Tour Down Under in Unley

This evening, thanks to councillor father-in-law, a planned wander around the Tour Down Under stage carnival on King William Road in Unley turned into free wine, canapes and thoroughly lardy desserts courtesy of whichever corporates were sponsoring the VIP reception. Apparently SA premier Mike Rann was there (though I still wouldn’t recognise him if I tripped over him, I’m afraid), but his beleaguered deputy Kevin Foley was not in evidence. Adelaide federal MP Kate Ellis was also around, looking intimidatingly glamorous and with some interesting things to say about women‘s representation in Australian politics which I hope to follow up on soon. Other than that, there was a lot of lippy, a lot of botox, a lot of press dropping in for a quick look and some free grog, and a lot of council schmoozing…

Unfortunately F-I-L just gave our first names for the invitations list and when the passes got printed it was, I guess justifiably, assumed that I had taken Marc’s name. Administrative error or Patriarchal Conspiracy?:

The Tour Down Under, for the uninitiated, is a Tour-de-France-style cycle race around South Australia. Unley, a city-suburb of Adelaide, hosts one of the stage starts and has a history of closing off King William Road, where this takes place, for a big street fair the night before. Food stalls, a fashion show, cooking demonstrations, late-opening shops (I guess this must be a killer marketing opportunity for a cycle shop like Mega Bike, right in the middle of it all), lots of South Australian wine… For me, another attack of culture shock about how incredibly WHITE Adelaide is (although people keep reassuring me how diverse it is compared with a decade ago… all I can say to that is it must have been hideously and scarily Anglo). And even F-I-L, who has often been described as politically ‘somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun,’ was disturbed by the fact that the street police wandering amongst the crowds were packing pistols.

The gallery is here