Manyfaces of Inspiration Conversations on Australian Creativity

William Barton Bruce Beresford Tony Bilson Wendy Blacklock Joan Carden Geoffrey Chard David Clarkson Michael Crouch Rosemary Crumlin Tania De Jong Ross Edwards Robert Gard Stephen Kovacevic Greta Lanchbery Justin Macdonnell David Malouf John McCallum Elisabeth Murdoch Ted Myers Roland Peelman Helena Rathbone Rodney Seaborn John Shaw ManyFaces of Inspiration Conversations on Australian Creativity

Dinah Shearing Rachael Swain antony Ken Tribe Googie Withers jeffrey Martin & Peter Wesley-Smith

Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 1 2/09/10 4:52 PM ntony Jeffrey has worked A in arts management since 1975 when he joined the Australia Council as Music Board director. He was the first general manager of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and for many years has maintained a close association with the orchestra. Prior to that he was commercial manager of the Australian Opera. More recently he was general manager of the Song Company until 2009.

He originally trained as an accountant with Price Waterhouse, where he worked in Australia and overseas until his passion for music seduced him into the professional music scene. Since that time, in addition to his executive appointments, he has worked as director or consultant to many arts organisations including the Australian Ballet, Melbourne Theatre Company, Lyric Opera of Queensland, Musica Viva, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust.

He has been a leader in establishing philanthropy, corporate sponsorship and strategic planning in the arts in Australia, publishing several books in this field, notably 101 Good Ideas for Assisting the Arts. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2008 for his services to the arts.

Since 2002, he has recorded over 200 interviews with artists and arts people, driven by his curiosity and admiration for their creativity. Many Faces of Inspiration is a direct result of this work.

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n ManyFaces of Inspiration N

Conversations on Australian Creativity

n Varenna Conversations www.manyfacesofinspiration.com

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 3 2/09/10 4:52 PM Published in 2010 by Varenna Conversations 63 Ryan Street Lilyfield NSW 2040 Australia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a rretreival sytem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written premission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Jeffrey, Antony, 1936– Many Faces of Inspiration ISBN 978 0 646 54166 2 (pbk.) 1. Arts & Creativity

Design by Guy Jeffrey Typeset set in Adobe Garamond & News Gothic Printed In Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd

www.manyfacesofinspiration.com

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To Sally, with love

Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 5 2/09/10 4:52 PM vi

Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 6 2/09/10 4:52 PM Contents

Foreword — Peter Sculthorpe ��1 Introduction ��3 Note on Recordings ��7

Author David Malouf ��9 Australia’s Musical Mentor Kenneth W Tribe �� 21

Actors Googie Withers & John McCallum �� 33 Dinah Shearing �� 47

Chef Tony Bilson �� 59

Composers Ross Edwards �� 71 Twins: Martin & Peter Wesley–Smith �� 83

Curator Sister Rosemary Crumlin �� 95

Directors Bruce Beresford �� 109 Roland Peelman �� 121

Musicians William Barton �� 133 Stephen Kovacevich �� 141 Helena Rathbone �� 151

Music Teacher Greta Lanchbery �� 159

Producers Wendy Blacklock �� 169 Justin Macdonnell �� 179 Singers Joan Carden, Robert Gard & Geoffrey Chard �� 191

Partnership David Clarkson & Rachael Swain �� 213

Commitment Dame Elisabeth Murdoch & Tania de Jong �� 233

Philanthropy Rodney Seaborn �� 245 Michael Crouch �� 255

Departed Friends John Shaw �� 263 Ted Myers �� 271

Acknowledgements �� 281

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 8 2/09/10 4:52 PM Foreword

Foreword

Peter Sculthorpe AO OBE

The makers of art have long-defined the identity of nations, of place. They continue to do so. In Many Faces of Inspiration, Antony Jeffrey provides us with wondrous insights into the thoughts and thought-process of artists of our own nation, our own place. He also includes the thoughts of some of those, equally distinguished, who have given nurture to our artistic life. I need hardly say that I was delighted when he asked me to write the Foreword to his book. Some years ago, I attended a lunch in Canberra for Margaret Thatcher.. In a conversation with me, she declared: ‘Artists are the only survivors! We can give them everything or we can give them nothing and they survive!’ I asked her not to mention this to any politician present, lest her words be used to give the artist nothing. I believe that any politician who may read Antony’s book would be inspired to give the artist everything. Most of the people who were interviewed for Many Faces of Inspiration are, like Antony himself, friends of mine. Ross Edwards is one of my closest friends. What I especially like about the book is the wide range of people interviewed. Sadly, some are no longer with us. Their words keep alive their memory. What I also like about the book is the abundance of information that it contains, much of it quite new to me. Indeed, I found myself being continually surprised and continually eager to read more of it. While the makers of art define nation and place, they can achieve little without loving commitment to their work. In his Introduction, Antony states that writing the book was ‘a true labour of love.’ This is one of the many reasons that I cherish it.

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 2 2/09/10 4:52 PM Introduction-

Introduction

n a speech at a TED conference in 2006, that passionate advocate for greater creativity in education, Sir Ken Robinson, told the story of the little girl asked by her teacher what she was drawing. She replied Ishe was drawing a picture of God. The teacher said that nobody knew what God looked like. The little girl responded: “They will when I’ve finished.” The girl’s innate understanding of what she was doing exemplifies the inner belief, sometimes unconscious, of really creative people. Tania de Jong, singer, activist and founder of Creativity Australia, told me a recent international study showed that people lose 98% of their creative behaviour by the age of 25, and this loss of creativity starts when children go to school. Luckily, she says, the loss of creativity in the edu- cative process is not necessarily permanent; much of her present work is dedicated to helping people get back in touch with their creative instincts. Having worked in the arts and around artistic people for many years, I have long been intrigued by the insights, motivation and processes of creative people. What is it that inspires certain people to do or make such extraordinary work; how does an artist’s imagination conjure up such unique images often beyond his or her life experience? Is there some intrinsic quality in an artist’s imagination and resultant work that is frequently transformative to the reader, listener or observer — whether in a positive or negative sense? Asking these questions presumes there are answers. But the very notion of creativity with its unpredictable outcomes acts against easy answers — any answers. The idea of finding an explanation for how it works, let alone a formula, is repugnant. Nevertheless, I have found it fascinating to observe the myriad different ways in which the clever and remarkable people, whose creativity is the subject of this book, tap into their talents and achieve wonders. Despite my deep suspicion of explanations, there are some recurring characteristics, though that is perhaps too strong a word: ‘hints’ might be more appropriate. One quality I consistently observe is complete lack of hubris, or put more positively, a consistent modesty or humility, though usually accompanied by deep conviction in the essential value of what is being done.

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Another is the apparent phenomenon of the work producing itself; the supremely intuitive process where the artist is being carried along by the momentum of the idea without willing its outcome. In the chapter on David Malouf, he says when he was writing his novel An Imaginary Life, at one stage he was unsure where the story should head until he looked back and found the solution already existed in what had been written, as if the story was writing itself. Tony Bilson says that when his senses are totally concentrated on preparing food, when he is the ‘zone’, he can sometimes detect flavours and smell aromas that exist outside the room, beyond normal sensory perception. Another consistent theme with many of the people with whom I have talked, is the struggle they have been through to adequately express themselves, or to achieve what they set out to do. Leading composer Ross Edwards spent most of the early part of his life fruitlessly striving to express the sounds in his mind into a form that could be written on a page. Nearing 70 and one of the world’s finest pianists, Stephen Kovacevich still drives himself to endless hours of grinding practice to bring certain passages to the level of perfection he demands. Some of the people I have written about in this book are not artists or arts practitioners, but have devoted large parts of their life and energy towards helping and facilitating artists and the arts. Their effort has been just as prodigious and committed. Rodney Seaborn was a pioneering psychiatrist and it was not until he retired at the age of 65 that he allowed himself to indulge his life long passion for the theatre and spend the next 30 years as an incredibly generous theatrical philanthropist and archivist. Ken Tribe who died recently aged 96, was undoubtedly one of Australia’s great men. For over 50 years he served Australian music in the most self- less, generous and creative way. n Australians tend to be more interested in what is happening today and what might happen tomorrow rather than reflect on what happened yesterday. Perhaps it is our warm sunny climate and our delight in a hedonistic lifestyle that makes us so eager to look for the next diversion and forget about what we enjoyed, impressed us, or even disliked last week. In the artistic world, we love to set up our homegrown heroes,

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often before they have delivered real substance. Equally, we love to strike them down, or more likely, forget about them when the next hero comes along. It is even more painful that so many Australian artists are forgotten despite careers of great distinction and previous celebration. Many Australians have worked tirelessly to remember and celebrate our often neglected past heroes, none more so than Judy White, noted social historian, writer, publisher and archivist. The idea for this book came from Judy who is an inspiration in herself. With seven children and at last count, nineteen grandchildren, she is the matriarch of the historic Belltrees property in the Upper Hunter Valley where she has created a remarkable archive of the history of the pioneering White family together with comprehensive collections of historic artifacts and memorabilia of the property and the district. Judy originally encouraged me to record a series of interviews with leading Australian artists and people who have contributed to the arts so that their stories and their achievements were not lost. n It has been a true labour of love in undertaking this task; for me it has been both a revelation and a privilege that everyone has been so open and frank in responding to my questions about their lives and their ideas. When I started out on this project, I was concerned that creative people would resist talking intimately to a stranger about their motivations and their passions. This concern established the first criterion in my approach to people to interview: in order to surmount that first hurdle of trust, I decided I should be known to each person I approached, though not necessarily a close friend. More importantly, it was essential that I admired their work and the guiding principles each seemed to follow. Other considerations followed naturally. I wanted to deal with people from as many aspects of artistic endeavour as possible, while obviously influenced by my own long experience of being a lover of the arts, especially music, and an arts worker. I wanted to include not only artists, but also notable people working for the arts; I wanted to include young artists and artists with a lifetime of achievement behind them, as their respective views on creativity may be so different. I was attracted to the idea of contrast: to talk to two successful composers,

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or to two successful actors to try to understand the contrasting roads to realisation within the same field. Above all, I was intrigued by the contrast between succès d’estimeof a person well known for his or her achievement and the interior kind of inspiration of a person less well known or even unknown to the public. My method has been to allow each person’s voice to speak directly of his or her own thoughts and ideas. My self-imposed task was to give a context and shape to these thoughts, but not to make personal judgements on their work. In setting a context for each person’s experience, I have tried to avoid writing mini-biographies, though some biographical element is necessary. In the end, most of these notions and processes have disappeared for me in the pleasure of following the personal paths of the 29 remarkable individuals in this book. I am immensely grateful to all of them for allowing me to look into their lives. Antony Jeffrey

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Notes on Recordings

ver the past ten years I have recorded over 100 interviews with the people who are the subject of this book and with many Oothers involved in the arts. It seems to me that listening to these people speak adds an extra dimension to what they have to say; the sound of the voice, the accent, the inflexion and tone all add to the meaning and emotional impact of what is said. Accordingly, I have edited brief extracts from the recorded conversations and uploaded them on the book’s website manyfacesofinspiration.com where they can be listened to at no cost. In addition to the recorded conversations, I have recorded poems and speeches from plays read by some of the people interviewed. Also I have looked for recordings not currently in circulation of some of the singers involved. Much of this material is not only fascinating in casting light on the lives and talents of the people concerned, but is also precious and unique. I have included on the website several private or otherwise unavailable recordings which I particularly commend to the listener. These include:

Dinah Shearing — Mary Tyrone’s concluding speech from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, recorded at the Independent Theatre in 2003 by Warwick Ross, courtesy Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust David Malouf — Reading by the poet of his poem Beside the Sea, recorded 2010 John Shaw — Anecdote recalling the premiere of Stefan Haag’s production of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride at the Elizabethan Theatre, Newtown in 1957, recorded in 2002 Geoffrey Chard and Marjorie Conley —Recorded in honour of the late Marjorie Conley from a memorial broadcast in 1959 of the English folk song I will give you the keys of Heaven Robert Gard — Tamino’s aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute recorded with the Victoria State Opera Orchestra conducted by Andrew Greene.

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The work of the various composers, singers and musicians included in this book is generally available on a range of commercial recordings, but there are several that are particularly interesting in terms of the book’s content. I recommend:

Joan Carden Great Opera Heroines with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Roderick Brydon (in particular Tatyana’s Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky‘s Eugene Onegin) — Walsingham Classics WAL 8026-2CD

Geoffrey Chard Richard Meale’s opera Voss with soloists, Australian Opera Chorus and Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Stuart Challender — Philips 420928

Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith Boojum! with soloists and Sydney Philharmonia Motet Choir conducted by John Grundy — Vox Australis VAST010-2

Ross Edwards and William Barton Kalkadunga Yurdu, with William Barton and the Song Company directed by Roland Peelman (in particular Ross Edwards’ Southern Cross Chants) — available from the Song Company on (02) 8272 9500

Helena Rathbone JS Bach’s Concerto for two violins, with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra — ABC Classics 476 5691

Stephen Kovacevich Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations Op 120 — Onyx 4035

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Author

David Malouf at home (Photo: Ojārs Greste) David Malouf

David Malouf is one of Australia’s most eminent writers. He has won many Australian and international awards and honours for his work. Poet, writer of short stories, novelist and librettist, he is known for the simplicity and beauty of his language, as well as the clarity of his images of people, their feelings and their settings. Born and educated in Brisbane and deeply influenced by its physical environment, he now lives in Sydney.

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n his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street, David Malouf meditates at length on his memories of the house in Brisbane where he grew up. He moves quite systematically from room to room reflecting Ion objects, colours, spaces and moods; this concentration on the physical seems to conjure up the people whose shadows moved through the rooms. Elsewhere David has spoken of his novels being like the spatial exploration from room to room of a house, rather than some chronological development. A very tangible sense of place, including both claustro- phobic interiors and vast landscapes, permeates his work. It seems odd that Brisbane is the source of inspiration for the heightened sense of space and location so redolent of his books. Brisbane, certainly as it was in the middle of the 20th century, was a mundane looking city, dusty and shabby, with paint peeling from its boxy wooden houses on stumps. Its sweaty heat rendered people, streets, parks and the big overhanging trees listless and enervated. It was a place where things seemed to happen somewhere else, a town from which clever young people, like David, needed to escape. Perhaps it was a boring, unexciting place to live; to people who lived there, Sydney and Melbourne had auras of almost unimaginable glam- our and mystery. But it was and remains distinctive. The combination of humidity, easiness, flowering tress, drenching storms, the river and the proximity of both endless white beaches and superb rainforest make it a city quite unlike any other in Australia. In the ABC Boyer lectures he gave in 1998, which he called and were later published as A Spirit of Play, David refers to the journals of the early explorer John Oxley who was overcome by the splendour of waterfalls in elevated country: “We were lost in admiration at the sight of this wonderful natural sublimity.” Though Oxley was exploring NSW, his response to the landscape holds true for David in the part of the world, south eastern Queensland, where he grew up. “I grew up in a part of Australia that presents us very clearly with the sublime. If you think of the Brisbane valley up towards Esk, or the Bunya Mountains, or that landscape behind the Gold Coast, it was grand country. In North Queensland, it’s the Atherton Tableland and Mt Bartle Frere. These are grand, green places. The idea of Australia as a desert landscape that we will eventually learn to love, is complete nonsense in

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terms of my experience. But whatever you feel about our landscape, in Australia we are always aware of the immensity of space, and how high the sky seems when you look upward. Even if you live in the crowded city you are still aware you are not far from miles and miles of open space. It encourages us to feel that the presence of other people is not oppressive, that there is room for everyone here. This accounts for the willingness of Australians on the whole, to accept wave after wave of migrants. I think America felt that too.” Oxley’s delight in the landscape he was discovering in 1817 was part of his own self-discovery and seems to have a resonance for David’s own work as a writer when in A Spirit of Play, he says: “… a landscape … can be brought into the world of feeling so that it belongs at last to the man who has entered it, so that it comes to exist for him, through the power of words, as a thing felt, and therefore fully seen at last, fully experienced and possessed.” While landscape and the setting of the landscape plays such a strong part in giving his novels and poetry such clarity and luminosity1, it is the people who inhabit them, who seem to be in the same room as the reader (even if that room is in Ireland 300 years ago) that give his work such intensity of feeling. Probably it is the stark clarity of the distant setting in 18th century provincial Ireland (Conversations at Curlow Creek) or on the Black Sea 2000 years ago (An Imaginary Life) that heightens the reality of their protagonists to a reader in 2010. David says he is not good at explaining how things happen, or how the process works in his writing: “I think, and most writers would say this, that when you sit down to write, you don’t really know what’s going to happen. You hope the inspiration will start to flow, but where it comes from inside you, and where you find the detail, is usually not accessible to you. All you can say is that as creatures, we lay down an enormous amount of observed information, most of which is never used. The writer is someone who is always observant, always eavesdropping and even a voyeur. Henry James used a wonderful phrase: ‘A writer is someone on whom nothing is ever lost.’ So what comes out in the writing as vivid detail, as really convinc-

1 David Malouf’s reading of his own poem Beside the Sea can be heard on this book’s website www.manyfacesofinspiration.com

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ing detail, is brought up from that stored experience, from experience that is analogous to what you are writing about. For example, if you are imagining a childhood in a remote place or time, you are still drawing on the experience of childhood as you remember it, and then you translate it to the place and time you are writing about. Of course it’s the same shift you are asking the reader to make. It’s a mysterious process. So, the more acutely aware you are in your own world of the quality of light and atmosphere around you, the more likely you are to recreate that light and atmosphere on the page. For yourself but also for the reader.” It is not only the process of creating time, place and character that is mysterious, but also the fascination shared by the writer and the reader with telling or reading a story. David wonders what it is in us, from childhood, that makes us so responsive to story telling. He suggests that hearing or reading stories, especially an extended story in a novel, relieves the constraints of our identity, our limited circumstances, even our consciousness of mortality. “There is something enormously liberating about stepping into a story and living outside our own lives for a time. One of the reasons we like stories and why children love stories, and why the novel particularly is so satisfying, is that they offer so much detail and are so subjective. Reading is a subjective experience, because we do it alone. What you try to do, as a teller of stories, is to make it possible for the reader to move around in the story as if it’s their own world. You have to give the story the dimensions of reality which will convince the reader that he or she is actually there, that what is happening is happening now and is like real life.” Over the years as a novelist, David has observed another phenomenon in the writing process that is both unsettling and intriguing. It is an extension of the idea of a story developing a life of its own, where he as the writer is given a blank page to find out what is going to happen next. The excitement and surprise he feels at what gets written on the page should also be there for the reader. But he insists this is not and should not be an irrational process; the story should evolve organically, even inevitably, from what has already happened and given the psychology of the characters. This highly intuitive capacity in him is shown when he recalls writing his second novel An Imaginary Life. At one stage he was feeling quite

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unable to predict where the story would turn next, until he looked back to an earlier point in the work and found the solution was already there, as if it were the text writing the story. He finds it even more extraordinary that the disciplined process of writing a long novel, in little disjointed sessions of about 500 words a day for a year or two, can somehow result in an elegant and symmetrical arc as if it were constructed in one gesture. Surely this is the result of a finely tuned intuition that whispers in the writer’s mind, not only what the next step might be, but shapes it within a subconsciously pre-ordained whole. He explores these ideas in greater depth in a long essay he wrote in 2008 On Experience, where he is concerned about the sensory overload of modern technology and communication techniques on the ordinary daily experiences in everyone’s lives. He also examines the terrible effects on people’s lives of some of the plethora of horrific events in the 20th century through the experience of writers like Akhmatova and Primo Levi. It seems to be David’s great gift that while he is completely a man of our times, he is able to articulate with profound understanding the innermost thoughts, impressions and feelings of people by filtering his own experience through his imagination. In this little book, when he describes what experience was like before the onset of communications technology, it is as if he is describing his own method: “….when everything that came to hand, came first-hand, out of a world that was always in reach; when to make any discovery at all of what surged and spawned and swarmed around you, of how things worked, you had to be all eyes and ears for the immediate detail and effect, since your only source of knowledge was looking and listening. Looking closely and giving yourself time to take in the smallest deviations and differences. Listening. Listening in”. n David Malouf lives in a spacious but simply furnished terrace house in an inner suburb of Sydney close to Sydney University. It has a large double living room at the front, ideal for gatherings of friends. Writers are often said to be solitary beings, cut off from normal life and who live unevent- ful lives. David puts the lie to this notion. He is gregarious, has many friends, goes out frequently and attends many performances. He has a

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quiet , relaxed and direct manner, a smile always playing around his eyes, and a characteristically light gravelly timbre to his voice and laugh that always seems sympathetic and reassuring. For long parts of his earlier adult life he taught, at schools in England and at Sydney University, and built up a friendly and sociable lifestyle that interfered with his aim to write a novel, though he had a reputation as an outstanding poet long before Johnno, his first novel, appeared. He wrote Johnno in a borrowed flat in Italy while on a six month sabbatical from his university teaching, a task he had been trying to set for himself for ten years. He says he can get the first draft of a poem down in fifteen minutes but writing a novel is altogether a different proposition. The experience of writing his next novel, An Imaginary Life was extraordinary, or perhaps unhinged, and something he could never expect to repeat. He wrote this wonderfully imaginative book, set 2000 years ago, in less than six weeks of sustained concentration while at the same time he marked 1,000 HSC English papers and 700 first year poetry papers. He says writing that book was freakish and should have left him brain- dead, but what it did was bring to him an understanding that he needed to get away from the daily life he enjoyed so much, go to a place where he would not be distracted, and find out whether he had the capacity to be a full time writer and novelist. David knew there was no point in going anywhere in Australia or England where he would quickly fall into the trap of mixing in the literary scene, so he found a house in a remote village called Campagnatico, high in the hills of southern Tuscany above the plains of the Maremma looking out west to the Mediterranean. In the first six years he spent ten months of each year there, all the way through the long hard winters. He made friends with the people in the village, especially with Agatina, from whom he bought the house, and her family. In the memoir he wrote of his time in Campagnatico, he says: “When I acquired Agatina’s house ... I also acquired her husband Ugo, eighty two, and her sister Celeste.” David goes on to say in his memoir: “Agatina ... is bossy, bad-tempered, humorous, shrewd, a passionate defender of family and of all friends, and in the village much respected and feared.” He now says about his years writing in the little Tuscan village: “It was a very useful choice though I didn’t know it at the time. I had taken

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myself to a Mediterranean world which in some ways had always been my world though I didn’t really understand that. The little vegetable gardens at the back of every house were exactly like the garden my grandfather had created in the bottom of our garden in Brisbane and he used to tie up the tomato plants and the beans and grow the aubergines just the way they did in the village. I found it very moving that the daily way of life in a village like that probably hadn’t changed for 2000 years. Twice a day households came together, at lunch and at dinner, and they were clearly sacramental occasions where they gave thanks for the food they had grown.” The timeless familial experience of Campagnatico had a deep effect on him and was very important for his writing. It gave him a fuller understanding of his own sensibility and how it was influenced by his family background, which in some respects had parallels with what he saw in Italy. His paternal grandparents were Lebanese Christians who had migrated to Australia and arrived and settled in Brisbane in 1880. In 12 Edmondstone Street David has described his grandfather as: “Sometimes unshaven, often collarless, but always in a three-piece suit with watch chain and walking stick, he had a dignity that was disproportionate here.” His son, David’s father, was born and raised in Brisbane, left school at twelve and by driving trucks and later running a trucking business, became the sole bread-winner for David’s grandparents and unmarried aunts as well as his own family. While his father was a solid and dependable presence, his mother had artistic inclinations, was a voracious reader and a huge influence on David as he grew up. He says he would not be a writer, or not the writer he is, if it were not for his mother. “She came to Australia from England when she was eleven. Her family had a comfortable middle-class life in London but lost all their money in a bank crash in 1912, and had come to Australia steerage class and went to Mt Morgan and lived in tents where one of her brothers was gold mining. “She had known wealth and privilege long enough and never quite adjusted to the loss of that for her adult life in Australia. A lot of her reading was of books about the life, a ghostly life, she had known in England. I think there was quite painful nostalgia for her about a life she had lost. There are many people in Australia who have led lives like that, especially

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children of migrants. She tried to re-create this rather grand Edwardian life in our house in Brisbane. Such a sense of melancholy, loss and dis- ruption gets passed on strongly to a child who was as intensely aware as I was of his mother. I am sure it explains my interests, my facilities and obsessions.” Music was always important in David’s family and has become an abiding passion in his own life. He reflects that in his childhood and youth, there was little distinction between genres of music, or music for different age groups. Every radio station played popular music and light classical music. His knowledge of many of the standard classics of music was often through the introductory music for the constant radio serials, or from bandstand music played in the parks on Sundays. Both his parents played the piano and the family and friends sang around the piano on Saturday nights or in the car on the way to the beach. David learnt piano and violin as a child and played on Tuesday evenings in the orchestra that performed in the large room above Kaiser’s music store. “My aunt Frances was a piano teacher. I used to love going to her place as a child because she would play old pieces like the Battle of the Nations and from several operas she had in piano score, like Trovatore and Rigoletto. I loved the Gladys Moncrieff and Gilbert and Sullivan seasons, but my big revelation was the Italian opera company that came to Brisbane in 1948. I think I went to all their Verdi and Puccini productions. People don’t realise what a rich musical culture there was then. In Brisbane you could go to hear Dr Dalley Scarlett’s performances of the Handel oratorios and there was the Queensland Symphony Orchestra; but most important of all was the Queensland String Quartet which played in all the state primary schools and gave concerts in Brisbane of a really high standard.” Born of his deep knowledge and love of opera, David has been asked to write the librettos of many operas, notably Voss and Mer de Glace by Richard Meale and Baa Baa Black Sheep and Jane Eyre for English composer Michael Berkeley. “I would never have initiated the notion of writing an opera libretto but when I was offered the task, it was one I was really interested to do. I have seen hundreds of operas and I have not only seen them but I know many very well and I know how librettos work. Over a lifetime of going to opera, you get to know what the possibilities

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are, what not to ask the composer to do, and most important of all, what not to do as a librettist if you are going to leave room for the music. What I see most often in librettos that don’t work is where the music is pushed into the background by the strength of the drama. In the end the music must make the drama and the emotion — all the libretto does is provide the occasion for the composer to do these things. “I think it’s dangerous when you get works taken over into opera that are already successful dramas. Shakespeare is pretty dangerous; most operas based on Shakespeare have changed the text a great deal, such as Otello which I think is more successful than the play. Streetcar named Desire is such a successful play that you have to ask yourself what does the music add to this. Wozzeck is an interesting example of a really powerful play where the music makes it more so. But in the best operas, the music is always paramount; when I think of Peter Grimes and what I find moving about it, it’s not the dramatic circumstances, it really is the music that makes it so memorable.” In an interview some years ago with Michael Berkeley on a BBC program called Private Passions, David refers to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro as the ultimate example of how the simplest words can be transformed into wonderful music, and that the words’ simplicity is essential to allow the music to rise to another dimension of experience. At the end of the opera, when all the protagonists are exhausted from the cheating, dissembling and game playing, a few simple words: Tutti contenti saremo così (All should be made happy) herald in the music the most sublime transformation of forgiveness. He is probably being too modest about his contribution to modern opera through his libretti. Voss, based on Patrick White’s novel, is generally regarded as the most coherent and powerful example of Australian opera in recent times. David’s libretto brilliantly solves in a most theatrical way the dilemma of the opera’s key relationship between Voss and Laura, separated for most of the action by half the distance of the conti- nent. His libretto for Michael Berkeley’s Baa Baa Black Sheep is based on a horrifying Rudyard Kipling story of Kipling’s own experience as a child of being sadistically treated and shut away when sent home to England to be educated, while his parents remained in India. How to portray the terror and claustrophobia of this story on stage was a conundrum until

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David had the insight to link it with another story. The opera focuses on the child’s imaginings of The Jungle Book thus transforming the drama into a theatrical tour de force. n The invitation to give the ABC’s prestigious six part Boyer lectures in 1998, gave David the opportunity to work out his own response to Australia. He says: “You can’t produce really effective writing unless it engages you, and this was my way of working out what Australia is all about — and what I am about. I wanted to present Australia through a personal account of it, so that if I was talking about its architecture, it was drawing on my own experience of its architecture.” The published book of the lectures, A Spirit of Play, presents an optimistic view of the country, rather at odds with contemporary attitudes about Australia as burdened with climate change, terrorism, illegal immi- gration, financial meltdown and political cynicism. In the 1990s, David observed that the question of national identity and Australia’s place in the world was very strong, but now feels it is not regarded as so important. “But I’ve always challenged the idea that we have a short and dark history. 200 years is a long history in terms of lives lived. I also wanted to write against the idea of our history that is promoted in, say, The Fatal Shore. That we had a second rate beginning as a forced settlement by the dregs of society, in contrast to the settlement of the United States by people who were leaving Europe to find a better life and to establish the ‘just’ society. In fact what developed from our first settlement was a very successful society. Australia was an Enlightenment experiment, not only in the making of a colony but also in the redemption of individual lives.” He develops this lighter view of our past with reference to early examples of our love of entertainment, our ‘spirit of play.’ He reminds us that at Christmas on the first fleet, a month before arrival at Sydney Cove, the convicts put on a performance on board one of the ships, and shortly after settlement, a popular theatre was built, suggesting a liveliness and hopefulness in the fledgeling community. He says about us: “We are more sardonic and cynical than Americans and don’t have their naive optimism. We are more likely to question easy readings of things; our sense of humour is inclined to black humour, and often comes out

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of joking in the face of adversity. We are playful and tend to kick up our heels when things go wrong; I don’t think we are melancholic, but we are sceptical and ironic.” Qualities of liveliness and hopefulness saturate David’s work in humane and affectionate celebration of the ordinary people around us and the places where they live, but he laments the failure of our education system to provide knowledge of the past that led to our present. “For history, kids at school now only do something called social studies, so they might look at the role of women in society at various times, or they look at issues regarded as essential in society. None of them is given a chronological view of our history; they have no idea of what preceded where we are now, that one thing evolves out of another, of history as a continuous process.” He sees this as not restricted to Australian education, but as a very destructive phenomenon of post-modernist attitudes in universities everywhere, that hold that all value judgements are false and one of the ways to avoid them is to destroy the idea of society’s experience as a continuum. n David suggests most writers, as they get older, grow less patient with the slow accumulation of detail in a novel and are more attracted to succinct- ness. “Novelists love great density and detail, what Nabukov once called ‘the lovely irrelevancies’ where the novel most resembles life. But if you are thinning out the texture of the work, you have to be careful it doesn’t lose its imaginative quality or its intensity. There is a kind of wonderful excitement when you are starting on a novel; suddenly everything happening around you seems intended for your novel. Especially when you are younger, you are less self-conscious and less aware of the body of work as a context for what you are writing. You are simply more daring and open to letting everything happen. That’s the quality that’s different when you are older; you try not to be self-conscious about your past work, but unless it extends the achievement of what you have already done, there seems little value in bringing it into existence.” David’s latest novel Ransom is short and has a transparency absent from some of his longer and more detailed earlier novels. Set during the Trojan wars of antiquity, it certainly lacks neither intensity nor imagina-

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tion. Surely his highly self-critical instinct will not preclude the appearance of more small (or large) masterpieces. N

Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 20 2/09/10 4:52 PM Kenneth W Tribe

Australia’s Musical Mentor

Ken Tribe in his study. (Photo: Paolo Totaro) Kenneth W Tribe

In the Australian world of music, Kenneth W Tribe AC was widely recognised as a figure of the most profound and beneficial influence. Having practised the law all his working life, he spent over 50 years working in a voluntary capacity helping to create today’s thriving musical scene. He died aged 96 in July 2010 after this portrait was written.

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en Tribe is a slight man with thinning grey hair, a prominent nose and a scholarly demeanour. He has a precise, almost didactic manner that perhaps befits a man who has practised the law Kfor over 70 years. This rather severe and ascetic looking exterior con- founds the reality of someone who almost certainly has more friends and admirers in the musical world than anyone else in Australia. As a lawyer, mentor, colleague or friend, he has guided and advised countless musicians, singers and people from every background. Apart from his many friendships, his farsightedness and generosity of spirit has transformed the Australian musical scene over the years. His achievements seem endless. He was the guiding genius at Musica Viva for over 50 years; he was responsible for the transformation of Australian orchestras to their current and flourishing public ownership; as Chair of the Australia Council’s Music board in the 1970s, he established the range of policies that set the scene for the remarkable health and diversity of Australian music. These are just the highlights of a lifetime of service to music. How does he do it? His friendly unassuming nature and the clarity of his thinking enable him to deal sympathetically and creatively with any issue, but would not have led him to such pre-eminence without his passion for music. Now in his mid-90s, Ken lives alone in a simple but comfortable apartment in the home of his daughter and son-in-law’s family in Sydney’s North Shore. His wife Joan is frail and lives in a nearby nursing home, but he still drives, attends Musica Viva concerts and lunches regularly with friends. But he has deliberately reduced his commitments for some years now and has taken a quiet pleasure in doing so. Always an avid reader, he enjoys having more time for books and takes the New York Review of Books which he prefers to the Times Literary Supplement and other book review magazines because of the quality and depth of the articles. He says: “I once visited the New York publication and told them I had been recommending it to my friends and they thought I was after a commission!” He laughs at the recollection and believes it follows from the quality of their critical writing, that most Americans in public life are also articulate public speakers.

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Currently he is reading War and Peace and recently read Bob Carr’s My Reading Life with pleasure, but deplores Carr’s failure to include any female writer. His favourite writer is George Eliot; he believes Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda to be among the finest novels in the English language. “George Eliot had one of the greatest minds of the age and her quality as a writer is shown in Daniel Deronda where Daniel’s Jewishness was revealed by his mother during the book and shown in such a positive light, despite the strong anti-Semitism in Britain at the time.” Growing up in Sydney, his parents encouraged reading and music. They sang in the Sydney Madrigal Society and he sang in local choir competitions. “When you are very young, I think singing is an expression of happiness. You think you are immortal and you don’t dwell on the whats and whys of life.” He loved singing in the choir at school. His father was director of Public Lighting and worked near the Town Hall and used to see boys playing around at the back of St Andrews Cathedral and discovered there was a Choir School at St Andrews. Young Ken was auditioned and taken on as a probationer, and later as a chorister. The director of the choir was Frederick Mewton, an uncle of Noel Mewton-Wood the pianist. Mewton was a disciplinarian of the old school, had no time for the 19th century English choral tradition and had them sing a great deal of Renaissance and Tudor music. “We sang for two hours every day, services on Sundays and occasionally on Saturdays so our life was very different from that for most school children. In 1927 I became head chorister and looking back, I would say the pressure of having to measure up and perform to a high standard for all those services and special events, even before royalty on one or two occasions, was a discipline few children would ever have experienced. A chorister was a semi-professional as a child.” Later Ken won a scholarship to Shore School where he found a far higher academic standard and came under the influence of LC Robson, the enlightened headmaster of the time, who said as the boys were privileged to come to the school, snobbery or discrimination would not be tolerated; boys had an obligation to give back to society. On leaving school, he was awarded a scholarship and was articled to a small law firm to start a career in the law. He says as a young person he was slow to

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mature and lacked confidence but gradually overcame these inhibitions. However, quite early on he decided he was not suited to the bar and aimed to become a solicitor. In 1939, with a friend, he sailed to Europe to see the world, as so many young Australians did and found himself caught between the rev- elations of European culture and the alarming preparations for war. He returned via the US and was staying in Daytona Florida with friends of a client of his legal firm when war was declared. He hurried back to Sydney and found that the head of his firm was ill and away from the office, and died not long after. Ken was thrown into de facto leadership of the firm, working day and night to deal with the work. “In 1941, John, the son of the partner who had been ill since I returned was admitted as a solicitor and a partner of the firm. The Law Society was asked by the Manpower Authority to advise who should be called up and John was called up and I was exempted. I was naturally relieved but working under the requirements of the National Security Regulations which overrode all other legislation made for a huge work load in such difficult times.” This became the pattern of the next few years with national security regulations decreeing the maintenance of the firm’s practice was vital. In due course he became senior partner. Many years later in 1960, he met Ervin Graf the brilliant chief executive of Stocks and Holdings, the highly successful development company, who invited him to become general counsel of the group. He accepted provided he was able to maintain working with his own clients. This arrangement worked very well but ultimately he withdrew from Stocks and Holdings and ran his own legal firm until his retirement many years later. n Musica Viva is the largest presenter of chamber music in the world. In fact its modus operandi is virtually unique. It imports the finest international ensembles on tours throughout Australia, runs a huge education program, organises music festivals, facilitates Australian groups to tour abroad and regularly commissions composers for new work. Founded in 1945 by Richard Goldner, a refugee viola player from Vienna, Ken was

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invited in 1949 by Charles Berg, a music loving accountant, to become chairman. Since then he has been closely associated, indeed almost syn- onymous with the organisation, as chairman, music director, and now as patron. Musica Viva is a thoroughly democratic non-profit organisation, having a national board, state chapters, highly expert professional staff and countless volunteers. Its reach and influence is enormous: with the fine music scene at all levels, with arts funding agencies, with artists’ agents the world over, with education departments, broadcasters, Department of Foreign Affairs and more. All this came from the most modest beginnings, and many of Musica Viva’s ideas, policies, strategies and generosity came through this one man. How this came about is a complex question, but those who know him well agree he is very adept at finding consensus with colleagues and stakeholders when dealing with difficult issues. “Power,” he says, “should be exercised for the objects of the activity, and those with power and influence are too often seduced by the pleasure of the power or the patronage it creates. For many years I was the chairman of the Adult Deaf organisation, and I used to find we were tempted to make decisions that the board felt were best for the members without adequately consulting or empowering the deaf people we were serving.” In music, he always thought new or unfamiliar music should not be forced on an audience; he liked the idea of the ‘sandwich’ principle where you program a new work between works by, say, Mozart and Beethoven. “You don’t rape the audience, you seduce them! Programming in an organisation like Musica Viva is the exercise of power, and even there you have to watch yourself, as you are inclined to think you know it alI. I felt it was important to consult with staff or musicians for their thoughts and to get them involved. Power is something that goes with the job and it has to be exercised with honesty and without self regard.” Perhaps his proudest achievement at Musica Viva is the schools program, Musica Viva in Schools (MVIS), where many of Australia’s finest music ensembles from many genres perform in city, rural and remote area schools across Australia to over 300,000 students annually. The program was proposed some 30 years ago by the then Musica Viva general manager Kim Williams. Ken recalls with a smile that the board rejected the idea, but Ken, as chairman, quietly told Kim to get on with it, the

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program quickly became a success and no questions were asked about how the decision was made. Ironically, his greatest regret at Musica Viva was his falling out with the founder Richard Goldner. Goldner not only started the organisation, but played in Musica Viva’s own quartet (the Musica Viva Players) that operated until 1951 when it was discontinued as it was found to be financially unsustainable. In 1954 Fred Turnovsky of the NZ Federation of Chamber Music Societies came to Sydney to discuss with Ken and his colleagues the idea of collaborating to bring out the Pascal Quartet from France and the Koeckert from Germany. Bringing out leading foreign groups such as these turned out to be both less expensive and more attractive to audiences then maintaining the Musica Viva Players. He says it also gave opportunities for local musicians to work with the visitors. He is convinced the policy of importing the best foreign groups has contributed to the depth of the chamber music scene now. Goldner moved to the US, but still retained a close association with Musica Viva. Unfortunately he resented a statement Ken made in one annual report that Goldner wanted to re-establish Musica Viva’s own quartet. Ken admits he was at fault for not putting the remarks in the proper context. “He was critical about what I said and from then on was hostile towards me, which was a great shame after our long association. Later on when I became music director as well as chairman, he accused me of becoming Faustian. He should have known me better than that as I don’t have those sort of prideful ambitions, and I voluntarily stepped down as chair soon after. He died a few years later and unfortunately we never made it up.” It is remarkable to reflect that the depth and substance of his work at Musica Viva was matched by groundbreaking work as chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council, chair of the Council of Sydney College of the Arts, a commissioner of the ABC and other tasks at the same time as running a busy law practice. Eventually he decided he would taper off his law practice as his clients became more familiar with his younger partners. Ken’s work as chair of the Australia Council’s Music Board came

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during the advent of the Whitlam government in 1972 and the huge fillip to arts funding through the establishment of the Australia Council. For the arts, they were exciting but contentious times with many new funding initiatives, but the rampant inflation of the mid-70s dampened the enthusiasm and some of the newly funded companies soon got into trouble. He met the composer Don Banks who had returned from living in the UK and had been asked to head up the new Council’s music arm. Banks thought Ken could bring a more national perspective to the Council’s Music Board and got him appointed to the board. Don was not in good health and after a while he asked Ken to take over the Chair though remained on the Board himself. “For the first six months of the Board, I agreed with Don that ‘the action was out there’ and that after all, we were new to the game and we needed to learn what was happening before setting up our funding policies. We had some ideas of our own but we wanted to listen to what the people in the music business felt the priorities were. We were ‘enablers’ and we liked to encourage outsiders to set up the necessary structures for music.” The big test came from the very first meeting of the Music Board with a proposal to set up the Australia Music Centre. Ken initially felt the concept was rather woolly and unfocused, but later it was conceived as an organisation to support composers. He found himself fighting hard against the Council for the Music Centre. The Council told the Music Board it must not tie up funds for the longer term, but maintain flexibility for innovation. “I said ‘innovation’ sounds great but it can be feeble or it can have real merit. The view seemed to be that everything had to be ‘contemporary.’ In the sixties modernism prevailed and in many ways the composers seemed to compose for themselves — I called it the ‘plink plonk’ period”. In the end the Music Board went ahead with the Australia Music Centre initiative in the face of bitter opposition from the then chief executive Jean Battersby. The Music Board had a very difficult job in establishing priorities between all the interest groups, and especially in balancing creative

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grants to individual composers and musicians with the need to maintain viability of companies employing many people like the Australian Opera (now Opera Australia). Part of the problem was that the Council had never defined the relative powers of the Boards and the Council. In other words, did the Council have the right to cancel some grant proposed by the Music Board? “We also had a real problem with the Opera. There was prejudice amongst some board members against the Australian Opera and much misuse of the word ‘elitism.’ I remember Jean Battersby saying that in considering the grant to the Opera, you have to take into account the extra costs of stage production, and this is an issue that arises in relation to funding of large companies. I had the view that the Council needed to take into account the special problems of large companies like the Opera and Ballet and the big theatre companies, and fund them on a basis separate to individual or project grants.” This issue became a major problem for the Council, and by 1977 the Fraser government intervened and the big companies were funded subsequently by single line direct allocations from government. Not only was Ken closely involved in the constant agony of the funding for the Opera, in 1980 the company was in crisis through the sudden departure of the highly regarded general manager Peter Hemmings, who had clashed not only with the Opera board, but also with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, then at the height of their ascendancy at the Opera. Charles Berg, his old friend and colleague at Musica Viva, was then chairman of the Opera, and asked Ken if he would step in and steer the company through the period until they could engage a permanent new chief executive. At that period, the company seemed to be in almost permanent crisis. In addition to the funding problems, and the controversial Hemmings departure, not two years earlier, the previous general manager, John Winther, a prominent Danish impresario and concert pianist, had also left under a cloud after a dispute with Charles Berg and members of the Board. Ken accepted the request from Berg to step in, but found so many problems that it was 18 months before he was able to hand over to a new CEO. “Of course I got to know the company and its problems much better and I found that the main problem was that the Board was not handling

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things well. They were treating the performers almost like second class citizens. As a friend, I wrote him [Charles Berg] quite a number of letters pointing out the issues as I saw them. These have been kept as one day they may be of interest.” In 1984, he was asked by the Cultural Minister’s Council, a body comprising the federal Minister for the Arts and his counterparts in each state and territory, to preside over a landmark review of Australian orchestras. For many years, there had been concern amongst both the musicians and the general public that the ABC symphony orchestras were demoralised and suffered from bureaucratic management at the ABC. It had come to the stage that talented young musicians tended to avoid a career in these orchestras. This was a sad state of affairs, given the enlightened efforts by an earlier generation of ABC managers before World War II to establish six symphony orchestras, an extraordinary leap forward at a time when there was almost no government support for the arts. The review also covered other professional orchestras, some of which had major problems, such as the two Elizabethan Trust orchestras that played for the Australian Opera and Australian Ballet. Ken thought ABC management of the orchestras was very lax. The interstate orchestras resented the fact that everything was controlled from Sydney, even to a great extent repertoire and guest artists. A number of the orchestral players came to see him and it was obvious that morale was very low. For example, there was no proper policy for dealing with what the ABC called ‘waning powers’. This particularly affected wind and brass players. People retired at the end of their playing lives with very little to retire on. It was recognised that change needed to take place but nothing was happening. In other parts of the world, the best orchestras were independent bodies running their own affairs, and it was clear this was the way for the ABC orchestras to go. The central recommendation of the Tribe review was that the ABC should divest the orchestras to independent public companies, and that all the ancillary assets should be transferred to a national association for the benefit of all the orchestras. The review also recommended that the Sydney Trust orchestra should be transferred to the Opera and the Melbourne Trust orchestra to the Victorian Arts Centre. “We recommended that the process of divestment be completed

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within three years by 1988. However there was constant argument and what I call ‘fiddling around’ about what the states and the Commonwealth should pay for, and it wasn’t until Keating became prime minister in 1991 that real action was taken. He arranged for extra funding for the Sydney Symphony so it could become a world class orchestra.” Over the next few years, all the orchestras gradually became independent, but there was a different solution in each case. He was pleased that the WA state government came to a sensible decision to redirect the opera and ballet funding to allow expansion of the WA Symphony from 69 to 88 players, and for it to play for opera and ballet as well as its existing concert and education activity. By then Ken Tribe was in his 80s and consciously trying to cut back his activities. He had stepped down as chair of Musica Viva and now planned to retire as music director. But he was in constant demand and he found it hard to turn down new projects. One was the newly established Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, where he was invited to become chairman of the jury. The competition was the brainchild of a leading Melbourne musician Marco van Pagee and was first held in 1991. Ken was chairman of the jury for the first three competitions until 1999 and remained on the artistic committee until 2007. After the first competition, where any type of chamber music ensemble could enter, it has been run in two streams: for piano trios and string quartets. It has become one of the world’s leading competitions of its type and has led to the emergence of many successful new ensembles, not least the Jerusalem Quartet which has been artist in residence at Musica Viva and a great favourite with Australian audiences. Ken instituted a judging process to avoid drawn out arguments on the grounds that all judges were leading professionals from around the world. He insisted that all judges submit their choice in writing after each performance with no discussion allowed until after judging was finished. While not an enthusiastic advocate for music competitions, he has played a significant part in their development in Australia. The Paul Lowin Prize, Australia’s leading competition for composers, benefited from Ken’s farsightedness. Lowin, a Sydney music lover, died in 1961 and left a small and obscurely worded bequest to establish a prize for Australian composers. Ken nurtured the bequest for nearly 30 years until

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the funds had grown sufficiently and the terms had been approved by the court to allow a viable competition. It has operated triennially since 1991 to deliver many fine orchestral pieces and song cycles for posterity. In all his work with boards and committees of music and community organisations, usually as chair, Ken Tribe’s central procedure always has been to seek consensus. This is no empty process; he is quite open in admitting that he has allowed debate to go on for hours, or to avoid taking a decision until he is satisfied that everyone has been heard and any disagreements resolved. He is prepared to explain the ramifications of an issue patiently until everyone around the table understands the implications and is prepared to accept, even if it means elements of compromise. Unless it is a formal necessity, he avoids taking an issue to a vote. Not only does this process avoid rancour, but almost invariably it has a constructive outcome. Sitting on one of Ken’s boards is a pleasure and colleagues usually become friends. n Questions about his personal taste in music seem presumptuous for a man steeped in music all his long life. Predictably his answers are pragmatic. His early experiences as a choir boy gave him “a depth of feeling for classicism.” By the time he was fourteen, he had sung Bach’s St Matthew Passion (twice), the St John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah. This experience as a child gave him a benchmark to discriminate between the finest music and the merely meretricious. He recalls that at that time they often sang Stainer’s Crucifixion, and even then he felt it was superficial in comparison with the great Bach and Handel works, even vulgar. He found many of the hymns they had to sing were either boring or maudlin, an example he quotes being Abide with me. In his youth he had an almost exaggerated admiration for instru- mentalists. During Eugene Goossens period with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, he attended many of its concerts and came to admire Goossens’ taste for many modern works and the larger scale works of the late romantic repertoire. Beethoven was also a favourite and he became an avid collector of at first 78 rpm and later 33 rpm records, including a recording of all 32 Beethoven sonatas.

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Chamber music he at first thought may be too difficult, but he was invited to attend private chamber music concerts and with Fritz Rice, an older European friend, started attending the early Musica Viva concerts. Since those days, his knowledge of the chamber music repertoire and understanding of performance styles, has become vast. At the most recent Melbourne Chamber Music Competition, he was struck by different approaches to the famous Death and the Maiden quartet of Schubert, and despite the generally high standard, he felt none understood the eloquence of a raw open string approach to the opening bars of the slow movement. He candidly admits his family life has been compromised by his busy professional career and the breadth of his commitment to music and the arts. However, he is clearly happy living in the comfortable flat attached to the home of his younger daughter’s family and takes great pleasure in the relationships with his grandchildren. “Quite a few of my grandchildren ring up regularly and come and visit. We chat about things and they often bring a meal which we eat together and watch a DVD. I really enjoy that.” He responds with a chuckle to the suggestion that he retired too early from his many projects and appointments, and that maybe he should offer himself again to a few organisations who would love the benefit of his wisdom and ideas. In reality there is no one who has given more enlightened energy and wisdom to music in Australia; every musician and music lover in this country is in his debt. N

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Actors

Googie Withers and John McCallum in front of their portraits by June Mendoza. (Photo: Paolo Totaro) Googie Withers & John McCallum

The McCallums have both been leading actors since the 1930s. Their careers have taken them to most parts of the English speaking world, and they have starred in countless works for the stage, film and television, frequently appearing together. This portrait was written shortly before his recent death in February 2010, when they had been married over 60 years, and were the world’s best loved theatrical couple.

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he McCallum’s house in Sydney’s Bayview is approached up a winding street flanked by tall gums and lush flowering shrubs and bushes hiding very private houses. Theirs has cathedral ceil- Tings and high windows, where the sun streams in from a colourful garden with the verdant expanse of the golf course over the fence. Their sitting room, like both of them, is elegant and furnished in the cool greens, blues and odd splashes of oranges and reds reflecting the garden. There are a few well chosen pieces and two beautiful full length portraits by June Mendoza of Googie and John in their early maturity. The rest of the house is off stage, cluttered with books, pictures, furniture and memorabilia, accumulated over their amazingly long and far flung careers. Now both in their 90s, they have been in the film and theatre business for over 70 years. But old fogies they are not. On making the first telephone contact to seek a meeting, John answered against the background of a huge din and shouted explanations that they were having a lunch party. Even relaxing in the light and airy sitting room on a peaceful morning, the phone is always ringing and every tiny disturbance is greeted by frantic barking and leaping about by Tibby, their hyper-active Tibetan cross who concentrates fiercely on both their faces to anticipate their next move. John McCallum and Googie Withers are the last of the legendary theatrical couples that dominated the English speaking stage in the mid 20th century — in the times when the casting of the Oliviers, the Richardsons, the Redgraves, the Cassons, the Liveseys or the McCallums guaranteed success at the box office and a long run. At the peak of her film career in the 1940s and 50s, before she was whisked away to Australia for John to run JC Williamson’s, Googie was one of the top triumvirate of British female film stars along with Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert, and many would (and did) say she was the most interesting and versatile of them all. John had all the qualities to be the true matinee idol. Tall, handsome, charming and blessed with a keen intelligence, all he lacked was the killer instinct to put his career first, front and centre. In 1947, he first met Googie. He had just completed The Root of All Evil with Phyllis Calvert, his first major film part, and was offered the leading male part in a new film called The Loves of Joanna Goddenwith Googie as the female star.

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She said she received a cable saying the film (about an intrepid woman farmer) was to be made on location near Rye and her leading man was to be an actor called John McCallum. Already an established star, she said crossly to her agent: “Who is John McCallum — never heard of him!” John’s father (also John), a short white haired man of 75 and a theatrical producer from Brisbane, was thrilled with John’s success and came to England and went down to Rye to see him on the set. John was held up in London, but his father met Googie, introduced himself as John McCallum and she almost fell over with horror — not only was he unknown, but he was old! After this inauspicious start, long delays caused by bad weather allowed a romance to develop and shortly after they were married. John was brought up in Brisbane, where his father was the organist of the Ann St Presbyterian Church. Each year his father conducted The Messiah and through his entrepreneurial talent, took over the Cremorne, Brisbane’s best known live theatre. John (senior) was a great believer in comedy and a new show was presented each week at the Cremorne. McCallum senior was both a rival and a colleague of the Tait brothers (J & N Tait was one of Australia’s leading theatrical entrepreneur companies that was eventually to take over JC Williamson), and with his musical expertise, collaborated with the Taits to present great artists like Melba, Pavlova, Chaliapin, Paderewski, Galli Curci and Sousa. Thus John was immured from an early age in many aspects of show business. As a young person he often met Melba who was his father’s most difficult artist. “I remember very well Melba marching into my father’s office with her big picture hat and puffed sleeves like Cutty Sark under full sail. He used to say she was on stage barely five minutes before she knew what the takings were in the house! Claude Kingston of JCW told me about one of her farewell tours which wasn’t selling well. She was on the train from Melbourne to Sydney and as usual it stopped at Goulburn where the reporters met the train to interview incoming celebrities. Kingston met her there and told her the sales in Sydney were slow. So she summoned the reporters, hitched up her long dress to her thighs and complained bitterly of the fleas attacking her since leaving Albury. So the next day all the placards in Sydney carried the terrible message of the dastardly NSW fleas attacking the great diva: the publicity ensured her concerts were sell outs.”

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John had a passion for the stage fostered at Churchie in Brisbane: “I loved reading the lessons in chapel and for once everyone had to be quiet and listen.” So his father sent him to RADA in England. After graduating in 1938, he spent time at the People’s Palace in London’s East End performing small parts in two different plays each week for a pittance. By 1939, at age 21, he was at Stratford on Avon understudying at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and as luck would have it, Trevor Howard and Alec Clunes were injured in a car accident after over-indulgence at a party. With five hours notice, he had to take over the part of Petruccio in Taming of the Shrew: “which I hadn’t even got around to learning!” It wasn’t long before he was auditioned by the famous director Tyrone Guthrie and given small parts at the Old Vic. Guthrie told him he was bringing the great Granville Barker over from Paris to direct King Lear and offered John a part. He is the sole surviver of that famous production starring John Gielgud and with such luminaries as Jack Hawkins, Peggy Ashcroft, Kathleen Nesbitt and Faye Compton. His gift for story telling added to a prodigious memory for detail, gives a fascinating insight into life in the theatre before World War II. “Granville Barker was marvellous: he was a fine actor, writer, a revolutionary director, knew the texts backwards and had everyone eating out of his hand. Gielgud wasn’t really right for the part of Lear. His voice was too light — he was a tenor. Barker said to him ‘You know you should be an oak, but you are an ash’. Not very nice in front of the company, but he was right. Barker had tremendous authority, walked around the stage all the time, never sat down. His prefaces to the Shakespeare plays are better than any others, essentially the work of a practical man of the stage.” At the Old Vic he met and shared a dressing room with Alec Guinness, also at the start of his career and they became friends for life. It was in Guthrie’s production of Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier, that Guinness first made his mark on the stage with his special quality of facial expressiveness. When war broke out, John decided to return to Australia and enlist in the Australian army. After a hair-raising voyage in 1940 back to Australia across the Atlantic and through the Panama canal in a convoy, where ships around him were being torpedoed by U boats, he finished up in New Guinea fighting the Japanese. He hated the war experience and

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longed to return to the theatre, but he wasn’t forgotten. Guthrie made it his business to keep in touch with his young actors and maintained a correspondence with John that reached into the rain forests of New Guinea. “I wished I had kept his letters but they got lost in the war. I’ll never forget his advice to me when he wrote: ‘an actor’s bank balance is his experience of life and his craft is his cheque book’.” In New Guinea, he came down with malaria, was given leave and ran into EJ Tait in Brisbane who promptly offered him parts in musical comedy at the Theatre Royal. With the end of the war imminent, Tait contrived to get John out of the army, dismissed his reluctance to go into musical comedy and cast him opposite Gladys Moncrieff, who in her 60s was Australia’s great heroine of the musical comedy stage. He was cast as the leading man in Maid of the Mountains and Rio Rita, two of Moncrieff’s greatest hits. “It was wonderful after four years in the army to come on stage and wave your arms around, because if you don’t do that in musical comedy, nobody looks at you. Gladys had a great sense of humour and loved dirty stories — she would laugh on stage. We had a wonderful time, but after a few months I told the Taits I wanted to go back to England and take up Guthrie’s offer.” As it happened, Guthrie was away when he arrived back in London, but in no time John was auditioning for films and not long after, met Googie on the set of The Loves of Joanna Godden. n Googie’s experience of the war was very different: by then she was an established star working for Army Entertainment acting in plays, making (mostly) war films and living in an elegant flat in Portland Place. Life was exciting, though often terrifying. “I never went down to the shelters, as I thought it better to be blown to bits than buried alive. But I did go down to the tube stations as it was the only way to get about. It was amazing that hundreds and hundreds of people lived there on the platforms. Each had just enough room to sleep and have a little table for their belongings. And the trains would come in and people would catch it to the next station to visit their friends on that

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platform. It was terribly social!” Googie’s upbringing was also very different from John’s. She was born in 1917 in Karachi following a desperate flight by her Dutch mother from Basra where her father, a British naval officer, was stationed during the first World War. She spent her early childhood first in Mussouri in the Himalayan foothills and then at Chittagong in what is now Bangla Desh. She tells of the most vivid experience of her childhood: “One night our house in Chittagong was surrounded by a huge group of protesters carrying flares lighting up their faces in the most terrifying way. My mother and I were hidden away in a little room with a Ghurka carrying a huge curved knife protecting us while Daddy went out to meet them and found it was led by Gandhi. I was peeking through a crack in the wall and saw them sitting down on the verandah discussing whatever it was at issue, before they finally went away. Later I always thought how extraordinary that Gandhi came to our house!” Later she went to school in London and was determined to go on the stage and become a dancer. Her father and his very conservative family were appalled at this but her mother was secretly thrilled, so at the age of sixteen, Googie was taken by her mother to be auditioned for the chorus of a West End musical directed by Leslie Henson, for which she was immediately accepted. “There were twelve of us in the chorus and I created a sensation one day. I was mad about one of the actors, though of course he never knew I existed. I always stayed downstairs to stare at this actor instead of going upstairs to our dressing room. It so happened that at one point we had to come on in our bathing costumes with Leslie Henson. Well for some reason all the other girls were in the dressing room and missed the cue, so when the curtain went up instead of twelve girls in bathing costumes singing ‘Hello!’, there was one little girl whispering ‘hello’. Leslie Henson turned around horrified and hissed ‘where are they?’. He then turned to the packed audience and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, at this moment there should be another eleven girls onstage, and why they are not here I have no idea’. And he took me by the hand and said: ‘But in the mean- time, this is Googie and it is her first show and I think she will go far.’ To this day I don’t think I have ever felt such mortification!

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“The show ran for a year at the Strand and each night after the performance, we went to the Cafe de Paris and did a floor show so that when I caught the tube home it was about one in the morning. My parents always waited up for me and had a meal prepared for me. And the next morning I would be at the barre by 10.30 for my dance classes — I worked terribly hard.” As so often happens, her big break came the next year in 1935, when through illness of the lead dancer in her next show, Googie stepped up and was soon offered a screen test by Warner Bros and a part in the film A Girl in the Crowd directed by Michael Powell. Despite it being a leading role (in fact, the girl in the crowd), she says with her famous smile: “Oh it was nothing really, just a quickie — I did about 30 quickies in the next couple of years before I was offered a decent film.” When the war broke out, Googie was by then an established star and was recruited to Southern Command Army Entertainment by the grande dame of the English stage, Edith Evans, who said: “I want Googie Withers as my ingenue.” The company toured all over the country, and Googie found Edith a delightful companion, though hardly the style of actress to entertain the troops. “We had a wonderful orchestra made up of mostly German musicians who had fled Germany on the outbreak of war. They used to play before the curtain went up and on the opening night at one theatre where there was no pit, they turned around and watched the action and you could see all their faces right at the edge of the stage. Edith was completely thrown by this and when she came off stage, she cried out in her regal tones ‘Those heads, take those heads away!’” Googie also acted in many films during the war. She admits it was very exciting and as a successful young actress, had a wonderful time. It culminated in her being appointed a Lieutenant and leading a tour of a play called Mrs John, to war-torn Europe. The company of five women and two men was taken in a troopship to Ostend in Belgium, a few days after the D Day landings in Normandy. Over the ensuing weeks the little company and its sets and costumes were taken in TCVs (troop carrying vehicles) following the invasion performing in all sorts of rough venues through Belgium to Holland. When they came to the heavily bombed and beleaguered Belgian city of Antwerp, she said:

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“We were put up in a wrecked hotel and played to packed houses in a quite large theatre. On the Saturday matinee we got a direct hit from a V2 rocket — it destroyed the whole theatre. I found myself in a corner of the stage covered in white dust and looked out into the auditorium and it was nothing but rubble. Twelve hundred people were killed but miraculously, all of us on stage survived. It was the biggest land disaster in the war and is still in the Belgian and Dutch schools’ history books.” n Googie and John’s marriage shortly after the war was the start of an extraordinary partnership, both at a professional and personal level. Both were now successful actors and the film where they met, The Loves of Joanna Godden, was followed by another important film together It Always Rains on Sunday directed by Robert Hamer, where John played a criminal on the run and she a working class girl, against the rather glamorous images that up until then, they had both been cast. Hamer insisted John do his own stunts where he had to run along the roof of a fast moving train and run between the moving carriages where he nearly lost his leg under the wheels! Both regarded Hamer as the best director with whom they ever worked, but his career was limited because of alcohol. John said about him: “Some directors are good on the camera and some on the acting — he was good on both”. Googie worked with Alfred Hitchcock on two of his earlier films. She felt he was a brilliant director, but didn’t like him, thinking him cruel to his actors. She admired the French director Jules Dassin whose most famous film was Rififi. In 1950 he directed her opposite Richard Widmark in Night in the City. The film was shot mostly at night and he insisted no one should be made up. She recalled: “My screen husband was Francis L Sullivan, who was very fat and Jules wanted me to stroke his hair and caress him, but he sweated so much and stank terribly, I nearly threw up. In films you are asked to do some awful things and this was one of them! But the funniest thing was one day when I was fluffing my lines a lot and Jules asked me in a low voice: ‘Is this your ladies day?’ I said ‘What! What do you mean?’ Apparently in America at that time, you got three days off when you were having your ladies day!” In 1952, Googie took over Peggy Ashcroft’s role in the huge success

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of Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea. Harold Bowden from JC Williamson saw this and asked them if they would like to take the production to Australia. This was agreed together with Simon and Laura, a very contemporary comedy about the advent of television, as yet not available in Australia. In 1954, they arrived, and as John put it, “The Sydney Morning Herald had a field day saying John McCallum left Australia a few years ago with a single suitcase only to return with a whole caravanserai of a wife, a daughter, a mother in law, a nurse, and seventeen suitcases.” The two productions, both starring Googie and John (who also directed both plays), were enormously successful and toured Australia and New Zealand for 18 months. The venture was such a success that on their return to London, Frank Tait of JCW asked John to become managing director of the firm in Australia. As Tait was by then over 70 and hoping to retire, he insisted John take the job for ten years. Googie had just given birth to their son, and after a lot of soul searching between them, he accepted. This was a watershed for them and was to completely change their lives. Googie says now: “I’ll let John into a secret: they told me at the time they wanted to offer him this job but they wouldn’t if I were not agreeable to living in Australia. I said go ahead.” In 1958 the whole family arrived back in Australia and set up house in Melbourne. He found JCW’s theatres very run down despite the firm being the biggest theatrical enterprise in the world. They had been depending on revivals of old shows for years, so he made it a condition of his acceptance that new shows, both Australian and from overseas, must be future policy. His first task was to arrange My Fair Lady for Australia, at the time a huge hit in the West End and on Broadway. My Fair Lady opened at Her Majesty’s in Melbourne in January 1959 in one of Melbourne’s infamous heat waves. The temperature was in the mid-40s and no JCW theatre had air-conditioning. The whole theatre was packed with people in full formal gear and John and Frank Tait went around shutting all the doors onto the street to keep the heat out. “Poor Bunty Turner as Eliza nearly died when they wrapped her in a rug after she sang I could have danced all night. At least it made it clear to the Taits that we had to invest in air conditioning all the theatres and upgrading the lighting. I even insisted we air-condition the offices, much

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to Frank’s great discomfort at the expense.” My Fair Lady was a huge success, and after a year in Melbourne, they decided to form another company to allow the first company to go to Sydney, so both companies toured Australia and New Zealand for years. An intriguing aspect of John McCallum’s personality, perhaps unusual for an actor, is his love of finding theatrical talent and creating the opportunity for it to flourish. His work at the large but declining JCW allowed full rein for new talent and new ideas. He said about one of his trips to the US at the time that he couldn’t wait to get back to the office. Perhaps he inherited this characteristic from his father and the primacy of theatrical enterprise in which the older McCallum spent his life. He is also passionate about the role of the producer in films, and as a lead actor in countless films, he should know: “These days they say the director is the essence of a good film. I don’t agree. A good film is dependent on the producer finding a really good script and engaging the right director for it. If he is the wrong person for the script, it won’t work, however talented he may be.” At this time John Truscott was making a name for himself at Melbourne’s Little Theatre as a highly talented stage and costume designer. John McCallum saw several of the shows he had designed and he suddenly knew who should design Camelot. Camelot was the next block- buster John had already spied — in a lavish production in a huge theatre in Toronto, though Frank Tait thought it was too big and wouldn’t work for Australian audiences: “Shakespeare to music.” But John went to see Alan Jay Lerner (writer of My Fair Lady) and offered him a low 9% royalty for the rights of just the book and the score, with the production to be designed and directed locally. John Truscott’s success with Camelot is now an Australian theatrical legend. He went on to design the phenom- enally successful Hollywood film after which he returned to Australia to design the interiors of the Victorian Arts Centre and ultimately to become its artistic director. Robert Helpmann went to the JCW Camelot, saw how good it was and persuaded Jack Hylton to engage him to direct and repeated its success in London. John saw the London production later and realised the Australian production had been completely plagiarised. Outraged, he

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said as much to Hylton who asked him what he was going to do about it. John said: “I want 2%”. “Done!” replied Hylton. Reflecting on Truscott’s success reminded John of his discovery many years earlier of Audrey Hepburn playing in a floorshow at Ciro’s night club in London. He was so struck by her elfin looks that he phoned his agent the next day who followed up and in no time she was offered a screen test that led to her extraordinary career. At the height of her career, he met her at a lunch and she graciously said to him: “You discovered me and I owe my success to you.” John was responsible for organising the famous Sutherland Williamson opera season in 1965 which started the stellar career of the then slim 23 year old Luciano Pavarotti. The coming together on Australian stages of Joan Sutherland (then at the peak of her career) and Pavarotti was nothing short of a sensation and they remained close colleagues for the rest of their careers. It was the last major commercial opera season ever mounted in Australia or indeed anywhere and involved a huge risk on the part of JCW. John was very concerned at the level of risk (JCW assumed 92% of the risk) but Frank Tait loved opera and this was the crowning glory of his career, though he died soon after. “I summoned all the press editors and told them that the three operas Joan was singing were sold out, but hardly any seats were sold for the other five productions. They took the point and gave us terrific publicity, and in the end we almost broke even and it gave a huge boost to the careers of many Australian singers.” Googie went backstage as much as possible during the season and was tremendously impressed with Joan Sutherland’s personality as much as her voice: “Of course she and Richard Bonynge had spectacular quar- rels all the time but she always stood up to him which is no doubt why they were such a success together. I remember on the first night of one production, they had a huge row before the curtain went up and in her big aria he pushed the tempo so fast she could barely keep up. She was furious about this and at the end with the audience going wild, she refused to bring him on for his curtain calls and his language had to be heard to be believed. I laughed so much I could hardly stop!”

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By 1967, live theatre was suffering from the advent of television as well as “rock and roll.” After the death of Frank Tait, the JCW Board was in the hands of people with no experience of theatre, so John, feeling very disillusioned after ten years, decided it was time for him to leave. Before he resigned he had persuaded the firm to produce a film of Nino Culotta’s best selling comic novel They’re a Weird Mob, about an Italian immigrant’s experience of living in Australia, directed by their old colleague Michael Powell. Its success and the recent success of television got John thinking about producing a television series. A UK producer Ian Warren said he could get funding for a childrens’ series. John says: “Lee Robinson, a friend of mine and I devised Skippy, about a boy with a pet kangaroo. Within a couple of weeks we prepared a pilot and took it to Frank Packer and a deal was done for: ‘as many half hour shows as you can produce.’ In the end 91 episodes were produced over three years and it was sold in 84 countries. Its success was enormous, but the nature of the deal with Packer meant most of the profits went to him. It is still selling today in many countries though the growing sophistication of children has reduced the target age group from 10-13 to 5-7. “We had 20 kangaroos for making the series as they cannot be trained like dogs and the best we could do was to teach an animal to do one thing. We even had a set of artificial paws which we filmed doing all sorts of tricks like playing the piano. The Swedes never bought the series as they didn’t approve of children seeing impossible animal situations.” John continued producing Australian films and television series for many years. Boney, by Arthur Upfield, was a series based on an aboriginal half caste detective and was followed by Shannons Mob, filmed on Sydney Harbour, a forerunner of Water Rats. Barrier Reef was a 39 episode series for teenagers about marine exploration. “When we were filming in Townsville, the Queen and Prince Philip sailed in on the Britannia. I decided on the spot to write and direct an episode where I got Noel Ferrier to play a mad anti-royalist in a speed boat trying to plant a bomb under the Britannia. As it happened, the Queen came out on deck to see what was going on and we filmed her. Of course Noel’s character was foiled but when I sent the episode back to London, our producer Warren was horrified and sent it to the palace who confirmed that you can’t make the Queen a character in a film so

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it was banned in the UK. But it was shown all around Europe with great success!” n During this time, John and Googie had moved back to the UK and Googie resumed her career on the English stage and in film. Amongst her film and stage work, she spent several years from 1974 playing the gover- nor of a womens’ prison in a very popular television series called Within these Walls. She found it one of her most interesting roles. “Before it started filming, I went to see the governor of Holloway Womens’ Prison in London and found that she dressed immaculately and had her hair and make-up perfect all the time. I asked her why and she said: ‘I always do it for my girls so that they can understand what life after prison can be like.’” For four years it appeared every Friday night to an audience of 17 million, and she become a household name accosted on every street corner. “One Saturday I got trapped in the lift when I was leaving the house to film an episode and it was hours before I could get hold of anyone and when they finally let me out I was asked ‘What’s it like to be in solitary, guv?’” What does it take for a married couple to share 60 years of professional show business success on stages across the world? Stamina, no doubt, as shown by their active retirement amongst friends and family, and their delight in recalling the high and low spots of their fabulous careers. They tell many funny stories but there is no bitchiness. But it is much more than that. Their passion for all aspects of the theatre and film business is palpable, as is their deep respect and admiration for so many colleagues. Recently they went to see the Belvoir St production of Ionesco’s Exit the King with Geoffrey Rush and she wrote to him afterwards saying how much she had admired his performance. Her own performance in the first London production (and the subsequent film) with Alec Guinness made theatrical history. In his reply, Rush said he would have fainted had he known they were at the performance. In 2002, they both played leading roles in a celebrated revival of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at their favourite theatre, the

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Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London with Vanessa Redgrave and other stars of the stage directed by Peter Hall. It ran for six months to packed houses and was their swansong on the stage. By then in their mid-80s, Googie played the grande dame part Duchess of Berwick and John the vacuous Lord Augustus. At the time he heard someone talking of ‘wab- bits wunning awound’ so decided he would drop his ‘r’s for the part and of course he got the best laughs. It was the perfect ending to two prodigal but indissolubly linked careers. The real key to their success, the simplest quality of them all, is love. It is obvious to everyone who meets them that they adore each other, and every day of their lives is lit by the presence of the other. N

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Actors

Dinah Shearing receiving the Macquarie Award in 1952 Dinah Shearing

Dinah Shearing AM has been one of Australia’s most outstanding actors. Most unusually, and at the peak of her career, she left the stage in her early 30s to marry and start a family in 1960. Since then her family life has been predominant, and she never returned to the stage on a full time basis. She is married to the artist Rodney Milgate and lives on the Central Coast of NSW.

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n the decade or more after the second world war, the main medium for drama, and virtually the only source of paid work for actors was radio. A generation of actors, many returned from fighting in the Iwar, grew up working in radio and in amateur theatre. It was the age of ‘little theatres’ of which there was a profusion in all cities and many regional towns. Work in radio varied from variety shows, serious ‘literary’ dramas, usually on the ABC, but also the famous Lux Radio Theatre on Sunday evenings, and the endless radio serials. The serials were ubiquitous: commercial radio stations would broadcast as many as ten serials each weekday morning from about 9 am at quarter hour intervals. They were essentially ‘soaps’ and designed for what we would not now dare refer to as housewives, as they went about their morning work of washing, cleaning and ironing for their husbands. Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories was perhaps the best known on the commercial airwaves. At the ABC, they went in for family ‘sagas’ such as As Ye Sow, followed by The Lawsons and finally Blue Hills which continued for decades. Any actor seeking to earn a living at that time survived on radio work, and survival was about as much as they could expect. Dinah Shearing’s brilliant career started in radio serials and amateur theatre, and even in the leading role in a popular serial, she would be paid one pound an episode. The one advantage was the variety and non-stop nature of the work: the almost non-existent rehearsal bred versatility and especially vocal technique. The modern tendency for actors to mumble, whether on stage or screen, drives Dinah mad — as if you are not meant to hear the words, just to soak up the total atmosphere of the performance. During her childhood and early youth, Dinah never thought of being an actress. At Sutherland High School on the outskirts of Sydney, she found she had a natural coloratura singing voice. She pursued singing lessons with a passion up to the stage of an A Mus A where she was patted on the head by Eugene Goossens himself and told: “When you are old enough to sing Queen of the Night, and Sydney has a place where it can be staged, you will be splendid in the role.” Her parents were English, but on a trip to Australia had decided in due course they would emigrate. Dinah was a precious last child, more than a decade younger than her two sisters and went to a private primary school in England until she was 11. She was clever at the things

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she did, a very earnest child, always top of the class at everything. So arrival at Sutherland High, “sounding like the Queen” was a terrible culture shock. She loved to draw and the school art teacher was very impressed with her work. She suggested Dinah try for a scholarship to the National Art School. Not trusting her parents to agree with the idea, she forged her mother’s signature on the application and got the scholarship. Her astonished parents dubiously consented to her leaving school at Intermediate level to start at the National Art School where she spent two very happy years. Real life started when one day she was walking through the then well known fashion store Curzons with her portfolio. One of the assis- tants (whom she had previously met during a Christmas holidays stint in the underwear department) accosted her and demanded to be shown her work. It was all laid out on the counter when fate intervened in the person of the manager, who on the spot offered her a job in the art department. Her put-upon parents again doubtfully allowed her to leave the Art School and before long she was designing the shop’s spring show! She says with tongue in cheek that her childhood theatrical experiences doomed her to this arty precocity. “When I was a child we lived not far from Stratford-on-Avon, and I used to see Royal Shakespeare Company productions quite often but one of the first things I saw as a seven year old was a Birmingham Rep pantomime Where the Rainbow Ends. I fell in love with St George with his gorgeous blue eyes and shining silver armour who arrived in a puff of smoke to rescue the maidens from terrible fates. It was quite the wrong image to take through life as I fell in love with him then and there and never got over it.” She asked her singing teacher Margaret O’Reilly if she could audition for the chorus in the Conservatorium’s production of Rimsky Korsakoff’sSadko, her real intent being to ask if she could design the sets and costumes. That fantasy wasn’t indulged, but she was offered a leading singing role and a beautiful blue costume. The director was impressed and said she should take lessons in stagecraft. One thing led to another in rapid succession. She won the Actor’s Award, came to the attention of May Hollinworth, at the time a leading stage director of the mostly amateur, but highly regarded Metropolitan Theatre. At age 18, Dinah

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was offered the role of Viola in Twelfth Night. Photos of the young Dinah reveal a pale dark haired beauty with huge slanting eyes and a gazelle-like tapering chin. With her slender figure, deep silvery voice and almost-English accent added to her naive but steely determination, it was no wonder doors opened and people fell over backwards. In some ways it might have seemed a fairy tale of dreams come true, but the reality was rather different. Her adored father’s dream of Australia as a land of opportunity had not satisfied him. He was successful but had become an alcoholic. The family would sit at the dining room table for dinner, full of tension, waiting for the sound of the car coming up the drive, listening carefully to the sound of the engine as in this way they could tell if he was drunk or sober and what to expect when he came in the door. Kevin Brennan, one of Australia’s leading actors of the time, sent her a telegram at home telling her to contact Laurence H Cecil at the Macquarie Network. She had never heard of the Macquarie Network, but her mother said it was probably something to do with Macquarie Radio Theatre that we listen to on Sunday nights. Dinah dutifully rang them and immediately was offered a contract for radio theatre. She thought that would be fun so agreed to sign up. Designing for Curzons’ displays was also fun but that had to be discarded. Her first role was as the ingenue opposite great names like Peter Finch and Bebe Scott. On the night of the radio broadcast, with the cast in their finery in front of a studio audience, Finch appalled her by constantly grabbing her arm: “He held my elbow with such a grip that it hurt and I was thinking — this awful man, what’s he doing to me. I got through the scene and during the commercial break, he lent across to me and said ‘You realise what has happening little one?’ I was on the verge of tears and he said, ‘your script was shaking so much that it was thumping the mike.’ Well of course I fell in love with him on the spot.” From then on she did constant radio work, and while poorly paid, it was fun for a while, until she came to realise how hard the work was. She also worked with May Hollinworth’s Metropolitan Theatre in Reiby Place. She thought it more interesting and of a better standard than Doris

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Fitton’s well remembered Independent in North Sydney. Hollinworth specialised in international theatre, both classics and cutting edge plays and had a sure touch with casting, even selecting a highly successful Bottom for A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a workman with a fruity Somerset accent hanging around the theatre. “When I was at the Metropolitan, one night Lyndall Barbour [another luminary of that time] told me James Joyce was looking for me and I thought who is James Joyce, is it the writer? This little man with an Adolphe Menjou moustache was there and he said ‘I’d like to represent you.’ Represent me? I was so ignorant and had no idea what he meant. Anyhow, he became my agent and some time later he said he wanted me to meet a man called Hugh Hunt at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown which was being renovated and a new theatre company established. I went out there for an audition which was a complete disaster as I had nothing prepared, thinking I would be given a script.” Nevertheless Dinah really must have impressed Hunt who cast her as Viola in Twelfth Night and as Lydia Languish in The Rivals in productions that toured Australia. This was 1956, the year of the premiere of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the 17th Doll, the first truly vernacular Australian play, and the year of the Melbourne Olympics. It was also the first time an Australian drama company had been put together to tour the nation. These were great days for the arts in Australia with the formation of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (always known as The Trust) as both an entrepreneur and funding body for the performing arts, with a mission to create national opera, ballet and drama companies. Dinah recalls Hugh Hunt with great affection and admiration. He was Anglo Irish, with a deep knowledge of the theatre and had been brought out to establish The Trust. He was a shy introverted man, under- estimated by the local theatrical fraternity, and had an innate understanding of what was needed to establish the performing arts on a professional basis in Australia. The tour in 1956 with The Doll, the Rivalsand Twelfth Night was a great success but Hunt’s vision was to establish a national theatre company. His ideas were supported by Dr HC ‘Nuggett’ Coombs, Australia’s far seeing and most influential bureaucrat. Funds were found to establish the Trust Players, which was envisaged as a permanent ensemble of Australia’s best actors, directors and designers, performing

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both new Australian work and the classics on tours throughout Australia. 1959 was the first year of the Trust Players, but sadly it was like a brilliant comet. It did all that was intended and presented memorable productions around the country, but the cost of touring and maintaining a permanent ensemble was astronomic. After the second year it was abandoned: Australia never again had a national drama company. Dinah was a member of that elite company and had her greatest suc- cesses in its productions. Her performances as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical epic Long Day’s Journey into Night, a part where her character was 30 years older than her real age, were universally admired in a production that has become a milestone in Australian theatrical history. n Dinah and her husband Rod Milgate now live in a spacious house in a retirement village on the NSW Central Coast overlooking a large pond full of fat healthy ducks and other aquatic wildlife, She cares about (and for) the ducks and seems to know them individually. George, a large and forbidding looking lizard, lurks around the terrace and is fed like part of the family. The house is full of Milgate’s mostly abstract paintings, though he paints little these days. While he has enjoyed a successful career as an artist and his work is hung in most major galleries, he has led a varied life as actor, playwright and teacher as well. Dinah is now in her 80s but looks much younger. She laughs, speaks and moves like a person half her age; the mercurial quality that so entranced an earlier generation is alive and intact. The Milgates have been together over 50 years and it is intriguing to imagine the special qualities and emotions in their relationship that took her away from the stage at such a peak of youthful success. Was it a Svengali-like dominance by the ambitious young Rod Milgate, two young people in love ignor- ing career opportunities, or simply the maternal drive to start a family? Probably there was an element of all these things, but it also was influenced by external events. When she was first married, and became pregnant, Dinah was enticed to Melbourne to play Lady Macbeth in ‘that Scottish play by

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Shakespeare’ — it is theatrical lore that to mention ‘that’ play by name brings bad luck. It was worse than bad luck for Dinah as it was winter, the rehearsal room was unheated, the director was unsympathetic, and she fell ill and miscarried. She vowed she would never again perform when pregnant. She was also under pressure to go to England: her work with the Trust Players (especially the triumph of Long Day’s Journey into Night) resulted in all sorts of invitations including the Old Vic. Rod was becoming very successful as an artist and demanded her attention. She admits to having felt broody, and now speculates that all the excitement and tension of those frenetic years resulted in a kind of collapse of will. “When the babies came, I was very content to be a Northern Suburbs mum and really didn’t have ambitions to do any acting. Much much later I thought: what have I done? I could have gone on and done something really important. There was only so far you could go in Australia at that time. Of course that changed over the years.” While acting has played second fiddle in her life ever since, and her roles relatively infrequent, her work over the years by any conventional standard has been full of fascinating challenges. She spent two happy years in the long running TV series The Sullivans in the 1980s, played Man of Letters with Warren Mitchell and speaks highly of Michael Gurr’s play 100 Year Ambush. Later on she played Volumnia in Coriolanus directed by Gale Edwards which she hated. Edwards insisted she play the part without warmth or charm as a matriarchal despot, especially her great final speech of entreaty to Coriolanus. But she reluctantly admits “it worked.” In 1980, the prominent agent Bill Shanahan rang her offering a part in a film on location in Queensland. She was dubious about leaving the family and says, “Bill told me it was very good money and I would like the part, so I asked how much money and he said $12,000 for two or three weeks. I was so shocked that anyone could earn so much money for such a short time that I said: ‘That’s disgusting,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry I can get you more,’ and he did!” She has made many appearances on television series and taken leading roles with several of the leading state theatre companies, but some of her most challenging work has been in music and opera taking advantage of her music and singing training. She was invited to be the Narrator in

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Opera Australia’s production of Charpentier’s Médée and was delighted to overhear Richard Bonynge (who conducted) saying ‘Thank God we have a voice!’ Some years earlier she was asked by the ABC to narrate Stravinsky’s dance melodrama Perséphone in a concert performance by the Sydney Symphony conducted by Dean Dixon. She accepted the offer thinking it was a play and was appalled when she received a score, showing 80 pages of declamation in ancient French. “At the rehearsal he ran through it with the orchestra and it was so complicated I got totally lost. I thought there will be another rehearsal for me but no, that was it apart from the run-through before the concert. I went home absolutely sick with nerves. On the night I was taken into the conductor’s room and Dean Dixon was half dressed and he asked me whether I thought his trousers were long enough. He then asked what sort of perfume I had been wearing at the first rehearsal. I thought you nasty old man, you are just being provocative. So I asked him if he could give me cues for my entrances and he said he had a large adult choir, a children’s choir, a tenor and an orchestra and I would have to manage myself. Well I just wanted to be swallowed up and die. He brought me on and I had to clomp up those huge Town Hall steps right up to the top while they all waited for me. I stood there shaking, but at my very first entrance, he looked up at me, the pale eye in the black face and from then on, he gave me the nod — no gesture — for every entrance, and it was fine from then on, for all five performances. At one point I had to declaim,‘je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’adore’ and of course it was for him!” In 2007 she was thrilled to be asked to perform the old alter ego of Emilia Marty in Janáček’s Makropoulos Affair,a part where she had to sing sotto voce for the final scene while the principal soprano Cheryl Barker sang the notes in full voice as her own ghost nearby. Nowadays she has been directing a number of plays for the Actors Forum using both student and experienced actors, and has been delighted with the results she has been getting. She has directed several amateur productions on the Central Coast. She enjoys giving poetry readings and has been in demand for this on many occasions. Best of all would be to play Mary Tyrone again. She says she did

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it on instinct when it was such a success in 1959; it was terrible under another director in 1986, and now she knows exactly how the part should be played. n Australian theatre historians regard the early years of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust as a watershed time. Professional theatre of a high quality was being officially sanctioned and resources allocated. The Young Elizabethans was established as a schools company and the commitment to a national touring ensemble, the Trust Players, was fulfilled by engagement of the very best artists. Alongside Dinah were actors such as Ron Haddrick, who had been at the RSC at Stratford for several years, Zoë Caldwell who was later to become a star of Broadway, Neil Fitzpatrick, Patricia Conolly, Frank Waters, George Ogilvie, Ray Lawler and Madge Ryan. In 1958 the Trust asked May Hollinworth to direct the premiere of a prize winning new Australian play called The Shifting Heart by Richard Beynon. It was very topical as it dealt with the racism against Italian immigrants inherent in working class Melbourne. Similar to the experience of Summer of the 17th Doll two years earlier, the play was highly controversial and was toured around Australia with great success. Dinah, by then well known for playing the heroine in classic plays, was cast against type as the Italian immigrant daughter Maria. The review in the Bulletin eulogised: “...and Dinah Shearing in quite the best performance of the evening made Maria come to life in a way that held the emotional sympathy of the audience all night and left it too silent even for gasping when, kicking and screaming and tearing splinters out of the verandah post, she was carried upstairs to have her baby.” The Shifting Hearttour in 1958 came before the official inception of the Trust Players in 1959 for which Dinah was cast in no fewer than five plays, including Shaw’s Man and Superman and a new Australian comedy/ drama The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Dayby Peter Kenna, whom Dinah thought the most talented of the new wave of Australian playwrights. However the most important play in that remarkable season was Long Day’s Journey into Night in a production by the leading Australian director of the day, Robin Lovejoy. The cast was Frank Waters as Tyrone,

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Ron Haddrick and Neil Fitzpatrick as the sons and Dinah as the discon- solate and drug addicted mother Mary Tyrone. Always a perfectionist, Robin Lovejoy brought to rehearsal a full concept or picture of the play in his mind. In this instance the play was quite new; because of performing rights problems, the Trust told him a mere three weeks from the opening, that he was to direct this huge, four hour work. When he first spoke to the cast, Dinah remembers he said to them: ‘I have been given this play but I have had no time to think about it. I will give you a wonderful set exactly how it is specified in the script, so let’s read it.’ His direction of the play was minimal, possibly she thinks because the actors were so in sympathy with the parts and the ensemble — certainly she was. She also felt her technique as an actor was fully mature and allowed her to inhabit the character without compromise. The doyen of theatre critics of the day, Lindsay Browne, wrote: “The Trust Players’ Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Elizabethan Theatre last night was for many of its profoundly gripped audience, the most deeply moving and most beautifully argued Australian production of a powerful drama within memory. Unlike in New York, where Fredric March’s ‘father’ was always the play’s centre of gravity, it will be specially memorable here for its presentation of Dinah Shearing as the mother, as a full-range dramatic actress of commanding power and skill. Her portrait of this beaten woman, loving to live in the happiness of the past yet striving to do her duty in the miserable present, was art for the most critical places. This woman, trying to be strong against the ever watchful suspicions of her family that she shall weaken, emerged as the whole focus and meaning of the play — even the ‘mad scene’ at the end, where O’Neill so cunningly forestalls those who would criticise its theatricality by frankly admitting it through one of its characters……” There are interesting recollections from her colleagues at the time, from both her fellow actors and others who were there. Ron Haddrick recalled a day in Launceston after there had been a break in the tour for several weeks: “When you are playing this, it almost takes you over on its own emotional journey and is unlike any other play I have done. Robin sent down a message from Sydney saying you had better do a reading as there won’t

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be time for more than one rehearsal before opening in Adelaide. So one afternoon we got together in the foyer and the stage manager said: ‘just the lines’. Well within a couple of minutes, it was full performance and it sucked you in. It sucked you in. We gave as good a performance in that foyer in front of one stage manager as we did in the whole tour.” John Sumner, a pioneer of the professional theatre in Melbourne who went on to become director of the Melbourne Theatre Company for a generation, then was Sydney manager of the Trust and said of Dinah’s performance: “I can remember to this day the way Dinah spoke O’Neill’s searing words as she leant on a bookcase saying, ‘…none of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realise it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.’” The last word on that production should be Dinah’s own as she remembers a night in Adelaide: “I knew the performance was feeling wonderful and in that last speech she has that finishes2 ‘…. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy — for a time.’ she sits there with the family around her gazing into the distance. The curtain used to come down while we sat there and come up again with scarcely any applause for that final tableau as the audience is so shattered. Then it would come down again and we would leap up and link hands and take the applause. Well this particular night, we had four silent curtain calls and I remember saying to Frank Waters, ‘it must have been terrible!’ But one of the others said ‘wait for it’ and the audience went mad — they stood on their seats and we couldn’t go home. For me it was the best thing I ever did.” N

2 Dinah Shearing’s recording of Mary Tyrone’s final speech recorded at the Independent Theatre in 2003 can be heard at www.manyfacesofinspiration.com

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 58 2/09/10 4:52 PM Tony Bilson

Chef

Tony Bilson in Bilson’s Restaurant (Photo: Ojārs Greste) Tony Bilson

Of all Australian chefs, Tony Bilson is most associated with the French haute cuisine that has always influenced his unique style of presenting food and wine in this country. Through his life he has made friendships with artists, writers and musicians, as well as chefs from all parts of the world. For him, art, life, food, wine and friendship are indissolubly linked.

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n a balmy April evening at Circular Quay in Sydney, it is quiet and almost sleepy at 9 pm before the cinemas and theatres start to empty. Suddenly people start to converge on Tony’s No. 1, an Oinviting wine bar/bistro at the bottom of Goldfields House. The doors are all folded back and people are dining under the stars as well as inside; they look up surprised at dozens of people flooding in. The interlopers are from the audience of a Song Company concert that has just finished up the road at the Angel Place Recital Hall. A few minutes later they are joined by the singers, their director Roland Peelman and the guest of honour, Gerard Brophy, whose new work Gethsemane has just been premiered. Ten minutes ago No. 1 was half full of people quietly finishing their food or having a drink. Now it is full of chatter about the performance and people trying to get something to drink. Tony Bilson with longish hair, moustache, trademark bow-tie and rather rumpled jacket is standing beside his wife Amanda greeting guests. Their daughter Lily, who works at No. 1, is whirling around serving drinks. Tonight it is the Song Company, but on another night it will be a similar scene after an ACO concert, or a Bell Shakespeare performance. No. 1 is Tony Bilson’s latest venture and is very close to his heart. Amanda and he have set it up on their own without support from other partners. He has long wanted to have an informal, intimate place where people could gather regularly, have a drink, something to eat, and mix with an interesting crowd, and hopefully, a place frequented by artists. In a way it has elements of his first restaurant, Tony’s Bon Gout which lasted only two years in the 1970s, but made his name and is still remembered as an informal place for fine food where all the smart set gathered. Part of his motivation for No. 1 is his affectionate recollection of the crowd that used to gather at the bar of the Windsor Castle hotel in Paddington in Tony’s youth: “When I came up from Melbourne to live, I came to know some of the peripheral members of the Push who used to drink at the Newcastle or the Criterion. But some of us who were more interested in the visual arts started going to the Windsor Castle and we began to be called the ‘Baby Push’. There’s a famous photograph of us all with Madeleine Thurston on the balcony of the[old] Hungry Horse [restaurant in Paddington.].” The cosy atmosphere at No. 1 is in high contrast to the muted, high-

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ceilinged elegance of Bilson’s on the ground floor of the old triangular Bank of NSW building (now the Radisson Plaza Hotel) on the corner of Pitt, O’Connell and Hunter streets. This is one of the select few three star restaurants in Sydney, its white and pale grey tones highlighted with colourful splashes of contemporary art and asymmetrical paper mobiles hanging from the ceiling. One wall contains samples of a vast collection of high quality foreign and Australian wines. The expert help of the som- melier provides the diner with the ideal wine to match the choice of food. Despite his convivial and light-hearted manner, Tony is very serious indeed about the food, the sauces and stocks, blends of flavours and the selection of wines for each dish. While his ‘bible’ since childhood has been the classic French cook book by Escoffier, (though it is unlikely he would cook an Escoffier recipe now), his kitchen and his method are up to the minute with the finest equipment and technology to provide perfect heating surfaces, exact cooking temperatures and strict food hygiene. n Bilson is not Tony’s birth surname. His family name is Marsden; the Marsdens owned hotels in Liverpool NSW. He is a cousin of the well known lawyer John Marsden whom he has never quite forgiven for blow- ing out the candles at Tony’s third birthday party. His father died when Tony was a small child and his mother married Bob Bilson whose family owned a big store in Colac, Victoria, where he grew up with his stepfather’s family name. Almost apologetically, he says this was when his insecurity started: “I am quoted by my step-sister as saying: ‘My name is Tony Bilson, I used to be Tony Marsden and now I don’t know who I am.’ The Marsdens were Catholics though my mother was a Protestant but I was brought up Catholic. As was quite common then, I was sent to boarding school at Melbourne Grammar at the age of six. But when I was twelve, there was a court case to establish the moral rights of my education. My mother had promised my father I would be brought up a Catholic but the Bilsons wanted me to be brought up Protestant and go to Melbourne Grammar. So I was sent to Xavier until the case was decided by the court. It was resolved that when my stepfather adopted me, he gained the right to send me to a school of his choice, so after a term at Xavier, back I went

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to Melbourne Grammar. I boarded there until my final year when I was expelled for smoking.” This strange convoluted childhood had at least one benefit: to make him self-reliant. It also made him naturally attracted to the group and his gregarious personality brought him many friends. This self-sufficiency was even more important as many of his teachers had been at the war; some were traumatised and not equipped as role models for emotionally needy adolescents. His best experience at Melbourne Grammar was being taught art by John Brack who introduced him to the world of art, and through whom he met other young artists of greater talent than himself. The stultifying atmosphere at the school at the time is best summed up by Tony’s recollection of Brack, even then one of Australia’s leading artists, being summoned by the headmaster and told: ‘You are here to teach about art, not to teach the boys to become artists.’ “We had a flat in East Melbourne and I used to hang around Georges Mora’s nearby restaurant Balzac. Georges was an amazing character; he was Jewish and during the war he acted as a bagman with French farmers to hide Jewish children. Mirka [a leading Melbourne artist] was one of those children and he married her when she was only 18 and they came to Australia soon after. Through Georges, I met John and Sunday Reed and many of the artists and writers who used to meet there. While the Reeds were real Melbourne establishment, they represented a kind of cultural elite, not Melbourne Club conservatism. Charles Blackman worked in the kitchen and John Perceval’s angels adorned the walls. My sister Eril married the dancer Karl Welander so I got to know ballet people, even met Nureyev and Dame Margot. So outside of school, I was mixing in a pretty Bohemian milieu right from the start. “I was fascinated as an adolescent by everything French. I loved French films like Les Enfants du Paradis, fell in love with Brigitte Bardot and And God Created Woman. I loved the whole idea of La Belle Epoque, Le Chat Noir, the famous cafe, and identified with Henri Toulouse- Lautrec, the crippled artist who rejected his aristocratic background to paint prostitutes in the brothels. The Toulouse-Lautrec museum is in Albi, which is now one of my favourite towns in France.” Tony’s mother was a big influence; she had a wonderful library and was a great reader. Tony would devour her books, especially those on

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art and cooking. From Georges Mora and Balzac he was already passionate about cooking and had read Escoffier. His mother sadly became very depressed and addicted to barbiturates and alcohol and died from an overdose when he was nineteen. So Tony came up to Sydney to get away, got his first job at Johnnie Walker’s famous Rhinecastle Bistro in Angel Place, where one of the chefs had been a sous chef for Escoffier and another had run a fine restaurant in Nice. Tony started at the Bistro washing dishes, got on well with these European expatriates and within a year was evening chef. The fact was that at the tender age of 20, Tony was already familiar with the worlds of fine food, art and society. He loved and knew about food, understood classical garnishings and was offered good jobs where he learnt quickly. More significantly, he revelled in the company of artists and interesting people. As he says: “My life was really my social milieu at the Windsor Castle, and that was really important for me. In that bar every night at 5 pm I mixed with people like Martin Sharp, Richard Neville, Billy Rose, Robert Hughes, Donald Friend, John Olsen — it was a marvellous meeting place for people in the arts and gave us a great sense of cohesion where we could gossip and talk about all the things that were important for us. It’s missing in Sydney these days and it’s one of the things I’m trying to create at No. 1, a place where people can meet and interchange ideas about the arts.” In 1973, Tony and his partner Gay opened his first restaurant Tony’s Bon Gout and it became an instant hit. At that time French provincial cooking based on Elizabeth David’s books was the trend, but Tony’s Escoffier based contemporary French cooking was new in Australia. Both he and Gay later tended to dismiss Bon Gout as amateurish, but it was a landmark in the idea of fine food in Sydney and led directly to one of Australia’s greatest gastronomic establishments, Berowra Waters Inn on the Hawkesbury river outside Sydney. “Our daughter Jordan had become very sick with encephalitis and we had to get out of Bon Gout, so we decided to find a place out of Sydney. When I was a child, we had a house at Palm Beach and I used to go on the mail run up the Hawkesbury and I have always had a strong sense of identity with that part of the world. Berowra came out of our first visit to France and was our version of the French gastronomic auberge experience.

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I had always loved the idea of taking people out of their normal space and going through a psychological gap and getting a reward that creates memories. The workaday John Smith gets into a boat, crosses the river and is greeted as Mr Smith where he has a wonderful prolonged culinary experience. Glen Murcutt did such a fabulous job with the building and it’s just as fresh today as it was then. “One of the reasons Berowra is so special is its strong sense of Aboriginal spirituality. Underneath the inn there is a midden where the stones are dated as 5,000 years old. One day, in the second year we were there, we had Michael Leunig and Anders Ousback there on a beautiful clear day, and suddenly there was this sequence of 50 metre high water spouts wandering down the river like Aboriginal spirits. Then it clouded over and there was a huge hail storm that made the river seem to dance as the hailstones bounced off the surface and coated the river bank with white that stood out against the orange of the angophoras. Then the sun came out, there were more waterspouts and finally a series of rainbows. It was all extraordinary and I told Michael we had done it especially for him. Living out there is another world; it is so quiet and you can tell when anything is going to happen from the movements and cries of the birds.” Tony’s relationship with Gay had broken down and in 1982 he withdrew from their partnership in Berowra Waters Inn. At much the same time an opportunity arose that represented his dearest wish, establishing Kinselas. It was a former funeral parlour in Taylor Square and became Sydney’s trendiest venue, combining Tony’s finest French cuisine, live cabaret, and a meeting place where all the smart people were seen. “It was an expression of the Chat Noir, the famous cafe in Paris where the demi- monde gathered in the 1890s, Toulouse-Lautrec’s haunt. I was shown this place, Kinsela’s, which at the time was a front for an SP bookie operation. I asked Graeme Blundell to look at it and tell me whether the top floor was big enough for a theatre which he said it was. Leon Fink, who had been my landlord at Bon Gout, financed it and he operated the theatre while I looked after the food. Originally we had the bar and two dining rooms: the brasserie and a fine dining room in the chapel decorated by [New York interior designer] George Freedman.” Stories of the goings-on at Kinselas are legion; it was a place where everyone remembered a favourite experience, often disreputable. Tony

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laughs at the recollection of a night Leo Schofield (then Sydney’s leading restaurant critic) stormed out in high dudgeon, apparently in disgust at the performance by Divine, the notorious fat American drag queen who had been engaged for Kinselas’ cabaret. Tony’s career was soaring and his new relationship and subsequent marriage to Amanda in 1986 gave his life new meaning. As the 1988 Bicentenary approached, he was appointed by the State Government to work with architect Andrew Andersons to redesign or re-position 35 restaurants including those at Hyde Park, State Library, Sydney Opera House, Mt Annan, Art Gallery of NSW, Centennial Park and Dubbo Zoo. In 1988 he sold his interest in Kinselas to Fink who then helped him establish an haute cuisine restaurant, the first Bilson’s at Circular Quay. But his multiple interests, heavy drinking lifestyle and unhappy dealings with his backers were too much; he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1990 and was hospitalised. It took him out of circulation for six months; therapy gave him a better understanding of unresolved issues from his childhood and youth. His creativity and frenetic lifestyle had gone hand in hand, but he realised this could not continue and he needed to re- assess his life. He set up a more modest restaurant called Fine Bouche in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst. n In the last 20 years food technology in kitchens and restaurants has advanced enormously: kitchen equipment, cooking surfaces, preparation logistics and waste management have all improved rapidly along with the huge growth in public interest in eating out and eating well. One of the key advances in cooking is in temperature control. Cooking food at exact optimum temperature for a precisely measured time makes a great difference to the preservation of flavour and texture. Many of these advances have been initiated in the kitchens of the leading chefs in France, though these days the Japanese seem to lead the world in satisfying obsessively demanding diners with super-sophisticated food presentation. Tony Bilson is one of the first Australian chefs to wholeheartedly embrace these innovations. “I had relationships with some of the guys who had worked under Michel Guérard in France who did much of

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the original work on sous vide3 craft foods. Quite apart from what was happening in France, I had started to experiment with low temperature cooking: measuring the internal temperature of fish when it was cooked perfectly which is 54° and then cooking the whole fish at that temperature. At first this was a problem as there wasn’t very accurate temperature control, and that can be dangerous if you get the temperature wrong, unless the food is very fresh. But the technology improved and I got involved with some people to set up a production kitchen that became the Commissary Kitchen using very high tech processes to produce Michelin three star quality food.” At the same time, Tony’s investors in the Commissary Kitchen financed him in setting up a huge 500 seat restaurant calledAmpersand at the newly built Cockle Bay Wharf in Darling Harbour, again designed by George Freedman and with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Tony brought out some chefs he knew from three star French restaurants to work in the kitchens, but after a few years his investors found the combination of the big restaurant and the Commissary production kitchen too much to maintain. To Tony’s great disappointment, they closed Ampersand. “It was a fabulous set up. All the sauces and stocks and pre-prepared food were done at the Commissary to take all this work out of the high rent areas at Darling Harbour. Having all the major preparation and rubbish removal off site meant that food management at the restaurant was simpler, took less expensive space and avoided problems with vermin. Since it closed, the guy who was my chef de cuisine, Pascal Barbot, has gone on to become one of the most famous chefs in Paris and Olivier Rossi, who was chef saucier and did all the sauces at the Commissary Kitchen, has a wonderful restaurant on the canal at Monteche in the Languedoc. “The best thing about the whole project was that it really educated us in low temperature cooking techniques. For example we now are cooking pork at 65° which is acceptable for Australian pork eaters but Alain Ducasse4 is cooking it at 59°. There are other techniques related to this

3 sous vide, literally ‘under vacuum’, where the food is cooked or heated at a specified low heat in a vacuum sealed process to maintain shape, colour and flavour. 4 Alain Ducasse is one of the great French chefs of modern times, who has

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low temperature cooking such as searing the outside of meat after it has been cooked, rather than browning the meat first to seal in the juices, which doesn’t work anyhow. Another aspect is the use of highly pol- ished steel cooking surfaces which produces a much cleaner high quality appearance of the cooked food. All our cooking is done with these techniques these days; I even cook at home with these methods.” For Tony the secret of all the best food is the sauces and garnishings that give any dish its unique flavour. Contrary to the great Chinese stocks which are based on combinations of chicken, eggshells and vegetables, giving an intense flavour of chicken with an overtone of sake, Tony’s are based on wines. To make a chicken stock, in addition to the wine, he will add a small amount of vegetables but also six to eight herbs and spices in small amounts, some caramelised. Each of these elements will have a range of flavours though he says the only identifiable flavour will be chicken, but it will ‘sing’. Apart from these methods or techniques to produce the desired flavours, Tony relies on his intuition to develop combinations that produce a special or even unique result. For example he makes a salad of oysters and oxtail that sounds bizarre, but works beautifully. In the arcane language of the master chef, he talks of ‘bridging’ flavours: “Pinot noir often has an element of aniseed in its flavour, not that most people would easily identify it. If you are steaming a fish, you might expect to serve a riesling with it. However if you add a little anise to the steaming of the fish and serve it with a pinot noir, it will be a fabulous combination.” Tony believes that the great developments in communications and food technology has created an understanding of food as art, where the best chefs combine their culinary and aesthetic skills to create an experience of another dimension. “Because of the exchange of ideas, chefs everywhere are having new experiences. For the artist chef, the challenge is to prepare something that is beautiful for the public to enjoy. I was talking to [leading French chef] Nicolas Le Bec who said the greatest influence on him was his travels. Heston Blumenthal, who runs The Fat Duck in the UK, likes playing with the idea of the theatre of food. I am

enormous influence on contemporary food through his restaurants, teaching and publications.

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more interested in the ‘zen’ attitude surrounding food. One of my happiest memories was when we used found foods from Sydney for an event. We said the English nearly starved at the time of the First Fleet, so what would the French have done with just the local wild foods? It was an enormous success. “It’s a great shame La Perouse didn’t get back first for the French to settle Australia! The French have been making wine since Roman times and that culture of food and wine is fully integrated as art.” He quotes from Escoffier: ‘It has always been our belief that cookery will evolve as society itself does, and will never cease to be an art.’ “For me the growth of Australia as a wine culture is very exciting. One of the things the MasterChef series on television has demonstrated is that the gastronomic experience is now embraced here as part of the enjoyment of life.” With any art, there is a stage the artist reaches that people often call the ‘zone.’ Tony calls this heightened sensibility a state of controlled mania: “When I’m in the kitchen and I’m using all my senses, I’m in a manic state — it doesn’t mean that I’m angry, simply that I have all my senses concentrated on what I’m doing. Creative people have to be able to access this state of mind to achieve the outcome they want.” n In January 2010, Tony organised and presented a series of events he called Cuisine Now. For a period of two weeks he brought together great chefs from France, England and Australia including luminaries like Nicolas Le Bec, Michel Roux (this year celebrating 25 years as a Michelin three star chef) and Reine Sammut. There was a huge gala dinner where all the chefs prepared a dish; there were special food events and masterclasses. Most importantly from Tony’s perspective, there were musical and theatrical performances as integrated elements of each event. This mini festival took months to organise; lesser mortals would have passed up the opportunity in seconds. Tony and a few long-suffering friends and colleagues worked incredibly hard to pull it off for no reward other than enjoyment of working together with great international gastronomic talents and artists to show the world what Australia can do. “It’s like making mud pies with the boys when you start involving other creative people in the joy of collaboration as we did in Cuisine Now.

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I didn’t choose the program the Song Company presented at Cuisine Now — it was Roland Peelman’s response to what I was doing and it gave me great pleasure to see how he responded. John Walker’s wonderful paintings are in my restaurant and it gives me as much pleasure in seeing how he responds to the restaurant as it does for me to look at his paintings.” This same collaborative spirit affects Tony’s work as a teacher and mentor. “There are two types of cultures in kitchens: one is a bullying culture and the other is a nurturing culture. In a way I think I am fighting a moral battle and there is a great deal of nurturing co-operation and exchange of ideas in Australian kitchens now. We send our young chefs to work with carefully selected top chefs in three star restaurants in France so they can learn the special skills those chefs have. We bring young French chefs here from those or other similar places. Alfonso, my chef de cuisine at Bilson’s, has an incredible record of working with the best chefs in France and Spain, including the world famous El Bulli.” Tony cooks at home, as anyone does, because the family needs to be fed. But even at home he comes back to his central concern: “It’s the ‘zen’ thing again of beauty in simplicity. Like the stone in the Japanese garden that’s not there — you know it’s not there. When I was last in France, I had lunch at Trois Gros again. It is in a little hotel in a village in Central France opposite the railway station and has been there for over 60 years. There’s nothing there except cows and paddocks, but if you took Trois Gros away it would be like the missing stone in the perfect Japanese garden. I would like to think that the culinary culture that I’ve created is one of the stones in Sydney’s garden.” N

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Composers

Ross Edwards with score in his studio (Photo: Paolo Totaro) Ross Edwards

One of Australia’s leading composers, Ross Edwards AM grew up in Sydney where he still lives. His work is often identified with the Australian landscape and the natural sounds of the bush in Eastern Australia. Perhaps it is this unique sound quality in his music, added to his unswerving commitment to his work, that has won him such deep admiration both with the music loving public and his peers.

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n March 2009, the Song Company gave a memorable concert entitled Kalkadunga Man in the foyer of the National Museum in Canberra. Setting up for the concert in the vast resonant foyer with Iall its asymmetrical shapes, pillars and spaces (after all, the whole building is designed as a massive version of the Rainbow Serpent) was not an easy task. The foyer contains a huge fixed screen on which hundreds of landscape photos of outback country near Mt Isa were to be projected. Hundreds of chairs were set out in places where the audience could expect to get a reasonable view of the screen and the stage beneath it where the singers and didgeridoo player William Barton were to perform. But the biggest challenge was the sound. There was no problem hearing the singers: the issue was where the sound was coming from. It seemed the music was emerging from remote parts of the building. In the end, the director Roland Peelman shrugged his shoulders saying it didn’t really matter, it will sound wonderful in this place anyhow. The first half of the program was virtually all music by Ross Edwards: his choral work Southern Cross Chants, adapted for six voices and didgeridoo by Peelman. The work consists of a number of songs or sections based on various aspects of the Southern Cross constellations. This music projected by the six singers with the low rumble of the didgeridoo in that cavernous space was literally ethereal. The long drawn out notes of the central section called Proxima Centauri seemed totally disembodied and endless. Accompanied by the slowly shifting photographic images of the southern night sky, it was a deeply moving experience for all those present5. The emotional and spiritual effect on audiences from performances of Ross Edwards’ music is often powerful and affecting. Few Australian composers have this gift to write music that is so profoundly moving to the listener. He is now a man in middle life, having worked full time as a composer for many years, happily married and with adult children, with the time and insights to produce music of the highest quality to reach an

5 Southern Cross Chants can be heard in a recording by the Song Company with William Barton on didgeridoo directed by Roland Peelman entitled Kalkadunga Yurdu and is available from the Song Company at www.songcompany.com.au or by calling (02) 8272 9500

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appreciative and expanding audience. In a way, he is lucky to have become one of the few composers in this country to be able to devote his full working time to composition. Of course he is only able to do this because his music has won wide acceptance and is in constant demand. But the truth is, apart from his family life, nothing meaningful could get in the way of his composing, or if it did it would be frustrating and pointless. Writing music of this quality and intensity has never come easily to Ross. Since his adolescence, 40 years ago, he has struggled endlessly first to find the voice for the sounds and music in his head, and then to articulate it on the page. Even as a teenager, hopelessly vague and to the despair of his father, he was obsessed by this internal musical sound. He found it difficult to sleep at night because of it. At school, sitting in class, or going to school on the train, he was manipulating sound in his head. While it was always there, he couldn’t properly characterise it, couldn’t express it in a way that satisfied him. It made him uncommunicative with his family and school friends. He says he thinks he had some form of Asperger’s Syndrome. School was clearly an unsatisfactory experience and there was no option for the Edwards family – alarmed, but ultimately supportive — than to let him seek a career in music, an option more precarious than it is now. He enrolled in Arts at Sydney University, intending to convert as soon as possible to music. The fact that composition was not at that time taught in the first year course at Sydney University filled him with despair. On an impulse, he dropped out. He joined the temporary staff of the ABC, wrapping parcels and delivering internal mail, obsessed with the idea of saving enough money to leave Australia, which he’d come to regard as a cultural desert. Fortunately, he was persuaded to see reason by Peter Sculthorpe and the visiting English composer Peter Maxwell Davies who organised a scholarship for Ross to study at Adelaide University. It was an interesting time at Adelaide University. David Galliver, an Englishman, was professor of music and brought out a sequence of notable European composers, generally for six month stints to work alongside Richard Meale who was already teaching composition. So Ross fell under the influence of luminaries like Peter Maxwell Davies and Sandor Veress, pillars of the European avant garde, as indeed was Meale at that time. He

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would go back home to Sydney for holidays and work as an assistant to Peter Sculthorpe. Donald Peart was then professor of music at Sydney University, a man given to sudden bursts of inspirational enthusiasms. Peart had asked Sculthorpe to teach a course of ethnomusicology, perhaps because Peter was interested in Japanese music. Ross says: “Peter wasn’t an ethnomusicologist but he started to explore music of other cultures, Indonesian, Japanese and others. The students then all got a big dose of this and became really enthusiastic, partly because they weren’t being pontificated to about it — they were all discovering it together, and it seeped into the music of people like Anne Boyd and Barry Conyngham. My holiday job was to work with Peter, copying pieces like Sun Music I when it was first composed, so I was extremely lucky to be part of all this. I had the best of both worlds. In a way it was quite schizoid: in Adelaide I was being told what was correct in the European way and how we should look up to it, but in Sydney Peter was totally rejecting all this.” The Adelaide experience for Ross was enormously stimulating but he remained essentially a loner. He used to work mostly at night and constantly found himself being distracted by dawn breaking. He was acquiring a European technique but even in his earliest string quartet which was written in a totally serial form, he admits there are certain patterns and motifs that recur in his later music. The effect of his Sydney experiences with Sculthorpe and friends was to come later when he suddenly found the point of what they were doing and he was able to fuse this insight on to the technique he had developed in Adelaide. From Adelaide, he went to London to work with Maxwell Davies who later suggested he go to York to study with Wilfred Mellers and Bernard Rands. Mellers had created a free-thinking environment which attracted young composers including Anne Boyd and Martin Wesley- Smith, but somehow it brought Ross to a dead end. The 1960s avant garde was dissipating but he could not find his musical direction and was becoming creatively paralysed. He received a much awaited composer grant from Australia but it did nothing to help him find his way. He tells an amusing story of a recent experience while driving up to the Blue Mountains. His wife Helen turned on the radio and complained about the awful, neurotic piano piece being played, only for Ross to admit it

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was his own and had been composed in London in 1970. In the end, his mother fell seriously ill and he had to return home. The return to the Australian environment became the key to unlock his creative block, though it was some years before he was able to solve the problems that were besetting his work. Back in Sydney in 1972, he got a job as a tutor at Sydney University, met and married Helen, a music teacher, and started a family. For Ross, the completely novel situation of being a husband, breadwinner and father, while exciting and fulfilling personally, was no help at all in finding a way through creatively. During this period of the early 70s, he wrote only two pieces, one of which, an orchestral piece Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist, gave him some insight into finding creative freedom. “It was very depressing but for some years I couldn’t write music except for these two pieces. They weren’t quite satisfactory but they did give me a new direction and I started to realise that the natural environment was dictating the shape of the music. Writing the Mountain Village piece, I worked on it at night a lot with the backdrop of insect sounds and in a way it wrote itself, or at least I wasn’t conscious of what was happening. Then I made the mistake of trying to rationalise this process — to some extent self-consciously I tried to work out a language of my own until I realised that was wrong and I just had to let it happen.” Ross tried to free up his mind and let an element of chance come into his music, not in an aleatoric sense, but to some extent let his sub- conscious control what he was doing in writing his music. He found that his conscious mind was in a sense monitoring what his sub-conscious was throwing up, and that this was going to be his way of composing. “If I am not convinced by something I am doing at a visceral level, it all goes out just after its conception. That’s still how I’m composing. Even now I don’t pre-determine a structure — I have an idea of what I want but I allow it to evolve. I start with a ‘spark’ and if that ignites then I very gradually move through a structure which I assess as it’s evolving. I’m not really in control of it — all I know is when something is working and feels spontaneous.” His daily procedure is to go out to his tiny studio at the back of his Balmain house with great enthusiasm. If he is not interrupted he will

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get lost in the creative process for hours; he says he always knows when something is really working. If he is getting blocked or if something is not quite right, he will stop, go for a walk, or seek some separation from his work before returning to it later: “I can’t just sit down and do it — it requires such intensity and then release, and then return to the work.” n Early in his marriage, Ross and Helen started visiting Pearl Beach, a sea- side village an hour or two north of Sydney where her parents had retired. It is a beautiful wooded enclave, now expensive and exclusive, but in the mid-70s, quiet and a haven for people seeking an alternative lifestyle and with cheap rents. Ross fell in love with Pearl Beach and even though he was now a tenured lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium, persuaded Helen that they should move there and he would commute to Sydney two or three days a week, allowing himself time to compose in a beautiful peaceful environment. They bought a house and stayed for seven years. “It was the best time of my life: I just loved it. There’s a national park there and the relationship between the sounds defined the music I was writing. It was what I had been sub-consciously waiting for. I needed to walk in the national park every day, not to write down sounds but just come back from the walk and let the sounds and impressions filter through my mind. Even now I go back to this park from time to time and maintain a very intense relationship with a blank piece of paper when I walk there. “I wanted to get right out into a kind of silence where I was making a new language: there was no music in it. There were only natural sounds — there was bird song coming into my unconscious, crickets, certainly cicadas, drones. I found that there wasn’t really any harmony — just ver- tical combinations of sounds. I was even rejecting the tempered scale. I suppose I was trying to become incredibly pure and that silence was the end point. It was a very cathartic and important process for me. I had wiped the slate clean on European music — I didn’t even want to listen to it. “I wrote some pieces — not many notes in any of them, and I would conceive the sounds and notate them. Then I used to go over and over and over things after the moment of conception trying to make sense of

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them. I would listen to relative lengths trying to get it perfect. This was an absurd mistake but I expect it was inevitable. Later when I was no longer earning my living as a lecturer I didn’t have the luxury of this endless perfecting. I had deadlines and a more realistic perception of what had to be done and usually it was fine.” During this time at Pearl Beach, he wrote a piece called The Tower of Remoteness for clarinet and piano. It was commissioned by Alan Holley as a music theatre work. When it was delivered Holley decided it should have a dancer. This instant change in its presentation Ross found liberating: he had taken months to pare down the piece to what he considered to be its essence. But it worked well and he learnt a lot about the possibilities of his music in different kinds of performance settings. He also completed two piano pieces: Kumari and Etymalong both of which are still regularly played. Stephen Hough gave a performance of Kumari recently which Ross thought marvellous. The Pearl Beach sojourn eventually had to end largely because of the needs of the children. He had resigned from the Conservatorium as he found it inimical to his compositional needs and never took a full-time academic position again, though he taught privately, took temporary res- idencies and composer fellowships, and was never short of commissions. While Pearl Beach was over for him, it had given him a sense of place and peace and allowed him to find and develop his compositional method. If nothing else, he left it as a fully equipped composer, ready to take on any challenge that was thrown to him. Moving back to Sydney, the busy musical scene, its diversity and other musical influences flooded back to bombard him after effectively spending seven years in seclusion. By then he was so secure in his method that he was not diverted from what he wanted to do. He was able to use some of these influences for his own benefit. Anne Boyd wrote an article about the African influences in his music which astonished him. He also found himself intrigued by plainsong; both plainsong and bird-song found its way into his 3rd symphony. n For the next few years, after their return from Pearl Beach, Helen and Ross went through a frustrating process of moving from house to house

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in a generally fruitless search for a place that would fit their family needs and where he could find the quiet and solitude necessary for his work. In 1991, they moved to the Blue Mountains which Ross loved, but for various reasons they thought it best to move back to Sydney. They have stayed there ever since. Now with the children grown up and moved out of home, the house in Balmain has become permanent and is augmented by the retreat in the Blue Mountains where they go as often as commitments allow. In both places he has a studio where he can lose himself for hours on end. The aesthetics are simple in both places, the main require- ment being quiet, solitude and avoidance of insistent ambient noise. His increasing celebrity makes inroads on his time, not by pop star dimensions, but enough to need to plan the day and have Helen act as a line of defence from incursions. For years school students made significant demands on his time and energy as his musical style has great appeal and inspiration for young people. Both of them love to retreat to the mountains where there is no phone and no computer, but they can rarely stay more than three or four days. With so many performances taking place in Australia and abroad, Ross needs to be on hand to consult with conductors and performers. The violin concerto, which dates from 1988, is a good example of the international success his music is now enjoying. It is a spectacular piece entitled Maninyas (a name he uses for several of his works charac- terised by a highly rhythmic style with lively tempi and featuring drones and harmonies derived from the bush environment). In addition to frequent performances in the USA and Europe, the concerto is in regular demand around the world as a ballet score. While his intuitive compositional method remains essentially unchanged, in his maturity his work has encompassed a significant number of major scores including five symphonies. Observers have tended to describe his work as falling into two categories: the active dance- like ‘maninyas’ style mentioned above and a stiller, more contemplative ‘sacred’ style. Both these aspects of his work are evident in his symphonies but these works are so full of rich and highly developed musical ideas that it is probably unfair to categorise them in this way. Ross certainly does not set out to write any piece to a style or plan. As he says the shapes and symbols that appear throughout all his music are really very similar. “The

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symphonies are different from each other but are very much part of the same world. None of them is really distinct in essence from another.” Ross is currently writing two very contrasted pieces. One is for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra to be performed in the Perth concert hall that is very quiet, intense and intricate. He admits this is a risk and hopes the audience can stay with it; he is hopeful it can incorporate some photographic images by Allan Chawner as symbols of the elements of the work. The piece emerged through his interest in Taoism, allowing nature to be what it is rather than trying to impose a human will on it. He says it is like being in a landscape, not in a pictorial sense, but the feeling of being there. The other work is a saxophone concerto with pounding drums being written for a young Australian saxophonist Amy Dixon. In a way it could not be more different, yet he says it is still coming from the same interior place and in a Taoist sense is the other side of the same perception. This concerto, to be called Full Moon Dances, is very energetic and rhythmic but with many of the same shapes and sounds. Ross feels strongly about the way his music, indeed any music, should be presented in performance. The traditional formal concert hall presentation seems to him to be completely artificial and out of date, especially for new music like his. “I have always had a struggle between the concert hall and my interior world. A lot of my music comes from Eastern traditions of meditation where music is used to help people to get to another more contemplative state. In Asia music was not used as a commodity or even as a narrative but as a necessary element of meditation.” He gives the example of his Star Chant symphony, a large scale work for chorus and orchestra which he feels should be presented to the listener as a meditational experience, and indeed was written with the expectation of having visual projections of star clusters in a darkened performance space. When he was in Arizona in 2008, he had the idea of having it performed in a planetarium. A former colleague, Graham Williams, who runs a meditation centre in South Australia has prepared a six CD set of Ross’s music that has now been released by ABC Classics for specific meditational purposes. Williams has told Ross that his music

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is perfect for this purpose, and Ross has always wanted to have his music recognised in this way. “In the performance of the concerto for shakuhachi I did for Riley Lee (which ABC Classics are shortly to release on CD with the oboe and clarinet concertos) the hall is dark. The lighting on Riley is very low so that you can hardly see him, but there he is in the lotus position in his grand master robes. It’s a very inward atmosphere and Riley starts to play very softly. Traditionally in Japan it would be played by wandering monks, priests of nothingness. As the music progresses, the strings roll in like a wave in a quite intense way and the lights come up to match it. “I also see the saxophone concerto as a form of meditation, a very joyful and energising experience, a series of ‘wham’ dances taking you into an entirely different space, almost like a Sufi ceremony. Amy is a brilliant player and can dance so it will be something she can really make her own.” This concerto has been commissioned by the Sydney Symphony which also commissioned his oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming, a version of which has also been made for saxophone. The oboe concerto which was written for the SSO’s oboe virtuoso Diana Doherty, has been incredibly successful, and has been performed all over the world. In this concerto, he realised that some of the musical gestures had an element of bird-song, even sounded like a bird. Diana is a small but very agile person, mercurial in a bird-like way, and he thought the oboe could be like a beak. He suggested she wear a special costume which she liked; she rejected his idea of a mask saying it would be impossible to play, but she used makeup to give a bird-like look to her eyes. Ross and Diana became very excited about the inherent theatricality; a choreographer was engaged and between them a dramatic scenario was evolved including a love duet with the cor anglais player, in this instance Diana’s husband, Alexandre. In performance, the music starts with the stage in darkness and the oboe is heard offstage, then she jumps into a pool of light. For the love music, the lighting is rose-coloured, there is a celebratory dance towards the end and at the finish, Diana holds the oboe up in an ecstatic gesture and the lights go out. Ross believes in future there must be more innovation in the presentation of music, and that traditional concert hall presentation will

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become increasingly outdated and irrelevant. At present budget considerations limit opportunities for more innovative and theatrical solutions, a restriction he finds very frustrating. He feels music should not be performed in isolation, but in conjunction with the other arts, that the visual, symbolic, costuming, movement and above all the lighting elements in a performance are essential to the full realisation of performance of music. The importance of the visual and meditational elements in his work has resulted in several approaches to him to write an opera, but Ross is wary of all the practical and collaborative considerations in writing for the theatre, and the huge amount of work for what can be a limited or often non-existent performance outcome. Some years ago he wrote a chamber opera Christina’s World with Dorothy Hewett. He enjoyed the collaboration, but recalls a whole year of relentless work for too few performances. It is fascinating to speculate where Ross Edwards’ creative spirit might next go and how we, as the audience, will experience it. We should hope that in future presenters respond more imaginatively to the demands of his music. N

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Composers

Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith, quite a long time ago … (Photo: Belinda Webster) Twins: Martin & Peter Wesley-Smith

One of Australia’s leading composers, Martin Wesley-Smith AM was born and educated in Adelaide. His identical twin brother Peter is an ex-Professor of Constitutional Law who collaborates with Martin by providing lyrics and libretti for his brother’s vocal compositions. They both live on a farm in a beautiful corner of the Kangaroo Valley in New South Wales.

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he Wesley-Smith twins are the youngest in a family of four brothers of whom the eldest Jerry, died a few years ago. Martin, Peter and their elder surviving brother Rob, who lives in Darwin, Trecently held a wake in an old village hall in the Kangaroo Valley for their mother Sheila, who had died aged 93. Sheila was a softly spoken and gentle soul much loved by her boys and by their many friends. She lived most of her life in Adelaide where she brought up the family, but towards the end of her life when she became frail, Martin and Peter brought her over to the farm and looked after her. It was a bit rough in the farm house, but she couldn’t have been happier. The wake was a muted but joyful experience attended by many of their friends in the Valley, as well as large numbers of relatives and friends who travelled long distances to get there. Everyone filled the adjoining shed with plenty of food and drink, but around the walls in the little hall, there was a veritable exhibition of photos and paintings tracing Sheila’s and the family’s life. Seventy or 80 years of the visual history of a woman and her family is a moving and quite emotional experience, even for those who didn’t know her well. Even more so was the concert that followed. Peter was a wry but witty MC who commented caustically on some of Martin’s musical choices and introduced all the performers, explaining family connections and videos. Throughout he quoted wicked schoolboy howlers collected over the years by Sheila they had just discovered in her papers. Martin’s ex-wife Ann was there and their children and grandchildren were all outstanding performers. It was late before everyone left, feeling very privileged to have been there. The farm house where Peter and Martin live is a weathered wooden house in an elevated clearing like a stage, surrounded by wooded hills at the end of a long winding track. Visitors are greeted by the dog whose barking echoes all around the secluded valley. Agriculture on the place is rather desultory, though Martin has built a spectacular vegetable garden with a soaring wire canopy to resist marauding birds. The real work is done by small groups of WWOOFers, young foreign backpackers who spend a couple of months working in the paddocks and in the house, in return for free board and lodging and the company of Martin and Peter and their friends in the Valley. This idyllic bush retreat is a far remove from the lifestyles they both

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led until they decided to abandon the rat race. For many years Peter was a senior law academic at Hong Kong University and yearned for a country place where he could eventually retire. The farm in Kangaroo Valley was the result and for years he gravitated between it and Hong Kong. He still returns to Hong Kong, at least annually, to deliver a series of lectures. Martin spent much of his career as Head of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium but having become increasingly disillusioned with professional life at an institution, he resigned a few years ago and begged a bed at the farm. It has transformed his life; the odd couple seem to have dug in for the duration. n The twin brothers both look and sound alike despite their very different professional lives, though Peter has a trace of a British expatriate accent overlaying the remnants of their natural Adelaide private school sound. Sandy haired now interspersed with grey, both have permanent quizzical looks that express their particular type of low key monosyllabic humour. While it is impossible to know what sort of clothes Peter wears while in Hong Kong, neither of them in any way could be accused of good dressing; certainly Martin has never been seen in anything but an old tee shirt and jeans, even at a smart reception. All the family were close, even from the time when they were children. They were a musical family and their father Harry used to lead them in singing songs from the Oxford Song Book while Sheila played the piano. All four boys learnt instruments, and the eldest Jerry, went on to become a professional horn player and jazz musician. Martin remembers saying on an ABC interview: “Mum thumped the piano while we would all stand around and sing. When I got home from the interview the phone rang and it was Mum from Adelaide saying, ‘I did not thump the piano.’” The singing around the piano became excellent musical training. Martin says: “A feature of our singing was that after a couple of songs, Mum would get the knuckle in the back telling her to stop playing and we had to sing a cappella after that. Harry, my father, would sing the bass line and Mum would sing the melody so we would have to find a part to sing as you weren’t allowed to sing a line one of your brothers was sing-

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ing. It was one of the best ways to learn about harmony. It’s one of the reasons why I love harmonic progressions and funny little shifts. I grew up inventing harmonic progressions with my brothers in real time.” Both Martin and Peter learnt piano and cello as children, then, aged about 13, Martin was persuaded by his peers to give it up and get serious about Australian Rules football. But the family influence prevailed, and a few years later he decided he wanted to be a composer. “When I was about 16, I composed a little piano piece I gave to the music teacher one morning as we were going into chapel at school. He was going in to play the organ so as I’m trooping in with the other kids, I hear the organ playing this vast improvisation and suddenly I hear my little piece being played and expanded as part of his improvisation. That was one of those little moments of epiphany that made me think, ‘this is it — this is what I want to do.’” His father persuaded Martin to enroll in medicine at Adelaide University, but he was so obsessed with music, writing madrigals, singing in a choir, arranging and playing in a dixieland band on guitar and banjo, that he soon dropped out. He enrolled in the first year of a notable new composition course where John Bishop brought in a leading composer each year to teach, and which soon began to attract many of the bright young budding composers like Gillian Whitehead, Graham Hair and Ross Edwards. The first leading composer was Peter Tahourdin and in the second year, none other than Peter Maxwell Davies. Maxwell Davies taught him ‘not to hold back and to expand your thinking’ which became a fundamental precept in his career. The next big name who came to teach was Sandor Veress who was very European and strict. The students only got to know him when they plucked up the courage to take him to a pub on his last day and discovered he had taught Ligeti. If they had only listened to him, they might have learnt something. As his course progressed, the music department at the university tut- tutted Martin for not taking serious music seriously and spending his time with folk groups and jazz bands, telling him he would have to make a choice. This was another big moment and he decided he could not make a choice; he felt he must pursue both serious and popular music, that for him it was all relevant and that one influenced the other. The next break-through was when Tahourdin, who had studied electronic

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music in Canada, persuaded a benefactor to buy a Moog synthesizer for the students to use. “When I started with electronic music, you had to experiment and fiddle around with the dials. One time I plugged in a few chords and turned a dial and suddenly there was this amazing, beautiful sequence of sound. I thought, wow, that’s totally delicious and it’s got everything I would want in a bit of music, but I can’t tell you what a single interval was as it happened so quickly. I thought that was incredibly liberating — it meant that much of the detail I was struggling with wasn’t important, that the gesture is the important thing and you can fill in the details later. I found all this completely fascinating and later went to York in the UK to study electronic music. At that time, the electronics were fairly primitive, but I learnt enough to get a job back at the Sydney Con as a lecturer in electronic music, where I set up their first electronic music studio.” The establishment of the electronic studio was in the 1970s; this was the age for experimental work, freedom of expression and putting on ‘events’, where Martin and the students could go back to first principles, and do something entirely new in form and content. “The important thing about teaching is to get the students fascinated with what they are doing, find out how to get the information, and make networks. We didn’t have much in the way of facilities, so I’d say: let’s book a venue in a month or two and get together with other student dancers, photogra- phers, visual artists and create a performance. We did several of these; while as works of art they might be full of holes, they were fantastic vehicles for students to find themselves and work together co-operatively.” Don Banks was then head of Composition at the Conservatorium in Sydney, not only a composer of great repute, but a man who stood up passionately for Australian music and composers. However the mood changed in the 1980s; Banks died prematurely and a more academic attitude then prevailed at the Conservatorium. The political shifts at that time didn’t please Martin, and pleased even less his elder brother Rob, who has spent most of his life as a political activist agitating for the cause of self-determination for East Timor. Martin shares Rob’s views, though as a composer and family man with three children, his activism has largely been though his music and his fundraising. He blames his father for this, a rather unkind accusation given his father’s impeccably

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traditional views: “He used to drill into us, ‘Son, when you have a well formed view, stand up and speak out to the world without fear or favour.’ I have always appreciated that but sometimes I have come to regret it too.” The reality is that Martin, and Peter to a lesser extent only because he has lived mostly abroad, has always been a tireless and effective advocate for political causes in which he believes, whether it has been against the Vietnam war, his perception of Australia’s complacency and dishonesty in regard to East Timor’s independence, or in the musical politics of the Australia Council and the Conservatorium. “At the time of Vietnam, I was a conscript, though I didn’t go to Vietnam and it forced me to think clearly of what was happening in the war. I came to realise it was something I didn’t want to be part of; I thought it was appalling what Australia was doing with the Americans. I did a piece called Vietnam Image which wasn’t particularly political but it got me started in writing music with politically motivated themes. Then after 1975, with the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, I became very incensed about that, partly because of Rob’s influence as he was coming into contact with Timorese people arriving in Darwin. Many of these people came to Sydney where I met them. So I became an activist joining street marches and writing letters to the papers and politicians, but by 1977, I realised it was ridiculous trying to compose serious concert music on one hand, and be an activist on the other, as well as having a job and a family.” He decided to combine his interests and composed an audio visual piece called Kdadalak about the children of East Timor and from then on was labelled a political composer. Two years later Nicholas Routley commissioned him to write a choral piece Martin had been mulling over for a long time, Who Killed Cock Robin?, which was again overtly political, this time on conservation themes. He lightened its serious musical content with folk-like songs and it became a popular piece both for singers and audiences. Martin says it typecast him as a lightweight composer, but many would say it showed a great strength in being able to present thorny issues to the public in music that was beautifully crafted, witty and easy to understand. Reflecting now on his ongoing engagement with East Timor issues, Martin says: “It started as a human rights issue for me, a sense of fair

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go, but over the years it has become a passion that has led to creative work. Over the years, I have come to understand Australia’s attitude to East Timor has been entirely about self interest. It’s summed up for me by a former Australian diplomat who said to me recently about the East Timor invasion: ‘The trouble was that we didn’t know how brutal the Indonesians would be.’ I could hardly contain myself when you recall that it was only ten years earlier when Suharto killed almost a million people they suspected of belonging to the Indonesian Communist party. I said: ‘Don’t you think we could have asked the East Timorese what they wanted instead of deciding with Indonesia what was best for them?’” More than most composers or creative people, Martin’s life has been his art, or at least they are wrapped up together. In many ways his music has deliberately broken the rules of serious composition, but it has served well to portray his life engagements with clarity and purpose. He says, for him music has to come out of personal experience, rather than from a purely intellectual process. For him, it has always required a pragmatic approach, having to marry together his music, his activism, his family and the work with his students. Leaving the Conservatorium and coming to the Valley was meant to give him the freedom to compose for himself, to embark on the big abstract work he had always imagined, but it hasn’t worked out that way. n Peter Wesley-Smith says at school he had no particular aptitude for writing, but when Jerry and Martin showed such musical talent, they influenced him to get involved in writing for Martin’s work. “In my early 20s, I wrote a book of children’s verses that I thought might be suitable for setting to music, but that didn’t go anywhere. On the other hand, I always took great pleasure in writing professionally for my academic work in the law, which I found creative in some ways. I always assumed I would write a novel and will be very disappointed in myself if I don’t, but haven’t got around to it yet.” Perhaps predictably in a family like the Wesley-Smiths, he has written a play about that great Vietnamese activist Ho Chi Minh which has been performed in Hong Kong and may yet be presented in Australia. Ho Chi Minh was detained as an undesirable alien in Hong Kong in

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1931 for eighteen months, as both the French and the British saw him as a threat to their supremacy in Asia. “He was in Hong Kong to re- establish the Vietnamese Communist party and the French wanted the British to deport him. The play is about his lawyer’s use of the processes and delays of the law to prevent his deportation or extradition. It saved his life as the French would have bumped him off if they could have got their hands on him.” Peter has written the lyrics for most of Martin’s choral works and songs, including the scabrous Barber Shop quartets (being recorded by the Song Company) and Black Ribbon, a major choral and orchestral work written in 2001 for a commission by the Centenary of Federation. This is an important work, again political and satirical, that contains a collection of songs, mostly in humorous vein, but many with strong and even tragic underlying messages. Sadly it has been largely overlooked by performers with the honourable exception of the Song Company. Peter is sceptical that being identical twins brings any special intuition to their working relationship. “It mainly comes out of my tolerance of him messing around with my imperishable words. Usually I have to give him the words first. I always complain about this as it’s much more fun to set the words to a pre-determined tune. What I like best is to write the first line of a chorus and for him to then write the tune so I can go back and fill in the rest, but he’s usually too busy. I’m more tolerant than Martin, but I suspect there is often a lot of tension between lyricists and composers.” Martin says that for the work Peter and he do together, the words are very important, unlike many contemporary librettos where the words are not important and hardly can be heard. He feels it’s a rather old fashioned style, perhaps unique today, akin to Gilbert and Sullivan, though with a very contemporary delivery. In their more overtly political work, Peter defers to Martin as the driver of the work: “I tend to be less dogmatic than him but in fact there is a tension between being didactic or hitting people over the head with the message in our work together, and being subtle. Many of his political pieces are criticised as being dogmatic and very clear in their message, so are said to be propaganda, not art. I think we have achieved something when we have made the message clear but it’s expressed with some wit

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or humour. It’s a continual frustration because critics often take the view that if it’s funny, it can’t be serious.” Peter’s most significant contributions to Martin’s work have been the libretto to their major music theatre work Quito, and the lyrics for their collaboration called Boojum! based on the world of Lewis Carroll. Quito is based on the tragic true story of a young schizophrenic East Timorese man in Darwin, and in many ways is their most characteristically powerful and inventive work, having been performed to much acclaim around the world. Boojum! is extraordinary and quite unclassifiable. It was originally intended as a work of music theatre, has been produced as a musical by leading director Gale Edwards, performed as a witty song and dance cabaret piece, and recorded as a kind of zany opera. It is a culmination of the twins’ obsession with the mad nonsense humour of Lewis Carroll and his real alter ego the Rev Charles Dodgson. In their early post-student days in Adelaide, they simultaneously and quite independently became fascinated by Martin Gardner’s learned theorising about the meanings, connections and symbolism of Alice in Wonderland in his books The Annotated Alice and The Annotated Snark.At first they both saw this as an intellectual exercise, but later they enjoyed the fantasy, the logic, sense and nonsense of the whole Alice sub-culture. Martin’s younger daughter is named Alice. In the 70s, Martin started writing pieces on Alice and Snark themes; as it happened, both Peter and he found themselves in New York in 1979, both on leave from their academic positions. They went together to see the first production of Sweeney Todd. The production and other connections they drew from it, inspired them then and there to decide to write a musical on the Alice theme and so Boojum! was born. It took some years to be completed. When Martin’s marriage broke up in 1982, he retreated to Hong Kong to see Peter and they put together all their Lewis Carroll files and mapped out the work, which they completed over the next two or three years. The Sydney Theatre Company showed interest in presenting it, but in the end Anthony Steel snapped it up for the 1986 Adelaide Festival and invited Gale Edwards to direct it. The opening performance was given in the presence of the Queen and caused something of a sensation with some mild nudity and an ill-directed smoke machine belching

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smoke into the audience. Martin was bitterly unhappy with the Adelaide production, both with many of Gale Edwards’ ideas for it, but more importantly with being shut out of the workshopping process to arrive at the version that was performed. In his recent memoir Painful in Daily Doses, Anthony Steel quotes Martin at the time: “When I came to Adelaide about two or three weeks into the rehearsals, I was shocked. Treasured scenes had been cut completely; fundamental concepts had been changed; scenes had been removed……….The only way to get the show on was to remove myself, take no part and make no comment at the risk of damaging cast morale.” Later, Boojum! was performed in a revised version for semi staged performances at Steel’s Expo ’88 in Brisbane and in Sydney. In 1992 it was given a superb recording under the Australia Music Centre’s label Vox Australis6. Its chequered career has not dampened the twins’ interest in more creative work on the Alice theme. Indeed, a production of Boojum! is being planned in Chicago next year. n When he joined Peter living in the Kangaroo Valley in 2000, hoping he would have the big chance to do some uninterrupted creative work, Martin discovered there was an East Timor group living in the Valley. “They had wanted to make contact with Rob, knowing of his work as an activist in Darwin, and they rang him on his mobile saying they would like to meet him some time. Rob happened to be here at the time and suggested a meeting that afternoon. So we all met and Peter and I put on a concert for a visiting East Timorese choir and we’ve been putting on concerts ever since to raise money.” Being one of the few people in the Valley with proper musical training, he has found himself arranging music, leading and composing for a local choir and becoming more involved in Timorese activities than

6 Boojum! was recorded with soloists and the Sydney Philharmonia Motet Choir conducted by John Grundy on Vox Australis VAST010-2. Quito and a number of Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith’s songs have been recorded by the Song Company and are available at www.songcompany.com.au or telephone (02) 8272 9500.

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ever. He is philosophical about the continuing barriers to working on the larger scale personal work he had hoped for. Both the brothers remain keenly involved in writing and composing respectively, even if the big pieces they both want to engage with are eluding them for the time being. For Martin, the beautiful environs of the Kangaroo Valley and the close-knit and congenial community inevitably replace the music and student community he worked with in Sydney for so long. It has been a totally beneficent change as he is dubious about the legacy of his time at the Conservatorium. “In a department which talked mostly about serial- ism and cell theory in composition, I think I was a voice who said to the students: ‘why don’t you feel and listen to [the music] and give it the test of time to try to find your own inner voice. You must experiment with all types of music and techniques but then try to find something that really appeals to you even if it may not be appealing to anyone else’. That wasn’t a popular view amongst the academics.” When Martin was a student and was experimenting with his own techniques, he himself had a transforming experience when he discovered the music of American minimalist Steve Reich. “I remember hearing this vocal piece called Come out to show them, come out to show them, come out to show etc etc. For a start I realised you could make a piece with a really small amount of material and you didn’t have to have rhythm or melody. It was exploring shifting accents and sounds which I found fascinating. The phrase ‘Come out to show them’ came from a black man who had been beaten up at a demonstration and he kept on repeating it. It came out of real life, out of Steve Reich’s personal experience. It wasn’t some theoretical exercise. To me the whole thing was completely revolutionary and a dramatic lesson that I never forgot.” This sense of self-discovery for Martin and which he always tried to encourage in his students, is happening again — for both the brothers, this time caused by the peaceful and reflective environment where they live. They can continue to engage with the just causes in which they believe and with the like-minded people in the Valley, and almost certainly they will. But now there is no barrier to the novel, or to the big, ‘out there’ piece of music. N

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 94 2/09/10 4:52 PM Rosemary Crumlin

Curator

Rosemary Crumlin (Photo: Lachlan Warner) Rosemary Crumlin

Sister Rosemary Crumlin RSM OAM is a nun in the Parramatta Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy. She has been a school teacher, artist, educationist, women’s leadership consultant and a curator of major exhibitions of religious and spiritual art. Her work in the international arena has led her to a great diversity of friendships including many influential people in the Church, art and business worlds. She lives in Melbourne.

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osemary Crumlin is a very ingenious person; any project she undertakes becomes more labyrinthine and more revelatory as her exploration reveals new and unexpected connections. She is Rcurrently writing a book on the Blake Prize, Australia’s leading award for religious art, named after the mystical British poet William Blake. She says she has reached another exciting part of the project: getting involved in the book design and selection of works of art by the annual winners and other competing artists to complement the prize winning paintings. The book now is almost ready to go to the publisher. “It was particularly rewarding interviewing some of the artists. What I should do now is go and find the most profound things written about these artists. I have just read a book about Stanislaus Rapotec who is probably the most significant and most controversial figure amongst the winners. His work is suffused with his memories of what is now Slovenia where he belonged to a group of artists who saw themselves as ‘artists as heroes’. That opened up a whole lot of ideas and I thought there are some people I must have another look at.” The book is very much a labour of love, as Rosemary is in possession of the Blake Prize files of its founder, a much revered Jesuit priest, the late Michael Scott. The story of Michael Scott is one of the most moving and painful stories from within the Roman Catholic Church in Australia. In some ways it is symbolic of the long and often controversial history of the Blake Prize, and Rosemary finds it difficult to avoid tears when reflecting on it. “In 1953, when I was a second year novice, I was sent to a meeting given by the Jesuits. It was my first foray outside the convent gates, and I was told to walk on the outside of the nun who was accompanying me and I mustn’t speak to her. There must have been 150 nuns and brothers in the room and we were a bit late, so we had to sit at the edge of the front row. Michael Scott was speaking about the Blake Prize and I was fascinated, scribbling notes, when my chair collapsed and I fell on the floor. I was in utter disgrace, accused of falling asleep. “Even then Michael Scott was a priest of great charisma. Before he was ordained, he had been sent to study science in Dublin, where he met and fell in love with a fellow student, the later famous Irish writer, Mary Lavin. He admitted this to his superiors who said, ‘it happens’

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and so he tried to put love out of his mind. He was later ordained in 1940 and eventually returned to Australia full of idealism. In 1951 he set up the Blake Prize which continues to this day. Some years later he became Director of Newman College at Melbourne University. While at Newman, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study religious art in the US, and at a conference, again met Mary Lavin, who by then was a widow with two daughters. This was the time of Vatican II and it had become easier to leave the priesthood. In 1968 he left the Jesuits and the priesthood, went to Ireland, where he married Mary Lavin and lived there quietly for the rest of his life.” The loss of such a prominent and admired priest at that time was deeply distressing for the Australian Jesuits and many others in the Church, and Rosemary says it was almost certainly painful for him too. “There were only a handful of local people at his funeral in 1990 at a little village churchyard near where he lived in Ireland, when a car pulled up with a priest sent by the Jesuit Provincial and another big black car arrived with the Bishop’s secretary who said they had been told a very important man of the Church had died.” Despite his departure and absence on the other side of the world for so many years, the Society of Jesus never forgot their man. Long after Michael Scott had left the priesthood and was living in Ireland, Patrick McCaughey, who was then professor of visual arts at Monash University, encouraged Rosemary to write her Masters degree thesis on the first 25 years of the Blake Prize (in which she had already exhibited her own works three times) and wrote to Scott suggesting her. Scott wrote back with great enthusiasm and sent her all his papers on the Prize. n Rosemary was brought up in Bondi with her two brothers. She seems struck by how distant that feels and says: “Now that I’m older, I think quite a lot about my family; I’m interested in what survives from a family and how different my elder brother and I seem to be from our parents. In my case one of the things I do, for better or worse, is that I can see something through beyond the point where it is reasonable; I can keep going up the mountain even if it’s got disaster written all over it.

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“My parents were ordinary working class people and never owned a house or even aspired to own one. My little brother was nine years younger. When he was only two, my father got TB and was hospitalised for more than a year. This was very difficult for my mother, and my big brother Joey and I did most of the caring for our baby brother Christopher. I probably grew up quickly over that time. Dad recovered well, was a dedicated church-goer and golfer and lived to an old age. For my mother, life was different. My mother’s adored brother Bobby died of a congenital heart defect when I was about six and my mother rarely went to church again after that. My mother’s whole family was riven by guilt and grief; as I remember it, my grandmother pulled the blinds down and never lifted them up again.” With this family background, and her early awareness of responsibility, Rosemary was drawn to a religious vocation. At the age of about ten, she started going to mass every morning on her way to school, despite her mother trying to find ways to stop her, and the nun teaching her class accusing her of lying when she put her hand up every morning when the class was asked who had been to mass. At high school, she remembers playing basketball in the schoolyard and looking up and seeing the nuns sitting together on the verandah sewing and talking. She told herself she couldn’t bear to be cooped up like that, looking so horrible in those black clothes. Yet her faith, or her determination, was such that she was not deflected. and she entered Our Lady of Mercy Convent in Parramatta (OLMC). Explaining her feelings now, she says: “You entered into a love relationship with God — that’s the only way I can describe it, and that took you through the pain and oppression that convent life was like then. If you could put up with what was happening to you, things would get better and so they did. Later on, one of the commitments I held as a teacher was to enable people to be freer to make their choices. I believe this is what we are called to be — deeply who we are before God — that is the ultimate gift, complex as it is in reality. I came to see this as integral to a religious life fully lived, and that its vows and the faith community should be able to facilitate this, so that we could be free to be available for others.” As a child, Rosemary had always been interested in drawing, and

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while it was latent through her school life, it was not forgotten. As a novice in the convent, she had little opportunity for this talent to flourish. Being spirited and questioning, she often found herself in trouble in the convent’s culture of striving for perfection, where a novice had to walk, open a door, or even scrub the floor in a particular way. She will always be grateful for the Reverend Mother who became aware of her difficulties at that time. “I have always been indebted to her as she came to affirm and make space for me when I really needed it. One day I was sent to her for having been disobedient. The offence was very minor but being sent to the top superior was not. Mother Andrew had a very aristocratic Irish bearing and asked what I had done wrong, and I burst into tears and said I couldn’t stand it any longer. She calmed me down and a few days later she stopped me when she saw me sweeping the floor, asked me how I was going and showed me how to sweep properly — out of the corners, not into the corners. The empathy she showed was a big turning point for me, as I think she knew about art herself though she was very reserved and ascetic and would never have said so.” The second year of the novitiate was dedicated to an accredited course of teacher training as preparation for a life in the classroom. Rosemary was sent to OLMC Parramatta to teach art and religious education. Big changes were gradually taking place in the Church and Rosemary’s generation of novices began to be given more opportunities than the previous generation. Having completed a course in commercial art in 1961, the Reverend Mother asked her whether she would like to go to university, and Rosemary dared to reply she would prefer to go to art school. She enrolled at the National Art School, first in the Teacher Conversion Course and then in the full time Diploma Course, as she says, “in my habit” and from there, never looked back. “The first day I went to art school, I walked in and felt at home. I met people who talked like I did and thought like I did. Visual people, energetic, creative and independent. They were the best years; I can’t tell you how great they were for me. The teaching wasn’t always great, but the atmosphere was wonderful. I went to life drawing for nine hours a week, sitting in my habit, seeking to understand difficult things like anatomy and the more complex stuff of what the body reveals and hides

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of who we are. I used to take these life drawings home with me and had to think, where do I put them? So I’d secrete them in a cupboard out on a balcony and there was one senior nun who was extremely curious about my drawings, and I caught her one day going through them. One night she asked me what happened at art school, so I told her that the man or the woman stands naked on a dais and we sit on donkeys (a stool you sit on backwards) and draw for three hours. She said in a horrified voice: ‘Stop stop, I don’t want to hear any more.’ “Eventually I started to do quite well and people like Ken Reinhard and Rod Milgate were encouraging. I exhibited a bit — in the Sulman, the Blake and the Transfield. I also recognised that I’d probably gone the distance in my secondary school teaching. I was in my 30s and I have always believed that the best stuff happens ‘like to like’ so if you are going to make a difference in young people’s lives, it’s best when you are young.“ At this time Rosemary was asked by colleagues in the Church to help prepare a new catechetical text for young people in schools, as many of them were disenchanted with religion. This became an important collaborative project with a series of illustrated booklets called Come Alive that were successful with young people, but many of the clergy were disapproving. Apart from the joy of having the main creative input into this project, it had the added benefit of indirectly giving Rosemary the opportunity to take an advanced art education course in England at the Birmingham University School of Art Education, followed by a year of theological studies at Corpus Christi College in London. After she left for the UK, the Come Alive project and the Vatican II principles underpinning it were attacked internally despite the support of Cardinal Knox. One of the conservative Victorian bishops circulated a highly critical document and later forbade the priest in charge of the project to preach. Rosemary made the most of her sojourn in the UK both intellectually and in travel she undertook around Britain at every opportunity she could find. The Reverend Mother at her congregation back in Parramatta was less impressed and wondered aloud what she was doing, so Rosemary made it known that she’d won the major prize at the art school in Birmingham and things settled down at home. Before she returned, she got a letter saying the bishops had asked if she would accept an offer to be on the staff of a new adult religious education institute to be established

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in Melbourne. From the bitter experience of Come Alive, she wisely asked who was going to be in charge, as it became clear that at least part of the motivation for the establishment of the institute arose from the Come Alive controversy and the need for more relevant and expert religious teaching within the Church. The newly appointed first director, John F Kelly, pleaded with her to accept the post as he badly needed staff who knew the issues and supported reform. The National Pastoral Institute (NPI) became her base and absorbed most of her energies for the next fourteen years, the last four as director. She has mixed feelings about this period; on one hand it meant living an institutional life again and putting art on hold, but the work was ground- breaking and she made deep connections with her new colleagues and adult students. “I was sleeping in a tiny room, back living in a Presentation convent with strong, hospitable nuns. The work was very difficult because we chose to be available all the time for the students; we went to all the lectures and group work. We had an excellent director in John Kelly though everyone was scared of him because of his caustic tongue, but he was a pussy cat underneath, clever and sharp. Jim Briglia, the second director was a gentle man and a scholar who became a dear friend. For me it was a congenial atmosphere and lasting friendships were formed there. NPI’s work depended in large measure on the support of Church leadership and on their appreciation of what we were trying to do, even though it was so different from what they themselves had experienced. NPI was a place of space and belief in the goodness of the people who came. “We were able to encourage the students to ask questions and the goal was to get them to stand on their own two feet and take leadership. As most of them were in their mid-thirties or forties, they were being given a chance to take a breather without pressure. The result was that most of them became deeply engaged, worked harder and more creatively than perhaps they had ever worked before and, after graduating, took up significant leadership roles around the country.” It was during this period of such hard and unrelenting work that she met Patrick McCaughey, and desperately in need of some congenial distraction, was persuaded to do a Masters degree in art history, and the thesis on the Blake Prize.

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 101 2/09/10 4:52 PM Many Faces of Inspiration n Friendships are fundamental to Rosemary’s way of life. At key points in her life, close friends, or people she has greatly admired, have been cata- lysts for the achievements in her work. She says: “Saying ‘yes’ has been an important factor in my life, and both good and bad has resulted from it. Even more important are relationships — with people you care for and who care for you. At a spiritual level, it’s that sense of being surprised into gratitude, a kind of echo of transcendence. There are people like this both in and outside the Church. For example Frank Little [then the Archbishop of Melbourne] was on the NPI committee most of the time I was there and was a tower of strength; he used to say I was his light relief.” After she left the NPI in 1986, an enlightened leadership in her congregation offered her a year to assess her future options. On one hand, recent professional work experience in human relations at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations focused her attention on the needs of women in leadership. She also wanted to curate an exhibition of leading Australian artists post 1945 who were asking ultimate questions about meaning in life, questions that she and her students had been wrestling with at the NPI. On her way home to Australia though New York from a trip to Europe, she had dinner with Anna and Rupert Murdoch. She had taught Anna at OLMC and had reconnected with her after she married Rupert. He had become a friend too. “Rupert asked me what I planned to do next, so I talked about my idea for an exhibition of post 1945 artists and he offered to help. I went home and did both. I set up a consultancy for women in leadership and still do it, and I prepared the exhibition Images of Religion in Australia Art that took place in 1988.” That exhibition included work of Arthur Boyd, another seminal figure in Rosemary’s life. When she was at the NPI, in the late ‘70s she took an overseas colleague to an exhibition of Arthur Boyd’s paintings to give him an idea of Australian art. She says: “It was an exhibition of his Shoalhaven paintings and it had two wonderful crucifixion paintings, one of a woman, so I wrote to him and asked whether he would be prepared to lend these paintings if I ever got the chance to put on the post 1945 exhibition. To my amazement he wrote straight back saying it was

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quite the nicest thing anyone had said about that exhibition. “Fast forward ten years later and I’m in London and I rang him and he asked me to come down — I was so excited with the prospect of meeting him. When I arrived at the station, there was this little white haired man — I imagined he would be tall, and he drove me to his house where we had lunch with his wife Yvonne. Over lunch, I said I had just been to see some of the women at Greenham Common7 and Yvonne said Arthur goes down regularly to make tea at the campfire for the women. Then he took me to his studio and gave me a small painting. He became very interested in the exhibition and as a result started doing religious paintings again. To celebrate the exhibition, he did three lithographs, another crucified woman, a crying goat and an incredible prodigal son. He gave me ten sets of the lithographs to raise money for the exhibition. “For me he was an amazing man and he was so generous in offering support for my exhibitions. After he died I wrote a letter to The Age and said he always stood for women — of course he came from a very matriarchal family. I went down to the Brighton cemetery and there is a very simple little plaque saying ‘Arthur Merric Boyd 1920-1999. Rest in Peace.’ That’s all. His later religious images were very profound. Did he believe in God? If that means that he was open to some greater presence, I can’t answer for him but I think his work indicates he was open to the possibility. The best of what he did and all his life touched on the depth of what it is to be a human being.” In 1990, Rosemary was approached by Frank Brennan SJ, saying it was the year of the World Council of Churches meeting in Australia, and asking whether she would be interested in preparing an exhibition of aboriginal Christian art. At first she declined, as in her view what existed was of variable quality, but she persuaded him to consider extending the concept to aboriginal spirituality. So, accompanied by Brennan and aboriginal art dealer Anthony Knight, she embarked on a gruelling journey into the remote communities.

7 The Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp was established in 1981 to protest at nuclear weapons being sited at the UK airbase of the same name. The camp was frequently forcibly moved but remained in place for many years until after all nuclear weapons were removed in 1991.

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“We got to Balgo in the Central Desert and by then I was exhausted by the heat and pains in my legs. The people there had some interesting paintings combining Christian symbols with their own spiritual meanings so I said this will do and we can go home now. Frank said we have one more place to go, and I said no I can’t, so he said you’ll have to explain it to Sister Clare at Turkey Creek. I got on the phone and she told me in her Irish voice: ‘Of course you’re coming — you should have started here; just get on the plane and come now.’ So we went and Clare picked us up and drove us straight to a shed attached to the school and she opened the door and I heard Anthony gasp ‘Oooh’ and his face turned stark white. It was like Aladdin’s cave; we were surrounded by these amazing images. They were on bits of board and fly screens. Standing on what was like a hot water stand was this carved image of a pregnant Mary which you just knew straight off was one of the great images of the 20th century. The work there was by several artists but this sculpture was by George Mung Mung.” The exhibition and the book that came from this trip Aboriginal Art and Spirituality looked at the Christian and spiritual art from the key communities including Turkey Creek and was shown in 1991, first in the High Court, then Parliament House Canberra and to galleries in Victoria and sold out quickly. Rosemary says: “Aboriginal Art and Spirituality changed my life. It altered my consciousness of indigenous people as well as of Aboriginal art. I have returned to Balgo and Turkey Creek often and came to love (I do not have another word) the great Warmun elder, Hector Jandany Sundaloo. ‘Come quickly’ was the message he sent as he was nearing death, ‘I’m just about stuffed.’ Hector was the revered Ngapuny (God) man, and ‘two-way,’ able to rethink Christian symbols in Aboriginal terms, faithful to both.” From before the time of the Aboriginal Art and Spirituality exhibition, Rosemary had spent many years thinking about the idea of an exhibition to bring together work of key artists of the 20th century at a moment when they were asking themselves religious-type questions, such as ‘Who am I? Does life have any meaning beyond the obvious? What about love? Pain? Death?’ She took the concept to James Mollison who was then the director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and he liked the idea.

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Later, his successor, Timothy Potts, took it into his forward program. Rosemary’s method was to identify the artists she wanted, research where their best works might be, and then travel to where she could see them and wherever possible, meet and talk to the artist. The hardest part of all was to persuade the owner to lend the painting. It meant endless travel: Rosemary found herself traipsing around the world at least annually for several years. For example, she wanted a Frida Kahlo, she had to have a Frida Kahlo, and they are almost impossible to get. It took literally years of indefatigable patience and persistence, visiting wealthy collectors, asking favours and suffering disappointments, before she finally got what she wanted. For the NGV the prospect also was daunting. The exhibition promised to be the most complex it had ever mounted. It was not a block buster from one big institution, but would involve extracting a large number of the best paintings by the world’s finest 20th century artists from more than 20 lending institutions and private collections worldwide. It was the time when the trustees were planning refurbishment of the NGV and the building of the new Australian art museum, so regular gallery sponsors and benefactors were off limits because big funding would be needed for the capital works. Both Rosemary and the NGV found the process of developing the exhibition very stressful. “At times the journey was very rocky. At one point, years before the exhibition was scheduled to take place, I was summoned by Timothy Potts and told the project would fall over unless I was able to raise more than $300,000 by the following Monday! I can remember coming home from the NGV that night feeling desperate enough to break one of my own rules, never to ask sponsorship from friends. “I faxed Rupert Murdoch, telling him what had happened and asking how did he feel about coming to the rescue saying if there was to be a choice between support for the exhibition and friendship, I’d choose friendship. ‘I want to help’ he said, ‘how about I do 100 [$100,000]?’ ‘Thanks’, I said, ‘but 100 will not save the day, I’m afraid’. ‘Well, ask my mother for another 100 and we can do it together.’ So I did – and she did.” It still wasn’t quite enough; at the ultimate deadline, Rosemary called Murdoch’s PA and asked her: “Do you think Mr Murdoch meant $100,000 US dollars?” Indeed he did and the exchange rate at the time

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gave the NGV the extra they needed. Rosemary had the cheque enlarged, reproduced and framed before it was banked. Other generous support was committed too, from Michael Buxton, Patricia Rochford and her own congregation in Parramatta. Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination was mounted at the NGV in 1998 and comprised 96 artworks from 72 of the greatest artists of the 20th century. In her introduction in the beautifully designed catalogue, Rosemary sums up what the exhibition revealed about 20th century religious art: “At the beginning of the century, the iconography of religion and spirituality was usually Judaeo-Christian, narrative and figurative. By the close of the century, the interest is not so much narrative and scriptural as diffusely spiritual, questioning, and focussed less on a life after death than on a spirit that swells within the body, the earth, and — more rarely — society.” Her colleague and friend, Friedhelm Mennekes SJ, a leading German art expert and curator, came to Australia for the exhibition and concluded his article for the catalogue with a succinct rationale: “The function of art and the function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together in a living whole.” Years later in 2009, a leading academic at Cambridge told Rosemary that Timothy Potts had told him it was one of the finest exhibitions he had ever been associated with. n Just as Beyond Belief demonstrated the shift in religious values over the 20th century, Rosemary’s own religious values have shifted during her life. She says: “I went into the convent because I wanted to do the best I could in my life; I think you could call that a calling. People have often asked me if I ever thought of leaving and I say, of course, you grow up and you change, but I have never had a good reason to go. Ultimately, relationships are what I care most about and those deep and important relationships are not separate from, but within my relationship with God. God is revealed through the people you meet and the depth of those relationships. “Cardinal Basil Hume said if you are lucky enough to love somebody really deeply, of either gender, it is the closest you can come to the love of

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God. There’s something very truthful about that. I think with the people you are closest to in your life, it has to be a love of the whole person, not just the spirit. It’s about the mystery of what it is to be a human being. “At this stage in my life, working on the last reaches of the Blake Prize book, to be called Within, I know how blessed I’ve been in so many ways. For a restless and incurably curious person who needs solitude and the edge, as well as deep friendships, life continues to throb and beckon.” N

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Directors

Bruce Beresford (Photo: Jacob Hutchings) Bruce Beresford

From his base in Sydney, Bruce Beresford has made a successful career as an independent film director. While the early films that created his reputation were made from Australian vernacular stories, for over 30 years his career has followed an international trajectory of the highest repute.

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n the surface of things, the life of a film director seems deeply frustrating. Reading endless scripts, most of which, even if they were interesting, have no chance of being made, seems a par- Oticularly sad and pointless task. Bruce Beresford says that at any one time he might have 30 scripts he is looking at, but only four or five will be suitable for a film and only a fraction will be made. For an independent director as he is, having identified a first class script, the business of finding a reliable producer who will find the money for the project seems like finding a needle in a haystack. He tells appalling stories of travelling half way across the world to complete details of a film project, only to find the project was fantasy in the mind of the so-called producer. “You spend a lot of time dealing with people who are half crazy. Recently there was a project in the US about a famous singer, and the guy I was talking to in Los Angeles who had proposed it, said how great it was that he had a distribution deal with Disney. I spoke to my agent there and he called back to say not only was there no deal with Disney, but they had never even heard of it. My wife asks why do I keep dealing with these mad people and I say you never know whether they are mad or not. So I asked her to come with me to a meeting at the Dorchester about a film with a really good script based on a well known children’s story I had been discussing for a long time but never seemed to go anywhere. She came with me and we had this really positive discussion about contracts, the actors and distribution all being lined up and I asked her afterwards: ‘Is he crazy?’ She said: ‘I have no idea.’ Nothing came of it of course — he was giving a very good performance of impersonating a normal human being.” Even if there is a committed producer who is lining up the finance, the task of finding the right actors is surprisingly difficult. He instances a film he has long wanted to make of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good, itself based on Tom Keneally’s novel about the First Fleet, The Playmaker. The story is a fascinating one that tells of the interaction between some Royal Marines and a group of convicts who rehearse and perform Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer. “It’s a wonderful play and we had a terrific script and we even had the production money from Merchant Ivory, but the trouble was nobody wanted to be in it. It happens sometimes that you can’t get actors. This went on for about three years until my American agent called and said you have got to stop muck-

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ing around with that project. He said you have to face the fact that no actors want to be in it. Ismail Merchant said to me: ‘It must be you’, and I said: ‘No, it must be you because actors want to be in my other films.’” Recently Bruce wrote a very funny book called Josh Hartnett defi- nitely wants to do this that portrays his desperate experiences over a two year period when not one of his many film projects came to fruition. It has an almost Kafka-esque atmosphere of reality denial where every pro- tagonist seems to live in a different realm, and it suggests the film world is one of fantasy and giant egos. Bruce is neither a fantasist nor is he on an uncontrolled ego trip, but he is lucky to have a sense of humour, and is able to deal with the frustrations and lunacy that sometimes seem to dog him at every turn. n From the elevated back verandah bordered by iron lacework of the large old Victorian house, there is a panoramic view of the inner working part of Sydney harbour with the bridge square in the middle distance. On the water’s edge is a huge old Moreton Bay fig hanging over the garden so close to the verandah that you could almost reach and touch it. It is a comfortable old Sydney water view: there is no glamorous new water- front mansion in sight — in fact the garden next door is dominated by the rusty iron roof of a ramshackle shed. Inside the house, the big airy rooms have wide kauri floorboards, old rugs and are full of books, old furniture and heavy framed pictures, many of them figurative paintings from the early part of the 20th century. This is where Bruce, his wife Virginia and their daughter Trilby have lived for the past 15 years. It is so inviting, and so full of possibilities that it suggests a life time of living and working. Bruce is a tall strong looking man with a boyish and disarmingly frank and open manner that seems to belie his status as one of the grand old men of Australian cinema. Now in his late 60s, he radiates enthusiasm and determination to keep hunting for stories to film. His filmog- raphy of nearly 30 feature films, set in exotic locations all over the world and most with starry international casts, stands in sharp contrast with the always-out-of-reach debut feature desperately sought by today’s tyro director. Certainly it is a crowded scene these days with so many clever

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and well-educated young people wanting a career in the film business. And just like young people in the airline business want to be pilots, so many entering the film and television industry, want to direct. When Bruce started out there was no film industry in Australia at all. He was brought up in western Sydney in a household dominated by an unpredictable father where his mother retreated into her own world and Bruce and his sister were unable to live the normal life of children. Perhaps this unhappy milieu spawned his passion for stories and for telling them on film. “From at least the age of ten, I was aware that I wanted to make films to tell stories with all the excitement of the visuals, the music, the cutting, the performances. I loved books and films as a child and their emotional power and I knew I had to move people by doing this. I got an 8 mm camera when I was twelve and started making films. I made dozens of little films until my parents threw out all my film gear as they thought I was wasting my time.” After leaving school, he went to Sydney University and for a young man of his sensibility, predictably fell in with smart young people like Clive James, Robert Hughes, John Bell, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, Bob Ellis and Anne Schofield. He joined Sydney University Dramatic Society and at last was able to express his pent up feelings for film and theatre. After graduating, like virtually all talented young people in the 1960s, there was no option but to get on a boat and go to Europe. He boarded the notorious old tub Castel Felice that took tribes of callow young Australians to see the world and brought back even larger hordes of $10 emigrants from Glasgow and Manchester. Rather like the wide-eyed Candide, on arrival in London he accepted whatever was on offer, including helping demolish a factory called Cornwall’s Erections. He was the only applicant for a job as a film editor and cameraman in Nigeria advertised in The Times where he stayed (and survived) until civil war broke out two years later. The film unit in Nigeria was a shambles, but he directed and acted in plays with an African theatre group gaining invaluable directing experience. On his return from Nigeria, there was little else in his CV, beyond his enthusiastic personality, that could have persuaded the aristocrats of the British film industry to give him a free hand on the Production Board of the British Film Institute.

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“We made low budget films and gave grants to film makers — it was the only way to get started as the industry was controlled by the unions. Believe it or not, I also became the film adviser to the Arts Council [of Great Britain]. I was only 26 and I would go in and tell them what to do and they took me really seriously, people like Sir William Coldstream and Sir Michael Balcon and Lord Elton! As well as supervising other people’s films, I made a few short films myself, on art. I made films on Picasso’s sculptures, Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures, the paintings of Lichtenstein, Magritte. This was good experience for me: I photographed some of them and edited them. “Through the British Film Institute, we financed the first films of a lot of people who went on to big careers, people like Ridley Scott, Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh. It was my job to assess their applications to make films, and to work out whether it was going to be possible for the films to be made with the grants we gave them. It was a great training ground for me to work out all the budgets and logistics. It taught me the valuable lesson of how to work on low budgets.” He cites the example of one of his most successful films made in 1989, that won an Oscar for Best Picture, Driving Miss Daisy. “They cut the budget from $17 million to $7 million. They cut it because the studio didn’t want to do it. They had an obligation to the producer Richard Zanuck but they were trying to find a way out, so I had to find other ways of doing it. One of the things I said was that we won’t build a set, we’ll shoot it in a real house and I told Richard I’ll bring over an Australian cameraman who’s used to shooting in real houses. So we rented a house in Atlanta. We cut the fees down and we cut the schedule down from 75 days to 33. We had originally set the schedule to give rest breaks to Jessica Tandy who was 82 and unwell, but that all went out the window — I had to work her like a slave.” While his work at the BFI and the Arts Council in the 1960s was a fantastic apprenticeship, he wanted to make narrative films. In 1971, the Australian Film Commission was established so Bruce was back here in no time to persuade the new film establishment to take a commercial attitude to encouraging Australian film. With Barry Humphries, whom he had met in London, he wrote the script and directed the Adventures of Barry Mackenzie, a lavatorial comedy about the experiences, almost

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exclusively sex and booze, of a young Australian in London accompanied by his aunt Edna, the now superstar Dame Edna played by Humphries. This was sensationally successful, delighting the young while outraging almost everyone else. He followed it with a sequel, Barry Mackenzie Holds His Own and alternated these low life farces with serious documentaries about Aboriginal life, Poor Fella Me, and shipwrecked castaways, The Wreck of the Batavia. It was the Barry Mackenzie films that like it or not, were making his reputation. Phillip Adams, who saw himself as the main man in creating an Australian film industry, sent him a copy of David Williamson’s popular play Don’s Party about the night of the Federal election in 1969 and Bruce was asked to make the film. He says it was the easiest film he ever made because it was about the sort of people he knew, so he didn’t need to do any research. Since he was a teenager, Bruce had wanted to make a film of Henry Handel Richardson’s novel of adolescent school girl angst, The Getting of Wisdom. In 1977 he made a film of the story which was perhaps his most accomplished to date and for which even now he has a soft spot. He says: “It was not well received but I think it was a good film. The critics seemed to think it was a 10th rate Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Two years later he made the film that launched his international career, Breaker Morant, based on the true story of three soldiers executed by the British during the Boer War in South Africa. Bruce spent much effort in researching the background to this story, resulting in a dignified and beautifully shot film that won eight AFI Awards and became, up to that time, the biggest box office success in Australian film history. The success of Breaker Morant led to a plethora of scripts being sent to him, mostly from the US. To his agent’s disappointment, he decided his next film should be based on a script, Tender Mercies, he had been sent by Horton Foote, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. “This script was so great, I thought I would be an idiot not to do it, even though the budget was miniscule. My agent said, ‘You’re being sent all these scripts and you want to do something costing nothing and with nobody in it!’ Several directors had turned down the script but I thought it was wonderful and it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Horton Foote was one of the finest writers of the 20th century. He won two Academy

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Awards for his scripts, as well as the Pulitzer Prize.” Bruce didn’t go on to say that in this, his first American film, he was nominated for an Academy Award as best director for Tender Mercies. Coming on top of Breaker Morant it then meant he was recognised as a successful international director and could pick and choose his scripts, as far as anyone could in that wild and unpredictable world. n As a child, Bruce once bought a huge board bound book called The World of Music from a travelling salesman. It became his personal bible and a voyage of discovery into the world of classical music. Even now he dips into it. Music and opera have been more private, less obsessive passions than film, but he is always returning to them. Oddly enough, for a director with a real love for and knowledge of music, he has usually avoided musical scores in his films. “All those early films in Australia like Breaker Morant, Getting of Wisdom, Don’s Party and Puberty Blues had no musical scores, nor did my first American film Tender Mercies. I have always felt music in films is rather overdone and intrusive, and much of it is very second rate. I find when you look at old films on TV, even if it is a good film, the music often is awful and dates the film badly. I used to think I’m not going to let my films date because of a rotten music score, so I won’t put any in. However, the American industry insists on music, so I decided to get hold of Georges Delerue, who is such a superior composer, and he did the music for many of my films.” His career as an opera director is less well known than his film work, but it is still substantial. His first effort was Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West for Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto Festival. It was not unalloyed delight: he found Menotti charming but also unpredictable and the two leads sang poorly. “It’s very hard to do a convincing production if your lead singers are no good.” A few years later in 1991, Bill Gillespie of State Opera of South Australia asked him to direct Richard Strauss’s Elektra which was altogether a different experience. It was an inspired choice of opera and director as Elektra had not been presented in Australia before, probably because it needs a huge orchestra and a dramatic soprano of rare range and stamina. Gillespie cast the American Marilyn Tschau in

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her debut assumption of the role and the production was splendid. It became the spark for Gillespie’s triumphant mounting of Wagner’s Ring cycle a few years later, again a first for Australia. In the United States, Bruce has directed several operas, both traditional and contemporary, ranging from Rigoletto for Los Angeles Opera to Sweeney Todd for Portland Opera. He took great pleasure from direction of Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree for the Houston and San Diego opera companies. He admires Floyd whose many operas are constantly presented in the US. “He wrote the opera Susannah about 40 years ago which is performed everywhere except Australia. In my view, Floyd is a great composer who does his own librettos. I am directing another of his operas here in Australia next year, Of Mice and Men based on the Steinbeck novel which I’m very pleased about.” This will be his second production for Opera Australia, following his success with Andre Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire a few years ago. “In some ways it’s hard to go wrong with opera — if you do a production that is half-way good, you have this magnificent music and fabulous singers, so in a way it’s already there. In a film you’re making it up as you go along.” Strangely enough, in 2000 he made a film called Bride of the Wind about the great Austrian composer/conductor Gustav Mahler and his beautiful wife Alma who went on after Mahler’s death to marry or become the lover of several famous artistic figures including Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel. This is one of the great stories of music, musicians and art. The film is gorgeous to look at but fails to come to life and must be considered one of his less successful films. He says, “I loved doing it, but it didn’t really work. Perhaps the script didn’t give those extraordinary characters enough life. It has never been given general release because the film has been impounded over some legal problem associated with the producers.” n Unlike many mature artists, Bruce Beresford is not especially concerned about his life’s work and past achievements. More important for him is the challenge of every new film, presenting technical or artistic problems he may never have faced before. The upside of being an independent

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director is that he can follow his own ideas in making the film, even if he has to waste endless hours and energy trying to get the project up in the first place. Looking at a list of his films shows two things: his best films are intimate studies of interesting and sometimes very ordinary people, and secondly, most would never have been made if he had depended on the studio system. Films like Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies, Paradise Road, Mister Johnson and Evelyn are all small scale, intimate and intense in the interaction of the characters. All are superb films by any standard. No big Hollywood studio would want to make any of them. Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies were the films that confirmed his international reputation and won many awards. Both were low budget with simple non-eventful stories. Driving Miss Daisy was a true story about an old lady (played by Jessica Tandy) whose son insisted she should no longer drive herself and despite her dogged resistance, engaged a driver (Morgan Freeman) for her. As Bruce says: “It was written with enormous affection for the people involved, but people didn’t want to do it because nothing happens; the biggest thing that happens is when the chauffeur borrows a can of salmon and she accuses him of stealing it.” Two of his later films Mister Johnson and Evelyn are similar in their simplicity and portrayal of ordinary people caught up in situations outside their experience. Both have a deep poignancy that is highly affecting on screen, but in neither case has this translated into box office success, despite the presence in both of Pierce Brosnan in thoughtful and beautifully acted roles in contrast to his James Bond image. Evelyn is the true story of an Irish father where the law requires his children be taken from him by the state when his wife goes off with another man to another country. It so truthfully evokes the mood and time of the 1950s in Ireland, that the film seems to have been made then. Mister Johnson is based on the superb novel by Joyce Cary about the life of a colonial officer in Nigeria in 1923. Lovingly shot on location in Nigeria, its strength is in the cleverly set up character interaction with marvellous performances by both the European and local actors. Bruce says about the film: “I think the film was wonderful and got the best reviews of any film I ever made, but it has never had proper release. The only way it can be seen is on a bootleg DVD though I believe a good

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quality DVD is to be released soon.” Suggestion that intimate character films are his special forte are resisted and he cites Black Robe, a monumental historical action film about Jesuit interaction with native Indians in 17th century Canada and spectacularly filmed on location in wintry Northern Quebec. “It was based on the novel by Brian Moore that deals with an actual incident from the Jesuits’ diaries of the time [Relations aux Missions des Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus en la Nouvelle France] which are still extant and archived in Paris. The film was set in 1629 and you can read the daily events that took place between the Jesuit missionaries and the native Indians. It is like stepping back into another world. Filming in 30 degrees below in the snow and ice, every time someone spoke, you could see their breath; they said we should build the huts for the interiors scenes in the studio, but I insisted we build them on location too, so the cold was real and visible.” Another reason for his sure touch in ‘character’ films might be his fascination with films from unusual sources or by especially talented directors. He watches a select few films endlessly; a special favourite is Musa: The Warrior, a 2001 Korean film that has become a classic. “It is exactly what I like: it is an adventure film with a lot of action but it’s also a character study with about eight major characters who are all intricately drawn. Even the bad guys, the Mongols, are ultimately viewed sympathetically. It is superbly directed with a wonderful script full of great dialogue. And the action scenes are so heroic and breathtakingly staged. I get wound up by the story of films like this. In fact I was in a DVD store the other day and I saw the Director’s Cut version of Musa: the Warrior and I just had to get it. It’s half an hour longer and even better!” Fantasy or technology driven films do not much interest him unless they tell a good and absorbing story. Nevertheless he admires the achievements of Peter Jackson enormously. “The technology he has developed in New Zealand is extraordinary, the best in the world. They have just made Avatar there and it would not have been possible anywhere else. I couldn’t understand the story of Lord of the Rings but the films were fabulously directed and magnificently realised. The locations in New Zealand are in great demand too, as their forests look like the American West, or even look European. In Australia we have nothing like that.”

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Bruce is clearly a realist; poring through endless second rate scripts is bad enough, but the frustration of favourite projects not getting made must be worse. Perhaps his worst experience was for a film called Boswell for the Defence where the research had been done, cast and crew assem- bled, and filming about to commence. Bruce received a casual phone call: “I was told: ‘the film’s off.’ We found the office closed, the producers had vanished, and the whole cast and crew were left stranded with nothing paid, even our expenses!” All these frustrations seem to be shrugged off; the next film is always where his attention is focused. At present it is a film to be made in upstate New York about the conflicts between three generations of women called Peace Love and Misunderstanding. Bruce and his wife Virginia are off to the US for a year. It doesn’t sound like one of his favourite action films; more like the intimate character film he does so well. N

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Directors

Roland Peelman (Photo: Ojārs Greste) Roland Peelman

Born and raised in Belgium to a family with no musical background, Roland Peelman has lived in Australia since 1984. An accomplished pianist, he has worked in Australia, Europe and Asia as music director or conductor for a great many organisations including Opera Australia, Australian Chamber Orchestra and several music theatre and new music organisations. Dominant in his unbelievably hectic schedule is the Song Company, Australia’s leading vocal ensemble, of which he has been artistic director since 1990.

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he Song Company’s office is in an old wooden shipping tally clerk’s shed on the wharf at Walsh Bay — near the smartly renovated pier that is home to the Sydney Theatre Company and Tthe Sydney Dance Company. The office is anything but smart: shabby, cramped and liable at any time to fearsome smells from underneath, or bone-shaking crashes from the workshop above or even gushes of filthy water through the ceiling. On a typical day Roland will arrive at about 9.30 am, having risen very early to research a new program, arrange a piece for the Song Company, or write an overdue program note. Most likely he will do a yoga session, grab something to eat and run/walk four or five kilometres from Potts Point to Walsh Bay. At the office, he might stand behind the operations manager’s desk and discuss changes to the schedule of rehearsals and performances, check the proofs for the next printed program, review the travel arrangements and itinerary for the next concert tour and worm his way into the broom cupboard, which purports to be the company’s music library, in order to find a score and parts which may or may not suit a forthcoming concert. All of this will be done in about half an hour and all will require far reaching changes to existing arrangements that precipitates much eye rolling. Just in case you think this is all inconsiderate or obsessive, which in a way it is, it is accompanied by lots of chat, laughter and gossip that lights up the office. Very likely there will be a meeting out of the office for which he and general manager Karen Baker will be running late and the whirlwind will suddenly vanish. If there is a rehearsal that afternoon, it probably will be in an old church hall in Annandale. The six singers and Roland will sit around a couple of stackable tables in a curious yellow gloom that has the chiaro- scuro effect of an old master painting. The atmosphere is usually relaxed, even seemingly indolent, as they discuss their approach to a piece they are doing. Most of them have been in the company a long time, have become good friends and profoundly understand each other’s voices and musicality. But Roland is completely in charge and once the discussion is finished, he determines the line to be taken when they start to sing. Clive Birch, the bass, who has been in the Song Company even longer than Roland, finds Roland’s incessant energy exhausting and his constant changes to the schedule and program infuriating. Even so, he admires Roland unreservedly and finds his musicianship inspirational; he says he

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wouldn’t want to work for anyone else. If there is a performance that night, there is unlikely to have been a rehearsal that afternoon, or they will be in two hire cars driving to places like Wollongong, Newcastle, Canberra or Bathurst. They give many more concerts on the road than they do in Sydney. Roland may drive one car, as he has no car of his own; indeed he has very few possessions apart from his books. On arrival, as every venue has different facilities, he will spend sometimes several hours with the local manager or technician and the singers setting up a lighting plan, rehearsing stage movements and adjusting the vocal balance to account for the acoustic of the hall. He will dress and come into the hall half an hour before the performance and give a pre-concert talk. While planned in detail in advance, these are given off the cuff, and are both erudite and entertaining, though sometimes ordinary mortals find his quick delivery, long words and arcane references a little hard to follow. Once during a pre-concert talk in the Orange Regional Gallery, he spied a Judy Cassab painting he did not know on the wall and instantly wound it into the point he was making. His deep well of cultural knowledge facilitates such sharp lateral thinking. But for many people the talks have become an essential part of the performance. Unlike most orchestral concerts where the format and the works played are familiar or predictable, these programs generally include many songs, old and new, that represent unheard, sometimes challenging, territory. Roland’s introductions illuminate the central ideas or theme behind the concert and help create a context for the music to resonate with the audience. n Roland was born in rural Flanders. In his childhood there was no running water in the bathroom, let alone any understanding of his early passion for music. At age five he was given a toy piano which he played (!) for hours on end. Occasionally he would hear on the radio something that made him sit up: “I nagged my parents for a whole year to have music lessons or get a piano, and when I was ten, one day I picked up my courage and knocked on the door of the only musician in the village. He ran the brass band and I knew he had a piano. I asked him if he would teach me and he asked did I have a piano, and when I said no, he found a place

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where I could go after school and practise. “It was very isolating, and when I finished primary school at twelve, I decided I didn’t want to go to the local high school ten kilometres away, but I wanted to board at a school in a larger town. Even though it was only 25 ks away and there was a bus it was considered to be too far away to commute. For me it was a way of escaping.” At high school his talent as a pianist quickly emerged, and when he left school, he secured a place at the Conservatorium in Ghent. It is interesting that at the Conservatorium he did not immediately prosper. Despite playing much more and much harder repertoire, and practising assiduously, he did not improve and became very despondent. “Part of the problem was growing up in an environment where there was no understanding of music, and I was a late starter. It is impossible to know whether a more conventional musical background would have made a difference. While my parents put no obstacles in my way and were very supportive, there was no one to mentor me. I had the freedom to make my own mistakes and to fall into my own traps and I’m sure that helped to make me the sort of musician I am. “I found the experience in the first year very negative, almost traumatic. All the hopes and expectations that I had built up for when at last I could concentrate on my music became a complete fizzer — it was a very sobering experience. But a keen observer could easily have seen what the problems were. First I wasn’t being intellectually challenged enough. Doing far too much practice every day (up to six hours a day) badly affected my posture. I was not very in touch with my body and I developed all these blockages. In the end they became mental blockages. And as happens to so many talented young people, I had become completely infatuated with my teacher. She was good up to a point but by the third year she was out of her depth. Someone should have seen it — my problem became her problem too and eventually she realised that.” The turning point came later under the tutelage of Claude Coppens, an extraordinarily gifted composer and pianist who was part of the fiercely secular positivist academic circles of Ghent at the time. He was immensely analytical, and had the demoralising habit of following the score while it was being played, marking every tiny error or point of

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articulation he didn’t like. Every time the piece was played to him, there would be more black or red marks charting all the mistakes over the weeks. Paradoxically, the terrifying but analytical rigour of his criticism helped to build up Roland’s confidence again. In an intellectual sense, Coppens made him look and listen to music in a way he had never done before. He insisted you have to know a score before you can start to learn and practise it. By then Roland was becoming absorbed in the larger life of the university. He made life long friends among the students; he became influenced by luminaries of the early music movement who were older colleagues like Rene Jacobs and Philippe Herreweghe. He enrolled in art history and became absorbed in the visual arts, architecture and various psychological movements. It seemed that at last the barriers were down and he became fascinated with what contemporary composers were doing now, as much as how older music should be performed. At the age of 22, Roland married Annette Boucneau and over the next few years they had a family of four children. It seems an odd turn of events for a young man escaping from rural family life, but on reflection, he says: “Being obsessed by music as I was, music and art can take over your life and sublimate your day to day reality. I think on a personal level I was very repressed and very un-free. My adventure, if you like, was an intellectual adventure. My personal adventure was left behind. Though I don’t regret for a moment my marriage, it was a mistake. I was too young and wasn’t ready to be a father or a husband in the sense of being a family man. There are things in our lives we can’t explain or control. There are choices we can make and we can get carried away by those brave or exhil- arating choices we make. We forget about the things that are chosen for us and that we cannot escape. Growing up is about getting control and losing control. I’ve lost control several times in my life! There are things in my life where I surrendered control, because I couldn’t deal with it. I fell in love with a person (and she with me) and it was a surrender of control of that part of my life.” It is intriguing to speculate what Roland’s career might have been if he had not married at that time. Almost certainly he would not have emigrated to Australia. His former wife Annette was a keen traveller and it was she who wanted the great adventure of taking the family to Australia

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— to Mt Gambier as it happened. While he might never have gone to Australia, he was very attracted to the idea of going to the other side of the world and starting with a tabula rasa. Now the family is grown up and dispersed with two of the children and their mother in Europe and two others remaining in Australia. Ironically, it is Roland who now loves Australia and would not think for a moment of returning to Europe to live. About 15 years ago he came out in a lasting gay relationship, but at present he lives alone. n Despite his almost impossibly onerous job at the Song Company, much of it self-inflicted through the hugely challenging program he sets for the company each year, he revels in dealing with the problems and conflict- ing demands. “What I like doing best is doing different things. It took me a while to work this out but I found that if I am forced to do one thing, like practise the piano all the time during my first year at the Conservatorium, my brain doesn’t work well. I like to be pulled in different directions, and if I am facing a problem, I like to deal with it quickly. There’s nothing worse that taking a lot of time resolving a problem. They become all absorbing and take over your life. “To me, each project, each day, is an adventure and I’m always hoping for something new to arrive each day! What keeps me going is squeezing in a lot — and if I’m not doing that I get miserable. I have to do a lot of research but I don’t call myself a musicologist. While I have to be scru- pulous about what I am doing, I don’t need to abide by all the academic rules. For me the research is a kind of feeding ground of discovery of ideas and music I don’t know. You find things you don’t know and that’s the adventure and that’s what I love.” By the time he turned 30 he was becoming well established in Australia and was in demand as a conductor, most frequently at Opera Australia. It was soon found by various company managements that his fast analytical brain made him ideal to conduct difficult contemporary scores; nowadays there is no one in the country to surpass him in this skill. He became music director of Sydney Metropolitan Opera which exclusively presented new small scale opera and music theatre.

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However his real love lay in building organisations he could take in new directions and establish strong relationships with their community. In 1990 he accepted artistic direction of two organisations, the Hunter Orchestra based in Newcastle and the Song Company. Both operated part time and struggled financially but he revelled in the challenge of developing two such different companies simultaneously. He stayed with the Hunter Orchestra for seven years and retains to this day warm relations with many Newcastle people who put so much effort into helping him turn it into a success. There were many successful concerts at an artistic standard of which he and many Novocastrians were justifiably proud. Eventually the orchestra was defeated as much by paro- chialism as by lack of funds. Part of the problem was that it had a very large board of management which put great store on it being the flagship of the arts in the city. It was hard to find people who had the experience and wisdom to achieve consensus in making the critical decisions. In 1997, with the finances looking grim, the board decided to turn it into a ‘pops’ orchestra against Roland’s specific advice. He resigned, funding was reduced, and within a year the orchestra folded. Financially his other company, the Song Company, has also struggled but at an artistic level, it has gone from strength to strength and now is virtually unique anywhere in the world as a vocal ensemble of the highest quality capable of presenting music at a standard of excellence from any period, style or culture. Significantly, it has retained a small board that has always been supportive, has rarely strayed from consensus and generally seems to have made the right decisions. “Running a company very quickly goes beyond what you personally feel you want to do — like wanting this or that toy for Christmas. What ‘I’ want is only one small part of the equation. The Board of an organisation carries the collective history of the company as well as their own individual histories and it is important for them to understand this. However just doing the right thing is the recipe for creating a boring company. In 1995 there was a personal argument in the company which turned into a real crisis and it made the Board think very hard about the nature of the company and their role. The whole process was a good one and has helped the company to be where it is today. “For a company like the Song Company, the ensemble of singers is

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crucial. Without it we can have no consistency. The quality and consistency of our performances depend entirely on how well our ensemble functions on a human and artistic level. But it’s never good enough just to have a lovely ensemble. I have this simple theory — the triple H theory. First of all you have to keep the singers happy, which means they have to want to do what they do, they have to be happy and fulfilled as singers. Next they have to be healthy, and they have to be happy in order to be healthy. It is crucial for their bodies to be in good shape to do the demanding work they have to do every day. The third H is the most important of all. It is not good enough to have a happy, healthy ensemble, it could be a boring or complacent one. They also have to be hungry — this means they need to be hungry to be different, challenged, surprised. I never like to set things in stone, I like to keep things flexible. I know it frustrates the singers and it’s partly an unconscious thing with me but it also keeps everyone on their toes, keeps them hungry.” Artistically, he hates to repeat in the same way performances of music he has done in the past. He is currently preparing the Song Company’s performance project for Easter and says it will be entirely different from what was done in past Easter programs even though the last two have been amongst the most outstanding things the company has ever done. He believes it is vital for companies to stay vibrant and for the artistic director to “keep the heartbeat going.” Some organisations change artistic directors after a few years and he agrees this is necessary if the work is becoming routine or is no longer relevant. On the other hand, there are those companies where the artistic director has been in charge for 20 or even 30 years. He asks the rhetorical question: for better or worse, which ones do you remember? Another aspect of his commitment, indeed his prime responsibility when rehearsing a work, especially a new piece, is to know it completely, and be emotionally committed to it. He says when it comes to the performance: “It’s not like a lecture, you are not telling the audience ‘aren’t we clever we are doing it exactly at the metronome mark.’ Once you get to the performance you owe it to the composer and to the audience to create it as if it was the first time. Every performance should be as if it was the first. It’s there for that fleeting moment only. “As a performer, I don’t take composers’ indications lightly. I will take

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a lot of trouble to work out the reason why the composer wrote that note and not some other note. For new music this is very important for me and if I can’t find the reason, I may suggest a change or edit the score.” Asked about the most memorable performances he has directed, he sighs deeply; there are so many and the memory has become blurred. In reality he has little time for sentimental recollection, but some things stand out. During his time with the Hunter Orchestra he commissioned Nigel Butterley to compose an oratorio for the Newcastle bicentenary called Spell of Creation. Sadly it was never performed in Newcastle as the orchestra went out of business before it was completed. “It is a mas- terwork, perhaps the best work he has ever written and I would love to perform it if the opportunity came up.” He recalls a Porgy and Bess he conducted in Brisbane with a great cast and orchestra, and especially the fabulous all night party they threw for his 40th birthday afterwards. In 2009 at the Canberra Festival he conducted a memorable revival of Peter Sculthorpes’s massive dance/opera Rites of Passage, commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House and not performed since 1973. It was a momentous occasion and a deeply emotional moment for Sculthorpe hearing the work played and sounding like he had always wanted it to sound. For many, Roland will always be associated with the extraordinary achievement of the Tenebrae project where the 27 responsories for Tenebrae by 17th century composer Carlo Gesualdo were choreographed and sung as dance dramas with the Song Company singers dancing with professional dancers, as they sang this intricate and virtuosic music without instrumental accompaniment. Because of the cost and the enormous amount of rehearsal required, the project was spread over five years. Roland acknowledges the Tenebrae project with pride and especially the achievement of the singers to dance while singing the fiendishly difficult music. Personally, he doesn’t really enjoy the actual performances as he does not conduct it and makes no appearance, and sitting backstage or in the auditorium during the performance makes him anxious and fretful. At the Song Company, he has built a tradition that at Easter each year there will be a staged music drama with relevance to the Christian Easter festival. Some will be new, such as the production of composer Gerard Brophy’s Gethsemane in 2010, or previous years’ Tenebrae from the 17th

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century. He also presents a Christmas program each year and religious music is regularly featured in his programs. His commitment to religious and spiritual music has not come easily. Brought up in a Catholic family, he violently rejected it as an adolescent, and it is in Australia many years later that he found himself programming sacred music again. He says: “Eventually I could no longer ignore this incredible treasure of music written for the church , whether catholic or protestant or orthodox. In that sense the music actually helped me to embrace again the spiritual dimension of our life.” It begs the question: what about personal relationships? Was the experience of being a husband and father of four enough for a lifetime? The fact is his relationships with his children have only deepened over time and perhaps he is more of a real father now than he was when they were little. n While his lifestyle might look frenetic to the casual observer, Roland is careful to keep a balance. He is very strong and fit and devoted to yoga. Yoga enables him to keep in good overall physical shape as well as being a way of switching off the brain, something he finds very hard to do. He loves the beach, swimming and taking long walks, especially in Tasmania, where he goes as often as he can. He probably wishes he had time to go for a brisk long walk when he steps out of the car at All Saints Anglican Cathedral Bathurst after a three hour drive from Sydney. This is where the performance might be for Roland’s typical day. The program for this particular evening is called A Spanish Muse. The various movements of Tomas Luis de Victoria’s great Requiem Mass for the dead of 1605 will be interspersed with cantigas or songs composed by or for King Alfonso X of Sabio some 400 years earlier. The cathedral is a fine example of the often derided 1960s style of architecture, a flat topped red brick hexagonal block grafted on to the smaller gothic style original. Inside, the immense open high space is immeasurably enhanced by a magnificent series of brilliantly coloured abstract tapestries by John Coburn hanging on four sides, almost from ceiling to floor. Roland discusses with the Precentor (who is a fine organist and

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choral conductor) where the concert should be, the old or new cathedral? Which is the most suitable acoustically for the program? The singers gather and run through the program, reviewing positioning, movements, the acoustics and the limited lighting options. The new cathedral space is decided. After about an hour, they disperse for a meal and then to dress. A few people drift in, set up tables for the ticket, program and CD sales and chat quietly, dwarfed by the massive space. Gradually people arrive and take their seats, about 100 in the end, not very many, but not bad for a classical program in a regional centre. Roland arrives dressed in a black suit, black shirt and red tie and is greeted by broad smiles from the audience who listen eagerly but find it hard to hear his pre-concert talk in the boomy acoustic. The six singers enter and as the music unfolds, it reaches into every nook and cranny of the vast space, is utterly thrilling and overwhelming to the audience. People are astonished and gather afterwards around the singers and Roland, expressing their amazement, and when will they be back? Everyone is reluctant to go but eventually they leave and the singers discuss whether they will go back to the motel and straight to bed after such a long day or try to find somewhere to have a drink. Roland says, “I need to get back to Sydney — I have so much to do tomorrow, anyone want to come with me?” They decline as they are all too tired, so with a wave and a smile he is off. N

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Musicians

William Barton playing didgeridoo for the Song Company (Photo: Kim Askew) William Barton

Born into an indigenous music loving family near Mt Isa, William Barton is Australia’s best known and most creative didgeridoo player. Still in his 20s, he is also a composer, singer and guitarist and collaborates with many of Australia’s leading composers, orchestras, bands, choirs and vocal and instrumental groups. He is in high demand all over the world and travels constantly.

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t a recent gathering at the smart corporate branding and identity firm Principals, about 100 of their equally clever clients celebrated the year end in its elegant old army barracks office in The Rocks. AAfter a call to silence, a majestic young man, nearly two metres tall with long flowing dark hair, strides to the middle of the room, sits down and plants his intricately painted didgeridoo on the solid wooden floor. From the sudden silence, a rich low rumble emerges that vibrates in the bodies of everyone in the room. William Barton’s sound expands and leaps to huge animalistic cries, low grating growls, accompanied by sharp finger nail clicks on the body of the instrument and eloquent hand gestures illustrating his sound patterns. The audience is amazed and transfixed — cheers its enthusiasm when he finishes. It is a common response to this extraordinary musician. Modest and softly spoken, William is well aware of his talents and the danger of being exploited when confronted by exploding success. He is quietly proud of being offered honorary doctorates by both Griffith and Sydney universities in the same month, especially receiving the offer by a phone call from University of Sydney Chancellor and NSW Governor, Marie Bashir. William grew up in a family that held music in high regard. His mother has an operatic style voice which made quite an impression wherever she performed and his father was a guitarist in his spare time from his post office job. The family had a collection of vinyl discs of all kinds of music, from opera and classical music, to country and western, but his mother’s favourite singer was Mario Lanza, the fabulous tenor who had a short but sensational career in the 1950s and was heralded as the new Caruso. William’s mother and father and her blind father used to go to silent movies to listen to the music, so her musical repertoire varied from opera, to ballads and folk songs and even traditional wailing for mourn- ing ceremonies. During his childhood, William would go with his parents on tours in North Queensland performing at festivals, community concerts and even corporate events. As he grew older he would play didgeridoo on these tours and for a time the family re-located to Sydney. Here, in addition to their concerts and session recordings, they performed with the Naroo Dancers, Jose Colarco’s troupe of aboriginal and Torres Strait

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Islander dancers. William was introduced to the didgeridoo by his uncle Arthur Peterson who was a well travelled elder of the Kalkadoon people from the Kalkadunga country near Mt Isa. He died when William was only eleven and William has inherited his favourite didgeridoo. “It was given to me by his tribe when he passed away. Normally they break up the didgeridoo and bury it to silence the sound forever. But my father asked the other tribal elders if they could give Uncle Arthur’s didgeridoo to me as I was one of his last students, and they could see I was going to carry on the culture into the 21st century.” Apart from his uncle’s didgeridoo, William has a large collection of instruments he plays, most of them made by a maker he trusts in Coffs Harbour, Nathan Burton. He used to learn on his uncle’s instrument and as he was a child, he needed to put beeswax around the embouchure to reduce the size to play. Now he has instruments made exactly to his requirements, yet at a concert may need to tape PVC on the playing end to vary the pitch as required. But he still sometimes sees an interesting instrument in a tourist or arts and crafts shop and will try it out. “You hand make the instrument: it’s a combination of the shape, length and diameter. The pitch will be defined by the length and the sound by the type of wood you use. Some players like to use bloodwood which is different from coolibah. The wood matures over the years and that affects the sound. All the grooves inside the didgeridoo left by the termites also affect the sound so that no two instruments will ever sound the same even if they are made to the same dimensions.” William’s rich and varied musical background not only honed his skills on the didgeridoo, but developed his musical sensibility in unusual ways. Through his mother’s love of opera and traditional folk song, he became exposed to classical music through ABC Classic FM, while on the other hand he loved improvising on his guitar to the music of his favourite rock band AC/DC. He found he wanted to use his guitar to express the rhythms and tonal sounds he felt in his body that came from his indigenous heritage. He even discovered that some of the heavy metal music he liked, seemed to have a relationship with the Bach and Vivaldi he had grown to love.

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By the age of sixteen he already had a significant reputation, as he was then approached by Mick Roche, a senior manager in BHP Cannington, to play in the premiere of a new orchestral piece with didgeridoo at a major event sponsored by the company in Brisbane. This invitation came about because of the company’s silver mining interests in the Mt Isa district and its commitment to work with the local indigenous people. William’s father, who had recently passed away, was the cultural custo- dian of the district. It was a huge experience for the young musician. He met the composer Philip Bracanin, who gave him the score, though at that stage all William knew of a musical score was what a note looked like as he had seen his primary school teacher draw one on the board. The concert took place in the courtyard of Queensland University with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra before a huge audience of some 4000 people. It was a turning point for him; it won him many friends and admirers, and gave him an insight into the type of musical collaboration he wanted for the future. As he says: “Everything doesn’t happen overnight but develops over a period of ten to 15 years. You get the gig because you are at least partly established in your career and you do it with a great deal of passion and connection to your collaborators. The best example of this in the classical aspect of my career was the concert of Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry in 2002 at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. It was one of those real magical moments with a ten minute standing ovation and that night they found a sponsor for me to perform Earth Cry in Japan and going from there to the London Philharmonic.” Mick Roche was Chair of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville and invited William to play, with the Goldner String Quartet, Sculthorpe’s version of Earth Cry for string quartet. He got to know Sculthorpe who then wrote his 14th quartet with William in mind. “We were doing a workshop with the Goldner Quartet in Sydney and Peter said we should put the didgeridoo in the String Quartet we were workshopping — No 14. So he did and even though I had never heard the piece before, we played it that night at the City Recital Hall.” After that, Sculthorpe wrote his Requiem which was premiered in 2004 with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at the Adelaide Festival and

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again featured William. This major new work was then taken overseas to the Litchfield Festival in the UK the same year. Now, of course, William is in great demand for collaboration with many fine music organisations both at home and abroad. In 2006, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra invited composer Matthew Hindson and William to jointly devise and compose a work for performance with the orchestra. “For me, the most important thing was to make it about the Mt Isa area and the Kalkadoon people and base it on the song I wrote when I was sixteen about the passing of the culture from one generation to the next. It’s an oral tradition where the old people sit around the camp fire at night and sing the songs and the dance, and the young child has to learn to do it. That was the centre point of the process but on either side was the story of the famous massacre that took place in the 1880s — there was a ten year battle where the Kalkadoon people stood up against the settlers and the troopers and other native troopers and trackers from other parts of Australia. There is a place called Battle Mountain where there was a lot of bloodshed. We used to go to a place nearby called Bar Creek which is so eerie. My old uncle used to say to mum and dad: ‘You know something here — there’s no birds singing here,’ even though it was right next to a waterhole.” In the joint composition of the piece, William wrote the sections involving the didgeridoo and sings several songs, playing the didgeridoo only in the last section. The pull between his various talents: singing, guitar and didgeridoo, a kind of embarras de richesse, is evident throughout his career to date. Even though he started playing didgeridoo at a very young age, it was the guitar he first loved; sitting endlessly in his parents’ car improvising to the cassette of AC/DC. Recently he enjoyed a collaboration with a Brazilian band and even more the tribute concert for AC/DC playing Thunderstruck on the didgeridoo. He is enjoying coming back to the guitar, spending a lot of time with it and finding his ‘voice’ with it in the way he did many years ago with the didgeridoo. In the recent tour to Europe with the Queensland Ballet, he played guitar as well as didgeridoo, and in the finale, a piece he calls Didgfusion, he plays both instruments at the same time! Singing is equally important to William. He has a lovely fresh tenor

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voice and to hear him sing the Kalkadunga song he wrote at the age of sixteen is always an affecting experience. He sang it in an orchestral version with the Sydney Symphony, and again with the Adelaide Symphony in Carnegie Hall, New York, in their tour of the US for the Australian promotion G’Day USA. Early in 2009, he sang the Kalkadunga song in a series of performances around Australia and recorded it with the Song Company in a version arranged by the Song Company’s artistic director Roland Peelman. The program was called Kalkadunga Yurdu (Kalkadunga Man in the Kalkadoon language), featured him both singing and playing didgeridoo, and later in the year, it was toured to Europe. The Song Company collaboration was a major project for both William and the Song Company. Roland had pondered the idea for some time and discussed it at length with William and other colleagues. He wanted to create as best he could the space and feeling of William’s country to use as a spiritual and visual context for the music to be performed. In addition to William’s Kalkadunga song and stories told by him of his cultural background, William chose a selection of music by Australian composer Ross Edwards, in particular a series of vocal pieces, Southern Cross Chants, which marvellously evoke the Australian landscape. Roland Peelman spoke to noted photographer Allan Chawner from Newcastle University who specialised in finely detailed landscape photography and asked him if he could travel to Mt Isa and photograph William in his own country. The result was a collection of several hundred magnificent photographs, both intimate and large scale of this spectacular country, many of which included William with his didgeridoo, appearing like a timeless rock in this elemental setting. For the performances, Allan Chawner selected a range of the images he had taken that reflected the sequence of the musical program and suited the mood and spirit of the music. These were projected on a large screen placed just above and behind William and the singers for all the performances. For the splendidly produced recording, a DVD that displays the sequence of photographs shown during the performance, is provided with the CD. “Allan is a very natural rather than technical photographer; he knows and understands the composition needed for each photo, especially with

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the briefing he had for the project. He focuses on the very vastness and rugged beauty of the landscape; it can be so harsh or you can be near a river which can save your life. I particularly liked the night sky and dusk on dusk in the photos. “There’s a lot of history there. The Afghan camel drivers used to pass through on their way to the Northern Territory, and in a community like Mt Isa they used to stay for a day or so and pray in the evening and sit around with the old bushies and have damper and tea with them. My mum and dad told the story of my great grandmother who got lost and was found by a Scottish family called Maclean near a river now referred to as the Burke and Wills river. They were a good family and let her learn her culture and pass it down. She was given the name Annie Maclean and married a man called Barton who was probably also a Scot and must have been my great grandfather.” Ross Edwards’ music strikes a deep chord in William’s psyche. For him it is like ‘magic on the wing’ and is intensely spiritual music connected to the stars and the earth. It reminds him of really old music, like Gregorian chant, deep and heavy and going to the heart. He also feels a strong connection to some of the contemporary European composers, like Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. He feels these composers wrote about their own ‘songlines’ and are closely connected to their own landscapes in central Europe. n Another aspect of William’s life is his evangelism on behalf of the didgeridoo. While his technique originated from traditional practice, what he does now has evolved from his own experimentation with extended techniques and his working in different ways with other artists, using various musical styles like hip hop, rap and vocal sound effects. As he says, “It’s such a basic breath instrument — it’s a piece of wood and it’s up to the player to transform it into something you can do whatever you want with.” He enjoys learning languages because of the rhythms and their melodic quality. He has learnt some Polish and Gaelic and is interested in Czech. “The landscape determines the way you write the music as well as what happened in the past in a similar way as happened to my ances-

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tors. It’s like hearing a polyphony of sounds in my mind. I want to go there and write it down. It’s an inspiration I need to voice.” William was recently in Maribor in Slovenia with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the festival that Richard directs. The Didgeridoo Society in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana came in force to his concert. He has found that there are didgeridoo societies all over the world. For many years aboriginal people have played didgeri- doos overseas, and musicians visiting Australia have been fascinated with it. A friend of William’s, Stuart Dempster, is a trombone player from Seattle. On a visit to Australia, Dempster took up the didgeridoo and now teaches it in the US, though he uses PVC tubing rather than wood hollowed by termites. William sees it as his task to promote the use of the didgeridoo in many musical settings and in this way provide greater opportunities for other players coming through. Quite early in his career, William became aware of the opportunity his talent gave him. He knew he wanted to go beyond playing commercial gigs, and he realised he could exploit his intellectual property and earn royalties for the original work he created. Part of the value of the musical collaborations that have dominated his career in recent years, has been the mentoring he has received from other leading musicians and composers. He recognises he has created his own brand and that this will become the materialisation of his talent. But the brand he is talking about does not exist in an egotistical vacuum: he sees it as William Barton and Friends. Working with a diversity of talented and original artists is his driving force. He is presently working on developing a big show where the program and the participants can be part of his own concept. This idea has been fermenting in his mind for several years but he is not in a hurry and will not make a commitment until he feels he is ready to bring all the musical and artistic elements together. He has discussed it with corporate and presentation partners and expects the whole project to come together before long. This is a very big step for a still very young didgeridoo player, but he is approaching it with confidence and a clear eye. Meanwhile he has been commissioned to compose a piece he will play with a forthcoming tour of soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The invitations never cease.

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Musicians

Stephen Kovacevich (Photo: Mark Muirhead) Stephen Kovacevich

Born and educated in Los Angeles but having lived in London for many years, Stephen Kovacevich has performed regularly on most of the world’s major concert stages for almost 50 years. Famous for his playing of the classical piano literature, he is arguably the most admired exponent of Beethoven’s piano music before the public today.

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n the cover of his latest recording — of Beethoven’s late masterpiece, the 33 variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli8, Stephen Kovacevich is pictured sitting at the piano on a darkened stage Owith virtually the only light showing his close cropped white hair, profile and hands. It reveals a monkish figure — the very essence of concentration. He appeared exactly thus at a recital of the Diabelli Variations in November 2009 at the City Recital Hall in Sydney. Sitting low at the piano on a cut-down chair, utterly still except for economical hand movements, the range of dynamics and depth of expressiveness was astonish- ing in his performance of this monstrously difficult work lasting nearly an hour. It seemed not to tire him unduly and minutes afterwards he was sitting in the foyer chatting amiably to the endless line of people queuing to have him sign the CD. This recent recording of the work has won many prizes for its musical and technical mastery. Strangely, its success in the later stage of his career echoes his first international success where he became an overnight sensation with the same piece in 1961 and his first recording, also of the Diabelli Variations in 1968. He explains he first heard and fell in love with it through a recording by Rudolf Serkin while still a student. At school, his talent as an exceptional pianist had been recognised and he loved playing Chopin and of all composers, Scriabin. At that time, he ‘hated’ Beethoven, and having discovered Beethoven through the Diabelli, like many young people of musical passion and sensibility, he devoured the late string quartets. A kind of lifelong journey of exploration into Beethoven’s inexhaustible genius then commenced and has been the central tenet of his career. Stephen describes his first musical experience at the age of five. He was taken to a concert and was amazed at the sadness of the opening theme of the molto allegro of Mozart’s g minor symphony K550: “I thought there must be something about life that I didn’t know which is so terrible that anyone would write music like this, so already I was pre- disposed to picking up on the anguish in this music.” He goes on to explain with a rueful chuckle that he has zero toler-

8 Stephen Kovacevich’s new recording of the Diabelli Variations is available on Onyx 4035.

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ance for any tampering with this work and how furious he was with his sons recently when they teased the old man by playing it to him in a version with a beat. He says when they saw how cross he was, they sweetly apologised — for once! At the age of 20, Stephen went to London to study with the much venerated Myra Hess, the pianist whose recitals in London in the darkest days of World War II were such a source of inspiration. He took nine months to learn the Diabelli Variations with her though she did not play the work herself. However she understood the elusive idiom and sehnsucht of the music of Beethoven’s late period music and of other classical music of Schubert, Brahms and Mozart that became so central to Stephen’s repertoire. “I was privileged to work with her for nearly two years when I was 19 and 20. She excavated a lot in me. When I came to London I played very well but it was a bit like a typewriter, very fast and clean but I didn’t have a great variety of sound and she unearthed that.” For the next ten years his career and reputation developed rapidly. While his repertoire was broad, even then his reputation as a classicist with Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms was paramount. He had married Bernardine, an English girl, both at the age of 20 and they had two sons. His film star looks and charm were no hindrance to his success and he signed a contract with Philips and starting with the Diabelli in 1968, made a series of best selling recordings of Beethoven sonatas, concertos and other works during the 1970s. Perhaps the most celebrated of these was the recording of Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Together with Debussy’s En blanc et noir and Mozart’s Andante and five Variations,this recording was released in 1977 and featured Stephen with Martha Argerich, the Argentinian pianist with whom he had developed a profound professional and personal relationship. In the 1970s these two young artists were the toast of the musical world. Though very different temperamentally and in artistic sensibility, their work together was memorable and an important stage in the musical development of both artists. They had a much loved daughter together, Stephanie, who now lives in Switzerland. Martha and Stephen remain close friends.

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It was in the 1970s that Stephen Kovacevich first came to Australia, a place he came to love. In 1985 he was invited to play with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and immediately developed a strong rapport with the players and the audience. The previous year the ACO had started to present concerts and invite soloists to perform with it. The orchestra’s new first violin and artistic director was then Carl Pini. Both he and the players had a deep suspicion of conductors and tried where ever possible to schedule repertoire that could be directed by Carl Pini from the first desk. However when Stephen came to the ACO, he wanted to play Beethoven concertos, generally regarded as too large scale to be directed by the orchestra leader. He suggested he should direct the concertos from the piano and conduct the remaining items on the programs. While initially dubious about this idea, the ACO was so excited about its work with him that they agreed. On his next visit, an all Beethoven program was scheduled where he played a concerto and conducted the rest of the program. For some years, he had been conducting orchestras in the US and Europe, characteristically without a baton. From this auspicious start, Stephen’s relationship with the ACO was cemented in 1987 when he was appointed Principal Guest Conductor. He says now that the period in the 1980s with the ACO was the happiest of his professional life. Audiences for the orchestra grew rapidly and his performances were always sell outs. He mixed socially with many of the players, played tennis and enjoyed Sydney’s outdoor life. For a man accustomed to work at a constant peak of professional intensity and solitariness, the easy going Australian lifestyle was a balm. Nevertheless, Stephen worked enormously hard while here and the orchestra embarked with him on the most ambitious recording project in its history, unsurpassed to this day. This was to record all the Beethoven piano concertos directed from the piano. The plan was to perform each concerto during an Australian concert tour and to record it at the end of the tour when it was fully ‘played in.’ Sydney then enjoyed the presence at the ABC of David Harvey who was their chief recording producer, and had earlier worked for the legendary Decca recording team on the famous Wagner Ring cycle under Solti and had recorded all the Mahler symphonies with Solti and the London and Chicago Symphony Orchestras.

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It was a baptism of fire for the young ACO to record these masterpieces for international release, but Kovacevich and Harvey trusted and understood each other and the sessions went well. The recordings (including the Grosse Fugue in an arrangement for string orchestra) remain in the EMI catalogue and at the time received glowing reviews in Europe. On the other hand there were setbacks, such as Stephen’s initial refusal to play the third concerto, because of a passage that at the time he found impossible to play as he wanted. In the end he agreed to record it but never played it in concert with the orchestra, and despite many takes of the offending passage, he never felt really happy with it. Even more alarming, and costly, was David Harvey’s withdrawal from the recording sessions of the Emperor Concerto in 1988, due to the Sydney Symphony’s tour to the USA which took precedence for him over the ACO’s recording. The ensuing recording with another producer turned out to be unusable and the whole exercise had to be repeated at great cost to the ACO in 1989. n Life for an artist of such renown and of such uncompromising standards is not easy. Practising up to eight hours each day, mostly in strange and empty halls or studios, perfecting of familiar repertoire that seems not to be quite at the stage it must become, is onerous and must sometimes seem to be profitless. It is also lonely; the concentration, travel, stress and concern about the piano, the hall, the management and the myriad frustrations in foreign cities must be constantly debilitating. Despite his good humour, ready laugh and enjoyment of the company of friends, Stephen Kovacevich often seems anxious and distracted by the pressures of the next day. He yearns for stable and loving relationship, but the peri- patetic and demanding lifestyle does not deliver the peace and stability enjoyed by more conventional people. With gales of laughter that have a tinge of mirthlessness, he tells a terrifying story that exemplifies this life on the edge. Some years ago, he was asked to play the fiendishly difficult Bartok 2nd piano concerto in a concert to open the Edinburgh Festival and which was to be broadcast live through Europe. “Bartok 2 is like a totentanz (a dance of death),” he says, “it needs an access of anger and controlled ferocity that is incredibly

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hard to achieve.” There is a passage he had never been able to master to his satisfaction. On this momentous night he felt he simply could not go ahead and play it. He was so overwhelmed by this realisation, that he could not even do a short call with the orchestra before the performance for the balance for the broadcast. As he walked out on stage for the performance he rehearsed the speech he would make to say he was indisposed and could not play. The implications for his career and the turmoil he would have suffered do not bear thinking about. Martha Argerich and another pianist friend were sitting together in the audience aware of his agony, hugging each other to somehow help him through. But he sat down and played: it seemed to work and he sailed through the technical difficulties in a way he had not previously been able to manage. He found the fury needed to make the piece work for him. In considering his attitude to life, after a thoughtful pause, Stephen makes a shocking admission. If he was offered an option of one of two buttons to press about his life: button A being to live the life he is living and button B being not to have lived at all, button B wouldn’t be completely safe from a push. Over two years ago, an unfamiliar weakness in his hands was diagnosed as being incipient cardiac trouble, or more technically referred to as a TIA (transitory ischemic attack) and a little later he suffered a mild stroke. He thought his career was over but his doctor sensibly insisted he keep practising and gradually his playing facility returned. Some months later, he woke up one morning and realised it had all returned to normal and his career has resumed its former trajectory, albeit with the aid of the ubiquitous statin drugs that lower cholesterol in the blood. n Over the years he has become more economical with the repertoire he likes to play. It is the reverse of many pianists today who search the byways of obscure, forgotten or new work to discover repertoire that can establish a reputation or create a distinctiveness in the eyes of the public. He finds great satisfaction in choosing works of great quality and range that he can play many times, finding more variety and layers in the piece with each performance. Currently he is performing the Diabelli Variations

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in many parts of the world, and despite its diabolical demands on the pianist, and its great length, it does not unduly fatigue him. It has been so exhaustively prepared, and is now so deeply ingrained in his psyche. “[A work] is tiring when you are fighting to have a good chance of playing it well but now I really do know it [the Diabelli] and if I prepare it well, it will be good. Therefore some of the exhaustion will not apply as some of it comes from anxiety. There are some parts of the variations where the fingers do get tired and then you dip into the slavery and all that practice carries you through.” He likes to have at least one major work in his current solo repertoire and he gives an insight into a comparison with Beethoven’s other hugely challenging major work for the piano, the Hammerklavier sonata, also written towards the end of Beethoven’s life. Stephen recorded the Hammerklavier several years ago when it was similarly ingrained in his repertoire. It has a long complex first movement where Beethoven demands a tempo with an impossibly fast metronome marking. It also has a long and outrageously difficult fugue at the end. “I think the Diabelli, in that it ends graciously, is easier for the audience, but the Hammerklavier just pulverises you for the last seven or eight minutes, and if you really play it, audiences find it intimidating.” In the 1930s, Artur Schnabel famously recorded the first movement (though with many wrong notes) at the metronome mark Beethoven had indicated. While Stephen believes it should be fast and plays it so in his recording, he feels Beethoven was wrong because with his deafness he only had his inner voice, and when the inner voice moves to the physical performance, the perception (and the tempo) will change. He says playing that movement at the marked speed makes it sound trite. He finds it intriguing how the playing of really fine music impercep- tibly changes without consciously willing it. He found he was playing the JS Bach Partita at his recent recital differently from the recording made only a year earlier. Reflecting on a conversation he had not long ago with Vladimir Ashkenazy, he says in recent performances of Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto, he has carefully tried to maintain the steady allegro moderato tempo throughout the first movement though in most performances there tends to be an accelerando and crescendo in the tutti passages.

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“For Beethoven to write moderato must have given him toothache because it was not in his nature. So he must have really meant it. It’s like Brahms writing presto! I think the piece gains and it is more beautiful played this way, but it comes as quite a surprise to the audience as they are not used to hearing it like this.” He uses the word ‘luminosity’ to describe the late music of Beethoven and of other composers such as Mozart and Schubert. He first became aware of this as a young man when he went through a very religious phase. He found that music of this kind, with its introspection, depth and sense of abstraction suited his temperament. “It appealed to me because it has a metaphysical subtext. You feel these speculations are not about a bottle of red wine, they are about whether there is beauty, is there justice, is it worth it, or not worth it? There is something luminous about it. There is stuff going on in these late quartets in which you feel the energy is so ferocious, but sometimes the energy itself is luminous and you don’t know what it’s all about. It happens in late Mozart — the opening of the late E flat symphony — I just have to think of it and it brings a tear to my eyes. Why? It’s a descending scale. What is this?” Stephen’s tastes in music are broad but his determination to limit his repertoire to what he feels he does best has curious consequences. For example, he greatly admires Rachmaninoff and learnt all his concertos but has never played them, not because he wasn’t asked, but because he felt his particular style and technique would not do them justice. As a pianist he feels Rachmaninoff was the greatest of the great. He cites Rachmaninoff’s playing of Schumann, especially Carnival as: “… so free, so wild, so perfect it defies belief.” And about Rachmaninoff playing Liszt: “… some of the transcriptions are breathtaking: he is a coquette, he teases, he gives you almost but not quite everything — it’s intoxicating.” Similarly, he admires the Etudes of Ligeti, one of the great pianistic creations of the 20th century, but says it would take far too long for him to learn them and there are other pianists who could do better. But in his careful choice of repertoire, he plans to add some of Rachmaninoff’s solo pieces to a recital program. He is shortly to play the three Brahms sonatas and Takemitsu pieces at recitals with young Russian violinist Alina Abragimova who recently toured Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 148 2/09/10 4:53 PM Stephen Kovacevich n Sydney is a place he loves and he would think of living here were it not for his phobia of huntsmen spiders. He also likes Wellington in New Zealand, and says apart from himself, he knows no one who who likes the windy weather. His ironic smile betrays a certain amount of wish fulfillment in these speculations. In reality his beautiful flat in London’s Hampstead is his home and his refuge. Soon he turns 70 and in a celebratory concert in the Wigmore Hall will return to the Bartok Sonata for 2 pianos and percussion with Martha Argerich. Now that is a concert not to be missed. N

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 150 2/09/10 4:53 PM Helena Rathbone

Musicians

Helena Rathbone in her kitchen (Photo: Ojārs Greste) Helena Rathbone

For the last sixteen years, Helena Rathbone has played principal second violin beside Richard Tognetti at the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Engaged for the position from England, where she was born and educated, Helena and her husband Jerry have settled permanently in Sydney. This year she gave birth to Jack, her first child, and is on maternity leave from the orchestra.

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he Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) is one of Australia’s greatest musical success stories. Founded in 1975 in Sydney by a group of string players wanting more performance opportuni- Tties as an intimate ensemble, it quickly found a niche at a time when high quality small orchestras (generally referred to as chamber orchestras) were emerging in Europe. After World War II, composers frequently wrote for smaller ensembles, and less for traditional symphony orchestras. In response, but partly for economic reasons, and also as good musicians loved working in the more demanding and exposed context of a chamber orchestra, virtuoso small ensembles sprang up. By the 1970s, a further phenomenon arrived in the classical music scene: the so-called ‘period instrument’ orchestra where Baroque and early classical music was played on instruments set up to give a style with a leaner sound, more appropriate for 18th century music. The ACO was quick to grab both these opportunities: to become a first class small orchestra, capable of playing old or new music at the highest level, and later to play 18th century music in ‘period’ style, though with modern instruments. Since 1990, the ACO has been led from the first violin by Richard Tognetti; in the ensuing 20 years, it has become one of the finest orchestras of its kind in the world, touring to Europe, the USA and Asia almost annually and to constant acclaim. Tognetti’s unfailing musical imagination and discipline has spearheaded the ACO’s rise to eminence, but the orchestra’s success is totally dependent on Tognetti being supported by players of similar talent and dedication. Helena Rathbone, more than any other player, has been the rock on which Tognetti has built the talent around him. At all its concerts, Tognetti has the players standing. He believes it allows them to be more physical and expressive in their playing, and their body language more clearly visible to each other, so vital in ensemble performance. Helena, as leader of the second violins (usually five or six in number), stands almost in the middle of the stage. She is tall, with flowing blonde hair, and has a serene, statuesque appearance rather like the archetype of the classical Greek goddess. It’s a good look and admira- bly complements Tognetti’s somewhat wild and fluid expressiveness. The audiences love them, while their splendid and contrasted aspect masks

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complete musical rapport and trust. “I am very lucky: I think it’s the perfect job for me. Having Richard there all that time, I have moulded my job for myself, or have been moulded so that I’m very comfortable with the people around me. When I am leading the orchestra, I am also comfortable in that position, but that’s because I know the musicians so well and have such complete respect for them. I love playing second violin, but only if there is somebody I really respect leading. It’s the right place for me as there are many people who can play much more technically difficult pieces than I will ever be able to play. While I like playing first violin from time to time, in the second position, it’s another way of thinking. Being in the middle, it’s a more sociable, supportive role, as you usually don’t have to play all the whizzy stuff the leader plays.” Music has been Helena’s life from the beginning — even from the time in her mother’s womb. Her parents are both singers and school teachers. Her father runs a choral society in England, where choirs and choral music have always been a large part of community life. Both Helena and her younger brother were taught music from an early age and she started learning violin at five. Her parents were constantly travelling around England to various engagements, and as she and her brother grew older, they would go too. It was a sociable childhood, with singers in and out of the house, concerts being organised, family concerts for Christmas and special musical events. There was never any doubt in her mind about becoming a professional musician. Helena played all the time at school, spent school holidays at summer and Easter chamber music schools so by the time she arrived at the Guildhall School of Music aged eighteen, she was already familiar with large parts of the string quartet and chamber orchestra repertoire she had started playing from the age of nine. “I also spent Saturdays at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music playing all day in orchestras and having choir, theory and instrumental lessons. When I started full time at Guildhall, I decided to follow the chamber music route rather than the symphony orchestra. I knew the music so well, I guess, but also I have always liked the intimacy of chamber music and the stronger role it offers to a string player.” Her exceptional talent continued to prosper. After she graduated at

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the Guildhall in 1993, with tours lined up with the celebrated chamber orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, she went to the Banff Centre for the Arts for a three month residency: “While I was at Banff, I got a fax from my teacher David Takeno, which was very exciting new technology in those days, saying the Australian Chamber Orchestra had asked him if he knew someone who might be suitable for their principal second position, and he’d recommended me. I had never heard the Australian Chamber Orchestra or whether it was any good and thought, no, I’ve got my plans lined up. But back in London, a friend who had been in Australia told me the ACO was pretty good, and by then it was January and miserable weather in London, so I thought, why not give it a go? I went out for three weeks as that was all I could spare at the time, but I did a trial and the next year went out on a one year contract. And here I still am!” n Having a baby might seem predictable for most married women; for Helena it seems very strange in prospect: “I have real mixed feelings about it, as having children is something I’ve always wanted to do and at the end of my thirties, if I’m going to do it, I have to do it now. But the ACO and ACO life has been so much part of me for so long now, that sitting here talking when the orchestra is away in Melbourne feels so bizarre. It has been like my family. Everyone tells me the time with your baby is so short that you have to enjoy it when you can. I’m sure I’m going to miss playing, not just with the ACO, but for myself. It’s not just the music but it’s the physical thing of having the violin in your hands.” Helena plays the Commonwealth Bank’s wonderful 1759 Guadagnini violin acquired over ten years ago for permanent loan to the ACO. It was played by Richard Tognetti until 2007, when an anony- mous benefactor purchased, for an astronomical sum, one of the world’s most famous violins, a 1743 Guarneri Del Gesù for loan to Richard. Helena has now been playing the Guadagnini for over three years: “It has made an enormous difference to my playing; it has made me more confident and has opened up a whole world of colours that I knew were possible but I didn’t know how to achieve until I played this instrument. I’m still discovering new sounds and new resonances in it.”

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While she is on maternity leave, it is being played by her colleague Satu Vanska, who will be leading the second violins while Helena is away. She is genuinely bereft not to have it under her arm, as it goes everywhere with her, even on holidays. One of the most important projects for the ACO in recent years has been to establish what they have called ACO2, a new ensemble to develop talented younger artists. The first tentative steps to establish a second ensemble were taken in 2007, and Helena was immediately identified as the right person to lead the initiative, mentor the young players, and lead the group in performance: “When this idea was first put on the table, I thought it would be fantastic if it could work, but as our schedule is so full already, I had serious doubts about it and I didn’t know where the energy and time would come from. Somehow we have got there; its been hard work and many, many extra hours, but it has been so rewarding and it sent my mind back to when I was a student and how important it was to get this sort of experience. “It’s a dream come true for the ACO, not just to provide new talent for the orchestra, but it is even more important to nurture the really talented young musicians in Australia in the best way, we as the ACO, specifically can. Music doesn’t attract the level of attention as sport does, so if we can help to develop the talent of these young people, it will be really worthwhile for Australia’s future. The co-operation with the tertiary music institutions, where the emerging artists are mostly studying, has been excellent. The same goes for the AYO [Australian Youth Orchestra] and we go to great lengths to juggle our schedule so that the emerging artists can manage their studies with their teachers along with the performance opportunities we can offer. “They don’t just get performance opportunities with us; an ACO player is assigned as a mentor to each of the young artists to take them under their wing, and offer guidance about careers, about the social aspect of working in an orchestra and even personal problems they may have. One of the most satisfying things I have seen is the way the young artists become so much more responsible and confident when they have been in our program for a year or more.” For Helena, coming to live in Australia at much the same age as most of the ACO2 emerging artists has added to her sense of commit-

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ment to the program. “Until I became pregnant, coming to Australia was the biggest thing that ever happened to me, and I loved it from the beginning, especially living in Sydney. Both Jerry and I love the water and as our families live on the other side of the world, we made up our minds we were going to make the most of what Sydney has to offer. We live close to the harbour and catch the ferry to work, we swim a lot, hire kayaks and we enjoy going sailing with our friends who have yachts! Recently Jerry and I went on holiday to Broome where I’d never been before and it was amazing. We went out to the Ningaloo Reef where we went swimming with the whale sharks — that was incredible.” For all the companionship she enjoys with her friends and her ACO colleagues, it is music that is at the core of her being. Though she is not a religious person, playing music keeps her soul fulfilled. Having been around churches and choirs all through her childhood and adolescence, she finds religious music very moving and it reminds her that she has a gift for music which she feels must come from a spiritual source, even if she can’t fully accept it as a gift from God. “Certain types of piano music calm me when I am feeling stressed, but for me it is playing music myself that I love and that fulfills me. Like many musicians, I don’t enjoy music playing in the background so I don’t play classical CDs much at home.” Again like many professional musicians, going to a symphony concert is not her idea of a good night out, nights off being a rarity, but she has a keen interest in new music. She loved Opera Australia’s new production of Brett Dean’s opera Bliss, which she found fascinating both musically and as a production. The ACO has commissioned many works from Brett Dean and played several more and she admires his work enormously. “We are so lucky at the ACO that we have the chance to play as many as twelve performances of all the new pieces we play, so you get to know them intimately, which unfortunately the public rarely can. I remember the Ligeti concerto Richard played a few years ago which was very challenging for all of us, but you knew very early on that it was a piece with real substance and it was worth it. I think we have chosen the new works pretty well as there are very few pieces I can recall over the time I’ve been with the ACO that I wouldn’t want to play again.” Having such a rewarding and fulfilling life in her sixteen years at the ACO, and now taking a break for her baby, it would be tempting

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to suggest everything has fallen into place for Helena. It has not always been thus: early in her time at the ACO she fell in love with the ACO’s principal cellist, Cameron Retchford and they were married. She says: “Cameron was such a talented and intelligent person in so many ways that it seemed to be frustrating for him to decide what he really wanted to do; he was a fantastic cellist and a brilliant cook and he even took up painting and was great at that too. We had three terrific years together before we were married. But it wasn’t long after we married that things started to fall apart.” Cameron left the ACO and went to live in Tasmania where he later died in a car accident. The strength of her relationships at the ACO helped her through those difficult times, and outside her family, remains the strongest bond in her life. n Little Jack has now safely arrived and Helena is facing huge change in her life. As it is with most mothers, nursing the first child is an incom- parable, life-enhancing experience. Typically, Jack is a demanding baby, bright and determined; Helena is finding it exhausting in a way she has never experienced before: “Nothing can prepare you for what mother- hood entails. It is such a total contrast with everything I’ve done before. You have huge responsibilities being a leader in an orchestra but it’s quite unlike the honour of being responsible for another person’s life and well- being. But I was ready for a break; I’ve had 20 years of being on the road.” The question of when she will return to the ACO is of course on hold, though she has confirmed to the orchestra that she will play for the ACO’s annual jaunt to WA for concerts at the Vasse Felix vineyard when Jack is six months old. On the other hand, that is just a first step, and it doesn’t mean she will be going back permanently from that time. Helena has confirmed she will lead the ACO’s national tour in mid 2011, but has resisted a request to confirm her availability for an international tour in 2011. “I have no idea of how it will work travelling with Jack on an ACO tour, so it does worry me. It will be very different, but I’m a pretty robust person so I’m sure I will manage, though there will be no more naps in the afternoon for me. Jerry and I are going to England for a month soon to take Jack to meet our families and friends so I’ll soon find out how hard it will be travelling with a baby.”

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Helena, unlike most women having their first baby, had to give up the joyful work that is her whole life experience. Also, the loss, though it may be temporary, of the implement that is the key to that joy, the Guadagnini violin, has been painful. She has just started to feel the need to play again and has begun to pick up and play her own violin. Her life as a player already is tentatively intervening: she has agreed to lead two major chamber works in a concert three months hence, the Schubert C major Quintet and the Ravel piano trio. “I’ve also been asked to play in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time two weeks after that — it’s one of my favourite pieces, but I’m not sure I can manage that so soon as well. I have promised myself that this year is my special time with Jack and I will try and stick to that decision!” While his arrival has been so fulfilling, it seems unlikely that Jack will prevent the resumption of her career. Jack has already met Helena’s friends in the ACO when she took him to a concert at the Opera House two weeks after he was born where they listened backstage. She remains very much in their circle; the friendship of her colleagues, and the sense of belonging to the orchestra she has worked with for sixteen years, is a vital key to her contentment. They are her Australian family. N

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 158 2/09/10 4:53 PM Greta Lanchbery

Music Teacher

Greta Lanchbery (Photo: Vic Threader) Greta Lanchbery

A piano teacher by profession, Greta Lanchbery has lived her whole life in Tasmania, and for over 40 years in a spacious old house overlooking a river near Hobart. Her passions are music, teaching piano to young people and her garden. She has four adult children, eight grandchildren and now she has a great granddaughter called Russia. Since she was first married at the age of seventeen, she has enjoyed sustained relationships with three remarkable men.

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ingston Beach, where Greta Lanchbery lives, is about fifteen kilometres south of the centre of Hobart on the estuary of the Derwent river. In the days before the war, it was where residents Kof Hobart went for their summer holidays. Then it was quite an excursion along a twisting road hugging the bays and hills along the western shore of the wide and majestic Derwent. Today it is a suburb of Hobart in one of the fastest growing municipalities anywhere in Australia, and with an expressway giving access to the city in little more than fifteen minutes. Greta’s house is on the banks of Brown’s River, a tributary of the Derwent looking across to unspoilt bushland. Looking to the right from her sun room, which is her music room, with windows on three sides, there is a view of the beach and the wide expanse of the Derwent beyond it. She never tires of the views of the river, the bush, and the beach and their exposure to all the moods of the weather and the changing seasons. She feels particularly blessed that this front sunroom is where she teaches and spends the larger part of most days with her students. Behind the music room is a large double sitting room with two big fireplaces, comfortable old chairs and sofas, big dark sideboards, and a faded pink patterned wall-to-wall carpet that came with the house when Greta and her husband Wim bought it 40 years ago. She is rather ashamed of it now but nobody spends much time there these days so why worry. The back of the house is where Greta and her partner Vic spend most of their spare time. It has a big kitchen, dining and sitting area and opens on to her expansive back garden with all its fruit trees, flowering shrubs, vegetables and herbs, as well as tables and chairs for sitting, relaxing and having something to drink. On a cool May morning, with sun filtering through high clouds and the expanse of the river a flat shining silver, Greta has invited her star pupil to play. Gavin is fourteen and his parents emigrated from China sixteen years ago. Both his parents work hard at several jobs and send their three school age children to the best schools; all learn music and all three are brilliant. Gavin says very little but loves playing, and in less than an hour plays two Bach duets, three Chopin études, two Shostakovich preludes, the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, a complex piece by Carl Vine, and the fast and furious Konzertstück of Weber that he is practising for a competition. Greta whispers that in all her years as a

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teacher, she has never seen a talent like him; that his talent must be treasured, nurtured and exposed to as much of the great piano literature as he has time for. His father calls in to pick him up, chuckles at the praise for Gavin, but complains he never practises. Greta says about Gavin: “I wouldn’t presume to tell him how to play these pieces now. He can play far better than I can but I can offer him suggestions about the interpretation of the music, or point out that there may be a need to bring up a certain strand of melody. With younger students, I might suggest an analogy of a non-musical experience.” To explain, Greta demonstrates a little Croatian folk song that she played recently to Gavin’s sister aged seven: “I asked her did it remind her of a story and she thought a bit and said: ‘It sounds like someone walking through the country feeling very lonely.’ In this way, she was able to play it really beautifully. I try to make it so that the students will invent their own ideas, because with most pieces there are many ways they can be played.” In her late 20s, after her first three children had started school, Greta took up the piano again after a long break and studied with a well-known teacher, Helen George, from whom she learnt valuable lessons about how to impart knowledge about music. “Madame George had a spiritual quality that was very special; it was a kind of intuition about the music that I can’t really describe and have never struck with any other teacher. Somehow she has unconsciously passed it on to me and I have absorbed it. I rely upon this intuition or understanding when I approach teaching each individual child. It is such a privilege to come to know each child and an enormous responsibility. Because each one is different and has different needs, I would find it impossible to teach in a class. “I also make a point of knowing very well the music of any piece I ask a child to play. There’s such a wealth of piano music now for students to play, much of it written in recent times and by Australian composers. I like to buy new music for even my little students. Much of it comes through the Australia Music Centre. I love Ann Carr-Boyd’s music, and also Ross Edwards, Carl Vine and several others, and I find the students really like new music and feel challenged by it. It goes without saying that technique is an important part in preparation. It has been said that scales are like laps of the swimming pool.”

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 161 2/09/10 4:53 PM Many Faces of Inspiration n Greta’s own musical upbringing had none of this loving and intuitive consideration she brings to her own students. She was the eldest in a family of five children that lived in Devonport, though she had been born in Hobart. Her much loved father was a magistrate, but a shy, gentle and unworldly man who agonised over his court judgements and whenever possible retreated into his world of books and a library of gramophone records, from which Greta received her love of music. Her mother, while kind and generous, was strong willed and dominating and it was not a contented marriage. The tragedies of her younger sister who was disabled and died as a young child, and the youngest sibling, who was stillborn, had profound effects on relationships in the family. “My parents didn’t have a piano so I used to practise at the home of the local Baptist minister, who lived in a dark old Victorian house. I hated going there because when I knocked on the door, he would hide and leap out from the darkness in his old tattered dressing gown and say boo. The blinds were always down and it was cold and dank and I never got used to it. When I was ten, my grandmother gave us a piano, and I went to a teacher who was obsessed with getting her trousseau ready and sat behind a screen shouting instructions.” More teachers followed in a positively Dickensian litany of failure that makes Greta laugh now. When she was fifteen, her parents made a bizarre decision to send her for piano lessons at a pig farm near the remote village of Barrington, over 20 kilometres from her home, to which she sometimes cycled and stayed for the weekend. Her teacher was Veronica Tozer, mother of the late Geoffrey Tozer, one of Australia’s most eminent pianists. “She was the first real teacher I had and her lessons went on for hours, full of passion. She used to play these big powerful pieces and I had to try to imitate her — it was like a Svengali experience, but completely over my head. In reality she was frustrated and desperately lonely, much younger than her husband who had been a colonel in the British army in India. She used to talk endlessly about the colonial life in the hills where they lived but had to get out when India became independent. Her husband had no idea how to run a pig farm and used to console himself with the bottle. Even now I can’t smell rum without feeling sick.”

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After matriculating from school at the age of sixteen, she went to Melbourne to study at the Conservatorium but unsurprisingly, was both musically and socially unready and soon dropped out. It was at the Conservatorium that she met a young Dutchman, Willem (Wim) Müller who had a background even more eccentric than hers. Müller had been born and raised in Amsterdam where his father was a house painter. He also had a passion for music but was never taught, as it was wartime and starvation was rampant. Towards the end of the war he taught himself enough to inveigle his acceptance into the Amsterdam Conservatorium. One night on a food finding mission for his parents he was captured by the Germans and disappeared for six months. His family thought he was dead until he arrived home one day wraithlike and unable to tell anyone what he had been through. All Greta knows is that the forced labour, including digging trenches for burying the dead in the chaos at the end of the war was deeply traumatic for him and as a result, he hated gardening and could never bring himself to dig. After the war, Müller’s parents soon decided there was no future in Europe and emigrated to Australia. He enrolled at the Conservatorium in Melbourne and supported himself by house painting. “Wim was a strong character, handsome and very Dutch with swept back hair and blue eyes. He was quite unlike anyone I had ever seen before and I fell in love with him immediately. I completely forgot about my musical studies and wanted to be with him day and night. My mother was worried about me and came over and worked as a private nurse. She quickly saw what I was up to and whisked me back to Devonport, but as soon as I got home, Wim followed.” Her parents were appalled at this and tried to stop the relationship. However they relented to the extent that Greta’s father summoned Wim to his presence and she says they liked each other. But this was 1950 in Tasmania, Greta was seventeen and anything beyond chaperoned friendship was regarded as out of the question. The young lovers thought: do we elope or have a baby? They decided on the latter, Greta soon became pregnant and marriage became essential. Her father had a heart attack, though he recovered, and her parents were unable to attend the wedding. Gregory was born and she felt completely fulfilled. Anne and Adrian followed in quick succession, Wim undertook a correspondence course to become an accountant and they decided to move to Hobart.

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It was after they had settled in Hobart and Adrian, the youngest child, had started at school, that one morning Greta turned on the radio and heard a piano piece that transfixed her. She discovered it was the last movement of Schubert’s A major sonata D664: “I dropped everything, ran to the phone and rang up a piano teacher I knew of, Peter Townley, who later married my sister Elsa, and asked if I could study with him. Now that the children were at school, I knew I had to get my A. Mus. A. and become a teacher so that I could play and teach music like that. Peter Townley was an excellent teacher, but later on went overseas and suggested I study with Helen George whose own teacher had studied with Clara Schumann. Madame George was an inspiration to me and the best teacher I ever had.” Greta got her A. Mus. A. after four years of study, became a piano teacher, and later obtained her Licentiate. Teaching transformed her life; she discovered she had a gift for it that enabled her to focus her passion for music in a meaningful and purposeful way. After she passed her Licentiate, she felt restless: “One morning I was with a friend having a cup of tea and I thought maybe Wim and I should move. My friend and I looked at houses for sale in the paper and my eye caught an advertisement for: ‘A gentleman’s residence overlooking river and bushland and with an artist’s retreat.’ The gentleman’s residence idea didn’t appeal much but the river and bushland did, so I rang the estate agent who took me all the way down the coast road to Kingston and I stepped inside the house and looked out at the river from the front room and knew I had to live there. It was far too expensive of course and Wim said it was impossible, but I said forget about birthdays and Christmases for the rest of our lives and come and see it. So he did and he fell in love with it too, especially as he was painting as an artist in his spare time and the upstairs studio was perfect for him.” They bought the house at Kingston Beach in 1967 and Greta has never moved from there and hopes she never will. Their youngest child, Alex, a happy afterthought, was born soon after, but during the next few years, she found Wim was becoming increasingly isolated and intro- spective. “He missed his homeland dreadfully, didn’t make friends easily unless they had an artistic or philosophical temperament. He became very unwell and had a breakdown, to a large extent because of his war

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experience. It was very destructive for us both and for the children.” The disintegration of the marriage is still very painful for her and she has never forgotten her love for him . In the end she had to tell him to go and eventually he moved back to Amsterdam, where he still lives. n When the Whitlam government came to power in 1972, there was a great infusion of funding for the arts. One of the beneficiaries was the Tasmanian Opera Company, recently formed to present opera to an oper- atically starved state. The newly appointed administrator was Michael Lanchbery, an opera singer himself who also had been a staff producer at Sadler’s Wells Opera in London, and was a nephew of John Lanchbery, the famous ballet conductor. Michael had been in a relationship with Elizabeth Connell, the sensational young South African soprano who had joined the Australian Opera to sing leading roles in the opening season of the Sydney Opera House. When Michael arrived in Hobart, he answered an advertisement to rent the studio flat at Greta’s house and moved in. Michael blew into Greta’s life like a gale. A man of deep cultural knowledge and great charm, he arrived with boxfuls of classical records, tapes, opera scores and a huge library of literature. Before long there were large gatherings of Hobart’s literary, academic and musical fraternities in Greta’s garden or in the big double sitting room. Greta stood back and watched the passing parade with amazement and dubious delight. By then the three older children had left home and only five year old Alex was left and he and Michael became firm friends. Michael cooked, cleaned, gardened and re-organised Greta’s life. Coming to live in Tasmania was not easy for Michael. The relationship with Connell had ended, perhaps because of his bi-sexuality. The retreat to Hobart from the theatrical scene in London was both a boon for him and probably an escape. He was impatient and critical of those whom he thought were trying to undermine him, a common enough characteristic of the operatic scene anywhere. The Tasmanian Opera Company was in financial trouble almost from the outset. Despite his imaginative ideas and productions, Hobart was too small to sustain an opera company. By 1976, it lost its funding and closed down, and

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Michael was forced to find other work, mostly on the mainland. In the summer of 1975, Greta and Michael married: “I was able to give him a home life that he had long wanted and needed; in many ways he had very simple tastes and seemed to like doing domestic things like ironing and cleaning. He was an excellent cook and was always cheerful and kept making me laugh. As he had travelled so widely and had such knowledge of artistic matters, he gave me a much broader understanding of life as well as art. He gave a new dimension to my life so that I felt it didn’t matter I hadn’t travelled. He was marvellous with Alex and when Adrian became so ill, I don’t know how I would have managed without him.” The next fifteen years were the most colourful, and in many ways the most exciting of Greta’s life. It was never without problems; she went with him to Canberra in 1978 when he was appointed artistic director of the Canberra Theatre Company, but hated it and soon came home. Later, when he was appointed head of Drama at James Cook University in Townsville, she decided not to go with him, and he commuted to Queensland. Despite his charm and generosity, living with Michael could be frustrating for Greta. The house was often full of his young theatrical and musical friends, both male and female, and sometimes she felt swamped. Despite this, Michael was absolutely devoted to Greta, and when he was diagnosed with terminal lymphatic cancer, they became closer than ever. When he became very ill, he met an Anglican priest who shared a love of English literature. Michael asked Greta to drive him to his church St Raphael’s, an old wooden church out of Hobart at Ferntree. They went there every Sunday until he was too ill to travel. After he died, she went back to play the little harmonium at the church on Sundays for a long time afterwards. n On the same day that Greta’s brilliant pupil Gavin came to play, Greta and her partner Vic Threader had a dinner for friends in the family room at the back of the house. Her sister Elsa was there: she is tall and slender like Greta, but her hair is nearly white. Greta cooked a delicious casserole mostly from vegetables grown in the garden, but the bread stood out:

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Vic makes it from an organic flour using a sourdough starter he has been adding to for many years. Everyone was pleased when Alex rolled up half way through the meal. He is now 42 and a big man with thinning hair, not to say bald. He is the sort of man whose good humour and interest in other people makes everyone’s eyes shine with delight. In the years after Michael’s death, Greta learned to live by herself and found she rather liked it. Years before, Michael had introduced her to the world of German lieder and as she wanted to understand the lyrics in the original language, she decided to learn German. One of her teachers, Sylvia, who is German and is according to Greta: “Tall and magnificent with black hair like a woman in a Klimt painting,” was insistent that Greta should meet Vic, a widower who was also learning German. They agreed to meet and made the cautious decision to read German together once a week. The ice was fully broken when Vic asked Greta to accompany him on a trip to Germany which they both loved. He had a house in Kingston, but Greta would not move, so he moved in. Vic, who is now 86, was a geologist, but is well read in literature, philosophy and the classics. He speaks slowly, choosing his words with care, often interrupting himself with little self-deprecating laughs. There is an inner calm and centredness about Vic that has been very important for Greta: “He was 73 when I met him and he had built a house at Broadmarsh and was planting a vineyard. I couldn’t believe how strong he was. He is a typical male: he loves propagating and planting things. He has done much of the re-vegetating of the river bank across the road. Of course he has slowed down now, and I have said to him it’s now time to do what you really want to do and can enjoy. He and his wife, who died a few years before I met him, led a very traditional life and travelled a lot. I have said to him, if there is an afterlife, which I must say I doubt, I want you to feel free to go to June. I know it might seem a ridiculous thing to say but I felt I had to say it. He didn’t say anything but gave a little smile. “While I am not a religious person, I do believe in a force of life and a life outside ourselves, and in things I can’t explain. I also believe very strongly that it’s not me who gets ideas. It’s all so simple and it’s like being in the garden. With all this talk and all this philosophy and economics about what we should do in the world, it’s all utterly useless unless there

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are people like me to grow the potatoes.” N

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 168 2/09/10 4:53 PM Wendy Blacklock

Producers

Wendy Blacklock in her office (Photo: Ojārs Greste) Wendy Blacklock

Wendy Blacklock AM spent the first half of her career as an actor playing mostly ingenue roles in comedy, revue and television. In the 1980s she decided to try her hand as a producer. For nearly 20 years, since its inception, she has led Performing Lines, a unique company that commissions and presents the best intimate theatrical work for touring around Australia and overseas. She lives in Sydney.

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n Wendy Blacklock’s room in the Redfern offices of Performing Lines, there is a large board covering one wall dotted with little coloured patches giving the itineraries of all the productions scheduled for the Iyear. It seems as large as the battle plan in the war room for a World War II movie, though more colourful. Wendy is a small person who sits at a large desk full of the evidence, even detritus, of the dozens of shows that pass under her nose every year. Today she is wearing a bright red tee shirt that adds to the general atmosphere of action and celebration that seems to infect the whole place. This is hardly surprising as she says there are now seven producers on the payroll, an amazing development considering she and her assistant Trish Solomon did it all themselves when they started out. The idea for Performing Lines began as the Australian Content Department of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) back in 1981. Robin Lovejoy, then a leading theatre and opera director on the AETT board, realised there was a need to give performing and touring opportunities for small-scale innovative theatre that was exciting but not commercial and otherwise would never get presented. The Australia Council Theatre Board agreed it was a good idea and offered funding. Wendy at that time was a successful and busy actor and had offered herself to the AETT to train as a producer on a volunteer basis. The timing was perfect; with the support of Lovejoy and Jeffrey Kovel who ran the entrepreneurial division of the AETT, she was given the job as manager of the new program. Since then she has never looked back and the program has grown with her, though for the last 20 years as an independent non-profit company, Performing Lines. She has just been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Sydney Theatre Critics: “What I loved about it was that I got all these emails and letters from people, even people I went to school with, one of whom remembered she had played Katisha opposite my Ko-Ko in The Mikado. But most of all I was thrilled to get a letter from Don Grace who back then was financial controller at the AETT. He reminded me of the difficulties I had raising the money to take an Aboriginal company overseas. I must have been such a trial for him because I used to keep a separate set of books as I didn’t trust the AETT to keep their hands off my money for the Australian Content program. He used to laugh at that and say: ‘I taught you too well.’”

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Wendy was born into a middle-class North Shore family in Sydney. Her father had theatrical ambitions, but like her, being small in stature, decided the stage was not for him. Ultimately he became a successful businessman running Slazenger, then the largest sporting goods company in Australia. Youngest of three children, she spent her teenage years and early youth mixing with famous tennis players and golfers. Luckily she was not suborned by the dubious attractions of hanging out with touring professional athletes, and enrolled at drama school. “My father was a natural entrepreneur and I suppose I get my interest in this business from him. After the war, he was involved in starting the All Nations Club which helped to set up migrants arriving from overseas. We travelled with him overseas a good deal and it gave us a broader understanding of a bigger world and other nationalities and their problems. “It was a very different world then; how can I describe it? You ate a chop and three veg. The Phillip St Theatre revues were just about the first theatre I did, and suddenly we were discovering satire. The audience was full of European people who had migrated to Australia and were used to cabaret. At first most of the scripts we were using came from London and had been written for people like Dora Bryan and Miriam Karlin. One of the first things I did at Phillip St was a show with this young man from Melbourne called Barry Humphries who drove me mad because he never stuck to the script and Dot Mendoza would go tinkling on at the piano and I would be left high and dry. The next show had Barry, Gordon Chater, Max Oldaker, June Salter and me and we did eight shows a week and it ran for 14 months. The only reason it came off was because we were all so exhausted.” In 1954, the AETT had been established as Australia’s first subsi- dised presenter of the performing arts. In its early years it brought out famous British actors who starred in touring productions of popular plays alongside Australia actors. Being tiny, blonde and with big blue eyes, as well as having a natural aptitude for comedy, Wendy was in great demand for ingenue roles in plays as well as for revues. One of these was to play a school girl in Happiest Days of Your Life starring the incompara- ble Margaret Rutherford, well known for her comic parts as a dithery old lady in countless British films. Even though Wendy was an experienced actor well into her 20s, Rutherford thought she was actually a school girl

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and would give her little gifts of posies and china dolls. Later when television started in Australia, Wendy was consistently in work from its earliest days. Her biggest break came in 1972 when Channel 10 started one of the most popular soap series in Australian television history, No. 96. It set the dubious record of being the first time full frontal nudity was shown on Australian television. More importantly, it was also the first time a homosexual character was depicted in a mainstream way instead of the gay queen stereotype. In No. 96, Wendy played the scatter-brained wife Edie McDonald. Her part was so successful she was able to reprise it for years on the club circuit. These days Wendy seems almost embarrassed by her recollection of this period, but it was an excellent way to make a living while bringing up a family. “I think I’m the luckiest person in the world. How lucky I was from the age of about 14 to have known that I wanted to be on the stage; I wanted to give people enjoyment and I loved making people laugh. And I was lucky that I had enough talent to be able to keep working — there’s nothing worse than wanting to express a talent and not having the opportunity to use it. I was lucky again when eventually I found I didn’t want to be on the stage any longer and decided to go to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and see if I could become a producer.” n It must have been quite a shock for the manager of the AETT, Jeffry Joynton-Smith when one of Sydney’s best known comedy performers appeared across his desk offering to volunteer. “I walked off Dowling Street one morning and went to see Jeffry and said I want to learn how to do contracts and budgets and I’ll work for you for nothing. He didn’t seem surprised and I suppose he thought she’s got nothing better to do so why not? Anyhow I went in every day and I found I wasn’t learning much about budgets and contracts, but I was starting to tell them what to do and what not to do.” At that time in 1981, the AETT was struggling to find a new identity. Over the previous 25 years, it had established Australia’s national opera and ballet companies, two symphony orchestras, various state based theatre companies and the ill-fated national touring company, the Trust Players. All these companies had since become independent and

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the Australia Council was asking questions about why the AETT should continue to be funded as most of its work seemed to be importing foreign companies to tour Australia. As Wendy was well known in theatre circles, Australian artists started to come to see her and she found herself putting up proposals to AETT management to present and tour new Australian plays. “I told them I couldn’t stay any longer as I’d been volunteering for five months and I had two kids to support. That seemed to surprise them as in a few weeks they asked me to come back — on the payroll. Shortly after, Robert Merrett, the author of an aboriginal show The Cakeman, came to me suggesting the AETT do a production of it. I knew a World Theatre Festival was to take place in 1982 in Denver, Colorado so I found some money and offered them The Cakeman. We thought we’d have a try out at the Parade Theatre in Kensington and we sent out all these invitations but no one RSVPd. Just before eight pm on the night I thought there isn’t going to be an audience; then I found this huge queue outside the theatre and along the street of all these aboriginal people who had come to send off the show, and by the time they all got in the theatre was full. It was the first aboriginal production to go overseas.” The AETT was in real trouble; it depended on Australia Council funding but the Council was insisting money go towards contemporary Australian production. Nobody at the AETT knew much about new Australian work so eyes fell on Wendy who was put in charge of what came to be known (and soon celebrated) as the Australian Content Department. She was so successful that the following year, a third of the annual grant was quarantined to her new initiative and within three years the Australia Council insisted the entire AETT annual grant be put to Australian Content. “After the success of The Cakeman, I wondered what other indigenous work might be around. I heard of a director called Andrew Ross working with an aboriginal company in Perth and he was about to do a play called The Dreamers by Jack Davis, an aboriginal poet and playwright. One of my colleagues liked it so I persuaded the AETT to do a national tour which lasted 17 weeks. When I met Andrew Ross, I found that he wanted to help Jack Davis write a trilogy of plays based on stories of aboriginal life, so I organised a grant so they could work together and

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the outcome was No Sugar and later a play for children called Honey Spot. “At that time, the organiser of the 1986 World Theatre Festival in Vancouver came to Australia and couldn’t find anything here she liked so I persuaded her to go to Perth to see No Sugar. She loved it and it went to Vancouver playing to packed houses. In 1988 the MTC presented the whole trilogy in Melbourne and we toured No Sugar around Australia and then it went to London for the Bicentenary. The reason it worked so well was because the company was made up of Jack and his family and friends from Perth including his sister who’d never been on a plane, and a young woman with her baby.” By 1990, the AETT was on the verge of bankruptcy after a sequence of disastrous decisions to present large scale commercial productions. Wendy had been openly critical of the AETT’s management style and her Australian Content Department had become increasingly independent. She recalls: “It became quite unpleasant as it had been made quite plain to me by the chief executive that he wanted me to go. The Australia Council wanted to airlift me out but it dragged on for several months as the Board wouldn’t let me go because my department received grants and was profitable. In the end I left and I also was asked to take the Theatre of the Deaf with me and we hosted them until they were ready to be independent. The Australia Council had retained the funding until Performing Lines was formed and they helped me choose a Board. My Chair was Ian Temby who was then the Independent Commissioner against Corruption. He was fantastic and chaired the Board for twelve years. I have been lucky enough to have had only two people as Board chair in the whole 20 years of Performing Lines. After Ian stepped down, Robin Hughes, who is a film producer and used to run Film Australia, has been chair ever since.” The work Wendy has been doing at Performing Lines is not only innovative in content, but her mode of presentation had never before been applied consistently. She wanted to present genres of theatre that were unfamiliar such as contemporary dance and music theatre, pup- petry, physical theatre, multicultural and indigenous work. She found that artists of a particular genre in one state might never see developments elsewhere and their work might not progress, or the artists became marginalised. If scarce funds had been invested in a production of real

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value, it was unlikely it would go beyond its home base, so a tour around Australia would develop both the quality and the exposure of the work. If it was good enough, she then might find funding to tour it overseas. “A good example is the photographer William Yang; I have now produced eight of his shows and have taken him across five continents and he has become so well known he sells himself. His shows are very simple but eloquent slide based monologues. I first saw him in 1992 at Belvoir St Downstairs when he did a show called Sadness, consisting of photographs of his Chinese family and also of many of his friends who were at that time dying of AIDS. He is in demand all over the world at festivals and in big international events where he represents Australia. In fact he is better known overseas, and easier to sell, than he is in Australia.” It is the same with some companies Wendy tours overseas whose shows are more appreciated and better understood abroad than they are here. This is at least partly because in Europe, and even in Asia and South America, audiences are more in tune with theatre and dance that use mime, circus and other physical and non-text based skills to tell stories. Wendy says foreign festival directors or producers rarely want mainstream plays from Australian theatre companies, as there will be any number of famous companies available to present them. But unique work of great talent, never seen before, is always in demand. Her ground-breaking work with indigenous theatre in the 1980s, with plays based on family stories, has changed over the years. Having produced and toured a number of shows in those early days, she thought aboriginal artists might take on producing their own work but it wasn’t until 1995 that she came across a show that made her sit up. This was The Seven Stages of Grieving, developed by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman and starring Deborah, presented in a small theatre in Brisbane. She decided to tour it around Australia and at a showcase in Canberra, Deborah was invited to London and her career took off. Later, Rhoda Roberts, who was curating the indigenous arts festival Festival of the Dreaming associated with the 2000 Sydney Olympics, asked Wendy to produce several solo shows by aboriginal women including Leah Purcell, Deborah Cheetham and Ningali Lawford. Since then Performing Lines has toured a range of contemporary indigenous productions, several overseas. She is proud of her record as a

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pioneer of indigenous theatre and the huge gains in its professionalism and sophistication over the last 25 years. It amuses her to think that a champion of indigenous theatre should have a white, North Shore private school background. Her secret seems to be the flexibility she can bring to bear to any project. Whether its developing a collaboration between Paul Grabowsky’s Australian Art Orchestra and an Indonesian gamelan orchestra touring to the US and Europe, or taking a small local theatre to another state. “We have proved the endless possibilities for small and medium companies and have built a reputation of ‘have show — will travel.’ One night we can be in a school hall and the next in the Opera House. Australia is so vast and audiences can be so different in the places where our shows can go. For instance in Tasmania, the artists were leaving the state — there was no work for them. The funding body asked us to help build audiences so for the last three years we have a program called Tasmania Performs and a producer based in Tasmania developing and touring work by Tasmanian artists. Part of the job is to organise the Rotary Club or the Council or a local school in towns across Tasmania to put on a performance, so a three week tour might be a series of one night stands. It’s been tough, but it’s working and we are building audiences. “Each state is different in its needs so we have a different set up in each state. In WA we have a branch where we work with six performing companies. In NSW we have a producer working with six companies and now we have been asked to set up a producer’s hub in Darwin to work with any of the artists in the Northern Territory. When I first started, I thought I should be fair to everyone and only tour a company for a short time so I could move on to the next one, but then I found it takes several years to get a company known so that you can guarantee there will be an audience. Kate Champion’s dance company Force Majeure is the perfect example. I first saw her work back in the 1980s and admired it and later organised two solo shows for her. They led to her being picked up by festivals and eventually she was able to create her own ensemble and one of our staff went to be her general manager. Now we are about to manage a very big tour of her latest ensemble show.” Wendy says it is easy to complain about the funding as it is never enough, but she is immensely grateful for the support the Australia

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Council and other funding agencies have given her over the years. Currently she is taking an indigenous show from Elcho Island north of Arnhem Land on a four city Australian tour, and where the airfares alone cost as much as fares to London, but members of her Board have pulled out all stops and they have confirmed extra funding from three founda- tions to make it possible. n “I have never for one moment regretted leaving the stage; this work has been completely fulfilling. I always look forward to tomorrow — it’s part of the adrenalin in keeping going. I never look back.” Her partner has given up waiting for her to stop work to join him in retirement up at Lake Macquarie. Working six days a week doesn’t allow time to even think about that. But she was reminded about the passing of time when she and some colleagues were waiting for some visiting artists to arrive and someone googled Wendy Blacklock; up she came on YouTube with impossibly bouffant hair on Graham Kennedy’s Blankety Blanks untold ages earlier. Amidst helpless laughter, her young colleagues couldn’t believe it: ‘Is that you? That can’t be you?’ “I rarely see my friends these days — my girlfriends of a similar age, unless they are prepared to come to the theatre with me. My social life is really my work, mixing with all my colleagues in the theatre business, most of whom are much younger, and I love being in their company. I love books and I talk about books with some of my friends, and I love cook books and cooking — for myself or with friends, but I never have time for a dinner party. Twice in recent years I have gone for long walks in Italy with groups of friends and that has given me wonderful breaks.” In a moment of introspection, Wendy admits there are probably no more mountains she has to climb at Performing Lines. The array of theatrical expertise and experience amongst her seven in-house producers is remarkable and a true testament to her achievement. Still, it’s hard to imagine her sunning herself in a deck chair on the shores of Lake Macquarie. N

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 178 2/09/10 4:53 PM Justin Macdonnell

Producers

Justin Macdonnell at an art fair in Miami, Florida Justin Macdonnell

For his entire professional career, spanning more than 40 years, Justin Macdonnell has worked as director, producer, manager and somewhat reluctant apologist for most aspects of the performing arts in Australia. His clear-eyed objectivity, sardonic humour and active engagement with such a broad scene at the highest level, adds weight to his judgements and he is now in much demand as an adviser in national arts strategies.

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he practice and management of the arts in Australia has matured enormously in the last 50 years. Until the establishment of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1954, there was no policy or Tmechanism for federal government support of the performing arts, apart from the ABC and its orchestras. While there were established art muse- ums, there were no funded companies presenting performing arts, little employment in the performing arts and no encouragement of young people to consider a career as an artist. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a huge leap forward in the presentation and reception of the arts, matched only by the burst of creative energy. Many Australian actors, musicians and singers forced overseas by lack of opportunity, returned home. The flowering of modernism in the 60s encouraged a new generation of Australian composers who are now seen as standard bearers of a new (perhaps golden) age in Australian music. Theatre, opera and dance companies sprang up. In 1972, the Australia Council was created by the Whitlam government with generous allocations of funds to dispense to the fledgling arts industry. It was into this ferment that Justin Macdonnell first fell after graduating from Queensland University with a degree in Classics. While he had studied piano and done some theatre in a desultory way at university, he had no notion of working in the arts, least of all as a practitioner. However a friend told him of a casual holiday job as a props assistant for a visiting theatre company. He quite liked this and soon decided to try his luck in Sydney where he found work with various performing arts companies including the Old Tote. Soon after, in 1968, he applied for a job at Flinders University in Adelaide where Wal Cherry, something of a guru in theatre at the time, was Professor of Drama. This was the start of his real career; for the next eight years in Adelaide, he might best be described as a bright eyed young operator in the centre of what was one of the most extraordinarily fertile periods in Australian cultural history — the Don Dunstan era. This bumpy and unpredictable ride was typical of the experience of most young people entering that brave new world, whether as artists or arts workers. A decade earlier there had been virtually no opportunity; now there was a real need for people with talent or experience (rarely both) to support the artists in what they were trying to do. More

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than that, the big changes in society, the Vietnam war and its aftermath, demanded new ways of creating and presenting art, whether it was music, theatre, dance, film or the visual arts. There was no profession of arts management and almost no managers with practical arts experience available to facilitate the artists in their work. At Flinders, Justin had a scholarship to do a higher degree. His thesis was on Seneca and his influence on Antonin Artaud and his idea of Theatre of Cruelty. It was inspired timing: “It was the era of Vietnam, the era of the first outdoor rock concerts, Monterrey, Woodstock, the first really serious application of technology to popular concerts, massive amplification, light shows, happenings, all of which I thought was what Artaud was on about. You had people doing extreme things like Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar during a performance; Janis Joplin effectively drinking herself to death onstage; Altamont.” It was the time of sex, drugs, rock and roll, tuning in, turning on, dropping out, bad behaviour and the “protest” movement. As Justin says, it was touchy feely time with people taking their clothes off onstage. In Adelaide, Liz Dalman’s Australian Dance Theatre was doing anti-war dance pieces and Macdonnell was producing agitprop theatre like ‘Viet Rock’ alongside anti-establishment classics like Prometheus Bound. “There was also a lot of bullshit,” he adds. But in South Australia it was also the beginning of the Dunstan government and the admiration, encouragement and funding he and his government gave towards the arts. After a brief period in power, he lost the election in 1968, but was re-elected in 1970 and presided over a remarkable period for the arts in the state. “Dunstan wasn’t the cause of the flowering of the arts in South Australia. Artists did that; there was George Ogilvie, Rodney Fisher and Helmut Bakaitis at the State Theatre Company, Gil Brealey at the Film Corporation, Richard Meale at the Elder Conservatorium and Anthony Steel was an outstanding director of the Adelaide Festival Centre and the Adelaide Festival, probably the best appointment of any in those years. But Dunstan enabled it. He symbolised the feeling of the time and took the arts very seriously and certainly had a deep personal interest. Curiously enough, I have no idea of what his opinions were about any art form. I never heard him having a conversation with anyone about the

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arts. To me, he was an enigma.” By contrast, one of the first people Justin got to know in Adelaide was Len Amadio from the eminent Sydney musical family. Both feeling rather parched for good company in the stuffy provincial Adelaide of the time, they spent many hours together in Italian restaurants drinking too much red wine, and postulating the future of the arts. For some years Amadio had been the concert manager of the South Australian Symphony Orchestra, popular with the subscribers, and a fount of knowledge about the orchestra’s program and guest artists. Early in his time as premier, Dunstan appointed Amadio as his arts supremo. Amadio was absolutely the right man for the job as he and Dunstan were as one in their vision for the arts, and Amadio had the expertise and connections to make things happen. “Len was the one who really blazed the trail”, Justin says. Certainly, he was the key to one of the most exciting periods in Macdonnell’s professional life. Justin’s job at Flinders, his enthusiasm and his practical experience of the performing arts, made him a resource for would-be presenters. One of these was the Intimate Opera Group, run by a formidable lady called Kathleen Steele-Scott. The IOG consisted of a number of enthusiasts, singers and ex-singers. In addition there was the Adelaide Singers, the last full time professional chamber choir run by the ABC. Thus Adelaide was well placed for singers and the potential for presenting opera. Steele-Scott was interested in contemporary music and the IOG used to perform Britten operas and other new or off-beat work. Justin was drawn into the IOG and brought new talent and ideas into its orbit. One of these ideas was to mount a production of Rameau’s Pygmalion for the 1972 Adelaide Festival featuring authentic Baroque gesture. This came about as the life work on Baroque gesture of an Adelaide musicologist, Dene Barnett, had been published by Larousse. Among others, it featured young talents like Richard Divall as conductor and soprano Marilyn Richardson, both of whom would go on to major operatic careers. The stir caused by Pygmalion was the catalyst for a decision by the State Government, no doubt recommended by Len Amadio, to establish a professional opera company based on the IOG which became New Opera, South Australia Inc. with Justin as manager. New Opera became a beacon for innovative opera production in Australia, and its work was

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ahead of its time, especially in regard to the new forms of music theatre emerging around the world. “It was an important time in my life — I revelled in doing something that not many people get to do and that was to have an ensemble of pretty well continuously employed artists who were multi-skilled in the music theatre genre. We were doing new music theatre work that required younger artists with movement and dance skills and more fertile imagination than more conventional operatic artists. We had a very vibrant group of people like Lyndon Terracini, David Brennan and Tessa Bremner, as well as directors like Wal Cherry and Chris Winzar. “The highlights included John Tasker’s beautiful production of Janáček’s Excursions of Mr Broucek which Anthony Steel asked for in his first Adelaide Festival in 1974. It was a rare piece needing a lot of edit- ing in the Janáček archive in Brno. Anthony was hugely supportive and it was a major landmark in Australian operatic history. Then we had the opening of The Space at the Adelaide Festival Centre also in 1974, where we produced Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins — Robyn Archer’s debut. Then we presented Banchieri’s wild madrigal operas — very earthy and Chaucerian. We commissioned Larry Sitsky to write a short opera on Chaucer’s A Miller’s Tale and George Dreyfus wrote an amusing satire on the Whitlam government dismissal called The Lamentable Reign of Charles the Last.” On a more mainstream level, English director Anthony Besch’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte for New Opera was witty and elegant and far outshone The Australian Opera’s expensive production mounted at the same time, and was taken up by other companies in Australia and New Zealand. “But it was obvious to me and I think to everyone else that New Opera needed to go in another more mainstream direction. Adelaide was too small to sustain a loopy company like this for long. We had four or five exciting years. That wasn’t bad. It might have worked for longer in a bigger city like Melbourne.” Not yet out of his 20s, in 1976 Justin resigned from New Opera and returned to Sydney. Soon after he left, the company changed its con- stitution, name and purpose to a conventional company purveying the

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traditional repertoire, and to this day State Opera of South Australia has remained Australia’s most successful opera company outside the national company Opera Australia. Despite the creativity and excitement of his years at New Opera, he had never liked Adelaide, feeling it a flat and gloomy city, laid out like a cemetery. Once during a weekend early in his time there with nothing better to do, after edifying himself at the State Gallery, he saw a bus with a sign indicating it was going to Paradise. He thought, well if this is the bus to Paradise I’m going to get on, and when he got there, it was an outer suburb and even more dispiriting than the rest of the city. n Justin lives in a spacious old terrace house in inner west Sydney with his life partner Willy Brien. Sitting on a comfortable sofa in the quiet, cool sitting room with its dark floor boards and casual old furniture, eons away from the busy road outside, we are invaded by an insistent little cat. It is a beautiful bluish grey in colour, mews loudly, tramping over everything and demanding Justin’s attention. It is a rare Korat breed, a Thai temple cat, obviously used to being treated with affection and respect. He was brought up in a middle class Catholic family of Irish origins in Brisbane, though his mother had Jewish and Scottish blood and cultural aspirations for herself and her children. She was an avid reader and as with many self-educated people of the time, could quote memorised literary chunks at the drop of a hat. Justin was taught piano and the family went to concerts and all the shows that came to Brisbane. His father was of a slightly different cast and evidently preferred showgirls rather than the shows. One of Justin’s earliest theatrical memories was being taken by his mother to a performance of The Merchant of Venice in the famous tour starring Katherine Hepburn and Robert Helpmann. “My mother was quite sniffy about that, not because it wasn’t any good, in fact she saw Robert Helpmann as an Australian star, but Hepburn as just an American film actress, who wouldn’t know anything about Shakespeare.” Curiously the most influential factor in his early life, by his own admission, was contracting polio at the age of four and being isolated

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in hospital for a year. This was before the Salk preventative vaccine and people were very scared of the disease as it was not known how infections took place. For a year at this formative age, his mother was virtually his only visitor. “The point is that at the age of four, I was on my own and everyone was kept away. I think looking back that more than anything it shaped my personality. At an age when most kids are tucked up in the bosom of their family, I became an adult, and as a result I never again thought of myself as a child. Recently an old school friend said to me that his greatest memory of me was that I was always on my own. I certainly didn’t feel lonely and I think what he was probably saying was: you seemed to be rejecting us. I always felt different, rather isolated, and I always felt older.” He was never conscious of the course of puberty and another old friend recently remarked to him that he was the only Catholic educated man he knew who appeared never to have been assailed by Catholic guilt. More seriously, he admits to a sense of disappointment that he has never really been in love, even to being unsure of what love really is. This seems strange given his keen intelligence, penetrating humour and warmth of personality. But it is borne out by the nature of his engagement with art in all its forms, when he says few experiences of art have deeply moved him. “This has always surprised me, but in the art forms I really understand, such as the performing arts and literature, I have always been able to distinguish between the executant skill in the making of a work or its inherent quality as an object of beauty, and its emotional content. I suspect part of that is me holding back from emotional involvement.” It is also Justin’s real strength in being able to make cool and objec- tive judgments about the professional work in the arts he deals with on a daily basis, judgments that appear to be based on empirical evidence and can be clearly expressed, despite the widely divergent views heard all around him. This ability to provide clear and helpful advice to artists in the process of making their work is greatly valued and these days his opinion is widely sought. It would be quite wrong to attribute a dry shamanistic wisdom as a dominant aspect of his personality. Like many mature experts, becom-

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ing a person of judgment and benevolence has been hard won. In his youth, Justin lived well and was a heavy smoker and drinker. Spending an hour or three with him in the bar of the Sydney Opera House Green Room was always a highly entertaining experience. His pack of untipped Camels on the counter and a glass of red in his hand, his eyes glittering with amusement, he would skewer his targets with carefully articulated and often justifiable malice. Pretentious and successful colleagues were often in his sights, as were right wing politicians and foolish bureau- crats. Descriptions of unfortunate or misconceived productions could be hilarious. In the end, much to his friends’ regret, he realised this lifestyle could not go on. Finding himself alone minding a friend’s house at Patonga, a long and steep walk away from a shop, he ran out of Camels and liquor, and decided to give up both. “The one thing I knew about myself was that though I was a heavy drinker, I wasn’t an alcoholic as I could always do without. If you like, I was a drunk rather than an alcoholic. And the other thing was that while I smoked heavily, I never liked it, so I found that over that week, I had stopped — both. People used to say that must have been very hard, but no, it wasn’t.” n The happiest times in Justin’s life, at least at a professional level, were his years working at the Sydney Festival. Since he had returned from Adelaide, he had accepted invitations to run the Opera School at the Sydney Conservatorium and various projects at The Australian Opera, to some extent simultaneously, and neither to much personal satisfaction, especially as the latter coincided with the famous wars between the Bonynge and Hemmings factions at the Opera. He exited from this unhappy situation to run the National Opera of New Zealand for two years. It was a grim and depressed period in New Zealand’s history so running an opera company with hardly any money wasn’t much fun. Coming to the Sydney Festival in the 1980s during Stephen Hall’s long tenure as both general manager and artistic director was like coming out of a tunnel into the light. At that time, Hall was one of Australia’s most experienced and well-liked arts managers. He had been both an

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actor and a manager in his career and for a time, artistic director of The Australian Opera. A bon vivant, he had a huge circle of friends and acquaintances and had the unusual talent of being able to persuade politicians, prominent business men and society ladies to give generously to the Festival. “I loved working with Stephen. There was a great little team; it was fun, it was buzzy and it was energising. It was the first time for years I wanted to get out of bed each morning and get into it. Festivals are tricky things and it was my first real multi-art form engagement. The job was program manager, to buy or produce all the ticketed events. The festival had started as a largely free series of events, so putting on our own events was relatively new.” With his deep vein of connections through the arts world, the job suited Justin perfectly. He was able to make things happen and let others take the credit. A good example was the idea to give free opera concerts in the Domain. In 1982, the New York based Patrick Veitch had just arrived to take over management of The Australia Opera. One of his first ideas was to establish an annual free opera concert in January during the Festival. It would expose opera and the company to a vast new audience and it would impress the constantly carping funding authorities. But Stephen Hall would have to be persuaded and he might not like the interloper from New York moving on to his patch in such a big way. So Justin contrived a quiet Sunday morning social gathering at a friend’s home where Veitch and Hall happened to meet. The Domain concert idea was floated; Veitch got his concert at the next Festival and it was such a success that somehow over the years it became Stephen Hall’s creation. After his period with the Festival, he became Executive Director of CAPPA, the peak lobbying organisation for the performing arts, but his restless mind was leaping ahead. He had stumbled on the work of the Spanish revolutionary poet Garcia Lorca and fell to learning Spanish so he could read it in the original. Wanting to avoid the flag waving of the Bicentenary in 1988, he thought it would be interesting to spend an extended holiday in South America where he could use his newly acquired Spanish. He touted amongst his colleagues for a few pieces of paid work to pay his way — find a tango company for the Adelaide

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Festival; sell Australian music groups for tours around Argentina. He found this enterprise both attractive and successful, started to develop an increasingly wide network and proceeded to buy a house in Buenos Aires. As the connections developed, he saw opportunities for Australian artists in more northerly Latin America countries such as Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. Almost single handedly, he created new circuits for Australian performing artists and groups and to a lesser extent brought Latin American artists to Australia. With long time friend and colleague Marguerite Pepper, he established a business called Export Oz to export and import the best and most innovative performing arts. Major festivals in Australia were becoming more sophisticated and festival directors demanded more innovative artists and performing companies from out of the way sources. Many Australian artists have been fascinated with the experiences they have found in Latin America, though sometimes mixed with danger in unstable societies. Large and appreciative audiences in unusual and often outdoor venues are typical. While he has opened a substantial and quite exotic market for Australian artists, he is sceptical about its deeper effect on Australia’s relations with Latin America. “I like to think there have been great improvements in traffic both ways in arts activity and certainly in a heightened awareness of cultural practice between the countries that have been involved. At a trade and economic level there has been some diversification. There may have been some benefit since the foundation of APEC with countries like Mexico Chile and Peru joining. By far the biggest development in our engagement with Latin America is from education services. Latin Americans have always been well received here, unlike in the US, and we are regarded as a safe country for their students.” His personal interest in Latin American culture has been deepened with a Master’s degree in Latin American studies. He says: “From the earliest I was interested in why almost every international singer or conductor of note had worked at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in the first half of the 20th century. I wanted to find out what was normal rather than exotic in Latin American, especially Argentine society. They say an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish, behaves like the British and would like to be French. All these countries to some degree are post-

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colonial migrant societies living uneasily beside indigenous communities. In many ways like us.” Through his unique Latin American expertise, in 2003 Justin was invited to become artistic director of a huge new performing arts centre in Miami, Florida, now known as the Adrienne Arsht Center. At that time it was simply a set of architectural drawings and his job was to envisage and plan what would happen once it opened a few years hence. Miami is an unusual quasi-expatriate city which has the largest propor- tion (60%) of Spanish speaking Hispanics of any city in the US. These are also some of the the poorest residents of the US while the more privileged are mostly emigrants or retirees from New York. It is said that Miami is an unhappy society. “It is a very cantankerous society. A colleague of mine there used to say: ‘Miami is full of people waiting to be left out.’ They feel Miami is not being taken seriously and that it should be taken very seriously indeed. Many of them think they would be happier and more important somewhere else — notably where they came from. “But it’s a marvellous artistic society; the ethnic mix and the fractures across it are the very things that give it the life and energy that I enjoyed so much. There are some interesting new producers there doing some really challenging work. There are a couple of small dance/theatre companies and the Miami Dade College has an excellent presenting program of new work. There is a vast spectrum of popular music, mostly with a Caribbean or Latin influence. I had the huge pleasure of trying to engage with all these people, usually through partnerships to present new work.” Justin also took the opportunity to introduce Australian artists to this vibrant scene, particularly those who would respond to the ethnic mix, such as leading stilt and physical theatre artist David Clarkson. Unfortunately, most American arts centres are much more conventional than this, relying on traditional opera, ballet, symphony and drama companies mixed up with popular shows that tour the country. He says with regret and a touch of cynicism that it all reverted to type after he left and artists recall what he wryly terms a ‘Golden Age.’ After five years at Miami and with the magnificent new centre established with a multi million dollar naming donor, he looked around to see what was next on his agenda, and turned for home.

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Many Faces of Inspiration — Antony Jeffrey.indd 189 2/09/10 4:53 PM Many Faces of Inspiration n What is to be made of Justin Macdonnell’s presence in the Australian arts scene? He has held no chief executive or artistic director position with a flagship Australian company or festival, yet it is hard to think of anyone with such a depth of knowledge and influence about the way the arts have developed and options for the future. His 1992 publication Arts Minister? is still the standard work on development of public policy in the arts, though in need of updating. Compulsively readable and organised under headings for each Federal arts minister, it has the personal frisson of one of those old history books where each chapter starts with an outline of the monarch’s character traits. Asked about his personal tastes and favourite moments in the arts, Justin is elusive. He says he might have been quite a good dramaturg. He feels his rather scholarly education in the Classics might have given him an apparatus criticus for his work in the arts. He has always preferred more austere and undecorated art forms such as chamber music and contemporary dance and dislikes extraneous activity on a stage. Great moments of satisfaction for him include Robyn Archer’s debut at The Space in Adelaide, and a wonderful piece of cabaret in Miami by a young Afro-Cuban female artist who tragically died soon after. When he was in Miami, an extraordinary thing happened. A young man emailed from England claiming Justin was his father. It transpired a boy had been born from a brief liaison nearly 30 years earlier at the Edinburgh Festival. He had been fostered out and never knew his real parents. In his late 20s, the lonely young man tried to find them and discovered his father was a man called Justin who once worked in the arts in Adelaide. In due course Sean found his father and later emigrated to Australia and now lives with Justin and Willy. The discovery of his father and the deep affection and pride he has found in the relationship has transformed Sean’s life. It is a moving story and has given both their lives new emotional depth. N

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Singers

From left: Robert Gard, Joan Carden and Geoffrey Chard in Robert’s garden (Photo: Ojārs Greste) Joan Carden, Geoffrey Chard & Robert Gard

Joan Carden AO OBE, Geoffrey Chard AM and Robert Gard OBE are three of Australia’s best known and most successful opera singers, all of whom have retired from the professional stage after long and remarkably varied careers. Having for many years been professional colleagues and good friends, all three still take an active interest in the opera business. Their conversation is both instructive and hilarious.

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he soprano, tenor and baritone are gathered in Robert Gard’s cluttered music room at the back of his house in the smart suburb of Mosman in Sydney. It is a very large gathering of talent in one Tconfined space and they almost seem to burst out of it. The room is actually quite large but groans with walls and fixtures full of CDs, DVDs and books — there must be thousands of them. But the reason for the sense of confined space is not the books and CDs. Opera singers naturally articulate their words with clarity and sonority; voices are projected to reach the back stalls. If there is a performance tonight, the voice is used gently and sparingly, but there is no performance tonight for these singers and they haven’t seen each other for a while. The specific purpose of the gathering is to talk about what it was like to sing in the early days of professional opera in Australia, and especially the experience of country touring. In the 1950s and 60s — when their careers were starting (not Joan’s — she is a relative babe and was a student in the 60s) opera was toured extensively in the regions. The forerunner of our national company Opera Australia was founded in 1956 and for the next fifteen years or so, both national and regional tours were frequent. Despite paltry funding, hand to mouth theatrical and rehearsal facilities and primitive touring conditions, touring of opera was regarded as essential. Not so anymore: Opera Australia for many years now has divided its time between Sydney and Melbourne. Although the company now has facilities scarcely dreamt of in the 60s, it is likely to argue it cannot afford the huge cost of touring at the high standard demanded these days. It might be argued by opera goers of a certain age (certainly by our three opera singers), that while the facilities weren’t much good back then, the voices were even better and some great performances were given in pretty strange places. “We fell into this business by accident,” says Geoff, “the amateur societies, suddenly getting a taste for opera, listening to records of the great singers of the past like Lawrence Tibbett and John Charles Thomas and wanting to sing like that.” Robert continues: “It’s that passion of listening to singers, going to performances, wanting desperately to do it — it almost seems not to be there anymore.”

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Joan gives an example: “Bob Allman, Emma Matthews and I were asked to come to a fundraising concert for the Opera School at the Conservatorium and afterwards we were talking to the students and I asked them what brought them to opera and none of them knew about the history of opera and the singers in Australia — they knew nothing of my career for example. They won’t make it if they are not almost fanatical about all aspects of the business.” While Robert is English and trained first at the Guildhall in London and later came to Australia where most of his career took place, Geoff incredibly started singing principal roles in Sydney while still in his teens, unheard of today, and later went to England where he spent 25 years before returning. Joan was different again: she trained for ten years in England, mostly at the London Opera Centre, and returned to Australian in 1970 for the larger part of her career. They all agree there was a golden age of singing in Australia in the 50s and 60s. Most of the talented singers had to go abroad to develop their careers; many stayed away but most returned and helped to give the new national company a flying start. Following the legendary Dame Joan Sutherland who was the most internationally sought after opera singer for a generation, there were many others of special talent. Robert Gard remembers Donald Smith, the nuggety ex-canecutter from Bundaberg who many thought had the greatest tenor voice of the age. Don was a rotund little man with no pretensions as an actor but who was blessed with a golden voice. “It was a world class voice but he was personally very insecure and was always missing rehearsals and performances. I used to say Don was on for three and off for two. It may have been his appearance that made him reluctant to take direction. But when Don was in good voice it was amazing — he had a wide open Italian sound. He was very naughty and was always making up stories of why he missed a call that nobody believed but we were all terribly fond of him. “He and Betty Fretwell were similar in resisting acting instructions from the director. They were both very big names in London and had a huge success at Sadlers Wells, singing many of the big roles together. She used to frustrate the directors who wanted her to do certain moves and she would say: ‘We are here to sing’, or if she was asked to kneel, she

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would say: ‘No, I don’t kneel when I sing.’ John Pringle told me once when she was resisting the director’s requests, he [John] whispered to her what the line she was singing (in Italian) meant and she hissed back at him: ‘Don’t tell me what it means — it puts me off!’” Two other great singers of those early days were Raymond Myers and Neil Warren-Smith. Robert thought they were both quite exceptional. “Ray Myers was fantastic — you’ve never heard such a big sound. The story was that he went to Florence Taylor as he’d been told that singers’ deep breathing would be good for his asthma and she discovered he had this wonderful voice. His voice was so exceptional that he went to the Opera Company after a couple of years despite having no experience at all. He had a marvellous career and as you know his Rigoletto was amazing. Neil Warren-Smith was an outstanding bass — we’ve never had a bass voice of that quality since then. His voice had a beautifully mellow sound, not the dark growly Russian sound. n After this reflection on some of the great singers with whom they worked (modestly excluding themselves), talk shifts to their experiences of touring. Geoff’s career started very early and in 1953, he was on tour with Clarice Lorenz’ old National Opera doing many school performances. He recalls a performance of the garden scene in Faust when somebody fell off or broke a chair making a loud noise in the auditorium so the teenage kids in the audience ignored the opera and gathered around the fracas with the chair. The pianist started to giggle and leading tenor Ronald Dowd was so furious that he insulted her and tried to pick a fight with Geoff who was defending the children’s behaviour. It is hard to imagine opera in such circumstances today. Geoff tells another amusing story of a (not to be named) tenor at that time who had a bad review on the opening night of La Bohème: “He came in for the Saturday night performance saying to everyone’s surprise that ‘I feel wonderful’ and was all over the place and we found that he had a thermos flask with him the whole time and kept taking swigs of it. They sent for Ron Dowd as he had been doing an ABC performance and he came down but refused to go on. Beryl Hardy and I sang most of the tenor’s part that night. When it came to the curtain calls, he bent over

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too far, staggered and nearly fell over. Needless to say he was replaced for the next performance.” In 1966 Robert went on a tour for 18 weeks of the Barber of Seville for the Elizabethan Trust Opera Company. Touring on the bus was like a mini-opera city. Not only were there two casts of singers, but a crew of three or four mechanists and lighting people had to be fitted in, together with a pianist, director, stage manager and of course spaces for the costumes and sets had to be found — usually the roof of the bus for the sets. The two casts not only shared the performances but on off nights for one cast, those singers would have to come in to sing the chorus sections. If they were lucky enough in the selection of the opera, they might be able to leave after the opening chorus but more often than not would have to come back later for the final chorus. Of that Barber of Seville tour Robert says: “There were two casts and that was where Doreen and I got together — she was my Rosina. The stage director Stefan Beinl used to say in his thick accent: ‘Ooh, the music lesson scene Robert, I counted twelve kisses and there are only meant to be two.’ We had a lot of laughs but you had to put up with a lot of discomfort and they made you go into digs [billeting with local families] which is the last thing you want when you are exhausted and want to have a rest. We all got on pretty well but 18 weeks together and on a bus every day was a bit much. But do you remember Henri Penn who used to accompany all the visiting ABC soloists? He was our accompanist on this tour and he was eighty something. One day we had an extra call and we were all so tired and I said to him, ‘Henri you must have a rest too.’ And he said: ‘No, no, no, I’m too old, dear boy, I might go to sleep and never wake up and then what would you do?’” While he remembers Stefan Beinl with affection, the first tour of the company in 1964 to the Adelaide Festival featured a production of Carmen directed by a New Zealander who Robert prefers to forget. “Stefan Haag [artistic director of the Elizabethan Opera company at the time] had given this man the production but he was really a set designer. The Carmen was Jean Madeira [a famous African American mezzo]. She was a very funny lady — we loved her. She arrived in Adelaide the day before the dress rehearsal in the middle of summer swathed in furs as if she’d been in Greenland and was asked to rehearse right away. ‘Yes my

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dear,’ she said, ‘I’ve got no voice but when I can’t sing, I’ll whistle.’ We thought she was joking, but no, she whistled the Habanera! “Stefan Haag gathered us after the dress rehearsal and he said, ‘Kids, (certainly we were youngish), kids, we don’t have a production. Opening night is in two days time and you’ve been rehearsed to death but I’m afraid we don’t have a production from this man. All I can say is that you are experienced artists, and when we come to the performance, if you see a light, get into it, and whatever moves Miss Madeira makes, follow her and play your parts. Well, we did the first performance, and believe it or not, the reviews of the production were fantastic and this dreadful man from New Zealand got all the credit!” Geoff Chard was in London during the early days of the Elizabethan Opera Company and was not involved in either the Carmen or the Barber of Seville tours, but he was in similar tours earlier and agrees that they became tedious after a few weeks and tempers often became strained. He recalls: “During one tour everyone was at each other’s throats and on a long weekend we were in Tenterfield and it was decided to organise a cricket match between the company and the local Tenterfield team. Now Ron Dowd was a second grade player, Neil Easton was a terrific spinner, Bob O’Donnell was a reasonable cricketer and I played a lot of tennis. Anyhow I opened the bowling and with the first ball I hit this bloke on the pad and as I walked back, I said to the umpire ‘how was that?’ and he said to me, ‘out.’ I said why didn’t you say so and he replied ‘you didn’t ask me.’ In the end we beat the local team and they were astonished that a bunch of opera singers could play cricket. After that the atmosphere in the company changed completely.” Discussion of the food they used to eat on these tours reminds Robert of the time the wig mistress Shirley Germain asked for raisin toast at a local Italian pizza place. “Raisin toast?” queried the proprietor in his heavy Italo Australian accent. “Yes.” said Shirley. Five minutes later a plate of rice on toast arrived. n During the 60s, Joan Carden was in the UK learning the business of becoming an opera singer. By the time she arrived back in Australia and joined the national opera company, newly named The Australian Opera,

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regular regional touring had stopped. She quickly started singing principal roles with the company. Slender and petite in stature, she had a voice of great warmth, clarity and accuracy and a commanding stage presence. She was perfect for the histrionically and vocally demanding Mozart soprano parts like Fiordiligi in Così fan Tutte and Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In the earlier years of her career, she was often cast in roles of this type as nobody else could sail through their fierce technical difficulties as she could. She remembers her first experience of sound when she was tiny, maybe hardly 18 months old, being fascinated by the seated dog in front of the gramophone, spinning on old HMV records. She started learning piano at seven on an old American pianola, but she insists she was never much good: “Just good enough to be able to play the accompaniment while I learnt roles.” From the beginning she was shy but had a determined streak very early, which she needed — and fostered, as her career developed. Her father managed a cinema in North Carlton and when she was little Joan would go into the empty auditorium and stand at the microphone and tell stories to the imaginary audience. She always sang at school until the age of seventeen when her father thought her voice exceptional enough to arrange for a singing teacher in Melbourne. Thea Phillips was a large lady and a Wagnerian soprano but was gentle with Joan. Nevertheless the determined streak came to the fore and by the age of 22 she set sail for the UK with two girlfriends with the single minded ambition of becoming a singer as good as her role model, June Bronhill. As soon as she arrived in London, she auditioned to become a student of the leading singing teacher Vida Harford, herself a West Australian, who became for many years not only her teacher but her mentor. Joan admits: “I think I got my determination from Vida. The first thing she said was that if I wanted to become a professional, I had to learn to read music. So I went off to Trinity College to learn from scratch how to play and how to read. In a way, having come that far without learning to read music properly helped me, as you had to develop a very acute ear, not only for the pitch of the note, but for the quality of the note. In fact for my whole career, my sight reading has never been good enough so I always came well prepared for everything I did.

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“Vida was very demanding, not only at lessons, but she would ring up and tell me what concerts and operas I should listen to on the radio and discuss them at my next lesson. She would take me to concerts and there was always a post mortem. I had to concentrate hard at these performances and it sharpened up my ability to listen and my ability to hear. She also invited me to come to lessons she gave to some really prominent singers, and ask them to come to mine. This was wonderful experience and in this way I met Cliff Grant who became a great friend and John Mitchinson and his wife Maureen Guy who already had big careers.” At the beginning of the sixties, to earn a living while she studied, she worked as a secretary at Decca at the time when the brilliant John Culshaw was making his land-mark recordings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with Georg Solti. Joan used to type the artists’ contracts; it was her first taste of meeting and mixing with the great operatic world. It was at this time she first met Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge when she attended their recording sessions of Handel’s Alcina. Later Joan won a scholarship to the prestigious London Opera Centre and graduated in 1967. By then she had met and married her husband William Coyne and later embarked on engagements in the UK and Europe. However The Australian Opera beckoned and she made her Australian opera debut singing Liu in Turandot in 1971 and later was cast as Natasha in War and Peace during the opening season of the Sydney Opera House in 1973. In the same season she sang Pamina in the Magic Flute for the Royal Command performance. For the next 30 years she was a star soprano of the company singing a bewildering variety of roles. The relative isolation of Australia in the operatic world was a mixed blessing as it meant she sang many roles but rarely got to work consistently on roles to perfect them as tends to be the case in the US and Europe. As her career developed, she moved away from the taxing Mozart roles to the more ingratiating romantic roles like Butterfly, Mimi and Violetta that swapped the vocal fireworks for the longer and more voluptuous lines of the Italian repertoire. On the other hand, two of her most admired Italian roles, Violetta in La Traviata and Gilda in Rigoletto could not have had more demanding arias than Ah, fors e lui and Caro nome. She says: “Gilda was the first Verdi role I sang and it was so well suited to me as my sound was perfect for that role. Richard

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Bonynge nursed me through those roles; his great advantage was the way he listened so carefully to the singers. Stuart Challender also had an uncanny ability to let you do it your way but at the same time guide you.” Joan went on to sing almost all the great Verdi heroines and they became central to her repertoire. She sang them not only in Australia, but her career took her to Europe where she sang lead roles at Covent Garden, Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne and to the US where she sang with the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Miami Opera. She sang many other great roles including Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes and under Stuart Challender, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier for the last performances he conducted before he died so prematurely. She has sung countless concerts and musicals like Sound of Music and more recently Titanic and frequently in operettas like The Merry Widow. Early in her time with The Australian Opera, the then artistic director, Stephen Hall, told her he would know she had fully arrived as a singer when she could forget herself and she could stand in front of the public as if naked (in her mind) saying ‘here I am.’ “It took me a while to acquire that but eventually I did. My career really changed my personality in this way. Unlike Callas who used to say she had two personalities, one the singer and the other herself, my persona is as a singer. I feel I am one person dominated by being a singer, and I am changed from the person I was before I became a singer.” In trying to encapsulate what it is that produces the extraordinary energy and concentration necessary for a leading opera singer to produce a performance melding all the disciplines of words, music, voice, pitch, rhythm, ensemble, movement and acting, Joan ponders and says: “First of all it’s the adrenalin and this is created by your identification with the character, the passions of the character you’re playing. It doesn’t happen when you come on stage; it happens before you go onstage. You have to be psyched up to a point where you have it all together so that the moment the audience sees you, they know you know who you are! You bring with you this tremendous aura of your character; you’ve got everything together about this character — which is why most of us don’t like to talk or horse around before we go on. We are gathering in everything we know about this character so we don’t lose a single thing and we walk

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out into the middle of the stage as this person. That’s why it’s so exhausting, and it can be good therapy too. John Copley [leading English stage director] used to say the most effective people he directed were those who for some reason, such as personal troubles, had to leave their life behind and be someone else on stage.” Quite early in her time with The Australian Opera, Joan separated from her husband and became a single mother for her two little girls Vida and Ana. That she managed so well and was able to juggle her life as Australia’s leading resident opera diva, was of enormous credit to her. This achievement is even more remarkable as her health deteriorated during the 1980s and she had several heart attacks, having experienced crippling pain during performances on more than one occasion. She recalls with ironic amusement the DVD made of her signature role of Violetta in La Traviata in 1987. There she is on the cover resplendent in her gorgeous costume but the bitter fact was that she was in desperate pain from angina scarcely able to move during her great first act aria Ah, fors e lui. Eventually in 1995 she had a sextuple bypass and within ten weeks was able to resume her career in greater comfort, singing the part of Liu, though as she says with 20% less lung capacity. Soon after that she made her debut in the great dramatic role of Tosca and was immensely grateful to the stage director John Copley who helped her manage the histrionics of this demanding role. Reflecting on all the roles she sang, she especially loved the role of Butterfly. At the age of 20, she went to Japan and prepared herself for Japanese culture. It was her first trip overseas and she met people like Butterfly and this experience has always resonated with her when she sang the role. But perhaps her favourite role and the one that suited her voice and personality best was as Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. During her study period in London, she had learnt the big Letter Scene in Russian parrot fashion and when she came to sing it many years later she found it was so much easier to sing it expressively in the original language. She sang the role of Tatyana first in English and then in Russian in the same production by Anne Woolliams in Melbourne conducted by Richard Divall, with Geoff Chard singing Onegin9.

9 Joan Carden’s fine 1996 recording of Tatyana’s Letter Scene from Eugene

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She says about this role; “I just adored being Tatyana — the acting challenges were so great to be youthful and naive yet passionate in the first act, and then to go through and be the devoted wife of the old general and reject this man she loved and still loved. Then when she runs off in the end there’s not a dry eye in the house.” n “I always wanted to be an opera singer and I got a three year scholarship to study at the Guildhall,” says Robert Gard. “Everyone thought I had this tiny English Gilbert and Sullivan voice, but then I was given this teacher called Arthur Reckless who said I was a baritone with a freak top! So I wasted a year trying to be a baritone and in the end I left because I wasn’t getting the right teaching. I took a few odd jobs and in 1954, I joined the George Mitchell Singers at the London Palladium.” There is much chortling from Joan and Geoff at this — singing in the chorus for shows at the Palladium is not quite what an opera singer, even a budding opera singer does! “I was down to four quid in the bank,” sniffs Geoff, “but I still wouldn’t go and take one of those commercial jobs as I was an opera singer, you know.” Robert continues: “There were twelve girls and twelve men at the Palladium and they were really good and we worked hard — you performed twice nightly and three on Wednesdays and on Saturdays.” Slightly miffed at the condescending laughter at his Palladium experience, Robert goes on to explain he auditioned for the chorus at Covent Garden and was accepted but the Palladium offered him a pound a week more so he followed the money. Geoff acknowledges with a smile that the George Mitchell Singers were a marvellous group and that session singers like them earned more than singing on radio or in the opera chorus in London at that time. Robert says: “All that intimate revue in the West End and the pantomime we did led up to very good stagecraft — not much to do with singing, but I kept up my singing lessons with Borgioli who was very good for me.” His life-changing decision to come to Australia was thanks to Rex

Onegin was issued by Walsingham Classics on WAL 8026 – 2CD

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Harrison. “I auditioned with about 100 tenors for Freddie in My Fair Lady and I was one of two chosen to do the final audition in front of Mr Harrison. He arrived from the US and it was all set up to sing On the street where you live with costumes and choreographed by Wendy Toye and she said to me: ‘I think you’ll get it dear, you’re taller and he’s Irish.’ Nothing happened in the end; I was told we both sang beautifully, but it turned out that song was a show stopper in New York and Harrison had decided it wasn’t going to be in London. So I came out a bit later in 1960 to Australia to sing in Lock up Your Daughters.” For the next few years Robert sang in musicals like Once Upon a Mattress and Showboat and toured with The Merry Widow singing Camille. In 1964, he was approached by the Elizabethan Trust Opera to sing Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus for his debut with the company, a part he went on to sing countless times over the next 40 years. As it happened at the last minute he was asked to sing the other (and bigger) tenor part, Alfred, in his first Fledermaus. Robert is tall with a handsome profile, that added to the blue eyes and blond hair of his youth, tended to type-cast him as a matinee-idol stage personality, delivering a mixed benefit through his whole career. When he sang Siegmund in Wagner’s Walküre later in his career, some critics said he would have been better to stick to operetta like Gilbert and Sullivan. On the other hand, reviews often remarked that it was good to hear a real operatic voice singing Gilbert and Sullivan. He deadpans this dilemma with a little story of a fan that came up to him after a performance of Aschenbach in Britten’s Death in Venice, arguably the most memorable assumption of a complex character in his career: “This man came up to me and said, ‘Robert I can’t believe you’re singing Death in Venice in the same season as you’re singing The Gondoliers.’ I said to him, well they are both set in Venice you know — it just happens that one gets a few more laughs than the other.” His long career with Australia’s national opera company (then known as The Australian Opera) was a continuous celebration of his versatility. In the earlier years, his voice had a light quality which, added to his stage personality, suited him for operettas like The Merry Widow, Countess Maritza and La Belle Hélène and character parts in repertoire as diverse as the operas of Mozart, Britten, Janáček and Stravinsky. As his

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career progressed, his acting ability, superb stagecraft and the clarity of his diction led to his being offered many interesting and challenging roles. A turning point in his career was winning the German government’s Bayreuth Scholarship in 1976. He went to Bayreuth in Germany and studied with the renowned language and voice coach Professor Kaiser- Breme. Many English language singers have difficulty singing the ‘a’ sound as in ‘ran’ and Robert found a solution from Kaiser-Breme by means of the front of the mouth ‘oe’ german vowel. His singing and language technique much enhanced by this experience, in 1979 he was offered the part of Aschenbach in Benjamin Britten’s new opera Death in Venice for the 1980 Adelaide Festival. The part of the dying German writer in Thomas Mann’s famous novella was one of the last great roles created by Britten for his partner, tenor Peter Pears. For Robert, it was the major dramatic role for which he had been waiting. The opportunity in Death in Venice coincided with a dreadful period in Robert’s life. His wife Doreen Morrow, herself a singer in The Australian Opera, was dying of cancer, and late in 1979, Robert contracted hepatitis and was laid low in hospital for an extended period. Both their illnesses, the care of their two boys and the looming production of the opera was overwhelming for them both. Eventually he recovered sufficiently to start rehearsing late in the process. “Doreen told Rosina Raisbeck: ‘I hope I can last until after Bob’s opening,’ but she died five days before the scheduled first performance so I came back to Sydney to be there for the boys. There is only one thing in an opera singer’s life that really stops you singing and that is grief. When you have grief and your throat is tight it’s just impossible to continue. I was in a hopeless state but as it happened, the baritone became ill, the first performance was cancelled and the extra two days gave me just enough time. I knew when I went on stage for that performance that I was going to be OK but it was one of the loneliest moments of my life, and at the end when Aschenbach dies in the deck chair on the beach, I was so exhausted emotionally, the stage manager had to help me up to take the curtain calls.” The production was a great success and a huge personal success for Robert. He says it was as if one great door had closed and another had opened. Offers to sing Aschenbach came from all over the world but he

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was unable to accept any because the timing never suited his schedule with The Australian Opera. Ten years later the production was revived in Sydney and understandably he thought he sang it better then. Robert was cast as Aschenbach in the film made of the opera and at that time he had the rare privilege of meeting Peter Pears where he lived in Aldeburgh. “It was a sad situation as he was paralysed down one side from a stroke and he was trying to be cheerful. I told Pears I always found the part emotionally overwhelming and that at the end I feel I actually have died on stage and he said ‘That is absolutely what Ben wanted.’ I had to laugh later in our conversation because I knew Pears used to have difficulty in singing the unaccompanied monologues in the opera — people used to say he would hiss into the wings, ‘What are the words — what are the words?’ They are really hard to sing, both in remembering all the words and also in finding the right pitch as the key changes from time to time and if you get it wrong, it sounds terrible when the orchestra comes back in. So I asked him, ‘Sir Peter, I find those monologues very difficult — did you ever have a problem with them?’ And he replied, ‘No, no I don’t think so.’ After the success of Death In Venice, Robert was given many interesting dramatic roles and became something of a specialist in the passionate operas of the Czech composer Janáček, many of which were mounted by The Australian Opera. But to his colleagues’ amazement, his next big break was being offered the heldentenor role of Siegmund in the company’s first production of the first two operas of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Having been typecast for much of his career as a light tenor in mostly comedy roles, few knew of the potential he had developed for the heavy dramatic roles, especially since he had studied in Germany with Kaiser-Breme. “Donald Smith was cast as Siegmund but he pulled out so I phoned Moffatt [Oxenbould] and said very tentatively, ‘Sit down, but would you consider me for Siegmund as I studied it in Germany?’ He replied that he had already submitted my name to Mackerras who was to conduct.” Before The Australian Opera production, he sang it in concert with Nance Grant as Sieglinde with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the ABC and enjoyed the experience hugely. The Australian Opera performances were a great success and there is little doubt that if the com-

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pany had continued with the production of the Ring, a major new direction of his career would have been confirmed. However, Robert appears to have no regrets about this and prefers to recall lighter moments late in his career such as singing the Emperor in Puccini’s Turandot. “People say that when you are cast as the Emperor, it is the writing on the wall for the end of your career. I had such a ball doing it. In our production, the Emperor sits on the top of this huge structure that looks like a crinoline and to get to it you have to climb up a 20 rung ladder. In this production I had only half a costume as the lower half is fixed at the top of the set. I have this magnificent wig, whiskers and resplendent costume down to my waist. So when I had to climb up this ladder, all the chorus were at the rear of the stage behind the ladder waiting to make an entrance. I used to get wolf whistles as I climbed the ladder and I played up to this. At every performance I would sport a different pair of vulgar satin underpants with lips on them or some gross message. Then when I was set up on the throne, the chorus would come on and turn their backs to the audience and bow to the Emperor, and all of them would poke out their tongues at me as the audience couldn’t see what they were doing. I loved it — we had such a lot of fun. It made me feel so powerful sitting up there on top of everything and I thought it might be the writing on the wall, but what a way to go!” n Despite the most unlikely background for a singing career, Geoffrey Chard’s story is about a youth destined to become an opera singer. “I came from a very humble country family from Hurstville Grove — we didn’t have a telephone and least of all a piano. The local church had a pianola and I had a loudish voice and sang in the church choir and even got to sing at a wedding. I was bored with school so when I passed the Intermediate and turned fifteen, I decided to leave and get a job to help out the family. I got a job at a printing company and started studying to be an accountant.” He quickly found that he enjoyed singing and got his first break with Rockdale Opera, which has been and still is the best known amateur opera company in Sydney. “My stepping stones were musical comedy at Rockdale and then the formation of the Rockdale Opera Company.

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It was a very significant event — even now, as there are very few places for young people to learn on the job. I was cast as Marcel in La Bohème and at that time I didn’t even know how to learn the music. I bought the records and learnt everyone’s part from the recording and I was intoxi- cated with the music. It was a young cast and I quickly realised this was a big cut above the sentimental musical comedy I had been singing. It was such a great experience that I thought: what do I do next? There was no opera company to offer a job, so I decided to enroll part time at the Conservatorium. I was offered a small part in a student production of Gianni Schicchi and then [Eugene] Goossens took an interest in me and asked me if I would be interested in singing Iago in Otello? Would I what!” Otello is Verdi’s second last opera and many regard it as his finest. The roles of Otello and Iago are amongst the most dramatic and vocally demanding in the whole operatic repertoire. Singers take on these roles in their full maturity when their voices are fully settled, but Geoff was a callow 18 at the time. He clearly was making his mark and was given lead roles in Conservatorium productions of popular operettas like The Gypsy Baron and Land of Smiles as well as the four villains in Tales of Hoffman. These productions attracted large audiences and started to give him some real profile, yet even then he was hardly more than a kid who liked to sing and did it rather well. “I never had a good vocal technique and I wish I had a teacher who understood the importance of proper breath support like I do now. I just winged it.” If he wasn’t taught proper vocal technique, he must have understood intuitively the right way to sing. For the next 50 years he sang principal roles with major opera companies with no apparent wear on his voice which must be a feat worthy of consideration by the Guinness Book of Records. In 1951, the redoubtable Clarice Lorenz, wife of a prosperous Sydney optometrist, decided to set up an opera company she called the National Opera of NSW. She invited the 20 year old Geoffrey Chard to sing the eponymous hero in a production of Don Giovanni which then toured to Brisbane where he sang six performances in a week, again, unheard of today. He tells an insightful vignette of himself at that time: “When I first sang Don Giovanni, I remember it was a matinee and I pulled on John

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Brownlee’s10 costume and the family and a lot of people from Rockdale were there to see me perform. Afterwards when I went outside the whole crowd had evaporated and I thought ‘hey, where is everybody?’ That was a lesson. The place for you to be an opera singer is on stage and when you come outside it’s no different from someone working in an office. It’s something I’ve never forgotten.” Geoff’s career burgeoned at the National Opera of NSW and also in New Zealand. He estimates he sang Figaro in Barber of Seville 200 times in the early 1950s and a similar number of Marcels in La Bohème. The demand for his talent continued a few years later when the Elizabethan Trust Opera Company presented its first season in 1956. By then he had sung two of the great Verdi baritone parts, Di Luna in Il Trovatore and Rigoletto, even more remarkable for one so young. Even more important was falling in love with Marjorie Conley, the sensational young soprano who won several singing competitions in the 1950s, culminating in the prestigious Mobil Quest in 1955. Almost overnight she became the soprano of choice for concerts of oratorios like The Messiah and for ABC symphony concerts where a soprano soloist was required. “She had a very beautiful voice and appearance and was inclined to eschew the operatic field for the concert platform, though she sang the first performance of the Antill opera Endymion and was lovely as Micaela in Carmen for Clarice Lorenz’s company. Then she won the Mobil Quest in 1955 which was a very big event in those days and made the big mistake of agreeing to marry me. Her father had got everything together for her to fly off to England, but instead we got married. After we married, we both sang in the first season in 1956 of the new Elizabethan Opera. She sang Fiordiligi and Pamina and I sang Papageno, Don Giovanni and Don Alfonso. “We had four wonderful years together, but in 1959 on the Mobil Quest tour in Queensland, she had a cerebral haemorrage and died in

10 John Brownlee (1900-1969) was an Australian baritone who was ‘discovered’ by Melba, sang in her final concert and had a stellar career where he sang in all the world’s major opera houses, specialising in the Mozart baritone parts. He spent the last 20 years of his career at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and teaching at the Manhattan School of Music. In 1952, he sang in Australia for the last time.

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hospital three weeks later in Brisbane. Our son David was two and a half years old at the time. It was devastating for me and I didn’t recover for years. She was a lovely singer and such a beautiful person — it was a national tragedy. I can still see the billboards in Brisbane at the time — Famous singer dies suddenly.” The aftermath of this tragedy was Geoff’s realisation that he couldn’t resume his old pre- Marjorie life so he made the decision to go overseas to the UK, taking David with him. To his astonishment work offers came almost immediately, from Welsh National Opera and for television work. But life was terribly hard; he had almost no money and the care of a small child. Finding suitable accommodation and care of David was a nightmare. “I had about six changes of ‘digs’ and constant changes of school for David before I found an elderly woman who had recently been bereaved who would put her arm around David while I rushed off and did the performances I had to do to earn a living. I remember she answered an ad I put in the local paper; when I talked to her I said I think you’re an answer to my prayer and she said I was an answer to hers, as her husband had recently died. We lived with her for 10 years until I married Margaret [his second wife].” Geoff says sadly that Marjorie’s death probably made his career: that he was perfectly prepared to, and indeed expected to put her career before his as hers was the greater talent. Of course, then, and perhaps subsequently, he did not adequately recognise his own talent, both as an evergreen baritone of great vocal flexibility, and as a highly intuitive stage performer who became heavily in demand to sing difficult, not to say, impossibly demanding roles in contemporary opera. In his early years in the UK he would take any singing work on offer — anything to earn a pound and to make ends meet. He sang premieres of new operas at the Aldeburgh Festival, including The Castaway of Lennox Berkeley. He also reprised at Glyndebourne one of his great early suc- cesses in Don Giovanni. However in 1969, through Sir Charles Mackerras who had become very influential at the English National Opera (ENO), now newly transferred from Sadler’s Wells to the Coliseum Theatre in the West End, he was asked to sing Don Giovanni. He then was offered a contract with the company where he remained a fixture as a resident principal for fifteen years.

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Geoff says 1969 was a great year for him as not only did he get a contract with the ENO, but more importantly, he won all three titles at his local tennis club in Surrey. By then he had met Margaret whom he later married and found that though untrained musically, she had an amazing musical memory, and played tennis. “That year I had won the singles and the mens doubles and I said to Margaret, who was not at all competitive, let’s have a go at the mixed doubles. She was dubious but agreed to play and there was this gung ho young couple we were playing. They won the first set but at the beginning of the second our male opponent belted a smash straight at Margaret and I got stroppy and told the young man if he did that again he would know about it. They lost their cool and the second set and in the decider it was very tense and almost dark when we finally won 9-7. She was in tears when we won and said she had never won anything in her life.” Singing in the huge Coliseum Theatre major roles like Don Giovanni, the four villains in Tales of Hoffman, the Toreador in Carmen and Germont in La Traviata improved Geoff’s singing technique enormously. He explains: “When young people start to sing they haven’t built up the stamina in their bodies to support breath in the way it is necessary. Don Smith used to say that he thought the sound came from the middle of his back, and it’s true, the support comes from the back and your sides. Most young people have shallow breath and squeeze the sound out. Those 15 years at the Coliseum taught me how to train and use my body; it was no good thinking I could sing pianissimo tonight — they wouldn’t hear it.” His prodigal career in London was in no way limited to the ENO at the Coliseum. He became in great demand for roles in new operas because of his exceptional memory, stagecraft and vocal flexibility, though he had mixed feelings about work of this kind and frankly admits some of them were incomprehensible rubbish. In 1968, he sang in Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Aldeburgh Festival, a hideously difficult piece to sing and he kidded Birtwistle that he loved it so much he wanted to sing all his work in the future. He complained to Lord Harewood that he didn’t really want to be cast as a specialist in difficult new operas and was told nobody else is able to learn the notes! The next few years brought many important new premieres such as

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Shostakovich’s The Nose, David Blake’s Toussaint, Malcolm Williamson’s Lucky Peter and Penderecki’s Devils of Loudon. In the last of these, he suffered appalling simulated torture and burning to death that one backstage wag said: “Geoff Chard went down and charred Geoff came up.” In 1981, his agent Jenifer Eddy encouraged him to return to Australia as major opportunities for him were emerging. For a few years, he divided his time between the ENO and Australia but found this was impracticable so he decided to return permanently, a decision he always regretted as he was never offered regular work by The Australian Opera. Ironically, this disappointing period in the 1980s featured what he feels may have been the most important and rewarding role he ever sang: the title role in David Malouf’s adaptation of Patrick White’s great novel Voss for an opera by Richard Meale. The then general manager of The Australian Opera, the late Peter Hemmings, commissioned Malouf and Meale in 1978, but it was 1986 before it came to the stage at the Adelaide Festival in a superb production by Jim Sharman. Voss was a triumph for Meale, Malouf, Sharman and the company and a high point in the careers of its two stars, Geoff Chard and Marilyn Richardson. It was revived several years later with Geoff the only surviving principal from the original production. Voss is now regarded as the most important production yet given of a new Australian opera by the national company. At the time, the ABC issued a recording with the original cast that remains a wonderful document of Richard Meale’s masterpiece. It is perhaps the best recorded example of Geoff’s magisterial voice.11 Last year, there was a symposium about Voss in Canberra attended by Geoff, Marilyn Richardson, David Malouf and many others originally involved in the production. “They showed the opera on the big screen from one of the original performances and I was moved almost to tears — it’s a great piece. I’ll never forget that night of the premiere in Adelaide at the end of the first act when we all got up on to the table to herald Voss and his party leaving for the centre of Australia, and the whole audience

11 The recording of Voss was issued on two CDs by Philips 420928-2. A much earlier example of Geoffrey Chard’s singing can be heard at manyfacesofinspiration.com in a charming and very moving rendition of I will give you the Keys of Heaven with his late wife Marjorie Conley.

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stood up and cheered. It was a real coming of age for opera in Australia.” Geoff feels that about the time of the composition of Voss, a new view was being taken by operatic composers that their music should be attractive and appealing to audiences. This view recognised that much new post war contemporary opera was obsessively inward looking and too complex to perform. He exempts Britten’s operas from this general stricture, as he sang in many of them and admires them all. As an example of the wheel turning full circle, he cites Scottish composer Ian Hamilton’s two operas Royal Hunt of the Sun based on Peter Shaffer’s successful play and Anna Karenina from Tolstoy, in both of which he sang the lead roles. While he feels the former missed the opportunity of a great libretto, they were both far more appealing than much of the new opera he had sung. Voss, in his opinion, showed Meale in this new vein, and was a joy to sing. He admits it means a great deal to him, that in a way, his whole professional life was a preparation for the role of Voss. On the verge of his 80s, Geoff Chard still sings regularly but not for professional engagements. He sings at the Savage Club and at local music clubs. Despite a serious car accident a few years ago which he believes compromises his breath control, he sounds and looks as youthful and energetic as ever — no doubt his ruthless prowess at tennis helps. n In order to be photographed, the singers move out to the terrace at the back of Robert’s house where the light is better. It’s a hot day so they huddle for positions under the umbrella. Further recollections of the great days come thick and fast; much raucous laughter with it. There are subversive tales of famous stage directors’ lack of musical knowledge and how they often floundered in rehearsal, until rescued by the singers’ suggestions. The latest Opera Australia Tosca is deplored as having no relevance to the music or the libretto, and an inappropriate setting for the entire opera in the back room of a church. Conductors are given more respect and there is general agreement about Carlo Felice Cillario’s idiomatic way with Italian repertoire, despite the fact his head always seemed buried in the pit leaving the singers on

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stage to cope by themselves. While he sometimes infuriated them, singers loved his musicality and dramatic energy. Joan remembers one hideously cold July night at the old Princess theatre in Melbourne: “Jenny Bermingham and I were singing in a stage rehearsal in Butterfly and we were sitting on this freezing bare metal stage which had no heating. Carlo kept us waiting for ages while he rehearsed the orchestra and I remember being so cold and worried how it would affect my voice — I was so cross with him. He came up to me afterwards in the dressing room and said: ‘Giovannina, you ‘ave a little-a love forr me tonight?’ I said: ‘Yes Carlo, but only if you watch me and then I’ll watch you.’” The stories degenerate until it is scarcely believable that adult opera singers could behave in this way. The Barber of Seville seems not only a favourite opera for touring but somehow a catalyst for bad behaviour. Geoff recalls singing a performance in Dunedin during a rugby test between New Zealand and Australia and to the hilarity of the audience, singing the half time score in the match during his dialogue in the opera. Robert tells of another performance in Innisfail in North Queensland: “The alternate cast used to sing the first chorus and then go off for the night, but on this occasion, we decided to have a bit of fun and gathered a bucketful of cane toads and when Bartolo came on to sing his aria, we pushed all these toads on to the stage…” His story disintegrates into helpless laughter. The reader might prefer to close the book and leave them reminisc- ing under the umbrella. But before doing so, let Miss Carden have the last word. Robert admits to have become very bored with all the performances he has sung of Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus, but Joan recalls one she sang with him: “Your most memorable Eisenstein might have been the one where I was singing Rosalinda and I was distracted thinking about the performance by someone new in the cast. Instead of saying to you: ‘Vot a vunderful votch!’ as you waved it hypnotically at me, I said: ‘Vot a vunderful gown you are vearing!’ The whole orchestra went up with laughter and you were transfixed, your eyes like saucers. I tried to recover but it was impossible, so I rolled my eyes and they all laughed again.” N

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Partnership

David Clarkson and Rachael Swain at the CarriageWorks (Photo: Ojārs Greste) David Clarkson & Rachael Swain

Rachael Swain and David Clarkson are founding partners and artistic directors of Stalker Theatre, arguably Australia’s finest physical theatre company, operating for more than 20 years. Both were born and started their careers in the South Island of New Zealand but for most of its life the company has been based in Sydney where they both live. The work of its associated company of artists, Marrugeku, has been profoundly influenced by Australian indigenous culture and many indigenous artists have been involved as collaborators. All their productions are planned with an expectation of extensive international presentation.

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David

avid Clarkson recently completed a season of performances of a new work Mirror Mirror in collaboration with long time friend and colleague Dean Walsh. It is a cool limpid piece set in a cur- Dtained space of greys and blacks where the floor gradually fills with water, over which David and Dean swing, coil, crouch, climb and intertwine in their sinuous and acrobatic movements. Both artists are of the same height and strong nuggety build; both have shaven heads, bare feet and wear only black briefs. They look alarmingly alike — like identical twins. The piece lasts exactly an hour without a break, and while it looks utterly exhausting, they both appear fresh and relaxed when it finishes. Amazingly, David is 49 though with his superb physique and soft spoken reflective manner, he seems 20 years younger. Sitting in the little garden of his house, sipping a cup of tea and surrounded by the joyful racket of birds, he admits to being really pleased to be performing again. Due partly to injury and partly to a desire to extend his expertise, he has spent most of his time in recent years directing. “Justin [Macdonnell] whom I work with as producer has been asking me — what next? I have been saying, I really don’t know until I have performed Mirror Mirror. Now having made the piece, and finding it so satisfying, returning to performing seems really important as it’s one of the things I do best. It’s easiest for me to express my heart on stage in a creative sense. The deli- cacy of the work has made me re-evaluate what I can do next. “Coming back to performing for me is like re-visiting the well. While I have enjoyed training up and directing the ensembles I have worked with over the last few years, I have had to re-train, re-invigorate and re- vision each group of people. It’s a very high energy process and to do it well, I have to envisage myself as the performer.” Stalker Theatre Company is a most unusual company, unique in several ways. While Rachael and David agree to differ on precisely where and when Stalker started, it is probably safe to say its first manifestation was in New Zealand in the late 1980s. They first met, together with their other founding partner Emily McCormack, in Christchurch at a Fringe Festival theatre workshop in 1987. Their first project together was for the Sydney Festival in January 1989. The Stalker name came from the arche-

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typal character created by the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, representing the guide who takes you to a place where you could fulfil your innermost desires. From the beginning, the three partners had seriously ambitious notions of presenting to broadly based audiences, a form of powerful visual or physical theatre that communicated strong ethical, emotional, political or narrative ideas. The physicality must be rigorous and highly skilled, and for many years was largely stilt based. “My early work in New Zealand was already involved with stilts”, David explains. “Even as a ground character, I interacted with large stilt based archetype characters like Famine, War, Aggression and Religion. Stilts create a mobile stage that is already a metre above the street audience. They can create unusual physicalities or sculptural images for larger than life characters.” Stalker’s first work was a street theatre piece calledFast Ground, that included stilt creatures nick-named ‘The Greenies’ as it featured strange indefinable characters clad in shiny blue/green fabric doing extraordinary feats of physicality on stilts. In 1990, David found the money (from a commercial he did for nose drops!) to take Fast Ground to Europe for the company’s first overseas tour. David describes a performance in Bonn: “We had to do a performance for European presenters and had already done two public performances that day and were exhausted. It was one of those shows that somehow worked perfectly — I felt I was floating several inches above the ground, and based on that we got a lot of work in Germany over the next couple of years. They had never seen anything quite like this before — it was the combination of audacious physicality and the stilts, and perhaps the spatiality and rhythms. Fast Ground was completely abstract except for the politic of performing outdoors at no charge to the public.” Since then Stalker has greatly diversified and become far more sophisticated in method and intent. Another unique aspect of the company is the total change from a mode where the artists used to devise, make and perform each work together. Several differentiated strands of activity have now emerged. Unrelated circumstances led to this: Rachael badly injured her knee, had to give up performing and took a keen interest in developing her skills as a director of more complex work. David was becoming a stilt walker of world renown and was in demand as both

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teacher and performer. Emily left the company to have a family, so the needs and circumstances of the company changed dramatically. At one stage it seemed the company might split up and the two remaining partners go their own way. It is a tribute to their good sense and maturity that they took external advice and worked out a method of staying together in the company to follow their independent artistic destinies within a common philo- sophic and administrative framework. This wise solution is the more surprising, given their very different personalities that are almost bound to clash. Rachael is ambitious, uncompromising in following her goals, and outspoken in making them clear. David is gentle in manner, naturally accommodating, diplomatic and takes time to work though his own and the company’s issues. The beauty of it is that they both respect and understand the other’s point of view, even if they don’t always agree. Also they are as one in the political and ethical concepts underpinning the company. It is this kind of respectful and consensual interdependence that has helped them weather a few (usually financial) crises and led to such admiration for their work from both colleagues and audiences. n When David was preparing for the Mirror Mirror production, which is all about origins and relationships, he went to Ireland and did extensive reading and research into his own family which has an age old Celtic background. His immediate family is, in practice and in belief, strongly working class. He was born and went to school in the small coastal town of Timaru, near Christchurch. His father was a plasterer (related to Les Andrews, one of New Zealand’s most famous entertainers) and later on worked at the local slaughter house along with David’s elder brother and stepfather. His mother, who has always been a powerful influence in his life, also had colourful links. Her two brothers were part of the Flying Delgados, an itinerant troupe that toured around with the circus or at local shows doing trapeze acts and offering prizes to anyone who could last a few rounds with them in the boxing ring. This was all before David was born but it was the heritage he knew from early in his life. His elder sister was a big influence. She introduced him to music and hippy culture and, oddly, at a ludicrously young age,

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to TS Eliot and William Blake. His mother staunchly believed in unions and working class rights; she had always wanted to join her brothers in the circus. She believed in and taught David to be involved in the greater world, probably because it was not possible for her. She taught him all the capital cities of the world. His father, on the other hand, was a feckless dreamer of the Irish variety who no doubt drove his mother mad. He was superstitious, a drinker and gambler and had not a care in the world. The big influence he had on David was through what he called ‘true dreams’, a phenomenon of prophetic dreams shared by his father, David’s grandfather and even his great grandmother. When he was researching in Ireland he had a bizarre experience. “I wandered up on to a hillside with a friend in County Cork, and when I got there, I realised I had dreamt of that hillside about fifteen years ago. In the dream I had been in a group of people who were pulling carts and about to go on a long journey. They were like family but weren’t recognisable as family, and later that day I realised this was the part of Ireland my ancestors came from. I found this very disturbing and went out and got drunk. It was a total loss of identity; I didn’t know whether I was dreaming my great grandmother or she was dreaming me. I think that so much of our heritage, whether it’s Celtic, or Scottish or indigenous, has been stripped away by colonialism.” While he was always lithe and strong, as a youth he was not sporty in a sport crazed country. He ran and swam, danced and did handstands, but as he says: “Physicality is inherent in the New Zealand landscape.” When he was 20 he had a massive electric shock and nearly died. It pulled him up short and made him think seriously about life. As a teenager, he had dabbled in Tibetan Buddhism so he decided to go on a retreat with a prominent Buddhist teacher. He studied reaching a state of mind that generates compassion and looks at how you find happiness for yourself and for the world. He says it changed his life and gave him a set of practical moral principles by which to live his life. “Lama Zopa taught me that the good deed I do generates a good state of mind; the love I have for others creates happiness for myself. Buddhist psychology 101 really, but through meditation and very clear thought processes, he showed me practical ways to make that happen in my life. So I went away and became a very good Buddhist for a couple

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of years. I would meditate for several hours each day with a particular visualisation about the interior life of insight, love and understanding becoming manifested externally. “I feel that as a 20 year old not really knowing where I was going, through all that visualisation, theatre just came along — it gave me the perfect way to act out a meaningful, moral and creative life that deals with and touches all the basic human principles of life.” These principles still hold good for David nearly 30 years on. In a modern Western world obsessed with strategic plans and angst about the future, a mode of work that relies on meditation and intuition seems not anachronistic, but new and fresh. More recently, David’s interest in his ancestry shows his commitment to understanding his heritage as well as his place and role in life. His research unearthed that his mother’s ancestors were involved in the Guy Fawkes plot and were hung, drawn and quartered for their trouble. The papers he found were disconcertingly detailed and graphic, both in terms of their description and the gruesome details of their execution. His two plotting ancestors had his physique and a strong moral sense of obligation to the justness of the cause for which they gave their lives. He also acknowledges the deep connection with his father through the itinerant lifestyle he has always comfortably led. His father would work for a few months to save up enough so he could get in his car with his gun and his new wife and lead a nomadic life until the money ran out. Until David recently settled down with his partner Margie and their baby daughter, he rarely had a fixed abode. He was content with few possessions, and necessarily spent most of his time on the road following the work, mostly for Stalker, but frequently teaching or running performance projects in many parts of the world where his skills were in demand. While the Buddhist experience might have given him the right mindset for working in theatre, the actual opportunity could not have been more accidental, though perhaps fatefully inevitable. Half laughing, he tells the story: “One day in Christchurch I thought I needed to do something new. I saw this notice board and I told myself that whatever’s on that notice board, I will try. There was only one sign on the board saying ‘Mask, mime and movement.’ So I thought, OK, I’ll try that. I did

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two or three of these classes and one day a woman came up to me and said, ‘You’re really good at this — there’s a company that’s auditioning and you should try out for it.’ I tried out for this company called Splinta and got in, with absolutely no experience. It was where I first learnt to use stilts. It was a new company and had received a government grant for six months work and they were hiring an ensemble. This really launched me and I then started to get serious and did a series of classes in mask, butoh, yoga, dance, trapeze and I was on my way. “That first Splinta show was a politically motivated work, an anti- nuclear work. From touring with it, I got positive reinforcement about the show and what I was doing. It confirmed my view that theatre didn’t need to be exclusive and indoors with a captive audience. It could be very meaningful with a casual, found audience. From my early readings I learnt the notion that in our culture we are ‘word saturated’ and that physical images can be read by the psyche in new and imaginative ways. Added to this I found that I had a natural aptitude for physicality.” Later when he had become an experienced theatrical artist, David came to realise how important and ‘real’ theatre is in demonstrating the fundamentals of human understanding, what our beliefs are and the power of imagination. “For me, with theatre you examine what it is to be human.” He recalls when Stalker was performing in Eastern Europe in former Soviet bloc countries not long after the Wall had come down: “There, theatre wasn’t seen as a commercial transaction; it wasn’t seen as entertainment but more in terms of the ideas you are exploring, what human values you are trying to present. Back in the West doing the same show, the questions were more commercial: ‘Do you do this for your living?’ The questions were more about how you function economically, rather than the ideas we were trying to present. “In our culture, theatre and dance have become entertainment, and we have lost track of the fundamental need for humans to have these forms of expression in their lives. It’s a core necessity to play around with these ideas. Our society here in 2009 is a construct; we think the way things are and the ideas we uphold are permanent, but they’re not — in a 100 or 200 years time it will be different, as it was different 100 years ago. We need systems to constantly re-evaluate who we are and what we are doing, and theatre and dance are excellent ways to do this. When we

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were performing in the war-torn Balkans, or in the slums and barrios of Bogota or Rio de Janeiro, there the contract is better understood. It’s more vital to them because they have so little. They don’t come up to you afterwards and ask about what you earn; they want to engage in the fun and the joy and the subtleties of what we were doing.” n When thinking about what physical theatre is today, and what it has become, and how Rachael’s and David’s work in Stalker has changed, it is hard to ignore the overwhelming presence of Cirque du Soleil, the incredibly successful Canadian company that has become a world wide brand and now has several companies touring the world simultaneously. Cirque du Soleil has perfected a bewildering variety of circus skills and created shows with huge spectacle. In fact it has effectively redefined what has been understood by circus and physical theatre. Dealing with its impact on audience expectations has been a challenge for Stalker and similar companies elsewhere. David explains his response not in terms of a reaction against Cirque du Soleil, but as a continuation of the loss of truth and reality in much theatre and dance presented today. “There is a point now where theatre or physical theatre is becoming so overly physicalised and so overly visualised that it is becoming pure sensation. Whether or not it is caused by these trends, it is interesting to see that both Rachael and I are involving text in our work in a way neither of us has done before. We have never been very good at com- mercially exploiting market niches, though we have talked about it from time to time. In the early days of Stalker there really was a niche which we were able to fill, but these days there is a lot more competition.” One of the qualities that reassures him about Stalker’s future is that both Rachael and he have never been short of good ideas for their next works, or even their next two or three works. As in contemporary dance companies, all their work is new: there is generally no precedent for each piece they conceive. Apart from possibly wanting to reflect a certain existing style or physical language, much of their work develops empirically from first principles. In addition, most pieces will involve much cultural research. Indeed some of Rachael’s work, which is usually larger scale and more complex, may take a year or more in conception alone.

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David’s own work is generally and deliberately simple in concept: “There are usually two principal aspects of a work I make which include the physicality or physical elements and then the more subtle elements, what I call ‘the dream of the piece.’ The works I make are really like a poetic sketch; there may be a little story line but it will be mostly abstract. My ability to envision a work I am directing relies on a resonance with the actors, whether I give that to them by specific dramatic exercises or by talking to them, and maybe I am acting as a catalyst. But my work is usually fairly understated, including deployment of the physical skills. “When you compare Mirror Mirror with the show Rachael is preparing Shanghai Lady Killer, she is working with really cutting edge technology in the harness work and very high end physical skills. This is such a contrast with the hip hop artists and break dancers I have been working with for some years — a real sub-culture of their own!” While understatement might be his hallmark, the skills David brings to bear in his productions are of the highest level. The use of large catapults to fling performers in a recent show called Red seemed terrifying; even more daring were his high wire and tall stilt acts at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. He is reflective about the nature of the partnership with Rachael and the fact that two such different personalities have rubbed along together so long without great ructions. He puts it down to their consistent commitment to good practices of communication, especially in working through difficulties. He extends this process to talking through any problems he senses with the artists working on his productions. He feels the partnership has been aided by similar world views and spiritual values derived from their socialist upbringings. David is ambivalent about the increasing importance teaching is playing in his professional life. He likens it to the yoga practitioner who by tradition is obliged to teach anyone who asks. He is immensely grateful for what theatre has offered him. “It has given me an incredible life and it has been given to me as a gift, and in a way to teach is like a request I can’t refuse because that’s what life is. Teaching for me is very demanding because it’s like passing on all that you know about life. I’ve taught a lot of students over the past ten years or so, both here and overseas. If it’s a theatre show like Red or Four Riders, I might be passing on a certain

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physical vocabulary, or I might be demonstrating a technique I’m good at. But recently it’s become more that I want to set up an environment where the students can explore their own physicality and creativity. Now I feel I am trying to teach a methodology of how to create. In some ways this is what makes Stalker unique — there is a teasing out and spacious- ness about our approach to our subject matter and our dramaturgy.” Ultimately the idea and the practical values of partnership are the bedrock of a company like Stalker in David’s view. “There are now hundreds of artists who have worked with us over the years and it has always been a two way street. For many of them the work with us has been a catalyst for their own careers. Producers like Justin Macdonnell and Marguerite Pepper have been crucial for our success, and even to our survival. People like Sofie Gibson and Joey Ruigrok have given large parts of their careers to the company.” n The biggest challenge for David now is to spend most of his time at home with Margie and eight month old Lilah. For a man whose backpack is his most valuable possession and constant companion, this will not be easy. The rundown of his travel plans for the next six to nine months is alarming — practically no time at home. But Margie is an experienced dramaturg in her own right and will be working with the company when they go shortly to Bogota. Soon it is to be hoped both Lilah and Margie can join him on the road. N

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Rachael

he CarriageWorks is a new arts centre in Sydney’s inner city Redfern fashioned within the massive bulk of the old brick railway sheds where carriages were once built and repaired. In Bay T20, one of its performing spaces, a line of athletic looking actors and dancers sit on a long bench facing an enthusiastic audience. The artists have just finished a strenuous performance of Burning Daylight, a spectacular dance/physical theatre work, the brainchild of Rachael Swain, and are now involved in a Q and A session. Rachael is there too, sitting at the end of the bench in a shapeless red T shirt leaning forward with a half smile holding a paper cup of tea. She has the tall rangy body of an athlete, topped by perfect regular facial features, huge green eyes and wavy black hair that seem completely out of place in the grungy milieu in which she works. Burning Daylight is a work of Marrugeku, an arm of Stalker set up to explore intercultural-Indigenous dance theatre practice. It is set in sweaty polyglot Broome and deals with the ways young people inter- act and amuse themselves, and the clashes from outside this exotic and racially mixed frontier town. Most of the performers are indigenous or of mixed race and several from Broome itself; they face the audience and answer questions with varying degrees of confidence, reticence or embarrassment. Rachael intervenes only when a more complex question is asked about the ideas behind the production. Also sitting on the bench is Trevor Jamieson, an aboriginal dancer who has worked for the company for many years, and Joey Ruigrok van der Werven who has long been Stalker’s technical manager, a genius at building complex mechanical structures out of odds and ends. Many of the questions are answered with precise enthusiasm by Dalisa Pigram, a tiny but muscularly built dancer of extraordinary athleticism, who is Rachael’s longtime collaborator, friend and proté- gée. Dalisa comes from Broome and together with Rachael conceived Burning Daylight. Dalisa is eloquent at the Q and A about the work of the Burning Daylight company. She explains how Rachael and she got together in Broome two or three times to discuss ideas and explore the cultural issues of the town before they started to make the work. She adds

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to the amusement of the audience that there were four periods of creative development in Broome and then, as you do, in Zurich. The cast members joke with the audience that they are mostly connected with each other through blood, marriage or some other relationship. In more serious mode, Dalisa says the company’s method is very inclusive, that there are long consultations with the elders and many other people as it is developed. She says it is performed in Broome first so that local people can respond to it and have their say before it is taken anywhere else. Burning Daylight is the third major production of Marrugeku; Rachael has carried the flag for Marrugeku since the first production Mimi was conceived with Kunwinjku artists of West Arnhem land in 1994. Of the aspects of Stalker that are unique, Marrugeku is perhaps the most original and ambitious. The separate identity of Marrugeku within Stalker has continued to the present, not without some internal controversy. While the connection with Stalker is acknowledged in programs, Marrugeku productions have made large and possibly disproportionate demands on Stalker human and financial resources. In return, through the work of Marrugeku, Stalker can claim a broader reach in its commitment to reconciliation. Rachael is passionate and uncompromising in her dedication to the ideas behind Marrugeku: “I still make work as a New Zealander in Australia. Also growing up there has had a massive cultural impact on me. The shock of arriving in Australia in 1986 and seeing what the cultural situation was here and my experiences with aboriginal people in the Northern Territory made it clear to me that this work needed its own identity.” Rachael explains that the origins of Marrugeku happened when the aboriginal choreographer Michael Leslie first saw a Stalker production on stilts at the Perth Festival: “He had the idea of making a piece on stilts that represented the ‘mimih’ spirits from the stony country of West Arnhem land. Three of us from Stalker went with Michael to West Arnhem land to consult with the Kunwinjku elders. He introduced us to several dancers from Western Australia including Lorrae and Dalisa who of course is now my co-artistic director of Marrugeku and has performed in pretty well everything we have done.

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“I had spent a lot of time with aboriginal people in the Northern Territory in the late 1980s, so after consultation with my colleagues at Stalker, we agreed with Michael that I should co-direct the piece and the project should have its own separate identity from Stalker. The Kunwinjku elders gave us the name ‘Marrugeku’ which means ‘clever people who can speak to the spirit world.’ Michael left the project for personal reasons soon after so at the age of 27, I found myself in the pretty scary situation of directing my first show, a major commission from the Perth Festival.” Mimi premiered in the 1996 Perth Festival and was performed in the Boya quarry in the hills an hour out of Perth, where Peter Brook’s memorable all night production of the Mahabharata had been located some years earlier. It was spectacularly successful and the huge stilt based images of the mimih spirits like giant butterfly wings made an indel- ible impression. Always determined to make the most of opportunities, Rachael applied for an outrageously large grant from the newly established Council for Culture and the Humanities. “We got this massive grant to go back into Arnhem land, redevelop the work closer to the community and then tour it to five different remote communities. When I look back on that, we were pretty young and inex- perienced and nobody had done anything like this. We had a convoy of trucks, 4WDs, flat bed trucks with generators, we cooked on the road, had food drops from small planes, we went on barges to Elcho island. There were 26 of us and we spent two months on that tour. This expedi- tion forged the essence of Marrugeku. The experience of performing that show in the communities was amazing; after the performances, the communities would perform back to us — for hours and hours. Sometimes they would say things like ‘that old man hasn’t danced for years!’ “I don’t think we totally understood what was happening, but it was very powerful; it was like an exchange of gifts. The negotiation process for presenting the work was also very complicated, things like the land it stood on, kinship issues, ceremonial dates, footy games to be worked around, funeral business. These were quite transforming experiences for many of us. In Yirrkala, Rhoda Roberts came to see it and booked us for a month for the Festival of Dreaming that preceded the Sydney Olympics. That had a huge impact and sold out to 1200 people a night. In between

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the remote areas tour and the Olympics, we toured it to Europe so it all gave the company a very solid grounding.” Apart from Rachael and the composer Matthew Fargher, most of the company of performers were indigenous, six were from the Kunwinjku community near Oenpelli and others, like Dalisa, from Western Australia. A similar pattern has been followed for all the Marrugeku productions. After the success of Mimi, and like Mimi, the next production Crying Baby was developed in five stages over about three years. It was more ambitious in its scope, also involved Kunwinjku dancers and much of the development took place there. About this process Rachael says: “It’s a very transparent public process, literally in the middle of town under a roof with no walls with people standing or sitting around watching what we are doing. The elders might be sitting nearby under a tree gambling or talking and I would always get feedback later about what they thought. You are in the middle of the community and in the centre of what is going on with births, deaths and all the other daily events.” For the new show Burning Daylight, Rachael and the Marrugeku artists felt they needed to move away from West Arnhem land. Partly this was because of the exceptional logistic problems of working in such a remote place, but it was also born of her fascination with Broome and the friendships she has made there over the years. Broome is probably the most racially mixed town in Australia with its Chinese and Indonesian roots mixed with the aboriginal and white communities. She found that the rich cultural melting pot of Broome and the political and cultural issues that frame and fracture it made it the right location for her new show. At the time it was conceived, the struggle over land rights in Broome was at its most intense. In Broome it also became clear to Rachael that Marrugeku’s main raison d’etre is really to sit between the concerns of the elders and the concerns of the young. “Because old people are passing away and the ceremonial aspects of their culture are dying with them, the future of indigenous culture and art must rest with the young people. I feel we need to make work that connects to the concerns of the elders but is accessible to the young and interesting for young artists. Marrugeku is finding this place with Burning Daylight but when I look back to the Arnhem land works

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[Mimi and Crying Baby], it was happening there too. Even though we worked with and consulted the elders, the big response was amongst the youth, in terms of wanting to learn the songs and dances of their culture. “Because of this, over the last two years we have been establishing a youth company in Broome with ten young performers aged between ten and 20, first with a series of training projects in consultation with elders and young people, and now we are in rehearsal with the young people for performances for young people. It’s based on telling stories about the six indigenous seasons, half of which will be told in a contemporary way and half in a traditional style.” n In Christchurch Rachael had a Bohemian upbringing dominated by the visual arts. By the time she was at school, her parents had separated and her artist mother had become an art teacher and a gallery guide at the main gallery in the city. Rachael remembers her brother and herself being given personal guided tours by her mother with detailed disserta- tions about the artist’s life as well as about the art movements. She paints the picture of the two children running around the gallery at exhibition openings while speeches were given, drinks passed around and guests pontificated about the paintings. Significantly, she remembers listening to all these people talking about art and thinking they were all making it up! Later she became absorbed and influenced by New Zealand’s important landscape painters, artists like McCahon, Rita Angas, and Maori artists. “In a way I think I make my [theatrical] work as a visual artist; the way I process meaning and imagery in the work. The pieces are very visual and there is usually no text. I also think I went into theatre because I was actively NOT going into the visual arts, as a sort of act of rebellion against my mother.” New Zealand cultural politics, its landscape painting and the effect of its dramatic landscape on humanity has affected Rachael deeply. Creating outdoor work, site specific work and working in remote places has emphasised the importance for her of this relationship between art and landscape.

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Her father was a scientist and her stepfather was a social worker working with young people. During the 1980s, her stepfather became a political activist and a strong influence on her thinking. She says about him: “He was involved with the anti-apartheid movement and through him I became involved in black politics and the Maori land rights movement. I became really caught up in this and at fifteen my first high school essay was on how the institutionalism of white culture affected the modern Maori! By then I was going to night school with my stepfather, learning Maori language. When I came to Australia at the age of seventeen, having been so involved in black politics, the context of cultural politics here was a real shock to me, progress and knowledge seemed so far behind New Zealand and it became the seminal influence in my work here.” The next stage in her life started when she made a bold decision to leave high school in Christchurch. While by then she had decided she wanted to work in theatre, she felt instinctively it wasn’t to be with text based theatre. She left school to save money to study at Le Coq school in Sydney, a Paris based drama school teaching masks, mime, stilts, com- media del arte and such skills. In 1988, with two friends she went on a huge road trip lasting nine months that led them to working in aboriginal communities in the central desert and Northern Territory that sowed the seed for her later work with Marrugeku. Soon after returning, she met Emily McCormack and David Clarkson and they all found they had similar ideas, training and political views. They started to work together under the name Stalker. Fast Ground, as explained in the previous section on David, was to be their first collaboration. A few years ago Rachael completed her second Masters degree at the prestigious school Das Arts in Amsterdam. It was an intensive course of study of theatre art and practice offering extended periods of mentored work with leading practitioners and the opportunity to create pieces of work that go in any direction the student chooses. It was set up by the Dutch government to offer exceptional young practitioners from around the world intensive periods of study and mentorship with outstanding theatre artists. “It really challenged you and forced you to go deep inside yourself in developing a piece and it was like having a great big micro- scope focused on you.”

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Looking back on this, she feels the main benefit for her was working and studying alongside the late director Ritsaert Ten Cate. He was a far- seeing figure in contemporary European theatre and dance practice who for over 20 years ran the Mickery, a ground-breaking production house in Amsterdam and facilitated artists like Pina Bausch, the Polish director whom he knew would have profound effects on theatre practice. “The most important thing I got from Ritsaert was the need to foster an essential duality in my work; a profound gaze inwards balanced by a profound gaze outwards. As I was so concerned with cultural identity, and the experiences of the people I was portraying, I found I needed to give more weight in my practice to this inwardness. In fact looking back at what I had done, I realised how much I had been failing to do this. “Ritsaert had an amazing beacon-like insistence on doing away with all the bullshit that surrounds contemporary theatre practice, all the dis- tractions and external pressures you get from presenters, festivals and funding bodies that get in the way of what you are trying to do. He encouraged you to be provocative, to question the relevance of what you are doing and he made you go on a very personal journey.” Das Arts undoubtedly helped Rachael to find greater clarity in her vision for her theatre practice. But her constantly enquiring mind has never stopped looking for better ways. From the first, she was always looking to be apprenticed to someone who could genuinely be her guide or mentor. She once heard John Denver, of all people, say it took eleven years to fully learn a craft, so made one of those instant decisions to give herself eleven years to work with people she really admired and could learn from, before considering herself a fully fledged director. She has held firmly to this precept and established mutually nourish- ing relationships with artists like the Dutch director Koen Augustjnen, West African choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly and more recently Tony Ayres for her latest work Shanghai Lady Killer. With all such people she is generously prepared to offer equal partnership in developing the work. While in most cases the ideas for the work are hers, she believes she can learn a great deal from the collaborations, as can the other artists who work with her. In her intercultural-indigenous work with Marrugeku, a joint cura-

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torial process with the performers is fundamental to its rationale, but even in her ‘mainstream’ Stalker productions, it is natural for her to work in a very collaborative way with colleagues and performers in researching and developing the work. She says: “Another principle I found at Das Arts was how this approach helps artists to get to places in their work they had not realised they were capable of. In a very practical way it helps to keep them committed to the project too — it takes so long for a project to go through the various stages before it gets to performance.” Her latest work for Stalker, Shanghai Lady Killer is still in preparation and has just confirmed further funding towards bringing it to the stage. She gave a ‘showing’ of sections of the work recently at the Red Box, a large purpose built rehearsal venue in Leichhardt, in front of a crowd of friends, theatre people, presenters and festival directors. She calls it a Chinese Australian futuristic martial arts thriller, that she explains, “explores Australian fantasies of Asia.” The showing at the Red Box was fabulously spectacular with breathtaking leaps, knife fights, lethal looking kicks and exaggerated posturing, a kind of brilliant high camp entertainment that thrilled the professional audience with its sheer elan and use of the latest flying harness technology. The project emerged through her friendship with Chinese Australian filmmaker Tony Ayres. Both have a fascination with intercultural work based on difficult and painful issues, so they agreed it would be fun to collaborate on a more satirical piece that invokes “a future in Australia where there has been a terrible marriage between capitalism and com- munism and China has bought up all the big companies.” They thought it might attract some commercial investment in its use of cutting edge technology in telling a highly entertaining story, but then the global financial crisis intervened and the interest dried up. It is to be hoped the recent additional funding allows this marvellous entertainment to get to the stage. n Rachael is now a single mother with a daughter aged three. Jade Jet’s father and Rachael’s former partner comes from a well known Broome family of Chinese descent. While she and her former partner share the parenting and remain friends, she recognises with a philosophical regret

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that her professional work at Stalker and Marrugeku leaves little room for a personal life beyond Jade Jet. However she says being a parent has made her a better director: “You have to be more flexible and responsive and have good techniques for dealing with bad behaviour! I can find ways to make it work for Jade Jet, but I haven’t yet found a way to balance a personal life with the demands of what I do in running a company and making work that’s trying to break new ground and the kind of tenac- ity that takes.” Does this mean life partnerships are impossible for her? “Certainly not, it’s very important for me and I really hope I can make it work some day. I think people have this romantic idea of what it is like to be with an artist and don’t realise how relentless the work is.” What does the future hold for an artist so committed to her work? In Rachael’s case, it is not the personal satisfaction that drives her, least of all the egotism of seeing her name up in lights. Her primary motivation seems to be born of her long held cultural and political convictions that the stories of ordinary or marginalised people must be told and celebrated in ways that are new and true and authentic. Despite very different personalities and approaches to their work, both David Clarkson and Rachael Swain seem to share a strongly ethical and even crusading determination to use the beauty and eloquence of physical theatre and dance to help us see our country and its problems more clearly. She speaks almost quixotically of the future of Stalker and Marrugeku. David and Rachael share the view that the company is not a permanent fixture, that at some stage it should close when the work has been done, when the goals have been achieved, or certainly when the passion to do better has been lost. This issue often has been discussed on the Stalker board of management, though never yet with a sunset date in mind. “David and I have talked about his often. We have both done a lot of reinventing of ourselves in recent years and I think our work is better for that, but we both want to go out on a high point. We are incredibly privileged here in Australia being able to dream our projects and put them into action. You don’t want to throw away the privilege but you have to remain relevant and there’s plenty of young talent around who would like the opportunity.” She says she has the worst CV in the world. “I have worked my

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whole working life in Stalker and have never done anything else. I have never even had a boss to tell me what to do!” Perish the thought of any boss telling Rachael Swain what to do. N

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Commitment

Tania de Jong with friend and role model Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Dame Elisabeth Murdoch & Tania de Jong

For most of her long life of 101 years, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch AC, DBE has worked tirelessly on behalf of many causes of which she is a generous benefactor, especially in health, welfare and the arts. Tania de Jong AM is a singer and musical entrepreneur committed to developing the potential of people through active participation in music and the arts. They are good friends and Tania sees Dame Elisabeth as an inspiration and a mentor.

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ruden Farm, where Dame Elisabeth lives, is set in flat farming country on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. The property is entered along a closely planted avenue of white gums Cthat curves up to the large but simple old white painted weatherboard house that, rather incongruously, is fronted by a large Palladian style porch. The garden is spacious and full of mature fruit and ornamen- tal trees, shrubs and flowers, a veritable botanic garden. There is a large artificial lagoon, shaped like a heart. At the inner point, on the edge of the water, stands a strikingly beautiful steel windmill bending up its length with a single rotor or vane that moves in the direction of the wind. This was commissioned and built over ten years ago to celebrate Dame Elisabeth’s 90th birthday. Her sitting room is cluttered with books and correspondence, pictures of family and favourite things and the bits and pieces that hang around in people’s lives. She sits in front of a window with a fire in a nearby grate, in a rather complicated chair that allows her to put her feet up, or sit upright if she needs to have a cup of tea or attend to correspondence. Her face with its twinkling blue eyes is framed by a prolific halo of white hair loosely drawn back into a bun. She seems tired but has the gracious charm and almost Oxford English accent of a much earlier generation. Opposite Dame Elisabeth sits Tania de Jong, totally contrasted: petite, animated, swinging between laughter and serious talk. Tania hasn’t seen Dame Elisabeth for some weeks and relishes the chance of catching up on mutual doings. She is angry about the proposed merg- ing of disciplines at the Victorian College of the Arts and the financial inability of the University of Melbourne to fund the specialist training in the arts so essential to produce fine artists. She tells Dame Elisabeth that The Age has published her letter of protest and they discuss the deleterious effects the changes might have. Despite her great age, Dame Elisabeth remains passionate about the many causes she supports and is still actively involved in their affairs. According to the Australian Women’s Register, she supports 110 causes. Her long history and reputation as an active and caring philanthropist, virtually since her husband Sir Keith Murdoch’s death nearly 60 years ago, has created a matriarchal aura about her that transcends the achieve-

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ments of the Murdoch family. She is in great demand everywhere and what is most remarkable, she goes up to Melbourne several times a week to attend events, gatherings, and performances, often in support of her causes but also because she loves the arts and likes to keep in touch with her friends. Dame Elisabeth says her philanthropic work probably originated from a sense of obligation stemming from her sense of good fortune and her happy childhood. She claims to have been a wild child: “I didn’t go to school until I was eleven — we had an acre of garden in Toorak Road just below the Village and I almost lived in the garden, climbed trees and had a very happy time.” She attended Clyde School at Woodend (now part of Geelong Grammar) as a boarder and continued to revel in an outdoor life, finding she was a natural sports person. She didn’t go to University, but soon after leaving school, she was courted by the much older Keith Murdoch and married at the age of nineteen while he was 42. Even before her marriage, she became involved in community work, and in particular, the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. A few years later, she joined the management committee of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. But substantial philanthropic and community involvement took a back seat while she had four children, Helen, Anne, Janet and son Rupert. Her marriage was hugely influential in her personal development, and to this day her deep respect and admiration, as well as love, for everything Keith did and stood for is evident in her views and conversation. With typical modesty, she told a previous interviewer that the wonderful life she has enjoyed stemmed from her marriage and the opportunities his position gave her. Keith Murdoch was a truly remarkable man whose style, scope and daring as a journalist, businessman and public figure not only inspired his wife, but must surely have been a shining and formative example for their son Rupert. In his youth, painfully shy and with a crippling stam- mer, Keith was an ambitious and determined man who made the most of his contacts, became a friend of the famous British newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe and created his own news empire through his transformation of the Herald and Weekly Times. As a young journalist, he created

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a sensation during the first World War by his visit to Gallipoli and his subsequent letter to British prime minister Asquith, bitterly criticising the British conduct of the Gallipoli campaign. While the letter was full of errors of fact, subsequently admitted by Murdoch, it was one of the chief factors in the recall of General Hamilton and the evacuation of the Dardanelles. Despite his controversial business and public life, Murdoch’s private life was that of a devoted family man. Before he married Elisabeth in 1928, he bought Cruden Farm and it was there that the family spent as much time as they could and where they all shared their happiest collective memories. He was a great lover of the arts and through his friendship with Daryl Lindsay, challenged the conservative Melbourne art establishment, working tirelessly over the years to increase accessibility for the visual arts and re-organise its institutions and governance. Through his example and as the children grew up, Elisabeth became involved in the arts and after his death in 1952, it became a major commitment in her life along with her charitable interests. n Tania de Jong first met Dame Elisabeth in 1999 when her vocal group Pot Pourri was invited by Dame Elisabeth to perform at Cruden Farm to celebrate her 90th birthday. Pot Pourri has performed in any number of special occasions over the years, but this was a unique event for Tania and her colleagues. As Tania says: “Dame Elisabeth had seen Pot Pourri perform at another event and she approached me then and said she wanted us to be the featured performers for her birthday celebrations. I said fantastic, as she could have had anyone in the world. I visited her several times, talked about her life and read about her. It was a highlight of my life and very inspirational for me to see the spirit in which she lives. By the time it came to the performance we had prepared a view of her 90 years in words and music including ‘There is nothing like the dame, no one gardens like the dame, no one donates like the dame.’ We got Rupert and Lachlan up on stage and it was a really great event.” At the end of the celebration, Dame Elisabeth’s son-in-law, John Calvert-Jones approached Tania and asked her what she thought the

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greatest needs were in the community. She replied she felt it was in dealing with disenfranchised youth, keeping them at school, and offering them creative opportunities. He suggested she set up a foundation for this purpose and he and Dame Elisabeth each gave $5,000 to start it. In this way, The Song Room was born. At first it was a matter of Pot Pourri giving performances to large groups of children brought in from disadvantaged schools, many of whom had never experienced any sort of live public performance. Soon special programs were prepared to enable schools to get involved in their own arts activities. Tania points out: “Three out of four government schools in Australia have no access to professional arts at school. The Song Room now has about 250 programs going for a minimum of six months in schools throughout Australia and reaching over 200,000 primary school children so far. The idea is to create sustainable arts programs in schools. Once teachers and principals see the effects of the arts on the children’s other capabilities, their greater connection, their self esteem and their better results, it starts to prove itself. But you have got to wonder why in a prosperous country like Australia, we still don’t have creative thinking and learning as an essential part of the curriculum.” The Song Room is now funded by a mix of state government, foun- dations, private and sponsorship support. After eight years of solid work with The Song Room, and, as she says, with a great staff and board in place, Tania has withdrawn from it to concentrate on her other projects. From the outsider’s perspective, this looks like a good thing, as a glance at her website reveals a bewildering variety of activities that would over- whelm an ordinary mortal. Her primary vocation has always been as an opera singer, but consistent opportunities for opera singers in Melbourne have always been rare, so in order to make a living, she and her partner Jonathan Morton established Pot Pourri as a group of four singers with a piano presenting a ‘pot pourri’ of opera excerpts, Broadway songs, cabaret and comedy. Somewhat ruefully, she says “it developed a life of its own” and since then they have toured abroad 40 times, made six CDs, and given countless performances in Australia, mostly in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Now she runs a major talent and event agency called Music Theatre Australia of which Pot Pourri is just one of a lengthy talent list. She has

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won numerous awards for her creative entrepreneurship, especially in support of her commitment to the disadvantaged and social inclusion. Recently she established Creativity Australia, a non-profit organisation and perhaps her boldest and most imaginative project so far. It takes many of the concepts of the Song Room and extends them into the broader community. But for all this entrepreneurial and social welfare achievement, singing remains in the forefront of Tania’s life and she was delighted with recent performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, a soprano part that she feels suits her voice perfectly. Tania’s family background is exotic. Her grandfather was a Dutch businessman, but her maternal grandfather was Karl Duldig, a noted Polish sculptor who met her grandmother, Slawa Horowitz, an artist, at the Vienna Hochschule für Kunst in the 1920s. She was a resourceful woman and having lost her umbrella in a cloakroom, put her mind to developing an umbrella that could be contained in a bag. This was the invention of the first folding umbrella which she patented in 1929 earning substantial royalties for the next ten years. These ceased suddenly when the Anschluss took place in Austria in 1939. Karl and Slawa fled the very next day to Switzerland with their little daughter Eva (Tania’s mother) leaving behind other family members who were taken by the Nazis. Eventually they arrived in Australia, where after the war they both worked as artists and teachers. While Eva was educated in Melbourne and became a champion tennis player, Tania’s father grew up in Holland, became separated from his parents and lived safely in the home of a Catholic priest during the war. Years later he met and fell in love with Eva at the Maccabean Games in Israel, she as an Australian tennis player, and he representing Holland at hockey. After their marriage they settled in Holland and when Tania was a baby they came to Australia and settled in Glen Iris. The resilience of her parents, and especially her grandparents, in re-making successful lives in Australia has always impressed Tania and led to her great admiration for immigrants and the huge challenges they face. Her own childhood was more conventional and settled. Her grandmother Slawa taught for many years at the elite St Catherine’s school but Tania’s parents decided to send her to her mother’s alma mater Korowa Anglican school. It is likely the living example of her clever, artistic and

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resourceful family led her to singing and a determination to succeed. As a fourteen year old she surprised herself and her family by winning the lead role in the school’s production of Oklahoma. She explains how this happened: “My best friend told me I was not good enough to be a singer and should never bother having singing lessons! I finally got up the courage to audition for the chorus of Oklahoma two years later. Imagine my surprise when I was offered the lead role never having had a singing lesson.” Later she took singing lessons and despite discouragement and setbacks determined to become an opera singer. n The large panelled sitting room and the dining room at Cruden Farm are full of splendid old furniture, paintings and rugs that give the spacious old house great warmth while retaining an unpretentious simplicity. Dame Elisabeth sits at the head of the long refectory table and a simple but delicious lunch is served. She is delighted with praise for the award winning Delatite riesling we drink, and says it is a family vineyard and was made by her niece who is a leading winemaker. Tania tells us about the very creative challenge of the work she has been doing in establishing community choirs like Melbourne Sings. Dame Elisabeth is intrigued by all Tania’s projects. Suddenly several brilliantly coloured parrots alight in the tree outside the dining room window, and they both exclaim; Dame Elisabeth is thrilled and says she has never seen them before. The parrots and Tania’s amazing projects turn the conversation to Dame Elisabeth’s love for the visual arts. Through her husband Keith’s and her own friendship with the influential landscape artist Daryl Lindsay, youngest brother of the famous Lindsay clan of artists, Dame Elisabeth was invited to chair the nearby McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Garden at Langwarrin. She became an admirer and patron of Lenton Parr, one of Australia’s finest sculptors, whose work is generously represented at the McClelland Sculpture Park. Even now she says she is more drawn to the expressive and monumental forms of sculpture and their placement in natural outdoor settings than other forms of the visual arts. However, of all her artistic commitments, she is proudest of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, of which she is Patron and Emeritus

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trustee of the Tapestry Foundation. The Tapestry Workshop is by any reckoning, one of Australia’s most valuable art institutions. It could be argued that its output has done more to promote and develop the careers of Australian artists than any other. Some 400 tapestries created by the Workshop’s weavers hang in collections around the world, most based on works by leading Australian artists. The Tapestry Workshop was established in 1976 and Dame Elisabeth says: “I am very very proud of the Workshop and I think it does wonderful work. Lady Delacombe [wife of former Governor of Victoria Sir Rohan Delacombe] and I started it. We were so impressed by the tapestries that had been produced and acquired by the National Gallery [of Victoria], that we felt there was a need to establish a workshop in Melbourne that could build on the work of our fine artists. We offered some support and asked the state government to get behind it.” The discussion about the Tapestry Workshop and the National Gallery prompts the question whether Dame Elisabeth remembers Rosemary Crumlin, the Catholic nun who curated the memorable exhibition Beyond Belief at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998 which brought together great works of art from around the world by 20th century artists that reflected aspects of the religious imagination. The exhibition was the result of years of inspired work and arduous labour by Rosemary Crumlin and would have foundered for want of sufficient funding until saved by generous contributions by Rupert Murdoch and Dame Elisabeth. She recalls Rosemary with delight though has not seen her for years and remembers that she opened the Beyond Belief exhibition and found it very moving. After lunch, the talk moves to reflection on Tania’s new organisation, Creativity Australia and the inspiration from Dame Elisabeth’s life of creative philanthropy. Tania’s overall goal is to unlock right brain creativity, especially in the work place and to help people towards improved mental health and well being. She says that one in four people will suffer from depression and this reduces enormously their ability to lead productive lives. “Today we are predominantly educating children to the left side of their brain, focusing on numeracy and literacy. When you combine that with the information revolution and their devotion to the computer

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screen, you run the risk of ending up with an uncaring and disenfranchised society. A recent fifteen country study revealed that 3-5 year olds exhibit 98% creative behaviour, reduced to 35% by the age of ten and to 2% by the age of 25. The good news is right brain creative potential is not lost and people can tap into it all through their lives. One of the big challenges is for people to find meaning in the workplace; organisations need to find ways for their employees to achieve this. Employees often feel disenfranchised and that’s why we do programs like Finding Your Voice and With One Voice. “For example we have set up a choir at the Royal Children’s Hospital to reduce the silos between the clinical and non-clinical staff and to improve communication and leadership skills. The goal is for the choir to go for at least twelve months and have performance outcomes every three months. We have started another at the Sofitel Hotel, called Melbourne Sings that brings together executives and staff, people from city businesses, migrants, and disadvantaged and disabled people. The idea is to bridge and build social capital. The age range is from sixteen to 85 representing 12 nationalities and with many not speaking English.” Since setting up Melbourne Sings, Creativity Australia has established Geelong Sings, Dandenong Sings, Maribyrnong Sings, Singing for Sunshine, Orygen Youth Health Choir, with more in the pipeline as communities keep calling up to take advantage of the concept of choirs to bring together business, government and community. She has many moving stories to tell of people, often immigrants, who have found the opportunity to sing in these groups completely liberating, and given them confidence to seek and obtain work previously unavailable to them. On the other side of the coin, she says: “Corporate executives are finding the programs very beneficial with informal mentoring of some of the migrants, learning more about diversity, and starting to see the value of creative leadership programs for their teams and organisations. There is no doubt this work impacts the bottom line and leads to greater cultural integration, performance and productivity.” She is confident that the success of the corporate programs on the well being and motivation of staff will become clear to cautious executives. Though it is a cool and damp day, the splendour of spring is already apparent in the beautiful garden at Cruden Farm. It is disappointing that

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the weather is not conducive to Dame Elisabeth leading us through the garden on one of her well known excursions on her golf buggy. When it is time to leave, Tania stirs the fire at Dame Elisabeth’s request, leans over to kiss her in her chair in front of the window, and they talk momentar- ily about the concert they both will be attending in a week or two’s time. n Tania drinks herbal teas as she finds coffee and caffeine stop her from sleeping and she already has too much energy. When asked what she likes to do to relax, she seems surprised, as if she had never thought that she might do anything to relax. But on reflection, she says singing is her best relaxation as she has to concentrate completely on what she loves to do to the exclusion of everything else. She loves opera, especially early or baroque opera as she feels it best suits her voice. She has a passion for Puccini and at some stage has sung almost all his soprano arias. Now she says her voice has become higher and lighter and the earlier operatic repertoire suits her better — such as Bellini, Handel and Mozart. Like most singers, what she sings often depends on what she is asked to do, not necessarily on what she wants to sing. Nevertheless while invitations to sing major operatic roles are infrequent, she has carte blanche to sing what appeals to her with Pot Pourri, and to respond to audience requests. “I get to sing Nessun Dorma from time to time — not many sopranos get that chance! I sing in both intimate and very large settings, from 20 people in a board room to 20,000. It’s a great joy to sing under the stars to 20,000 people. The thing I find really exciting in a large venue is that the audience goes nuts after every song. Once in the Perth Concert Hall, the audience stood and cheered wildly after every piece and we felt like rock stars. When we tour in Asia, we sing in large venues most of the time and they are always full, mostly of young people, and they treat you like pop stars — we were once even asked to sign their body parts — as opposed to Australia where we sing to a generally much older demographic.” Being a self made person, though with a loving family background, she finds her friends have a similar independent attitude to life. She likes people who are real and unpretentious. The big question is whether she will have her own family. It is one of the dilemmas of her life, and obvi-

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ously is a matter of deep reflection. She feels it now may be too late, but it is not really a question of time, it is the true dilemma of a highly concerned and creative person, who apprehends that having children may stand in the way of a passionate life commitment. “You could say I have had five babies, as I have created five organisations and in a way I have treated them all like they are my children. I nurture them and watch them grow and I want them all to be as good as they can possibly be.” Ever since she was a child, Tania has resisted organised religion and now believes it is one of the chief causes of conflict in the world. However a sense of spirituality is fundamental to her being. It is in her singing that she is aware of this in the most powerful way, where she feels the deepest sense of connection with others and of her own spiritual essence. The friendship between Dame Elisabeth and Tania which began years ago when Pot-Pourri performed at a 60th wedding anniversary of one of Dame Elisabeth’s friends, has deepened as they have come to know and admire each other’s work. Since they first met, Tania has often visited Cruden Farm and they see each other regularly in Melbourne. Tania says: “Just last week she told me how important she feels creativity is and how it has the potential to solve many of the problems our world faces.” This is exactly the kind of encouragement Tania wants in her own quest. N

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Philanthropy

Rodney Seaborn (Photo provided by the SB&W Foundation) Rodney Seaborn

Dr Rodney Seaborn excelled in two entirely different and unrelated fields: as a pioneering psychiatrist, and a great theatrical philanthropist. While theatre was a life long love, remarkably he had no personal involvement in the theatre business until after he retired as a medico in his 60s. For the next 30 years, support for theatre, theatre artists and theatrical archives was to become his abiding passion and his generous legacy.

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n 16 May 2008, Rodney Seaborn walked towards the interview room at NIDA. He said he had slept badly the night before and was still feeling the effects of his angina. He thrust his hand into Ohis jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of little white pills and swallowed a couple. When asked if he had ever had a bypass, he said: “I have been taking these for my angina for 30 years and they have worked pretty well for me — after all I’m 96. No I never bothered with a bypass.” After two hours of recorded chat, he offered a smile and a firm handshake and in response to a request for one last interview, said he didn’t have time until he got back from London in six weeks. He died from a heart attack that night. Even in his last year, he drove into NIDA every day where he and his long time assistant Carol Martin occupied a large room at NIDA working together with various dedicated volunteers on developing his theatrical archive. Always beautifully dressed in a suit and tie, his manner was gentle and softly spoken, but confident and humorous. He always seemed on the verge of laughter, the absolute antithesis of the pompos- ity of age. At NIDA, near the library, there is a portrait of him by Judy Cassab sitting in a chair in dignified pose, perfectly reflecting the amused smile that seemed to sum up his attitude to life. His first experience of the theatre, indeed his first really clear memory, was: “Being taken by my father at the age of five to see As You Like It at the Conservatorium, featuring Alan Wilkie, the leading Shakespearean actor of the day. My memory was not so much of the play, but of my father’s explanations to me about the play infuriating the man in the row behind, and my acute embarrassment.” A few years later as a school boy, he started to go to the theatre with his grandmother: “I suppose she was what you would call a socialite. She loved the theatre, especially opera and ballet, and she was very knowl- edgeable. She would take almost the entire third row for the first nights and would invite my parents, my uncles and other friends. If I behaved myself, I was sometimes invited to join them and had to get dressed up too. I particularly loved the Grand Opera House, which later became the Tivoli, sadly no longer in existence. I remember the Melba opera season in 1926, not so much the shows themselves but the atmosphere in the theatre — I really became hooked.”

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He developed an early fascination with the theatres themselves during the great boom in theatre construction, during the 1920s: “The great legitimate theatres were the St James, ‘the Theatre Perfect’ built by the Fuller brothers in 1926, opening with No No Nanette, and the magnificent Empire down near the central railway, which later became Her Majestys. The Prince Edward was called ‘the Theatre Beautiful’, and of course the State, the Regent, the Theatre Royal, the Criterion and the Capitol. But the one I liked best was the Palace, a beautiful little theatre with Oriental style decoration, seating about 600 on three levels. It was said to have been built from the uncollected winnings at Tattersall’s sweeps. “The most lavish of the theatres of the time was the Empire, seating about 2000, with huge luxurious seats and decorated in full art deco style. As a young person, I went to the first production, a very popular show called Sonny which starred Queenie Ashton who came out from the UK and stayed for the rest of her life. The investment in theatres was huge and they were wonderful places, but in some ways none of the shows in these theatres matched some of the earlier JC Williamson productions like Rose Marie and The Maid of the Mountains for the quality of the production values, show girls and music direction. Of course there was also a great deal of straight theatre, especially at the Criterion and the Royal, but apart from what Doris Fitton was doing at the Independent, this was mostly by visiting companies with stars like Faye Compton and Sybil Thorndike. “At Christmas I often went with my grandmother to Melbourne and we always went to the theatre. I was a great admirer of Gladys Moncrieff — she was a wonderful singer. I think it was in 1925 that she had a farewell performance at Her Majesty’s before she went to England for several years. I remember the audience went wild and wouldn’t let her go and in the end, she broke down in tears. When she came back to Sydney a few years later, she had a huge success in Rio Rita, and then of course The Maid of the Mountains.She had a very warm stage personality and a beautiful smile, though not a great actress or dancer and the audience absolutely loved her. There was no pretension about her. “However once the depression hit, most [of the theatres] went out of business, became cinemas, or were pulled down. The Palace even became

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a venue for mini-golf! It was also the start of the talkies which really was the end of the musical theatre, and even much of the straight theatre as I remember it. Even today I don’t think it has recovered to the level of popularity it had then. “Part of the problem in my view, is that today there is not the same emphasis on speaking clearly on stage. There seems to be greater concern about speaking in a natural voice. Even in older films they projected their voices so much more clearly. Famous artists of that period of my youth like Nellie Stewart, or Sybil Thorndike, laid great emphasis on clear articulation of the words and would insist that their words carry to every seat in the house.” During the depression, while he was still at the Kings School in Sydney, Rodney’s father died. With his mother and sister, he moved into his grandmother’s large house in Edgecliff. He was taken into his father’s legal firm to study law, but claims to have been a feckless youth with no ambition and a dislike of study. Over several years of law, he passed no exams, but tried gold mining and spent a year working like a navvy on his uncle’s tobacco farm at Mareeba in North Queensland. Nevertheless he was a resourceful young man and when given a car, decided to start a car hire business. In no time he had acquired five cars which he hired out mostly to his many friends who, like him, were young men about town needing private transport to enjoy the good life. “My father left me a block of land at Avalon so I used to gather all my friends — there were about 40 or 50 of us — and each weekend we would all go down to the block to build the house. We would all camp out until we got the roof on and then we would sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. We had three T model Fords in which we would take all the building supplies. We had a wonderful time: we played a lot of tennis and many of us joined the surf club, and we would do shifts on the house while others played tennis or surfed. One night I heard the king’s abdica- tion speech when I was down at Avalon and it made me realise I needed to take life rather more seriously.” There were several doctors in his family and he decided he wanted to study medicine. He was determined to make a clean break from what he saw as his irresponsible youth, and in May 1939, he arrived in London, a few months before World War II broke out. He started his

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studies at Kings College at London University and then later at Charing Cross Hospital. “When I started at Charing Cross Hospital, the bombing had started in earnest and we had a tremendous amount of casualties. At first we lived in the hospital but later after it was bombed we had to move out of London. After that we students had to move a number of times because of the bombings. But apart from being penniless, I enjoyed my period as a medical student more than any other time of my life. All the students were so close and shared everything. We even went to the theatre together in the ‘gods.’ Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge were performing at the Strand next door and they used to come over and have a drink with us in the intervals of the performances. But during the war I was able to see very little theatre, though I will never forget a wonderful production of Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh at the Haymarket — I think it is one of his best plays.” Rodney’s innate modesty was nowhere more apparent than in his reluctant descriptions of his day to day war time experiences in central London. With a ghost of a smile he described his worst experience: “I liked to play quite a lot of tennis, but one night the house where I had my digs was bombed and my racquet destroyed — I couldn’t get another. “When Churchill came to power, it made an enormous difference. Whatever you like to think of him before or after, he was a great inspiration to the people through his radio speeches. At the end of the war, I remember him being driven down Whitehall with tremendous cheer- ing and euphoria from the crowd and he had tears streaming down his cheeks.” At Charing Cross hospital, he came under the influence of a leading psychiatrist Dr Petrie, a grandson of Matthew Flinders, who encouraged him to take up psychiatry as a specialty. He was also influenced by the situation at home in Sydney, where his mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and his sister was not coping with the situation. He realised he had to return home. For the next two years, he had to deal with his family difficulties — a sad business. Having left a very spirited and integrated family in 1939 he returned seven years later, after the death of his beloved grandmother, to deal with the illnesses of his mother and sister. In 1949, he returned to London to take up Dr Petrie’s offer to study

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psychiatry at Belmont hospital in Surrey, taking his mother with him. Psychiatry was to become his vocation and career and he remained in England for several years. Rodney’s career as a psychiatrist was of the greatest importance. In 1955 he set up his own practice in Sydney’s Macquarie Street. Over the years he developed a deep understanding of the effects of drugs and alcohol dependency and became a pioneer in its treatment. His reputation became international and he served as president of the International Council of Drug and Alcohol Addictions. In 1956, he bought a house with a large garden in Mosman and converted it into a small psychiatric hospital which he called Alanbrook. It was the first of its kind and, at first, the staff lived on the premises. It had five beds for patients. Over the next few years, fourteen more neighbouring houses were acquired, extensions were made and all buildings were connected in a labyrinthine complex. At its height, there were 63 beds in Alanbrook and its connected buildings and 76 staff. It catered for neurotic rather than psychotic patients and became well known for its treatment of drug and alcohol dependency. In 1986, now in his mid-sixties, in typically forthright fashion, he decided he would retire, so he sold his Macquarie Street practice and Alanbrook, which ultimately became a high quality retirement village called the Manor. While his passion for the theatre had remained through his life, it was not until his retirement that he was able to devote time to it. He often told his friends he wanted to achieve three things in his life: to own a hospital, a hotel and a theatre. Alanbrook became the hospital; he bought the Oxford Hotel (later renamed Wattle House), and it was not to be long before he bought a theatre. His philanthropy also came about more by accident than design: “I have never planned for anything too far ahead; I prefer to wait for opportunities. But about the time I sold Alanbrook, I saw a notice in the paper from the well known actress Penny Cook appealing for someone to save the Stables Theatre. I had always liked the Stables and the plays I had seen there put on by the Griffin Theatre Company, especially those directed by John Bell. So one day I went up to the Stables and spoke to the man behind the bar and said I would like to buy the theatre if the price was right; the Griffin Theatre Company can have it rent free. He was quite surprised and after that Penny Cook came to see me and I

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arranged to buy it. A bit later Ken and Lilian Horler suggested to me that I establish a foundation to own the theatre. That seemed a good idea, so I asked two judges who were friends of mine, Lloyd Waddy and Tony Larkens, to help me set up the foundation. I also asked my cousins, Peter Broughton and Leslie Walford, to become directors to represent the branches of my family. So this was how the Seaborn Broughton and Walford Foundation was set up. “Over the years I had collected many theatre programs and I also had persuaded several friends to donate programs and memorabilia to the Foundation. Then John West, who for over 20 years had run the ABC program The Showman, came to see me and asked if the Foundation could accept the gift of his archive. His collection is really wonderful and indeed unique. Another tremendous gift was from the actor David Wenham whom I had helped in his early days. He had built up a marvellous library of plays, programs and theatre publications.” Many years later, the SBW Archive is now one of the most important in Australia and almost certainly the most substantial private theatrical archive, now housed in a well equipped warehouse in Sydney. One of the most treasured items in his archive is Mr JC Williamson’s diary of his trip in 1909 to Europe and the US seeking shows and performers for his theatres in Australia. “I first became aware of the diary at a meeting of the Glugs, [a theatrical lunch club] in 2004. At that lunch, Don McPhee, a former JCW manager, showed me an old diary of JCW himself from 1909. Peter Orlovich, our archivist, did some research and found there are no diaries in any of the Williamson papers in the Mitchell or Latrobe libraries, so it appears to be a unique document. It begins with his arrival in England in June 1909 and ends with his arrival in Canada on the way home in September that year. It is very meticulous with a copy of the program of the show he saw on one page and, on the facing page, his critique of the show and comments on the artists and of artists back home who might play the parts. What is particularly fascinating are his detailed comments on famous artists of the day and his belief that Nellie Stewart (who was his star at home) was the equal of anyone he saw on the trip. The diary is now in the SBW Archive and in fairly fragile state. In JCW’s very first entry on the day after he arrived in London, he wrote:

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‘Arrived at the Savoy and went to the Lyric Theatre to seeFires of Faith by Conan Doyle. I liked the performance but consider the piece too talky (sic). Third act very strong but I doubt whether it would be a big success in Australia. Home and bed.’ “Another entry I found of great interest was about the famous musical of the time, Our Miss Gibbs, which my grandmother always spoke of with great affection though I never saw it. I have always thought Peter Cousens should revive it. It was incredibly successful in Australia before the first world war and we have a copy of the elaborate program in the Archive of that original production. In his diary JCW says: ‘In the evening, Our Miss Gibbs — splendid performance; Gertie Miller simply great. The piece is full of comedy; costuming very fine; about 50 girls on and their changes of modern costume most attractive; certainly one of the best Gaiety pieces I have seen. Packed houses and can’t get seats months ahead. Fanny Davies would be the only one suitable for Miss Gibbs’. The acquisition of the Stables Theatre in 1986, and the generous work of the SBW Foundation had become well known in theatrical circles. Rodney recalled: “One night in 1987, I was at the Stables when Lloyd Waddy who was on the board of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, came up to me and said he had a board meeting of the Trust the next day and would I come along, as I might be able to help. I had no idea what he wanted but I agreed to go. At the meeting I was introduced to the Board members who were very eminent people indeed, like Sir Ian Potter, Andrew Briger, Sir David Griffin and others. “Then we all sat down and the accountant came in and said: ‘Gentleman, you know the Trust is effectively insolvent and if you go on trading tomorrow you could all be in jail!’ We all laughed but it was no laughing matter. He went around the table and asked if there was anyone who could help the Trust out of this problem. Everyone said ‘no’ and Lloyd turned to me and asked if I could. I said I wasn’t prepared to put the money in but asked whether a guarantee would be any good, and I finished up making a guarantee of I think $2m — but I’m not sure of the amount, for two years. Sir Ian then said that if I was prepared to make the guarantee, he would donate $100,000 which he did there and then.” This was not the end of the matter for Rodney. He joined the Trust board and though the guarantee was never called upon, some years later

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the Trust fell into even more serious difficulties having bought the near derelict Independent Theatre in North Sydney with a view to its major re-development. The builder went bankrupt and the Trust was forced into provisional liquidation. After complex and protracted negotiations, the SBW Foundation agreed to buy the Independent and undertook its restoration. This was a huge financial undertaking but resulted in the rescue and elegant restoration of one of Sydney’s most important heritage buildings. Ultimately the Trust survived and finally bought the building back from the SBW Foundation at a fraction of its commercial value. Rodney was happy to leave the Independent behind, as his real passion had become the permanent development of the archive. For many years until after his death, the archive shared premises and facilities with NIDA where it was readily accessible to students and staff. Together with one of the directors of the Foundation, Gary Simpson, he established policies and procedures for giving grants to individuals and projects, but eventually he became concerned this needed a more professional process and he formed a partnership with NIDA where it was represented in all grant decisions. In 2009, under the guidance of the SBW Archivist, Dr Peter Orlovich, the Chairman Leslie Walford and a Board member Dr Judy White, the Foundation bought a building at 925 Botany Road in Sydney, for the SBW Foundation Archives. By 2010 the move has been such a success that the vast research collections have almost fulfilled Rodney Seaborn’s dreams of a “Full House”. n All Rodney Seaborn’s passions seem to owe their origin to his love for his family. While he never married, he constantly recalled with the greatest affection his grandparents, his parents, his sister, uncles, aunts and cousins and the younger people of his family. His love of the theatre was a direct result of its importance in the lives of his grandparents and parents. His determination to become a psychiatrist was born of the tragedy of his mother’s and his sister’s breakdowns. The establishment of Alanbrook as a place of care and respite, can be seen as a way of honouring his mother. While his life was full of the highest achievement, mixing confidently in sophisticated circles with a dry wit and wisdom, personally he was almost

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painfully modest and self-deprecating. He was in the best sense a true and good man. N

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Philanthropy

Michael Crouch (Photo: Hifzullah Ekmen) Michael Crouch

Michael Crouch AO over the last 30 years has built up a small company that is now a successful multinational corporation. For most of his life he has worked tirelessly in support of several great community causes and is passionately committed to promoting Australian culture and values.

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n the reception room at Sydney’s City Recital Hall in Angel Place, a large crowd of well dressed business people and their spouses gathered for drinks and canapes after the performance of a concert called IBallads of the Bush. The gathering was addressed by Michael Crouch, a highly respected businessman with neatly parted black hair and a ruddy complexion, who thanked the artists with the greatest warmth and extolled the work of the Royal Flying Doctor Service which was to benefit from the proceeds of the concert. After his confident and generous speech, he turned to the Patron of the RFDS, her Excellency the Governor of NSW Professor Marie Bashir AC, CVO, who responded with evident delight and intimate knowledge of the work of the RFDS and of Michael Crouch. He likes nothing better than creating an occasion like this where he is able to combine publicising one of his favourite causes with presentation of a splendidly resourced concert featuring the talents of a much admired young Australian artist well known to him. Better still, he enjoys inviting large numbers of his friends and colleagues to share his enjoyment and generosity. In this instance he has formed both a foundation and a non-profit company called the Symphony of Australia dedicated to the stag- ing of concerts and other performances celebrating ‘what it means to be Australian’. The name comes from Symphony of Australia, a symphony composed by Gavin Lockley to provide a musical dramatisation of the history of Australia, before and since European settlement. The final movement of the symphony, titled My Country Australia, was written first and premiered in the UK at a concert at Australia House, London, in May 2006. A year later, the whole work, lasting nearly an hour, had its first public performance at a concert celebrating (and aiding) the 80th birthday of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, at the Sydney Opera House. Michael had been aware for some time that at big international sporting and public events, Australia, unlike virtually every other country, had no rousing anthem for the supporters to sing. We have Waltzing Matilda of course, but it is not in the nature of an anthem. He impressed upon Gavin Lockley the need to create a new composition that would excite and fill Australians with pride. Gavin’s then composed the stirring

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song My Country Australia to the words of Dorothea MacKellar’s well known poem My Country. Symphony of Australia, Ballads of the Bush, (an evening of songs based on popular colonial poems of Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson and CJ Dennis) and an opera Morgan’s Run currently being composed, are all the work of Gavin Lockley, a prodigiously gifted young singer, pianist, and composer whose talent first came to Michael Crouch’s attention when Gavin was a teenager. n All his life, Michael Crouch has been a ‘hands-on’ person with a highly developed ethical sense for undertaking anything he does, whether it has to do with expanding his business, representing Australia at an international forum, raising money for important community causes, or helping the young musicians whose talent and determination he admires so much. He doesn’t just make the call or write the cheque; he gets personally involved, whether as a host, a colleague, a worker, an advocate or a mentor. He is not sure where this drive and determination comes from, but says it may have its origin in the solitariness from illness as a child. “So I had plenty of time to think. I used to fiddle with crystal sets, read a lot, learn to weave and play the piano. Maybe when I grew up, I had all that pent up determination I hadn’t been able to express as a child.” His career was not at all auspicious at first. He loved boarding at Cranbrook school but proceeded to fail his leaving certificate, and later failed to graduate in Economics at university. He joined his father’s import business, but itched to go out on his own. He saw that a few older men he knew slightly and admired were members of Lodge Cranbrook, so thought it might be a good idea to join. He became a good friend of one of these men who encouraged him to buy a little business that manufactured bath and shower heaters. This was over 40 years ago and the story of that business, Zip Heaters, is one of the great small business success stories in Australian corporate history. This is not the place to tell that story, but the fact it is now one of Australia’s relatively few homegrown multinational companies, manufacturing (in Australia) innovative, indeed unique, water heating and cooling equipment selling around the world, speaks volumes for Michael’s drive, ethics and imagination.

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When he started out at Zip he found out the hard way that manufacturing was a very competitive business and that you needed a unique, not just a ‘me too’ product as the core of a business. In the early 1970s, most households started demanding hot water systems in place of bathroom and kitchen heaters, but unable to compete with larger manufacturers, Michael came to realise there may be an opportunity for instant boiling water heaters if the technology could be made to work. It did work and the product caught on, to the extent that virtually all modern office blocks in Australia and many other countries have Zip instant boiling water heaters in their kitchens and tearooms. But he says it is teamwork that makes the difference and he always had a good team. His head of manufacturing stayed 35 years and the head of sales 20 years. Today his current team leaders have an average of twelve years with the company. He likens the teamwork to a rugby team where the organisation or team strives passionately for success. He says it is the team at Zip, and his family, that have enabled him to make his contribution to the community. “A company is always bigger than an individual and I don’t understand companies where you see a group of people suddenly depart and join a rival company. We have people who have worked with us 30 — 40 years and the company develops its own culture and a passion for its own welfare and success. We love to do well at what we do. Australians have a very ‘can-do’ attitude. For instance, when you look at our Olympic team, we seem to send one of the biggest teams and we expect to have a very high medal tally” In 1996 he was invited by former Prime Minister John Howard to become one of Australia’s three representatives on the APEC Business Council. This meant giving up at least six weeks a year to attend international meetings and work on the many initiatives that sought to facilitate business and trade between the 21 member countries. Significant advances were made on eliminating trade barriers and adopting international standards on issues like visas, customs procedures, financial benchmarks and currency exchange. However the thing that stood out for him in his eleven years on APEC was the realisation of the honour of representing Australia. He discovered huge respect for Australia from the business leaders and politicians of the other nations. It gave him a better

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sense of the tremendous value to the nation given by athletes, artists and people from many disciplines who worked so hard to achieve international recognition for Australia. He has given real leadership to community causes like the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He credits former NSW Premier Tom Lewis with the insight to set up the National Parks system in NSW which became a model for other states. He says Bob Carr was the most outstanding Minister for the Environment and drove many of the national parks initiatives. For some 20 years Michael and a group of NSW businessmen were the principal drivers and fund raisers for national parks until in the late 1980s the main role of protec- tion and funding was taken over by the State Government. In more recent years, his energies have been directed towards the Royal Flying Doctor Service which operates 52 aircraft throughout remote Australia and runs nearly 100 medical evacuations daily. It has four divisions operating from WA, Adelaide, North Queensland, and the South East division operating from Broken Hill. Some years ago he was approached by this division to develop a fund raising program. Never one to shirk a big challenge, he suggested the creation of the Friends of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, was appointed Chairman and it raised enough funds to purchase two much needed new aircraft and raise the profile in Sydney of the Service. Indeed one of the key events in this campaign was the Symphony of Australia Concert given in the Sydney Opera House for the RFDS 80th Anniversary. He sees no special magic in successful fundraising for these causes apart from hard work and commitment, but is convinced any successful campaign must offer a sense of ownership and participation to donors. But he believes that Australia is still not a wealthy country and we will always have to depend on Government support to provide the range of services in health, welfare, the environment and the arts we have come to expect. Despite its active fundraising, the RFDS still needs 70% of its funds from Government each year. He is the principal sponsor of the Duke of Edinburgh Award in Australia and initiated the formation of the Ambassador Programme among people he knew in order to provide an annual source of funds for the Award. Also in recent years, he has co-sponsored the National

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Biography Award of Australia as encouragement to recording and remembering ;the lives of interesting Australians. He feels a strong commitment towards innovation; he has established and funded an Australian Chair of Innovation within the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of NSW’s Australian Business School, where he was a member of their Advisory Board for ten years. He was delighted that the University awarded him an honorary doctorate in the discipline in which he failed as an undergraduate. His own concern is not so much in scientific and technological research, but in seeking more productive and ingenious approaches to all endeavour. He has given occasional addresses at the University where his theme has been ‘you can do it’ and ‘there is always a better way’ to look at doing a given task. Being such an optimistic and positive personality, he is rarely critical of others, but he believes that in both business and bureaucracy there is always a need to look for better ways to get things done. n His parents gave him the idea of the ‘parameters of life’. This was the notion that you should give part of your life to the community you lived in. He speaks of the four ‘Cs’ in his life: children, community, church and country. These very traditional values underpin all that he and his family do. They explain his passion for Australia’s heritage which at first glance might be thought to be at odds with his commitment to innovation. “I think Australia is a very innovative society. If you go back to the arrival of the first and second fleets, 1300 people arrived here on 11 ships including 756 convicts with provisions for a few months. The second fleet didn’t arrive until two years and a half years later and in that two and a half years, those 1300 people including a few women and children learnt to survive. I think it was at that time the Australian ‘can-do’ attitude was born.” The creation of his Symphony of Australia project is a further reflection of his patriotism mediated with his love of music. The notion of refracting the history of Australia through music has tremendous appeal to him. Getting to know Gavin Lockley and other young artists gave him new understanding of the difficulties they faced in fulfilling their potential. Setting up the Foundation has given him a new outlet to celebrate

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‘what it means to be Australian’ and at the same time offer material support and encouragement to young musicians and film makers. He has further dreams of what might be achieved in promoting Australian patriotism, and how his Foundation can play a role. He believes no other nation has such a degree of freedom as we have, and this is represented in our uniquely successful multiculturism. The Symphony of Australia Foundation will shortly publish a book examining various aspects of Australia’s heritage and values. He would like to think that music plays an important part in bringing together nations and faiths, and in its future activities, his Foundation may be able to develop these ideas. He points to the large enclaves of Australians achieving success in many parts of the world — 40,000 in Los Angeles alone, and the opportunity to promote our culture through them. n On weekends Michael travels to his Angus cattle property Waverley Station in the Upper Hunter Valley. His wife Shanny is very much a country person, as are their two daughters. Their son George, who works at Zip, spends as much time as he can at Waverley. This relaxed country setting for most of their family life sets the seal on Michael’s and his family’s traditional values. Shanny and Michael feel it is incumbent upon a parent to create an environment where the child is nurtured in a healthy and productive life, but the parent should not unduly influence or stand in the way of the life the child wants to lead. He has had a little book for most of his life in which he records thoughts and sayings that have particularly moved and motivated him, and which he will pass down to his children and grandchildren. One that has always resonated with him is the homily from an unknown source: ‘I shall pass through this world but once, therefore any goodness I can show or do to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’ N

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Departed Friends I have approached this final chap-

ter differently from that which has

gone before in this book. I have not

attempted to analyse the creative

impulses of either, but simply have

tried to give brief portraits of two

people I loved and admired, in both

cases from an entirely personal per-

spective. — AJ

John Shaw in 1964 John Shaw

John Shaw was one of Australia’s most illustrious operatic baritones whose long career in Australia was supplemented by fifteen years as a leading principal at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He was tall and commanding in physique and personality, and some thought him sometimes arrogant in manner. In fact he was gentle, humorous and a superb raconteur. He was devoted to the art of singing, understood its nuances in fine detail and held his mentors and leading colleagues in great respect. He died aged 81 in 2003.

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first met John Shaw in 1976, a few years after he had returned permanently to Australia after a long period as principal dramatic baritone at Covent Garden in London. By then he was a principal at The IAustralian Opera singing major roles in Italian repertoire like Scarpia, Simon Boccanegra, Amonasro and Macbeth. All these required an impos- ing physical stature and a strong dramatic edge to the voice, particularly in the higher register. All these qualities he had in large measure as well as ‘the best legs in the business’ as he frequently reminded his admirers. Offstage, his big boisterous personality still retained something of the raw boned youth from Newcastle, softened by mixing with the smart set and star performers surrounding Covent Garden. His career reached its peak during the Covent Garden years, and was probably the most successful of any Australian singer at that famed opera company apart from Joan Sutherland. He sang with her in her legendary performances in Lucia di Lammermoor in 1959, became a close friend and colleague of the great Italian baritone Tito Gobbi, and sang Posa in Luchino Visconti’s historic production of Don Carlo. Though happily settled back in Sydney with his gorgeous red- headed wife Isabel Begg, previously a leading presenter/interviewer on Scottish television, John was evidently frustrated with aspects of the policies and repertoire at The Australian Opera. It was the heyday of Richard Bonynge’s ascendancy as artistic director, with Dame Joan Sutherland singing regularly for the company. John did not approve of some of Bonynge’s choices, either of singers or repertoire, and was delighted with the appointment in 1977 of Peter Hemmings as general manager. He had known Hemmings well as general manager of Scottish Opera where he had transformed a small provincial company into arguably the finest in the UK after Covent Garden. Hemmings saw to it that John was given several challenging new roles, but soon became embroiled in a very divisive wrangle with Bonynge and the company’s Board, leading to his abrupt departure two years later. John was bitterly disappointed by Hemmings’ exit. With his own career coming to its end, he became increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as the company’s declining standards of rehearsal, direction and singing. n 264

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I remember running into John about ten years ago at a song recital at the Sydney Opera House given by American soprano Renée Fleming. He was breathless with admiration and I listened as he explained the finer points of her technique and artistry. For him she represented all that was finest about the art of singing: a superb voice, beautifully projected with a full understanding of what she was singing. She also happened to be extremely beautiful: for John a great added advantage. In 2002, long after John retired from the operatic stage, I recorded several conversations with him for a project that never eventuated. These are fascinating from several perspectives. While revealing much about his generous personality, they give valuable insights into the work of many leading artists he observed and include many instructive and hilarious stories of life at the opera. John was born and raised in Newcastle. Both his grandfathers were singers so becoming a singer was a natural thing to do, though with no expectation of making a living. He had an aptitude for language and a prodigious memory and always claimed that back in Newcastle, he learnt seventeen principal roles in Italian before he had sung a note of them onstage. As a youth, he joined BHP as a clerk and was soon transferred to Melbourne Head Office. The redoubtable Gertrude Johnson had founded her National Theatre Opera Company in Melbourne and in 1953 the brash young man was at her doorstep offering his wealth of operatic experience. Somehow she found the money to present two seasons each year and was able to offer him exactly what he needed — a range of small roles. Some of the most important singers Australia had ever produced were singing in her company at that time and most went overseas to develop their careers: names such as Elizabeth Fretwell, Ronald Dowd, Neil Easton, Geoffrey Chard, Robert Allman and many others. But as John said, the standard of stagecraft was virtually non-existent. He told an amusing story about this. “I was offered the small part of Antonio the gardener in The Marriage of Figaro and I asked Bill Carr [the director] what should I do and he said: ‘Come on stage and make it big.’ Now of course that can mean anything, especially with someone like me, and the last thing you want to do with a part like Antonio. There was nobody around who could teach us about stage deportment or gesture

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and I decided to go to an acting school in Melbourne. Later on I learnt a great deal more from Tito Gobbi who was the greatest exponent of stage demeanour I ever saw.” The great Italian baritone was to have a huge influence in his career. John’s progress in the mid-50s was so swift that through the intervention of two leading Australian singers in London, Joan Hammond and Elsie Morison, he was invited to sing at Covent Garden in 1958. Gobbi had been invited to sing in Visconti’s new production of Verdi’s Don Carlo conducted by the legendary Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, a production that at the time and for many years later was lauded as the benchmark for truthful psychological realisation of opera on stage. “Gobbi was a prime example of the qualities that distinguish a really special performance on stage. He did not have a great voice but he was able to bring an extra dimension over and above what the director asked. I had the enormous privilege of understudying him in that role when I got to London. I did the first ten days of rehearsal with Visconti and Giulini as Gobbi hadn’t arrived. They were wonderful and what interested me most was when there was any sort of conflict between the music and the drama, these two great men would sit down quietly and resolve it and, horror of horrors, would even ask singers their opinion! When Gobbi arrived he took me under his wing and over the next few years we talked about all my roles.” In 1959, John succeeded Gobbi in Don Carlo, singing with famous singers like Jon Vickers and Boris Christoff and in the same year part- nered Joan Sutherland in her sensational Lucia di Lammermoor that set the world alight. For the next fifteen years he sang a large number of leading roles with the cream of the world’s great opera singers at Covent Garden, and also in many houses in Europe and the US before he returned to Australia to sing at the opening of the Sydney Opera House. But for me it is his affectionate recollection of Australia’s finest singers that I find most special. He adored Dame Joan Hammond who guided him at crucial times in his career. Joan Hammond was the best known Australian opera singer in the mid-20th century. Before, during and after World War II, she had a remarkable career in the UK where she performed with Covent Garden, the British National Opera Company and toured constantly around the

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country singing, mostly in English, to huge audiences. Recordings of her noble silvery sound in popular Puccini arias like One Fine Day, They call me Mimi, Love and Music and above all, O my beloved Father, were played endlessly on the radio and were loved by a generation of listeners in the English speaking world. John was asked to speak at her 80th birthday celebration. “One of her most famous 78 rpm records was of Love and Music on one side with O My beloved Father on the other. At her birthday I told the story of the concert which she once gave in Bradford or Leeds, where after she sang Love and Music to great applause, someone in the audience yelled out, ‘Miss Hammond, can you now sing the other side.’ Then when she got up to reply to my speech, she said, ‘I must correct Mr Shaw yet again, it was not at Bradford, it was at Covent Garden.’” Perhaps John’s most important engagements before he left for England in 1958, were in 1957 with Joan Hammond and Ronald Dowd in both Tosca and Otello in the newly established Elizabethan Opera Company, precursor of Opera Australia. Both these artists became his great friends though Joan Hammond was much older than John and was more of a mentor to him. “While her singing was very beautiful, her stage presence was of an earlier generation, too refined and English for my taste, especially as Tosca, but she had sung those roles many times and it was marvellous to observe her style and the way she used her voice. Ron Dowd of course was different and as always gave it everything, too much as Otello, as the role was really too heavy for his voice and got him into vocal trouble.” Both Iago in Otello and Scarpia in Tosca became major roles for John which he sang all over the world. He gave the credit for this success to Joseph Post who was assistant to Eugene Goossens at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor at the new Elizabethan Opera. Post was a low profile local musician who had worked as conductor, repetiteur or backstage for many local and visiting opera companies over the years and had become the leading resident expert on training singers how to phrase and sing their roles. “Post’s musical experience was vastly superior to anyone else at that time and it would not have been possible to achieve an acceptable musi-

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cal standard without him. Early in my time in the UK, conductors like Edward Downes and Alexander Gibson told me I was very well prepared, and it was simply because I had learnt these roles with Joe Post. Unlike most conductors these days, he had worked in every aspect of the theatre and knew how all the roles were performed while nobody else did. He could be pedantic and very critical but none of us would have survived without him. I remember when I sang the king in Aida with Marjorie Lawrence in her wheelchair12 in my first big role. He was rehearsing and I was singing pretty badly and he barked at me ‘Is this the latest way they sing in Newcastle?’ “Post was also insistent on getting the words right. There was the famous occasion when he stopped a rehearsal and called out to Ron Dowd: ‘Words Mr Dowd, words!’ Ron Dowd walked to the front of the stage and said: ‘Look here Mr Post, you may criticise my voice, you may criticise my acting and you may criticise my technique, but my diction you don’t criticise!’ He was known as Diction Dowd because he had perfect diction and when he sang with that perfect diction, it didn’t affect the vocal line. Many singers find, especially when singing in English, that if they enunciate the words clearly, the vocal line gets lost.” Though many years younger, John was a close friend and admirer of Dowd who had a major career in both Australia and the UK. John said he first met Dowd while rehearsing the role of Plunkett in Martha. “It is a role you only take if you have never seen it before and once you have sung it, you never want to sing it again. While I was rehearsing, this man walks on stage and says to me ‘you sing very well’ and then walks off. I turned around and asked ‘Who was that?’ and they tell me, ‘Who was that?- that’s Ronald Dowd!’” Dowd was a passionate and unique performer with a plaintive quality in his voice that was immediately recognisable. When I was about fourteen, I heard Dowd sing Wagner’s Lohengrin in the first opera performance I ever saw and have never forgotten the performance or the sound.

12 Marjorie Lawrence (1907-1979) was a famous Australian Wagnerian soprano, who spent most of her career in the US. In 1941, at the height of her career, she was stricken with polio and continued to sing operatic performances from her wheelchair. Hollywood made a film about her called Interrupted Melody.

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I mentioned this over a drink in a pub with both Shaw and Dowd many years later. Neither man being falsely modest, they seized on this memory, Dowd claiming it as one of his finest roles, and John extolling the metal- lic edge to Dowd’s voice which made him such a splendid Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio and indispensable in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and the Berlioz Requiem. John’s best known role was Scarpia, the malignant police chief in Tosca which he sang more than 350 times in his career. When he first sang it as a young man at Sydney’s Theatre Royal in the early 1950s, he received a rave review from the leading critic Lindsay Browne. The soprano singing Tosca was so irritated with the review for John, that at the next performance when Scarpia takes her hand to lead her offstage, she whipped her hand from him and slapped him on the wrist. Again it was Gobbi who influenced his interpretation of this role. “Gobbi didn’t go to the opera as he got bored with singers standing at the prompt box and belting it out. But when I knew him, he would go to one act at a performance I was singing and would meet me the next day for a beer and a sandwich and discuss it and he would make suggestions. He would always say, ‘John when I make a suggestion, you don’t do it as you would imagine I would do it but you do it in your own way.’ In the second act, when Scarpia is pursuing Tosca around the stage and it is getting quite physical, he once asked me whether I knew what the name Scarpia meant. When I said I didn’t, he said it means ‘spiders web’ in old Italian. ‘You must remember when you sing this, you just sing mia, mia and she will come to you. You should make little gestures or movements and be very cool.’ And this is what I did.” Another of John’s favourite colleagues was Australian soprano Elsie Morison, who was a great success in England and came back to Australia to sing in the Elizabethan Trust company in 1957. She sang in Stefan Haag’s beautiful production of The Bartered Bride which suffered a disastrous opening night in Sydney. The story of that evening is legendary in operatic circles but John told it better than anyone else and my recording of his telling can be heard in full on the website www.manyfacesofinspiration.com. When she left England for the 1957 season in Australia, Elsie Morison had been asked by the general manager of Covent Garden,

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David Webster, to let him know of any special talent she might hear in Australia. She reported back to him that John Shaw was a high baritone with real potential and could sing seventeen principal roles in Italian operas in Italian. This was enough for Webster, who to John’s disbelief, invited him to Covent Garden, sight unseen and sound unheard, to sing Rigoletto with Joan Sutherland before she shot to stardom as Lucia. As soon as he stepped off the plane, Webster summoned him to his office and introduced him to conductor Edward Downes, telling him he would be singing a role in three weeks he had learnt but had never sung on stage. Webster with his haughty old school manner, became charmed with John’s rough and ready cheek and the two became friends. So too did Ted Downes, an introverted and perfectionist Northerner, who had often been passed over for the big engagements by more glamorous and urbane colleagues. Downes loved the Australian way and singers like John Shaw. He later came to Australia as musical director for the Elizabethan Opera company and its successor The Australian Opera. n Not only was John Shaw a superb opera singer, but he was a colourful and authentic character who was an outstanding representative of Australia in his years abroad. He was awarded an OBE and later made an Officer of the Order of Australia but this official recognition told nothing of the affection in which he was held by countless friends, colleagues and admirers. I loved his irreverent remarks and fabulous stories, but above all his love and passion for the ‘business’, his total commitment to the art of singing and his unselfish admiration for his colleagues. N

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Departed Friends

Ted Myers (Photo: Caroline Davis) Ted Myers

Ted Myers was brought up in a musical family in rural NSW where his father was a teacher in public schools. He became a noted expert in the planning and marketing of education in schools to their local communities, but his greatest interest was in exploring depth of relationships with people he cared for and loved. He died in December 2009.

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ed was diagnosed with liver cancer in May 2009, a terrible shock to his family and friends as he was always so strong and healthy. He was told his condition was inoperable, but that if he was Ttreated with the latest form of chemotherapy, he had a good chance of living two years. He embraced the diagnosis with determination to live longer than two years and to make the most of whatever time he had left. He investigated his condition in depth, as well as the different options for effective treatment, including spiritual and dietary procedures in addition to conventional drug therapies. He started a blog of his day-to-day voyage of discovery about his condition and potential treatments. It became a treasure trove of obser- vations and experiences for his friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Researching and writing the blog, the stories, information and encouragement from all the people who responded gave him great pleasure and guarded optimism. At the time his condition was diagnosed, he was well advanced in a lengthy series of interviews with school principals around Australia for a book he was writing on what makes an excellent school and how schools best engage with the wider community. Despite the diagnosis he and his wife Caroline decided to continue working on the book. They went to see schools in Tasmania and brought forward a long-planned trip to the outback to interview principals from remote area schools, and to visit places they had never been before. It was a magnificent journey in every way, but it was exhausting for Ted and turned out to be his last trip away; after their return, he began to find it hard to keep any food down and he suffered a great deal of pain. By the time he died, he had lasted little more than seven months from the time of the diagnosis. Over ten years earlier, Caro and Ted had bought a secluded place in steep rain forest country at Brogers Creek, a couple of hours south of Sydney. While Ted commuted to Sydney for his work at the Catholic Education Centre, they spent all the time they could at Brogers creating a beautiful and productive garden. I recorded a long conversation with him there, a few days before he died. He told me he wanted to have one of his famous soirées — entertainments where the guests are asked to perform something, whether playing a piece of music, a recitation, a song, or some crazy skit: “My plan, now that it’s probably terminal, is

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that I want to have a living wake early in the New Year, probably here. I don’t like parties and have never been any good at flitting around working the room. I like to get into a real conversation, so if there’s going to be a big gathering, I like people to bring something they can get up and say or perform.” He didn’t live to have his last gathering but he would have loved the wake which became a very powerful and emotional day. There must have been nearly 100 people crowded into their lovely room overlooking the garden and rain forest. In addition to Caro, his daughter Millie, son Gregory, grandson Kai, brother Doug and stepdaughters Rebecca and Charlotte, there were relations, friends and colleagues from every part of his life, including many from the warm and generous local community. It seemed that everyone there said something from the heart, read a poem they had composed, sang a song or played some music. Ted’s local choir also sang. At least four people, including myself, said they had lost their closest male friend. The common thread throughout was Ted’s passion for relationship and deep friendship. It was not always easy to be his friend as he demanded depth and intimacy in the relationship, and some found this difficult, even intrusive. But on this day, everyone there had cherished his friendship at important stages of their lives, and now truly mourned him. n Ted always credited his instinct for the theatrical to his father: “I came from a family of performers. My dad was an excellent pianist; he learnt harmony very well and became a superb jazz pianist and it was one of the last things he was able to do when he developed Alzheimer’s later in his life. He was this ebullient school teacher based in Narromine when I was born during the war. Being a teacher, he had been exempted from war service and used to play piano with the jazz group at the big RAF base there and all over the district. My mother used to say she would find him asleep in the car after these gigs as he was too tired to go to bed when he got home. As a child my brother Doug learnt the violin, but later learnt clarinet and in 1970 became fascinated with Balinese gamelan music. As you know, Doug has lived in Bali for the last 40 years, set up and played in his own gamelan orchestra, and has the finest collection of recordings

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of Balinese music, probably anywhere in the world.” Ted’s sister Rosalie, who died some years ago, also from cancer, was an accomplished pianist, was a finalist in the ABC Concerto competition, and spent her adult life as the pianist in the BBC Welsh Orchestra in Cardiff. “There was always music in the family — we had lots of sing- songs around the piano where my father would play all the popular songs. I learnt piano to Grade 6 and I loved playing jazz, picking out really beautiful chords, but I had two disabilities that gave me great angst: I was colour blind and I lacked a sense of natural rhythm. I remember going to a dance at the old Trocadero with my girl friend and she had brought along her friend Dale Spender, who became the well known feminist. I had a dance with Dale, but I was a hopeless dancer and half way through, she said: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ and walked off leaving me in the middle of the dance floor!” These setbacks never compromised his love of music and performing in all its forms. He joined à cappella groups and choirs and throughout his life his melodious bass was a great asset. Ted studied Arts at Sydney University, planning to become a school teacher, instinctively modelling himself on his father whom he admired so much. He told me that at that time, he had two priorities in life: a good sound system and a good bed, and being the person he was, he managed both. If he thought the latter was the best way to have a varied sex life, he was mistaken. Almost as soon as he started university, he fell in love and married when both he and his wife were nineteen. Their son Gregory arrived soon after. Ted remembered his first marriage with equal amounts of affection and regret: “We had a warm, loving, harmonious and stimulating relationship and we could talk endlessly about ourselves and what we wanted from each other. In a sense the depth of our relationship might have contributed to our break up. We were so young and had virtually no other experience of the opposite sex when we first married, and through all our discussions and our reading over the next few years, we thought our relationship was strong enough to extend our experience and cope with an open marriage. We were completely open with each other about who we were seeing. “In the end we realised the real heart of our own relationship was failing and it was becoming hollow. I remember vividly one day when

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my wife said we were ruining our marriage and suggesting we each give up our other partners and start again. To my great shame I refused. We had been married twelve years and that was the end of it. Predictably, neither of the other relationships lasted more than a few more weeks. It’s easy to say it from this distance, but I now believe it is impossible for two simultaneous relationships to be sustained.” For the next ten years Ted worked for Qantas, travelling first class all over the world preparing education kits and producing documentaries, living the high, corporate life. Looking back, he saw it as wasted time: “It was the best job in the world, but the social culture I was living in was ret- rograde and forgettable. Being their education officer preparing all these wonderful kits for schools, and travelling around presenting them gave me a lot of prestige, but I was drinking quite heavily and at a personal level, it was not a good time.” During this period he married again, and his beloved daughter Millie was born. He decided to leave Qantas, as he felt there were no further career opportunities for someone of his experience, and with a partner set up an education consultancy. But at a personal level he was unhappy and confused. Quite unexpectedly, his life was about to change: “A friend of mine, Judy Pinn, was a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney in the Social Ecology course, and she suggested I should do the course. It turned my life upside down. It focused my life on personal growth; it gave me a new direction and new friends and it was wonderfully stimulating. I had really lost my way and this course and all its interactions gave me a totally new attitude to life. I met people who are still amongst my greatest friends. “The Social Ecology course was residential and an action research process where you set your own agenda. In the first residential, it was very touchy-feely; massages, swimming and personal interest stuff. After the first three days, I realised it wasn’t the conventional education model where you are told what to do, and that you had to work out your own course of study. I thought: ‘I can’t do that — you have to tell me what I have to do.’ I was befuddled and went to Judy and said I can’t do this, I’m going home. She said, no don’t go, stay until the end of the week. So I gritted my teeth and stayed. Then they announced there would be a performance on the Thursday night. I thought what am I going to do? I

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went down to Vinnies and got myself up as a 1960s rocker with a guitar. I sang these old songs and it was a great success. All the girls crowded around in mock adulation, pulling my clothes off. That really gave me a boost, and when we farewelled each other at the end of the residential, I found it very emotional.” In 1989, soon after starting the Social Ecology course, Ted took a job at the Catholic Education Centre as manager of Promotions and Publicity. It turned out to be the happiest job of his life, and where he stayed until his retirement in 2007. For Ted, a life-long atheist, ‘working for the Pope’ suited his skills and temperament perfectly. His commitment to improved school education and his knowledge of educational marketing and publication were great assets for the Catholic Education Centre and he forged a close bond with his boss, Brother Kevin Canavan. No doubt the changes in his personal way of life brought about by Social Ecology helped; an even more profound change was wrought by meeting his future wife, Caroline. Ted met Caro in 1993 at a time of emotional loneliness for them both. Ten years earlier, her husband Rollo, also a close friend of mine, had died from a heart attack at the age of 42 while out riding. Three years later, her beloved seventeen year old only son Daniel, a budding artist of exceptional talent, fell to his death when he slipped at the top of a waterfall while bushwalking with friends at The Crags, a commu- nal farm shared with other families. Caro’s recovery from these terrible tragedies had been helped by intensive study and practice to become a successful therapist. Ted too, had been through the break up of his second marriage, and had suffered a classic mid life crisis. He had undertaken the Social Ecology course with the aim of seeking more depth and commitment in his relationships. It was a fortuitous time for them to meet; Caro had also done the Social Ecology course some years earlier and knew people in Ted’s circle of friends. She had developed great inner strength and resilience from her personal work. Ted quickly became aware of Caro’s exceptional qualities; they became friends and over time the friendship flowered into a love that subsequently fulfilled their lives in ways they never could have expected. In 1996, Caro and Ted were married at The Crags, a setting that

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could not have been more spectacular or dramatic. It is located in a wild and remote part of the Southern Highlands in NSW. Guests gathered around a huge split rock in the middle of a paddock directly beneath the brow of the huge sandstone cliffs (the crags) that ran across the farm. Before the marriage ceremony, everyone was asked to link hands in a slow, almost ritualised dance before the rock. Afterwards a band of brilliantly dressed Sudanese drummers struck up volleys of sound echoing against the sandstone crags, resounding through the whole valley. The horses, panicked by the sound of the drums, stampeded across the paddock under the crags, a spectacular climax that could not have been outdone if it had been staged. n One sunny Saturday morning nearly ten years ago, Ted and I were walking along Seven Mile Beach talking animatedly, when we turned around and saw that our wives, Caro and Sally, were several hundred metres behind us and lost in conversation, turning in towards each other and walking at a snail’s pace. We said to each other, why don’t men talk like that, relate to each other in that intimate way? Ted pounced on the notion and said we should form a men’s group and do just that: talk intimately about personal issues, problems and the things that really matter to each one of us. In the following weeks, we invited friends, and friends of friends, to join a men’s group; Men on the Edge was formed and continues today. There is no agenda or facilitator; we meet once a month and the host’s prerogative is to choose some music and start a conversation on a topic of his choice. The only limitation is that personal feelings and issues drive the conversation, not matters of the world. While a few men have left the group over the years and a few others have joined, it has become very important to all of us, and for different reasons for each of us. Ted’s death, as the founder of the group, has been a challenging and emotional experience for all the men, and has profoundly affected its dynamics. It will never be quite the same as it was. He was a stickler for upholding the purpose of the group: to talk intimately about our feelings, our apprehensions and the issues that were most important to each of us. If any of us strayed and started talking about the forthcoming election or who was going to win on Saturday,

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Ted would remind us of why we were there. Within the group, his deep commitment to meaningful relationship between us and with his other friends, was a talisman for us all. It would be quite wrong to think that intimate friendship, his great passion, was easy for Ted. Frequently, he reflected on aspects of his life he felt he had wasted, and on relationships that had not worked out. This sometimes appeared odd in a man who had so many friends and seemed so exuberant and confident. The key to this may have been his wariness of superficial acquaintance masquerading as friendship. His confidence with people was often a bluffness hiding an insecurity he felt until he had established a real and deep rapport with a person, the aim he always had in any relationship. If the feeling for the other person was compromised by insincerity or misunderstanding, he could be devastated, as it was contrary to his whole purpose in relationship. He was haunted by the failure of his first two marriages for which he blamed himself, though he remained on good terms with both former wives. He loved women and was very attractive to many of them. Liaisons often ended up as life-long friendships, but sometimes caused offence, resulting in much soul-searching on Ted’s part. The common factor in all these relationships, failed or long lasting, romantic or convivial, was strength of feeling. Ted wore his heart on his sleeve. He enjoyed nothing more than telling his friends about his feelings, and the more of his friends present, the better. One night when he was host at our men’s group, he proposed that each of us should talk about some aspect of our marriage or important relationship. As host, he offered to speak first and having married three times, said he had more to tell than anyone else. The story was breathtaking and went on almost the whole evening. Most men could not have been so uninhibited in revealing their intimate feelings. Equally, he loved hearing stories told by others, feeling it was a privilege or a gift to receive them. At parties or his soirées, he loved dressing up in the most outrageous costumes and giving a performance; it was a way of sending himself up and of expressing his affection towards his friends. The performances at the soirées tended to be variable, but what they lacked in refinement, was made up in enthusiasm. The main thing was that Ted could be relied

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upon to be the star turn, whether as a singer, a speechmaker, or a revue artist in drag. But these performances took risks and could go wrong. At a big birthday party for a good friend, where everyone said or sang something in tribute, Ted misjudged badly and his skit was unwittingly offensive. He was horrified when later he discovered he had erred. It was typical of him that he went to great lengths to admit his mistake and profusely apologise, as well as closely examining his own attitudes and motivation to try to understand where he had gone wrong. In our last conversation, Ted didn’t waste time talking about what he was going to miss or what he regretted, but there were two things in the front of his mind that pained him deeply. One was not being around for the happy times in his daughter Millie’s life. Millie and Ted understood and adored each other and her life is at an exciting stage. The other sadness was the loss of the long happy retirement Caro and he had planned. Ted, the man who put so much store on relationships, had at last found the one he had always searched for. The loss for Caro is equally painful. My loss of a dear friend is not shattering as it is for Caro or Millie. For me it is lost intimacy, affection and understanding. Ted was the one man to whom I could, and did, confide anything, whether it was a trivi- ality, frustration, deep feeling or a joke. I didn’t have to be careful what I said to Ted. It didn’t matter if what I said was foolish, casual or thought- less. In that sense it was conventionally male, quite unlike the female relationships we envied that day when we were walking together on the beach deciding to create a men’s group. For me it was like a friendship from childhood, though I had known him less than 30 years. It was like a school time friendship, when the sun always shined, and wandering home from school was like a slow journey where there were always little discoveries made, despite the familiarity of the road. N

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Acknowledgements

etween 2002 and 2004 I recorded a great many interviews with over 60 actors, singers, dancers, musicians, directors, critics and managers to create a sound archive for the Australian Elizabethan BTheatre Trust, entitled Performance – The First 50 years of The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. In its heyday, the Trust was the pioneer and virtually the only presenter of Australian professional performing arts. I am grateful to Judy White, who was then and continues to be a director of the Trust for inviting me to undertake that task. I have included extracts from some of those interviews in this book, notably in respect of Wendy Blacklock, Geoffrey Chard, Robert Gard, Dinah Shearing and the late John Shaw. I am particularly grateful to Lloyd Waddy and Warwick Ross, respectively Chairman and General Manager of the Trust, for allowing me to quote from those interviews. I acknowledge with gratitude the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for allowing me to quote from A Spirit of Play, David Malouf’s 1998 Boyer Lectures. The extracts from 12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf, published by Chatto & Windus are reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd, and the extract from his long essay On Experience is reproduced with permission from Melbourne University Press. I am grateful to the National Gallery of Victoria for its consent to reproduce short extracts from its catalogue for Rosemary Crumlin’s 1998 exhibition Beyond Belief, and to Wakefield Press for allowing me to quote a short passage from Anthony Steel’s memoir Painful in Daily Doses. Most of the conversations on which this book is based have been recorded since 2008. I am greatly indebted to all the people I interviewed for the frank and open responses they all gave me to my questions and their tolerance of my intrusiveness. In addition to allowing me access to their lives and ideas, I want to thank Tony Bilson for his incompa- rable hospitality; Bruce Beresford for lending me DVDs of two of his films I had not been able to see; Geoffrey Chard for giving me a unique and historic compilation of recordings from broadcasts of performances with his first wife, the immensely talented Marjorie Conley who died in her twenties; Robert Gard for giving me a compilation of his broad-

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casts including his remarkable assumption of Siegmund in Die Walküre; Greta Lanchbery for her good sense and hospitality over the years; Dinah Shearing for access to her wonderful scrapbooks and for lending me gorgeous photographs of herself with theatrical colleagues in the 1950s; and the late Ken Tribe for lending me many books and his wise counsel for over 30 years. This book could not have been written without the help, expertise and advice of many of my friends and family. My eldest son Guy designed the book and its website and I am deeply appreciative of his insights and design sense. My indefatigable editor Belinda Grieve took her family obligations very seriously indeed; her eagle eye for mistakes, unfortunate phrasing and unintended meaning was a revelation to me, as was her continuing belief in the the project. My brother-in-law Kim Askew and good friends and neighbours, Paolo Totaro and Ojārs Greste took most of the photos for no recompense other than the pleasure of meeting many interesting people. I offer my heartfelt thanks to many people who gave me valuable practical advice on various aspects of the writing, production and distribution of this book, including Peter Sculthorpe, Philippa Sandell, Graeme Russell, Eddie and Jane Coffey, Derek Hammond, Mark Muirhead, Peter Orlovich and my publicist Deb McInnes. Above all, I want to thank Judy White for her consistent and generous support and my wife Sally for her many suggestions and her faith in this book. Antony Jeffrey, August 2010

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inside back cover

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