This month's Vogue

In Vogue, out this week, I have a piece on family secrets. This is just part of an ongoing process of writing a family memoir.

As part of my thinking about the role and impact of family secrets I interviewed Anne Hollonds, CEO of Relationships Australia. Anne is always a thoughtful and balanced opinion leader in the area of our relationships.

Here is a transcript of my interview with her for that piece.

V: Do you find lots of people come to Relationships Australia with issues about family secrets?

AH: It wouldn’t be unusual to find people in a new relationship who haven’t fessed-up about something that happened in a previous relationship. These days generally there is a greater degree of openness about things generally, whether it’s coming out and telling people you are gay. Because social norms aren’t as rigid as they used to be. The more rigid the belief systems are in any family – if they are very religious or prescriptive about what should and shouldn’t be done – then it’s more likely there are going to be secrets because people feel what they are doing is unacceptable or might caused trouble or might upset somebody and so they keep things to themselves.

V: What would you advice be to, let’s say, a mother who had a personal secret and wanted to reveal that to her child after a long period of time? How should you go about revealing a family secret?

AH: It depends on what it is. It all depends on what the issues are, what the circumstances are, how old the child is and so forth. It also depends on the kind of family. If the family is one where things are talked about openly and they are pretty relaxed then it might be something you just always talk about and there doesn’t need to be a moment of revelation as such. It becomes part of the family story. If that’s not the case, then you really need to consider the level of maturity of the child. Around sixteen years of age is a good time in that they are already thinking about these things anyway.

V: Yes, they are probably at that stage where they are trying to work out their parents as people.

AH: Yes, that’s true. And also they might be mature but they might be going through some difficult personal times themselves so you probably wouldn’t want to load that onto them then. If there are some things that you have never gotten around to telling your kids and you should consider telling them in their early twenties. They are adults and the sooner they know the better and the risk of not talking about things honestly is that they may feel quite betrayed and question the basis of trust in the relationship. You do hear of people finding things out after one parent has died, the other parent discloses something and that can be a shock but it doesn’t mean you can’t recover from the shock. The more open and honest you are, the better it is for the relationship. It may take a bit of getting over in the first instance. There never is a perfect time to disclose things.

V: Can you imagine a situation where a family secret should be left alone?

AH: On the whole the more you disclose the better. That doesn’t equate with ‘you must say everything’. You don’t necessarily tell your partner every single thought that passes through you might. You might have a one-night stand and never tell them but if you repeatedly do that then that becomes a pattern and can create a wedge between you. It’s often a sign that you are living a separate life. If there are more and more things that are hard to talk about, it usually spells death for the relationship.

20 Questions on New Matilda

Check out my attempt to be witty and intelligent in 20 questions on the fantastic site newmatilda.

http://newmatilda.com/2010/04/27/wellresearched-answers

And yes I do update my own facebook page albeit I am not blogging as much as I should.

Mind and Mood April 2010

Twice a year Ipsos Mackay produces our Mind & Mood study. Our April version was released last week to clients and features in a story by George Megalogenis in The Australian today.

See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/jobs-not-voters-main-worry/story-e6frgczf-1225858135860

After finishing the fieldwork for this report, all the researchers were struck by the contrast between the Mind and Mood report we did in early 2007 and this report.

In 2007, all groups were showing signs of engagement with political issues and discussing the impending contest between Howard and Rudd. Here’s a snippet from that report:

We are finding a small but significant shift towards re-engagement with political and social concerns, partly sparked in part by the revitalisation of the environmental debate. Whilst participants in this study were rarely inclined to reveal their party of choice in the forthcoming federal election, there is a strong belief that at least there will be a choice this time around and that the election will be a genuine contest. For some who have been politically adrift over the last decade, there is a palpable feeling that politics has suddenly become interesting again. They are paying attention.

Rudd is a real contender. Before we had that fat bastard who made us fall asleep.

Federal politics has suddenly become a topic, after years of it not being a topic so much. I don’t talk much with my parents about it but when I recently went down to Melbourne to see them, we did, because it has suddenly become interesting. There is a real contest now. It’s not just because it is an election year.

Whilst some participants debated the personal strengths and deficiencies of Howard versus Rudd, the respective policies industrial relations and environment politics of Labor and the Coalition also evoked interest.

I think [John Howard] stuffed up with two things – IR and greenhouse. With greenhouse, suddenly everyone got interested and he hasn’t kept up. With IR, he has bitten off more than he could chew. He misread that. The environment, he has never been interested in that. And neither has the public until recently. With greenhouse he hasn’t changed, but the public has changed. With IR, he wanted change but the public didn’t.

In 2007, discussion about party politics merited an entire chapter in the report. This year it barely filled a paragraph as an afterthought in Chapter 1. There was some lively discussion centred on Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard however. Here are a couple of quotes about them from our recent report:

Man 1: I think Abbott was elevated quicker than even he expected to be. It certainly surprised me.
Man 2: The Libs are split down the middle and Tony Abbott put his hand up. He’s done better than anyone thought.

Man 1: Julia Gillard is a surprise package. It was a marriage of convenience between her and Rudd, but she’s got leadership written all over her
Man 2: Yeah, she’s a doer all right
Man 3: She’s a very intelligent woman. She’s tough too. Kevin Rudd will have to be careful

A future Abbott versus Gillard contest will be one Australians might perk up for.

For Mind & Mood fieldwork this time, I conducted groups in Melbourne but also Ballarat. It was my first visit to the town and it was just lovely, grander than I had anticipated but then I realised walking around that the beautiful buildings and wide streets suited its heritage as a gold town. I conducted a group at the Ballarat East Community Men’s Shed. See their link:

http://www.becs.shed.org.au/

Among many other things, they make wooden objects. See here for a list:

http://www.becs.shed.org.au/index.php/products-to-buy

I bought one of their newer products, a doll’s bed for my daughter’s second birthday.

One of the nicer aspects of my job is the chance to discover towns in regional Australia, meet and listen to the people that live there. As someone who lives most of her life in an inner-city, bourgeois bubble, these trips provide an important reality check.

Meal planning … have we lost the art?

I have blogged before about a report I was involved in last year called ‘Last Night’s Dinner’. One of the findings from the report was that most meal preparers only start to plan what they will have for dinner on any given night in the middle of the same day. Only Monday and Sunday main meals receive more time and attention, with Sunday dinner traditionally being an occasion for the family to gather together for a special meal like a roast. As the week goes on we tend to plan less and cook less, in part to do with our paid work commitments.

If you look at the chart from the report at the end of this post, depending on the dish, only 20% of less of us plan for a dish several days before we cook it.

I am a huge advocate of meal planning. I will get to the reasons in the minute but I thought I’d explain (or brag perhaps) about my meal planning process.

Every day Wednesday or Thursday night (depending on other commitments), I collect pen, shopping list and whatever cook book or torn-out-of-magazine recipes I have around. I check my schedule. What’s the next week going to be like? How many dinners do I need to prepare? How much time will I have? Lots of late nights or social commitments or not? I then work out how many dinners I will need to prepare and what types (quickies or those that are a bit more elaborate). I then start browsing through the cook books. I want a balance of red meat, chicken and seafood meals with at least one meat-less option. Once I have the weekly menu set, I write my shopping list. I check the pantry as well to see if I have any of the staples required.

I do this without fail every week. It sounds terribly anal, the height of food nerdyness but there are good reasons.

Number 1: I hate food waste. (Paraphrasing Nigella Lawson, I am always extravagant but never wasteful). If you know what you are cooking, you are much better positioned to only buy what you need. Furthermore, the more recipes you have in your repertoire, the easier it is to work out what to do with 4 eggplants that need to be cooked today or else.

Number 2: Life is too short to spend it in the supermarket. Even though I love browsing supermarket shelves for research purposes, most weeks I am doing the shopping at night after a long day or with a toddler who may well lose it once the babyccino has been polished off. So I like to know what I am doing and don’t have time to waste in the isles food planning on the run.

Number 3: I like to mix up what I make. Before the days of meal planning, I found that dinner often defaulted to pasta and sauce and my diet wasn’t as varied as it could have been. Planning allows me to think ahead about making different kinds of dishes and also helps me make sure I have the right mix of red meat, white meat, seafood and veggie dishes.

Number 4: I like to know what I am doing. Meal planning means the end of wondering mid-afternoon ‘what should we have for dinner?’ No more trying to remember whether there is risotto rice at home or not, spending way too much on risotto rice at the local deli and then returning home to discover you actually have 3 packets of the stuff. Planning saves you time, money and angst.

So why don’t we plan more? Maybe it’s because we feel our weeks are so hectic and stressful, that even if we did plan our meals, we may not feel like making them when the time comes. Or that our schedules are such moveable feasts that planning is a futile exercise. This is understandable. I often have to rethink the weekly meal plan in light of changing arrangements, but then again I always plan a few meals around ingredients that will last beyond the week (frittatas for example) or meals that can be frozen to be enjoyed another time.

Weekly meal preparation is, like restaurant cooking, a skill and a discipline. For many of us it seems, it is also a joy (only 18% of respondents in the research for ‘Last Night’s Dinner’ reported that cooking was a chore). So even thought planning to make something next week might seem to be premature, if you do like to cook, just trust once you get there, if you know what you are doing, it will probably happen.

If you plan for it, you will cook.

The Busy Woman's Cookbook

My dear friend Emily knows I collect vintage and off-beat cookbooks and so on Friday when I saw her and our friends for dinner at The Press Club, she handed over a copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly The Busy Woman’s Cookbook, published in 1972 (the year of my birth).

There is so much to love about this piece of food history: the distinctively seventies use of brown and yellow, the Goodies font used throughout, the pink lipstick and blue eye shadow on the woman lighting red candles on the cover. Moreover looking through the recipes in the book, they reflect perfectly the ways in which Australians from English speaking backgrounds approached food and cooking at the time.

The chapters follow the course approach to structuring a cook book – soups hot and cold, the first course, salads, fish, chicken, meat and desserts cold and hot. There are only a few sauces for pastas – including curried steak. In any modern cookbook our continuing love of the Italian noodle would ensure a pasta sauce chapter was at least as long as the salad chapter.

In terms of cooking with alcohol, Sherry is a favourite (as is Marsala), whereas now we cook with good red and white wine and with alcohol from different cultures such as Chinese rice wine.

In terms of spices, curry (powder not paste) is used in very Anglo-type dishes – minced steak, mayonnaise chicken and so on. In terms of fresh herbs it’s mainly parsley.

There are lots of recipes for veal and hardly any for lamb. It’s all about canned and fresh white fish rather than fresh seafood and fresh salmon.

In terms of sweets, there is a fairly narrow range of fruits used – apple, banana, pineapple and lemon mainly - whereas it’s hard to imagine a cook book today without recipes using berries and stone fruits.

Asparagus is canned. There is hardly a mention of oils and when it is mentioned it isn’t of the extra virgin type.

There are some shockers in there.

Fish fingers in sauce verte (using fish fingers frozen from a packet)
Crab Creole with canned crab meat
Curried sausages
And the famous apricot chicken

That being said, there are definitely recipes that stand the test of time in this book, albeit more along the sweet end of the spectrum (such as the very pretty rose wine ice).

There is a straightforward and unpretentious approach in old style cook books like this which I love. It’s not about glossy pictures that make your dish look inadequate. It’s not about lifestyle or conspicuous consumption. It is all aimed at people who will actually use these recipes. I like that.

I feel a seventies dinner party coming on, minus the key swapping.

The enchanting Mr Bell

The latest edition of Vogue hits the stands this week, containing a story I did on John Bell and the 20th anniversary of the Bell Shakespeare Company.

See http://www.vogue.com.au/vogue+magazine

He was terrific to meet in person, having seen him on stage so many times. He was fairly laid-back and quiet when we spoke but very generous and engaging.

Here is a snippet of the transcript of my interview with him, conducted on a hot day in December in a courtyard outside his office in The Rocks.

V: You’ve chosen King Lear as the corner stone of your 20th anniversary year. Why that role?

JB: It’s pretty much the only one left I can do. I am 70 next year and it had to be a big one, a blockbuster and I can’t do Hamlet anymore and I am the wrong colour for Othello. What is there left? I have done it twice before. It’s a nice 20th anniversary statement, to do it again. It will be touring all the capital cities. It’s a big statement about the company and where we are at.

V: I guess the audience will be full of 70 year old men pondering the nature of aging and so forth, what it means to retire but also to worry about the next generation. Lots of modern themes.

JB: When I have performed the role before those issues didn’t really come to the forefront of my brain but now they are very much at the forefront - what it’s like getting older, giving up your authority, preparing for the next generation? I’ve got two daughters so I’ve been through all that. The role means many different things now to me than it did ten years ago and ten years again. The play does change in one’s head quite radically.

V: When you are thinking about trying to give Shakespeare a modern interpretation, is there a limit or criteria for this?

JB: The sky’s the limit as long as you’re doing it with some talent and some tact. It is easy to say ‘we’ll set it in a pizza parlour’ but the question is why and what does it mean to the audience? It’s pretty fashionable to be wacky with the classics but that can be very empty unless there is a good rationale for it. I think the thing is not to squeeze it into one frame – [the plays] are wider than that and have more connotations.

V: Over the decades that you’ve be involved in Shakespeare, have you noticed any trends or changes in how young actors coming out of acting school feel and approach the bard?

JB: The trouble is they don’t actually do enough at drama school to get familiar with it. They might do one Shakespeare play in three years but that is not enough. When they get out, some of them have a real hunger and aptitude for it, others are floundering a bit but we take a lot of them into our Actors At Work scheme that plays in the schools. They play three shows a day in schools for a whole year and by the end of that they certainly know how to do Shakespeare, the crowd control, the storytelling, they get the language clear. Peter O’Toole said you don’t get good at Shakespeare until after ten years. There is some truth to that. It has to become second nature, a second language. That’s why this company is important because it allows actors to do Shakespeare again and again and revisit the same parts. I have done King Lear three times, Macbeth twice, Prospero three times. Opera singers and musicians get a chance to develop a repertoire and actors don’t always get that chance.

V: Is it the same too of audiences, getting to see Shakespeare regularly and getting used to the language and so on?

JB: I think that’s true, although there can be a danger of too much Shakespeare. I think last week there were ten Shakespeare plays on – at the park, at the beach and so on. When we started this company Shakespeare wasn’t being done all that much and now smaller groups and co-ops and other companies are now doing it. I think we have encouraged a growth industry. It’s proved how popular it can be. And that’s because from the beginning we insisted on doing it in modern dress, with Australian voices. We weren’t going to try to imitate the English way of doing it. That doesn’t seem like a big deal now but back then it was a shock to audiences to see it done that way. That has been broken open and now we can see all the things we can do with it.

For tickets and more information about Bell’s birthday celebrations see:

http://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/

The Future

At the end of last year Ipsos Mackay published a report on consumers’ attitudes to the future.

Man, was it bleak!

Hardly anyone, regardless of age, gender or background, thought the future would be better than the past.

Here are some of the comments that were made in the fieldwork for that report:

“The boat people coming in. If they start coming, they’ll swamp us.”

“Crime is going to get worse.”

“The gap between rich and poor will get a lot worse and not just other countries, here in Australia too.”

“That’s how the future is going. American culture is going to dominate everything.”

“We won’t have the services. No enough people paying tax.”

“In ten years we’ll be like London. You have to be scared of ten year olds in London.”

“Our stimulation levels will get more and more elevated. Something will have to be really big to get people’s attention.”

And this is just a taste of all the terrible things awaiting us in the future, according to the participants in this study.

At the end of the fieldwork, the team wondered what was causing people to feel so despondent about the future. As someone currently reading a lot of Australian history, there are many ways we are now better off than we were, say, fifty years ago (let alone a hundred years which is not long in the scheme of things). Are we hard-wired to be nostalgic about the past? Are we bracing ourselves for an unknown future by being deliberately pessimistic? Or is this pessimism merely a symptom of our lack of faith in our leaders to adequately address the problems of today, let alone tomorrow? All three probably and one of the consistent themes in our research over the last two years has been consumer anger about short-term thinking in government and corporate life.

You can hear me discussing this report with the lovely Antony Funnell from Radio National’s Future Tense program:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2010/2811132.htm

More information can be found about The Future here:

http://www.ipsos.com.au/knowledgecentre/news/100128.aspx

There is one quote that never made it into the report, which I just love. The young man responsible said this in the context of a broader discussion about the impact of technology on our ethical behaviour.

“I have more faith in humanity to believe that internet porn will lead to a decline in personal integrity.”