Australian radio star Paris Pompor dies aged 58, sparking tributes for the industry legend
The beloved star was known for his influential role at Sydney 's 2SER.
Pompor had long worked the airwaves at the not-for-profit station, where he hosted the music program Jumping The Gap from 2007 - 2022.
No cause of death has been publicly released.
Pompor was known as a talented and vibrant DJ on the Sydney radio scene.
As co-host of the Groovescooter show, he celebrated the arts and music culture in the city, and indeed nationwide.
2SER played a tribute to Pompor on Friday night and featured a retrospective of his work at the radio station.
Following news of his death on Wednesday, a number of people posted tributes to Pompor on social media.
'Totally stunned and very sad to be hearing the news that Paris Pompor has passed away. A complete and total music fan, a beautiful human and always a joy to run into around the traps or at 2SER over the years,' Stuart Couple wrote on Facebook.
'Watching him dancing around the studio whilst presenting a radio show always made my day just that little happier.'
Eastside radio 89.7FM, said he had made an 'indelible' mark in Sydney: 'Paris shaped so much of Sydney music and influenced the city's arts and culture like no other.
'His love of music documentaries started a movement of film screenings at the Golden Age Cinema that can best be described as all sold out!
'The curation of underground independent films mixed with classic revivals like Stop Making Sense were enjoyed by everyone who attended and deserve to keep going by the next generation.'
Former Newsreader Geoff Mark Field added his own tribute
'My sincere condolences to family and friends of Paris Pompor who has died aged 58,' Field wrote.
'I remember the way he would always have something positive to say to my journalism students when I was at 2SerFM.
'Paris was a beautiful man who always went out of his way to be kind.'
The Queen Screen account for Mardi Gras also posted a tender farewell.
'Incredibly saddened to hear the news of Paris Pompor's passing.
'He was a great friend to Queer Screen who volunteered at many of our events and Groovescooter was a community partner on so many films that focussed on music and soul over the years.
'Sending love to his family, friends and community. It's a great loss to the arts, music and culture scene in Australia.'
Pompor is survived by his long-time partner Georgie Zuzak.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Perth Now
an hour ago
- Perth Now
Vogue Australia runway show to make Perth debut
A touch of Vogue magic will return to Karrinyup next month for a renowned weekend-long spring-summer fashion festival. The festival returns to Karrinyup Shopping Centre in partnership with Vogue Australia for an elevated four-day celebration of new season fashion trends, following its sold-out debut last year. To kick off the event, starting on September 4, customers can secure tickets to experience WA's first Vogue Fashion After Dark runway show, where the most coveted looks of the season will be showcased. It will take over Karrinyup's West Deck and is expected to set the tone for a style-filled weekend wrapping up on September 7. Some of the brands to feature on the runway, curated by Vogue's Australia fashion team, include Scanlan Theodore, Viktoria & Woods, Coach and Morrison. Vogue Australia's fashion director Kaila Matthews said she was thrilled to bring first-to-market looks to Karrinyup, giving guests the chance to experience new trends. 'The Vogue After Dark Runway will be a celebration of fashion in all its forms,' she said. 'We're bringing a breadth of statement styles – from effortless high-summer dressing to bold, head- turning evening wear – giving our guests a first look at what's next. It's an opportunity to experience the energy, creativity and glamour of the season.' The four-day festival will feature WA's first Vogue Fashion After Dark runway show. Credit: Supplied Karrinyup Centre general manager Trudy Cook said the centre was anticipating another record-breaking turnout for what is fast becoming one of WA's premier fashion events. 'Karrinyup continues to set the standard for exclusive and memorable experiences for our customers, unlike anywhere else,' she said. 'Building on last year's success, this will be a celebration of Australian fashion and showcase the true breadth of what our customers can experience in our centre.' People who miss out on tickets to the launch will have the chance to get a taste of the action in the centre's outdoor dining precinct, where the show will be projected live on the shopping centre's facade. Fashionistas can expect exclusive panels, workshops and fashion, beauty and interior styling masterclasses across the festival days. Event highlights also include in-store styling sessions, shop-and-sip experiences, matcha carts, exclusive Vogue merchandise and photo booth pop-ups. Tickets to Karrinyup's Vogue Festival events go on sale from Thursday at
Sydney Morning Herald
4 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Looking for a new book? Here are 10 new titles to try
This week's books include the fiction debut of the former 'queen of current affairs', some Australian coastal noir, two true wartime tales and shocking tales from Australia's paramedic frontlines. FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Far Side of the Moon Jana Wendt Text Publishing, $40 Anyone who had a nerd-crush on Jana Wendt growing up (raises hand) will be eager to read the short stories in her debut fiction collection, The Far Side of the Moon. Wendt was a fixture on Australian television for decades, establishing herself as a star reporter with Channel Nine's 60 Minutes in 1982 and going on to become – as her fictional alter ego is described in the story Fame and Nothingness – the 'queen of current affairs'. That story probes the disconnect between fame and the (often quotidian) private life of someone touched by it, with an appealing blend of wistfulness and playful bemusement. Only two of the tales are related: the final stories deliver drastically divergent perspectives from co-workers at a numismatics shop, in a fable-like illustration of the effects of cynicism and openness. It isn't Rashomon, exactly, but Wendt's keen intellect and imagination make for a strikingly plausible, humane contrast. Readers will take pleasure, too, in the volume's running themes – particularly the puzzles it constructs from the different kinds of truth, and the opposing strategies deployed to uncover them, in journalism and fiction. Billed as 'Great Ocean Road noir', Luke Johnson's King Tide is a foreboding, character-driven crime fiction set in the fictional town of Lagunes Bay on Victoria's Surf Coast. In the wake of a monster storm and king tide, a buried corpse is washed free from its sandy grave. The victim is a young woman, Hayley, who vanished from the town years before; suspicion falls widely in a community that did little to find out what happened to her. Now young adults, Hayley's peers must know something, and the gruesome secret implicates Tate, the town's golden boy who may have been Hayley's final boyfriend, and his 'bad boy' best friend Luther. Meanwhile, Brylie and her Anglican vicar father have returned to Lagunes Bay – the former still resentful and clueless about why they left town in the first place – setting everyone further on edge. King Tide leans into its rugged setting to amplify the sense of danger and deliverson genre tropes. Johnson has written a mystery laden with dark secrets, suspense, and small-town menace, while crafting young adult characters realistic and complex enough for a coming-of-age novel to infiltrate by stealth. Eva Reddy's Trip of a Lifetime Fiona McKenzie Kekic HQ, $32.99 Eva wakes up to the 50th birthday from hell. She receives an anonymous Facebook message informing her that her husband is having an affair. And she loses her job. As if that's not enough, her elderly parents have gone missing in India, Bollywood dancing their way to some obscure fate with only a trail of very weird TikTok videos as clues to their whereabouts. Eva decides to put miles between herself and her faithless husband and embarks on an epic rescue mission. What's disguised as a search for lost parents is, of course, a quest of self-discovery, as Eva steps outside her humdrum existence into a larger-than-life subcontinental adventure. Eva Reddy's Trip of a Lifetime is strongly reminiscent of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, though it'll also remind readers of the feelgood classic Shirley Valentine in its main arc – a middle-aged woman liberating herself from the weight of social expectation and reckoning with middle age, love, and second chances in an exotic locale. Luke Harris returns to Melbourne and appears to be an ordinary university student, but his past life won't leave him alone. As a teenager, Luke was an underworld enforcer, and his skills – from street smarts to how to bury a body – remain of value to Gus Alberici, the brutal crime boss he worked for. It was only a matter of time before Gus resurfaced, and when he does, it's to coerce Luke into finding a few things that have vanished – Luke's father, for one, and a large pile of Gus's cash, for another. Pressured to resume his old life, Luke seems to have no choice but to resort to nefarious skills to stay alive, track down his dad, and discover what happened to the missing loot. Stillwater is a gritty Australian crime thriller with plenty of action and suspense. It's artfully paced, written in a muscular style, and the fortunes of its flawed (anti)hero should keep readers on the edge of their seats. Land of Hope Cate Baum Indigo Press, $29.99 Land of Hope folds a dystopian fable into an Emily Bronte-like gothic novel. It's a fascinating idea for a crossover, and the central character, Hope Gleason, seems to emanate from the wild and windswept moors as if she were a ghost already. Rumours and myths about Hope – and her role in her husband's brutality – swirl long before an indescribable sound annihilates a nearby village. A weapon of some kind has been unleashed, and Hope takes an orphaned lad under her wing, as the two survivors embark on a grim quest for a serial killer amid the apocalypse. Like Bronte, Cate Baum uses the brooding, elemental landscape to expressionistic effect, and she channels the spirit of Cormac McCarthy in the mercilessness and extremity of the novel's examination of evil. The orphan is irritating, it must be said, but the passions at play and Baum's morbid imagination should have you hooked regardless, especially if you're a fan of Wuthering Heights, gothic sensibility, serial killer chillers, or all three. Survival in Singapore Tom Trumble Penguin, $36.99 In September 1943, Australian commandos – after having sailed from Australia in a craft disguised as an Asian fishing boat – entered Singapore Harbour and sank a reputed seven Japanese ships. The somewhat surprised Japanese assumed it was a local operation and arrested large numbers of suspects, including detainees in Changi prison. It's the repercussions of the raid that are the main focus of Tom Trumble's evocative study of extraordinary fortitude and inner strength. Elizabeth Choy, for example, who became known as the Heroine of Singapore, endured intense torture and brutal beatings, her ordeal (via a variety of primary sources) presented here in vivid, grim detail. Likewise, British diplomat Robert Heatlie Scott, who drew strength from a volume of the complete work of Keats given to him by an interrogating member of the Japanese military police. Both survived the war. It's not just the characters, though – Trumble is adept at describing the city itself at this time with eerie details like hooded Japanese informants cruising the streets. A comprehensive, dramatic (sometimes novelistic) re-creation of dramatic times. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, 'The very rich are different from you and me'. Indeed! One measure of it can be found in the things they consume – such as the world's most expensive spirit, a US$44 million Limoncello. Coleman has fun delving into the obscenities of the rich and famous throughout history, which he divides into seven parts, one for each of the deadly sins. There's no shortage of rogues for the gallery, be it the aptly named Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose wealth equated to the yearly incomes of 32,000 citizens – or the almost universally detested Belgian king Leopold II, whose genocidal greed bled the Congo dry. From papal orgies hosted by the Borgias to exorbitant modern weddings, this is a chronicle of fantastical sounding but true excess. And, as much as we might think ordinary punters admire them, Coleman highlights the case of Luigi Mangione, who murdered multi-millionaire Brian Thompson and became something of a cult hero on social media. In the spirit of Boccaccio, funny and sobering. The Last Tour Ann Curthoys MUP, $39.99 When Paul Robeson sang to workers on the construction site of the Sydney Opera House, it became famous as the first concert on the site, but was one of many in the tour of Australia and New Zealand by Robeson and his wife, feminist and activist, Eslanda. This may be an academic study of what proved to be Robeson's last tour, but it's a very engaging one: Robeson is the subject of the book, but it's also a window into post-war, Cold War Australia. In what amounts to a portrait of the tour, Curthoys emphasises its many facets, especially its political side, Robeson being a Marxist who made his support of the USSR well known; a political stance that led to his and his wife's passports being revoked. Apart from the music, the Robesons were deeply interested in Indigenous and women's rights movements in Australia and New Zealand. Along the way, we learn about Robeson's studies and reading, Robeson being the only African American at Rutgers in 1915. First-rate cultural, political and social history. This series of dispatches from the battlefront of ambulance duty comes layered with grim humour, but as former journalist and ambo driver Tim Booth explains, it's a way of coping with the drama and sheer absurdity that can come with the job. Take Darlene and Fluffy. After being called by a neighbour, Tim and a workmate enter the stench of Darlene's flat and find her, barely conscious, cradling the rotting Fluffy. It's clear Darlene's not going anywhere without the pet, and so they wind up taking a dead cat to emergency. Other cases are just plain gripping, such as a car crashing through a clothing shop window, leaving a teenage girl critically injured. But, even here, the absurd is not far away – the site strewn with confusing, life-like mannequins. Other anecdotes include the time a young woman called 000 for a broken toenail. Collectively, they paint a darkly comic picture of a system stretched to its limit (in this case, NSW), that is also dealing with the absurdities of all-too-human foibles. Blamey Brent D. Taylor ABC Books, $36.99 In what became something of a controversial address, General Blamey (commander-in-chief of Australian military forces in WWII) spoke to troops who had just seen action in New Guinea in 1942, the rumour spreading afterwards that he had said they ran like 'rabbits'. It's part of the mythology surrounding the 'flawed' figure of Blamey that Taylor examines in this no-nonsense biographical assessment. He cuts through the innuendo, the quirks and the public image, and Blamey emerges as the country's greatest general. He coolly examines the facts of Blamey's career and concludes that, by any reasonable standard, he was an outstanding leader. Pivotal to this is the death rates of Australian troops in WWII, which were very low. He may or may not have been popular among the troops, but he was efficient and diplomatically successful in dealing with our allies in arguing for control of Australian troops. Taylor takes us back to a tough rural upbringing in NSW, his invaluable time under Monash in WWI (especially the groundbreaking significance of the Battle of Hamel), his civic life and sometimes controversial private life. A bit like Blamey himself, no fuss, and to the point.
AU Financial Review
4 hours ago
- AU Financial Review
Arkley, Olley soar at $14m art sale
Collectors flung their umbrellas in a soggy tangle at the door of a Sydney auction room to help send three paintings through the million-dollar mark on Tuesday night. And it was two of those in-room bidders who secured the top-priced works in Smith & Singer's 93-lot auction of Important Australian Art. One attendee landed Howard Arkley 's deliciously gaudy painting, Contemporary Units, 1988, with a decisive $2 million gambit, knocking out a rival's $1.7 million bid in one go.
