Cotton Shoppers

A short, sharp shock to the system

---------------------------------------------------------------------------FOR most of us, the clothes we wore in the 1970s have long since become landfill, or cleaning rags, or patchwork quilts, or children's dress-ups, or bedding for animals at shelters, or have simply broken down into smaller and smaller shreds and patches until they turned to dust. But Don Dunstan's pink shorts still exist, held by a private collector from whom they were borrowed by History SA in 2008 for an exhibition. In his memoir, Felicia, Dunstan devotes more than a page to the pink shorts, and concludes that he "shall bequeath them to the South Australian Archives as a monument". In a photograph of them that was used to publicise the exhibition, they look as though they have never been worn at all. They may well have been worn only the once: Dunstan recalls in his memoir that after seeing the furore they had caused, he put the shorts away. It seems unlikely that anyone else would ever have had the nerve to wear them: there's hubris involved in what some would regard as a blasphemous act, given the status that the pink shorts have acquired. And having been so precisely tailor-made for Dunstan, they have about them the aura of Cinderella's glass slipper, unwearable by all but one.

Source: Adelaide Now

Cotton Trousers adelaide News

A short, sharp shock to the system

Adelaide Now - Dec 31, 1969

Reporting on the 1972 Adelaide Festival, a Sydney journalist wrote of "a Premier who appears in the evening in a see-through white lace shirt, bulging over his pectorals, skin-tight black trousers, and ornate silver rings". These, too, were the early