‘Madam Lash was an attempt to be a living art work.’
—Gretel Pinniger
Gretel and Flash were by now close friends. Flash had a love of engineering elaborate S&M scenes. He conceived a plan for Clyde Packer’s Forbes Street terrace. ‘You’ve been carrying around whips and spankers long enough,’ he told Gretel. ‘Now you need an out-and-out torture chamber.’
Gretel liked the idea; it would give her somewhere unique to entertain Clyde. So Flash put his carpentry skills to work, transforming the front bedroom into ‘Madam Lash’s Pleasure Dome’—a laboratory for sexual experimentation.
To soundproof the room from nosy neighbours, he padded the shared side walls with black ruched mock leather. Other walls were covered with brick-patterned paper to simulate a cell. A vertical bed of nails was installed, and in a corner Flash used a blowtorch and cheap shower-curtain rails to fashion a triangular, man-sized cage. In the absence of a willing slave, a naked black female dummy was temporarily installed there.
A huge wooden cross was fastened to another wall, with handcuffs hanging nearby. In place of a bed there were a whipping post and stocks. Hanging in orderly rows were whips, leather hoods, a scold’s bridle, straps and paddles. To enhance the ambience, medieval-themed stained glass windows by fantastic-realist artist Wolfgang Grasse were installed. Downstairs, Grasse’s pseudo-religious paintings adorned the walls. The room had cost almost $2000 in materials alone, but Gretel and Flash both thought it money well spent.
The pièce de résistance was a block-and-tackle body hoist rigged so that willing captives could be suspended and moved about the room. A ceiling mirror, wooden bench and furs for the floor were still to come when journalist Judith Rich arrived to do an interview. Before she knew what was happening, Flash and Gretel had secured her wrists and ankles with leather straps. These were attached to the hoist, and the hapless journalist was soon suspended and being slowly manoeuvred through the room. Flash and Gretel giggled helplessly. To the journalist, it was great fodder for her article.
To mark the launch of her Pleasure Dome, Gretel decided to host an event to remember. A musical she had auditioned for—The Rocky Horror Picture Show—was premiering at the New Art Cinema (later the Valhalla) in Glebe in April 1974. It was the first time a transvestite had appeared, let alone starred, in a mainstream production. Produced by Harry M. Miller and directed by Jim Sharman, it featured Reg Livermore, Kate Fitzpatrick and Brian Thomson. It would become a resounding success, running for almost two years.
Gretel threw a fancy-dress party to outdo Rocky Horror. In her eyes, ‘if people paid to see Reg Livermore in drag as Frank-n-Furter or Betty Blokkbuster, I could give them my version, a girl drag queen’. Guests were to arrive in costume. A hired bus would ferry them to the show and then back to the opening of her Forbes Street torture chamber. She had of course made her own outfit—thigh-high, silver high-heeled boots with spurs worn over fish-net stockings. She had crafted a leather chastity belt with heavy zips, chains and padlocks and a leather slave bra above which her exposed breasts bobbed. Tiny studded-leather pasties covered her nipples. To finish, there was a head-hugging leather helmet, copious make-up and her trademark whip. Flash zoomed up on his motorbike, dressed in full leather and old-fashioned driving goggles. Gretel rode pillion to the theatre.
At the Glebe venue, as other theatre-goers gaped in amazement, Gretel’s bus disgorged a crowd of freaks, drag queens and leather-fetish boys. Charis and George Schwartz were there, as were Debra Starr, Roger Foley and Oz magazine’s Richard Neville. Charis recalls making George a nylon tutu and dressing him in striped socks and ballet slippers.
Back at Gretel’s dungeon, guests squeezed up the terrace’s narrow staircase past a light box, lit altar candles and a sound-sensitive dildo that swayed when you spoke into a microphone beside it. People queued for admission to the torture chamber, where Gretel and the leather boys put on a spectacular show.
Naked guests were lashed, shackled and locked into the playroom cage. One acquaintance whom nobody liked was tied to the bondage rack and beaten black and blue. Someone else was then strapped down. Over-excited, one drag queen stood over a friend screaming in a nasal baritone, ‘She should only be whipped with ropes of real pearls!’
Lilith Rocha recalls that Gretel’s parties ‘were so colourful, they were completely mad … everyone looked amazing, you met amazing people’.
To attract submissives to the playroom, Flash placed ads in the only newspaper that would run such risqué material—Gordon Barton’s Nation Review. Gretel said later, ‘I was just doing anything Flash wanted to do … I was just doing it for the fascination with Flash and the fun of having a torture chamber … I was only as wild as Flash made me.’
She can still recall some of the ads:
Sydney—discipline dispensed by attractive blonde chick, all you can take plus a little more.
Have you tried torture? S and M torture, mild or severe? Experienced young blonde chick will gladly introduce you to the scene.
Fully equipped torture chamber, experienced young blonde chick will gladly show you the ropes.
Flash would sort the responses by age and sexual orientation. He found time between his lectures to join in the fun. If the client was straight and could possibly freak out at anything too intrusive, he might pose as the butler, answering the door with, ‘Madam is expecting you. Could I have your coat … your shirt?’
‘If nothing else was going on, he’d sort of pull someone [in] from the Taylor Square [gay] beat,’ Gretel giggles.
Flash and Gretel regularly used amyl nitrite, marijuana or LSD to enhance their fun, but Gretel rarely saw him ‘out of control’ when they were playing. One night, however, she and Flash got heavily stoned before a scene. The pair had a client blindfolded in the dungeon’s corner cage. Every now and then Gretel would prod him harshly and growl, ‘You’re sagging!’
‘I kept leaving the person … to cool off. I’d go out and listen to music and flake out. I remember waking in a panic, thinking, I can’t hear a noise from the torture chamber. Then I’d howl with laughter. It was just such fun to be me.’
Debra Starr recalls another visitor, an acquaintance of Gretel’s, who ended up being made to eat his own pubic hair.
Writer Daphne Guinness profiled Madam Lash in a six-page article in Clyde Packer’s Forum magazine. Of the relationship between Flash and Gretel she wrote: ‘Their bond is more than amenably spectacular bodies. They also have a bizarre relationship: a sharing-caring-jealous-unjealous couple who interrelate with S and M as easily as falling off a highwire. Flash is, in a sense, her Svengali.’
Guinness noted that both brought a sense of occasion to everything they did. Flash was a wonderful cook and had introduced Gretel to gourmet food and the pleasures of fine dining. A typical night out would start with dinner—perhaps mud crab down at Vaucluse’s Fisherman’s Lodge—and move on to S&M in the torture chamber.
When Guinness met them, the pair had just performed for a class of design students at Sydney’s new National Institute of Dramatic Art. Flash appeared on a motorbike in a Nazi helmet, handcuffs and studded belt. Gretel, manacled and naked, was dragged along behind him. She bumped into Rebel Penfold-Russell on her way out. ‘Oh, Gretel, I didn’t know you were Madam Lash,’ the heiress exclaimed.
On their way back to Darlinghurst—Gretel riding pillion in tailcoat, fish-net stockings, thigh-high silver boots and a diamante crotch-piece, Flash in a black T shirt and handcuffs—they were pulled over by a slack-jawed policeman. Back at Forbes Street, the pair found they had been burgled. Furry bras and leather breastplates were scattered about the lounge room but Gretel’s two mink coats, money and watch were untouched.
Gretel was so busy she had no time for ordinary sex. And even if she had found a straight partner who was into S&M, Guinness reported, ‘she can’t imagine finding any partner of sufficient stamina to think of making it a permanent thing’.
Flash was at pains to tell Guinness that S&M sex was not really about inflicting or enjoying pain. Instead it was a sophisticated power play in which both parties had to trust each other completely: ‘All [S&M] is doing is what various forms of fantastic sex [are] already doing … one of the most important things in a personal relationship is the degree of dependence which comes from a certain submission to the other person.’ Flash impressed on Guinness the importance of ‘safety words’ so the submissive party could communicate without wrecking the ‘scene’. He had three: ‘wood’ meant ‘Everything is fine but you’re turning it on a bit heavy’; ‘iron’ meant ‘This particular act is not turning me on’; and ‘steel’ said ‘What you’re doing is not arousing me. Let’s stop and have a drink.’
Gretel interrupted him. ‘The other night … the person suggested a fourth, “velvet” … to mean, “Oh, I really dig what you decided to do right now.” ’ ‘The point of it is,’ Flash said, ‘you can discover whole new territories with a person [that] they wouldn’t have permitted without some sort of escape clause.’