uni

Okay that's the mawkish youth and childhood stuff out of the way. Now for the embarrassing student years. 

There's a writer called Andrew McGahan who wrote the book (later a movie) called Praise. In his detective novel Last Drinks he described 'Old Brisbane' - a disheartening place - very different to the green, latte-society it is now. Old Brisbane was unfriendly to outsiders, foreigners, basically anyone different.....

Most of the books I read came from the northern hemisphere. 'It was one of those fine May days', I read, and wondered what that possibly could mean.
Brisbane had just two seasons. Hot and PutyourCardiganon.


There was a sense of unreality about the life in Brisbane. It's not the real world. It's not sung about like London town or San Francisco. We are somehow substandard. And we don't speak properly.

I longed to hear foreign languages. My french boyfriend and his wonderful family introduced me to wine (I drank my first glass holding my nose) and music and furnishings that were not covered in vinyl or laminated. There were playful conversations around the table, and poems by Prevert being read out loud. Eric took me to see films by Antonioni, Visconti, Zabriski, everyone with an i-ending name and more. He had me reading Genet and Boris Vian.

At university I learned French (I had studied German up till then) and took French Drama. We did the Absurdists. Artaud, Adamov, Ionesco, Jarry. My major was Drama. There was a practical component. There was a hall half-way along Sir Fred Schonell Drive where we danced to Mars by Gustav Holtz, and impersonated tea bags being immersed in boiling water. Two teachers. Maggie Collins - an English woman in middle life. Black-framed glasses, black and white permed hair. She would lead the classes in a dress and panty hose, taking off her street shoes and slipping on little elasticated slippers that came in a see-thru carrying case called Jiffies. We did the Greeks.....Oedipus. 'It's not dread, it's DRE-E-E-E-E-A-A-A-A-A-D', she resonated from her core.

She had a fantastic teaching technique for Restoration. She dropped a plastic sack full of opaque panty hose on the floor. 'Men you will put these on your legs and roll your trousers up. Women you will bind your upper arms to your ribcage. Now walk!'

We read Endgame and were asked to write a short play in Beckettian style. 

I searched haberdashery stores for fabric samples for costumes I designed for Twelfth night. 

Despite the warm-ups and tea-bag improvs there were no productions. I signed up for a lunch-time production based on the works of William Blake. The project leader lost steam and the rehearsals stopped. I attended workshops led by another student who had us walking around the room 'like we were in warm chocolate'. Or improvising dialogue on chairs.

Then, lo and behold, the amazing Salvatore Marrucci was hired to direct a play called 'Precious Moments from the Family Album.' I think. There was a discussion and most people wanted it to be wild and anarchic and extreme.

We had a giant radio with a scrim that doubled up as a Punch and Judy theatre. There were mad scenes interspersed with random interruptions: men in drag sang Andrews sisters numbers: a liontamer cracked the whip at a deliberately crap-ly costumed lion and men in fishnets and cropped nun's habits (of course) ran roughshod through the audience. Salvatore did the best with us he could and he respected the company in that he took care to serve his brief.

We performed in the 'Cement Box' under the theatre I had seen Greg Rush in. In that theatre I once saw a French company who performed for an audience of four people. The show was good and I was impressed by the privilege of the experience (it helped me know in the future years that performing to a small audience, when it happened, was still a thing of worth and validity). A production of Much Ado was hilarious and the 'we're Australian and can't do it properly so it doesn't really matter how we do it' created a production that was bouncy, imaginative and vibrant. A production of the Bacchae was overinflated, a bit camp and un-intentionally grande guignol. 

In that same theatre, I saw Trevor Stuart (then Trevor Smith) later of Circus and Lumiere company perform Kaspar by Peter Handke. A tour de force. very exciting.

At the QTC I saw Eqqus and loved the horses on their high metal platforms. The more recent London production was not as well-realised in design.

And upstairs in the proper university theatre, I saw a quirky piece of music theatre called Childhead's Doll by Ralph Tyrrell.

seventeen, vacation drama school

I speak about this in my show MIDRIFF. The moment where I look around - we're outside for some reason, doing an exercise or having free time together in the open air. Two girls walking about wrapped in a crochet blanket. A boy in a pink shirt. I have an epiphany of sorts where I feel - 'at home'. Sounds trite I know.

We do movement with Salvatore Marrucci. He looks like an beautiful Incan with a superb profile, glorious skin and a shock of dark hair. We warm up our hips: 'hit the apple! hit the banana! hit the orange! griiiiiiiind the coffee!' He has an American accent and I've never seen anyone more exotically beautiful.

There are two female teachers on the course. One American and one English. We do exercises where we lie on the floor and visualise relaxation, passing an imaginary hoop over our body while someone chings hand cymbals - wow is this permitted? Is this work? One of the female teachers ridicules me when we read a section of text. I think I am brave because I step up. There's a podium and I stand with my toes over the edge, apparently, and wiggle them as I read. So many young people who begin theatre have no concept that the whole of their body is being seen, or that it matters. She tells the whole class loudly and emphatically at the end - 'that was all we saw, your toes wriggling!' Teachers, be kind. She could have stopped me and let me know kindly and started me again. Of course I didn't have the wit to think that then. Just a tad disappointed that, in a world where we were learning 'trust' exercises, the great teaching technique of ridicule was still employed.

She also taught that damned falling-like-a-plank 'trust' exercise. Giving trust is easy to do. That's when you follow the teacher's instruction. What is harder is preparing the group as a whole to be worthy of the trust of the others, to really look after each other...bend your knees, lower your centre of gravity, keep your eyes in soft focus, stay relaxed. Instead, someone got headbutted.

We study 'Camino Real'. They tell us it's Spanish for the royal road and I am afloat in its surreal world and pretty much blind to the themes. We have to do a makeup for a character. The boy in the pink shirt makes himself up as Don Quixote. I am surprised at how much he knows about shading and lines and why he chooses this character and not one closer to his age range. I think we are also working with The Rose Tattoo. Anyway I have chosen a young girl, a virgin. I think I do a white face like a mask. At the end I am disappointed at my choice and the result. I'm ashamed I haven't read the plays since. Certainly I didn't study them enough before I went. Auditionees, always read the play, study it! Apart from David Sutton's stretching our reading and creative writing, my schooling contained very little to make me proactive. 
(The life-saving teacher David Sutton first suggested I read The Year of the Flea, about Guerilla Warfare - not my choice of subject, but the book was slim. I got into the habit of using the library shelves and one book lead me to another. I read maybe most of Ibsen in this way. One collection of plays would lead me to the next. he also suggested we subscribe to Time magazine. I would flick through the news and end up mainly reading the literary section without realizing that was what I was doing.)

That's all I remember about the Drama course. Apart from one mad evening where a group of us made a small spontaneous parade around the campus, across the huge lawns chanting in nonsense. I remember being embarrassed and a little exhilarated, wishing I could jettison self-consciousness. Pleased to be 'in' something with others (a solitary childhood sniff sniff, very sad). I think once, in class time, we improvised sitting in a toboggan just like the song in Chorus Line. Once we did a long extended journey improvisation. Oh and one evening we sat around with a guy who could play Gloria on the guitar. G-L-O-R-I-A. The excitement of the riff, the satisfaction of the spelling out, the disappointment of not knowing the words of the verse.


There was a student who had stayed on in the student accommodation (no one called it halls). A French boy, aged 21. He said he could have gone to his sister's house for the holiday, but preferred to stay to meet 'interesting people' - ie the tutors, Jazz dancer Ronnie Arnold among them. He'd sit and meet them in the refec at meals. (I never found out or thought to care who was teaching the writing course, maybe it was held elsewhere). 

Somehow I got to meet Eric (disappointingly un-French name). He was studying Modern Political Ideologies (1968, Daniel Cohen Bendit, 'sous les pavés, la plage' etc) and was a photographer. His special basement room had a shower stall which he used as a dark room. He took photos of me one day just outside the halls - me in my pale green Indian shirt, long blonde hair held back by a bobby pin (kirby grip). When I walked into his little student den I saw them - newly out of the developing chemicals, glossy 8x10 prints showing my face (as large as I'd even seen it, barring in a mirror) plastered still-wet to the walls. 

We sat side by side and he opened a large book. The photographs of Henri Cartier Bresson. He made me aware of composition - 'What is it about this one? See, the priest's cassock matches the line of the roof'. Ah, not just content but form. A visual language. An assonance of images. My dad had had a darkroom when I was tiny. Just family snaps really.

And Eric listened to Mozart and Jazz. He said that Jazz is what Bach would be writing now if he were alive. 


At the end of the course, I was taken back to my dry southern suburb in Dad's big cream-coloured Valiant. I had met someone from the northern hemisphere. Someone who lived in one of the more established and pleasant suburbs of the sprawling urbanity of Brisbane. I wasn't dreaming of becoming an actress. I had no thought to create a life on stage. But I knew I wanted to be a creative person, I had seen things that were mysterious - not blank and stark un-knowables like the family secrets but mysterious in a different way, a good way. The world had opened its doors. Even if just a little.

my english teacher

I chose a state high school. My parents offered Girls Grammar - my brother, like my father, had gone to Boys Grammar but the idea terrified me. Their black stockings, white blouse and dark blue pleated shirts, the blue and black horizontally-striped ties, the stone buildings and the vast gloomy and pungent Fig trees which surrounded them reminded me of either St Trinians or English boarding schools (minus the giant Moreton Bay Figs of course) and something about that intimidated and horrified me. My friend was going to the state school and I felt comforted by that, though we didn't even end up in the same class after the first year. My academic side might have been better served at Grammar, probably, but 'you can't put old heads on young shoulders' as my father used to lament, grotesquely.  
Physically, Cav Road High was an aesthetic wasteland. A sprawling site of wood and concrete, graceless buildings surrounded by lots of bare soil and eroding escarpments. Two huge gaping ovals for - shudder - sports. Tin buildings called 'Temporary Block', and the just-asking-for-an-epithet, 'F' block. Ugly bottle-green tunic style school uniforms for the girls with camel-coloured tights. So far so familiar. Comfortingly low expectations.

Miss Cornish did her very best with our study of Macbeth. I loved looking at the Albrecht Dürer engraving in the notes and the arresting 'nave to the chaps' graphic-ness of the text and Porter's earthy ramblings.  We had to memorise the 'unsex me here' speech, an incongruity to recite it in front of Miss Cornish's permanent wave coiff.
In grade 10 a man walked into the classroom. Young, but wearing the old-style Australian male uniform of shirt, walkshorts and to-the-knee socks. David Sutton had us read a book a week. And we had to write a paragraph a day and an essay a week. It was creative writing but no one called it that.
Wordsworth. Coleridge. I wrote poems and Mr Sutton looked at them and encouraged me. He once to my shock read out my essay to the class saying - here's something I want you all to listen to, it's very good. 

One day he brought in a brochure for me. August residential courses (there's a week or two-week holiday in August, our winter). He was pointing out the writing course to me but again, the black and white pictures terrified me. People sitting talking, a hand on the page writing. Perhaps my father's fury at my inability do do things when I was very small had paid off. Maybe my parents' mockery of my brother's future career as a dustman had had some kind of impact. Perhaps Mr Weeks (incidentally, a lecher and quite probably an alcoholic) in primary school telling the whole class that we were stupid on a daily basis had something to to with it. Or perhaps at some level I believed them when they told us that although the girls were always smartest in our class, once we got to high-school that would all change and we wouldn't have a chance against the boys. Who knows what was so scary about sitting and writing in a room with a bunch of others and then having to speak about it?
I took the brochure home and turned the pages...there was another course on offer, a drama course. I don't even remember what the pictures showed and I don't know why it inspired me - perhaps it looked relaxed and fun.

So it's the eve of my 17th birthday. I am installed in a freezing (by Queensland terms) student room at the Queensland Uni. Only one thin blanket on the bed. The next morning, I survive brushing my teeth in the large communal bathroom with shower cubicles. Another girl asks me a question and unaccustomed to being spoken to in this activity, I swallow my toothpaste in order to answer her. I am afraid of seeming odd. Meanwhile she has a plastic bowl of muesli and is adding water from the tap to it, chatty and relaxed.

Actually, to back track a bit, Mr Sutton also took us to the theatre a lot. We saw shows at the Queensland Theatre Company. The thrill of dressing up to go into the centre of town. And a revue at the St Lucia University Theatre. (Uni seemed a very glamorous place). The now world-famous actor Geoffrey Rush was in the show which may have been called 'I Hear What You Say' and it had been organised for us to go back stage and speak to the actors. I spoke to Geoff Rush and said something inane. He was very kind in his response. Possibly Geoff had already been to Le Coq (I was not even to hear about Le Coq for another 10 years). They did a sketch about a football match that they froze, rewound and replayed in slow motion. Incredible and to me unimagined expertise in pursuit of something stupid. I was impressed. (The piece was no doubt making a satirical point that escaped me).