I left early Sunday morning for four days in Bowral.
I had in hand a ticket (or three) for a preview screening of the first episode, and was tagging aong with "someone I'd met on the internet" to go the Netflix-organised Garden Party on Tuesday. I had somewhere to stay and people I was meeting up with.
It's been decades since I went to Bowral. I studied at uni a couple of hours away, so it was a great weekend spot to visit and roam.
I remember it as a lovely but 'very small town' place back in the late 90s
, but it's gained a lot of 'satellite Sydneysiders' in the few years since COVID made working from home ubiquitous. There might be some companies agitating for people to come back to the office, but the plain truth is that a lot of people and knowledge and skills in remote working moved out of Sydney during the pandemic and most of them aren't coming back. (And the people who have that knowledge and skill have had them for two decades and have options - if one company isn't going to allow them to work remotely, then another will.
So Bowral is a 'small town in NSW/VIC', which is not the same as a small town in Queensland. A small town in Queensland is more likely to be like what Americans imagine a small town is like, but still: small towns across Australia are no longer as insular and behindhand as they were. They have nice cafes and open spaces, and modern menus. There are, of course, the eyerollers who are exasperated by the influx of 'new people', but Australian immigration patterns have often focused on getting non-western immigrants with skills and knowledge out of the cities and into small towns - specifically people with degrees in things like medicine and health care. This has been happening since the 1990s, to the point where people get their immigration processing sped up for citizenship/perm residency. And, as I mentioned, many (former) urban and suburban dwellers have moved out into the small towns around major cities as they aged, retired, and/or got to work remotely. So it wasn't too bad - but I can understand the annoyance of outsiders coming in and your town just 'changing' for everything, even if it's only a few days of trouble.At any rate, Bowral had really decorated up for the event - stores had 'Bridgerton-esque' displays, there was bunting up all over town, a few posters here and there, and in one of the gardens a small string quartet played 'Bridgerton songs' on the hour from midday to 4pm on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.
Exhibit A: the pergola in the park where the string quartet played.
pic of me in a burned orange dress and a regency spencer, under an arch of flowers at the entrance to a gazebo
I was staying in a section-of-a-house off the main drag - two bedrooms a small sitting/living room, and a hallway that was clearly part of a larger house. There was the main house, the East Wing (where I was staying) and the West Wing. The three sections can be booked separately, or you can arrange to book the entire place.
I reckon it would be pretty good to book the entire place with a bunch of friends and stay there, using it as a home base while travelling around the area wine-tasting and food-tasting, etc. Maybe sometime if my friends at church want a group holiday, that might be a possibility.
So one of the reasons I went to Bowral was to meet up with an assortment of women who I'd met through TikTok, FB, and other methods - a bunch of us were messaging back and forth to try to work out what was happening, where it was happening, and how we could meet up. We caught up for dinner on Monday night (all of us) and Tuesday night (some of us) and it was pretty good.
As I said, I enjoyed the first episode. I went in my 'sober regency-style dress' which is under the cut.
pic of me taking a photo in front of a mirror wearing the burned orange dress with the spencer over it
I actually bought the dress and the jacket and modified both so it looks vaguely Regency-ish. Not fashionable, though. But then, I've never been particularly fashionable, I guess.It was good meeting fellow fans in real-life; I've kind of missed that part of being fannish tbh. Having people to discuss things with in real life and not just across the internet. Having things that people are all up with, and that we can have actual discussions about. We hung out a little, caught up here and there, and discussed the episode at dinner on Monday, and it was just
fun. It feels so so rare!
Not to mention, the online attitudes are just getting really tiring.
Yes, Kate and Anthony's season was badly done; it was advertised and presented as a romance, but everything else about it was to do with 'drama' - the drama of Edwina, the drama of Queen Charlotte and her George - that the lead couple didn't get any time to actually have a romance. The romance wasn't actually satisfying, and the result of the stupid love triangle is that about a quarter of the fandom seem to believe that Kate is a husband-stealing bitch who doesn't deserve to be viscountess or happy after she stole her sister's fiance.
Then there's the S3 promotional whirl for Pen/Colin, which has most of the Kate/Anthony fans on X utterly incandescent with rage. They can't stop being furious that all this is being done for S3 and so little of it was done for S2. Heck, Kate didn't even get her own poster - Kate and Anthony didn't get their own poster together - they had Edwina coyly smiling at the side, as though it really was a love triangle and not a drama pushed by...IDEK. Stupidity, perhaps? "He's Just Not Into You?"
I don't have the energy to be furious; I'm mostly resigned - I've never been the one who got exactly what she wanted from her ship - and although Kate/Anthony is canon, I fear they're another pairing with a non-white or non-feminine female lead who isn't going to get anything near the respect and plots that she should.
At least, though, this time, there are plenty of fans who are writing for this couple - and they are canon. Heck, compared with the fandoms where my favourite female characters were fridged, or where I was the primary author for the fics for my pairing, or the fandoms where I laboured and laboured and laboured for a few scraps of something? I'll take Kate/Anthony anyday, even if they don't turn up much in S3 and even if they were cheated of what their season could/should/would have been if the Bridgerton showrunners and writers hadn't screwed it all up.
Is there race and homophobia involved? (Kate's actress is South Asian, and Anthony's actor is gay.) Quite possibly. It may not be explicit, but we all know that people don't have to be self-aware of their underlying and innate bigotry to ruin media. It is what it is, and no amount of bitching will fix what they broke. So in the end, we've got to live with it. I will be perfectly happy with a happy Anthony/Kate storyline, even if I wish they would give Kate the respect and honour and attention she deserves now that she's part of the Bridgerton family, even if she's not a Bridgerton-by-birth.But back to the trip to Bowral!
Tuesday was the Garden Party in the afternoon. We got ourselves to a racecourse where there was parking, was picked up by a bus to go to the conference centre/house&gardens where the Netflix-organised Garden Party was happening, and arrived to the beautifully set up gardens for picnics and snacks and some drinks.
"you never know who you might meet!"
That was the tagline in the invitation to submit for the party: 'You never know who you might meet!'
And there was some excitement when a private plane was spotted at the local airstrip; perhaps someone big was coming in?
We already knew that Nicola and Luke (the actors of Penelope and Colin) were in town - several of our party had encountered them at one of the dressed-up coffee shops and got not only some signatures, but were videoed doing so and put up on the Netflix social media. They were doing 'events' or so it was said, but nobody we talked to on the street was invited to these events. Not a one.
There were dinners and 'events' happening - on Monday, there was a 'paint and sip' party - where people are given an easel and paints and a glass of wine and they paint a still life or something. And Monday night while we were having dinner at one of the local pubs, the pub across the road was empty and the doors shuttered. But there were a number of black vans outside - the kind that had been seen around town and which were generally known to be transporting the actors around.
So, yes, the actors were around town along with the Netflix crews and the PR and the promotional people. But there wasn't so much as a hint of anyone getting to go to these dinners.
The woman who invited me to come to the Garden Party with her in lieu of her husband was really hopeful that we might get to talk to the actors. She was disappointed ("gutted") when she missed them on the main street, and also when they didn't eventuate at the cinema premiere, so was hanging her hopes on the Garden Party.
We arrive at the party, there are lovely grounds and a beautiful white house house. But while there are people in the house and on the terraces looking out over the garden, they all have lanyards with Netflix labels hanging off them. And we're not allowed to go inside the house, or even stand on the stairs.
The gardens are gorgeous - apparently it's a conference centre that is often used as a hotel/spa. Various members of my group suspected it was where the actors were staying, because it was entirely booked out for the week, so again there were high hopes that they'd get to meet the actors at the Garden Party - maybe they'll come out and mingle with the guests?
We're all dressed in our 'Bridgerton Best', btw. This could mean anything you wanted; some people turned up in jeans and a t-shirt, others were dressed in modern formalwear. Some people had tried for the Regency style (I saw it described today as 'the vibe' and that about perfectly depicts it) in various ways, shapes, and forms, and my dress was recognised by a few people who saw when I posted it on the FB Bridgerton group.
BTW It's still exceedingly weird to post in the Bridgerton group under my FB name, which is followed by all my real life peoples... I'm a little anxious, actually, because I'm very easily traceable from RL to fandom life and while I don't expect anyone is particularly interested in my fannish life from my RL, it's still...anxietymaking.
Anyway, as we're sitting around in picnic groups, exploring the garden spaces, the people inside the house come out and start wandering down the driveway. They vanish off to somewhere else, leaving the house empty. And then a little while later, the black van drives up, and Nicola and Luke emerge from the house to cheers and hoots. They pause, they wave to the crowds, they get into the van, they are driven off.
That was it. My friend was very annoyed and frustrated. "What was the point of putting 'you never know who you might meet' if they weren't going to let us meet them?"
I've been to decades of conventions, long before ComicCon started taking them all over and corporatising them, and even back in the early 00s in the small, 'niche' fandoms, you paid for the actor's time. You paid to go to a dinner where they were the guest, or you paid to get a signature. You paid for a ticket to be in a crowd where they were speaking or being interviewed, and you paid, you paid, you paid.
The people who got to meet the actors? The people who wandered down the driveway and climbed int oa coach, who had Netflix lanyards and phones in their hands and were made up to the nines? They were influencers. They might be fans of the Bridgerton show, but they were almost certainly given perks because they had hundreds if not thousands or millions of followers on social media. And influencers ‘pay’ for their privileges by promoting the company that’s paid for them. In this case, the Netflix network and the Bridgerton show.
The thing that irks me most is in fact not that the influencers got to spend time with the actors, with all the extras (although, yes, that does irk a little): it’s that Netflix is advertising these events – including the influencers-only events – as though ‘ordinary regular people’ got to go to them. ‘Fans didn’t expect to meet Polin at the luncheon’ they say – but not at all meaning “people who love the show:. Sure, some of the influencers are also fans of the show, but their inclusion is incidental to having hundreds of thousands of followers.
So there are people in the comments of the social media posts wanting to know how they can get to these lunches to meet the actors; and the answer that other people are giving them are ‘you win the raffles for the garden party events’ when the only true answer is ‘have hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok’.
And that leads only to disappointment – as my new friend who took me to the Garden Party discovered.
We did finally get pics on the stairs up to the house, but we weren't allowed inside - or even up to the level where the Netflix logo was!
This is as close as I got.In the end, though, I had great fun. Would it have been great to meet the actors? Sure! But also: the actors come and go through the years. The friends I’ve made in fandom remain. I have people reading this I’ve known for a decade. I have people reading this I’ve known for two decades! I’ve stayed at their houses and listened and sympathised to their woes. Their children have grown from babies to infants to adolescents to adults. They’ve seen me at my best and highest, and they’ve seen me at my grumpy, sulky, vengeful worst - and I've done the same.
The half-week in Bowral was a great time away, a nice change from life. But it was also a hope for the future – to make more friends and get to know people in fandoms that I still might have in common. It won’t be like the oldskool fandoms, I suspect – or if it is, it will be a different level of intimacy. I’m no longer the callow 25 year old I was when I first got into fandom; I’m older, wiser, more weary by the endless drumbeat of fannish interactions. But it’s still great to meet people, to make friends, to squee and laugh and share in a common delight.
We call it ‘the deep fandom’ and you don’t need to quote it to us; we were there when it was written.