SA Drink Of The Week

Graham Kilsby interview

The Kilsby Sinkhole episode is live now but its show notes will be updated Thursday, August 1, in the evening.

The Kilsby Sinkhole episode is live now but its show notes will be updated Thursday, August 1, in the evening.

A weekly podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, news, interviews, chat and quizzes. 

Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. 

The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis and Nigel Dobson-Keeffe.

Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday (when we have published a new episode) with an overview of that week's show. Plus, consider joining our Inner Circle; a small group of passionate South Aussies who allow us to pick their brains and gain interviewee suggestions.

This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, ...

The Adelaide Show

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

Steve Davis talks to Graham Kilsby and Jen Will about the Kilsby Sinkhole near Mount Gambier

286 - The Kilsby Sinkhole

David Olney, Robert Godden

The Spin Detector

Musical Pilgrimage

If last episode cracked open the lid on South Australian politics, this one peers inside the engine. Steve Davis reunites with international relations analyst David Olney, and is joined by long-time Adelaide Show political commentator Robert Godden for a compact but chewy conversation about why our democratic system reliably produces a certain kind of politician, and what, if anything, citizens can actually do about it.

The SA Drink of the Week does not feature in this episode.

The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with something deeply personal: Steve’s original song, Goodnight Don, a Brechtian cabaret-styled tribute to Don Dunstan that names Steele Hall as an unlikely hero of South Australian progress; a fitting coda to an episode about leaders who felt compelled, rather than merely ambitious, to change the world.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:02:00 David Olney and Steve Davis

David Olney’s opening thesis sets the frame: stop blaming the individual politician and look at the system that produced them. Political parties absorb people at eighteen. By their mid-thirties, the successful ones know the rules, know who to listen to, and know how to sell the message. Whatever they were before they entered that pipeline is largely beside the point. Party discipline does the rest.

Robert Godden comes at it from economics, or more precisely from the widespread misunderstanding of it. Almost every political party fails to grasp that incentivisation and punishment change behaviour, which is why the same voters who accept cigarette taxes as behaviour-modification tools will simultaneously insist that everything else they disapprove of should be dealt with outside the law. Godden’s observation that he would personally outlaw religion and instant coffee, while conceding not everyone shares his distress about either, is the episode’s warmest moment in a conversation that doesn’t have many warm ones.

The thread tying both arguments together is shame. For hundreds of years, Godden argues, the one reliable corrective available to citizens was the ability to shame politicians into doing the right thing. That rulebook got torn up in 2016. Steve says “because of Trump.” Godden confirms it. Two words and the subject is closed.

After Godden departs, the conversation turns to what collective action actually looks like when the system is this good at absorbing or deflecting pressure. Steve raises Possum Park as an example of the government’s capacity to flood the zone, announcing Gather Round to push the other issue off the front page. Olney draws on Ted Robert Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation: collective action only rebuilds when enough people believe both that things should be better and that they are in fact getting worse. We are only just entering that zone. The grassroots energy Steve is seeing is not wishful thinking; it is the early stage of the only mechanism that has ever produced real political change.

Barbara Pocock closes the argument. She is Olney’s model of the kind of leader collective action eventually produces: not someone who wanted to rule the world, but someone who looked at the state of things and felt she could no longer sit and do nothing. The contrast with the party-machine pathway, Malinauskas entering politics through the party room before he ever held a seat, Ashton Hurn as Marshall’s comms manager before pre-selection, is left to speak for itself.

The Spin Detector

Steve has built a tool, available on The Adelaide Show website, inspired by Ed Coper’s Angertainment and a good deal of additional thinking. You paste in a social media post and its comments. You choose whether you want a draft reply or simply an analysis of what rhetorical move is being played. The tool’s one job is to identify the mechanism, name it, and give you the option to respond or simply move on better informed.

The worked example is a meme circulating from a One Nation-adjacent account: Gina Rinehart above, Albanese below, the implicit message being that her money is hers to spend and his is yours to waste. Pasted into the Spin Detector, the tool surfaces what the meme papers over. Rinehart’s wealth comes from royalties on sovereign natural resources. As Olney notes immediately, that makes her money our money, and we have a system that allows her to keep taking it. The same voters this meme targets often also support taxing international gas companies on the same principle. The meme cannot survive both positions, but that inconvenience is the point of the meme.

Olney’s observation about pace is the practical underpinning: every second between seeing something and reacting is a second in which the emotional charge dissipates and clearer thinking becomes possible. The Spin Detector is a structured pause. Steve calls it a mini David in a bottle. Olney asks only that nobody shake it.

Steve is open about the fact that hosting logistics are still being worked out, and that if the tool proves useful, a conversation with Ed Coper about something larger may follow.

The following resources were mentioned during the episode.

Books

Angertainment by Ed Koper
The Spin Detector

00:31:38 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Goodnight Don by Steve Davis & The Virutalosos.

The closing conversation touches on what Don Dunstan would make of a Labor government in 2025, and on the historical context Steve uncovered while writing the song: that neoliberalism had not yet fully gripped the Labor party during Dunstan’s era, that shift arriving more in John Bannon’s time, and that Steele Hall, Dunstan’s political opponent, played a genuine role in making the reform era possible by supporting electoral changes that cost him politically but were simply the right thing to do.

Goodnight Don is Steve’s original composition, performed by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, written for a cabaret performer to take on and bring to life. It gives Steele Hall his own verse, which feels right in the context of an episode about the rarity of politicians who act from obligation rather than calculation. Steve writes all lyrics by hand. The Virtualosos bring them to life.

PS The image for this episode was taken as part of the SA Electoral Commission's campaign to urge people to vote in the 2026 State Election.

If last episode cracked open the lid on South Australian politics, this one peers inside the engine. Steve Davis reunites with international relations analyst David Olney, and is joined by long-time Adelaide Show political commentator Robert Godden for a compact but chewy conversation about why our democratic system reliably produces a certain kind of politician, and what, if anything, citizens can actually do about it.
The SA Drink of the Week does not feature in this episode.
The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with something deeply personal: Steve&rsquo;s original song,&nbsp;Goodnight Don, a Brechtian cabaret-styled tribute to Don Dunstan that names Steele Hall as an unlikely hero of South Australian progress; a fitting coda to an episode about leaders who felt compelled, rather than merely ambitious, to change the world.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: The Adelaide Show Spin Detector
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:00:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:02:00&nbsp;David Olney and Steve Davis
David Olney&rsquo;s opening thesis sets the frame: stop blaming the individual politician and look at the system that produced them. Political parties absorb people at eighteen. By their mid-thirties, the successful ones know the rules, know who to listen to, and know how to sell the message. Whatever they were before they entered that pipeline is largely beside the point. Party discipline does the rest.
Robert Godden comes at it from economics, or more precisely from the widespread misunderstanding of it. Almost every political party fails to grasp that incentivisation and punishment change behaviour, which is why the same voters who accept cigarette taxes as behaviour-modification tools will simultaneously insist that everything else they disapprove of should be dealt with outside the law. Godden&rsquo;s observation that he would personally outlaw religion and instant coffee, while conceding not everyone shares his distress about either, is the episode&rsquo;s warmest moment in a conversation that doesn&rsquo;t have many warm ones.
The thread tying both arguments together is shame. For hundreds of years, Godden argues, the one reliable corrective available to citizens was the ability to shame politicians into doing the right thing. That rulebook got torn up in 2016. Steve says &ldquo;because of Trump.&rdquo; Godden confirms it. Two words and the subject is closed.
After Godden departs, the conversation turns to what collective action actually looks like when the system is this good at absorbing or deflecting pressure. Steve raises Possum Park as an example of the government&rsquo;s capacity to flood the zone, announcing Gather Round to push the other issue off the front page. Olney draws on Ted Robert Gurr&rsquo;s theory of relative deprivation: collective action only rebuilds when enough people believe both that things should be better and that they are in fact getting worse. We are only just entering that zone. The grassroots energy Steve is seeing is not wishful thinking; it is the early stage of the only mechanism that has ever produced real political change.
Barbara Pocock closes the argument. She is Olney&rsquo;s model of the kind of leader collective action eventually produces: not someone who wanted to rule the world, but someone who looked at the state of things and felt she could no longer sit and do nothing. The contrast with the party-machine pathway, Malinauskas entering politics through the party room before he ever held a seat, Ashton Hurn as Marshall&rsquo;s comms manager before pre-selection, is left to speak for itself.
The Spin Detector
Steve has built a tool, available on The Adelaide Show website, inspired by Ed Coper&rsquo;s Angertainment and a good deal of additional thinking. You paste in a social media post and its comments. You choose whether you want a draft reply or simply an analysis of what rhetorical move is being played. The tool&rsquo;s one job is to identify the mechanism, name it, and give you the option to respond or simply move on better informed.
The worked example is a meme circulating from a One Nation-adjacent account: Gina Rinehart above, Albanese below, the implicit message being that her money is hers to spend and his is yours to waste. Pasted into the Spin Detector, the tool surfaces what the meme papers over. Rinehart&rsquo;s wealth comes from royalties on sovereign natural resources. As Olney notes immediately, that makes her money our money, and we have a system that allows her to keep taking it. The same voters this meme targets often also support taxing international gas companies on the same principle. The meme cannot survive both positions, but that inconvenience is the point of the meme.
Olney&rsquo;s observation about pace is the practical underpinning: every second between seeing something and reacting is a second in which the emotional charge dissipates and clearer thinking becomes possible. The Spin Detector is a structured pause. Steve calls it a mini David in a bottle. Olney asks only that nobody shake it.
Steve is open about the fact that hosting logistics are still being worked out, and that if the tool proves useful, a conversation with Ed Coper about something larger may follow.
The following resources were mentioned during the episode.
Books
<a href="https://amzn.to/4eiId2b">Angertainment by Ed Koper</a> <a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/spin-detector/">The Spin Detector</a>
00:31:38&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to&nbsp;<a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/goodnight-don/">Goodnight Don&nbsp;by Steve Davis &amp; The Virutalosos</a>.
The closing conversation touches on what Don Dunstan would make of a Labor government in 2025, and on the historical context Steve uncovered while writing the song: that neoliberalism had not yet fully gripped the Labor party during Dunstan&rsquo;s era, that shift arriving more in John Bannon&rsquo;s time, and that Steele Hall, Dunstan&rsquo;s political opponent, played a genuine role in making the reform era possible by supporting electoral changes that cost him politically but were simply the right thing to do.
Goodnight Don&nbsp;is Steve&rsquo;s original composition, performed by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, written for a cabaret performer to take on and bring to life. It gives Steele Hall his own verse, which feels right in the context of an episode about the rarity of politicians who act from obligation rather than calculation. Steve writes all lyrics by hand. The Virtualosos bring them to life.
PS The image for this episode was taken as part of the SA Electoral Commission's campaign to urge people to vote in the 2026 State Election.

Steve Davis, David Olney, and political commentator Robert Godden wrestle with the machinery of South Australian democracy (the discipline of the system, the death of shame as a political force, and the rise of rage-bait), before Steve reveals the Spin Detector, a new tool built to hand you back your agency.

435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

David Olney and Steve Davis

This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he’s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia’s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state’s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted.

There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn’t call for it.

In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we’ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:03:15 David Olney and Steve Davis

Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia’s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems.

David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr’s second threshold, citing the government’s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide.

Two further things have deepened Steve’s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump’s playbook. The second is the government’s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve’s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa’s book The Watchman’s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David’s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver’s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack.

Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper’s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell’s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley’s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley’s version is the more troubling of the two.

David then explains neoliberalism at Steve’s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed economies with market-driven ones. David argues that the mixed economy model of the postwar decades, while imperfect, delivered stable living standards and could absorb shocks. What replaced it produced private monopolies, underinvestment in infrastructure and services, and a political landscape where both major parties operate within the same economic framework. His summary: in Australia, both parties wear one jackboot and one fluffy slipper. David connects this to the growth of parties like One Nation and Britain’s Reform Party, arguing that voters who have seen no meaningful improvement from either major party are reaching for alternatives, not out of ideological conversion but out of exhaustion.

Steve raises a related concern: that the same billionaire interests bankrolling One Nation-type parties have no real incentive to disrupt neoliberalism, which raises questions about where that political energy actually leads.

Toward the end of the episode, Steve reads from a reply he has just received from his federal member, written in response to a handwritten letter he sent six weeks earlier about a gas tax. The reply is considered and personal, acknowledging hundreds of individual constituent responses and explaining the member’s position. Steve describes it as a strand still holding, though he is careful not to place too much weight on it. David names two economists whose recent books offer some grounds for thinking a better model is possible: Mariana Mazzucato and Daron Acemoglu.

Steve closes by naming David Pocock as an example of what a politician in this era can be, and David adds Barbara Pocock to that list. The episode ends with a brief exchange about what Don Dunstan and Malcolm Fraser might have made of where their respective parties have ended up.

The following resources were mentioned during the episode.

Books

Angertainment by Ed Koper
The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca Costa
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1984 by George Orwell
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The Common Good Economy by Mariana Mazzucato

Podcasts

The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
The Rest is Politics US featuring Anthony Scaramucci

00:42:34 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virutalosos.

Steve introduces Australia Day as a song exploring how Australia lost the social conditions that made postwar migrant integration work. The central argument is that Italians, Greeks, and Vietnamese newcomers were absorbed into communities partly because people had time and proximity, sticking their arms over fences and saying hello. McMansions, mobile phones, and an economic model built on scarcity and anxiety have eroded that. David adds that prime ministers who romanticised the 1950s as a human ideal were simultaneously promoting the economic model that made those conditions impossible to replicate. Steve writes the songs and uses a virtual session band to produce them, with the hope that a live musician will one day take them further.

This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he&rsquo;s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia&rsquo;s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state&rsquo;s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted.
There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn&rsquo;t call for it.
In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis &amp; The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we&rsquo;ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:00:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:03:15&nbsp;David Olney and Steve Davis
Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia&rsquo;s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems.
David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr&rsquo;s second threshold, citing the government&rsquo;s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide.
Two further things have deepened Steve&rsquo;s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump&rsquo;s playbook. The second is the government&rsquo;s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve&rsquo;s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa&rsquo;s book The Watchman&rsquo;s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David&rsquo;s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver&rsquo;s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack.
Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper&rsquo;s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell&rsquo;s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley&rsquo;s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley&rsquo;s version is the more troubling of the two.
David then explains neoliberalism at Steve&rsquo;s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed economies with market-driven ones. David argues that the mixed economy model of the postwar decades, while imperfect, delivered stable living standards and could absorb shocks. What replaced it produced private monopolies, underinvestment in infrastructure and services, and a political landscape where both major parties operate within the same economic framework. His summary: in Australia, both parties wear one jackboot and one fluffy slipper. David connects this to the growth of parties like One Nation and Britain&rsquo;s Reform Party, arguing that voters who have seen no meaningful improvement from either major party are reaching for alternatives, not out of ideological conversion but out of exhaustion.
Steve raises a related concern: that the same billionaire interests bankrolling One Nation-type parties have no real incentive to disrupt neoliberalism, which raises questions about where that political energy actually leads.
Toward the end of the episode, Steve reads from a reply he has just received from his federal member, written in response to a handwritten letter he sent six weeks earlier about a gas tax. The reply is considered and personal, acknowledging hundreds of individual constituent responses and explaining the member&rsquo;s position. Steve describes it as a strand still holding, though he is careful not to place too much weight on it. David names two economists whose recent books offer some grounds for thinking a better model is possible: Mariana Mazzucato and Daron Acemoglu.
Steve closes by naming David Pocock as an example of what a politician in this era can be, and David adds Barbara Pocock to that list. The episode ends with a brief exchange about what Don Dunstan and Malcolm Fraser might have made of where their respective parties have ended up.
The following resources were mentioned during the episode.
Books
<a href="https://amzn.to/4eiId2b">Angertainment by Ed Koper</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4osyZVO">The Watchman&rsquo;s Rattle by Rebecca Costa</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4v7scmV">Brave New World by Aldous Huxley</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4vKLZZc">1984 by George Orwell</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/49TA6I7">Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4a0QUNs">The Common Good Economy by Mariana Mazzucato</a>
Podcasts
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/@restispolitics">The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart</a> <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-rest-is-politics-us/id1743030473">The Rest is Politics US featuring Anthony Scaramucci</a>
00:42:34&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to&nbsp;<a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/australia-day/">Australia Day&nbsp;by Steve Davis &amp; The Virutalosos</a>.
Steve introduces Australia Day as a song exploring how Australia lost the social conditions that made postwar migrant integration work. The central argument is that Italians, Greeks, and Vietnamese newcomers were absorbed into communities partly because people had time and proximity, sticking their arms over fences and saying hello. McMansions, mobile phones, and an economic model built on scarcity and anxiety have eroded that. David adds that prime ministers who romanticised the 1950s as a human ideal were simultaneously promoting the economic model that made those conditions impossible to replicate. Steve writes the songs and uses a virtual session band to produce them, with the hope that a live musician will one day take them further.

In a raw and unusually personal episode, Steve Davis admits something has broken in his connection to SA’s government and sits down with former geopolitics lecturer David Olney to make sense of the spin, the Park Lands, the politics of distraction, and whether there’s still a strand worth holding onto.

434 - Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction

History Hit Parade

There are episodes of The Adelaide Show, and then there are events. This is one of the latter. Recorded live at the Mercury Cinema as part of South Australia’s History Festival 2026, History Hit Parade brings together broadcaster and journalist Keith Conlon and host Steve Davis for a ninety-minute show that weaves original songwriting with storytelling, historical context, and the kind of warm, unhurried conversation that feels like sitting in a room full of people who actually know where you live. Ten songs. Ten slices of South Australian life. All of them written with pen and paper by Steve, given musical life through his AI-assisted “virtual session band,” and offered here as what he describes as “audition pieces” for real musicians who might one day make them their own.

There is no SA Drink of the Week in this episode.

The entire show is the Musical Pilgrimage. Rather than a single track appended at the end, this episode is the songs, each one set up by Keith’s historical grounding and Steve’s personal connections before the music rolls. Full notes on each song appear in the segment breakdown below.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: History Hit Parade

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:04:07 History Hit Parade

The Mercury Cinema is not a neutral venue for Steve Davis. He was married there on a sweltering 42-degree December day in 2002. He launched Talked About Marketing there. And it is where, on two days in May 2026, he and Keith Conlon performed History Hit Parade to an audience that included Steve’s parents, his former drama teacher, the chair of the History Trust, and the real-life couple immortalised in one of the songs.

The name History Hit Parade, Steve reveals, was Keith’s idea, drawn from his memory of the Harold Wright Hit Parade on 5AD, a Thursday-night ritual of about eight or ten songs in an era before the Top 40 existed. Buddy Holly, Elvis, Perry Como, and Pat Boone: that was your week’s music. The name lands perfectly for a show that does something similar, except every track is an original, and every track is South Australian.

Song 1: Jack and Lil (Up Please, Going Up)
Keith sets the historical scene: John Martins began as Peters and Martin, a drapery store in Rundle Street, until Mr Martin was released from his duties due to what Keith delicately describes as “debauchery.” The Hayward family eventually took the helm, and it was Sir Edward Hayward who, in 1933, looked to Canada for inspiration and brought the Christmas Pageant to Adelaide. He was so nervous before the first one that he hired a biplane, circled the inner suburbs with a megaphone, and personally invited people to come. They did. About 300,000 still do, each year.
The personal thread in this song belongs to Steve’s maternal grandparents, Jack and Lil, whose photograph appeared on the screen behind him. Lil worked in the kitchenware department. Jack was the young engineer installing the new lifts in the building during the 1930s. The rest, as Steve says, is history. The song follows their life together as their family grows, moving floor by floor through what John Martins offered, with the lift ladies’ announcement, “Up please, going up,” as its guiding refrain. Steve thanks Paul Flavell, who has written a book on John Martins, and former John Martin’s planner, Robert Tedstone, who provided a complete floor-by-floor inventory to keep the lyrics accurate.

Song 2: Oh Marion
Marion, the suburb, was surveyed in 1838 by Colonel Light’s private firm after Light had broken with Governor Hindmarsh. The name comes from Marianne, daughter of resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher, though somewhere along the way Mariannen became Marion. Keith’s own connection is fond: his father learned to drive in the 1950s by heading south into the almond groves and vineyards of Marion, where the long straight roads offered room to practise.
Steve’s Marion is the 1970s version: aerial photographs, numbered landmarks, railway tracks where he’d flatten 20-cent pieces, overpass pile drivers thumping for weeks, and a Coles New World at the Park Holme Shopping Centre. He walked to school at age six, “with my little satchel and my shorts.” One afternoon he left school early, got lost, and found his way to a doctor’s surgery he recognised. They rang his mother. She wasn’t home. The neighbour came to collect him and made him a sandwich. “That was life in Marion back then,” he says, with a fondness that carries no nostalgia for the vineyards his own family’s house helped displace.

Song 3: My Jolly Valentine
This one starts with the Torrens. Keith explains that before the lake arrived, the river in summer was “a series of rather smelly waterholes” until Mayor Sir Edwin Smith, a beer baron with civic ambitions, created the weir. Within a year of the lake’s arrival in 1882, a rowing craze had taken hold, boat sheds lined the banks, and Jolley’s Boathouse was selling milkshakes and pies to rowers who could rent a boat by the hour.
The Palais de Danse gets its moment: a floating ballroom on a barge moored near the Elder Park Rotunda from 1924, with a soda fountain, no grog, and 800 people on opening night. It was gone by 1928, Keith noting, “maybe it was just not well made and sank slowly into the mud.”
Steve’s research for this Valentine’s Day song turned up two details that captured his imagination. First, the Rundle Street Parade: on Saturday nights, young men would walk down one side of the street, young women down the other, window-shopping for company rather than goods. Second, the postage stamp code used in the twice-daily mail service to communicate what couldn’t be written openly: upside-down meant “I love you,” tilted right meant yes, left meant no, sideways meant “let’s stay as friends,” which Steve notes is “a soft no.”

Song 4: Spring Gully Road
Keith traces the geography first: up Third Creek from the Torrens, past the village of Magill, pointing toward Norton Summit. Market gardens that ran through to Tea Tree Gully. One of Steve’s friends, Dominic, remembers his father loading a ute with cucumbers twice a week and driving them across town to Spring Gully. That was not long ago.
The song covers four generations families. Edward McKee began pickling onions after returning from the war. His son-in-law Alan McMillan, stepson Eric Webb, and friend Malcolm Climer formed the second generation. Kevin and Ross Webb steered it through 2013 when a public campaign saved the company. Russell and Tegan Webb were at the helm when cheap imports and cost-of-living pressures finally made it too hard.
Steve played the song to Russell Webb before the performance. Russell’s response: “Our whole family thinks this song should be in the state archives for covering the story so well.” Steve says it with quiet pride, and then lets the song make the case.

Song 5: Away, Away (The PS Canally Crew Song)
Keith tells the founding story of the Murray River trade with the energy of someone who could spend a full hour on it. Governor Sir Henry Fox Young puts up a prize in 1853 for the first boat to take a paddle steamer from Goolwa to Swan Hill and back. Two men are unknowingly racing: Captain William Randell, a flour miller from Gumeracha building the Mary Ann upstream from Mannum, and Captain Francis Cadell, who has a paddle steamer built in New South Wales and sails it through the Murray mouth. They end up racing each other, neither knowing the other was coming. Both get their prize, and instantly the river is transformed: wool that was a month away from market by bullock wagon is now days away by water.
Steve wrote this song aboard the PS Marion, on a three-day cruise, watching jet skis cut through the peace of the river and thinking about the crews who worked these boats without rest. He noted he’d been “a bit passionate” about the contrast. One thing he is proud of: annoying the captain by asking about terminology, which is how he discovered that “larboard” was the original term for port side, changed because “larboard” and “starboard” were too easily confused when shouted across a noisy deck.

Song 6: Shout Your Mates Another Round
This song grew from a drive past the West End Brewery site on Port Road, now demolished. The chimney is gone. Steve felt its absence.
Keith sketches the arc: South Australia once had around 43 breweries. The West End Brewery operated from 1859 through to about 1980, and somewhere in there a Westies supporter working at the brewery persuaded the boss to paint the chimney in the SANFL grand final colours each year. Port Adelaide’s coach Fos Williams asked to be included. The tradition held, moved to a second chimney after the first came down, and now continues on the old brickworks chimney with the help of some “fancy technology.”
The pickaxe long-neck bottle gets its own verse. Those amber glass communal bottles that sat on dinner tables, shared rather than individual. Steve remembers the day his Italian neighbour Nino offered him a sip of Southwark Bitter from one: “It put me off beer for the rest of my life.” He recalls his paternal grandfather worked at the original Hindley Street brewery. A bottle recently turned up on Kangaroo Island. These things accumulate meaning.

Song 7: Tunarama Love Song
Greg and Nicole, Steve’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, are in the audience. They wave when introduced. Greg is described as “so bashful.”
Keith gives the historical context: Captain Matthew Flinders named Memory Cove after losing eight sailors there when he was 28 years old, 10,000 miles from home. He named Cape Catastrophe, Thistle Island, and Boston Island after those men. Port Lincoln was named, Keith theorises, from homesickness for Lincolnshire. The tuna industry came after the war, when scientists found massive schools in the Bight. Colin Thiele wrote Bluefin there as a high school teacher, which became a film. Tunarama itself began in 1962.
The song’s story is Greg’s: he left Adelaide on a bicycle heading west, eventually reached Port Lincoln, and through mutual friends met Nicole. They came back to Adelaide later that year and were at the Mercury Cinema for Steve and Nardia’s wedding. “Their love story didn’t actually happen at Tunarama,” Steve admits, “but my wife loves her rom-com movies, so I did a bit of rom-com where I just put it against the backdrop.” He also notes that Tunarama won Best Seafood Experience this year, and that “it is okay to call someone a tosser, at Tunarama.”

Song 8: Good Night Don
This one has weight. Every episode of The Adelaide Show signs off with “Good night, Don,” so a song about Don Dunstan was, as Steve puts it, always going to happen. Keith, who lived through the Dunstan decade, tries to give it its due in a few minutes. Decriminalisation of homosexuality. Women’s rights reforms. Aboriginal land rights. The South Australian Film Corporation in 1972. The State Theatre Company in 1974. The Rundle Mall, celebrating its 50th anniversary later in 2026. The week of the performance happened to be the anniversary of the death of Dr George Duncan, thrown into the Torrens in 1972, a murder that accelerated the push for decriminalisation.
Keith acknowledges the controversies too: the Salisbury Affair, the personal challenges, the pajama press conference, and, with particular relish, the day Don stood on the Pier Hotel balcony during the 1976 tidal wave scare and told the crowd that “the only thing that will happen today is that we will all get a bit hotter.”
Steve wrote the song in Brechtian cabaret style, a nod to Don’s close friendship with Robyn Archer. The refrain draws on a George Bernard Shaw quote: “Your life was no brief candle, was a mighty torch that shone.” Steele Hall also gets a verse, recognised for his willingness to equalise the electoral boundaries even when it worked against his own party.

Song 9: Cellar Door Shuffle
Keith went to university with Malcolm Seppelt, “which was pretty helpful,” and takes us back to the first commercial vineyard up Jacob’s Creek, planted by Johann Gramp, one of the early German arrivals. The creek became the name of one of the most recognised wine labels in the world. The doctors follow: Penfold, Hamilton, Angove, Tolley. Keith notes that by the 1960s, 90% of South Australian grapes were going into fortifieds. Barossa Pearl and BenEan Moselle changed that. Keith asks the audience who had a sip of BenEan Moselle as a youngster. Most hands go up.
The song is partly in honour of Joseph, who runs Ballycroft at Greenock. Steve describes him as “the sweet spot of wine tasting because it’s not stuffy with him.” The song delivers two reminders: if your cellar door is making you feel uncomfortable, leave; and you are not there to guzzle.

Song 10: Ben Venuti (The Rostrevor Pizza Bar Song)
The final song is an ode to Gaetano at Rostrevor Pizza Bar, who has stood behind the same counter for 35-plus years.
Keith sets up the context with Don Dunstan’s liquor reforms: the end of the six o’clock swill, and the radical notion of drinking a glass of wine at a footpath cafe. Then the postwar wave of Italian migrants, and how pizza arrived in Adelaide. Keith’s first was in 1962 at a corner of Hindley and Morphett Streets, long since demolished. “In another ten years,” he predicts, “there’ll be Australians who reckon we actually made it.”
Steve moved to Rostrevor in 2006 and spent his evenings stripping 1970s Italian wallpaper off the walls of his new house before heading around the corner to eat Gaetano’s pizza. Gaetano calls his dough “pastry,” starts making it the night before, and has won awards for it. He welcomes every regular by name. He personally refuses to put pineapple on a pizza, but if you want it, he will make it. “The Italians,” Steve says, “they understand the value of the money.” He goes through about a pallet of pineapple a month.
The song is in Italian and close-to-Italian, with the chorus “Benvenuti, come inside” running through it. Steve says you will come along for the ride.

Closing
Steve thanks the audience and invites them to stay in touch with Keith via This Day in South Australia on Facebook and LinkedIn, where Keith posts about South Australian history every day, and via the Wednesday morning bike rides from Bicycle Express in the city at 9am. He then plays the old State Bank ad, which Keith greets with “Oh, dear. Well, I wasn’t actually named at the time, but a lot of people said, ‘I reckon that’s Keith in there.'”
Steve closes by noting that the album from the show, History Hit Parade, is available on Bandcamp.

00:00:00 Musical Pilgrimage

No Musical Pilgrimage this week because the whole show was a Musical Pilgrimage.

There are episodes of The Adelaide Show, and then there are events. This is one of the latter. Recorded live at the Mercury Cinema as part of South Australia&rsquo;s History Festival 2026, History Hit Parade brings together broadcaster and journalist Keith Conlon and host Steve Davis for a ninety-minute show that weaves original songwriting with storytelling, historical context, and the kind of warm, unhurried conversation that feels like sitting in a room full of people who actually know where you live. Ten songs. Ten slices of South Australian life. All of them written with pen and paper by Steve, given musical life through his AI-assisted &ldquo;virtual session band,&rdquo; and offered here as what he describes as &ldquo;audition pieces&rdquo; for real musicians who might one day make them their own.
There is no SA Drink of the Week in this episode.
The entire show is the Musical Pilgrimage. Rather than a single track appended at the end, this episode is the songs, each one set up by Keith&rsquo;s historical grounding and Steve&rsquo;s personal connections before the music rolls. Full notes on each song appear in the segment breakdown below.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: History Hit Parade
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:00:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:04:07&nbsp;History Hit Parade
The Mercury Cinema is not a neutral venue for Steve Davis. He was married there on a sweltering 42-degree December day in 2002. He launched Talked About Marketing there. And it is where, on two days in May 2026, he and Keith Conlon performed History Hit Parade to an audience that included Steve&rsquo;s parents, his former drama teacher, the chair of the History Trust, and the real-life couple immortalised in one of the songs.
The name History Hit Parade, Steve reveals, was Keith&rsquo;s idea, drawn from his memory of the Harold Wright Hit Parade on 5AD, a Thursday-night ritual of about eight or ten songs in an era before the Top 40 existed. Buddy Holly, Elvis, Perry Como, and Pat Boone: that was your week&rsquo;s music. The name lands perfectly for a show that does something similar, except every track is an original, and every track is South Australian.
Song 1: Jack and Lil (Up Please, Going Up) Keith sets the historical scene: John Martins began as Peters and Martin, a drapery store in Rundle Street, until Mr Martin was released from his duties due to what Keith delicately describes as &ldquo;debauchery.&rdquo; The Hayward family eventually took the helm, and it was Sir Edward Hayward who, in 1933, looked to Canada for inspiration and brought the Christmas Pageant to Adelaide. He was so nervous before the first one that he hired a biplane, circled the inner suburbs with a megaphone, and personally invited people to come. They did. About 300,000 still do, each year. The personal thread in this song belongs to Steve&rsquo;s maternal grandparents, Jack and Lil, whose photograph appeared on the screen behind him. Lil worked in the kitchenware department. Jack was the young engineer installing the new lifts in the building during the 1930s. The rest, as Steve says, is history. The song follows their life together as their family grows, moving floor by floor through what John Martins offered, with the lift ladies&rsquo; announcement, &ldquo;Up please, going up,&rdquo; as its guiding refrain. Steve thanks Paul Flavell, who has written a book on John Martins, and former John Martin&rsquo;s planner, Robert Tedstone, who provided a complete floor-by-floor inventory to keep the lyrics accurate.
Song 2: Oh Marion Marion, the suburb, was surveyed in 1838 by Colonel Light&rsquo;s private firm after Light had broken with Governor Hindmarsh. The name comes from Marianne, daughter of resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher, though somewhere along the way Mariannen became Marion. Keith&rsquo;s own connection is fond: his father learned to drive in the 1950s by heading south into the almond groves and vineyards of Marion, where the long straight roads offered room to practise. Steve&rsquo;s Marion is the 1970s version: aerial photographs, numbered landmarks, railway tracks where he&rsquo;d flatten 20-cent pieces, overpass pile drivers thumping for weeks, and a Coles New World at the Park Holme Shopping Centre. He walked to school at age six, &ldquo;with my little satchel and my shorts.&rdquo; One afternoon he left school early, got lost, and found his way to a doctor&rsquo;s surgery he recognised. They rang his mother. She wasn&rsquo;t home. The neighbour came to collect him and made him a sandwich. &ldquo;That was life in Marion back then,&rdquo; he says, with a fondness that carries no nostalgia for the vineyards his own family&rsquo;s house helped displace.
Song 3: My Jolly Valentine This one starts with the Torrens. Keith explains that before the lake arrived, the river in summer was &ldquo;a series of rather smelly waterholes&rdquo; until Mayor Sir Edwin Smith, a beer baron with civic ambitions, created the weir. Within a year of the lake&rsquo;s arrival in 1882, a rowing craze had taken hold, boat sheds lined the banks, and Jolley&rsquo;s Boathouse was selling milkshakes and pies to rowers who could rent a boat by the hour. The Palais de Danse gets its moment: a floating ballroom on a barge moored near the Elder Park Rotunda from 1924, with a soda fountain, no grog, and 800 people on opening night. It was gone by 1928, Keith noting, &ldquo;maybe it was just not well made and sank slowly into the mud.&rdquo; Steve&rsquo;s research for this Valentine&rsquo;s Day song turned up two details that captured his imagination. First, the Rundle Street Parade: on Saturday nights, young men would walk down one side of the street, young women down the other, window-shopping for company rather than goods. Second, the postage stamp code used in the twice-daily mail service to communicate what couldn&rsquo;t be written openly: upside-down meant &ldquo;I love you,&rdquo; tilted right meant yes, left meant no, sideways meant &ldquo;let&rsquo;s stay as friends,&rdquo; which Steve notes is &ldquo;a soft no.&rdquo;
Song 4: Spring Gully Road Keith traces the geography first: up Third Creek from the Torrens, past the village of Magill, pointing toward Norton Summit. Market gardens that ran through to Tea Tree Gully. One of Steve&rsquo;s friends, Dominic, remembers his father loading a ute with cucumbers twice a week and driving them across town to Spring Gully. That was not long ago. The song covers four generations families. Edward McKee began pickling onions after returning from the war. His son-in-law Alan McMillan, stepson Eric Webb, and friend Malcolm Climer formed the second generation. Kevin and Ross Webb steered it through 2013 when a public campaign saved the company. Russell and Tegan Webb were at the helm when cheap imports and cost-of-living pressures finally made it too hard. Steve played the song to Russell Webb before the performance. Russell&rsquo;s response: &ldquo;Our whole family thinks this song should be in the state archives for covering the story so well.&rdquo; Steve says it with quiet pride, and then lets the song make the case.
Song 5: Away, Away (The PS Canally Crew Song) Keith tells the founding story of the Murray River trade with the energy of someone who could spend a full hour on it. Governor Sir Henry Fox Young puts up a prize in 1853 for the first boat to take a paddle steamer from Goolwa to Swan Hill and back. Two men are unknowingly racing: Captain William Randell, a flour miller from Gumeracha building the Mary Ann upstream from Mannum, and Captain Francis Cadell, who has a paddle steamer built in New South Wales and sails it through the Murray mouth. They end up racing each other, neither knowing the other was coming. Both get their prize, and instantly the river is transformed: wool that was a month away from market by bullock wagon is now days away by water. Steve wrote this song aboard the PS Marion, on a three-day cruise, watching jet skis cut through the peace of the river and thinking about the crews who worked these boats without rest. He noted he&rsquo;d been &ldquo;a bit passionate&rdquo; about the contrast. One thing he is proud of: annoying the captain by asking about terminology, which is how he discovered that &ldquo;larboard&rdquo; was the original term for port side, changed because &ldquo;larboard&rdquo; and &ldquo;starboard&rdquo; were too easily confused when shouted across a noisy deck.
Song 6: Shout Your Mates Another Round This song grew from a drive past the West End Brewery site on Port Road, now demolished. The chimney is gone. Steve felt its absence. Keith sketches the arc: South Australia once had around 43 breweries. The West End Brewery operated from 1859 through to about 1980, and somewhere in there a Westies supporter working at the brewery persuaded the boss to paint the chimney in the SANFL grand final colours each year. Port Adelaide&rsquo;s coach Fos Williams asked to be included. The tradition held, moved to a second chimney after the first came down, and now continues on the old brickworks chimney with the help of some &ldquo;fancy technology.&rdquo; The pickaxe long-neck bottle gets its own verse. Those amber glass communal bottles that sat on dinner tables, shared rather than individual. Steve remembers the day his Italian neighbour Nino offered him a sip of Southwark Bitter from one: &ldquo;It put me off beer for the rest of my life.&rdquo; He recalls his paternal grandfather worked at the original Hindley Street brewery. A bottle recently turned up on Kangaroo Island. These things accumulate meaning.
Song 7: Tunarama Love Song Greg and Nicole, Steve&rsquo;s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, are in the audience. They wave when introduced. Greg is described as &ldquo;so bashful.&rdquo; Keith gives the historical context: Captain Matthew Flinders named Memory Cove after losing eight sailors there when he was 28 years old, 10,000 miles from home. He named Cape Catastrophe, Thistle Island, and Boston Island after those men. Port Lincoln was named, Keith theorises, from homesickness for Lincolnshire. The tuna industry came after the war, when scientists found massive schools in the Bight. Colin Thiele wrote Bluefin there as a high school teacher, which became a film. Tunarama itself began in 1962. The song&rsquo;s story is Greg&rsquo;s: he left Adelaide on a bicycle heading west, eventually reached Port Lincoln, and through mutual friends met Nicole. They came back to Adelaide later that year and were at the Mercury Cinema for Steve and Nardia&rsquo;s wedding. &ldquo;Their love story didn&rsquo;t actually happen at Tunarama,&rdquo; Steve admits, &ldquo;but my wife loves her rom-com movies, so I did a bit of rom-com where I just put it against the backdrop.&rdquo; He also notes that Tunarama won Best Seafood Experience this year, and that &ldquo;it is okay to call someone a tosser, at Tunarama.&rdquo;
Song 8: Good Night Don This one has weight. Every episode of The Adelaide Show signs off with &ldquo;Good night, Don,&rdquo; so a song about Don Dunstan was, as Steve puts it, always going to happen. Keith, who lived through the Dunstan decade, tries to give it its due in a few minutes. Decriminalisation of homosexuality. Women&rsquo;s rights reforms. Aboriginal land rights. The South Australian Film Corporation in 1972. The State Theatre Company in 1974. The Rundle Mall, celebrating its 50th anniversary later in 2026. The week of the performance happened to be the anniversary of the death of Dr George Duncan, thrown into the Torrens in 1972, a murder that accelerated the push for decriminalisation. Keith acknowledges the controversies too: the Salisbury Affair, the personal challenges, the pajama press conference, and, with particular relish, the day Don stood on the Pier Hotel balcony during the 1976 tidal wave scare and told the crowd that &ldquo;the only thing that will happen today is that we will all get a bit hotter.&rdquo; Steve wrote the song in Brechtian cabaret style, a nod to Don&rsquo;s close friendship with Robyn Archer. The refrain draws on a George Bernard Shaw quote: &ldquo;Your life was no brief candle, was a mighty torch that shone.&rdquo; Steele Hall also gets a verse, recognised for his willingness to equalise the electoral boundaries even when it worked against his own party.
Song 9: Cellar Door Shuffle Keith went to university with Malcolm Seppelt, &ldquo;which was pretty helpful,&rdquo; and takes us back to the first commercial vineyard up Jacob&rsquo;s Creek, planted by Johann Gramp, one of the early German arrivals. The creek became the name of one of the most recognised wine labels in the world. The doctors follow: Penfold, Hamilton, Angove, Tolley. Keith notes that by the 1960s, 90% of South Australian grapes were going into fortifieds. Barossa Pearl and BenEan Moselle changed that. Keith asks the audience who had a sip of BenEan Moselle as a youngster. Most hands go up. The song is partly in honour of Joseph, who runs Ballycroft at Greenock. Steve describes him as &ldquo;the sweet spot of wine tasting because it&rsquo;s not stuffy with him.&rdquo; The song delivers two reminders: if your cellar door is making you feel uncomfortable, leave; and you are not there to guzzle.
Song 10: Ben Venuti (The Rostrevor Pizza Bar Song) The final song is an ode to Gaetano at Rostrevor Pizza Bar, who has stood behind the same counter for 35-plus years. Keith sets up the context with Don Dunstan&rsquo;s liquor reforms: the end of the six o&rsquo;clock swill, and the radical notion of drinking a glass of wine at a footpath cafe. Then the postwar wave of Italian migrants, and how pizza arrived in Adelaide. Keith&rsquo;s first was in 1962 at a corner of Hindley and Morphett Streets, long since demolished. &ldquo;In another ten years,&rdquo; he predicts, &ldquo;there&rsquo;ll be Australians who reckon we actually made it.&rdquo; Steve moved to Rostrevor in 2006 and spent his evenings stripping 1970s Italian wallpaper off the walls of his new house before heading around the corner to eat Gaetano&rsquo;s pizza. Gaetano calls his dough &ldquo;pastry,&rdquo; starts making it the night before, and has won awards for it. He welcomes every regular by name. He personally refuses to put pineapple on a pizza, but if you want it, he will make it. &ldquo;The Italians,&rdquo; Steve says, &ldquo;they understand the value of the money.&rdquo; He goes through about a pallet of pineapple a month. The song is in Italian and close-to-Italian, with the chorus &ldquo;Benvenuti, come inside&rdquo; running through it. Steve says you will come along for the ride.
Closing Steve thanks the audience and invites them to stay in touch with Keith via&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/keith.conlon.9">This Day in South Australia on Facebook</a>&nbsp;and LinkedIn, where Keith posts about South Australian history every day, and via the Wednesday morning bike rides from Bicycle Express in the city at 9am. He then plays the old State Bank ad, which Keith greets with &ldquo;Oh, dear. Well, I wasn&rsquo;t actually named at the time, but a lot of people said, &lsquo;I reckon that&rsquo;s Keith in there.'&rdquo; Steve closes by noting that the album from the show,&nbsp;<a href="https://stevedavisvirtualosos.bandcamp.com/">History Hit Parade, is available on Bandcamp.</a>
00:00:00&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
No Musical Pilgrimage this week because the whole show was a Musical Pilgrimage.

Episode 433 is a live recording of History Hit Parade, the South Australia's History Festival show in which Steve Davis and Keith Conlon perform ten original songs about South Australian life, history, and community at the Mercury Cinema.

286 - The Kilsby Sinkhole

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