BDSM RTV MEDIA NEWS!!!!



11 june 2010




Madam Lash makes for fantastic reading(book)


Source: southern-courier.whereilive.com  - Southern-Courier - Australia


Madam Lash is a character so much larger than life that sometimes people don’t realise she is (or was) real. Certainly the story of her - or rather, Gretel Pinniger’s - life, makes for fantastic reading.


A lot of people have heard about Madam Lash and they didn’t even realise it was a real person,” said Sam Everingham, the biographer of Australia’s most famous dominatrix. “And I realised it was a great story, all the amazing things this woman had done.”

Ms Pinniger was born Ann Gretel Pinniger in 1945. She was a “quiet, introspective” schoolgirl, and went to Methodist Ladies College. By the time she was 27, she was the mistress of Clyde Packer, Kerry’s wild brother (and the founder of the Wentworth Courier), who set her up in a terrace in Darlinghurst. She threw outrageous parties at the Kirk, a deconsecrated church in Surry Hills, spent time with Sydney’s underworld in Kings Cross, outraged Fred Nile, ran for parliament, and entered the Archibald Prize.

So how real was the Madam Lash (the name was taken from a racy comic strip in the back of the Kings Cross Whisper) persona?

“I think she’s not a dominatrix at all,” said Mr Everingham. “She didn’t ever enjoy whipping fellows, for her that was a just a performance piece, it was just a person she put on. She’s a really introvert and that was always extraordinary for me to understand.”

“She was thrown into the Madam Lash persona, she had a great creative style to her and she was great at making amazing garments and paintings, and that creatively allowed her to create a persona that men loved. She wanted to be loved, she always craved the attention of men.”
He said it was hard to pick a favourite story that had come up in the writing of the book, for which he spoke to dozens of friends, family members, old lovers and business partners.

“There’s so many of them… she was a very adventurous girl. She had a boyfriend once who liked to tie her up and she loved that. He had a place in the Blue Mountains and he took her up there one weekend and he had this dungeon, he put her in it.. and then he left. She was left in this dark room for two days with nothing but a few carrots to eat. She was in hysterics by the tame he came back.”

There has been much speculation over the years as to the identity of Ms Pinniger’s patron. He was a billionaire, lived in Europe, flew her around the world, and left her a regular allowance when he died. Mr Everingham declined to spill the beans to the Courier.

“I suppose I was surprised (when I found out who she was), this was a billionaire who’d fallen for her in a way, a happily married establishment fellow who was otherwise highly thought of the country he lived in,” he said. “A lot of people who are conservative establishment figures in their public lives can have a private life that’s quite different.”

These days Ms Pinniger spends up to 12 hours a day working on her “4D” paintings - dark swirls of pigment mixed together on the canvas, often over earlier portraits, much to the concern of her friends.

“It’s been a very controversial part of her life, a lot of her friends have thrown up their hands in despair,” he said. “She does these holographic images, she’ll spend ten or 12 hours a day on them and she swears she can see images under the paint but no one else can see those images.”
The switch from portraiture to 4D came on the weekend of her 51st birthday in 1996, after she reportedly took four drops of LSD in liquid form.

“She just seems to feel that life’s one big risk I suppose,” said Mr Everingham. “She’s a very trusting person. People have ripped her, so that’s been hard for her, she’s not very good at knowing which people are true friends, and which people are there to rip her off or lock her in a dungeon.”

Madam Lash: Gretel Pinniger’s scandalous life of sex, art and bondage ($35, Allen & Unwin) is out now.