Emerald City

We laughed our heads off watching the 1988 film of David Williamson's Emerald City on ABC2 last night; especially at the inept househusband antics of the Colin character (John Hargreaves) in the midst of his midlife crisis brought on by his (and his family's) move to Sydney from Melbourne. There was Nicole Kidman too, lighting up the screen, as an EIGHTEEN year old!

Avaricious, self centred, superficial Sydney......22 years on it seems that everywhere North and West of the Murray River has caught the superficiality disease and our Emerald City seems more lustrous to us than just a shallow, glitter city now!

This weekend there were so many events in Sydney for us to choose from: the Moran Portrait Prize Exhibition at the State Library, the Ferrogosto Italian Festival at Five Dock, the Young Blood: Designer's Market and Sydney Designboom Mart at the Powerhouse Museum......

I opted for a long session at the design market at the Powerhouse Museum,


which gave us just enough time to squeeze in some QVB scanning in the afternoon and a refreshing Guinness at the Royal Hotel Randwick on the way home. We had a lovely time at the pub, enjoying a lively conversation with an intelligent, well informed older woman about the election campaign. She left us in very good humour to get ready for a concert that night at the Opera House: Let it Be with John Waters, Doug Parkinson and a cast of thousands.

We'd met up with Tania and Aine the afternoon before at the Rosewood Cafe in Roseville and watched hundreds of expensively uniformed private schoolies emerging from the railway station and being picked up in the assortment of late model 4 wheel drives lining Hill Street. Tania is looking forward to "outing herself" next Saturday by handing out How to Vote cards for the local Labor candidate (with no chance of winning this very safe Liberal North Shore seat in Sydney (Bradfield)).

Travelling by bus from Coogee to the CBD and seeing all the posters on display made us very aware of the high profile candidates for the federal electorates we were passing through: Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith), Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth) and the beautiful and intelligent Tanya Plibersek (Sydney). This very strange election campaign is an insistent backdrop to the gorgeous, late winter sparkle of this emerald city.