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Atlantium, The Smallest Country in Australia
PS: Bachelor's bumpy road to fame
Richie Strahan has found just how bumpy the road to fame can get.
On a busy night, things were positively jumping behind the mock Victorian lace "privacy screens" adorning what was once the location of Australia's most famous brothel, A Touch of Class.
"We could get 200 jobs a night through the place, I'd say it was the busiest brothel in the city," says the establishment's most recent owner, Suzelle Antic.
"The business was good, very good, but I think the landlord had different plans."
Today all is quiet in the 15-room rabbit warren of a building, which has been empty for the past three weeks after Antic moved her "girls" out of the venue to a new location in Newtown, where she operates the popular Misty's brothel.
But rather than the 10-girl "party room", these days high-end residential apartments with European appliances and marble benchtops are causing all the oohs and ahhs around Surry Hills.
PS understands a consortium of unnamed but high-profile business people have negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal to buy the site, with plans to convert the former brothel into yet another luxury, inner-city apartment complex.
Across Sydney a spate of similar deals has resulted in the closure of several other brothels as landlords cash-in on the property boom sweeping the city and lockout laws change the demographic profile of suburbs once famous for their raunchy nocturnal attractions.
An 11-bedroom, 10-bathroom brothel on King Street, Erskineville is on the market with a price guide of $1.8 million, though selling agent Adrian Abrook recently told the Inner West Courier that the site held more value for developers keen to convert it into a commercial and residential development rather than keeping it as an ongoing concern.
In Kings Cross, 16 Kellett Street, a lurid neon pink terrace house, has been converted from a bordello into a boarding house with nine studios fetching $350 a week in rent, while another brothel on Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills has been converted into a boutique apartment building, with all the units selling before completion, prompting the owner of the brothel next door to consider selling their site to developers too.
But it was A Touch of Class that had intrigued Sydneysiders since opening in 1972.
In January, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Anne Davies wrote that despite penning the book Memories of a Touch of Class: Life in Australia's best-known Bordello in 1987, Zara Powell, its most famous madam, took to her grave the secret of who owned the establishment.
Rumours flourished that it was owned by a colourful Sydney business figure and that late billionaire Kerry Packer had a secret share. According to the tycoon's unauthorised biographer, Paul Barry, while there was no evidence to support this rumour, Packer once hired the entire place for the night so his polo-playing mates could enjoy a romp with "some good, clean girls".
Eddie Hayson falls at the first hurdle
Eddie Hayson could do with some good PR. Photo: Louise Kennerley
When it comes to chronic gambler Eddie Hayson and his media relations, it is pretty clear that his publicist Max Markson has his work cut out for him.
For starters, instead of hosting comical press conferences, Max might want to confiscate Eddie's well-thumbed mobile phone.
Last Sunday afternoon Fairfax Media investigative reporter Kate McClymont's mobile started pinging when she received an unsolicited SMS from Hayson's mobile number, which said: "Race 5 port Macquarie no 2 urban prince. Get on it".
To which McClymont cheekily responded: "We are set at ten large".
Realising his message had presumably not been delivered to its intended recipient, Hayson responded: "If you had any brains you would be."
McClymont returned serve, doing a little research of her own on the race in Port Macquarie to tell Hayson: "I think you would be better to look at Before You Think".
Failing to find anything funny in the situation, Hayson responded: "I'm a serious person Kate not like you. I don't play games with people's lives for fun. You should try doing the same."
And that's where the good humour came to an end, with McClymont pointing out: "You don't play games with people's lives you just fleece them", which resulted in a few more barbs being traded between the pair.
As for Urban Prince, well it wasn't such a sure thing after all, coming in at third spot. Thankfully McClymont didn't actually bet "ten large" of anything on the horse, though we can't be certain if Hayson had made an equally judicious call.
McClymont pointed out Hayson's dud tip following the race, to which the former brothel owner - who declared himself insolvent with debts of $52 million in 2014 - texted back to McClymont: "you got the jockey to pull it up didn't you".
Reality bites for Richie
Alex Nation and Richie Strahan after Nation was named the winner of The Bachelor. Photo: Channel Ten
Three weeks ago, the media couldn't get enough of Richie Strahan, this year's pretty, blue-eyed sacrificial lamb on the dating slaughterhouse that is Channel Ten's hit show The Bachelor.
Paparazzi were making $10,000-plus sales for photos of the handsome blond as the series reached its crescendo and he ultimately selected Alex Nation, the single mother who, with the aid of great lighting, a cheesy score, a few over-bedazzled frocks and impeccable hair and makeup, stole his heart.
So fierce was the media competition that Who weekly threatened to sue one pap who dared take photos of Strahan and Nation during a sexy swimsuit shoot the magazine conducted at a rented mansion in Darling Point. PS hears the cheeky pap offered his set of shots, taken from a neighbouring property, to Who, only to be slapped with a stinging legal threat. The images were splashed across the Daily Mail this week, but PS understands the sale was for much less than the sort of money being being touted just a few weeks ago.
One pap, Jonathan Marshall, who has followed the couple across Australia and Bali over past few months, told PS that today: "I'd be lucky to get $20 for a shot ... the steam has gone out of it, I just don't think Australia likes them as much as they did the other couples from the show."
Indeed, in today's click-and-you'll-miss-them world of instant celebrities, three weeks can be an awfully long time in the spotlight and fame can be an especially cruel mistress the longer she seduces you.
Strahan lashed out at another magazine, Woman's Day, when it ran a cover story claiming he and Nation had already split on September 19, while rival New Idea's cover featured the couple with the headline "Wedding Day Announcement" and "We're Having A Baby!".
This week, still bruised, Strahan told Popsugar – that oracle of celebrity tittle-tat – his old friends at Woman's Day had "thrown [them] under a bus" after they posed for exclusive photos during a "holiday" the magazine had organised and paid for in Bali, for which Strahan and Nation were paid a rumoured $20,000 each.
But according to Strahan: "It was like we'd bent over backwards to help them, and then it was a massive stab in the back. We were just frustrated."
However, the Australian public wasn't buying the love story. PS can reveal Woman's Day's shock-split cover far outsold New Idea's wedding-day-announced edition.
Given the couple's flagging celebrity stocks, Strahan might be returning to his former gig as a "rope technician" sooner than he anticipated.
Roxy prison-visit coverage misses an angle
The Sunday Telegraph's 'exclusive' of Roxy Jacenko visiting her husband in jail.
The tarmac at Cooma's Snowy Mountains Airport is not the usual place one would find the paparazzi lurking, but there he was, a lone snapper in position to capture Roxy Jacenko as she touched down aboard a private plane she chartered from Bankstown to make her first visit to convicted insider trading husband Oliver Curtis who is behind bars at the local jail.
And the same photographer, Canberra-based Telegraph staffer Gary "Rambo" Ramage who is more at home covering global war zones than documenting Sydney socialites, managed to also get more "exclusive" shots of Jacenko leaving the jail.
Indeed PS has learned that the good folk at Rupert Murdoch's Telegraph bunker had received a "tip-off" that Jacenko would be flying down to Cooma on Saturday morning, which just happened to be on the day PS had revealed Jacenko had been spotted out and about with her former boyfriend, millionaire property developer Nabil Gazal.
While it is not clear if the actual tip came from Jacenko herself or via an intermediary who was well versed in her flight schedule and Cooma timetable, there is no question Jacenko is adept in the black arts of media manipulation and image control, and regularly tips off photographers and select reporters when it comes to her celebrity clients.
Though when it comes to her own PR, admittedly her efforts have delivered mixed results, but she had reason to celebrate this week with what appeared to be her final radiation treatment for breast cancer, a moment she uploaded on Instagram.
Insiders at the Murdoch tabloid, and not those who have forged strong ties with Jacenko courtesy of truckloads of freebies, flowers and designer frocks she has sent them over the years, agreed with PS that it was strange the paper made no mention of the Gazal revelations.
However, Sunday Telegraph editor Mick Carroll assured PS there had been no censorship in the piece in return for striking a deal with Jacenko, but blamed a lack of "manpower" on the weekend to cover the Gazal angle thoroughly. Phew!
A tipsy tilt at quaffing queen
Cup unlikely to runneth over: Vin de Champagne Awards amateur winner Nicky Goodyer at The Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney on Monday. Photo: Belinda Rolland
Terry Biviano, you have been robbed! And where was Eileen Bond? On Monday night a Wollongong florist who has never graced the Sunday social pages named Nicky Goodyer was crowned the most knowledgeable amateur (yep, there's a professional category too, for those paid to drink) champagne quaffer in the country at the 2016 Vin de Champagne Awards.
By her own admission, Goodyer is a "bad housewife", there's no milk in her fridge but plenty of champagne (lucky husband). It was her third tilt at the title, and she has now won a trip of a lifetime to Champagne to be fully immersed (dunked) in all things bubbly, though PS must note neither Biviano nor Red, who surely earned life-time achievement awards for services to champagne by now, were actually competing.
Turnbulls enjoy romantic dinner
While South Australians lit candles, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and wife Lucy were enjoying what PS can only presume was a coal-fuelled dinner at Potts Point's Missy French on Wednesday night. It was an intimate date night for the couple, though PS's moles noted they dined behind their own lacy privacy curtain, hidden from prying eyes, while two chaps ate at separate tables nearby wearing ear pieces and playing on their iPhones. Another two burly blokes in suits hovered around outside as the PM's car and driver waited. Clearly they had left their beloved Opal cards at home.