Regular viewers of The Block will know the name Dave Franklin. The award-winning landscape and pool designer has been a regular guest across the show’s many seasons, as well as doing much of the show’s landscaping. He even landscaped Scott Cam’s house. In the house and garden universe, there can be no finer endorsement.
So this column was worried when we saw Dave’s name in less-salubrious company: on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission liquidation list. Franklin Landscape & Design – “Australia’s leading boutique landscapers and swimming pool builders” (that’s Franklin’s description, not the regulators’) – was wound up in late February, and Robert Ditrich and Craig Crosbie were appointed liquidators.
Dave Franklin, TV show The Block’s favourite landscape gardenerCredit: Instagram
But readers calm yourselves. Franklin says he’s not out of the game for good. The move is structured to allow his sprawling empire – garden maintenance, landscaping, pool works, design – to be moved into a single corporate shell.
“It made sense to make everything go into the Franklin group. We felt the easiest way was to liquidate the landscaping side of it. We’ve looked after all the creditors. We’re not shutting down, by any means,” the man himself told CBD.
All creditors will be fully paid, and he’s working with the Tax Office to deal with an unpaid tax debt.
“They have been absolutely fantastic to deal with, to be honest. We plan on paying what we owe. We’re not running away by any means whatsoever.”
All that said, times are definitely tough.
“The current climate, it’s hard to be builders. We never really recovered from COVID,” says Franklin. “The honest truth is, it is very, very hard out there.”
The new series of The Block, filming in picturesque Daylesford, is set to air sometime in August. Franklin will, alas, not be part of it.
The end as we know it
After 25 years, and seeing off six prime ministers, it is the very, very end of The Wharf Revue. The satirical show devised by Phil Scott, Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsyth and performed by them along with Mandy Bishop has been touring since late last year and over the years has skewered pretty much every politician and statesman in a pointed way that was never overly mean.
Drew Forsythe (left), Jonathan Biggins and Phil Scott, are retiring The Wharf Revue.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The band is splitting up due to a combination of retirement and other projects and realised that its last performances were scheduled to be in Nunawading, in Melbourne’s east.
So it booked into its spiritual home, the Seymour Centre in Sydney, for a return final run of The End of the Wharf as We Know It!!! from Tuesday until Easter Saturday.
“The satirical stayers have vowed there will be no resurrection, so it’s your last chance to say farewell before they retire to start some sort of lucrative consultancy work in the defence sector,” says producer Jo Dyer of Soft Tread Enterprises.
The gang were famous for their prime ministerial impersonations, and the titles of their shows have stood the test of time.
In 2003 the disaster of the Iraq war prompted the Stephen Sondheim-inspired Sunday in Iraq with George, while 2006 inspired Best We Forget, 2008 brought the Samuel Beckett-inspired Waiting for Garnaut and prime minister Kevin Rudd’s GFC-inspired handouts in 2009 brought us Pennies from Kevin.
The closing party will be held at the Different Drummer bar in Glebe, which has its own minor place in political folklore as the watering hole where former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce used to hang out with his ex-staffer and now wife Vikki Campion.
Perils of group chat
Rule No.1 of the group chat: never post anything you wouldn’t expect to one day see written in the newspaper. The larger the group chat, the more ironclad this rule becomes.
And when the group chat in question contains about 200 Liberal Party volunteers trying to wrestle the must-win inner-west Sydney seat of Reid back from Labor, then CBD’s official advice is to proceed with extreme caution.
This rule was lost on prominent behaviour economist and psychiatrist Doron Samuell, who went on a bit of a tear in the Reid Liberal campaign WhatsApp chat last week.
“Nazis at Chiswick wharf,” Samuell wrote, in a caption to a photograph of two Greens volunteers
“Please do not use such terminology, it could come back to bite us,” another member helpfully responded.
“How, they are Nazis?” Samuell replied.
Psychiatrist Doron Samuell called Greens campaigners Nazis in a Liberal Party WhatsApp group
When the other member then reminded Samuell that his comments could come with the risk of defamation proceedings, an unsavoury and costly outcome for all involved, Samuell doubled down and continued to post through it.
“They are Nazis. Truth is a defence. I’m fine with it. You do you,” he said.
“Sure, I won’t call antisemitic Greens Nazis again in this forum,” he wrote, promising to stop, before the relevant messages were quickly scrubbed – but not before screenshots were dutifully leaked to CBD.
Samuell is a managing director of behavioural economics consultancy Behaviour, and is chief medical adviser for Australia at global healthcare technology company Clanwilliam. He’s just finished a three-year term on the board of Industry Innovation and Science Australia, a posting that coincidentally ended the same day as his WhatsApp spray.
Samuell didn’t return CBD’s offer to discuss further. We heard nothing back from the Liberal campaign either.
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