Alice Coster: Gina Rinehart’s portrait rage achieves little more than ‘Streisand effect’

Gina Rinehart’s fury at the jowly portrait hanging in the National Art Gallery is easy to understand, and it’s just as easy to understand why she should’ve simply stayed quiet.

The “swivel-and-push” has become a trademark, failsafe posing move when taking the unplanned group photo. And it’s all thanks to Australia’s richest woman.

Given the hullabaloo surrounding mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s unflattering portrait, which has reached The Late Night with Stephen Colbert in the US, it feels the right time to share a trick out of Mrs R’s playbook.

Sort of, not sort of, like “The Elle Woods Bend-and-Snap” in Legally Blonde.

“The Gina Rinehart-swivel-and-push” requires you to quickly swivel, pushing the person beside you into the foreground while taking a subtle step backwards.

Voila, or as the Instagramming influencers like to say, Wallah!

The result is a flattering angle, although not for whomever you have shimmied in front of you. They look like a stranded whale.

The swivel-and-push gives all the right angles in depth perception, making you look like a wee slip of a thing, smiling beatifically in the background.

I learnt the swivel-and-push the hard way, after interviewing the iron lady turned cattle queen some time back.

It appears Rinehart has fallen victim to “The Streisand effect. Picture: Phil Gostelow

Not usually one for joining in a celebrity selfie, I found myself at an event being ushered into a photo opp with Mrs R post chat.

All of a sudden there it was, a slight swivel and whooooosh, I was thrust into the foreground by La Rinehart as she took her cue backwards.

SNAP!

I too wished I could call in the Australian swimming squad and ask for its removal. I thought to myself what a cunning old fox and have adopted the trick ever since.

So it came as no surprise, nor to anyone who has worked with Mrs R in the past, that she wasn’t happy at the portrait hanging in the National Art Gallery of Australia.

The reality is that Mrs R is never happy, often having her own photographer take and later send pictures to go with an accompanying story.

This I might add is not altogether uncommon. I remember feeling shock and awe when US actor Geena Davis had her entourage provide DIY back lighting for a shoot after an interview.

This was pre social media and as far as I could see the backlighters travelled everywhere with the Thelma & Louise star, to ensure just the right and flattering light needed to create the sought after silhouette.

A features editor was once in a pickle trying to ensure supermodel Elle Macpherson’s elbows and knees were cropped out of every frame, such were “The Body’s” demands.

So Mrs R baulking at her jowly portrait isn’t all that hard to understand. Nor how it has cruelly backfired. The aforementioned Stephen Colbert said on The Late Show, watched by an audience of some 2.7 million, that “the artist really captured her expression at the moment she saw this portrait”.

Cue hysterical laughter.

The Rinehart portrait by award-winning Arrernte artist Vincent Namatjira. Picture: Supplied

Pop culture declared Rinehart had fallen victim to “The Streisand effect,” when singer Barbra Streisand launched a lawsuit to remove an aerial shot of her Californian beach house from online. Of course, her attempts to suppress the pictures went public, leading to almost half a million people hitting click, click, click.

Be careful what you wish for.

Similarly, the Rinehart painting by award-winning Arrernte artist Vincent Namatjira at the Canberra Gallery, may have had little media mileage before Mrs R sought its removal.

So ever so quickly why not give credit where credit is due. The exhibition by Albert Namatjira’s great grandson, is titled Australia in Colour and features 21 depictions of influential people, including Queen Elizabeth II, prime ministers Scott Morrison and Julia Gillard, former AFL star Adam Goodes and Olympic hero Cathy Freeman.

The NGA website describes Namatjira as a “celebrated portraitist and a satirical chronicler of Australian identity” whose paintings “offer a wry look at the politics of history, power and leadership from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective.”

Rinehart may think she’s no oil painting and getting the right angle is never easy.

Radio host Lauren Phillips used to have the classic millennial “teapot” pose down pat. You know the one, ‘skinny arm’ to the hip, leg jutting out, cock your head to the side and smile! Again good angles. But even the ‘teapot‘ has been declared old hat, with Gen Z’s now holding an ‘imaginary marble’.

Don’t we all have that friend who can’t help but stitch you up, posting a flattering image of themselves while leaving everyone else with mouths agog and eyes wide shut.

I’d probably try and do the same as Mrs R if I had all the money in the world. Although it rankles when people with power can with the click of a finger delete images they don’t want seen on the worldwide web.

Just ask the AFL about the “diki-leaks” pics they magically disappeared from a Google Drive last year.

Sadly we mere mortals are not afforded such luxuries.