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It’s a brave comedian that takes on two full shows in the one comedy festival, but late at night, in a tiny room at Trades Hall, Lou Sanz and Claire Hooper do just that. I’m here to report that The Sandz and Hopper Show is a slice of fried gold.

Under a shaggy haircut Lou Sanz looks like Breakfast Club-era Ally Sheedy, shooting a perpetual death stare at no one in particular. Claire Hooper, on the other hand, is upbeat: frothy and bubbly like the milk for a babyccino. It quickly becomes apparent that this sharp contrast in disposition is because Hooper is inherently evil, treating the writing of the show as an avenue for making Sanz her unwilling sexual plaything.

On the surface this is a sketch show, but a self-referential narrative weaves through it like a drunk in the traffic. The opening scene has Sanz onstage clutching a suitcase, coat buttoned to the neck, trying to extricate herself from her working relationship with Hooper. Hooper convinces her to stay and the show goes on, albeit with regular objections from Sanz at Hooper’s constant groping and condescension. Diary-style voiceovers between sketches reveal the comedians’ extreme frustrations over working together.

The sketches themselves are short and absurd: juice bar workers shake drinks with their cleavage; Sanz diffuses a bomb with nail scissors that are tied to Hooper’s bra; Hooper licks whipped cream off Sanz’s hard hat from beneath a transparent tarpaulin. Even when in character the girls are also playing themselves, discussing their careers and the writing process behind the show.

The simple props and casual pace give the show the back-to-basics vibe of a high school variety night, but it’s backed up by the performers’ considerable comedic talent and experience. The scene in which Sanz, dressed as Vegemite, apathetically chases Hooper, dressed as a Vita-Weet, around the room talking ultra dirty while honking a bicycle horn is out-and-out the funniest thing I’ve seen at the festival this year.

The freedom of a dodgy timeslot and a tiny venue has given them the opportunity to experiment and let their freak flags really fly. They’ve obviously made this show primarily to please themselves – Sanz breaks her deadpan glare only when overcome by laughter – but while it’s self-indulgent it’s also utterly, ridiculously funny.

Chuckle Factor: 9/10

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It’s a shame that Stand Up and Be Counted: Knows No Boundaries  was a one-night-only affair, because it was a ripper. Over two hours (and a bit), six female comedians brought the house down.

First up Melinda Buttle gave us a cracking impersonation of her ex-Navy Dad’s encounter with a beggar in Bourke Street. This was unfortunately cut a bit short when she had to scuttle off to her solo gig.

Stella Young is an absolute gem. A person of short stature with much to say about disability, be warned that she does make liberal use of the c-word – cripple. At 88cm tall she’s a tiny package but one that was chock full of sass as she riffed on public transport, the annoyingness of kites and being patted on the head by condescending “normal people”. “I’ve realised that ’special’ is a code word for ’shit’,” she told us, and if that’s her definition of the word then I say she is anything but.

Canada’s DeAnne Smith failed to disprove my theory that every international comedian performing in Melbourne is obliged to do a Frankston gag, but apart from that her set was solid. She enlightened us to the fact that the birds in our country are “assholes”, and introduced us to her hilariously racist grandmother.

The Northern Territory’s Mia Stanford, winner of the 2007 MICF Deadly Funny Award, treated us to some blackfella storytelling humour. Her mimed re-enactments of conversations with her deaf-mute foster brother (one of 27 foster siblings) were both funny and touching, and her seemingly endless story about life as a rosella at the Bird Bath Bar showed her incredible skill at dropping puns.

Adelaide Fringe Festival’s Best Newcomer award-winner Lori Bell was full of beans. Most of her material revolved around life as a redhead, or a “chutney crutch” as she instructed us to never call her, ever.

All this was skilfully hosted by bespectacled Taswegian Hannah Gadsby, who regaled us with stories of awkward encounters with short-statured fans and ended the show with a rollicking game of “you-shout-out-a-body-part-and-I’ll-tell-you-how-I’ve-broken-it”, which included her left breast. What a smashing show.

Chuckle Factor: 9/10

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American business guru Tom Peters says that the secret to success is to ‘under promise and over deliver’. Funny Irishman and tiny Yamaha keyboard guru David O’Doherty appears to subscribe to this advice.

His first song for the evening instructs the audience to ‘please lower your expectations’. Then he tells us how bad he is at telling jokes. Then he laments that every review he has ever received has essentially said, ‘It’s good, I suppose. If you’re into that sort of thing.’ And then he over delivers.

O’Doherty’s sense of humour is of the gently weird variety. His material always begins with observations of everyday life but he’s only ever a tangent or two away from something really surreal. His trademark shambolic plinky-plink keyboard songs are alternated with long ramblings about French pants and public transport experiences in the ‘quiet carriage’. These are also interspersed with extracts from the book he recently co-wrote with fellow comedians Claudia O’Doherty and Mike Ahern, 100 Facts About Pandas. (‘A blindfolded panda will always head north. This is due to the high iron content in the panda’s liver, which makes the animal slightly magnetic.’)

Fans of quietly eccentric observational comedy will dig this show, as will anyone with a penchant for vintage keyboards.

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When it comes to self-deprecating humour, Felicity Ward can deprecate with the best of them. Her performance at last year’s MICF, Felicity Ward’s Ugly as a Child Variety Show, contained a liberal sprinkling of anecdotes about her idiotic misadventures. This year she cracks open the Book of Moron, a hefty tome she has penned full of stories of her own stupidity.

Wearing a blazer and cravat and clutching a pipe to her mouth, Felicity sits in a comfy armchair and reads aloud from her book. Across the way onstage, fellow Ronnie Johns Half Hour/3rd Degree member James Pender accompanies her on guitar, dressed as a dog.

The stories themselves are funny enough but as is always the case with Felicity Ward, the real hilarity stems from her outlandishly physical delivery. As she is fond of telling her audiences, Felicity weighs 48 kilograms and has ‘big features on a small head’. Summoning every fibre of dorkiness within her, she flings her gangly limbs all over the place, contorts her face, stretches, bends and flexes in a stunning display of pure, untainted dag.

While Ugly as a Child was like being trapped in an anxiety-powered tumble dryer while laughing so hard that a little bit of wee comes out, The Book of Moron is a marginally more relaxed affair. But while her material is rather gentle this year, Felicity Ward is clearly one of the best comic morons in the country.

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The unofficial title of Reginald D. Hunter’s show is Trophy Nigga, owing to the media’s habit of booking him for commentary only when race-related issues are in the news. His response to such requests is to insist that he be introduced as ‘Reginald – King of the Blacks!’, which tends to be a dealbreaker.

He has a reputation for controversy and an obvious, deep-seated belief that everyone should get their thoughts, no matter how unpopular, out in the open. A recent profile in The Age said that he has been labelled a misogynist by some thanks to his ‘referring to rape in a punchline’. Actually, in this show he jokes about rape no less than four times. The profile paraphrases him as saying that anyone seeing a comedy show might assume that the performer is joking. You might also assume that in a room with more than, say, ten women in it, at least one will have experienced sexual assault.

It really doesn’t help that his performance is completely off. At the beginning of the show he tells us that as it’s the last preview night, he has to get all of the mistakes out of his system. (I guess no one told him it was also media night.) He struggles to find a rhythm, which is almost forgivable, but when he asks an audience member for the time midway through the show he looks crestfallen upon learning that he still has 25 minutes to fill.

After a hefty dose of dead air while he stares off to stage left waiting for a techie to bring him a beer, Hunter proceeds to lurch from one random topic to the next. Tiger Woods, anal sex, stupid people, the Matrix movies – wait a minute, the Matrix movies? If you’re going to clutch at straws, try to pick one that’s less than seven years old. They get brittle with age.

Reginald, you may be the King of the Blacks, but your work is off-colour in more ways than one.

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Born in Egypt, brought up in Sydney and banned in Rockhampton, Akmal Saleh’s stand-up show It’s Not My Fault is based on extracts from his recently-published memoir, The Life of Akmal. Musings on being raised in the Coptic Orthodox Church, battling through ‘special English’ class as a new Australian, and the early days of his comedy career give us a CliffsNotes version of the book.

Akmal calls it like he sees it – and then ducks. His quip that ‘the Lebs took the credit for inventing felafel, and they also took my car stereo’ is followed quickly by, ‘It’s a joke, relax!’ No comment is out of bounds but he delivers his offensive japes in such a gentle, unassuming manner that this reviewer rather wanted to give him a cuddle.

Before his career in comedy took off Akmal was a taxi driver, and he has that cabby’s knack for telling funny stories about what are ostensibly shitty situations – being held up in a service station by a junkie with a butter knife; getting punched in the face by a woman at the Rockhampton Agricultural Show. Even in the grandeur of the Athenaeum Theatre he seems less the untouchable star on stage and more like a mate spinning yarns at the pub.

In fact, in one anecdote about the second smallest audience he’s ever performed to he describes just that. There were so few people at the gig that he sat down with them and did the show right at their table. When it was over they very kindly gave him a lift home. I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised.

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Motorbikes: Simone Tops

While glass artist Simone Tops remembers always being obsessed with motorbikes, she only got her licence a few years ago. “It’s like one of those childhood dreams you have that might take you a while to achieve as an adult,” she says. “You realise that you’re not a child anymore – you’re an adult and you get to do anything you want. All the people who told you that you couldn’t, or that it’s dangerous, aren’t there any more. You can just do it.”

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a motorbike theme emerged in her artwork. Recent pieces exploring engine blueprints – “motorbikes, jet engines and other crazy old diesel engines, early cars and stuff like that” – helped lead Simone to her latest project: replicating a Yamaha DT360 in glass, part by part. “I guess that’s something that tends to happen when you’re obsessed with something for so long,” she says. “It kind of encroaches on other parts of your life.”

Searching for an intact, vintage bilke that was also free was no easy task, but Simone managed to find one at a metal recycling yard. There she encountered Kev, a “totally stereotypical yard man with massive arse crack”. When Simone asked about the bike’s weight, Kev’s response was, “It’s fucking heavy.” “Everything was just swearwords without saying much,” she says, “He was pretty great!”

So how come they had such a find simply lying around? “I guess wreckers are quirky, hoardy people as well,” Simone says. “That’s another thing I’m interested in – the notion of the discarded and the wastefulness of things. I think the type of people who work in places like that know when to see the gem and when to see the junk.”

Simone can talk all day about her favourite models – “it’s just like some people are nerdy about all sorts of things, I’m nerdy about some types of bikes” – but when it comes to repairs she leaves it to the experts. “I can do little things like change the oil and all those basic things. I’d like to know more, but it’s like a whole other thing that I would obsess my life with and I’d rather just let someone else do it.”

Her favourites are cafe racers: beautiful vintage bikes that are often highly customised. For now Simone is happy with her Yamaha SRX600, but her dream bike is “something really unique, something handcrafted, where I’ve gone, ‘I want this and this,’ and someone’s built it fOr me”, she says. “I know ‘quiver’ is the word for multiple surfboard ownership – I don’t know the collective term for multiple bikes, but I would love that. That would be awesome.”

Zines: Susy Pow

Zinemaker Susy Pow has “absolutely no idea” precisely how many of the small-run, photocopied publications she has in her collection. “It’s something like 500 or more,” she says, and most are on display in her Newcastle shop, Bird in the Hand.

Susy started Bird in the Hand as a mail-order distro several years ago, but in 2009 she was invited to open a shop front as part of the Renew Newcastle program. It was an opportunity for her to stretch her business muscles and grow the distro into more than just a labour of love.

Susy’s store is now a hub for the town’s zine community. “We’ve got a couple of couches and big work bench,” she says. “People come in and read zines, buy zines, sit down and make zines, but they also come to hang out and talk. It’s how I’ve gotten most of my friends in Newcastle since moving back fmm Sydney.”

Zines have also helped her love life, after she gained an admirer while running last year’s zine fair as part of the This Is Not Art festival. A single volunteer turned up to the 7am start to help her set up tables. “We didn’t really talk that much and I thought I was really grumpy that day,” she says, “Then about a week and a half later I got something in the mail. I thought somebody had sent me a copy of their zine to see if I wanted to stock it.” Instead it was the story of a boy who’d fallen in love with the town. “Basically it said that he wanted to move here and that he fancied me quite a bit!” So Susy responded in zine form. She says the story is continuing, “slowly, very slowly”.

The limited-edition nature of zines means that many in Susy’s library are rarities. She hit the jackpot when revered US zinester Alex Wreck offered portions of her own collection in exchange for postage. “She’s got thousands and thousands in her collection and had to slim it down. So I paid for three kilos’ worth and a few weeks later I got all these zines that I would never have access to otherwise – things from the ’90s and riot grrl stuff that I’d never have found in Australia.”

With the price of most zines hovering between SOc and $5, Susy finds other ways to keep the shop afloat. “The amount of zines you would have to sell to make it sustainable is huge,” she says. “I’ve worked out that the only way to make it commercially viable is to do workshops and talks and make out like I’m some kind of expert! Now I’m the zine go-to person, I think.”

Dead celebrities: Kathy Charles

Self-described “death hag” Kathy Charles has “done lots of trespassing” in the service of her obsession. “I once jumped a fence to take photographs of the bungalow where Marilyn Monroe died,” she says. “The people next door have bought a massive dog because people are always doing it. And the house on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate was murdered, that’s a private driveway, you’re not meant to go up there.”

Mingling with the rich and famous in her aunt’s Hollywood Hills restaurant from the age of 18 and hearing mysterious and macabre stories about the area piqued Kathy’s interest. Over the years she has made many trips from Melbourne to LA, each time adding to her collection of photographs and artefacts from the sites of celebrity deaths.

A lot of Kathy’s recent LA trips were taken to research her first novel, Hollywood Ending, about two teenage death hags.”I knew that to be authentic I’d have to get the geography of all the locations correct,” she says. “I’d never visited the hotel where Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose on Franklin Avenue, but I had to go and do that to make sure I had the correct room number and to see which part of the road it was facing and all of those kinds of things.”

Her treasures include stones from the fireplace of 10050 Cielo Drive, the house where Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the Manson family along with four of her friends. Kathy had some of the stones set in a necklace, “but I haven’t worn it yet”, she says. She is also in the process of acquiring tiles that once lined the heart-shaped swimming pool belonging to Jayne Mansfield, an actress and sex symbol who was decapitated in a car accident in 1967.

But how does she know she’s getting the real deal? “There’s no guarantee of authenticity,” Kathy says. “You’ve just got to take people’s word for it. A lot of people refuse to buy that kind of stuff; they have to get it themselves. It’s better if you can get it yourself because that means you can verify it, but you have to have a lot of nous.”

Kathy’s favourite dead celebrity is John Belushi. Her lounge room walls feature two portraits of the actor, and a photograph she took inside Bungalow #3 at the Chateau Marmont where he was found dead of a drug overdose. “I’d love to own something of his,” she says. “There are a few things around that you can get – cheques he signed and things like that. It was quite a meaningful and emotional experience for me to be in the place where he passed away.”

Sausage dogs: Brooke Simmons

Brooke Simmons’s childhood pet was named after Punky Brewster’s dog, Brandon. “He was a sausage dog crossed with a kelpie, and he was hilarious,” she says. At Brooke’s school fete Brandon won the title of “dog with the waggiest tail”, and once saved her from crossing paths with a snake. “He was my best mate,” she remembers.

Memories of Brooke’s adventures with Brandon came flooding back to her one day years later when she spied some sausage dogs in a pet shop. She went home and asked her mum if she could have one, but was knocked back. So one night Brooke left a trail of written notes from the foot of her mother’s bed upstairs all the way down to the back door. Each page gave a reason why she should be allowed to have a sausage dog. Sounds like an awfully cute kid story until you find out Brooke was 21 at the time. Moca, a chocolate brown standard, moved in with them shortly thereafter.

Brooke’s passion for sausage dogs bloomed into a full-blown obsession when a friend encouraged her to channel it into craft. “I started making little brooches out of vintage and found fabrics and I would give them names and things that they liked to do,” she says. Once she had mastered the brooches, Brooke moved on to soft toys, which she sold in shops in Sydney and Melbourne. “I had this little production line going, with 10 sausage dog soft toys sitting on a table and Moca underneath, hidden in the fabric.”

Around the same time, Brooke began blogging to promote her wares. Readers started sending in sausage dog-related presents picture books, photographs, trinkets – and soon Brooke had quite a collection. Some of her favourite items are her sausage dog slippers, salt and pepper shakers and a tulip-shaped vase that she found in a Ballarat op shop.

Moca currently lives with Brooke’s mum, but Brooke still takes him out for adventures every Monday. “I think there’s nothing better than picking up Moca’s lead and taking him for a walk,” she says. He’s a constant reminder of why she adores the breed. “It’s their stumpy little legs, the long bodies, and they look like they need corrective shoes. I walk down the street with Moca and people just smile. I think it’s lovely that an animal can do that to so many people just because of its proportions and its size. That’s why they’re so worthy of the love. It’s because of the joy they spread.”

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Marie-Christin Grosse-Venhaus: unicycle

German high school exchange student Marie-Christin Grosse-Venhaus met her Canberran host father in 2008 in Denmark at UNICON, the world unicycling championships. Marie already knew she would be spending a year in Australia, so they kept in touch. “Then a day before Christmas I got an email from him saying they had decided to be my host family,” she says. “It was perfect.”

Marie first tried unicycling when she was seven. “I lived in a really small town, more like a village, and our trainer lived next-door,” she says. “Every kid did unicycling.” She gave it up when she changed primary schools, but took it up again in Year 6 after some friends showed an interest in the sport.

In April Marie’s host-dad took her to Wollongong for UniNats, the Australian national unicycle championships. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to take part because I’m not Australian,” she says. “But they were really happy to have me here. I met so many nice people.”

It’s a good thing the Aussies were so welcoming, because Marie went on to take first place in 16 events. “I wasn’t bad in Germany,” she says, “almost top 20. I’d looked at some times from other UniNats and thought, maybe I’d be really good, but I didn’t expect to win all the disciplines.”

Some of the competitions she had never tried before, such as riding backwards and muni, otherwise known as mountain unicycling. “I did that for the first time in Australia,” Marie explains. “It’s like a track race. It’s really hard but it was amazing. You ride through water and the hills and forests and stuff.”

While she does well in timed competitions, Marie’s event of choice is freestyle. Competitors spend up to a year planning a three-minute performance set to music. “You also have to dress up,” Marie says. “It’s pretty hard to find a new theme that hasn’t been used in a few years. You can compare it to ice skating. It’s kind of the same because they do racing and freestyle performances, and that’s like the unicycle.”

Naturally, any hobby you can fall off comes with its share of injuries. “I’ve never had a broken leg or arm, but I have heaps of bruises all the time. I mostly can’t remember where they come from, but then I think, oh yeah, I did that trick. You just hurt yourself. You get used to it. I’ve got lots of scars on my legs. I couldn’t be a model!”

Marie advises the uni-curious not to splash out on an expensive unicycle unless they want to go pro. “A cheap one does the job,” she says. “Sometimes you can buy them at Aldi. You can get anything there.”

Belinda Lush: Highland dancing

Of all the Highland dancing competitions Belinda Lush has entered, including the 12 championships she’s won in Western Australia alone, her favourite memory is of coming fourth place. A spot in the top six in the Champion of Champions Championship is the Holy Grail for ambitious Aussie Highland dancers, who get to compete on home turf with people from all over the world. Belinda’s placing in the 2008 event made her the country’s top female dancer of the year. “It’s the most ridiculous name on the planet,” she says. “But coming fourth to three amazing dancers, that was really cool.”

Belinda has been dancing since the age of five and won her first championship when she was nine. Now, at 26, she’s thinking about her retirement plan. “A lot of girls retire around 22 or 23,” she says. “I don’t see myself competing for very much longer because my body’s very tired. Training’s a lot harder on your body as you get older. My body is telling me it’s almost had enough.”

But that doesn’t mean an end to the Highland fling. “I will never, ever give up dancing. I think I would need therapy if I stopped dancing,” she laughs. She will continue to perform, as she has done in tattoos around the world, including Edinburgh, Novia Scotia and… Oman.

“That was really interesting,” Belinda says. In 2005 His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said hosted a military tattoo in celebration of his 65th birthday and 35th year on the throne. He invited 64 Australian Highland dancers and treated them to luxury accommodation and spending money. They were the only international performers.

“We thought, there must be a twist to this – perhaps all the women are going to be part of his harem or something,” Belinda laughs. “It was absolutely spectacular. A complete culture shock. We always had to be escorted by a male. We always made sure our shoulders and knees were covered but we weren’t covered head to toe like the women are over there. Sixty Australian dancers – young, gorgeous-looking females – we caused quite a stir. We literally stopped traffic crossing the road.”

Next on the cards for Belinda is the 2010 season of So You Think You Can Dance?. She made it into the top 100 last season on the strength of her Highland, but a broken foot put her out of the game. The judges have kept a spot for her in the upcoming show. Eliminating herself was devastating, she says, but apparently not titillating enough for the final cut of the program. “I think it was because I didn’t cry, faint or hyperventilate. I didn’t show a few tears or scream and stamp my feet.”

Clay ‘Bangers’ Connolly: air guitar

“If everyone in the world played air guitar at once, they wouldn’t be able to hold their guns. We’d have world peace.”

So says Clay ‘Bangers’ Connolly, three-time winner of the Australian Air Guitar Championships. The former circus acrobat, pro-rollerblader and Dream World man-in-a-character-suit also came second place in the 2006 Air Guitar World Championships in Finland and eighth in 2008, but news of his brother’s untimely death knocked him for six at the 2009 event, where he came 13th out of 20 contestants. “They judge you by charisma, showmanship, technique and airness, but no one can define what airness is,” he explains. “I think I just lost that bit of airness, finding out that my brother had passed away.”

Clay’s air guitar career began in 2003 when, on a whim and a few beers, he entered a contest at a music festival. He was last to be called up and he “just went crazy – I blitzed it.” His winning performance of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ landed him a spot in the qualifiers, and he went on to win the Victorian state finals. He’s competed every year since. “I just go out there and have a good night,” he says. “You know, release the demons.”

His circus skills give him an edge over the competition. In the early days some of his favourite moves were stage diving onto an empty floor (”it was a good crowd pleaser, that one”), jumping in the air and landing flat on his back (”that was a killer”) and throwing his guitar in the air, doing a backflip, and then catching it and playing on.

These days, though, he tries to keep his feet on the ground. “I’m over the backflips,” he says, “plus I’m getting a bit fragile.” He’s broken a couple of toes, and one backflip attempt on a wet floor led to a dislocated thumb. Other moves are just for laughs – his ‘lead’ fell out in the middle of his 2006 act, complete with sound effects as he plugged it back in.

With no plans to retire, Clay hopes to make it through the 2010 nationals and back to Finland for another crack at the world title. When he does give up performing he’d like to join the judging panel. “If I’m a judge, it’ll be top points to the Aussie no matter what he does,” he reckons. “We haven’t won yet, and we’re due for a win.”

Lina Chegodaev: button accordion

In order to succeed as a button accordion player, you need drive, motivation, and “someone in your family to push you,” says Lina Chegodaev. In Lina’s case it was her half-Russian, half-Chinese father, who started teaching her the instrument when she was seven.

“My Dad loved the accordion,” she says. “He taught himself to play. He wanted to teach me and my sister, but she couldn’t do it. I stuck with it even though I absolutely hated it, because I was quite terrified of my dad! Now I think I couldn’t live without it.”

Lina started formal lessons at the age of 13 and recently completed a Bachelor of Music at the Australian Institute of Music. She has won state and national button accordion competitions and, in 2007, won the Australasian Championships. “That was a big win,” she says. “The competitor from New Zealand was amazing and I thought he would win because he played more difficult songs. It was a bit of a surprise when I won. I was shocked.”

As well as playing in competitions, Lina also has a rigorous performance schedule. She is a soloist with the Sydney Balalaika Orchestra and has performed with them at the Sydney Opera House, numerous ethnic folk festivals and clubs, and even the Russian equivalent of The Morning Show. “I’ve been with them since 2001, and every Tuesday we get together and practice,” Lina says. “So every week without fail I get practice so my fingers don’t get too rough. They slow down if you don’t practice for weeks.”

Lina owns seven accordions, one of which previously belonged to world champion Vladislav Pligovka. “I had a Jupiter, which is the best button accordion you can get,” Lina explains. “My Mum went to Russia to get it for me. But you need to tune them every two to three years, and it was going out of whack. No one in Australia can tune the accordion. I didn’t trust anyone with it and it was too expensive to go back overseas.” The world champ was in Australia at the time, and traded his Zonta for her Jupiter and a few thousand euros. “And now I have the world champion accordion in my house.”

These days Lina is more focused on performing and teaching than on competing. While many players drift away from the instrument as they get older, Lina hopes to remain active within the accordion community. “My dad passed away in 2004 and I think I do it for him,” she says. ‘I know he didn’t see me graduate but I think he would have been proud of everything I’ve accomplished.”

As told to Chloe Walker, published in

I’ve always known I was adopted. I’ve never felt resentful about it; unconditional love has been around me from day dot. But I’ve always known there was a possibility of people being out there. There’s always been a desire to meet up with my birth parents, to have a sense of exactly where I came from.

About 10 years ago I started looking for my birth parents. I was about to get married and start my own family, and I guess I felt it was time to find some initial information about that question mark. I went to the adoption agency, and they gave me a file with my birth name, my birth mother’s and father’s names, their jobs, and their eye colour and height. I searched through the electoral roll as well as births, deaths and marriages, but a lot of people had the same names. As well as that, my birth father wasn’t in Australia, so trying to find him was complicated. But life got busy and it’s something that takes a lot of energy. I’ve always known that with adoption, when you open that door to meet someone it’s open for good. I just didn’t have room for that possibility and I felt like that was enough at that point.

In August my wife and I set up a Facebook profile with my birth name and birth date. It was a bit of a passive search I guess, just something to put out there in the digital age we live in. If someone was looking for me they’d surely be able to find me through that avenue. I was hopeful, but at the same time I felt like it was out of my hands.

One night in September I was out for dinner and my wife sent me a text message saying, “Someone sent you a message on Facebook and she’s saying she could be your sister.” I was like, that’s incredible. I didn’t even think about the fact I could have brothers and sisters out there.

The message was from Mel, my oldest sister. She’s 28. I found out I have another sister, Sammy, 22, and two brothers, Damien, 20, and Coby, who’s 14. It’s full-on because I’ve grown up in this family as the youngest child and all of a sudden I’m the oldest.

I also found out that my birth father went by another name. I found a Facebook profile that matched that name and his birthday. There was no photo, but I thought, I can only try and see if that’s him. He wrote me back and it was. That was three weeks after I found my birth mother’s side. His side of the family know all about me, just like my birth mother’s side. I was with them till about 12 months old and I’ve got all these relatives, uncles and aunties and grandparents, who remember bonding with me. It’s incredible the amount of people out there who know me and who’ve wanted to know what I’ve been up to for the past 30 years.

My birth father’s in Singapore and has three boys. Since all this has come out we’ve all gotten Skype and that’s been really great. It’s one thing talking to someone on the phone. It’s something else seeing them at the same time.

It’s quite overwhelming at times. I’m just trying to be really balanced about it all, looking after myself and being transparent with everyone involved. There’s a real trust and sense of understanding about the magnitude of the situation. We’re all in it together in the sense that it’s big for everyone. As wonderful as it all is, it’s quite draining to talk about because it’s not like “how’s the weather?” or anything – every conversation for the past six weeks has been at this higher intensity level.

It’s been amazing, and very healing for me. To reconnect with a blood relative is something I’ve been looking forward to all my life. As much as I’ve been a part of my family, having that biological connection with someone is something I cherish very much. My adoptive family and my wife are all really happy and it’s drawn us closer together.

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For a couple with a vineyard, two wine labels and two oenology PhDs between them, Col McBryde and Jen Gardner sure talk a lot about beer. The idea for their wine company, Some Young Punks, was conceived over a few brewskis with their business partner, Nic Bourke. So was the concept for the Label’s pulp-fiction aesthetic. “You throw enough beers and the three of us in the mix and there’s all kinds of talk,” Col says.

The company is based at Col and Jen’s vineyard in Clare, South Australia. It was here that they founded their first wine label, Adelina, which serves the higher end of the market. After finding themselves with “some cabernets that weren’t going to make the grade”, Nic and Col decided to start a side project rather than sell on the fruit. “We always thought it would stay fairly small and we’d make volumes that we could drink within a year if it all went pear-shaped. We’d be dead by now if that was the case,” Col laughs.

Nic whipped up a manifesto that adorns the back of every bottle: “We blame the booze. The whiff and the swill did us in and all that was left to do was to make more … This is Passion, a monster bigger than the three of us that leads us to soapbox, grandstand and sometimes pass out on the couch.”

Nic’s ephemera collection inspired the packaging for the Punks’ first products, the Pulp Series. “We wanted something a little more tongue-in-cheek, something that wasn’t quite as serious as what everyone in the wine industry makes out to be,” Col explains. They bought a licence to use the cover art from “dime store novels” such as Naked on Roller Skates, Quickie! and Passion Has Red Lips. Most of the wines are named after the original book titles.

So is the process of matching a wine to a book cover kind of like pairing a wine with a meal? “It’s very much like that. We were pretty selective about which novel covers we wanted to use. It really needs to be applicable. Naked on Roller Skates is an awesome example. We found this barbera that was really rocking – it was this lively, lush, bubbly, effervescent, very plush style of wine that really suited the label.”

Then the Punks released their mataro shiraz, Drink’n'Stick. Melbourne illustrator Joe Whyte created the graphics, adapting an original pulp fiction image so that the featured femme fatale could be dressed and disrobed with plastic, peel-away stickers.

And in 2008, inspired by a giant squid caught off the coast of Japan, the Punks decided to create their own pulp narrative. They commissioned Israeli graphic artist Asaf Hanuka to create three designs for their T’n'T series: Monsters, Monsters Attack!, The Squid’s Fist, and Double Love Trouble. The T’n'T is short for Trixie ‘n’ Tessa Love, two bikini-clad heroines who fight monsters and ninjas and make plans for world domination. This year the Punks will unveil another series of two wines illustrated by Asaf’s twin brother, Tomer: Lust Collides and Fierce Allure.

But for all the cheekiness of their packaging, Some Young Punks want their punters to know there’s a high-quality product in the bottle. ‘A lot of people think that if you have a fun label, that means it’s rubbish underneath,” Jen says. “But you’ve got such a great opportunity to create a fantastic visual experience, so why wouldn’t you? That whole boring, staid, traditionalist approach to labelling … it just doesn’t suit us.”