November a social whirl

Wicked Women’s Christmas Event

November must surely nudge March as the best fun month in Adelaide.  Take my November social calendar as an example of a typical Adelaidean’s merry-go-round of fun. We didn’t  need to be in Melbourne to gather in our thousands in myriad venues, in my case in the luxurious Springfield home of a friend, where we watched the race in the Home Theatre.  I lost money on both sweeps, of course,  but the fashion stakes of the day were won equally by tourism doyen Regina Twiss in her stunning lime green hat and evergreen real estate agent, Ros Neale in gorgeous George Gross red suit.

For Francophiles, November heralds the once-a-year French celebrations of the year’s French Beaujolais, a light red wine which is released to great merriment on the third Thursday of the month around the world. At Adelaide’s Alliance Francaise about 100 people gathered to announce it was the best drop to date.

I took four female friends – all dedicated Francophiles – with my French teacher, Elsa (on the left) to join a hearty crowd of Adelaide’s French-Australian community.  This year the French vintage, an excellent light red,  was from …………..

Samela Harris – a picture of joy at the Lyceum Club

Meanwhile, on a more formal note,  former Advertiser colleague and just retired, colourful journalist Samela Harris, joined the professional women’s club, the Lyceum Club  to great aplomp.

At chez moi,  we Wicked Women of the Media, welcomed Christmas with a wonderful lunch where everyone brought a dish. Wicked Women means we left our mark on the media world in which we slaved for many years of our lives. More than 100 years between the seven of us. Turkey, salads, salmon pikelets and a cheese platter were followed by Stollen and lashings of champagne and wines. Ho Ho Ho, we had a happy time.

It is seldom I have any L’art de la table to brag about, but I am rather proud of the simple table setting for the lunch. The centre piece is a simple collection of two of my memorial garden roses – French Lace (named after my wedding dress), a few daisies, ivy leaves and flowers from the hedge. Voila! See my foods blog for my artistic main course, while the other wicked gals – Celia Painter, Pat Gardner, Chris Ostermann,  retired media veteran,  Margaret Brenton, newly retired Tiser journalist Samela Harris and Sue Mapp (former Variety Club chef  Sue Fraser all brought accompanying dishes. Almost four hours later, the girls dispersed, filled with Christmas cheer, having spent the time telling colourful stories of the media characters we all rubbed shoulders with down through the years.

 

 

 

 

 

Kookaburra’s special song

Kookabura’s first visit

Remember the childhood song “Kookaburra sits on the Old Gum Tree…Merry, Merry King of the Bush is He….’’. The words flooded back this week when a kookaburra descended upon the gums surrounding the new garden and sat on a low-hanging dead branch. The interest in this snippet is that in the eight years I have stayed at Belair and the last five years when I have lived here, we have not seen a kookaburra close-up.

There are plenty so high in the trees it’s almost impossible to spot them and they laugh their merry heads off.  Their chorus is a part of the cabaret of birdsong in Belair.   Yet for the past three days, the kookaburra sat upon another branch of the same tree for some time before flying to the new garden fence, no more than three metres from the house. I snapped the beautiful bird so many times and took meat out to feed it, but it kept its distance.

It so happened, that the first time I saw this magnificent bird on the dead branch, former Adelaidean, Sue Mapp, who once ran the Variety Club in Adelaide when she was Sue Fraser, was attending the Wicked Women media members’ Christmas lunch here (see Life and Style by Nadine Williams).  Sue wasn’t at all surprised by the visit. “In my  Sydney home,  a kookaburra comes to my feet to eat the meat I drop there, but it won’t let me touch it,’’ she said.

What interests me now in reflection, is that this bird did not cackle or laugh at all, unlike the song which says …”Laugh Kookaburra, laugh Kookaburra, Gay your Life Must Be.’’  Instead, it sat silently for 10 minutes each time on its selected branch and this morning it rested for five minutes on the fence post.  It fascinated me and I share that photograph with you.

Kookaburra on the old gum tree

DAY FOUR:  Goodness! The kookaburra has returned this morning and this time only momentarily sitting on his favourite branch until it swooped towards the window where I sat and swept up over the roofline.  He returned a few minutes later, and this time, his cackling cry aroused me from my meditation to watch him laughing merrily.

My mind is filled with thoughts about that kookaburra’s visit – four days in a row – the foremost one being to remind me to laugh more and to be gay and that life is such a gift to enjoy such moments.

However, I also remember the special relationship Olivier had with “Eric’’, the frog-mouthed owl and here I take an excerpt from my memoir From France With Love.

I was writing about Olivier’s collection of beautiful and fascinating objects.

“He never had his own room in childhood but he has certainly made up for it since. An array of precious objects sit on the windowsill in his study. The room stays under the watchful eye of “Eric”” a stuffed tawny frogmouth owl that was once Olivier’s pet. He saved the bird as a chick and it happily cohabited at Belair well into its adulthood. “We think Eric simply died of a broken heart,’’  he told me later. “He was left alone in the house nd the children called in  to feed him each day on a roster system. Then one day he was dead. The children put him in the freezer and when I got home I had him stuffed. I loved Eric. He had lived his life on my shoulder.’’