act without words

Pre advertising, I had come back from Europe and Sue Parker, the talented and fearless performer director I had met on 'Captain Midnight,' asked me to be in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words. I read the opening stage direction. Something like 'he is thrown onstage backwards.'

I had done yoga at high school. After several terms I was discovered bunking off from dreaded sports and amazingly was asked what I would really like to do. Dance, I said, or Yoga. In the Yellow Pages my mother helped me find a woman who taught us the ancient vedic art of physical and spiritual harmony and health in black fishnet tights and leopard print leotard. But I hadn't done Yoga for a few years now, nor dance.


Standing on the rush grass matting tiles in my flat on Latrobe Terrace Brisbane, I bent over, tried to touch my toes and didn't get very far. I started to piece together some kind of routine from any dance and yoga exercises I could remember and that seemed relevant. I had no thought that I was 'warming up' or 'training'. We had no concept of 'improvising' or 'devising' or even 'playing'. We improvised in the most old-fashioned sense of the word as in we made do.


La Boite was in the round. That was never going to work for this piece. Nor thrust. We decided to play in one corner of the square. La Boite had no flies. Sue got an aluminium A-frame ladder and we had the wonderfully exuberant Sheldri Weston (art school) sitting at the top of it with the props that were delivered down to me by a fishing rod fitted with a butchers hook.


We had an all-female team. Our stage manager was Jo Hardy. One evening, rehearsing late in the theatre, we had a near mishap trying to strike the ladder. 'Hold it! ' said Sue. 'I've got it!' said Jo. 'Get a man!' shrieked Sheldri while I said with my trademark anxious conservatism: 'Put it back the way it was!'

We decided for whatever reason that I would be best dressed in black tights, a striped top (genuine sailor's matelot top - part of the spoils from the French boyfriend who rejected me) and fingerless white gloves. I had my first encounter with white face makeup. And my first struggle to control my lank hair on stage.


I have zero memory of the performances. The number of shows (one, three?), the quality, my sense of satisfaction, any accomplishment of anything like an emotional journey, post-show comments. Potentially more people were watching Sheldri than they were me.

at la boite/proper job

The last two chapters jump around in time a bit but there you go, such is memory.

I still had no idea what to do with my life when I returned from Europe. My friends from the 'Captain Midnight' production were at film school or art school. My proper jobs to date had been: a Saturday morning job during high school in a high street lingerie shop - before Victoria's Secret, don't get excited, I was selling comfy cotton sleeping shifts. Later my boyfriend got me a job working for a photography business, cleaning slides with toxic fluids. Back from Europe, my actor friends mentioned a casting agent. I got a commercial for a used car commercial. Yup. The director of the commercial was nice, an articulate man and not a mysogynist. Sorry to be so blunt about it but in Old Brisbane there was a lot of it about. Old Brisbane was a pretty scary place for females and people who didn't like football and beer. Even a decade later I saw a man in a florist shop - ah Brisbane has changed, I sighed to myself only to watch him ask , in hushed tones and a gesture for the bouquet to be fully encased in brown paper, as if it were a leg of ham. 
Bill, the commercials director spoke to me over a sandwich lunch on seating inside the used car dealership. We sat and spoke about Europe. He'd hated it but at least spoke about it . A rare thing. Normally just mentioning the continent would dry the conversation up. People perhaps felt defensive or felt you (I) were being arrogant. Or both.

Through my art school friends I drifted into artists modeling. A privilege to sit immobile and be with your thoughts for half-hours at a time. One student had been to my high school - a year or two below me. I'd spot him in the playground. He was beautiful and charismatic. Now he behaved with anarchy - painting in bold slathers over the sketches he was abandoning. He became a painter of witty, intriguing, colourful and distinctive works that fetched high prices. I don't think he ever liked me specially but I have him to thank for me getting my first proper job.

There have been a few key moments in my life that seemed quite accidental but which had huge impact:  English teacher David Sutton handing me a brochure. Gary Carsley pointing me to a job I didn't even know existed. Pauline Walsh meeting me by chance on the Kings Road and leading me to a whole career path. More about that later.


Gary said: there's a job going with that commercials director you did the advert with. I hadn't remembered even mentioning that to him. For a copywriter. I had no idea at all what that was. I went for an interview and was lucky enough to be taken on. I had a tiny offfice. I pored over the advertising awards books and was amazed by the screenings of British cinema and television commercials. The wit, the photography. For two and a half years I wrote commercials and I also provided free recording talent from time to time. And I got to direct a few commercials. Mostly starring inanimate objects such as shoes. But a couple with real people in them. I also got to experience Christmas parties with the receptionist being required to sit on the leading partner's knee. A board room with a pool table complete with a decoration of a woman's breast mounted on a small wooden plaque like an antelope's head. It has a bell in it and they would ring it when they won a round or pot the black or whatever marks a triumph on a game of billiards. Parties where the main voice talent of the day would fill a pint glass with ashtray contents and drink it for possibly money but I think just for the hell of it. Endless sexist racist and homophobic jokes in the office. My direct boss was an island of civilisation and calm. It was his partner to whom all these behaviours were I guess seen as essential to good Client relationships or simply droit de siegneur.  He used to call his secretary, a welsh woman named Susan, 'Chop'. Sue, Suey, Chop Suey. Chop. My name is Susan she would say to no avail.

But in the evenings the antidote. I cultivated my bohemian life. Vintage clothing, mattress on the floor. La Boite. 







 

what are you doing for the rest of your life

The best of the times with French boyfriend Eric were the long drives home from glamorous Indooroopilly to my slack suburb of Mount Gravatt in his Peugeot 505. There was a Jazz programme on the radio and a guy with a mellow voice would incant the names of the instrumentalists and that was of course Theolonious Monk....the  unmistakable sound of Stan getz on clarinet...... The slot was called Round Midnight. They had a sting of Bill Evans playing  'What are You doing for the Rest of Your Life' on a blurry, chime-y electric keyboard. So romantic and sophisticated. So NOT the world of my father lying on the floor in front of the TV watching the Black and White Minstrels - wrong in so many ways.

Well after the three years of the BA, what was I going to for for the rest of my life?

I didn't want to do the Honours year of my BA - there was no more Drama option. I would have to read Milton. Milton. Paradise Lost. What was that going to do for me? (sorry fans of Milton, no one had inspired me with all the reasons why that might be meaningful. Perhaps the meaningfulness actually unnerved me).

I never thought in terms of what I wanted to do - but what I didn't want to do. I was afraid of science, maths, the world of real work. I couldn't think of a single job I wanted to do. I didn't want to dance because I was told it was impossibly hard and lonely to be a prima ballerina and being in a chorus didn't seem to me to offer much chance of self-expression. I wanted to be the one doing that contraction, but doing it so that people were moved and amazed as I had been in that one fleeting moment when I was watching modern dance aged eight.

My mother proposed a European tour - really? God she was amazing. The phrase 'gap year' didn't exist in 1972 Australia. I went with my dear friend who was a professional actor. We sat in the front row and watched Ralph Richardson and Michael Gielgud in something - I remember Geilgud's character was given socks and sandals to wear. I was astonished that my friend fell asleep - these guys are Gods and you're the actor! I could see the quality of these wonderful performers but I didn't have the cultural context to really get the play. In the grand West End building, it's naturalistic staging seemed jarring in the wrong way and just old-fashioned.

By now I had had a taste of epic and ensemble theatre though I didn't know it was called that. The intimacy of La Boite's in-the-round or sometimes thrust space with it's necessarily non-naturalistic settings or skeletally naturalistic settings had woken up my taste for visual and imaginative work. Although I would not have been able to put that in a sentence for you at the time.

I went to the RSC and was shocked. Witty Elizabethan characters behaving like tidy middle class folk. Leafy gobos for the forest - but no atmosphere of a wooded space - and sincerely I could not hear the text. I could have understood the lack of vital physicality if the text were spellbinding in its excellence. Maybe I was unfortunate to see just one poor production.
I saw Terence Stamp - my first movie star onstage. The Lady from the Sea, I think - the hallmark Ibsen formula, after ten years the mysterious character spoken about so much in the first half appears! I was so ready to be astonished by his entrance. My mother had loved Stamp - his blue eyes! she would gasp. He was stunning on the huge cinema screen, but entering into the huge expanse of the old Round house in Chalk Farm, he was poor on his feet and had zero presence. 

My friend  and I diverged as planned, he went up to Scotland and I traveled on to Europe alone. I reveled in the paintings and sculpture I was seeing. I saw little theatre, though, usually too timid to go our at night. I did see an amazing Servant of Two Masters in Berlin. An unforgettable harlequin dressed in a suit like a broken down Frank Sinatra. 

I could weep now to think that I might have been at Le Coq school in those days. But I was an ignorant little Australian girl from a dumb suburb and a very nervy one at that. Signing up at a foreign school with a bunch of hungry strangers would have unhinged me, I think. Instead I stomped the streets of Paris every day. I haunted Pere Lachaise and looked at the graves of the dead greats. I took photographs trying to borrow some artistry from my ex-boyfriend Eric and thinking of Henri Cartier Bresson. With my 2 and a quarter square format Ricohmatic I took photographs capturing the quirky and the bleak and the kitsch, knowing that I would never really become any good with the camera.

After nine months I came back because my mother said that a friend was opening a musical he had written at La Boite.

I don't know what I am doing

I didn't know then and I don't know now. I remember doing a quiz in a women's magazine in my teens.

It was a career-finding tool. You answered all the questions such as do you want to work with people, do you like travel, do you like using your mind, your hands, whole body?The quiz results worked in a table form and in the box corresponding to using both imagination and body there was an empty space. There was no option for this choice of mine.
Mum had sent me to Ballet classes and Piano classes and Jazz dance classes and Art classes - all the things she had never had herself. I could weep now when I think of it. The battles she must have fought with my father to make it all happen. I'd like to go back in time and throttle my nine year old self who gave up the classes. To make more time to play Barbies with a girl called Susan something. For heaven's sake. My mother must have been in despair. I didn't know what privilege was, but perhaps I was also lonely.

Mum had taken me to the old stucco studded theatres of Brisbane a lot. I remember the pleasure and privilege of sitting on the edge of the seat ( the old fashioned flip-down seats. Mum told me to leave mine up and sit on that so I could see over he  heads of the grown ups.

A play about Elizabeth Browning with a live dog onstage. 

Modern Dance. Ah that - I remember a female dancer making a contraction and I was spellbound....oh the emotion to seemed to contain, ah what was the title of the piece, I suddenly wanted to know....what is the story, what is this woman going through, how wonderful a piece of dance that is telling me something emotional...and what a wonderful emotion - at the core of her body, it was compelling. All that ran through my small brain in a bare moment, trammeled up in a flash by disappointment. Because the gesture was fleeting. Just a dynamic to spin her into the next group of steps in a new tangent. Years later when I saw photographs of Martha Graham, there it was, that curve of the backbone - and that hollow space in front of the abdomen, the shape of absence. The grief of something lost or perhaps never found. But I never saw that promise of shape and emotion combined onstage until many years later.

My French boyfriend was widening my horizons - he had me reading Genet and Vian. Seriously, Genet - I was 17 years old. He (Eric, not Genet) had a curmudgeonly critical side which I thought only belonged to the old school Aussie men. We went and saw a Pinter play. I am always ready to be moved and excited when I go to the Theatre. Sometimes my aesthetic tastes go out the window, so strong is my impulse to be excited and swept up in the watching of a show.

Eric thought the Pinter play was pretentious although he didn't use that word. He found the pauses empty. I loved the mystery of it all. The blank emptiness of the space, the sofa and the characters sitting on it.

I saw Kopit's Indians at  La Boite - a wonderful dream-like play with a curious mix of humour and pathos, somewhere. Possibly in a wonderful little architect-designed theatre our English teacher had taken us to . Often architects get theatre design wrong or the building budget ruins their concept with compromise, but this was a little jewell.  La Boite, meaning The Box, was 'theatre in the round', in well, a square. The actors were able to enter from each of the four corners and sometimes via a ladder and a trap door, on a level with the back row and then enter through the aisle steps, or even use the aisles as playing spaces. My mother knew of the  Opera La Boheme but had never been permitted to study languages or even history ( her father said she had to do home economics) and she used to pronounce it La Boh-eet.

I've  just remembered that one May or August break ( August is a short break in Australia and not summertime), I signed up to do a Jazz dance class. I've done classes before, I said to myself, so I'm not a beginner, therefore I must be Intermediate. I had no one to tell me otherwise. A week of pain and humiliation. Actually not a full week. I dropped out. I was staying at Eric's sister's house and working my way through their record collection - Charles Aznavour! Like Piaf, his songs were vivid little movies, and the orchestration so emotional.

While still with Eric I signed on for some workshops at La Boite. We made sculptures with our bodies by running into the circle and striking a pose. One person would start and when the second person entered, their gesture had to be in relationship to that pose, then the first person would change. Each new person that entered, we all would notice the new feeling and possibility in the choice they had made and CHANGE! so the entire picture changed. We were urged to be interesting from every angle - the essential discipline of working in the round.

I've just remembered an exercise the other female teacher at the workshop when I was 17 taught. Standing in a circle, someone had to jump in and become something that would give the opportunity to build an entire picture, hopefully with everyone in the group ending up in the centre. I remember the two women teachers and Salvatore demonstrating. 'Fire!' one yelled and jumped into the circle writhing like flame. 'A hose!' (that was a gently mind blowing moment - ah, not the fireman, the hose), 'Water!' now, 'A fireman!'. Someone became a dog pissing on the fire 'Is this allowed? I probably jumped in as a pointing 'passerby...' with classic adolescent timidity and lack of chutzpah.

There was an audition at La Boite and I got the part - nothing much, nothing much at all. A Yukio Mishima play - a husband and his lover, I think, and much talk of drowned hydrangeas. I played the hysterical, nervy wife, but didn't actually have to play any of that as she was in bed throughout the play. 'In bed' under a sheet on two wooden cubes (classic bare stage design staple). My main acting challenge was to stay awake for my cue and my show stopping ( not that it was great  but I think it was at the end of the show, or before a blackout at least) moment to sit-up-and-scream. I think I wore a calico shift and my long lank blonde hair made me correctly wan.

At some point my french boyfriend ditched me. After much weeping and much wearing of his favourite shirt (out of some kind of rage of appropriation rather than sentiment), opportunity opened in a new way. Another audition at La Boite.
One day (years later) Eric told me this: he has been employed/volunteered into taking photographs of the UniQue (University of Queensland Theatre Company) 'Precious Moments' show. Where are those photographs now? He said that he watched me as I played (among other small roles) a bikini clad lion tamer (the way I recall it, my main focus in this segment was not to be too embarrassed) and that as he watched, he said to himself that he was never going to be able to put that look on my face. It astonished me that a/ he had been observing me so closely b/ that I had anything worth watching about me c/ that he couldn't see that I was just pushing out the performance so as not to fail d/ that he would expect to be able to get that reaction from me (he's a person, not an endeavour) or e/ that he would want it or need it. And I suppose I got a message that, buried under all that was, f/ something that I was enjoyed doing might well make me unviable as a love object.

Going back to a/ and b/. Most things in Brisbane happened with a stoic resignation. As a child disappointment was an old friend. My father's main aim for us children was for us to be invisible, silent and obedient. Timidity was pretty much my middle name. Yelling, railing, anxiety, bitterness and rancour were the unnamed principle actions and emotions for my dad. And my brother and I were encouraged to feel that we were the cause of all unhappiness or at least the salt in life's wound, which helped to prepare my jumpy disposition and an unhealthy self-consciousness in me.

Eric opened my world and also sometimes limited it. I'd say, 'let's go to that art exhibition', he would say 'yes', but not make a plan was given to understand that I would be somehow disloyal if I went on my own.

Somehow or other (My mum looking in the paper for a way to cheer up her rejected daughter?), I found out there was an audition at La Boite. 

The foyer. Normally a place where people in nice clothes stood to drink coffee and eat the amazing La Boite fruit cake slices. Now people are sitting on the hairy carpet tiles, leaning up against the walls. An intriguing girl and a stunning boy. Wow, this is a brave new world. Drama School but an new level. We were to work with a director from Sydney or was it melbourne..he had worked at The Pram Factory, which was in Melbourne. Exciting name. Pram Factory. New possibilities started to be created in my head.

I have zero recall of the audition process. What did he ask me to do? Lindzee Smith. Long black hair. Strong but very present and with you. I'd never met anyone like him. The word sincere seems limp.http://lindzeesmith.blogspot.com/ The next time the chosen cast came together, we sat (what privilege) scattered around in the seats of the La Boite auditiorium. Lindzee looked at each of using turn and called us by our names. Without reference to notes. He called us by our names. It was the first facilitation skill I learned. We were seen, we were present, we were going to do this thing together and he was our leader. So maybe the first good leader role model I'd ever seen, I now note.

Jack Hibberd's ensemble theatre style play, Captain Midnight, with music. We had two aboriginals who agreed to be in the cast. One of the two girls in the crochet blanket from the Drama School played one of the three aboriginal girls...they all work black leotards. Sounds naff, but it was done with as much care as possible. I remember a segment of the play she danced wildly in a spotlight, with her long bushy dark hair making trajectories in the space.

I had a solo song. A woman called Barbara - forgive me! time has erased her last name from my memory - was the MD. She taught me to sing 'Ah' instead of my first hard syllable 'I'. She and Lindzee told me 'hold your head up' and like a petulant moron I said, 'I am'. My posture was almost as poor as my confidence. That terrible way in which a 19 year old thinks they are a piece of shit and god's gift at exactly the same time. And that it's the director's job to get the performance out of them, not their own responsibility. Maybe not all 19 year olds, but certainly me.

I could probably sing you all the songs from the show. The ones I was in. I played the Premier's (?) wife the chauvinist white guy's wife. Again my long hair and ability to wear a long white cotton shift standing me in good stead. 

'I mope around this house all day, 

in search of something to do,

I feel just like a statue in clay, 

or a wingless cockatoo. 

I lounge all afternoon in bed, 

and bathe until my body melts, 

sometimes I wish, I wish I were dead...

there's one consolation though...the wealth!!'. 

I played one of a pack of french prostitutes in one scene - rainbow wig, heightened, cartoonish, camp - and other group roles with quick costume changes. Sue, the intruiging girl, had a larger role and she was playing a guy. I was amazed my her confidence and 'differentness'. I later found out that she had already directed Endgame. Fearless and focused, I found her. Not surrounded by a bunch of limits like me.

I do remember thinking that if I hadn't lost my boyfriend, I would not be able to do this. This. Theatre. It was something.

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).