Speaking Up For The Voiceless

Ondine Sherman & Sarah Ferguson

When the ABC TV's  Four Corners program screened A Bloody Business in March this year the political and public backlash was deafening. The images of the cruel treatment Australian cattle received in Indonesian abattoirs generated overwhelming public outcry and the temporary suspension of the trade with Indonesia.

The reaction was just what the organisation Voiceless, the animal protection institute would expect as they attempt to get the message across of how unethically animals are treated by humans. But Voiceless don't preach, they just present the evidence and allow you to decide.

Sadly the evidence overwhelmingly proves that we humans are unnecessarily cruel to other life forms that we share the planet with. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Gemma Davis & Jessica Gomez

Voiceless is the brainchild of the well known Sydney family of Shermans and in particularly Ondine Sherman who discovered at an early age, that the meat she was eating came from an animal,. She turned Vegan and gradually the entire family, dad Brian, mother Jean and brother Emile Sherman followed suit. (Everyone knows Emile Sherman now-ever since he stepped up to the stage at the 2011 Academy Awards to accept an Oscar for his production of The King's Speech.)

Caroline & Emile Sherman

In their third year, the  Voiceless Awards are handed out to those who  have advanced the cause to end animal suffering, overseen by a judging panel chaired by Nobel Prize Laureate J M Coetze.

This year at the Blue Hotel in Woolloomooloo the reporter on A Bloody Business Sarah Ferguson and producer Michael Doyle won $5,000 in the broadcast category of the Voiceless Media Prize. Other winners: Christine Jackman for her article, The claws come out  in the Weekend Australian Magazine, broadcaster Caro Meldrum-Hanna for “Bad Egg” which aired on 7.30 NSW about the Australian Egg Corporation on its proposal to allow 20,000 hens per hectare and Cheryl Balfour for a series of articles about the Eden Park kangaroo cull published in the Whittlesea Leader between December 2010 and October 2011.
A Bloody Business can be viewed here (VIEWER WARNING: Contains images which
may distress some viewers)
 The Voiceless website is here and contains a lot of evidence and information on cruelty to animals. 

'Extremists' We Like

Brian Sherman & daughter Ondine with a friendly Kangaroo
courtesy Voiceless

The billionaire Brian Sherman last week hit back at the Shooters & Fisher's Party MP Robert Borsack who claimed in the NSW Parliament on May 11th that Sherman's Voiceless was an "extremist animal rights group".

On it's website Voiceless says: “Voiceless will bring the institutionalised suffering of animals to the forefront of Australia’s agenda; ensuring that animal protection is the next great social justice movement.” 

 Borsack says that Voiceless was one of many 'extremist' groups attempting to buy credibility at Universities and other teaching bodies. Sherman is a well known philanthropist who donates millions of dollars with no strings attached to education bodies throughout Australia.

He is also a dedicated animal right's activist and a vegan who wears or uses no animal products that have been produced through animal suffering.

The Shooters and Fishers Party with just 2 state MPs also thinks The Greens are an extremist party despite The Greens now holding the balance of power federally with 9 senators, 5 NSW upper house MPs and one in the lower house.

MP Robert Borsack & the elephant he shot in 2008
 www.wildhunts.co.nz

Borsack who proudly tells anyone who will listen of how he slaughtered an elephant while on safari in Zimbabwe in 2008 basically wants everyone to be free to blast away at any living creature while rampaging through state forests in 4 wheel drives.

Brian Sherman started Voiceless with his daughter Ondine in 2004 to raise awareness of the suffering of animals.

It's fair to say the writer AA Gill who is in town at present wouldn't have received an invite to the fundraiser  Sherman hosted last week-Voices of Art 2: An Evening Of Art For Animals. AA Gill infamously shot a baboon last year because he wanted to see how it felt to kill.

And who were amongst the extremists at the Voiceless fundraiser ?. Noted Japanese designer Akira Isogawa, prominent artist Adam Chang, one of the world's most respected neurosurgeons, the brilliant Dr  Charlie Teo (Isogawa and Teo are Voiceless board members) Brian's son Emile Sherman who just picked up an Oscar at the Academy Awards in  Hollywood for his production- The King's Voice  ( he thanked his mother & father from the stage) Emile's mum Gene who runs the superb Sherman Gallery in Paddington and Lord Mayor Clover Moore and Edmund Capon, director of the NSW Art Gallery.

Don't miss tonight's Australian Story Hearts Of Gold: 23rd May 2011, 8pm which features the prodigiously talented Sherman family and their great passion for animals.
You can catch the show later on the ABC's Iview.

London Mayor Wants His $100 Wager Win from Aussie

Writing in the UK Telegraph newspaper in a piece titled Even the Aussies want to bend the knee to the Queen , London Mayor Boris Johnson says he made a $100 bet 20 years ago in a Melbourne pub and as he has won the bet-he wants his winnings !. Unfortunately for Johnson, he just can't remember who he made the bet with as he lost a slip of paper with a name on it but he recalls it was an Australian university professor.

Johnson says : "somewhere out there is a vaguely Left-wing Aussie professor who owes me a hundred bucks. The only trouble is that I can't remember his name, so I am shamelessly using this column to jog his memory "

www.moviemem.com

The subject of the bet : that HRH The Queen would still be the monarch of Australia in the year 2000, which she was and still is.

Boris had just seen the film The King's Speech in which Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist Lionel Logue reminds the future King George V1 that he will also be the King of Australia. The line jogged Johnson's memory about  the bet he made all that time ago when he was a visiting Professor of European Thought at Monash University.

Clover Moore

If you are that professor then 'fess up and send Boris his $100.

In the meantime, perhaps the London Mayor who nips around the dangerous London traffic on a push bike could give our dog collar wearing Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore some tips on just what those intrusive bike lanes that have appeared all over Sydney are actually used for.

On a trip from the Harbour Bridge today, the Shuttle travelled to the headquarters of Courier Newspapers in Alexandria alongside miles of the gleaming new bike lanes that have halved the size of car space on roads. We didn't spot one single cyclist.

Our Jackie is Up For An Oscar !

It took the Shuttle team some time to realise why one of our favourite thespians, Jackie Weaver wasn't appearing at the local supermarket in Kings Cross where we would always retire to the local coffee shop for a natter after our shopping.

Jackie is in the USA on a promotional tour in which she was swept up after the film Animal Kingdom won a few film festival awards. An email from LA informed us of the fact. With an always present minder, a publicist and a tour of US cities in the manner that only Hollywood knows how to do.

Weaver has been doing an endless round of TV chat shows, magazine and newspaper interviews and is loving every minute of it. Top Hollywood agents are lining up to take her on and everyday brings a pile of film scripts for Jackie to sift through.

Some of the offers, as Jackie says :"have been really bizarre and the more bizarre the more money they offer. The latest is for more money than I have earned in a lifetime of film and theatres and that is for 10 days work !"

Yet Animal Kingdom hasn't done too well at the box office even here in Jackie's home country. All that changes today as  Weaver is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category, as the Shuttle predicted she would be weeks ago and which we confidently predict she will win, or at least she deserves to for her superb  performance as the matriach of a crime family.

Also nominated, Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech is a worthy rival. The only hic-cup could be-and the Oscars are pure Hollywood politics-is if those who vote are determined The King's Speech sweeps the board, which it may well do.

Geoffrey Rush is also up for Best Supporting Actor  against Christian Bales' superb performance in The Fighter.

For the full list of nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards go to their website here

British Tabloid Catches Up to The Shuttle !

Four weeks to the day after the Shuttle told the world that the Golden Globe award winning film The King's Speech was filmed in the premises at 33 Portland Place in Marlebone, London owned by 'Lord' Edward Davenport, the London Evening Standard newspaper in the UK has picked up the tale :

"It is the room where Colin Firth as King George VI learned to overcome his stammer, a scene watched by millions of film fans.

But it can be revealed that the set of Lionel Logue's clinic has been the scene of wild parties organised by the house's owner, Edward Davenport, including being hired out for "sex parties".

Read the Evening Standard report  here

Our friends at the UK Daily Mail have also run a report .here