The Menu Diaries No. 12

March 1993

Somerville Movies, PM Keating Re-elected, and the Swimming Pool is on the Way

For an introduction to what these Menu Diary posts are about, please click HERE. And for the reasons why you really should read this series, please click HERE.

Monday, 1 March. Spaghetti Jaffles (closed toasted sandwiches) with lettuce. Hmmm! – that doesn’t sound very typical. I’ve looked in my 1993 work diary and seen that I had the day off from work. I presume we were doing something that wore us out, and jaffles were all we could do for dinner.

Tuesday, 9 March. Ghee Rice. I don’t recall that so it didn’t make it onto the regular list of dishes. Apparently it is nice, but Trenna probably didn’t persist with it for health reasons.

Thursday, 11 March. “Somerville with Nancy. “Riff Raff””. There’s a story…

The Somerville Auditorium

At the start of 1991 Trenna was trying to think of a meaningful birthday present for her oldest sister. Tren was in no way the sort of person who would be happy giving a cliched gift, or something she didn’t think the recipient would really like.

Getting just the right sort of thing was important.

Nancy was interested in movies, and Perth was “blessed” (as Nancy might say) with a good, annual, international film festival. It’s strength is not so much in the range of movies selected, but in the way they are screened.

Perth has a warm, dry summer, often with a cooling evening breeze, and rain at any time in those few months is extremely unlikely. It is ideal for screening movies outdoors.

And Perth has a ripper venue. The Somerville Auditorium at the University of Western Australia (UWA). It is a grassed area within the attractive university grounds. Surrounding the whole venue are tall pine trees that enclose it, and provide an intimacy to the experience.

A large screen is erected late Spring each year and there are rows of fixed, canvas, striped deck chairs. It holds hundreds of people.

But that isn’t all. What works well is to bring a picnic – a rug, beautiful food, some nice wine, and to sit in the gardens for an hour of two before sunset, eating, drinking, chatting, laughing.

Of course the drinking doesn’t stop when you go back to your seat to watch the movie. As long as we had been together Trenna and I had gone to the Somerville each summer to do exactly that.

Trenna’s geniosity told her that the perfect gift for Nancy was to take her and a picnic to the Somerville.

Well, Nancy loved it, and Nancy raved about it. It was pretty obvious that we had struck on a gift we could give each year. The first movie the three of us saw was “She’s Been Away” on Thursday, 7 February 1991.

“Riff-Raff” mentioned in this Menu Diary was the third movie we saw with Nancy – and Trenna and my first Ken Loach movie. We had never seen anything like it!

The last movie we saw as a birthday present for Nancy was “Let the Sunshine In” on Tuesday, 27 February 2018. The consensus from the three of us was that the movie was boring.

By that stage Trenna’s health was making it difficult to go and her eyesight had deteriorated to the point that she could no longer read subtitles, despite sitting in the front row.

Here is an extract from Trenna’s Diary from Tuesday 27 February 2018.

"5:30  Nance, F&C Somerville French Movie, Let the Sunshine In.
Fish & Chips as usual lovely. Cold night, lots of people. I couldn't read French subtitles!
Movie dull! People laughing @ end in disbelief in what we saw. Jane Croft spotted me on way out. I congratulated her, nice to see her."  [GM:  Jane Croft was a women Trenna struck up a friendship with as both started degrees at UWA.  Trenna was congratulating Jane on completing her degree.]

After that Nancy would come over to our home fairly regularly to have a meal and watch TV with Trenna, but it nowhere near emulated the magic of sitting under the stars at the Somerville.

Back to the Menu

Saturday, 13 March. This was a Federal Election night. Against expectations Paul Keating and the Australian Labor Party won a fifth term in office. It was the victory Keating described as “the sweetest victory of all”. Our friends Colin and Christine came to our house to watch the election count and Trenna prepared another of her epic Asian banquets: Indonesian Beef Curry; Indian Lamb and Potato Curry; Saffron Chicken; Eggplant and Potato; Steamed Rice; Pappadams. Sensational! Both the election and the meal.

Friday, 26 March. Helen’s husband, David had been in the hospitality/restaurant business for may years, and he was certainly a charming bloke. On this day in 1993 he opened his own restaurant, Mamak Malaysia (David came from Malaysia).

The restaurant didn’t seem to last very long, but that is one story I don’t know.

Saturday 27, and Sunday 28 March. We had simple take away meals as we were preparing the back yard for the building of our swimming pool. I have a separate Post planned telling the tale of the pool, but one snippet I picked up is that we had met with the owner of Neptune Pools, Cal Stanley on Tuesday 4 March 1993 at 5:30 pm and that following the meeting we chose him to build the pool. He was obviously keen to start soon, as here we were, spending the weekend moving plants before the excavator arrived.