When did you start doing drag?
I did a performance for the first time in drag in 2006 in Canberra at Toast. It was a kind of uni dive bar; this great kind of trashy, very loose experiment. It was very punk, raucous and cool. I think when you’re in all of that, you don’t realise it’s special and then that thing doesn’t exist anymore. I was at art school at the time and a friend of mine called Nick used to put on a night at Toast called ‘Man Shandies’ with all sorts of weird experimental groups. He called me one day and said, ‘You should come and do a drag show!’ I had gone to the Art School Ball the year before as a bearded lady in a wig and a mini denim skirt – not a good look but it provoked a lot of responses! Nick invited me to pull something together and I got a couple of backup dancers and we choreographed a routine to a medley of The Knife, Moloko and Madonna with a big costume change reveal on stage. I pulled together this bizarre character: I was barefoot as I didn’t have heels, and I had a wonky wig from a sex shop in Fyshwick. Back in the day when you couldn’t just get online and order everything and have it there in a week! That was the first time and it was great.. and terrifying.
Was she Venus Mantrap, yet?
No, we performed as Dragon Head, so it was kind of ambiguous. Then very soon after, Cube started to do a night called Drag Idol. We were like, ‘Let’s do it!’ because it went down so well at Toast. We performed and we won.. although it was not very stiff competition! Then it just sort of evolved from there. Dragon Head then became Fannii Minogue and people were expecting a Dannii or a Kylie tribute and just it never was. It was like, The Divinyls and PJ Harvey and The Knife. Not only was I performing with hairy legs and hairy armpits and not trying to pass at all but I was performing to rock ‘n roll songs. People were very like, ‘What is this?!’
Did you like the reaction?
I think that I was so focused on trying to figure out what the character was and why I was doing it and what I could do with it, that the reaction was secondary. It was really different to now where the idea of Venus is really curated and people have a really firm understanding of what a variety show is. We were performing in really weird spaces, like Toast and Das Kapital, an old bar at Narrabundah shops. These funny little venues where the audiences were always really strange and people were showing up for the spectacle. They knew what a drag queen was but were probably expecting Priscilla. Then they’d see me tear my way out of a paper body bag to a really obscure song by The Divinyls. But it just felt right. Sometimes I’ve tried to do the thing that I thought that people wanted and it always fell flat. I learned quickly that if you just do the thing that you love, people will respond in some way. They might hate it but usually they enjoy watching someone enjoy what they’re doing.
After that, I moved away for a long time. I lived up in Byron and I think I became Venus up there. I got really fed up with the expectation of people thinking it was going to be a Minogue tribute and I never wanted to do that. So I came back to Canberra in 2008 and kind of killed off Fannii Minogue during a performance and birthed Venus. I’d shed my band members by that time and was just on my own. I returned to the stage as Venus doing ‘TNT’ by AC/DC in a wild wig. It was a real kind of, ‘We’re putting that away now and this is the new thing’ moment. Then I moved to Melbourne in ‘09, knowing a few people but not many. I would trot Venus out at certain things and keep cultivating the look and the sound.
Was she the same Venus as the one we see today?
She’s/they’ve changed a lot in the last few years. I was doing Kiss and Robert Palmer songs then and definitely playing with gender. Performing male songs in drag, I think for a lot of people, is another confusing element. There’s this kind of puritan culture, which is also perpetuated through ‘Drag Race’. There’s rules and processes; how you do this and this is how you deliver that. I feel really separate from all of that and always have. I’ve been mocked. ‘Why aren’t you shaving your armpits?’ In the early days, people were really affronted by that. It’s like, ‘Because I love my hairy legs’. But I think if I look back at Melbourne, or even the very, very, very first performance of The Knife, Moloko and Madonna, that’s exactly what I’m doing now, in terms of the drama of those songs; the anticipation, the campness, the queerness and gender fluidity of it. The kind of art-pop thread that weaves them all together.
Where did the name ‘Venus Mantrap’ come from?
It’s a song title of a Veruca Salt album that I listened to a lot when I was a teenager and I just loved the play on words. I grew up on a property just outside Canberra that had Venus Flytraps all over it. I always loved them as plants and I just always loved the notion of this man-eating creature.
Somewhere along the way, Venus also became a movie persona. When and how did that happen?
Cult Classics officially started in May of 2023 and prior to that I’d been writing about cinema and had some stuff published. I thought it’d be really fun to curate a film night at the National Film and Sound Archive—because I love the building and the cinema—to design a performance that speaks to the film and to deliver an introduction that provides some context or commentary about the film. It’s sort of all of my hats being funneled into a single event; as a teacher, as a writer, a curator, a visual artist and a performer.
How do you select the featured films?
It’s like getting out a divining stick! You know when Eddie tries to pick her outfits in Ab Fab? It feels a bit like that. I kind of tune in: What do people need? What do I need? It’s original name was Fright Night and we started off exploring horror: it was vampires, werewolves, robots and beasts and creatures, which was great. It was really dark and gory and all of that good stuff. Then we changed to Cult Classics and the name change meant that we could broaden the scope of what would be delivered, which would include comedy and surrealist art house films. I definitely try to think about the year as distinct seasons. So we begin in summer and then we quickly move into autumn and winter and then spring. So I kind of cluster them and think about what a year looks like in terms of that arc. What would be fun to gather and look at? Films that celebrate milestone birthdays and stuff like that. What would bring people out of their homes in winter? This year I’ve called it Winter Wild Cards, which are films that I’ve never seen before. So, ‘Blood Simple’, ‘Body Double’ and ‘Scanners’, with directors that I love and actors that I love but I’ve just never seen the film for one reason or the other. I’m going to design performances based on the trailers and create my introductions just from the research that I do, and then watch it with everyone else.
Were you a massive film buff as a kid?
Yeah, I grew up with a family that loved cinema, and we had a fairly impressive VHS.. but not, you know, always entirely appropriate. The original ‘King Kong’ is one I remember, and ‘Streets of Fire’, which we showed last year and I’d never seen on the big screen. Like, kind of violent and I’d been watching them from the age of four!
What are your top three all-time favorite films?
It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure and sometimes I wonder if I love it or if I just have an affection for it because I adored it as a teenager, but ‘The Crow’ is always there. It feels hard saying it out loud. We screened it two years ago and it was the first time I ever saw it on the big screen and the theater sold out. People love that movie and really showed up for it. Seeing it big, I just wanted to live in that world for like, three more hours. I hated when the credits rolled! The performance was really fun too, and people were just losing their minds. I’ve never had so many people email me afterwards so it hit a nerve, which was cool. I used to watch that film alone as a teenager all of the time so to see it with 250 people who were freaking out and losing their minds for it was like, ‘Oh, cool! Here we are, all reveling in its glory’.
I never, ever get bored of watching ‘In Bed with Madonna’. I think she was really brave at that point in her career, showing herself as such a real person and quite unlikable at times. It felt it did, and still does, feel really honest. It doesn’t feel polished or contrived or fake, so I think that’s really interesting. We’ve seen pale imitations and you’ll watch something thinking it’s going to be like that, where a pop star has been followed on tour, and you just can’t believe anything that you’re seeing, it feels so contrived. From what I’ve read, it was just a guy and his camera crew following them and stitching together this tale of what it looks like to tour the world as a young woman who’s in charge. Her advisors were like, ‘You can’t release this to the world because you are gonna commit career suicide!’ or ‘You’re not palatable in this context’. And she was just like, ‘I don’t care’ and doubled down, and out it went. I still watch that and get blown away with, not just the kind of grainy, beautiful black and white footage of all the mechanics of traveling the world with a troupe of dancers and makeup artists and all the entourage and all that, but the, oh my god, the color footage of the ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour. Like, my blood pumps hard every single time I see that stuff.
For the last one, I’m gonna say something really ridiculous. I love ‘Something’s Got To Give’ with Diane Keaton. I’ll never curate it for Cult Classics but I watch it once a year, just as a comfortable little.. it’s like having a roast chicken for dinner. It makes me weep, but it makes me howl with laughter. It’s so funny.
What’s your favourite soundtrack?
There are a few, I listen to soundtracks a lot. I love the soundtrack to ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’, the Jim Jamusch film with Tilda Swinton. The ‘Streets of Fire’ soundtrack is incredible. We screened that last year and seeing that on the big screen was a trip and hearing all that music live, it’s a cracker. I have two copies of that on vinyl. And yeah, I mean, I love the soundtrack to ‘The Crow’ and even the sequel. Hole does a version of ‘Gold Dust Woman’ on that shitty movie, but it’s a really good soundtrack.
What’s your favourite Australian film?
‘Shame’ with Deborah Lee Furness. I think Australian cinema is incredible and it kind of pains me that our cinema was this kind of really robust machine that has affected culture significantly, globally, and we just don’t have that anymore. I think the fact that ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ got ABBA on board to provide the soundtrack and ABBA said ‘yes’ and from that they secured their first number one in America. Like, that is bonkers. And the enduring power of a film like ‘Priscilla’. Like, wow.
Are you excited about the Priscilla sequel?
I feel so nervous about it because I just think that it’s such a perfect piece of culture. Any time that I hear that something’s going to be redone or there’s going to be a part two.. I want it to be great. Sometimes these things are great, and sometimes you wish it had never happened.
What’s your favourite one liner from a film?
It’s so stupid (laughs). When Dick Tracy asks Breathless Mahoney, ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’ and Madonna says, ‘The side I’m always on, mine!’ I remember watching that as a 10 year old just being like, oooph! I love the camp lines. I love Anjelica Huston in ‘Witches’ when someone pays her a compliment, saying, ‘My God, you look fabulous’. She says, ‘Thank you. I wish I could say the same!’. I remember hearing that as a nine year old and just being like, ‘Diva! Yeah!’ I love that campy kind of catty vamp.
NSFA Creative Producer & Program Coordinator, Alice Taylor, says:
“Venus Mantrap brings electricity and pizazz to the NFSA. We know our audiences love unique experiences as much as they love movies and Venus Mantrap elevates a standard film screening to a dynamic and fun experience. What we love about Venus is that they bring a combination of sexy drag and geeky film professor… it’s a merger you never knew you needed. If you’ve never been to a Cult Classics at NFSA, we hope you’ll come to the next one. The event is a safe and welcoming space for Canberra’s Queer community, and we’ll continue to foster that.”
Check out the full Cult Classics 2026 program here.
[Interview by Danny Corvini]
