Carving in Snow

Today is the 90th birthday of La Boite Theatre Company, making it, perhaps, Australia’s oldest continuously running theatre company. I’m really looking forward to tonight’s big birthday bash. On this day in 1925, the first show was staged: a one-night season of A. A. Milne’s comedy The Dover Road at the Theatre Royal in Elizabeth Street. The following day The Brisbane Courier raved: “Nothing was left to chance. The cast was admirably chosen, and the large audience was held by the splendid acting f or two hours and three-quarters. The players, one and all, rose to the occasion, and satisfied the sceptics that the repertory movement in Brisbane has come to stay; it will grow from strength to strength; it will enlarge the communal mind, and prove a great and joyous power in our cultural life.”   I love that last stretch: “it will enlarge the communal mind and prove a great and joyous power in our cultural life.” It’s quite confronting to lead a theatre company, as I

Politics and the arts are family. Both are concerned with the affairs of the people. Whenever anyone questions an accepted reality, it becomes a political act – and many people do that most days, whether they think of themselves as artists or political or not. Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and vocal critic of his government, goes further: “Everything is art. Everything is politics." It’s easiest to see this in the extreme. The success of any revolution depends on a rupture with the past. In February this year, ISIS burned 100,000 books in the central library of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. UNESCO called it “one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Look at any revolution – French, Boshevik, Chinese and so on – and you’ll find a similar pattern. As Orwell reminded us, “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Wars against a people always go hand in han

Today I gave the Commencement Address at the graduation ceremony for the Creative Industries Faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, held in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Here is what I said: I really don’t know why I’m here.   I think you've been fooled into thinking I'd have something interesting to say.   But no. I’m a fraud.   Standing here, I remember my late friend Nick Enright. He was a great Australian theatre artist. As a playwright he gave us a few classics –  A Property of the Clan, Blackrock, Good Works  and an adaptation of Cloudstreet . As a librettist for musicals he gave us  The Boy from Oz  and  The Venetian Twins . As an acting teacher at NIDA he taught Mel Gibson and Judy Davis and a raft of other big names. He was loved, and a great mentor to many.   He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for George Miller’s film  Lorenzo’s Oil . Nick and I spent a lot of time together during this