The Queensland Problem
Where are the stories and talent?
Let’s talk about place.
I’ll start where I live.
My family occupy a decent chunk of land in Bellbird Park, which is on Meanjin’s (Brisbane’s) outer Western suburbs. It’s just behind a suburb called Goodna, which straddles the very end of the Warrego Highway. Goodna’s low-lying and has repeatedly suffered horrendous flood damage. In the centre of a roundabout that I pass every day is a yardstick measuring the height of water in 2022, 2011 and 1974.
Meanjin is home to the Turrbal and Jagera people, who have held land here for tens of thousands of years.
I grew up mainly in Toowoomba. Toowoomba is a school and church town, a pseudo-metropolitan hub for the agricultural communities of the surrounding Darling Downs. There’s no reason it should have the largest (and prettiest) proscenium arch theatre in the Southern Hemisphere. But it does. I spent a lot of time there growing up.
When I wasn’t participating in theatre workshops and later running them, I often stayed with my grandparents on the Sunshine Coast. When I was eight years old, they took me to the Australian Reptile Park, a small tourist joint where you could see some lizards and a couple of crocodiles. Within fifteen years, the park had become Australia Zoo, an international sensation and home to the Crocodile Hunter. He would pass away from a deadly sting ray attack in 2006, but not before leaving behind a family empire that still occupies today's public consciousness. If Australia had a royal family, it would be the Irwins.
Now, I don’t want to bore you. But I would like to pause and ask if there’s anything about this place that so far strikes you as a location bereft of story or interest. Perhaps a cultural desert? A place for hicks and incestuous farm hands?
This is Queensland, after all.
Everyone gets insecure about their hometown. Patriotism can be garish and unbecoming. Far better to roll your eyes in superiority and get out of dodge.
Australian culture, built on the corrosive ballast of colonialism, is insecure. We consume British and American content. Our theatres are filled with New York or London shows. Hamilton tours the country, and we applaud American history and neglect our own.
Sydney and Melbourne look internationally for cultural mentorship: to New York, Paris and London. The rest of Australia, including Queensland, are at the bottom of the cultural food chain.
Sydney and Melbourne, we’ve all been led to believe, are ‘better’ at culture. They have better stories to tell and better talent to tell them.
In the theatre industry, this belief is at a crisis point. In recent years, inexperienced leadership from out of state has meant Brisbane talent doesn’t stand a chance. Actors who managed steady work for decades are out of work. Queensland playwrights like me are changing careers.
It’s a calcification of a long-held cultural prejudice. The pressure on young talent to ‘leave Brisbane’ is immense, and many follow it. Many successful artists find they get more Queensland work once they’ve left the state. We need the validation of others before we find our own backyard legitimate.
It’s reached a disastrous precipice on our stages and screens.
In response, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has begun a campaign, ‘Hot Locals for Hire’.
Artistic ‘excellence’, a cul de sac of a term, has never been a problem here, particularly in the last decade.
Deb Mailman, Barry Otto, Adam Zwar, Carol Burns, Geoffrey Rush, George Miller, Josh Lawson, Leah Purcell, Margot Robbie, Michael Caton, Miranda Otto, Ray Meagher, Russell Dykstra and William McInnes all came from Queensland.
If they were starting out today and trying to get a job in Brisbane, their chances would be slim to non-existent.
Anna McGahn is a successful, talented actress. I’ve had the good fortune to work with Anna several times. She’s returned to her home state of Queensland after eight years inter-state. In an article on Medium for MEAA, she articulates the experience of being a Queensland actor that so many face:
As someone who left this state for eight years, I can attest to the patterns of exclusion so many are reporting, and the stress and devaluation it puts on Queensland-based performers, who struggle to be recognised as the accomplished professionals they are.
When I lived interstate, I was invited to perform as a ‘returning Queenslander’, much to the frustration of my peers who never left. However, when I decided to live here permanently, Queensland theatre auditions stopped completely, while film and television auditions shifted from leads to bit parts. It was as if I’d announced my retirement.
Bluey, currently the most streamed television show in the United States and the biggest cultural export from Australia since the Sydney Olympics, is created and made in Brisbane, Queensland.
I’m having coffee with an old friend. They’re a talented actor but haven’t found work in a year or more. They stayed in Queensland for family.
‘I’m fifty, and I haven’t got other skills,’ they tell me. They’ve taken up smoking again and are taking a long drag on their cigarette. ‘I think I’m done. I’ve had droughts before, but I don’t know, I’m…’
Their voice trails off.
I leave the chat concerned about them. I set a reminder on my phone to check in on them in a few days.
And what is artistic ‘excellence’ anyway?
I was consumed enough with the question that I devoted a decent chunk of my doctoral thesis to it when considering the intersection of ‘community’ and professional talent. One of my key research findings was that of intentionality. You can’t have a high-quality outcome if all your stakeholders aren’t on the same page at the beginning of your project.
So then what is our intention in making Queensland theatre?
Should it be - and I’m just taking a wild stab here - to make shows that entertain and enrich the lives of Queensland audiences? Especially, say, if the company doing the work is subsidised by the government (ergo the taxpayer)?
Many artists have an unfortunate egoic streak - and I can identify with this - that places ourselves ‘above’ mainstream attitudes and tastes. We take shelter in our university degrees and discuss the need to educate or enlighten audiences.
I cringe at some of the conversations I’ve had with senior artistic leaders in the past. I regret our shared frustration that Queensland audiences don’t ‘get’ it. The implication is that an audience development strategy needs to improve Queenslander tastes.
The assumption is, of course, that they don’t have the correct taste to begin with.
Why would an audience come to a work that doesn’t respect them?
A mentor of mine (who’d been working in Queensland for decades) and I were bemoaning the systematic failures of the theatre industry. We kept circling back to essential cultural principles.
Respect the audience.
Acknowledge the artists, the stories and the audience that are here in Queensland.
There’s nothing that will stop the audience from coming to a theatre show in Queensland.
You’ve just got to speak to them.
Queensland has stories to tell.
Eddie Mabo began his campaign for civil rights here.
The biggest schism in the Roman Catholic Church (ever) took place here.
The only dedicated Children’s Library in all of Australia is here, in Ipswich.
One of Australia's busiest dinosaur fossil sites is here, in the outback town of Winton.
Australia’s largest and most corrupt political scandals occurred here under Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Some of Australia’s most controversial politicians come from Queensland: Kevin Rudd, Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter.
In Kalkadoon Country (Mount Isa), locals gave one of the most successful and long-running resistance efforts against colonial powers. In 1884 one of Australia’s most significant battles ever broke out on Battle Mountain.
In World War Two, 880 Torres Strait Island volunteers became Light Infantrymen. Horn Island on Queensland’s coast became the only place where non-Indigenous and Indigenous soldiers fought and trained side by side. They were paid half as much and not appropriately recognised for their service.
These are not points of pride. We have historical spots of shame like any other state or territory.
It is only to say: things happen here.
It’s not all cane toads, XXXX and State of Origin.
A famous children’s author from Melbourne is meeting me at Southbank for lunch. He arrives at the cafe buzzed.
‘I went for a walk this morning. Bloody hell you keep this place quiet, don’t you? Melbourne’s Southbank is bloody miserable cement. Youse have it fucking sorted. Amazing stretch along there -’ He gestures to the riverfront. ‘And then I lost a couple of hours to the gallery and GOMA. So it’s pretty good up here, yeah? Fucking amazing. A relief to be in a place that supports arts and culture. I should move up.’
I’ve auditioned hundreds of high school graduates vying for a spot at a Queensland university for a degree in Acting.
But almost all of them, even if they grew up down the road, have Queensland universities as their second or third priority.
They almost all audition for NIDA (Sydney) and VCA (Melbourne).
After all, a key part of artistic excellence is the technique and training you apply to your craft.
And it’s assumed that what those universities supply is superior to what is offered in Queensland uni’s.
Universities and the creative arts are at an existential crisis. The performing arts industry and the tertiary education environment have changed beyond recognition in the last twenty years. When I was considering auditioning for NIDA as a high school graduate, I was banking on their track record of starting careers like Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett.
It’s worth noting Margot Robbie didn’t go to university at all. Neither did Chris Hemsworth. Rose Byrne didn’t get into NIDA when she auditioned.
I’m not saying Queensland universities are better. Neither am I saying there’s anything wrong with the courses that VCA and NIDA offer.
Our perception of southern universities being better is based on a larger cultural context that assumes that Queensland doesn’t have centres that train artistic excellence.
I also happen to be saying, just quietly, that NIDA’s Course Leader in Directing, Benjamin Schostakowski, didn’t train at NIDA.
He trained in Queensland.
In the university courses I’ve taught, the students and I often debate about the mysterious ‘Great Australian Play’. Is it Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler? Perhaps When The Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell? The Removalists by David Williamson? Is it yet to be written?
As we delve deeper into the semester and discuss Australia’s history, politics and culture, I put it to a democratic poll.
If we had to choose a play we’ve studied as The Great Australian Play, which would it be?
For more than five years, they return with the same result.
Seven Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman.
They created, produced and performed the work as a couple of young theatre graduates in the independent theatre scene in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1993.
‘Theatre marketing’s fucked, hey,’ says a friend, flicking through a season brochure of a theatre company. He points at a word that offends him. ‘Urgent. Look at that. Urgent. If I see one more theatre show described as ‘urgent’ I will lose my mind. Fucking urgent? Like an audience is going to think, ‘shit, I better go to that then. It’s urgent!’
David Morton and Nicholas Paine started Dead Puppet Society as two Queensland theatre graduates in 2009. Within twelve years, their work was performed to sell-out audiences in Brisbane, at the Sydney Opera House, and to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at the London Natural History Museum.
Nelle Lee, Ross Balbuziente and Nick Skubij founded shake n stir theatre co in 2006 as a school touring company. They now tour the country (and world) with their work for schools and mainstage shows, including wildly successful adaptations based on the works of Roald Dahl.
These are just two, but there are more. Such as Grin and Tonic Theatre Troupe (who took their production of Seven Stages of Grieving to LA, Toronto and more), or The Good Room (whose crowd-sourced plays have toured the country)...
The list goes on.
I lied in this article.
That friend who was fifty in the cafe? There are about a dozen of those people. I keep tabs on them. I try to check in every now and then. There’s a sense of loss and hurt and emptiness.
Things are pretty fucking bleak out here.
If one more wanker from down South asks if we’ve got good coffee up here yet, I will lose my fucking mind.
I want to tell you about the place where I live.
It’s where my grandparents found land over a century ago, and it’s where my children will be raised.
It’s the place I fell in love and married the most beautiful person I know.
It’s a place of beaches, flooding rains and the most stifling Summers.
My story, and the stories of all of the most important people I know, come from this place. And when my community is given the chance to express itself, it does so in the most beautiful, spectacular ways.
We just have to give ourselves - and be given - the chance.
Kat Henry also running the Directing Masters at VCA.
Little fact check - the Toowoomba theatre is the largest regional pros arch. I believe the State Theatre in Melbourne is the largest pros arch in the Southern Hemisphere. Great article though. I emerged into the industry in Perth so I can identify with some of these emotions although now that I live in Melbourne and work in the industry down here I think so much of the attitudes are more about history and folklore rather than anything that is really happening down on the ground today. In particular, post COVID it really is tough all over...