Encounters

Current Issue

Annette Kellerman & Esther Williams

By Shane Maloney

Both were champion swimmers. Both made a splash in show business. “My God, I wish I could meet her,” thought Esther Williams when she was shown a photograph of Annette Kellerman, the woman she was set to play in the 1952 MGM aqua-musical Million Dollar Mermaid. Taken 30 years earlier, the photo showed Kellerman twirling a parasol as she walked a tightrope high above Santa Mo

Bob Menzies and Gamal Nasser

By Shane Maloney

Prime Minister Menzies did not think very highly of Egyptians. “These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, full of self importance and ignorance,” he recorded in his diary. He was just the man, in short, to head a diplomatic mission to Cairo to negotiate with the Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser. In 1956, Nasser, whose modernising regime had overthrown the playbo

Pemulwuy & Black Caesar

By Shane Maloney

In the first desperate years of the settlement at Sydney, two men supplied much of the excitement. One was the powerful Aboriginal guerrilla leader Pemulwuy, who waged a campaign of resistance to the British interlopers. The other was a tall, well-built convict known as Black Caesar, one of the 12 prisoners of African origin who had arrived on the First Fleet, and a frequent and unrepentant absconder from captivity. Pemulwuy first stepp

Australia II and Liberty

By Shane Maloney

A thousand boats had gathered on Long Island Sound to witness the spectacle, among them a US Navy destroyer. Helicopters buzzed overhead and the Goodyear blimp floated in the sky. It was the afternoon of 26 September 1983. For more than four hours, two 12-metre class yachts had been fighting a gruelling series of duels as they tacked and manoeuvred through t

Richard Neville & Charles Sobhraj

By Shane Maloney

Long, lean and languid-limbed with Mick Jagger lips and hair to his shoulders, Richard Neville was the very picture of a bell-bottomed hippie. A pioneer of the war on deference, the one-time UNSW student newspaper editor was convicted and sentenced to priso

Vida Goldstein & Theodore Roosevelt

By Shane Maloney

When the first International Women’s Suffrage Alliance conference convened in Washington in February 1902, Australia’s representative was its most prominent radical feminist, Vida Goldstein. Vida was then 32, “slight in figure and attractive in personali

Brett Whiteley & Billy Connolly

By Shane Maloney

In January 1985, a little bird flew into Billy Connolly’s life. At least that’s the way the Big Yin puts it. Connolly was beginning his Australian tour with a series of shows at the Sydney Opera House, and one night his Glasgow-born mate Mark Knopfler joined him on

Hubert Opperman & Bruce Small

By Shane Maloney

Hubert Opperman was a telegram delivery boy. At the beginning of the 1921 racing season, he joined a suburban cycling club and entered a distance race. It was hot and dusty on the unmade country roads but the 17 year old was gritty and tenacious. He kept pace

JJ McRoach & Hunter S Thompson

By Shane Maloney

They were somewhere above Batlow in New South Wales when the drugs began to take hold. Not for the first time since Hunter S Thompson’s arrival in Australia, JJ McRoach began to think he’d made a terrible mistake. He was strapped in a Piper Apache in the middle of a

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith & John Carlos

By Shane Maloney

When he first saw Peter Norman, John Carlos said, “Who’s this little white guy?” Up until then – the semi-final of the 200 metres – the phys ed teacher, “seventh-generation Salvo” and sometime butcher from Melbourne’s northern suburbs hadn’t

Truganini & George Augustus Robinson

By Shane Maloney

By 1829, Truganini was running out of options. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a sailor, her uncle shot by a soldier, her mother-in-law kidnapped by escaped convicts and her sisters abducted into sexual slavery by sealers. She had seen her betrothed’

Gough Whitlam & Enoch Powell

By Shane Maloney

At the 1938 ceremony for the conferring of degrees in the Faculties of Arts and Law at the University of Sydney, the address was given by the newly appointed professor of Greek, Enoch Powell. Although only 25, Powell came very well credentialled. The only son of ambitio

George Lazenby & Cubby Broccoli

By Shane Maloney

The railway worker’s son from Goulburn had done pretty well for himself since arriving in London in 1964. Within three years, the knockabout car salesman, mechanic and ski instructor was one of the most expensive male models in the world. European Marlboro Man, no less. Life as a clothes peg was swinging. But at 28, George Lazenby had just one burning desi

Fred Schepisi & Vladimir Putin

By Shane Maloney

As Fred Schepisi was whisked along the Rublyovka highway, past luxury car showrooms and Gucci boutiques, he reflected on how much Moscow had changed in the 18 years since he’d last seen it. Back then, Mikhail Gorbachev occupied the Kremlin, the USSR was a superpower and, despite the promise of perestroika, drab lines of people still waited outside shops. On that occasion, he was there to direct

Gareth Evans & Ali Alatas

By Shane Maloney

One was a career diplomat, the very model of discretion, patience and good manners. The other was a famously volcanic politician, a thrower of tantrums and ashtrays, witheringly intolerant of others’ imperfections. It was 1988 and each had just been appointe

Morris West & Ngo Dinh Diem

By Shane Maloney

It was 1963 and Morris West, Australia’s most successful novelist, was researching his next book. Dismissed by the literati as a middlebrow Graham Greene, the former Christian Brother had won a huge international readership for his religious thrillers – pa

Robert Helpmann & Anna Pavlova

By Shane Maloney

Little Bobbie Helpman was a delicate infant. On doctor’s orders, anything liable to make him cry was forbidden. His adoring mother, a woman of theatrical disposition, recited Shakespeare to him in his cot. As he grew, they took to acting the roles. He particularly lik

Helmut Newton and Alice Springs

By Shane Maloney

One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne stage actress walked into a small Flinders Lane photography studio, looking to pick up some extra cash as a model. Expecting a whiskery old man behind the lens, she found instead a dashing young European called Helmut Newton. June liked the look of the photos on the walls and Helmut liked the look of June. When his standard pick-up technique failed, he recruited