupert Murdoch.

It's already had a run on the top US political website Raw Story and from there it is just a matter of time before it hits the British tabloids.

Ita was talking during the second part of her Australian Story interview- Ita Tells Me So.

Near the end of the program Buttrose- former editor-in-chief of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, said that Rupert Murdoch instructed her to have a subject tailed because legitimate reporting techniques were not producing the desired results.

“I assigned a reporter to do it but [Murdoch] wasn’t happy with the result and said, ‘No, that wasn’t good enough. Have you followed this person?’” she recalled.
“I can’t give this instruction,” Buttrose later told then-News Limited chief executive Ken Cowley. “I’m not having anybody that works for me, for whom I’m responsible, follow anybody. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

During the credits of the show the following statements appeared :

“Mr. Murdoch has never asked any journalist to do anything improper,” 
a ( News Corp) spokesman said.
“Mr. Cowley has never been asked by Mr. Murdoch to have a reporter conduct surveillance of any kind on any individual and nor would he have agreed to it had he been asked by Mr Murdoch or anyone else,” 

Buttrose has been one of Australia's most successful female publishers having worked for both Murdoch and Kerry Packer. In 1972 she was hired by Packer to launch the Australian edition of Cosmopolitan but when the deal fell through, she and Kerry devised Cleo, one of Packer's most successful publications of all time. The story was told in the recent two part telemovie Paper Giants.The Birth of Cleo.


And even odder was her brother Julian Buttrose's friendly exhortation to spare fellers to give Ita a call and ask her out on a date. The last few times we've seen Ita out and about ( as our picture shows) she has been on the arm of the French tutor Professor Ross Steele. In fact the two sat front row at the Myer parade just ten days ago.


The ABC program Australian Story can be watched here.