Burning Bright - Drama Teaching, Part Three

BURNING BRIGHT


Teaching Drama 1963 – 1996
 by

Frank McKone

PART THREE

INTERVAL TWO
In the Rehearsal Room 1974-75

Ginninderra High School, Canberra

The construction of Ginninderra High School, in the brand-new Canberra suburb of Holt (named after the Prime Minister who had drowned while swimming at a beach known for its dangerous rips) had not been completed when we, mainly escapees from the New South Wales system, began teaching in the only rooms with chalk-boards – in what became the Art and Industrial Arts wing.

The Australian Capital Territory was most certainly a new beginning.  Experienced teachers gambolled about, released from old habitual strictures.  After all, not only did we have our own brand-new ACT Schools Authority, entirely run by seconded teachers, and headed up by one of the most interesting education administrators in Australia – Chief Education Officer Hedley Beare – but administration decisions and curriculum development were devolved to the schools. 
[ http://guides.naa.gov.au/records-about-act/part2/chapter10/10.3.aspx ]

Each School Board was the local community’s representative policy committee; the Principal (Level 4) was the school’s local Executive Officer, managing the relationship between his or her Board and the CEO; Deputy Principals (more than one in some schools, at Level 3) and Level 2 Senior Teachers formed the management team with a range of responsibilities like Faculty Head, Curriculum Development, Student Welfare and so on.

On the surface, of course, this structure doesn’t look unusual.  But  the difference was that all of us, including Level 1 teachers, were responsible for taking up initiatives and putting them into practice, arguing for them to our own school boards, and proving their worth.  The top down control that I had experienced for a decade, going back to the Broken Hill barber’s sponsored sandshoe story, was replaced by a demand for bottom-up input.  The key figure in setting up this system, centred in the community, was Professor Phillip Hughes, who I came to know later, especially in the setting up of the Australian College of Educators’ annual Phillip Hughes Oration.

But that’s in Act Three, 2003.  Rehearsal during this 1974-75 interval included other kinds of bottoms-up.  Gambolling about, as I’ve termed it, could mean that a deputy principal and various others, according to who had a free period or two after lunch, might spend rather longer in the local golf club bar than was strictly appropriate.  Perhaps they were developing curriculum but, since I was not much of a drinker, I never stayed long enough to find out.

One of the negatives of this rehearsal period, growing as a contrast to the hierarchical control system of the past, but also reflecting the new culture which has become common to Australia since the 1980s, was a new form of individualism.  This was different from recognising and appreciating individuality, but came down to the idea – stated word for word by one Level 2 English Faculty head – that “we are all adults”, meaning that each teacher must look out for themselves, deal with any difficulties by themselves, not expect support from him or other Level 2s, and be competitive in seeking promotion by being ‘smart’ about how you present yourself. 

I had never been ‘smart’ in that sense (witness my first inspection) and never wished to be – and so my attempt to become a Level 2, assessed by an in-school committee, failed in 1975.

But much, especially to do with Drama, was my kind of success.  Rehearsal at The Big ‘G’ involved  creative and original experiments, from which I learnt, even when only some of my students seemed to gain very much.  Though I can feel guilty that I did not have enough structure in my methods, especially for Year 7s, there were a number of very worthwhile events, and a number of students and their parents who were very pleased to see experimental arts become a part of the school’s life in a new way that could not have happened under the previous NSW administration.  And that, after all, is why I was there.

It was also why Craig Forster was there, from Melbourne’s modern art scene.  His art room was exactly the kind of ‘mess’ that my drama room was.  Although he made quite effective stylised landscape paintings, his main claim to recognition was for large welded iron sculptures, abstract in form, but with intriguing titles.  I’m not sure now of the accuracy of my memory of something possibly called “Back to Bed”, which surely had some kind of sexual connotation.

He donated this work to the school when he returned to Victoria, but I noticed it had lost its position of prominence some time later.  His lasting legacy was the Big ‘G’, a design used as an insignia for the school, in which the circular perimeter of the letter became a short stylised arrow.  All this has since disappeared into the annals of history as Ginninderra High School, a heavy concrete block monstrosity, has been replaced by a modern light-style pre-school to Year 10, named Kingsford-Smith School after the famous Australian aviator.

My first success was simply to have Drama allocated the same time per week as other optional subjects, such as French, Latin, Geography, History, Commerce, Art, Music, PE (Physical Education), Home Science, Industrial Arts.  At last I became a Drama Teacher, who also taught English.  At last, too, the Finance Committee allocated an amount (very small) per Drama Student.  Though I was not a faculty head, I was responsible for the Drama account.  I could spend money on my own authority and, what’s more, I could receive money.  The school had an administrative office, with a bursar and staff, with whom I could deal directly.  I had gone on strike for this in NSW in 1968!  At last I saw myself, and was treated as a professional teacher.

My second success was to have a curriculum document for the GHS Drama Course accepted by the School Board and become an official document of the ACT Schools Authority.  My basic concept for the course was that Year 7 should be largely games and an introduction to role-play.  In Years 8, 9 and 10 (when the option courses settled into three-year programs) a chronological history would be taught, in combination with script work which would lead to performance in Year 10.

As you will discover shortly I taught only some Year 7 and 8 classes in this course in its first year of operation, 1975.

The main failure in that first year was that for Year 7s, Drama was no more than one among many ‘taster’ units, lasting one (of the three) terms.  (In this program, on the basis of a year’s study of Russian once a week in my Dip Ed year, 1962, for example, I offered a ‘taster’ unit of Russian.)  The result was that none of the Drama groups I took developed very far, but some individuals were encouraged to take up Drama later.

However, in 1975, two factors mitigated against solid development – both based on people’s misconceptions about the nature of Drama.

On each timetable line there were a number of the option courses available – but not all, of course.  Drama ended up being on the same line as Music and PE.  This kind of problem is inevitable, when the staff have to be allocated classes across compulsory subjects (English for me) as well as cover the Option classes.  However, some students (and their parents) saw Drama as less demanding than Music and less physically active than PE.  The result was a large proportion of my classes were not exactly the energetic and self-initiating types of people I needed to generate enthusiasm, let alone skills.

In addition, as many parents took advantage of the School Counsellor for advice about their children’s choices, I discovered that there was a view that doing drama would be good for children with ‘problems’ – that is, emotional problems.  So I also picked up some for whom I was expected to provide therapy!

Out of all this came four interesting pieces.  In addition to the timetabled Drama classes, I and other colleagues had also persuaded the Board to allow the traditional Thursday sports afternoon to become a wide-ranging ‘other options’ afternoon.  For one term I took a group bushwalking.  In 1975, a group of Year 8s (including the few Drama enthusiasts) presented Riders to the Sea by J M Synge, and I began to feel that I was getting back to the real drama of Wyong days.

Blown, literally, out of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy over Christmas 1974, Denis B, who had considerable theatre experience at Brown’s Mart, was appointed to GHS where we could offer him a Drama class.  We worked together on a structured workshop based on the famous Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment, and found to the students’ surprise, that they behaved as prisoners or as guards entirely according to the role they were randomly given – even though the walls of the cells in which they were incarcerated were entirely imaginary.  Though now I see this work as probably not suitable for Year 8, especially when neither of us had the proper gamut of warm-up, warm-down and reflection tools,  we managed, I think, not to damage anyone but certainly stirred up a great deal of thinking on our part as well as theirs about the roles played in officialdom.  Many of the students, of course, came from families in the Public Service or the Military, living in Canberra.

Despite problematic students, a group formed in Year 8 wanting to perform.  Amongst the physical activities that I had hoped would stir up the non-PE people were basic circus skills, so this group decided to put these into action by taking a small-scale circus performance to the nearby Holt Primary School – and at the same time encouraging children there to take Drama at high school. This began a tradition which I followed up post-Ginninderra with specific units on Children’s Drama in Years 11 and 12.

The other ‘happening’ was strongly influenced by the art work of Craig Forster.  But some background is needed about the Drama Room.  The main concrete block building, when it was completed, not only looked a monstrosity but behaved like one, too.  Apart from leaking torrents down the main stairwell every time Canberra had another of its unpredictable wild storms, I discovered a completely unexpected feature of the concrete blocks themselves.

The building was three storeys.  I was given a reasonably-sized room on the lowest floor towards the rear, next to the music room.  That, in itself was a problem.  Even after I had obtained donated carpet to lay on the cold linotile floor, expecting young teenagers to relax on the floor with a trumpet blasting out next door was a bit much, to say the least.

But I also found I needed to cover the walls with carpet as well as the floor, because of the echo effect.  When I researched this problem further (as I taught English on different floors), I found that there was no echo problem in the top floor rooms, some noticeable but not too disturbing in the middle floor rooms, but an impossible to speak or hear effect on the lowest of the low rooms – like Drama and Music.  It turned out the extra intensity in the reflection of sound was simply the result of the weight of the building creating a greater density in the bottom blocks, which formed all four walls of the Drama Room!

So doing what I might call standard-noise-level drama in the Drama Room was often not practicable.  Much of the time we spent outdoors or in other parts of the building.  This did nothing for consistency of development, but at least got some of the non-PE people on their feet and the non-Music people away from the Music Room.  As one of our Prime Ministers, Malcolm Fraser, famously said (a few years later when we teachers were on strike again), “life is not meant to be easy”.

One result was that the Drama Room became a kind of sculpture à la Craig Forster.  Strands of the carpet strips I had hung on the walls were pulled out and stretched across the room until a complex web filled the space.  Movement in the room became a skilled task of flexibility because each strand’s ‘owner’ had to be respected and it could not be shifted or broken without agreement.  The web grew over several weeks, and was finally completed when a human figure – in the form of a transparent model of the human body from the science department – was suspended in the very centre. 

I have no idea what genre of drama this activity constituted, but it drew the group together, involved everyone equally, and created something that was visually dramatic and meaningful.  Unfortunately, in those days before smart phones, no-one carried a camera around all the time, so I have no photo of The Web.

The next term, because now we wanted to free up the Drama Room to use it a bit more conventionally, the students discovered that the builders had left a stack of scaffolding on site.  I had my credentials as a one-time plasterer’s labourer (for my father, when I was completing university), and so they constructed a three-dimensional scaffolding web in a walkway from one part of the building to another.  We had a sympathetic principal in Alan Casimir, but even he, after a few days of everyone weaving their way through as they went from class to class, made us move The Web to a position where it became a voluntary activity rather than interrupting a necessary access route.  From ‘Life is not meant to be easy’ the theme moved on to ‘Enjoy the challenge’.

A disappointment in making the move to Canberra could have been that my involvement in amateur theatre – it would have been with Canberra Repertory Theatre – could not continue.  The workload in establishing a new school system was simply too much, especially when my next success was to be ‘early identified’ in 1975 to write the curriculum and gather the equipment and other resources for teaching Drama in the new Year 11/12 College system, starting the very next year, 1976!

In the event, the demands and the excitement of this project, which constitutes the 20 years of my Act Three, outweighed acting and directing outside the school environment. 

But one last amusing story from Ginninderra High School should be told, from an English class rather than Drama.  The teaching of Media was becoming seen as a more important element of teaching English (later to become another subject in its own right), and it wasn’t too difficult to respond to a Year 8 girl who was busy writing a film script.  In the Canberra setting, the centre of politics and the intelligence industry, it was not surprising that secret agents, murder and mayhem were core elements of this script.  “Of course,” demanded the class, “we must make the movie.”

I was aware of Pano Lionis, a student in Year 9, as an already quite competent camera man, and the next big question was ‘studio’ (which we didn’t have) or ‘on location’?  Maybe not for every scene, but there was only the one notable hotel where all the famous politicians went.  Surely the right location for a hotel room for secret negotiations with foreign intelligence, and some way up above ground level for the shot of someone leaving and someone else, equally secret, murdering the agent and escaping (since the police had not been made aware of the secret dealings).  Where else but The Lakeside?

The class on the whole were a cohesive lot.  So I began moving the furniture.  Would Principal Alan Casimir come to the party?  After all he had been an English teacher from way back (and, as it turned out much later, his son Jon Casimir made a considerable name for himself in media production, becoming ABC TV’s Head of Entertainment in 2014).  “Take the time you need,” was his response.  And so we did.  Five days out of school with the one and only trusty Super 8 camera from the school library.

Canberra had a reputation, based on it being a designed city (by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin) full of public servants, and therefore of having no heart.  But the Lakeside management were all enthusiasm for community involvement, as I was.

So there we were, four floors up, with great views down onto the open terrace where our murder could be shot, with Lake Burley Griffin beyond, in a standard but inevitably quite upmarket room which became our location and our studio for five days.

Rydges The Lakeside ca 1975

Rydges The Lakeside - a room with a view

I can’t imagine how the NSW Department would have dealt with me if I’d tried this at a hotel overlooking Hyde Park in Sydney.  In Canberra, no worries.

Except there’s always one – odd child out, I mean.  This was the young lad, not quite with the rest, not really following his confreres’ tale of murder and intrigue, who found something more interesting to do.  Like ride the elevators.

When I realised he had disappeared, I managed to arrange for someone to come and help supervise the filming – all that was needed, since the directing, camera, continuity, make-up, costumes and acting were all in the students’ control – and off I went searching.  The boy’s interest in the lifts had been passed on to me by observant members of the class.  But where do you start with two sets of lifts servicing 12 floors?

I chose one lift, rode it up, hoping the renegade would appear as it stopped on different floors.  But no luck.  So I took it down to the foyer, thinking that perhaps to wait there and watch both lifts might do the trick.  And the trick was – doors on lift 2 opened to reveal … previous Prime Minister John Gorton (the one who had replaced Harold Holt when he drowned) with his one-time secretary Ainslie Gotto, in tête à tête conversation as they politely ignored me standing there, staring!
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainsley_Gotto ]

“So the gossip was true,” flashed through my mind, before I focussed once again on my recalcitrant student.  Who, by now, had got bored with riding lifts and was back in the room on the fourth floor, looking absolutely innocent.

I had to edit the 96 takes on tiny Super 8 2-minute filmstock, physically cutting and glueing each in place over several days of the vacation to make up this 8 minute movie.  Life wasn’t meant to be easy in the days before a teacher could have access to an editing suite, and certainly before computerised digital video technology.  But life could be fascinating, nonetheless.

But interval in the Ginninderra High School rehearsal room was already merging into Act Three as Alanna Maclean and I started ACTADIE (the ACT Association for Drama in Education) to complement the recently formed EDA (Educational Drama Association) in NSW, and effectively worked two full-time jobs teaching in our respective high schools while researching drama curricula, writing the documents and obtaining the materials to begin teaching at the new Phillip College and Hawker College, respectively, after Christmas.

It was said, but obviously not loudly enough, that we (and all the other pre-identified teachers across all the subjects needed for setting up Senior Secondary Colleges) would receive some unspecified payment.  We worked on, of course, because we were committed not only to our specialist areas (Alanna’s and my commitment included camping out for a week in frosty conditions at the Showground with selected students attending Australia ’75, directed by the doyenne of Canberra Children’s Theatre, Carol Woodrow, leading a team of theatre teachers from NIDA and many other sources across Australia), but also to the idea of College – comprehensive schools for Years 11 and 12, which brought Canberra’s retention rate of young people attending school to Year 12 up to 96% in the forthcoming years.  The average across Australia in other States varied from well below 50% to around 66% at that time.

Once again, this was why I was there.  Now it was time to get on with the job.  Interval Two was over.

ACT THREE 

The Course of True Drama Never Did Run Smooth 1976-1996

Scene Locations:
            Hawker Community College:
            Drama Studio and Murranji Theatre

With excursions to The Jigsaw Company, INSEA, Australian National Playwrights’ Conference, Goulburn College of Advanced Education, National Association for Drama in Education (NADIE), Canberra Theatre Company, Wildwood Theatre Company.

Hawker College main entry
(refurbished since my departure in 1996)

Fortunately, dramatic structure for a book need not be as taut as for a play.  Shakespeare’s plays were generally cut into five acts by later editors (though I think he worked from scene to scene more like a modern movie, or, in Brecht’s eyes, like Bertolt Brecht); for a few centuries three acts became the norm; nowadays we are down to one interval if we are lucky, or a long wait for the amenities after 90 or 100 minutes.  I suppose in our hectic lives each activity needs to be short.  In any case, traditionally, the final act should be relatively shorter than the development of the story leading up to it.

My teaching life didn’t properly conform to fiction or the unity of time and place.  My Act Three, in time, is twice as long as Acts One and Two combined, and far more complex.  So, as Bernard Shaw did in St Joan, I’ll stick a little Epilogue at the end to finish off, even if everyone thinks it’s not really necessary (as most directors treat St Joan – the Epilogue, I mean).

The story will also need to be more strictly chronological.  This is because changes as they came, one after another, each marked a development for me in practice and understanding.

Where were we, that is Alanna Maclean and I with some help from Denis B, going to begin in 1975?  Other Australian States had secondary schools covering Years 7 to 12 or Year 8 to 12, except Tasmania.  The population on that offshore island was small and more contained, in that sense more like the ACT.  The Tasmanian school population, though, was strictly divided: the great majority had left by Year 10, while only a small proportion opted to continue to matriculation for university.  To cater specifically for this special academic group, Tasmania had set up matriculation colleges for Years 11 and 12.  Rosny College was studied in particular by the ACT as a successful example.  As in other States, Technical and Further Education (TAFE) was a separate system outside the schools.

Drama, as ever, did not quite fit into this scheme.  But fortunately for us, nor did the ACT school population which already had the opposite proportions to Tasmania, with around 70% completing Year 12 in the old 7-12 NSW system.

Teaching Drama would cater for a range of people from those seeking employment in all sorts of areas where the social skills they could learn in Drama would be important, to those who might aim for a career in performing, stage managing, designing or backstage technical areas (which on the surface could look like TAFE rather than school in other States), or to those who would want to matriculate while aiming to audition, say, for NIDA, or to those who would like to take up tertiary studies in theatre, English, history, and other related areas like linguistics and languages, or with an interest in sociology and anthropology.  Even potential doctors and lawyers should find it useful to learn skills and attitudes from Drama to complement their obsessive, but necessary, abilities in memory for details – of physics and chemistry, or of legal precedent and implications.  Only in mathematics did Drama not seem to have a proper place!

We needed comprehensive colleges just for Drama!  And the Territory needed comprehensive colleges to give all our young people the best opportunity for an education to suit their diverse range of needs.  How wonderful!  Drama fitted in!

So the ACT Schools Authority made the momentous decision to take High Schools up to Year 10 (at which point the legal leaving age would have been passed), and then to have students move to new buildings, with their own staff and new curriculum, for College.  How lucky we were that the short-lived Labor Federal government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had pushed through new education funding to the States, and could hardly overlook its own Capital Territory, as in November this very same year the infamous Dismissal of 1975 was engineered by the conservative Opposition led by Malcolm Fraser, and completed by collusion with the Governor-General.

For us, going into the Colleges, at least it meant that, financially speaking, life was a little less difficult, if not entirely easy.  Unfortunately for the High Schools, which lost their senior students and many experienced staff, and never gained the extra funding they needed to establish themselves as new and vibrant entities, life became considerably more difficult and continued to be so throughout my last 20 years’ teaching.

The next question for us was, What curriculum?  No-one in Australia had laid out a drama course for senior secondary students.  As our system grew its nerve endings, seeking out connections that would make it possible to teach for general education and for matriculation within the same school, we had to find something that we could adapt for this purpose.  Fortunately, among those many Australians who had gone to teach in Canada in the mid-sixties (like Tom Deamer when I took over his production of The Beggars’ Opera in 1966), Alan Youngson had returned just at the right time for us.  What’s more he was teaching at Holt Primary School where my Ginninderra High School group were cavorting in their circus.  What’s more again he had a strong interest in educational drama and joined ACTADIE with us.

“Ontario” was all he needed to say.  The Canadians had beaten us to it by years and, what’s more, the level at which their students completed matriculation and went to a proper university was much more like what was expected of our students going directly from school into full-scale degree courses, such as Alanna and I had done, rather than the Liberal Arts type of college in the US.

Time being of the essence, we began here.  But as we had school-based curriculum available, we were at liberty to diverge according to what our respective colleges would be happy with.

There were four Colleges to open in 1976.  Dickson and Narrabundah High Schools were converted into colleges, sending their junior years to Watson and Woden.  Building was going on apace to convert old schools and create new ones, and it took several years before the government school system settled on seven colleges (with the much later addition of Gunghalin).  Staff at schools which converted had the choice of staying where they were, or applying to move to another converted or new school, or, of course, they may have stayed with the NSW system and been transferred to somewhere in that State.

I felt lucky, and I think Alanna did too, that we were beginning from the beginning with new buildings and a newly formed staff.  We did not have to face established traditions – just negotiations with people all open to negotiation because we were all equally new to the task.  I felt even more professional and responsible than I had starting Ginninderra High, which of necessity had had to begin by small adaptations to the old NSW ideas, and still ran the NSW Higher School Certificate for students who would complete Year 12 in 1976 (since the first ACT Year 12 Certificate would be in 1977). But here we come, Ontario!

As it turned out later, we had made a sensible choice without knowing it. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, OISE, by this time was probably the most original in its work on educational drama, at least in the English speaking school systems, headed up by Richard Courtney whose work RePlay became part of my thinking as the 1970s progressed.  However, the senior secondary course we obtained through Alan Youngson’s good offices, was fairly conservative in approach, with academic study and performance work to be assessed.

Through my reading I found myself influenced a great deal by the ideas of British educator Brian Way, which were often characterised as the ‘Play Way’ or more formally as ‘Creative Drama’.  Though my attempts to go in this direction at Ginninderra High were hardly great signals of success, I found it hard – for educational purposes – to escape the notion that learning through play was a core process in all learning, even as adults.  To teach drama – or play making – without playing seemed to be to invite an inevitable conflict of purpose.  But I still could not articulate process or method clearly at this time.  It was just that 1K would not go away.  Nor Margaret Barr.

We also had to work into our course-writing a program that would fit in with the timetabling structure which, being school-based, might not be the same in each college.  Decisions were made at the Chief Education Officer level as well as by the pre-identified staff which included some common elements.  The first of these was that the colleges would operate from 9am to 4pm.

By comparing with the teaching time generally given to subjects in the Higher School Certificate in NSW over the whole school year (and allowing for the fact that we would have internal continual assessment instead of externally conducted annual exams; and that our teaching staff would have to do the processing of students’ internal results and calculating of standardised scores and grades for their public matriculation and Year 12 results), it was decided that a standard full unit of work in a course would work out at 44 hours: 4 hours per week for 11 weeks, which allowed for our three terms of 12 weeks each, with time for assessment in Week 12 and for final calculations at the end of the year).

With this news in mind, discussions between the Hawker Principal, John Edmunds, our Deputy Principal, Lance Chapman, and staff, resulted in Drama being offered in three ways: ‘T’, ‘A’ and ‘R’, just like all other courses.  In 1976, this was for Year 11 only, since there would be no Year 12 until 1977.

A full unit could be taken as Drama T (meaning Tertiary Entrance) and counted as a core unit towards university matriculation.  Or a full unit could be taken as Drama A (meaning Accredited) and counted towards a Year 12 Certificate, in combination with A or T units in a range of subjects.

A Major consisted of at least 5 full units in a course.  A Minor consisted of at least 3 full units.

You could also take half units, in Drama and in a range of other activities which might or might not be part of or related to other courses.  These were classed as R (Registered) meaning they were included in one’s total package but were not graded or scored beyond P (Pass) or F (meaning not completed).

I won’t go into the next phase of how to make up a package for each of the three circumstances: matriculation; for just a Year 12 Certificate; and (in later times) for a Year 11 Record for students who didn’t last the distance.  But you can imagine how this system provided an enormous opportunity for students to mix and match units over the six terms, including, as people soon realised, that you could make up Double Majors, and Major Minors to concentrate on special areas of interest.  No subjects were compulsory in the ACT.  To some people this seemed like bottoms-up gone mad.

But for me it meant that Drama was now totally equal – not just a bit equal as it was with the options at Ginninderra High, but now equal with knobs on.  A Drama Major was now as good as an English Major or a Maths Major.  Heaven on a stick!

One last series of issues about timetabling helped me make a decision about the form the Drama course would take when adapted from the Ontario material.  Would every lesson in every subject be a standard one hour long?  Would there be the old school bell to ring the changes?  When would morning tea take place? And lunch?  And when would R units happen?

You would not believe the length of time it took in so many meetings of the pre-identified staff to resolve all this before the year 1976 could begin.  It finally came down to plans A (less than half support), B (more than 75% support) or C (with no specified time for morning tea, almost no support).  So the Principal duly announced Plan C – and with no school bell.

His logic was hourly neatness – every lesson started on the hour – and making double lessons easily timetabled.  Hooray for doubles from me and several other subjects with practical components.  Boos for staff cohesiveness and social interaction if we didn’t see each other regularly at morning tea.

So 1976 began in Drama T with one hour on one day for formal teaching, mainly on history of theatre, one hour on another day for research, essay writing and working individually with me as advisor and editor, and a two hour session from 10am to noon on a third day for what I called Creative Workshop.

There were only 14 students, all enrolled in Drama T.  So wasn’t life easy?

Thursday from 2pm to 4pm was set aside for Registered half units, so all of my drama teaching was now timetabled intra-curricular, with Stage Production each Thursday.  Woohoooo!  Here we go.  The real Act Three begins… Now!

Ah - but wait on a bit.  Sorry to get you excited, but there’s a building to be constructed first.  What would be in it for Drama?  I went to have a look, well before the end of 1975.

There would be a theatre!  A real one.  I could see the concrete form of the raked auditorium, shaping a little wider as the floor rose away from the stage area, then with parallel sides from halfway up.  What did this mean?  And the stage area seemed very deep, but it was just the concrete base.  How could I find out more?

Buildings and Construction, of course, was a quite different administrative body from the teaching side of the Schools Authority.  The architect, Paul Platt, was from the Commonwealth Department of Works.  I went onto the site, discovered a temporary office building, knocked on the door and asked if I could talk to anyone about the plans.  Paul politely explained that I was not supposed to enter the site or talk to him – but he would show me the plans anyway.  Another little spark of Canberra’s heart.

Remember those years ago, at Wyong High School, I more or less commandeered the GA suite so I could open up walls and move the furniture for my first dreadful experiment in classroom drama?  Paul was limited by having to provide only the same amount of space as was the standard for a high school in New South Wales.  But NSW schools had to cater for the extreme slow learner General Activity classes, while there was no need for this special provision in our new colleges.

So he profusely apologised for not being able to add a flytower above our stage, because the nearly 300 seat theatre with its stage, large wing storage area, male and female dressing rooms and Green Room behind the rear wall of the stage had taken up all the space allowed for a GA Suite – three dimensional space, he explained.

“I’ll cope,” I said.  “But I notice that the proportions of the proscenium arch are not quite right.  It’s too low for its width, which makes a letterbox shape which distorts the image of the actors – remembering that my actors are going to be 16 to 19 and adult size.  There seems to be a strip across the top of the proscenium. Which cuts the height by about a metre or two.  What’s that for?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve put the ceiling at 4½ metres to allow for standard 12ft flats and lighting bars, and that strip is to hide the top of the flats and the bars.”

“Yes, but,” I said, “we’ll be doing Brecht – in fact I’m planning for The Threepenny Opera in Term 3 next year.  All that technical stuff should be exposed.  Does that strip of wall have to be there?”

“Well, no,” he said.  “It’s not weight bearing.  In fact it would save me a little bit of money if we leave it out.”

“Done,” I said.

It would have been greedy, of course, to ask for the whole timber stage to be left out, instead of being the standard metre high above the front row of seating, but I knew that couldn’t be done at this late stage because the backstage concrete flooring was already in at stage height.  In the next new college built with a theatre included, at Erindale at the opposite end of Canberra, the seating was given a steeper rake, the stage kept at front row floor level – and it has a fly tower.  The extra cost was covered by Erindale College being combined with general daytime community use of the library, gymnasium and theatre.  Hawker College was just a school.

But there was more good news to come.  Platt was an acoustics engineer.  That’s why the shape of the walls in the auditorium were not the standard rectangle, and why he lined the concrete block walls with very attractive narrow timber strips spaced a few centimetres apart (echoes of the carpet strips on the walls I’d used at Ginninderra), and why the ceiling had an angled reflection piece above the stage.

For 20 years I thanked Paul Platt for never having to force a young voice.  A whisper on stage could be heard evenly throughout the theatre.  A rock band never sounded distorted.  One year, Yamaha used the Murranji Theatre for its professional sales demonstration of grand, upright and electronic pianos.

There were still issues of lighting and sound equipment, and stage dressing to be dealt with, but these were operational matters.  The architecture was beyond anything I could have dreamt of in a government school.

Furthermore, placed centrally on a lower level of the building, was a Drama Studio.  Its ceiling was standard classroom height, but with concrete beams supporting the floor above.  Between these there was room to install lighting bars.  The main area was 10 metres square, carpeted in a pleasant dark-green, with a 3 metre square area off to the side near the double entrance doors.  This was linotiled supposedly as a potential wet area, although there was no plumbing installed.  It became the students’ ‘cloakroom’ to keep bags out of the activity space, and acquired a small operating desk for a dimmer rack and sound board.  A door from this area led into a small room which on the plan was to be a tutorial room, with another entrance, not necessarily only for Drama.  But of course, before too long, this became the drama store room for sets and props.

Now we really can begin the story of Drama at Hawker College, 1976 to 1996.

It’s a story of constant change, as much from within my practice and the comings and goings of my colleagues, as from College wide or System wide pressures.  It begins with the reaction of those first 14 students to the Ontario-derived course structure.  And how they responded to the building itself.

They thought the Drama Room was too ordinary and too small a space for them.  As soon as they saw the Theatre, there was no holding them back.  This was their space, their home, their place of proper status.  It was not about performance but the place where they could experiment and experience the dark, which they loved.  The stage was for moving expansively on; the auditorium was for exploring.

I set up my desk on prompt side in the wings and lived there, only occasionally visiting my other desk in the English staffroom upstairs and across the college.  Drama was only one, small, class against my three English classes, but the theatre was my home as it was for the group.  The college day allowed both students and teachers hour-long ‘free’ periods, and it would be easy to guess where the drama group spent most of their time even if I was busy somewhere else.

It wasn’t all in the dark.  The biobox behind the audience had projection capabilities (though not yet the projectors) and was wired up via 10 fixed dimmer controls, each to one pattern 23 or fresnel or floodlight hung on a bar just behind the proscenium strip of wall that I had had Paul Platt leave out, with (I think I remember) 6 outlets, with the other four on a bar across mid-stage meant to light upstage and a cyclorama.  There was no lighting for the apron, and no cyclorama – just a brick wall painted white.  In other words, despite having the imagination to allow the construction of a real theatre, this equipment was no real advance on what I had had in the multipurpose school hall at Broken Hill High in 1963, except that the dimmer controls were 10 very tiny levers protruding from a small square box, instead of the ancient huge rheostats of earlier days.  And I couldn’t even re-plug leads in this biobox.  My 13 pages of cues for Pirates of Penzance would be an impossibility here.

It took me some five years to raise the money to fit proper Strand dimmer racks and operating board (which I had to cable very unprofessionally from prompt side for the first productions), and to hang legs and borders on stage, as well as replace a horrible red stage curtain (which was fortunately not fireproof) with a deep blue – fireproof – electrically operated curtain.

The theatre wasn’t all at my command, of course, since its 300 capacity was meant to make it the school’s assembly hall.  In its first year, with just 300 Year 11 students, this worked fine.  By the second year it coped by having separate assemblies for Years 11 and 12, but as the numbers climbed to 800 and to a maximum over 900 in later years, assemblies were moved to the cafeteria where that number could just sit on the floor.  Even in Broken Hill and in my alma mater North Sydney Boys’ High in the 1950s, 1000 could be seated in the hall.  Education funding for schools in Australia was always highly haphazard, with many schools having assemblies outdoors.  And I’m still not sure that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis entirely fixed the problem despite the Federal Government pumping up the economy by giving money for the States to build halls and libraries for schools.

The big development for the Drama course came from the students.  An improvisation would begin in the Creative Workshop, but would not be allowed to die after its allotted two hours.  It wasn’t long before I had to accept that history, research and essay writing were not going to be done by these students in the other single hour sessions.  After all, for the first time in their schooling, they had free periods to do that sort of thing, and they were not going to leave the theatre dark without them playing in it.  If they needed help with the academic side, I was there in my free periods and lunchtime.  In effect they said – or rather did, whatever I thought about it – let’s set aside learning about drama for non-drama time.  In drama time, we do drama.

To give a flavour of the drama that they created, I’ll describe three themes which I found essential to my future understanding and guided me with less self-guided groups than this one.  None of this work was done for performance to an outside audience.  In my later research I realised how similar this stage of development was to what Erwin Piscator had done in Germany in the 1920s, and to what happened in the Group Theatre under Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan during the 1930s in New York.

On the stage, my group loved to dance.  But from their first moves they were not interested in routine or imitative steps: Creative Workshop meant creating movement.  I had picked up a tiny smattering of the work of Rudolph Laban and introduced them to the idea of interweaving movement within the group and finding some kind of pattern, shape or structure.  All very abstract, but they took to exploring the possibilities and finally created an hour-long dance which went through small scale movements by individuals and ended with a total group ‘construction’ which was held as if for a photographer to record the meaning.  They talked of the meaning not in terms of describing the shape as an image which represented anything from the outside world, but as a completed experience in doing the action with which they felt satisfied.

The lesson for me was how I could start them off with a minimal stimulus which they would want to develop into a drama, just for their own self-satisfaction.  This thought became a key to much of my work.  Later I also learned that for me to proffer too much would destroy the feeling that the students needed within themselves to create a drama.

Another device was to use mental imagery, but with a particular purpose.  With a large, very dim if not quite dark, theatre to play in, I was concerned that the space might be too amorphous, or even that people might become competitive about spaces.  Some of my thinking came from watching them when a ‘workshop’, which had now become part of their language, seemed to lose direction or structure.  I thought each person needed their own space, perhaps to retreat to if needed.

For this, I asked them to explore the whole space of the theatre and find a particular spot where they felt warm and comfortable.  As they settled themselves in their chosen places, I asked them to imagine this place as their very own personal home.  Not the actual house they live in with their relatives, but just their own place, and to see there whatever there was to see – maybe wall hangings, curtains, coloured lighting, items that they loved: anything they wanted to see in their personal home.

This could have been more strictly a drama exercise, which I learnt to use often in workshop situations and in rehearsal work as I developed my understanding and skill, but at this time I was only able to see my way into the drama, rather than knowing how to come out again.  I was really only just beginning to follow up the experience of the three girls at Wyong playing Kattrin, Mary Warren, and Lavinia.

Since I wanted my group now to ‘own’ the theatre, I left them to their imaginations.  Some did describe to the rest of us what they saw and how they felt about their ‘home’.  Some kept this to themselves.  But from the point of view of taking risks in drama, most – and some in particular – found themselves wedded to that place in that theatre for the rest of their two years in college.  Again, later, as I read more of Lee Strasberg’s American Method version of psychological internalisation derived from Stanislavsky, I learnt to set the drama with limits to help protect students from going in but not coming out.

Now that a collection of Elia Kazan’s letters has been published, I see that he had very great concerns about Lee Strasberg’s approach from the 1960s on: His work seemed to go deeper and more obsessively into the actor’s concern with his own experience and resulted in certain arcane techniques which came close to self-hypnosis, techniques which during rehearsals often held the director at arm’s length.  One result was that some of our actors ‘talked a good game’ but often didn’t produce anything more than a glassy-eyed psychological posturing.  (The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan eds. Albert J Devlin and Marlene J Devlin, 2014. Alfred A Knopf, NY)

Somehow I had always felt there was something very wrong with Strasberg’s treatment of people like Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and James Dean.  But it was in 1977 that a student brought me to clearer thinking about this kind of issue.

But before that, the last example from this first group is about the content that I found over the years to be common to many group improvisation workshops: sacrificial death.

In this particular case, though there was no apparent religious theme or motive behind individuals’ improvised relationships, and characters were based not on obvious stories but seemed to arise organically (if I can use that word without too much emphasis), one character gradually became separate from the group, taking on a status that placed him above others, until he physically climbed on stage blocks to be above others.  At first there was acceptance of him in that position, and perhaps the drama could have ended with that tableau.  Time for the session was coming to an end, but that sense of satisfaction and completion had not been achieved.  They worked on into lunchtime until the ‘higher’ figure had been brought down from his pedestal and laid to rest as if in a grave among them.  Only then could the workshop end: the drama was complete – not with destruction and violence but with the need for the ‘higher’ figure to sacrifice his position, to be remembered, even mourned, but no longer to be placed above and beyond others.

I have said ‘him’ because it was a boy who took this role in that first ‘sacrifice’ workshop. Talk afterwards recognised the story of a Christ-like figure.  Since that time there have been many group improvisations with a similar kind of story, which perhaps says something about the universal issue of the place of the individual in society; and of the human tendency to worship.  And the ‘higher’ figure was as often a girl as a boy over the years.

I was struck by how intense and committed this first group was, and oddly how they were like – at their level and stage in life – my dear old 1K, when given the right and the power to entertain me.

And that year, with people from this group and others, including some staff, we did do The Threepenny Opera as a joint production of Drama, Dance – directed by Carlene Winch, and Music – directed  by Sue Vidler.

My family had taken advantage of the availability of my long service leave after 10 years, the Commonwealth fortunately counting in all my New South Wales teaching time, for our first trip to Europe.  In London I obtained permission from the Bertolt Brecht Institution (today, the International Brecht Society, IBS).  I was told I had to use the Hugh MacDiarmid translation, but I cheated a little to use Eric Bentley’s translation of some songs which were easier to teach to the singers.

It must also be said that this production added something to my reputation in the eyes of John Edmunds.  He called up Carlene, Sue and myself to complain about the influence we were having on students, since we had cast an attractive young woman English teacher as a prostitute (as well as having girl students in such roles).  Sue Vidler was no pushover in this ‘discussion’ – she’d just successfully taught Year 11 students to play and sing Kurt Weill – and she wasn’t going to take John’s views as the true gospel (though it must be said that pressure from this principal persuaded her later to leave teaching music to take up Outdoor Education: she was a bushwalker I had known from my young days in the very club where my wife and I had met).

In fact the scene which was probably the most telling against the Principal is the final song in Act Two: "What Keeps a Man Alive?".  The whole cast sing about the inequity of mankind, and Carlene Winch and I turned this into a movement piece where in unison the cast, starting from upstage, came more and more menacingly downstage to the very edge of the apron, gesticulating at first generally at the audience and finally pointing very obviously at the seats which contained those in the highest positions of authority as they sang

You gentlemen, don’t you be taken in
What keeps a man alive is hate and sin.

Deputy principal Lance Chapman appreciated the intention, but I suspect – though he never said anything directly – that John Edmunds was seriously offended.  But that’s Brecht for you, I decided, and time – by the mid-1970s – to come to terms with such theatre.

The first version of Drama A and T was accredited by a panel formed from across the Schools Authority system and including a representative from each of the universities.  University of Canberra (UC) was at first a College of Advanced Education, modelled from the 1990s to some degree on the Polytechnic Colleges in Britain.  It had, and has retained, a strong interest in teacher training, but at this time had little to offer on drama.  The Australian National University (ANU) had no courses related to drama, beyond English in the Arts Faculty where there was a strong tradition of Australian literature.  The only practical drama at ANU was from the students’ drama association which operated intermittently.

The ACT Schools Authority system also covered all the private schools in Canberra, except for Canberra Grammar School, which elected to stay with the NSW system and sit their boys for the NSW Higher School Certificate (and have their results counted as if from that State).  Interestingly, Canberra Girls Grammar went with the new system.

Although the forming of a Drama Accrediting Panel was somewhat suspect when considering the lack of expertise across the Territory, I was happy enough that my course was accredited for three years (rather than the possible five years).  In effect this meant after teaching it for one year, there would be a need to set up some kind of evaluation process the next year, so that in the third year a new document could be prepared and taken to the Panel ready for teaching in the fourth year.

This was an exhausting process, but the evaluation and proposed changes needed to be exhaustively detailed.  Otherwise there could be no guarantee that Drama would continue at my college, or anyone else’s college for that matter.  No rest for the wicked, as someone like Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser might have said.

But I can’t leave 1976 without going to The Jigsaw Company.  Carol Woodrow, whose parents had run Arena Children’s Theatre in Melbourne, had taken her Canberra Children’s Theatre’s Saturday morning drama activity for small children, called Jigsaws, along a new track which grew into Canberra Youth Theatre on the one hand, and The Jigsaw Company to take performances and inservice training into schools on the other.  I sat on the CCT Committee during the time when we turned The Jigsaw Company into an independent professional company.  It was to determine its own program with its own bucket of money from the CCT budget.

Jigsaw needed a qualified teacher to go into schools, and I was instrumental in persuading the Schools Authority to second a teacher with the right primary teaching background to the Company – an arrangement which lasted several years until the incumbent left for higher studies and Jigsaw had to bid for the work of providing drama services rather than having a monopoly.  The money which had paid the seconded teacher then became the ACT annual grant, while Jigsaw obtained grants from the Australia Council and other sources.  It never lost its position, despite some challenges from interstate, and continued to provide an expanded program for children and youth for nearly 40 years, until Theatre-in-Education became embedded in the by-then major theatre companies like Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir and Bell Shakespeare.  I felt proud to be involved in the establishment of a permanent TiE team at that time, as I still feel today.

Then in 1977 came the shock of the new: the incoming new Year 11s, and one rather special Year 12, musician, Trevor Dunham.  After his work on The Threepenny Opera he joined the drama class for a Year 12 Minor.  Oddly enough he became a police officer, and married Kathleen Montgomery from that drama class, but some years into his law enforcement career an injury enabled him to retire into the life of music which was his real calling.  He has become a lead guitar in the Monaro Folk Music Society and the couple’s children have done drama at Hawker College, going on to become regular performers in Canberra – and we are still friends.

This could be a bit surprising, since his first pronouncement after his first Creative Workshop class was along the lines, “This is crap.  It’s just self-indulgence.”  Whatever he was, he was a musician and he knew about the discipline imposed by music.

I was at first taken aback somewhat, but now had to consider what to do about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the course.  There was no format established for an evaluation process, so I decided the first thing would be to conduct a survey of the students and their parents who had completed a year, and of the staff.  Among the staff there were some differing views, perhaps according to how they had been affected by our often very visible Drama students – hug-ins in corridors, for example – but no commentary that said anything about the course’s approach or content.  This was not surprising, since I was the only ‘expert’ there, however inexpert I was.

Trevor was in Year 12.  Though he hadn’t completed a year in Drama beforehand, he had observed that year, so he was given a survey form.  The result was fascinating.  All the ex-1976 group wrote raves about how wonderful the course had been – even those who had not received great grades since they hadn’t come to the academic party that enrolment in T had expected.  Their parents backed them to the hilt.

But Trevor wrote in some detail about self-indulgence.  However much his friends had enjoyed the experience, he could not see that it was getting anywhere, and could not see any value in doing it again for another year.  Without being able to put it into these words at that time, long before reading Elia Kazan’s letters, I found myself wondering if I was a Strasberg or a Kazan.  After due consideration, my inner Kazan was clearly in the right.  The course needed to focus on practical workshop, but the workshops needed content and direction.  They needed purpose outside of self-satisfaction.

And classes needed something else which at first was not easy to find.  If the same group were to be together for the whole two years, then self-indulgence was almost inevitable.  And it would happen again with the next Year 11 going on to Year 12.  Something had to change, and it was about any group needing an injection of new blood.

And it came to pass that as students were taking full advantage of all the choice of subjects, there were Year 11s who needed to do Drama on a timetable line which had Year 12s in the class.  And Year 12s who needed to move their Drama onto a different line to accommodate another move they wanted to make to pick up some other subject.

So, bingo!  Drama classes do not need to have all the students lockstep at the same level of experience as each other.  In the real world, people in the theatre industry always had to deal with the new and the old, the less and the more experienced, the better and the not so talented.  The teaching of Drama to senior students being prepared for the adult world began to become formulated.  There was a purpose in combining Year 11 and Year 12 students in the same class, and for the combinations to change from term to term.  Self-indulgence would be giving way to a more realistic view of the world.  I reckon Kazan would have been proud of me, if he’d known.

And direction for the content?  Make each term-length unit have a focus from the beginning.  ‘Storm and Tempest’ used material from Shakespeare to stimulate the group improvisations, or small group presentations.  ‘Melodrama’ took us into the 19th Century (and a Registered stage production of The Factory Lad by John Walker). And so on.

All I had to do for the new course was to invent 12 titles like these for a student who might want to take a double major, including some to focus on design, or communication skills or types of theatre.  Advertise the next term’s title for each unit on each line we could offer Drama on, and let anyone enrol.  Easy peasy.

And – actually this was where Trevor was more right than perhaps he realised – teaching would become much more interesting for me than watching the same group try to keep coming up with their own new stuff for two years in a row.  Drama can die as easily as it can grow.  Now we had enough structure without rigidity.  The academic side simply related to the unit’s theme.  What a wonderful course it will be.

And it was given five years’ accreditation, from 1979.

In the meantime other things were changing.  The new course was attracting greater numbers for Drama, meaning that I could not continue covering all the classes.  Geoff Davey, Helen Boucher and David McClay were on board with me for varying lengths of time.  Sandra Lambert was stage manager for a production I directed, later going on to become Principal of the college.  Christine Knight filled in for a term when I took more long service leave. And others in the 1990s –  Kate Rose, Bren Weatherstone and Steve Brown.  Over the years Drama enrolled an average of about 10% of the total college population.

But the odd experience was when I realised that one of my early students had enrolled in the drama course at Rusden College in Melbourne and within a few years Jenny Brigg would appear on my doorstep – she virtually promised me it would happen – with an up-to-date paper qualification to teach drama.  Suddenly I foresaw losing my job to an ex-student!

And it actually happened. But fortunately not until considerably after I had gained an Associate Diploma in Theatre Practice from Goulburn College of Advanced Education. Jenny taught at Hawker for a few years after having been a drug and alcohol counsellor in Sydney, and then moving on to follow other interests.

The Ass Dip UG2 was designed as a 2-year undergraduate course for Goulburn students 100 kilometres away.  It was offered as evening classes with Professor Anton Witsel (Professor is his European title) in Queanbeyan, on Canberra’s doorstep, twice a week over the three years 1979-81, with a focus on community theatre practice.  It also involved my performing in God, a Play by Woody Allen, stage managing for Quartet by Jane Bradhurst, and in my final semester finishing both my own course for Ton, who was at that point quite ill, and filling in for him by teaching the class which was a year behind me.  All the while I was still teaching full time at Hawker.

(Thinking on the side: how would the NSW system have coped with me, considering their reaction to my being sponsored for a pair of Volley sandshoes for a weekend walk as if it were a second unapproved job!)

Ton had taught at NIDA before moving out of Sydney to Goulburn, and had first come across me at the International Society for Education through the Arts (INSEA) Congress in Adelaide in 1978.  He gave me much more than an undergrad-level piece of paper which I could claim made me a drama teacher.  His principles of the teacher as the facilitator of learning – the enabler, to use his term – and his skill in demonstrating how to make this happen, gave me confidence in my own intention, and the organisation and clarity of purpose which I needed.

He also gave me an abiding friendship which has persisted into our late years, and the encouragement to see my work for its wider purposes by nominating me as a member of the Australian College of Education (now ‘Educators’) in 1982.  That College saw fit to announce my Fellowship in 1986.  It was Ton who also successfully nominated me for Fellowship to the Royal Society for Arts (RSA), and I worked closely with him and Maryna Goodwin to make sure that the Phillip Hughes Oration became a regular event in the ACE calendar after their initiative in setting up the inaugural oration, given by Professor Hughes himself, in 2003.

Among the most enjoyable teaching I have done was with Ton as his assistant on a holiday program with the Apprentice Theatre, Tasmanian Theatre for Young People, in Hobart in 1982, including a memorable meeting with director Diana Large.  It was also with his encouragement (and a reference) that I successfully went through the process of being awarded Master Teacher status in the ACT system.  This gave me a higher salary as, in Deputy Principal Lance Chapman’s words, a ‘lighthouse’ teacher.  Rather than having to try to turn into an administrator for this promotion, I was expected not only to be a leader exemplified by my own classroom practice, but it gave me the opportunity to be invited to go to other schools in a wide range of hopefully helpful capacities.  In one case, for example, a local primary school had decided to set aside small classes for ‘difficult’ children.  A teacher who was given one of these, Year 6, asked for advice.  I went (in ‘free’ periods) once a week for 10 weeks to work with him on game playing and role playing techniques that he could use to establish a productive relationship with those children.  I have to say I am not sure of the long-term results, since he may not have been the best choice for the task, but the children seemed to progress in their attitudes over my 10 weeks.

By 1983, as the current drama course accreditation drew to a close, forces at Hawker College and from my position representing the ACT in the National Association for Drama in Education, as well as my experience working with Anton Witsel, began to redefine the Drama Course again.

A basic change was needed to cope with the students’ need for flexibility of choice which arose when students would enrol in a particular class to suit their timetable, only to find that the proposed unit theme was one they had already done.  It got to the point finally when in one class there was no-one who had not done a unit that anyone else had not done.  The only solution was to add to the document the possibility of creating a new unit title and theme in this circumstance.  To do this, the class would discuss when they first met what they felt they needed to do to add to and develop what any or all of them had done before.  This did not take away the responsibility of the teacher to make sure a unit’s theme would offer sufficient depth for both T and A students.

As the 1984 course rolled along, it was not long before we teachers realised that this decision-making process was itself a crucial element of good drama making.  By the next year hardly any of the now extended list of unit titles (some 30 or more) were chosen.  Classes preferred to invent their own.  They saw it as a mark of maturity, and we saw it as mark of the developing maturity of drama and the Drama course in our college.

Alongside this development, Garth Boomer, from the South Australian Department of Education, was espousing a new approach to curriculum in general.  The basis of his view was that students did not necessarily learn what a curriculum document said they should learn.  To reveal the ‘hidden curriculum’, and thus to find out where the students actually were ‘at’, the curriculum itself had to be ‘negotiated’.

For the 1986 NADIE Conference I wrote a paper taking up Boomer’s ideas (before his unfortunate untimely death in 1993) called ‘Negotiating the Rapids’, to explain how we were negotiating the drama curriculum at Hawker College.

In the next version of our course, from 1988, the process of group decision-making on the content of a unit’s work was firmed up by including in the assessment a reflective oral report to the group by each student about the achievements or otherwise of the group over the time of the unit.  What had they decided to do and what was achieved?

These ‘orals’ had been used informally for some years before this to assist teachers in grading each student’s understanding of the work: now this part of each unit became formalised.  In the teaching process, these reports, followed by a group discussion, became the ‘reflection’ after the ‘action’ which led to the ‘planning’ of the next term’s ‘action’, using the concepts of David Kolb  [David A. Kolb: Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1984)] which now legitimised our Creative Workshops in the eyes of the Drama Accrediting Panel, and especially our Principal who kept asking “Where is the body of knowledge in Drama?”

Working alongside this development was a definition of the role within the group to be played by students with more experience, usually meaning Year 12s, in providing leadership for those with less – usually Year 11s but also Year 12s taking a Minor.

Putting all this together happened from about 1986, also in tandem with a new demand from more students to learn specific acting skills, and to look towards writing and directing.  We had always encouraged students to direct performance in the Stage Production R units – in fact ever since Trevor Dunham’s year in 1977 when the students (Trevor, Kath and Sue Richards – whose family is also still active in the Canberra theatre community) wrote a musical, called Anna, about a Year 12 student’s fears for her future (in which, incidentally, I performed as the School Counsellor and wrote a blues style song).

From the late 1980s, through the process of student decision-making and negotiating the curriculum, stage production and workshop drama gradually became more clearly understood as two sides of the same coin.  The division between non-performance somewhat precious ‘creative drama’ of my Brian Way days and workshop processes for exploring ideas or rehearsing a performance for the studio or on the mainstage began to break down, as it has in adult theatre very much over that same period.

Now that you have a brief picture of where things were going, I’ll backtrack in time and talk about other things I was doing, dramawise – that’s an arcane reference to Brad Haseman and John O’Toole’s book which was another major source of ideas and techniques for me to use. [Haseman, B & O’Toole, J Dramawise – An introduction to the elements of drama  Heinemann Educational Australia: Richmond, Vic 1986]

I had had an idea for a play floating around in my head for a number of years, about the Australian male and his relationship with women.  I put this together as a one-act piece called The Death of Willy and sent it in for consideration by the ANPC, the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference.  Out of some 200 submissions that year, 1981, six were chosen for the fortnight’s development work leading to a public reading – including mine!  Ken Horler, at that time director of the Nimrod Theatre which is now known as Belvoir, in Sydney, was to direct work on my play, with Barry Oakley, author of the popular and critically acclaimed  play And the Big Men Fly as dramaturg.  All the actors were well-known professionals of excellent standing, including, in my eyes, the very special Helen Morse as the lead young woman character, Young Nancy.

Fortunately, the ANPC took place at the local ANU (Australian National University) in a school holiday.  I had to meet with Ken beforehand in Sydney for a discussion, in which he told me that the opening of the play needed new writing, to make clear to an audience what was going on.  That discussion made me feel that Ken had little idea of the kind of semi-poetic drama I had written, which was really taking place in Willy’s head.  He was looking for naturalism or his idea of realism, while I was writing imagery and symbolically.

I wrote an opening which set the action in a TV studio, with an unseen director, a voice from the control room, so that the scenes between Willy meeting Young Nancy, Willy and his father,  Young Nancy being seduced by her university lecturer, Willy and the dentist Old Nancy, the funeral of Willy’s father, and Young Nancy’s song as she leaves Willy for an independent life, could be seen as clips from a rehearsal for a TV show.

Barry was terrific as dramaturg, and I was rewriting each night after rehearsals, but by the beginning of the second week, Ken Horler just was not coping with my style and intention.  He simply didn’t turn up at the next rehearsal.  Barry was there as support.  Then the best thing ever happened.  Helen Morse, who had learned the song (which was a kind of wistful folk song solo of her leaving, but having to go), asked me to explain what the play was really about.

When I explained that it was a kind of looking back in Willy’s mind after his father’s death, and how Nancy’s leaving was beyond his comprehension – how could she do this to me? – and this was like another death, and how for the audience this was sad but inevitable because Willy’s attitude towards women was just the same as his father’s had been, and how it was in the end about Young Nancy’s freedom to go her own way, and how Old Nancy as a dentist is a kind of ogre in Willy’s mind but for Young Nancy is a figure of a woman as an independent person in charge of her life…the actors said “OK, we’ll do it.”

So I took out the unnecessary tv studio construct, left in some of Barry’s good suggestions, and so went back pretty much to my original concept.  Barry sat in, but Ken Horler never came back, and I let the actors do what they felt they should.  Reactions to the public reading, which they did more as a performance because it was only about 50 minutes, came down to three ideas that struck me as significant.

The first was that it made people feel depressed – exactly as I felt about the failure of men (I suppose, not just Australian men) to see how limited they conventionally are (in 1981, at least) and how women were not theirs to put down or control.

The second I didn’t expect.  Chris Westwood, a well known activist feminist of the day, castigated me for being anti-feminist because of the ogreish and sexually dominant figure of the dentist, Old Nancy.  I never got through to her (or seriously tried to), but she missed the point that Old Nancy was a figment of Willy’s imagination, perhaps based on a childhood experience, if you wanted to find a realistic base for the image, but twisted by his old-fashioned male sensibility.

But the final comment was from a man, unknown to me, who bailed me up to explain in quite considerable detail how The Death of Willy represented Australian culture and its unwillingness to change from the prejudices of the past to the freedoms of the future.  I’d written it entirely from within Willy’s perception of things, but now I could see the wider implications of my imagery, and I was very pleased to hear this man’s interpretation.

The script is held in the Salamanca Collection of unpublished scripts in Hobart as a result of having received a public reading by Antill Theatre in Melbourne, though it was never taken to full production.  I did get a request from a group in Melbourne for the script, again as far as I know without it being performed, and I think it must have been that copy which got to Hobart.  At the end of the Conference, Bob Ellis expressed interest in The Death of Willy but did not take it up when I pressed him about it later that year.  I have multiple copies in my library at home, registered with the Australian Writers Guild for copyright purposes.

From the point of view of teaching drama, this experience was invaluable.  It made the business of the professional theatre come alive for me, adding on to Anton Witsel’s contribution, and made me much more able to talk realistically to students who wanted to be writers or performers about what they might expect.

It also made me very much aware about how people can take the initiative, as those professional actors had done.  If the director was not up to the mark, it was up to the actors to make sure that they were not going to be seen as failures on stage.  They are the ones who the public see, not the director, or even a good dramaturg like Barry Oakley.  If the actors do it right, then the audience can see the work of the author for what it is.

It was this thinking about initiative, responsibility for the work, and leadership that turned me towards the issue of how to assess the quality of students’ drama work, and how to present this assessment in a form that was constructive and of positive benefit to each student, while also satisfying the need of the system to record students’ results as letter grades, and scores which could be normed and statistically standardised in their Year 12 Certificate, and would place them fairly in the competition for Tertiary Entrance Scores, which had to be valid across the nation since Canberra’s students commonly applied for universities in every State.

That’s a long sentence, and it was a long struggle which began in the year of the very first college Year 12 Certificates, 1977.

For most people, student or teacher, assessment seems simple (an A to E Grade, and a number) but the story behind the scenes is complex and confusing, partly because of the nature of numbers and partly because of politics.  So I would rather tell you some stories of drama, partly because some of them raise questions about assessment – which I think we answered in the 1992 accreditation (only a short while before medical matters made me retire.)

One of the disadvantages of the Drama Room being on the lower floor in the middle of the building, where most of the classrooms were, was the old and probably enduring problem of noise.  When the first group reached Year 12, and the Music Department was put into the behind-stage Green Room, simply because there was no other place for them, regular drama classes moved into the Drama Room.  We shared the mainstage in normal teaching time with music, according to openings in our timetables, and set the theatre aside otherwise for stage production.  In time dance also moved into the theatre from being a PE activity in the gym.  From early on I was keen to follow up on my community relations, first up with my directing The Tempest combining adults from an amateur group from a nearby suburb, Melba Players, with our college students.

I’ll come back later to the importance of the community use of the theatre, which I named Murranji Theatre after the street address of the college.  Hawker’s street names are all of places in the Northern Territory, and Murranji was a huge cattle station in its day.

In the meantime, back in the Drama Room, of the many humorous effects of being in the middle, two occasions stand out for me as examples of where drama fitted in – at least from our point of view.

We fitted the room with light-weight black curtains on a track placed about a metre in from the walls of the 10 metre square area.  The acoustics were not too bad in the first place, because of the ceiling being broken up by the beams which supported the floor above.  The curtaining, in eight sections so that openings could be made at any point, worked very well as an extra sound dampener; and, of course, there was properly laid carpet on the floor.

Going back to my previous mention of risk about going in and coming out, the space inside the curtains became defined as the acting space, while people could retire outside the curtains from the action – like being in the wings on the mainstage.  (By 1980, in fact, we were also presenting studio productions – for example, of a cut-down version of Hamlet with 9 actors – across one part of the acting space, for an audience of up to 50.)

This boundary became essential to escape the Lee Strasberg syndrome.  One class finally made it compulsory that as you entered from the corridor, you placed all your outside issues, attitudes, worries, even loves, in the imaginary bin which was just inside the door but outside the curtain and the acting space.  Then as you left the room, you could pick up all those things you had put in the bin – if you wanted to or needed to – before going out into the ordinary real world again.  This idea began to gell after a class which was in the last period of the day.  One girl’s character experienced a high level of intense emotion during the workshop, but, unfortunately being the end of the day, not all the dramatic effects were resolved in the action time; nor was there time for a debrief (which at that time I was only just learning to set up properly).

The result for this girl, though for her the emotions were not unpleasant or destructive, was similar to my previous Kattrin, Mary Warren and Lavinia.  ‘Helen’ was still high the next morning, and came to tell me about the experience, not because she was afraid or upset but because she was surprised and amazed by the effect, but realised that she needed to come out before going home.  Fortunately her father was sympathetic to his daughter’s interest in drama, and we got along well, perhaps even better than we might have, after this episode.

The first humorous (sort of) story was about the intensity of people’s acting in these improvisation workshops.  Marcel Marceau-style mime was the activity of the day, but voice was allowed when it became necessary.  The group began exploring rooms in some kind of building – perhaps a set of offices or storerooms.  In silence they moved together along a corridor, opened doors with expressions of surprise or laughter at what they saw in the rooms.  Then one person went into a room, leaving the others in the corridor, and to people’s consternation the door closed behind her.

When she tried to open the door to reach her friends, it would not budge.  In fact it seemed to have disappeared completely.  She, in the ‘room’ naturally called out, but the others couldn’t hear her.  She began screaming, as you would expect.

I decided some side-coaching would be useful, so I moved into the ‘corridor’ and suggested that maybe Marcel Marceau could save the day.  In his mime where the walls close in upon him, he was able to escape by reaching under the wall itself and lifting it up just high enough to crawl out.  Our friend trapped in the ‘room’ of course could not ‘hear’ our conversation on her side of the invisible wall– even if she hadn’t still been screaming!

Just as the group were reaching for the bottom of the wall, the Drama Room door opened abruptly.  Fortunately I was positioned right there, as Brian Robinson, one of the Deputy Principals, entered, apparently in panic.  Fortunately, too, his son took drama, though not in this class.  As he approached I indicated to be silent and to watch, as the corridor group, lined up along the wall of the ‘room’, lifted the huge weight just enough.  The girl inside was now ecstatic as she realised she could crawl underneath.  Out she came, as the wall was dropped behind her, to relief, tears and hugs all round.

“Thank you,” said the Deputy – both for resolving his problem, and I think for the commitment in the Drama Room.  His son also played the cello, so the father understood the intensity.

Afterwards, I had to find out what had happened, and the story was more peculiar than you would ever guess.  When the building was being constructed, spaces were left in the concrete of the walls and floors for conduits which might be needed at some stage for, say, extra electrical cabling.  It turned out that one of these had an outlet into the Drama Room, in between a column and some brickwork, which was quite invisible unless you knew where to look.  The conduit went up through the Drama Room wall, through the concrete floor above and had another outlet, also invisible to those not in the know, in a room lined with computers (this was in the days when a class had to go to a ‘computer room’ to use them for English, or to be taught programming).

Our panic-stricken screams had sounded magically as if they came out of the wall in the computer room, which was not too far from the Deputy’s office.  Having heard the screams for himself, he had rushed along all of the top floor, to no avail, down the stairs at the far end, then all along the lower floor, still unable to locate the source of the scream, until he opened the Drama Room door.

“Typical Frank.  Typical drama,” he told me later.

Not all other staff members were as accommodating, so unflappable, or understanding. On the opposite side from the main door into the Drama Room, was a single door into a different corridor which included an open area which generally was used as a classroom, near the staffroom for the faculty which included psychology.

One particular psychology teacher, who was also the rugby football coach, regularly expressed his failure to understand drama.  At one time he was attempting to teach about the experiment with a cat which was supposed to show that Behaviourism proved that what the cat did was simply a matter of stimulus/response, as if there were no ‘organism’ or ‘being’ to whom this happened.  I suggested that he could have a student play the cat, while others would sit around the ‘cat’ on desks, so that their legs would form the triggers which the cat would try to operate to get rewards and avoid unpleasant shocks.  The class could then see how the cat learnt, but they could also ask the cat how it felt.

This idea was summarily rejected by this teacher.  But on another occasion, it turned out that he was teaching a class which included several who were (on a different line of the timetable) taking drama with me.  The issue they were dealing with in psychology was the concept of insanity.  The students were particularly concerned about how or when someone might be declared – by other people – insane, and so be involuntarily treated.

By this time in our teaching of drama, the importance of initiative and leadership had become firmly established.  Students (not only from Year 12 as time went along, and as the principles of our course became more common knowledge) who felt ready to do so, would negotiate with the class and the teacher an idea for a workshop, and then take on the role of workshop leader for the rest of the class to participate in.

On the occasion in question, four students from that psychology class started a workshop in the guise of academic researchers, with the rest of the class as students.  They set up an overhead projector and screen and presented a very informative short lecture on schizophrenia and psychosis, using material from their psychology class and obviously from quite a lot of further reading, including references.  For this they wore white lab coats.

Then they took the class through a floor relaxation, using pleasant imagery at first, as drama workshop leaders.  Their white lab coats took on a new meaning as they then announced that they were Dr So-and-So or Nurse So-and-So.  I think they were influenced for this part by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which they may have read in English, or have seen the Jack Nicholson movie which was popular at the time.  With the class still in relaxation on the floor, the leaders explained that they were here to help each of their ‘patients’ in this ‘hospital’.  They asked of the ‘patients’ that they should take their time to get used to their new surroundings.  The transition to being a patient was done without outside reference to the previous lecture, but it was clear that the patients would have mental problems like those that had been described.  They told the ‘patients’ they could get up and move about freely when they felt ready.  They could communicate with others if they wished, and seek help from the doctors and nurses if they felt it was needed.  (And, of course, they knew without it being made explicit, that I was in the ‘safe area’ outside the curtains which defined the acting space.)

The lead-in was done so well that it was absolutely fascinating to watch.  The whole ‘hospital’ gradually became more and more active.  Two things struck me: many of the patients found that they were locked into certain ways of odd but rhythmic walking (while others became catatonic);  as time went along, disjointed sound – though still with a discernible weird rhythm – began to develop among voices, and then with found objects (which included metal frames and pieces of wood which were part of the left overs from a previous class).

The scene looked to me much more realistic than scenes in the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest film.

It has to be said that the noise level was reaching some kind of crescendo when the usually locked small door opposite the main door where I was posted suddenly burst open.  The psychology teacher thundered into the middle of the acting space, obviously apoplectic.  The intensity of his emotion was so strong that everyone froze instantly.  In the enormous silence, he spoke vehemently, hugely exploding “It sounds like an insane asylum in here!  Why don’t you all grow up!”.  Then he turned on his heel, and wooshed out back through the small door into the real world of his class in the open area next door.

And how amazing it was when, after the burst of laughter had died down, that the workshop leaders, in role, calmed their patients down, lay them down on the floor, talked them back out of the ‘madness’ they had been experiencing, took them back to pleasant and comfortable imagery, brought them into their roles as students of psychology and had a terrific discussion, entirely led by themselves – not in the role of academic researchers, but as leaders of a drama workshop – of the experience of knowing and not knowing when or if you were insane.

As many of the ‘patients’ reported, what they were doing in their ‘madness’ felt normal to them when in the role.  This led to many now saying that they felt guilty for having mistreated or having a negative attitude towards someone who really was schizophrenic or simple abnormal, but they also now knew how difficult it must be to make a decision about someone else to have them treated involuntarily.

They said little about the invasion of the psychology teacher, and the four leaders who were in his class on the other timetable line never spoke to me about how they viewed him after this event.

But they got ‘A’s from me for their initiative, design and implementation of a workshop on one of the most difficult issues in life.  And there was no doubt they gained respect from their colleagues in the drama class.

I’ve mentioned before going to the INSEA Congress in Adelaide in 1978.  This was where I came into my first direct contact with the international leaders of educational drama from Canada and UK.  Though Ton Witsel says he remembers me from that event, and I think I remember seeing him but only knowing it was him in hindsight, the key figure for me was Gavin Bolton, closely followed by David Best, the philosopher of the arts, as well as Richard Courtney.  Of course I knew of Dorothy Heathcote and her ‘mantle of the expert’ (from Betty Jane Wagner‘s book Dorothy Heathcote – Drama as a Learning Medium).  Much later than 1978, Dorothy herself visited Sydney and I was lucky to get a place in one demonstration session she gave.

Gavin Bolton was from Leeds University, closely connected to Dorothy Heathcote, but as I saw it he was the next generation.  When I met Dorothy personally, I found her manner too domineering and directive when she demonstrated her approach by putting a group of us teachers into the position of the children she taught.  The situation was not ideal since she normally worked with young children, and her manner probably had a quite different effect.  Or maybe I was just too sensitive in my role as a child, or even as a critical adult.

Back in 1978, after the INSEA Congress, we Canberrans were very lucky to be able to bring Gavin to the O’Connell Education Centre (now-defunct) for a two-day workshop for ACTADIE.  Although now I have forgotten the details of the content, his method of en-role-ing people into elements of a story, designed to have implications for how to teach drama, was an exemplar that I feel I never managed to match.  The particular feature was that, at the point of setting up roles, he took Alanna Maclean aside and instructed her what to do at a certain point in the story which would occur at a certain time the following afternoon.  This was a secret instruction which I only learned about later from Alanna.

His objective was to make sure that the improvisation, which would develop from his storyline and be kept to some degree in line with developments he was looking for by occasional side-coaching (but never by interrupting the flow), would be brought to a natural-feeling end precisely at 3pm, ready for afternoon tea and the final analysis session.  Exactly on time – I think 2.30pm – Alanna said and did what she had been told on the previous morning.  And it worked.  Whatever was happening then seemed naturally to come to a point of completion at 3pm.

I was too engaged in the role play itself to be aware of the process, until Alanna told me her story.  I learned then that there was a higher skill than mine at work, but the essence was that whatever I might do when managing a workshop, interrupting the flow by making the participants aware of my interrupting was an absolute no-no.  My awareness of Bolton’s skill, I think, helped to make my approach more towards avoiding interruption.  This could be seen as a relative weakness on my part, but I also observed several other teachers who were not aware of how their impact might stifle the flow: sometimes by themselves playing roles that were too significant and thus over-guiding the students to the end the teacher desired; or sometimes invading the action completely out of role, except as the authority figure of teacher in control mode.

I was once observed by the then theatre reviewer from the Canberra Times, Ken Healey, whose article was published under the headline “The Invisible Man”, since I had spent most of the workshop he saw hidden behind the curtain out of view of the students who needed at that stage to gain confidence in themselves without being self-conscious about being watched by me.

Side-coaching would be OK if I could manage it as I’d seen Bolton do: sometimes by staying out of any role to do with the action, but taking someone aside at a moment when they were not in the thick of things and quietly suggesting (perhaps sometimes instructing) them to say or do a particular thing; sometimes by taking on a role, even if for a brief time, using the position of someone without authority in the story, who offers something which will shift others towards a more productive development.  I could see the Heathcote technique here where the children would be given the ‘mantle of the expert’ by being in decision-making roles, while Heathcote herself would be in  an advisor role.  As an assistant to a group of lords, maybe even a lowly servant, she could inject an idea as a possibility which the experts with the mantle could take up or not as they pleased, but in making the decision they were learning to critically examine their situation.

But funny things can happen.  One class wanted me to be in the role-play, which was set at a garden party in a large imposing house.  At the same time, I knew, they wanted me to be in a position where I could watch what was happening and provide them with guidance (and be able to step in to help if someone needed a safety net).  So they en-roled me as a garden gnome.

My short stature had long meant, since even Broken Hill days, that I was seen as a kindly but slightly comic gnome (and I still give pride of place on my knick-knack shelf to the gnome made by my last students, Amy Latona and friends.  Amy’s father, the sculptor Peter Latona, persuaded me, unaware of his daughter’s plot, to sit for a head study, which became the head of my 4 inch gnome, wearing glasses that make me look like John Lennon, and a costume sort-of mediaeval.  I had taught them philosophy in a course called People, Beliefs and Society, and perhaps my gnome is reminiscent of the Venerable Bede – or something.)

As the garden gnome I was a complete failure.  I was placed in a corner, where I could see all the action, and I had it in mind to be able to come alive if necessary.  Unfortunately after only a short time, someone, probably a little drunk at the garden party, accidentally knocked me over.  It really wasn’t possible to come alive after this, and lying on my side with a very lopsided view of a very small part of the action wasn’t a good prospect for the next hour or two of the workshop.

However, with a little discreet wriggling, only after, if I remember correctly, being sprayed by a garden sprinkler, I managed to disappear under the Drama Room curtain into the safety of the non-acting space, surprising a couple of others also not taking part in the official action.  It wasn’t too hard then to reappear in an authoritative guise to bring the party to an appropriate end in good time for a reflection and discussion.  This was a nice example of a quite different kind of workshop – done for fun and relaxation rather than intense examination of vital issues.

Yet it’s also important to remember the warning that Ton Witsel had regularly given us in his Theatre Practice course: “You can always fall flat on your face.”  He meant this literally as well as metaphorically, since his career had begun as a dancer in the national company in Holland in the 1950s, and I had to learn the same message in both ways, too.  The literal experience told me never to walk across a black stage with no lights on, when in the middle someone had left a black 3 feet square 10 inches high rostrum platform.  As I tripped I was extremely lucky to fall forward, directly onto the platform surface without breaking a rib and without my face actually hitting anything solid.  Though winded, I was able to get myself together and find my way off the stage to a houselights switch.  I’ve often wondered what insurance cover I would have had if I had been seriously injured, considering that I had not taken proper precautions.  I also have an image of the next dance class arriving, switching on the lights to reveal a body draped over the rostrum centre stage.  Might have been called ‘The Black Theatre Mystery’ or ‘Murranji Murder’.

But it was the class from a different kind of blackness that was my least successful.  Still in the period of predefined themes, the topic was Drama of Other Cultures.  This was put on in Term 3 because Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land in the far north of Australia had arranged to present to the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, in Canberra, a group of standing ceremonial poles in recognition of the work of Les Hiatt and other anthropologists who were now in retirement.

Unfortunately, the student group which formed this class on that timetable line was virtually the same as the one I had struggled with through Terms 1 and 2.  I had tried every technique I could think of, with a lot of help from Haseman and O’Toole’s book, but two factors were against me.  First was a palpable division, just about half and half, over the students’ reasons for taking drama.  Surprisingly, it was not based on the obvious divide you might expect: between those enrolled in Drama T and those in Drama A, nor between Year 11s and Year 12s.  Half wanted their drama to be nothing but fun for its own sake; the other half wanted us to deal with serious issues and take on matters of social responsibility.  And never the twain would meet.

I had serious students coming to me in tears because the group wouldn’t come together on real issues, while the fun lot would turn up early and be off and running into playing about – enjoying drama as they liked it.

By second term, I realised that there was one figure – a solidly built girl who always dressed in black, punk style – who was a central force in the division.  Her idea of fun was essentially to destroy any chance of group cohesion, while deriding those with a sense of social seriousness.  Nothing I tried was likely to be successful, since any attempt I made placed me on the wrong side of her fence.  Term grades and scores made no difference.  She enrolled again for Term 3.

Since the Aboriginal ceremonies were to be held at IATSIS, the Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, I hoped that an opportunity to take the class out of the confines of the Drama Room might be a turning point.  However, by this time a number of the more serious students had managed to switch timetable lines, and I was facing a more entrenched opposition to our drama beyond the funline.

At last the day of the ceremony arrived, after a period of some two weeks’ preparation by the Aboriginal people in Canberra, in addition to the months they had spent in their homeland decorating the poles and learning the songs and dances for performance before white people from the national government of Australia.  It was a deliberate policy that had been initiated very largely by the Marika family of the Yolngu people, and taken up by elders at Maningrida and Raminginin to bring their culture out to the mainstream dominant culture.  People from this region have been instrumental in assisting Stephen Page and his brothers from Brisbane develop the now world-famous Bangarra Dance Company, for example, and had a major part to play in the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.  I had had the good fortune to attend a talk and demonstration by the old man Marika (whose first name, after his passing, is no longer spoken) at a conference in Melbourne, and so I felt taking this drama class out of themselves for a day for such an important cross-cultural experience had to be of value.

I arranged permission for the group to spend the whole day at the Institute, since it was not known exactly how much of the day would be open to public view.  Even the timing of the official ceremony was not exactly known beyond being in the late afternoon, because the performers had to be sure that every step in the ceremonial process had been satisfactorily completed.  What was fascinating to me was that the Aboriginal approach to their drama was so similar to my (effective) classes’ need to know that an improvisation had reached a satisfactory point before it could be ended and discussed.

On the day, out of some 20 students in the class, perhaps half turned up for a while in the morning.  Only six lasted the day and saw the full ceremony.

At the end of the unit, after more struggles to explore material from different cultures, the oral reports, which by then had just become a normal, though still informal part of our assessment process, revealed why I had failed that group for virtually all that year.  Fortunately I never had another situation arise quite this impossible to deal with.

Why had the girl in punk black not gone to the Aboriginal ceremonial day (and in fact had not attended the class regularly before or after that event?  At last we heard her story.  She hated black people!  With an exclamation mark!

I thought this a bit ironic, since she’d worn nothing but black all year.  I made no comment.  But others asked why?

Her parents had been missionaries in Papua New Guinea.  I am not certain if she was born there, or taken there when very young, but she had grown up there.  As a result she hated not only Papuans but had generalised this hatred to any black person from anywhere in the world.

Of course, I could guess that being a punk in civilised Canberra (when punk was already rather passé) was some kind of statement to her probably very well meaning missionary parents, who now lived in the more upmarket part of the upmarket suburb of Hawker; while the depth of her hatred could easily have been because she had been literally afraid of the people in the highlands of New Guinea.  Apart from the fact that inter-tribal violence and belief in what in Europe would be called witchcraft was still prevalent, the masks and costumes used in the mass ceremonial events could easily have frightened a young child who knew nothing of the culture (though I knew nothing about how her parents may have thought about ‘pagan’ beliefs, or had explained things like that to their daughter; nor, indeed, if anything of a more dire nature had happened to her).  I never met her parents, and I must say I’m glad the occasion did not arise.  I think I may have found it difficult to know what to say.  I had certainly failed their daughter, and most members of that class over that whole year.

So now I must turn again, to the question of pass or fail.  How should we assess what students do in Drama?

It had seemed no particular problem at Ginninderra High.  It had seemed natural to be able to say, for Year 7 or Year 8, “Oh, she’s really good – picked up things really well” or after having set up an activity and watched how different ones had responded to say “That boy’s got something going for him – seems to have matured a lot in the past few weeks, even.”

And, I guess, I was still thinking in these sorts of actually very vague terms in the first year or two at Hawker.  But if “What is the body of knowledge in Drama?” was the real question, I had to be able to answer that in order to be able judge a student’s work.  Bit by bit I worried at this bone, even while producing letter grades and numbers that were accepted by the system, though not always liked by every individual student.

The question became ever more complex as the system itself changed from the cooperative community model set up by Phillip Hughes and Hedley Beare into a much more conventional Department of Education and Training structure from 1981 under the eccentric polymath inventor Eric Wilmot as Chief Education Officer and tightly besuited Max Sawatsky as Chief Executive Officer at the same time as the Commonwealth Territory was being recast as a self-governing polity (though still with the Federal Parliament having overriding powers).  Now people working in the Department became ACT Public Servants, who may or may not have been teachers (who in the past had been seconded, and could be expected to return to teaching or school administration).

The important body, from my point of view, was the BSSS – the Board of Senior Secondary Studies – which was a necessary entity for negotiating the changes happening in every jurisdiction around university entrance.  Among many issues, I argued and won on the question whether ‘A’ students should be forced to receive standardised scores which they didn’t need and were essentially meaningless, or only ‘T’ students (who did need them for matriculation to rank them across the country).  The power of numbers, even when entirely symbolic and technically meaningless, became the bane of my assessment life.

It’s probably not a good idea to get into too much detail in this book.  It’s almost certainly going to have a soporific effect.  It’s hardly dramatic to try to explain, as I tried often, to teachers who do not understand statistics, basic things like a mark ‘out of’ some number like 100 can be of no use if you don’t know what 100 represents, or if your way of assessing doesn’t make clear distinctions between different students’ results, or if you can’t describe what it means when one student gets a score higher or lower than another.  (But I will put in Part Four the Epilogue, the matrix which I developed for assessment in Drama, which makes the task simple to do and provides fair and reasonable results.)

It got worse when the BSSS really got to work on recalculation of raw scores by putting scores from small groups together and ‘standardising’ them, since statistics from small groups are not reliable compared with those from large groups.  The six students at Dickson College taking Latin took up arms against small group moderation and combination of scores with those from other courses like French (at least it was a language course) or English (is that language or literature?)  But anyway, they said, it’s nothing like doing Latin, where we are all self-selected and obviously brilliant and should all get A+.

When the system moved to a standardised mean of 65 with a standard deviationof 15, most of the English teachers I knew had no idea what this meant and were never able to stop marking out of 100.  In the end I gave up trying to explain, but my still minimal background in stats finally enabled me to work out what we were assessing in drama, how to award grades that meant something that could make sense to an outsider, and how to relate those grades to a set of scores which would be consistent with a standardising regime.  And I devised a system for recording results which made the job easy for the teacher (the matrix). For matriculation, statistics which placed a student’s result fairly within the population they were part of (let’s say the Performing Arts, by combining Drama, Music and Dance) was not an unreasonable thing to do.  But it was not until the later 1980s that we (meaning at that time mainly myself and David McClay) managed to define the nature of Drama, at least as we taught it at this age level, and therefore describe the elements which we could assess in a student’s work (see the matrix).

Even that wasn’t quite the end, because the question had to be raised about what we might expect from someone who had simply less experience, in Drama or more specifically in our Drama course, compared with someone else who had more (so that, for example, a Year 11 in a mixed class would not be put down automatically compared with a Year 12).  This was enough for us to be satisfied that we had it all hunky dory in the 1992 course document.

Then the System decided to get its act together by requiring the same sort of definition to be done across the curriculum – with the same language to be used for the elements of assessment in every subject.  By this time we had not only trained ourselves, and been able to pass this on to new teachers over the period from 1989 to 1991, but the students had understood our terms and were now using our language to describe their learning.  This had taken our work up a step to higher metacognitive thinking on our students’ (and teachers’) part.  But the new system wording did not fit properly with our concepts.  To this degree, school-based curriculum now looked like a backdoor form of centralisation.  I could see myself going back to the kinds of argument I had faced at Wyong High in 1973, when I had won my point as my ‘Credit’ class nearly all achieved ‘Advanced’ results.

(Though I feel sure there was no direct connection, it was not long before my system began to show signs of wear and tear with a condition appearing in 1991 that turned out three years later to be a precursor of prostate cancer.)

But in the end assessment is not what teaching is all about.  Lots more was going on than arguing about grades and scores.

My interest in maintaining connections with the community did not fade with the quite rapid demise of the Melba Players in the late 1970s, as members moved out of Canberra on transfers.  I directed Ionesco’s La Leçon for the Players with the stage floor laid out as a chess board as each move was made in the Professor’s game.  Quite appropriate for any teacher I suppose, though my knife might have been a statistical weapon.

Carol Woodrow became a regular source of interest and activity for me as she set up Fool’s Gallery and directed for Canberra Rep, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Bell Shakespeare, until she began the Canberra Theatre Company as another attempt to form a professional company in Canberra.  I was able to be more than an observer of the action in this case, as I had a timetable line free from classes in my role as assistant to the Deputy responsible for curriculum development.  I could free up Wednesdays to spend the day in the Theatre Company’s office, mainly as the reader of unsolicited playscripts, suggesting to Carol whether or not any could be suitable for production.  I also had the task of studying the various translations of Chekhov’s The Seagull in preparation for a production.  However, a major sponsor, the real estate agency L J Hooker, at the last minute, had the unfortunate experience of a top executive running off with the money.  So after her rather controversial production of Stephen Sewell’s Anger,  The Seagull had to be abandoned, and the Company had to fold.

When Carol then set up Wildwood Theatre, as a non-profit vehicle for her to receive grants and direct plays, I chaired her Management Committee and acted as treasurer for some years.  Bod by Elaine Acworth was a production of considerable interest, set at the time of the Communist takeover in China in 1949.  However, when the Federal government introduced the new Goods and Services Tax system in 2001, it became clear that Wildwood would need to spend more money on accounting for its grants and expenditure than it could afford, so reluctantly Wildwood was put to rest at a time when I had hoped for Carol to be able to continue her central role in Canberra theatre history as a developer of new work.

Within the College, some early decisions were changed.  The lack of morning tea lasted, I think, only one year, but the effect of having morning tea from 11-11.15am and putting back lunch from – in my view – an already late 1pm to 1.15, with the afternoon starting at 2pm, meant that running morning doubles from 10am became very messy.  Most classes preferred to keep to the two hour length.  For the students this was not a great issue: they just took their morning break at 12.  I did the same, but for up to three mornings a week in some years I was not present for announcements and discussion of issues (let alone simple socialising) at the official morning teas.

Of more importance to me, though, was the matter of Drama being placed in the English faculty where it most definitely did not belong.  One of the effects of the faculty structure as against the standardising of scores and grades for subject areas with small numbers was that the Foreign Languages faculty head had a much smaller degree of responsibility and workload than heads of faculties with larger numbers.  Fortunately the first incumbent, French teacher Peter Voss, was a jazz musician in his other life, and began to push for languages to be seen as part of an arts grouping.

In the end my suggestion was taken up.  The common denominator for all the arts and languages was communication.  That’s what we all did.  So Peter became head of the Communicating Arts Faculty covering French, Italian, and Chinese language courses, as well as Visual Arts, Drama, Music and Dance.  And not too long after we had become a recognised political entity in the college, Judy Parker, whose course was called Visual Art and Design, created the design for the new college name: Hawker Community College, later to become Hawker College, A Community of Learning.

It was accidental that Languages had the running for the faculty head position, but Peter was just the right person – even though after some years he opted to move to Tasmania for personal reasons.  No later Communicating Arts faculty head matched him, including me when I was in the acting position for six months – and in truth the Master Teacher role suited me much better than the staff management and administration work required of a faculty head.

On that point, though, I was offended when I did not succeed in an interview for the permanent faculty head job, which I felt obliged to seek rather than easily accept another rather incompetent head like the person who had replaced Peter. She who shall remain nameless had also shown a major lack of sensitivity towards drama students, despite having presented evidence of experience in this field.  She simply did not know when to stay out, or how to move in when appropriate.

One considerable task I had, which took quite some time out of my six months’ stint, was to find all the missing records of previous students’ Year 12 calculations and final results which the faculty, on behalf of the school, was obliged to keep for seven years, so that ex-students could be given detailed information if they needed it for employment or other kinds of applications into their mid-twenties.  The issue came about because of one such request.  When I queried why my bid for the job was rejected, the grounds were that I had not had enough administrative experience.

Though I could take that as true in the sense that I had not previously held such positions formally, I had actually been running Murranji Theatre since the opening of the college.  Even for the internal college stage productions, the finances and management, including taking responsibility often for the whole college building over large amounts of out of normal hours activities, was a major task.  But I also had taken on the management of the community users, ranging from calisthenics classes to professional dance and amateur theatre performers, from body-building competitions to cultural events staged by the Indian community.  There were also the needs of other local schools to cater for, such as primary school play nights, and events like Rotary International speaking competitions.  There were so many and such a variety that my memory is overloaded.

This aspect of my work was important not just to me because I thought it should be done, but it needed to be done by a college teacher committed to its theatre, partly to engender good relations between the school and the community, and partly, to be honest, to ensure that the theatre remained in good condition for us in the college to use for our teaching purposes.  When it came time, quite early in this history, for Geoff Davey to need to paint the back wall of the stage black instead of its original white, and to paint the too-polished wood stage floor with black non-slip paint, the Registrar of the day (who received the fees paid by the community to use the space) told him he couldn’t do that, because the community users would be upset.

That Registrar, as was quite common in schools, was a retired military man – still in his forties – who got quite a shock when I confronted him on Geoff’s behalf and told him that we were the professionals here and the teaching program took absolute priority over community users – and that Geoff and his stage production students had just finished the job.  As I have found on other occasions, taking a firm stand in such a situation, so long as you are in the right, leads to a better understanding, and Noel and I remained on good terms throughout our many years together.

But the most important reason for encouraging the community to use the theatre was the benefit to our drama students.  Many of them over the years were keen to learn the technical and backstage management side of theatre work, quite often with the industry in mind.  Nearly every year I would have a small team, sometimes a couple, sometimes an individual, for whom the setting up and operating of the lighting and sound, managing the house lights, working as stage manager, or working front of house, could be done for the community groups as an ‘R’ half unit from term to term.  Several went on to stage managing or became technicians in later life, but the essence of this experience was that it was done for the College by a drama student, and the principles of learning in drama were maintained.

These theatre-focussed students had to learn to take responsibility for their work in a way that a workshop-based student did not, because they were dealing directly with the public.  So we teachers would set up for a college production a whole management and technical team, so that a production would run just like a theatre company, but those working for the community were not doing a kind of imitation of the real thing.  They were doing it for real.

Managing them could be interesting for us teachers.  As in a workshop, my role was often known by the students as ‘God’, who was always there but only when really necessary interfered with human life.  One ex-student went on to become the technical manager of a well-known theatre in Melbourne.  Some years into his career there, I asked him what was it that had been most useful about how we had worked when he had been the student manager of the Hawker Theatre for most of his two years there.  His answer was, “You left us alone to get on with it.”

As students from about 1986 began to ask for much more skills training, because many more courses in theatre and media at universities were being established, it became clear that this side of drama now needed to be developed more.  So I then began to offer, at the time when applications for auditions had to be presented, a separate audition training class of three hours for ten weeks on Monday evenings.  I took this on as a part of  my Master Teacher role, as a service to the small number – perhaps six or eight per year – who were determined to attempt acting auditions.  My concern was that though they may have been very successful in the college context, facing up to open auditions against many people in their early- or even mid-twenties could simply be demoralising to an 18-year-old.

One of our student theatre managers, an excellent practical operator, applied and got into the NIDA stage management course.  He had never done a full-unit Drama course with us, and had never been too keen on academic written work though he was competent in Physics.  He came to me for advice on the design he planned to put in for the application, so I grilled him about every aspect until he realised that he should start again.  He did that, without further reference to me, presented the design and the model and passed the interview, which I had modelled for him in criticising his original design.

Early the next year he arrived back, looking for me.  “I’ve got to write essays!” he said, as if amazed that anyone would need to do that to run a theatre.  “Where do I get the reference books?”  No problem, I explained, they’re nearly all right here in the college library.  So we made a special arrangement for him to borrow the books he would have known about if he had taken full-unit Drama – but of course only for a limited time.  He went on to stage manage at The Ensemble in Sydney and I believe went on to run the Singapore branch of a theatre production services company.

On the acting side was Steve Rodgers.  He told me he had come from Tasmania, and I could tell that from his broad Aussie (quite non-Canberra) accent.  In our student written, directed, designed and acted play Friends in High Places by Emma Brookes, which was in some ways a satire of the public service, at the Annual General Meeting of the gods of the world, Steve had played with huge flair the god of fire, Hephaistus, wearing a massive corona of bright orange hair.  He certainly had a presence on stage, though he was not so keen on formal academic writing.

When it came to his application for the fairly new course at Nepean campus of the University of Western Sydney, of the Shakespeare audition pieces on offer, one was the obvious choice for Steve: Hotspur’s report to the King of the progress of battle in Henry V.

Despite some family theatrical tradition, or maybe because of it, his first attempt was presented in a typical imitation of an upper-class English accent.  It was not so much that this was wrong for that character – after all Hotspur was a nobleman – but it was entirely wrong for Steve Rodgers from Tasmania.  It not only sounded false, but as he struggled with the language and punctuation, neither the meaning nor the strength of emotion needed for the speech came through.

I had already done some work with the group on the stress patterns of Shakespeare, showing how not all of his writing was in poetic pentameters.  I had also shown them how the natural English rhythm was a four beat line which you could see in Chaucer as much as in modern English.  Hotspur speaks with a rhythm much closer to the natural English than, say, Hamlet, especially at this point as he tells his story.

How to solve Steve’s problem?  Tasmania was the answer.  Just imagine you’re telling this story to a bar full of blokes in Hobart, I suggested.  Problem solved, audition successful, and Steve became an actor and in later times a writer in a solid career.

The annual audition training class, with no formal recognition in the ‘T’, ‘A’ and ‘R’ system, became a continuing feature of my work – so much so that after I retired at the beginning of 1996, students continued to contact me and I ran the course for payment a couple more times; but finally realised that for my health and other reasons this could not continue.  I suppose it’s really part of the Epilogue to mention that I finally wrote up my course as a self-administered training manual called First Audition – how to get into drama school which was published by Currency Press in 2002, and launched by Professor John O’Toole at a special event in Perth.

And then there were the college stage productions.  Geoff Davey and Helen Boucher did mainly musicals.  When I watched one of these I noticed a girl in Year 11 who was clearly outstanding on stage, Karen Sourry.  When I checked, she wasn’t doing Drama, just this ‘R’ half-unit.  I would not normally make an unsolicited approach, but I could not see how someone so skilled on stage – and with such a terrific voice – would not become a professional performer.  And therefore should be taking Drama.

So I boldly stepped up and asked her.  She was taking Music, where the teacher used her almost as an assistant and demonstrator with her classical voice, but otherwise she had fallen for the convention that you needed to do lots of Maths and Science to get a high tertiary entrance score.  Not so, I explained.  A Year 12 Minor in Drama will have as much good effect as in any other subject.  Trying to explain to her the ins and outs of the statistical standardising process brought out the usual glazed over expression.

But it was not long before she sought me out. “Maybe I will,” she said.  “I just got my last maths test results.  I got 9 per cent!”

Of course in workshops her improvisations were the leading light (even though she had never taken Drama before), and in stage production (I directed the five short absurdist comedies Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn, interspersed with brief thematic dance pieces, again using Rudolph Laban concepts) she was the one who would arrive at rehearsals with several costumes for me to choose from for each of her parts.  And it was Karen who wrote the music for the Young Nancy song in my play workshopped at the ANPC, The Death of Willy. After further training at the Canberra School of Music, Karen trained in and performed opera in Germany.

To have known such a student was a privilege, yet almost every year there would be at least one other with such qualities.

David McClay and I alternated for a number of years directing the mainstage production.  Though I had not been pleased when the college followed the rest of the system (after a great deal of ‘negotiation’) into two semesters rather than three terms per year, having a half-year fell more comfortably into presenting two productions a year.

I felt, after researching and presenting a paper to the staff, that the three term arrangement allowed far more flexibility of choice for students over their two years than a semester system would, but I could also agree that the workload for staff would be reduced significantly.  For Drama, I also felt then, and still feel, that 12 weeks is about the right length for a workshop-based course.  It also turns out I was wrong about the reduced workload, because two semesters became effectively four terms, with mini-assessments issued at the ends of Terms 1 and 3, which also allowed for courses to be broken into half-units.  This probably helped ‘A’ students rather than ‘T’ students, and perhaps reintroduced some of the original flexibility where a student had begun a course but realised that it wasn’t suitable for them.

And so to my last stage production.  By now, our course and the production program had a solid reputation in the community and the feeder junior high schools.   David McClay had returned to his native South Australia, but I had the luck (for me) of the very lucky (for her) Kate Rose arriving from Lyneham High, where she had been subject to a potentially deadly accident.  The stage in Lyneham’s school hall (rectangular and big) had a cyclorama wall (not just a curtain drop) which hung on a bar, which was supported on side tracks so that it could be moved upstage or downstage.  It was heavy.

Kate was on the stage, with a school desk next to her, when the cyclorama fell forward from its moorings, crashing down on her – but extremely fortunately being held from completely flattening her by the desk.  Her injuries were serious and continuing, but she was able to recover with treatment.  By this time, though, there was no way that she could be expected to return to her Drama and English teaching job at Lyneham.

My luck came from Kate’s personality, which dovetailed absolutely into my style.  Her drama workshops had a warmth about them, redolent with good humour, and a sense of community which seemed to encompass even those teaching spaces around the Drama Room.  Once, some four years after I had retired, I agreed to take her classes as a relief teacher for a few weeks while she took well-earned long-service leave.  The welcoming atmosphere she engendered was still there even then.  It’s not always easy to return to old haunts, but teaching her classes was a joy.

She took the view that her role in stage productions, which might formally be called stage manager, was to be stage mother.  She always made sure there was finger food at every rehearsal.  She appeared to do nothing much except be there, but that was what everyone needed (though in fact she did a great deal to make sure costumes and make-up were right, and managed the dressing rooms and backstage perfectly).  David had been such a well-organised and independent operator that I had got used to knowing everything was under control when he was around, and I had relaxed, but with his leaving I was back as the only one in charge.  Kate was the support I needed.

Before the end of the year, 1992, we invited students from Year 10 in the local high schools to a meeting to plan the next year’s stage production.  We were now getting younger siblings of previous students, and the idea of our negotiating what we would do had become the norm.  In the wider world too, the involvement of students in their own learning was part of the cultural change which could be seen, for example, in the way young women were saying they were not feminists – meaning that they didn’t think they needed to be now (even if the facts might still be a long way behind the assumption).

The students, both Year 10 and 11, said they wanted a musical, but they didn’t have a proposal that they all agreed on.  I said I would only do a musical if there was sufficient depth or significance in it to make it worthwhile doing as part of the Drama course.  Most of the students were intending to take Drama ‘T’, and saw the point.

Personally, if I were to do a musical, I preferred something that I already knew and something with social implications that I could feel relevant for Australian students.  Issues arose, like racial discrimination, and the best answer was South Pacific. After all, I had performed in it – all those many years before.

However, back in the staffroom at morning tea between our stints at calculating course scores, Jack Geary, long noted for his ability to have all kinds of unusual resources for teaching English, said to me “Did you know there’s a musical about William Blake?  It was on in London back in the 70s when we were on our way back home from Canada (Jack had been Principal of a small school in the Yukon!).  I think I still have the program, if you’re interested?”

This is called left field, I thought.  I’d better not miss this opportunity.  The program gave me basic information: the writer Adrian Mitchell and the composer Mike Westbrook.  And the theatre in London where it had been staged in 1972. I went to the recently appointed new music teacher, Mitch Burns, who was regarded as a bit wild and had taught at the alternative School Without Walls, and mentioned the composer.  “That’s jazz,” said Mitch – just what he wanted.

At least by this time in technological history I could send faxes overseas.  The theatre put me on to Angela, the composer’s agent.  It was not long before I had permission, at a very reasonable price, and a faxed copy of the dialogue and lyrics.  But the music?  Mike claims that he still has a copy, but he doesn’t know where it is.  Finally dear Angela faxed to say she had gone round to Mike Westbrook’s place and searched through his files (perhaps even behind the filing cabinet) and here are the pages of the original hand-written composition.  Hope it’s all right – it’s just the basic notes and the lyrics.  There’s no orchestration or other instructions.  Angela.

Angel indeed.  When Mitch saw the raw sheets of music, he was ecstatic.  This is the real jazz, he said, meaning that this gave him the freedom to interpret the music with his jazz students, who included a girl to play Mrs Blake who came from a well-known music family and who was already an accomplished jazz singer.

Sorry, South Pacific, but it’s Tyger instead.

The production elicited an unsolicited highly complimentary letter from a member of the public, not a relation of any of the students, which was high praise indeed.

But as it turned out, it was a dedicated science student who gave us the last word.  Rodrigo was pure science and technology, as far as he was concerned.  He had an interesting history, being among the many who left Chile for Australia in the time of Pinochet.  His stories of being a teenage boy in Lima were horrific, to say the least.

Technically he was a whiz, especially in programming and the latest in video.  He was already running his own business setting up and repairing computers.  We needed his help for Tyger because multimedia had been built into the script, including what became Rodrigo’s pride and joy – the film of William Blake escaping  this iniquitous world in a rocket ship.  Rodrigo copied a take-off of a NASA mission to the moon.  I shouldn’t say it: it went off like a rocket

Rodrigo, in Year 12, had never been inside a theatre before.  The biobox was obviously made for him.  He enrolled in the ‘R’ unit only because students had told me about him and science staff backed up the stories, so by the time I got to him he really had no choice.

What he saw and what he learnt in that theatre amazed him.  It was not just the technical side which he understood – indeed had no problem improving – but it was how the actors and crew related to each other, how the actors could improvise as they warmed up for rehearsal (and sometimes on stage), how they could express themselves on stage in a show which is highly symbolic, absurdist in style, yet requires singing with great emotional effect.  All was a stunning new experience for Rodrigo, who had had to survive the knives and guns of the backstreets of Lima.  And, of course, Kate Rose was mother to him as she was to everyone.

His conclusion, which I am pleased to purloin to bring Act Three to a suitable end, was simple, announced to all those who thought drama was just play:  “Every science student should take drama.”