By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
When it comes to Scots College’s multimillion-dollar new student centre modelled on a Scottish baronial castle, it’s beginning to feel a lot like groundhog day.
Six years after the $40,000-a-year Bellevue Hill institution first lodged plans for what is being called “Ian Lambert’s vanity castle” after the college’s headmaster, students and staff remain in the dark about an opening date.
As CBD reported last year, it was meant to be 2021, but then COVID happened, it started raining all the time, and Lambert may or may not have grandiosely insisted on acquiring special sandstone slates from Scotland.
Then it was meant to be 2023, but the year screeched by. When we last turned our attention to the subject in March, right after new amendments to the design were approved by the NSW Department of Planning, the school’s PR people told us only Lambert was authorised to give an on-record comment. Via a bit of disingenuous backgrounding, we were informed that construction would be completed by April.
It’s now July and what do you know, there’s still no official opening date, and no response to CBD’s queries about all this. At least Scots got Prince Edward in last year to lay the foundation stone, which is all very pomp and circumstance.
We can report that the John Cunningham Student Centre, as the project is officially termed, is close enough to completion to land a few reviews. The castle was recently picked up on by the folk over on r/ArchitecturalRevival, a subreddit for misty-eyed nostalgics who want our built environment to reject modernity and embrace tradition.
But consensus among those traditionalists was that the earlier, brutalist building was better.
“It’s so ugly, disproportionate, soulless, and it feels wrong. Like what a committee thinks is beautiful,” wrote one Redditor.
Another described it as a “cut-price Hogwarts appliqued onto an air-conditioner beer fridge of a building”.
For a rumoured cost of $80 million (three times what was first budgeted), you’d have hoped for a bit better.
WEDDING BELLS
ABC health guru and coronavirus masks on advocate Norman Swan is married for a third time, we hear. Overseas, we hear. Greece, we hear.
But to whom?
Turns out the good doctor has tied the knot with ABC Radio National executive producer Katie Hamann, but it is all hush-hush. No social media spillage. We won’t tell if you don’t.
Happy days. Norman Swan at his wedding to ABC Radio National producer Katie Hamann.Credit: Phillip Adams
But that message failed to reach Phillip Adams, the just-retired ABC Late Night Live guru who tweeted his congratulations to the happy couple with a pic of the pair, Swan in a classic relaxed beige suit and Hamann in a fetching ivory wedding frock. Is that a hint of the Mediterranean Sea in the background? Can’t confirm.
Phil and Norm go way back, 33 years in fact, when Swan, then with his management hat on, persuaded Adams to host a little RN radio program called Late Night Live.
Swan was a polarising figure during our lockdown years, but CBD admires someone who swapped his $80,000 medical salary for $19,000 as a health reporter on ABC Radio in 1982.
His health reporting won him admiration and awards, but the COVID-19 pandemic turned him into a national figure, beloved by some, but sharply criticised by others.
FINAL SUBMISSION
Oh dear. The proposal to abolish the federal electorate of Higgins in Melbourne’s inner east has cruelled the highly newsworthy but constitutionally novel campaign of good friends Lucy Bradlow and Bronwen Bock to job-share their way into a federal parliamentary seat.
Bradlow, a former lawyer who previously worked for Labor’s Kristina Keneally and Bock, an investment banker, are childhood friends who generated blanket media coverage by advocating a one week on, one week off arrangement in Parliament House.
The proposal captured the zeitgeist, well for one weekend at least, before some constitutional lawyers dissed it.
But B+B, as the duo are known on their $45 branded T-shirts and $85 branded hoodies, are charging forth.
The pair’s submission to the Australian Electoral Commission argues against abolishing the seat due to (our summary) a) gender and b) Bradlow and Bock.
Higgins is the only seat in Victoria where all declared candidates are women and “there are two people running a historic job-sharing campaign … that could have far-reaching implications for participatory democracy across Australia.”
They will fight on despite the AEC plans.
HOW GOOD IS COFFEE?
Spotted: Former prime minister Scott Morrison having a coffee with ex-NSW premier Dominic Perrottet at the cafe behind Sydney Hospital, about 12.15pm on Thursday. No doubt ScoMo was schooling the soon-departing Perrottet about civilian life. We couldn’t get close enough to discern their orders, but we always imagined ScoMo would be a mugaccino man. How good is Queensland?