
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upMay 2013
Encounters
Words: Shane Maloney | Illustration: Chris Grosz
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 Monica pier.
Born in Marrickville in 1886, Annette Kellerman began swimming at six as a treatment for rickets. She practised natation, mastered the trudgeon and, at 16, was the fastest woman in NSW waters. Moving to Melbourne, she got a job cavorting with the fishes in a glass tank at the Exhibition Aquarium. In 1905, her first attempt on the English Channel was thwarted by the weight of her skirted woollen bathing costume. In response, she sewed black stockings onto a boy’s bathers and invented the women’s one-piece swimsuit. When she wore one on a public beach in Boston, she was arrested for indecency.
By the 1920s, she was a star of screen and vaudeville, mixing mermaid routines with wire-walking, ballet dancing and high-diving into small tanks, sometimes containing crocodiles. She wrote books promoting health and fitness and toured the US giving lectures to “modern” women.
Esther Williams was a very modern woman. At eight, she was already working as a towel girl at her local Los Angeles pool. By 16, she was a national freestyle champion. When the outbreak of war dashed her medal hopes at the 1940 Olympics, she joined the Aquacades. Sumptuously irrigated movies soon followed, their gushing fountains and bathing beauties choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
Kellerman, meanwhile, had quit the water and opened a health-food shop in San Diego. One day, she turned up on the set of Million Dollar Mermaid. She was 65, “not a wrinkle on her face”.
The two women posed for a picture, then Williams asked how Kellerman felt about her playing her life.
“I wish you were Australian,” Kellerman answered.
“I’m the only swimmer in the movies, Miss Kellerman. I’m all you’ve got.”
Later in the shoot, Williams broke her neck when she dived from a 35-metre tower in a gold-sequinned leotard and aluminium crown. She spent five months in a full body cast. She recovered, but demand for water-based musicals was drying up and so was her movie career.
Annette Kellerman returned to live in Australia. She died aged 89 and became a municipal aquatic centre in Enmore.
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanOnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsThe Aurukun blues of Peter Sutton
An anthropologist hits the skids in Cape York‘The Secret River’
Sydney Theatre CompanyKevin Rudd’s unrelenting campaign to regain power
How Labor changed its view of the deposed PM from party saboteur to potential saviourBruce Springsteen Live in Melbourne
Rod Laver Arena, 29 March 2013The quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianistOne small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptationArt heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art worldCannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanThe avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history