The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 30

EDITED DY ALAN KENNEDY started to love each other freely." The letter was signed by Nigel Beafagot. of one member of the audience and thrust her breast into his face. "She stripped the man to his jocks and sat on his face." The meeting then moved to the fact that the shows could be seen by people in the street, including children, although some speakers said they "couldn't see it doing the kids any Advertisements for the show were also under fire, especially the one that invited the public to "blow out with a blow A representative of AFH, John Auchter, said the advertisement would be removed. TV pi lv.V"Vi' Toofift 3 7 Tfftp 1 leader was abusing them The Aussie woman's view of Ethiopia comes from Margaret Cobb, who also seemed to have problems with Mr Mollis. She told the Herald yesterday: "If you could have seen the circumstances of the situation of those poor, dreadful women over there.

Their whole society is so terribly sad and they are so oppressed. I just felt so lucky to be an Australian." NZ is Just one tourist dive Things are getting so desperate for tourists trying to overcome their near-terminal ennui at the New Zealand resort town of Queenstown that every day about 40 of them pay $60 to jump off a high bridge. Unfortunately for those travellers whose hopes were raised and then dashed after being asked if they "were a party of sex, only to find the query was numerical, not anatomical, and who see jumping as a way of escaping the constant massacre of the English language and yet another night of gourmet eating at the local sheepburger restaurant, jumpers have to tie a piece of rubber rope round their ankles to stop the fall. Among the jumpers have been a 62-year-old woman tourist from Denmark and a 133kg man who needed two cords to cope with his weight. after another And when jumping off bridges gets too much, tourists can go to Wellington, where a travel agent is lining up a tour of the New Zealand capital's lowest dives.

The itinerary includes a sewage outlet, the dog pound, a hospital laundry and the city garbage tip. A particular feature will be a stroll through the gloomy, glass-strewn pedestrian subway under the airport to admire Wellington's crudest graffiti. New Zealand's infamous lukewarm pies and boxed wine, known locally as chateau cardboard, will be provided as refreshments. The tour ends at The Thistle, one of the city's oldest bars, where patrons sit on beer crates and only wimps ask for a glass. Up the Creek without a stitch The people of Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, met last week to discuss the strip shows at the local 'pub, which seem to be getting out of hand, so to speak.

At the lively meeting, partners in Australian Frontier Holidays (AFH), which owns the Tennant Creek Hotel where the shows are held, proudly pointed to their voluntary code of ethics, which states: "Patrons may not touch the entertainers or vice versa" and that there be "no obscene act or sexual suggestion" in the show. This was fine until a Mr John Boffa said: "At a show I attended I saw one of the strippers sit on the lap Lust in the dust The account of the meeting was carried in the Tennant and District Times and in the same issue was a letter claiming that most of the men who attended the strip shows were latent homosexuals trying to pretend to their friends that they were heterosexuals. "Some may even be outwardly respectable married men," it said. "What better way for a man to cover up his lust for his workmates than to ogle naked women? It's time they all came out of the closet and cameras were ready to roll and that it was decided to borrow the Australians' song from the album. Not surprisingly, the Australian cast has reportedly been amazed by the backhanded compliment and is awaiting a reply from Britain on just how the audacity could have occurred.

Love is a many splendoured cringe A big chance at the big time: If the high-profile lawyer Chris Murphy (pictured) appears to be a little forlorn lately, it's not because he's lost his briefs, so to speak, but because girlfriend Lisa Patrick is Hollywood bound. One of Australia's leading models, Patrick has been invited to fly to Los Angeles next week to audition for a part in an American situation comedy. 1 .1 "Jill 2 TWist Trf SL Rough ride with Cobb and Co National Party MP Michael Cobb yesterday expanded on his problems with Colin ALP man and leader of the now infamous parliamentary delegation to Africa. He told the ABC's Andrew Olle that Mollis got things off to a bad start by calling everyone "comrade" and saying he was from the Australian Socialist Party rather than the ALP. Mr Cobb said that at the Ethiopian Revolutionary Women's Association meeting "we had two hours of propaganda on how women had been liberated since the glorious peoples' revolution in He said one of the Government delegates (unnamed) got up and said: "Well, I hope you don't make the same mistake as we have in Australia, where pregnant women are forced to have their babies in hospitals, delivered by men under clinical conditions." Mr Cobb also alleged that he had "a number of private complaints about a delegation leader using four-letter words starting with in front of And "embassy officials were complaining to me privately that the just a few minutes of his valuable time to take the picture for the magazine's cover.

After the deed was done, the photographer realised that his camera had malfunctioned and was forced to plead for a second chance. The Prime Minister released an expletive, but exhibited pity and agreed to return to the snooker table to pose again. The second time around the camera worked and at the end of the lightning session the Prime Minister even performed a trick shot. He lined up a ball in his sights and fired down the table, where it cannoned off one of the photographer's cameras and miraculously dropped into the pocket for which he had aimed! Later, the photographer discovered that the real reason for the prime ministerial haste was not due to some crisis meeting but a desire to play a game of snooker with one of his press secretaries. I SPY EDITED BY ANTHONY DENNIS More from Tim Environment Minister Tim Moore has, thankfully, been quiet for the past few months after announcing there was little he could do to save the trees in the Botanic Gardens from the ravages of the harbour tunnel and after saying he thought the Water Board's sewerage outfalls off the beaches weren't going to work.

Yesterday he re-entered the PR stakes with possibly the most blatant attempt this year to get his name in the paper. He congratulated Mark O'Connor on his new book, Poetry of the Mountains, while at the same time expressing his regrets at not being able to attend the book's launch. He then turns literary critic, saying the book "captured the beauty and starkness of the Australian bush in the Blue The release included two of the poems, one titled Hot Ridge, the other In A Cloud. The last line of Hot Ridge reads: The shrubs have minute fangs, needle-leaves that sting like flagellants. This could describe how Mr Moore will be feeling in the next few months when the Blue Mountains' environmentalists start to make their presence felt.

Of particular concern is the pro-development line of the Blue Mountains Council, which is considering an application for some lovely Spanish alpine villas along one particularly picturesque ridge. Of course, none of the poems comes within cooee of John Laws's Number Two, in which he discusses his relationship with his hot water system. Her face is known to television viewers in the United States since she appeared in a commercial for a telephone company in which she plays an Australian woman separated from her American boyfriend. If she wins the role she'll be required to play the part of an Australian girl from, yes indeed, an outback station, who goes to the United States and becomes a nanny with an American couple. So if Murphy suddenly acquires Joan Collins as a client and moves to Beverly Hills, just remember that the real reason was revealed here first.

Milestones And so say all of us etc, part two: The birthday mystery of Tom Hughes, the QC responsible for the marathon witness box interrogation of a boyish newspaper magnate, may have been solved. Those not on the guest list thought the birthday party would be held on Saturday night to coincide with his 65th birthday, but it turns out the festivities were actually held last night. The venue for the select gathering was the exclusive Australian Club in Macquarie Street. Our belief that the party was being held on Saturday could have ruined the surprise gift of a newspaper caricature of Hughes by some of his associates. When Today's People called Hughes's counterpart in the Fair-fax-Rothwells case, fellow QC Neil McPhee, to see if he had been invited, he told us he thought the party was last week! Feud glorious feud A case of they'd know those voices anywhere etc: The cast of the stage musical Les Miserables is rumoured to have asked Australia's Actors' Equity to protest to the union's British counterpart following an extraordinary revelation.

The casts from each of Les Miserables troupes around the world recently contributed their voices to a record album to benefit a charity, the Save The Children Fund. Now a television show, we understand, has apparently been recorded to coincide with the release of the album. The subject of the Australian cast's protest to the British Actors' Equity is the claim that the British cast mimed Oh Come All Ye Faithful the song sung by the Australian cast on the album. The assertion has been made that the voices of the British cast were deemed unsatisfactory before the Close encounters of the nerd kind I Hey, isn't that what's-her-face? The Australian Chamber Orchestra held its annual fund-raising dinner at the Great Hall in Canberra's Parliament House on Saturday night. Inside the hall an elegantly-dressed woman guest was for some reason or other standing on her own.

A fellow guest, in a gesture of extreme friendliness, took pity on her and drew her towards a mob of imbibers, introduced her to each member of the group and then good-naturely put his arm around the stranger. "And what's your name, love?" he asked. The elegantly-dressed woman replied: "I'm Hazel Hawke." The moral of the story, of course, is that no matter how famous you become there will always be at least one person who wouldn't recognise you in a crowd. Close encounters of the nerd kind II And for my next trick A photographer from the Herald's weekly magazine, Good Weekend, was summoned to The Lodge in Canberra recently to take a picture of Bob Hawke playing snooker. It was, by all accounts, a most enlightening experience.

An extremely busy man, the Prime Minister offered the photographer '-f And the walls came tumblin' down, etc: The lawyer-turned-merchant banker, Malcolm Turnbull, is reportedly having difficulties with one of his corbels. It recently dropped off at an embarrassing moment. Though he recently spent $2 million on Paddington's most expensive home, Alster House, in leafy Goodhope Street, passers-by who lack hard hats should now be advised of an incident that occurred recently. The Spy-catcher lawyer's neighbours were stunned when a corbel a heavy masonry decoration that projects from a wall somehow broke free from Chez Turnbull and smashed into thousands of powdery pieces on the footpath below narrowly missing a startled passer-by. The unidentified passer-by just pray it wasn't Sir Robert Armstrong now gives Chez Malcolm an extremely wide berth.

Since the corbel incident, at least one neighbour has posed the pertinent question of whether Turnbull has bothered to acquire public liability cover in the event of a similar mishap. R. -PA Z. 2. A Tuesday, November 29, 1988.