Carving in Snow

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 ...

Alan Seymour loved life like no one I have ever known. This made me particularly saddened by his passing, aged 87. I directed Sydney Theatre Company’s 2003 production of Alan’s groundbreaking play The One Day of the Year . The play, written in 1958 when Alan was 31, was famously rejected in 1960 by the very first Adelaide Festival as being too controversial. An amateur company produced the work in that city in the same year, and in Sydney the following year the first professional production earned Alan death threats. It is now one of the great cornerstones of the Australian theatre. Its nominal subject is ANZAC Day and the limits of Australian mateship and masculinity, but it’s a play, I think, that ranks with the best family dramas the world has. The war in Iraq was intensifying as we rehearsed, lending fresh frisson, but finally it was the human drama of father and son that affected people the most. To see Max Cullen as Alf and Nathaniel Dean as son Hughie, with Kris McQuade ...

It's probably true that one's early endeavours are more fondly remembered . M emory smoothes the edges of rough biograph y. One of my very first major productions was the first production of Nick Enright's Blackrock . Nick and I were friends - both born in Maitland (along with John Bell and Ruth Cracknell , weirdly) - and we spent some time developing this play at Sydney Theatre Company . Cate Blanchett acted Rache l in the early workshops, and the first cast included a fresh Joel Edgerton, Angela Punch McGregor, Simon Lyndon, Kym Wilson, Rebecca Smart, Paul Bishop, Dan Wyllie, Teo Gebert, Kristina Bidenko, John Walton and Julie Godfrey. It's a piece of which we were all very proud. Yesterday, a new project was launched called Reading Australia , initiated by the Copyright Agency. It aims to promote and expand knowledge of essential pieces of Australian writing. In July, the Australian Society of Authors’ (ASA) Council selected an initial 200 Aus...

Nicole Kidman placed her hand on my knee. I blushed. She said to relax and not to worry. We were in her trailer at Fox Studios during filming of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge , just shortly before Christmas 1999. Kim Williams, then head of Fox Studios, was also there, along with Angela Bowne SC. Who knew what would happen? Nicole put her money on the table, and asked Kim to match it. Kim immediately did, but then to his continuing credit offered to call David Leckie, then head of the Nine Network, asking that Nine match it too. As ever, Kim was true to his word. David happily agreed, and then a few days later the Australian Theatre for Young People had close to half a million dollars over three years. I recalled this moment at the 50th Anniversary gathering of ATYP at The Wharf in Sydney on 23 February. It was a moment that enabled transformation. I had been appointed Artistic Director of ATYP earlier that year and knew of the challenges facing a company that needed, and was inv...

Last week, a film crew landed in my living room. I was to be interviewed for a documentary called John and Tim , being made by Waterbyrd Filmz, about the lives of John Caleo and Timothy Conigrave. Conigrave wrote Holding the Man , a candid and magical memoir of his 15-year relationship with Caleo. I was being interviewed because I directed the theatrical adaptation of the book. In 2005, as Artistic Director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company, I commissioned  Tommy Murphy  to adapt the memoir. By November 2006 we had it onstage at the Stables Theatre. We remounted it six times, including at the Sydney Opera House, Belvoir and Melbourne Theatre Company, and most recently in 2010 in London's West End. There have bee n productions in San Francisco and Auckland, with others coming up. For such a particular Australian story, it's a remarkable trajectory. Conigrave was born in 1959 and went to Xavier College in Melbourne, an elite Jesuit school (also attended by Bill Shorten...