Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx

From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.

From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140

"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.

Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...