Issue 76

..graced either the stage, or the bench. The reception afterwards turned into the party of the year and threatened never to stop. My aged mother was persuaded to dance or at least bob slightly in the same spot, and the music, highlighted by Mike singing “I’ll be Gone” unaccompanied, was non-stop and loud. Relatives were…

..are hotly contested, in the same sense that having the first case of syphilis might be contested. Was it the Market Square in Lake Forest built in 1916 or the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City in 1922? Perhaps Highland Park Shopping Village built in 1931 in Dallas, which turned its back on the street…

..subject to the fashions of the day and it’s only the occasional performer who manages to transcend fashion. Dutch’s pithy advice to Geoff Achison to ‘play what you know’ is all you really need to know, but Dutch’s bigger-than-life personality surely played a part in his becoming the quintessential expression of Aussie blues. It’s a…

It’s not that the female characters aren’t fleshed out either, but very few of them even attempt to challenge the male dominance that was an accepted part of life in the early sixties. However, they do get their own way by various ways and means, mostly sexually, an arena where the men positively flounder. As…

..and Uzbekistan lie to the north, Iran the west, Pakistan to the south and the People’s Republic of China to the east. If you didn’t live there it would have little to recommend it and a large percentage of the population has become refugees from decades of conflict – mostly fleeing into Pakistan. Currently a…