WHEN Kylie Minogue began the process of tracking down 25 years of costumes and memorabilia for an exhibition on her (literally) glittering stage career, she had one crucial call to make.

“There were a few items the parentals were minding,” laughs Minogue. “I, too, do the same thing as everyone else: ‘Mum, Dad, can you just hold onto a few things for me?’ It’s just lucky they weren’t turfed out from under their watchful eye.”

Kylie On Stage is the singer’s latest collaboration with her beloved hometown’s Arts Centre Melbourne. She’s previously donated a swarm of outfits to the venue, going all the way back to the overalls she wore as tomboy mechanic Charlene on Neighbours.

This new — and free — exhibition rounds up outfits starting from her first-ever live performances on 1989’s Disco in Dream tour. Still aged just 21 and dismissed by some as a soap star who fluked a singing career, Minogue found herself playing to 38,000 fans in Tokyo, where her early hits “I Should Be So Lucky”, “The Loco-motion”, “Got To Be Certain” and “Hand On Your Heart” had made her a superstar.

“From memory, I was overexcited and didn’t really know what I was doing. I just ran back and forth across the stage,” says Minogue of her debut tour.

Disco in Dream also premiered what would become a Kylie fashion staple: hotpants. “Those ones were more like micro shorts, not quite hotpants, but they started it,” she admits. “There were also quite a few bicycle pants being worn around that time, too, I’m afraid.”

That first tour stands out for one other reason: Minogue officially started dating INXS’s Michael Hutchence at some point during the Asian leg.

“I had met Michael previously in Australia, but he was living in Hong Kong [at the time] and I met him again there. The tour went on to Japan and he definitely came to visit me in Japan.”

Fast-forward from Minogue’s very first tour to her most recent, 2015’s Kiss Me Once, and the singer performed a cover of INXS’s “Need You Tonight”. She remembers first hearing the song as a teenager. “I don’t think I really knew what **** was back then,” notes Minogue. “But that’s a **** song.”

Before the Kiss Me Once tour kicked off, the Minogue/Hutchence romance had been documented in the hit TV mini-series Never Tear Us Apart: The Untold Story Of INXS. Minogue said then it felt like Michael was her “archangel” during the tour — “I feel like he’s with me.”

Her “Need You Tonight” costume was also deliberately chosen to reflect what Minogue used to wear when she was dating the rockstar. “It was a black PVC trench coat and hat,” she says. “I loved that. It just made so much sense for the connection to Michael. I literally used to wear that exact same kind of thing, except it was leather, not PVC.”

By 1990, Minogue’s confidence had grown, something she’s partially attributed to Hutchence’s influence. Before her first Australian solo tour, she performed a secret club show billed as The Singing Budgies — reclaiming the derisive nickname the media had bestowed on her. It would be the first time her success silenced those who saw her as an easy target. Next year marks her 30th anniversary in pop; longevity that hasn’t happened by accident.

Minogue’s career accelerated so quickly that by 1991 she was on her fourth album in as many years and outgrowing her producers, Stock Aitken Waterman, who wanted to freeze-frame her in a safe, clean-cut image.

On 1991’s Let’s Get To It tour of the UK, Minogue welcomed onboard her first major fashion designer — John Galliano. He dressed her in fishnets, G-strings and corsets; the British press said she was trying too hard and imitating Madonna at her most sexed-up.

“Of course those comparisons were made, and rightly so. Madonna was a big influence on me,” says Minogue. “She helped create the template of what a pop show is, or what we came to know it as, by dividing it up into segments. And if you’re going to have any costume changes, that’s inevitable.

“I was finding my way. I don’t think we got it right in some ways, but if I look back over my career, sometimes it’s the mistakes that make all the difference. They allow you to really look at where you’re going. I’m fond of all those things now. There was a time when I wasn’t.

“Now I look back at the pictures of the fishnets and G-strings I was wearing ... Maybe the audience members absolutely loved it, maybe they were going through the journey with me of growing up and discovering yourself and your sexuality and where you fit in the world.”

As the ’90s progressed, Minogue started experimenting with the outer limits of being a pop star, working with everyone from uber-cool dance producers to indie rocker Nick Cave.

Her 1998 Intimate And Live tour cemented her place as the one thing nobody had ever predicted: a regular, global touring act. Released the year prior, her Impossible Princess album had garnered a credibility she’d never before enjoyed. But more credibility equalled fewer record sales.

The tour was cautiously placed in theatres, rather than arenas. Yet word-of-mouth led to more dates being added — she wound up playing seven nights in both Melbourne and Sydney, and tacking on a UK leg. All received rave reviews.

The production was low-key and DIY: Minogue and longtime friend and stylist William Baker were hands-on backstage bedazzling the costumes themselves. The tour’s camp, Vegas-style showgirl — complete with corset and headdress — soon became a signature Kylie look, but it was also one they stumbled across.

“I remember the exact moment: the male dancers had pink, fringed chaps and wings — we’d really gone for it. I was singing [ABBA’s] “Dancing Queen”. I did a little prance across the stage and the audience went wild. I thought, ‘What is happening?’ That definitely started something.”

Then came the “Spinning Around” hotpants. Minogue couldn’t wear the same gold pair from the music video during her 2001 On A Night Like This tour — they were too fragile — but another pair offered solid back-up.

“That was peak hotpant period,” says Minogue. “Hotpants for days.”

After the robotic-themed Fever 2002 tour (featuring a “Kyborg” look by Dolce & Gabbana), 2005’s Showgirl tour was Minogue’s long-overdue greatest hits celebration.

Following a massive UK and European run, her planned Australian victory lap was derailed by her breast-cancer diagnosis that May. Remarkably, by November 2006, Minogue was back onstage in Sydney for the rebooted Showgirl: The Homecoming tour.

“I look at that now and I’m honestly taken aback,” she admits. “It was so fast — months and months of those 18 months were in treatment.”

Minogue now reveals her health issues meant she had to adjust some of the Showgirl outfits: “I was concerned about the weight of the corset and being able to support it. I was quite insecure about my body, which had changed. For a few years after that I really felt like I wasn’t in my own body — with the medication I was on, there was this other layer.

“We had to make a number of adjustments,” she adds. “I had different shoes to feel more sturdy ... It was pretty soon to be back onstage. But I think it was good for me.”

The singer’s gruelling performances involved dancing and singing in corsets, as well as ultra-high heels and headdresses that weighed several kilos.

“A proper corset, like the Showgirl tour one, is like a shoe,” she explains. “It’s very stiff when you first put it on. By the end of the tour it was way more comfortable. The fact it made it quite hard to breathe didn’t seem to bother anyone except for me. But it was absolutely worth it. I felt grand in it.

“It took a while to learn how to walk in the blue Showgirl dress,” she continues. “I had cuts on my arms from the stars that were sticking out on pieces of wire. You’re so limited in what you can do. You can’t bend your head to find your way down the stairs.

“Whether it was the Showgirl costume or the hotpants, or the big silver dress from the Aphrodite tour [in 2011] that was just ginormous, they all present their own challenges of how you’re going to move and how you’re going to do the choreography. There are times the costume can do that [figuring out] for me; other times I really have to wrestle with it to do what I need to do.

“But you’re not meant to know about that,” she adds, “that’s an internal struggle.”

Minogue has spent much of 2016 happily off the radar, enjoying the company of fiancé Joshua Sasse, 28. She gets “gooey” talking about her future husband, whom she met last year when she was cast opposite him in the TV musical-comedy series Galavant. He proposed to Minogue last Christmas.

Just like the “secret Greek wedding” that was rumoured but never happened, reports of summer nuptials in Melbourne are also off the mark.

“I hate to let everyone down, but no,” she says. “People’s enthusiasm is lovely, we appreciate that, but there are no wedding plans as yet. I’m just enjoying feeling girly and being engaged.”

Minogue will be in Queensland next month filming the movie Flammable Children. The comedy, set in 1975, features her former Neighbours co-star Guy Pearce and is written and directed by Stephan Elliott (The Adventures Of Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert ).

“It’s Aussie-tastic,” laughs Minogue. And she is also planning a sneaky visit to check out her own exhibition when she’s back in Melbourne.

“I’ll probably try to move things around the exhibition,” she says. “And they’ll probably tell me off: ‘Who’s that child playing with the costumes?’”Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney | www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-2016

In 1983, the Fashion Design Council burst on to the Melbourne scene like a Liverpool kiss to the mainstream fashion industry. Inspired by punk's DIY aesthetic and armed with an audaciously grandiose title, an earnest manifesto and a grant from the Victorian government, FDC founders Robert Buckingham, Kate Durham and Robert Pearce were determined to showcase the burgeoning Melbourne design scene in all its outrageous glory.

"People resented hearing about Karl Lagerfeld," says Durham. "Our movement was against the mainstream and the way Australians and magazines like Vogue treated Australian designers."

Over its 10-year lifespan, the FDC launched such emerging designers as Jenny Bannister, Christopher Graf and Martin Grant. But what was perhaps most exciting was the FDC's ecumenical approach. Architects, filmmakers, artists and musicians all partied together at runway shows held in nightclubs.

"It was an inventive time when people came together and made people notice fashion," says Durham.

Among the creative congregation, Durham remembers artist Rosslynd Piggott, who constructed dresses of strange boats with children in them and filmmaker Philip Brophy, who used "naff" Butterick dress patterns. Elsewhere, an engineer made a pop-riveted ball dress out of sheet metal. The crossover between music, art, graphic design and film extended to architects such as Biltmoderne (an early incarnation of celebrated architects Wood Marsh) who designed the FDC's favourite runway and watering hole, Inflation nightclub.

"Clothing was confronting," says Durham. "It was brash and tribe-oriented. It was quite good if you weren't good-looking. People liked the idea that this or that clothing style was going to win you friends."

Today, however, even Karl Lagerfeld has a punk collection. To complicate matters, "fast fashion" appropriates the avant-garde at impossibly low prices. The digital era too has caused the fashion world to splinter and bifurcate. What's a young contemporary designer to do?

"The physical collective is no longer that important," says Robyn Healy, co-curator of the exhibition High Risk Dressing/Critical Fashion, which uses the FDC as a lens to view the current fashion landscape. "These are designers who are highly networked through social media who put their work up on websites."

Fashion designers still use music, film and architecture, but in different ways. Where FDC members might document its runway shows with video, studios such as Pageant use video as the runway show and post them online. Social media is perhaps the big disrupter. Where FDC designers might collaborate with architects, today it's webdesigners.

"Space has changed," says Healy. "Web designers might be the equivalent of the architect today. It's a different use of space."

As grandiose as the FDC, yet perhaps even more ambitious in scope, is contemporary designer Matthew Linde's online store *** gallery, Centre for Style. Like the FDC, it offers space for "artists who aren't at all designers per-se, but they're dealing with a borrowed language from fashion", Linde told i-D magazine.

"It's an extraordinary juggernaut across the world with a huge amount of Instagram followers," says co-curator Fleur Watson. "[Linde] has created a brand that uses social media in an interesting avant-garde way."

Yet unlike their often untrained FDC counterparts, these designers are perhaps the first generation of PhD designers, notes Watson. "Robert Pearce had a belief in culture changing the world. That's what these new designers are reflecting on in their research, their position in the fashion world and how do they change the way fashion works?"

While it's also true that new technologies offer exciting possibilities in embedded fabrics and experimentation with 3D printing, fast fashion has created certain expectations.

As Cassandra Wheat of the Chorus fashion label laments: "It's just hard for people to understand the complexity and the value that goes into production without being really exposed to it. They think they should have a T-shirt for cheaper than their sandwich."

During the course of the exhibition Chorus will produce its monthly collection from one of the newly designed spaces within the gallery. The exhibition's curators have commissioned three contemporary architects who, like its '80s counterparts, work across the arts, to interpret FDC-inspired spaces. Matthew Bird's Inflation-influenced bar acts as a meeting place for the exhibition's forums and discussions on the contemporary state of fashion. Sibling architects abstracts the retail space, while Wowowa's office design resembles a fishbowl. For Watson, the exposed shopfront/office has as much front as Myer's. Its architecture suggests the type of brazen confidence every generation of fashion design needs. Says Watson: "Fake it till you make it."Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/cocktail-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-2017

inspired by the performances of Maxine Pearce & Nico Mirallegro in BBC1's The Village,
this is from the point of view of a mother to a son who has to go to war*

01.20am, 30/4/13

Wherever life may send you
However far away
May light beings befriend you
Angels, to light your way

Four angels for protection
To guard the path ahead
Three more for introspection
To drive out fear and dread

May archangels placate you
And sanctify your dreams
May love illuminate you
However dark life seems.

Wingbeating high above you
To guide you on your way
The angels and I love you
A little more each day.

A scholar to change the human view
to make sense of twas, thou and than.
either shouting in the street through a mask
or preaching through the screen to those still ignorant.

Maybe a congressman to strike at the heart,
to burst from within scattered in gore and gold.
or just one more journalist,
one more stab at the sour core.

the flag bearer will fall time and time again
Brown,
Snowden,
Hammond.

they are not martyrs, they are victors,
the idea will never die with you
carry your flag through the hail of arrogance and evil,
through the fog of the ignorance and hate,
till you pearce the blackened heart,
and the last thing they'll see is your rosy cheeks.

Like a butterfly,
my heart flies away
to a place afar
where only emotions exist;
a place where love has kissed
The fragrance of its feelings
is sweet like the nectar of dew
on blades of grass new
just after Springs' first rain;
a taste that lingers
time and again
You sing me a love song
with the poetry you write
and your eyes pearce my heart
with the words you say
Even the birds can't help but sway
Like a butterfly,
my heart does fly away
to a place afar
with the words of our love song

~ Priya 3/20/15

"Are you a paranoid schizophrenic?"

"No."
"Certainly."
"Who's asking?"

Every tear I shall collect,
     But not one shall taint
                    The earth.

For I will mould every shard
         In vengeance

of emotion.

And when enough pain
           is forged cold.


The blade frozen in segments
            Of woeful  agony,

Then I shall pearce you deeply,
     So you feel the coldness

Of every tear descending down
      Tarnished cheeks.

   And know that pain saved,



Has a price worse that what
              Was dealt before.

Because tears have a price,
       Are you doing to pay...

At ‘civil’-war with mankind.


Life has been a lesson that I still haven’t learned.
Love still burns
And the way into my heart is not through strawberries and ice cream,
Or any material thing.
You have to have a soul that truly lights up,
Every time you are with me.
So much so, that it can be seen,
Because my smile will be a beamer of light for everybody to see.


My Princess your Prince would like to build you a little mansion,
For the two of us to live.
Maybe raise us some kids,
And if my dreams they never come true
And our family never begins,
Just know my heart will still sing.
A downpour of sounds will be seen flowing out of me.


My hope surfs on a stream of metaphysics and impossible dreams.
It is dancing on metaphor bliss,
Created with my last wish
And now my canary sings,
Like a bird that has been released!


If this love of ours continues,
We will become headline news.
The good news story at the end of the television;
A wave goodbye,
A blinding vision,
To those ‘in love’ who have to pretend,
Because our love will change the world,
By just sitting in a bed…
Me and my girlfriend.

All I need in this world of sin,
Is me and my girlfriend.


To all those in need, we will send peace, love and empathy.
We will have to build a spaceship, just to spread the love.
An army of Shakespeare’s monkeys will write us infinite books,
About human (be) kind…and love.
We will donate them to charity;
Just sharing the love.
Maybe do some good.
When we find a lost soul in damnation,
We will be God’s hand to Adam.  
Raise a kid; choose creation.
Lift their spirits up,
Simply by giving them love.


I think it’s time for a renaissance.
Build a palace of wonder;
Give it to the homeless and younger
And let them bring their pets and family with them, ok!
Communal gatherings will be the order of things.  There is a way.
We will create a society where everybody is free from slavery
And everybody is safe.
If imagination is just a figment and they say there is no way,
Then we will have to make amendments to their thoughts,
And our own thoughts will show them this can be done.
We could build a little hope.  The books are there to be taught.


The world doesn’t have to go to war to make a few bad men some cash.
We could live in utopia,
If only…
If only we gave it a chance…


And so I leave you with this quote I have heard my entire life,
From a man called Donald Mills Pearce.
(He is the one who chose to write.
Thank you Donn Pearce for ‘that song’ throughout all these years…)


“What we’ve got here is,
Failure to communicate.
Some men you just can’t reach,
So you get what we had here last week
Which is the way he wants it…
Well…
He gets it…”


(C)2018 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

They say actions speak louder than words, if so,
Why do they pearce though the skin like a sharp knife all the way to my heart?
Why isn't there any effective medication to help me heal, to help me forget.
I may resolt to alcohol or get high now and then to drown my pain,
but we know what's high gotta come down,
And as I get lower and the alcohol departs my body, so does the pain return
I remember having a bad accident when I was 8 years old, very big painful scar on my face.
Pain was both physical and emotional
But looking at me now, I forgot I ever had one
It healed
**** this hurts like hell,
Pardon for I don't really know what Hell looks like, or how Hell feels,
But if there was ever a way to describe hell, it surely would be the way I feel now

For now, I'm letting go,
Pain can't hold me hostage no more
You got no hold on me no more
I'm setting myself free..

I slept peacefully,
dreaming I was with you
closing the distance between
the clouds white
and the sky blue
floating on fluffy clouds of dreams
I awoke suddenly,
sinking deep into the blurry seams
suddenly, so very lost without you
and once again, widening the gap
between what I wanted us to be,
and what I always knew was true

~ ©️ Priya, 4/19

"Bitter truth of reality. When you hold something closely, you lose it nearly".

~ Pearce Crizyel

Have you ever heard of the clipper LOCH ARD?
Its story reminds us to be on our guard.
In 1878--oh, such grief!--
She shipwreck occurred when the ship hit a reef.

It happened just off the Australian coast--
Where shipwrecks caused many to give up the ghost--
Because of some miscalculations and fog
And not 'cause the captain was drinking his grog.

The crew had tried hard but could not get a grip
On any way that they could save the great ship.
Only two people--does this strike a chord?--
Survived of the 54 people on board.

A lucky crew member--Tom Pearce was his name--
Made sure survival became his chief aim.
A small upturned boat was for him within reach.
He hung on till he found himself on the beach.

Eva Carmichael was lucky as well.
She hung on to objects afloat in that hell.
When the young woman was pulled from the tide,
She learned that her folks and her siblings had died.

Tom had helped rescue her; he'd heard her cries.
He saw that she struggled and feared her demise.
The two nineteen-year-olds were both tired and sore.
They drank from some bottles that drifted ashore.

Tom searched for other survivors in vain.
He hoped that he had enough strength to sustain
His efforts to scale the sheer cliffs, which he did.
It could have been deadly in case he had slid.

After their rescue and it became known
How the survivors' two lives had been thrown
Together in such a way, people thought they--
Eva and Tom--would get married one day.

Could THIS be a love story starting to bud,
Or would their relationship end with a thud?
They shared a link that was special, of course;
But love is not something that people can force.

Both of them married but not with each other.
In Ireland years later she married another.
Tom and his wife had two sons who would be
On ships--sad but true--when they both died at sea.

As lovely as bodies of water appear,
Oceans and seas can be something to fear.
Eva and Tom were both lucky and brave.
The ocean came close to becoming their grave.

-by Bob B (5-14-24)