The other side of Julia.. not, oops I mean’t knit!
The headline read:
Julia Gillard: Knitting shows another side of me
Well, it certainly does but I am afraid it isn’t the side she may have been hoping for?
For the non-believers, the photo is a very bad case of staged photography.
My mother-in-law said:
- who has all that wool and yarn laying around
- the glass jar of needles, I’d knock that over when I stood up
- look at the wool wrapped around her finger, she (Julia) must be a very tight knitter
The point here is that an experienced knitter (mother-in-law), mother, lady, citizen was able to see straight through the very orchestrated picture of Julia and her dog. Most commentary on radio centred around either the dog (type) or the knitting.
The text that accompanied the picture we found [womensagendar.com.au] read..
In the photo, Gillard is knitting a toy kangaroo as a gift for the Royal baby due in July. It’ll appear in the latest edition of the Weekly, on sale tomorrow.
In an interview with the magazine’s associate editor Caroline Overington, Gillard says her life is full of often “combative engagements” and that she hopes she’s achieved an image that shows women don’t need to shy away from adversarial environments like parliament.
“But that’s not all of me. [Knitting the kangaroo] is an opportunity to show a side of me,” Gillard says, adding that she knits for babies because they’re “smaller projects” that can be completed in a limited amount of time.
She also tells the magazine that she’s not a “person who agonises” and will look back on her achievements with a sense of pride.
Overington writes in the piece that a request to photograph Gillard knitting the kangaroo came from the PM’s office.
The photo, published on the front pages of the Daily Telegraph and The Australia today, has ignited yet another round of headlines in the “gender wars”.
If this is Julia Gillard’s push for the women’s vote then I fear she missed her target. Maybe the young female voter may not spot the staged photo and be fooled by the scene. Maybe middle aged females have already fallen for her pointed finger and “misogyny” line but then the photo misses them and then there is the more elderly female voter, like my mother-in-law who only sees a woman trying to be the woman next door, except the woman next door is real.
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