Friday, July 01, 2011



During Expo 86 I had a couple of interesting photographic jobs involving the exhibition. One of them involved the Australian Pavilion. They gave me a call to tell me they need me to photograph a prominent Canadian guest, ex NDP Premier Dave Barrett. I showed up at the pavilion and suggested that I find something appropriately Australian to photograph the affable ex premier. I asked Barrett for his head size and went to the pavilion store and found a beautiful Akubra Snowy River hat. After the snap I asked the Australian officials if they were going to give the hat to Barrett. I was amazed to find out how frugal these Australians were. They told me the hat cost $85 and that was much too much for them to fork out.

I decided that since my head size was the same as Barrett’s that I would buy the hat as a souvenir. The hat has served me well (I don’t really like hats) for the special occasion of pruning my very long laurel hedge in either a rainy fall or rainy spring. The hat normally hangs from a hook behind the door of our guest bathroom.

I think that with age our head size varies inversely with our diminishing brain activity. In fact the hat really does not fit me anymore.

Dave Barrett

But here I am ready to go on a trip to a ranch in Texas and I have already gone through the agony of trying to stretch out the shafts of my Argentine Lopez Taibo boots. Some years back I could have gone to the hat store on West Hastings (near the Cenotaph) and had the hat stretched a tad. In Spanish an horma is a device that stretches shoes. The same word is used for the device that does the equivalent for hats.

I looked around the house and found a pot in the kitchen drawer that is slightly larger than my Akubra hat. I have forced it in and after a couple of days I am happy to report that the hat almost fits me! A day more and who knows!








Me and my Lopez Taibo boots