So
the growth of that over really the first 4 or 5 years that I was there in
South Australia was amazing and really quite a privilege to be a part of,
but as I say, as quite a young man not necessarily steering but what .....
and where Australian political processes really win over most form of European
political processes is particularly British political processes is that there
is a very direct relationship between politics and action and the people and
politics. So you have a state government which is led by a Premier who is
the Prime Minister of the state and in South Australia at that time the Premier
was a love of the arts and became Arts Minister. In fact, the next three Premiers
of South Australia became Arts Minister at the same time and Don Dunston basically
staked the future of the state on regeneration through the arts and really
showed what could be done by investing in talent and investing in buildings
and investing in a whole range of things, continuing the Adelaide Festival
and making the Adelaide Festival a real powerhouse of artistic development
in Australia in the 70s and 80s and through into the 90s. So that was a particularly
wonderful period and my job at that stage when I first went there was taking
work to small outback communities as a sort of touring manager and assistant
manager of the arts council which is not like the funding body but is like
the touring body and we used to package up whatever came into those various
theatres productions from those things and take them around the village halls.
Well actually what we called the soldiers memorial halls of the back-blocks.
Soldier memorial halls were all built at the end of the First World War when
these country centres,
next
next
which in many cases only ended up with 2 or 3,000 people left in them had
ambitions to be small cities and so they all had 500 to a thousand seat soldiers'
memorial halls with large stages of quite extraordinary facilities in many
cases and we used to take symphony orchestras and whatever to rock bands I
think I did the first rock band tour, I think I did the first ..... initiated
the first circus tour to some of those places. So the whole touring network,
so I learnt to tour and I learnt the excitement of touring and the importance
of touring in quite a bizarre sort of way. Some of that touring was as a tour
manager and whatever in those days you would spend most of your day driving
the truck for long periods of time. You'd get to the town, you'd get into
your jeep, well you'd be in your jeans, you'd help unpack the truck, you'd
put up the sets, you'd probably light the show, you'd have a dinner jacket
in the back of the truck which you'd change into afterwards so that you could
do front house management. You'd then go back and there would be a big supper
for the cast and whatever provided by the country ladies of the particular
town and then off you'd go back to somebody's house for drinks and bits and
pieces until 1 or 2 in the morning and then you'd get up and do the whole
thing again tomorrow and you'd do that 6 days a week and you learn to be relatively
obsessive and you'd go these wonderful places where people were ..... you've
got a sense of how the arts really refreshed people and how important certain
aspects of the arts were when people lived in those towns at that time there
was only one television channel they had access to and in many cases they
didn't have access to it like a normal television channel, it was brought
to them via a plane and let on video. So in Alice Springs for instance back
in the 70s you couldn't see the news, you saw last night's news from Darwin
which was brought down to you by the plane and we forget sometimes how far
we've moved and so how important an event was in those days. So they were
very seminal and very important and you know you learnt all the things about
how to make sure that the local community owns and runs the event, how they
need to be talked to, how you have to demystify the whole thing because your
cheek by jowel with that community and you can't hide from them afterwards
because there isn't anywhere to hide because you're staying in their houses
in many cases because the local hotel you really wouldn't want to stay in
and you're better to stay in peoples houses. The lovely anecdote when I first
went there I came originally from a rural town in south of England and I got
back to those bloke's house, oh it must have been one o'clock in the morning
and we sat up and had a glass of port or two and a glass of red wine or whatever.
He was a farmer and he said to me
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