While Bill Shorten says he doesn’t remember seeing any naked ladies in his past, one candidate can’t forget her experience — and is actually quite proud of it. Sally Baillieu, the Arts Party candidate for the seat of Dunkley, will be familiar to many fans of classic Australian rock:
“In 1980, legendary Australian band Australian Crawl released their Album, The Boys Light Up, and it went on to achieve Platinum, five times. It still ranks among the top selling Australian albums of all time. The cover featured a naked sunbathing girl on the beach at Mount Eliza, with the five band members standing in the shallows. 36 years later, the girl who featured in that iconic cover photo is standing as the Arts Party candidate for Dunkley.”
For those whose memories are as rusty as Bill Shorten’s, here’s the cover:
We asked Sally Baillieu if she was, in fact, the woman on the front of the record cover and she said it was “definitely true” and that she was “very proud” of being involved with it.
“I think it was my first year of media studies at RMIT. We’d all grown up together, James [Reyne] and his younger brother David [who was originally the drummer in the band] were really close friends of mine. When that first album came out they didn’t know many people who would do it,” she told us.
Although proud of the photo, Baillieu wasn’t going to bring it up as part of the campaign “It’s certainly not something I rest my hat on.” Baillieu has worked as a theatre producer and a radio presenter hosting an arts-based radio show. She says she was motivated to get political by government cuts to the small and medium arts sector, which have affected many of the artists and art projects for disadvantaged people in her area.
Baillieu’s surname is familiar to those in both the arts and politics — her brother-in-law, Ted Baillieu, was Victoria’s premier and arts minister. “I’ve seen [politics] reasonably first hand and terrfiying as it is, I still felt this is an issue I really need to wade in on,” she said.
So what is more scary, the theatre of democracy or an actual stage?
“It’s more scary to get up as a politician. I think if you get up on stage and you’re performing then everyone wants to like you, and in politics its a very nasty dog-eat-dog world and people don’t want to like you.”
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