I was in Wel­ling­ton, my first time back since I left in April, and I was furi­ously catch­ing up on things. I got the bus out to the Hutt and vis­ited the Dowse Art Museum.

It was choice, but as I left the gal­lery, I spied some­thing much more intriguing across the square. Over at the Hor­ti­cul­tur­al Hall, a ban­ner advert­ised a show of the Wel­ling­ton Por­cel­ain Doll­makers Club. A doll show!

I’ve always wanted to go to a doll show, that secret world of ladies and fake babies, so I excitedly went inside. The lady at the door looked at me like she knew I was an out­sider, a per­son without dolls. But my money was still good. She took my $5 and I entered the world of dolls.

I was expect­ing one spe­cif­ic thing – uncanny val­ley baby dolls. The show did not let me down. There’d been a com­pet­i­tion so the best baby dolls of the region were on dis­play. Some looked impress­ively real, though with an eer­ie still­ness; oth­ers looked a bit odd. I mean, if an infant doll looks more like the Dow­ager Count­ess of Grantham, some­thing has­n’t quite gone right.

There were also people selling old dolls, the sort of dread­locked orphans that nor­mally lan­guish in the 50c bin of an op shop. But unlike the op shop dolls, these ones won’t end up part of an art stu­dent’s sub­vers­ive recon­texu­al­ising of women’s roles in soci­ety. The doll show is an irony-free zone. Dolls are just dolls and if one has chipped face paint, you skil­fully repaint it. If the hair is mat­ted, you replaced it with silken locks.

But there was a strangely goth­ic feel­ing to it all. I came to real­ise this when found an actu­al goth doll, “Rose Red: a goth­ic baller­ina”. Some­how this dra­mat­ic pale-skinned, eye­liner-wear­ing young lady seemed more ordin­ary and lively than the corpse-like baby dolls.

This is a sub­cul­ture that spe­cial­ises in tak­ing arms and legs and scalps and eye­balls and put­ting them all togeth­er to make a baby, a girl or a woman. It’s way more goth than any­thing a black-clad sub­urb­an teen could come up with for their art port­fo­lio.

Back in the city, I stopped by Deluxe cafe. Deluxe is a cute little cafe that has been around since the late ’80s. It has­n’t changed much and is oddly start­ing to feel like a ’90s theme cafe.

As I sat with my lunch, I real­ised that a Nick Cave CD was play­ing (I googled it – it was the 1998 best-of.) And I sat there think­ing that in the ’90s, this would have been a very cool exper­i­ence. Sit­ting in a cafe, listen­ing to Nick Cave, drink­ing spirulina smooth­ies or mochac­ci­nos, feel­ing cool.

But things are dif­fer­ent now. I’ve been to the doll show. I’ve seen the dark side. I’ve seen the scalps, the arms, the tor­sos. I have seen the baby with scrag­gly orange fluffy hair pulled into two pig­tails, in an attempt to make the hair look cute and not like a Scots­man’s pubes.

Maybe the goth pop of Nick Cave has to exist to have some­thing that’s obvi­ously dark and altern­at­ive. Some­thing that exists so that the ladies paint­ing eye­balls in their spare rooms don’t feel like weirdos. Some­thing that makes a lady in her 30s sit­ting in a cof­fee bar feel edgy and cool.

Ori­gin­ally pos­ted as Nick Cave dolls at Robyn Galla­gh­er.