Some good reading I found at Sydney Morning Herald.

All dressed up but nowhere left to go

Before the boozy hordes of wannabe A-listers and PR flacks crashed the party, Sydney's high society represented true glamour. Damien Murphy charts a city's decadent decline.

They are remaking a movie in Sydney about a high society in which the rich get richer and the poor suffer for their indulgences.

Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is about greed and moral corruption. The 1925 novel on which this latest remake is based is an expose´ of the American dream but making the film in a city whose local high society has already gone beyond the other side of paradise is a fine irony.

Sydney's high society might once have been an establishment Dreamtime but of late it seems a place of louche decadence, replete with low-rent aspirations and a hint of danger.

The great old families of Sydney have abandoned the field, pushed aside by the young, the brash and the predatory – newcomers who coldly look at social climbing and see a new way only to make money.

Fund-raising balls have gone bust; nobody who is anybody bothers holidaying at Palm Beach any more; some people even go to the Sydney Opera House because they like opera. Against the glory that was Sydney high society, Justin Hemmes's central business district hostelry, the Ivy, is the de facto centre of what passes for fashionable society.

The son of straitlaced rag traders who once dressed the lithe young things of high society, Hemmes has ended up running pleasure palaces surrounded by the rancid odour of a cocaine arrest and violence. This summer he will feed and water about 10,000 a night across 19 bars, eight restaurants and several special-event venues in the Merivale empire started by his parents.

His guests and his parties and a few other soirees are grist for newspaper columns. Photographs of remorselessly young things with unknown names litter the Sundays like confetti forgotten outside a church. It is difficult to avoid the obvious: in less than half a century, Sydney high society was in such a hurry to run from old money to nouveau riche that it overshot and has gone to the dogs.

Back in the day, people who thought discretion the better part of glamour lived by one immutable rule: the only times your picture should have appeared in a newspaper were when you were born, married and died.

Indeed, many were the sort of people who would die if their picture appeared in the press. They, and the society to which they belonged, have been usurped by wannabes who will do anything, say anything, think anything, to be photographed, filmed or Facebooked.

The social pages are no longer social. They are now called ''parties'' pages. Unlike the old days of, say, 30 years ago, this new era of parties rarely promotes good causes alone. They are mainly commercial gatherings aimed at attracting maximum media coverage for a product and if some money is raised for medical research, animal welfare, whatever, it is merely a bonus.

The old order had their ways of raising money. The Cornucopia Ball and the Black and White Ball were the most sought-after tickets in town. To be photographed at either and see yourself published in The Australian Women's Weekly was a considerable social achievement. Alas, the rot began during the party madness of the late 1980s. The Cointreau Ball rewrote the rules: it had no intention of raising money for charity. Its aim was simple: sell more grog. Then came the deluge; there were parties for perfume, Club Med, everything.

Journalist Daphne Guinness, who has been observing Sydney high society since the mid-1960s, says the rise of public relations helped kill off the old order.

''The old establishment families – the Packers, the Fairfaxes, the Horderns, the Cootes, the Atwills, the Allens, the Playfairs, the Pagans, the Macarthur-Onslows, the Oxleys, the Whites, the Lloyd Joneses – they played together and socialised,'' she says.

''Say what you like about them, they were people of achievement and they used their position to raise funds for charities.

''Now it's all about getting publicity for a product, so it's all in with the actors, filmmakers, sportsmen, soap stars, musicians, gardeners – sorry, make that landscape gardeners – painters, cooks, make-up artistes, models, frock makers. All very nice, I'm sure, but famous for doing nothing much at all, I'm afraid.''

Guinness acknowledges the media have always lingered on the young and the beautiful but there is a kind of mechanical inevitability about the changing of the guard.

''People die or drop out, the cast moves on and there are always new players hovering in the wings,'' she says.

''The media changes. Tired of the same old names and faces, editors demand the new and young to zip up circulation, give readers something to relate to.''

Of course, much of what passed for Sydney's high society is counterfeit, begged, borrowed or stolen. Perhaps it's a congenital disease inherited from beginning life as a colony. Across the world, early colonists, once they made money and rose above their stations in life, took to sending their young back to London, Paris, Lisbon, wherever, to be rounded out and return with the latest in fashion and ideas.

Australians may have been raised on the myth of mateship and egalitarianism but by the end of the 19th century the great pastoral families were mimicking the lives of the English landed gentry in the antipodes by engaging in symbolic elite activities. They played croquet and golf, went yachting and rode to the hunt. They formed exclusive clubs, sent children to boarding schools. Their homes had rooms for dancing and billiards and they dressed for the occasion to display their status. Federation ushered newly rich merchant families into the inner circle and they happily amused each other through the boom and bust of the 1920s. The Depression until the Second World War briefly rewrote society's rules.

The Australia Hotel, a favourite of NSW wool kings since the 1890s, became the haunt of American servicemen. The Yanks tore down social mores, offering nylon stockings and a hint of Hollywood to locals from all levels, during brief Sydney sojourns before going off to battle.

After they left, the city was never the same: suddenly, young people were not only seen but heard. Florence James and Dymphna Cusack captured the Zeitgeist in their 1951 novel Come in Spinner, with the Australia Hotel transformed into the South Pacific Hotel.

Come the '50s and the pastoralists and the great merchant families of Sydney still enjoyed themselves as wool prices soared and industry, the sharemarket and property boomed.

Trips to England and the US were mandatory and when at home they wined, dined and partied together in each other's palatial houses.

Surrounded by an army of vassals and urgers who both protected and reviled them, bit by bit, they let the media into their lives.

The late John Lane, a taste maker who owned a celebrated boutique in Double Bay, dressed remnants of the squattocracy, the developer Harry Triguboff, the Lend Lease founder Dick Dusseldorf, Neville Wran and John Laws. He sent swatches to Kerry Packer's personal assistant, Pat Wheatley, to make selections for her boss. Renowned for a quick and acerbic tongue, Lane was a fixture of Sydney's social scene who became a prominent ''handbag'' about town for rich women with husbands too busy to squire them to soirees.

Guinness says high society transmogrified into something called the ''the A-list'', an American term that had the twofold benefit of providing succour to those who needed it and sneers for those those who didn't.

Guinness, who came to Australia after helping write the William Hickey gossip column in London's Daily Express, says there the locals seemed to think there was a lot to sneer at – although she remains fascinated by how people riled at the words nouveau riche.

Sydney was crawling with nouveau riche by the late 1980s, as the boom and banking deregulation made it the premier Australian city. ''Mind you, I had no idea who most of the people were when I first arrived,'' Guinness says. ''They enjoyed the publicity and didn't seem to mind being poked fun at.''

The roll-call included the late Sonia McMahon, Susan Renouf and Glen-Marie Frost, all of whom faded with the passing of the years. Lachlan Murdoch and his wife, Sarah, were on the list for a while.

So, too, were a herd of finance and developer types but as the century drew to a close, ordinary Sydneysiders had grown tired of how the other half lived, the parties they went to and where they holidayed. Besides, giving private parties had become just too expensive.

Dissatisfaction with high society was a long time coming.

It was given a hurry-up in 1990 with the risible wedding-that-wasn't of Primrose (Pitty Pat) Dunlop and a Qantas cabin steward from Sydney, Lorenzo Montesini, who bore an Italian title: Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia, Baron Alexandroff.

Lane regularly appeared at gala occasions with the bride's mother, the Melbourne semi-dowager Lady Potter, and was chosen to give the bride away in the absence of her father, prominent Sydney medico Roger Dunlop, in the majestic Basilica di San Pietro, Venice.

Four days before the wedding, it was called off and Ms Potter left in the lurch after Lane took a shine to Montesini's close friend, Robert Straub.

If the Cointreau Ball had begun the decline of Sydney's high society, this drove the final nail into its coffin. Montesini wouldn't get through the doors at the Ivy these days.

This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/all-dressed-up-but-nowhere-left-to-go-20120110-1ptb1.html