Hmm…. I was a shearer’s rouseabout and a pastry cook before uni, but after I graduated it actually took me almost another 5 years to actually leave the CSU Bathurst campus. My first job during university, using the skills I was learning, was probably a series of gigs with my mates Tim Durick and Geoff Keen (Alumni ’91) as The Banana Brothers, juggling and being idiots at among other places the Lithgow Home and Leisure Show! I also made a few short films and TVC’s  with another graduate Ben Pietor including one for CSU’s Open Learning Institute. I helped direct a couple of festivals and was a stilt walker for a while. One ongoing ‘real’ job I got after graduating from Theatre/Media was as a part-time tutor in the School of Communication on the Bathurst Campus. Basically a front for us to start covertly creating Circus Monoxide!

 

Absolutely! Yes on both counts. My job as a tutor kept me in a circle of incredibly creative people in the Bathurst community, many of whom are still there, people like Cammo (David Cameron), Phil Glen, John Merkel, Jerry Boland, Kate Smith and Bill Blaikie. The informal (and often illicit) support of the School of Communication, and in particular the Theatre/Media course, directly led to what I do now.  I started out much more interested in film and television, but I realised that you needed a story to tell to make a film,.. But you needed a young body to be an acrobat, so I chose circus. Our access to the T/M resources directly led to the creation of Circus Monoxide, which went on to become a significant contemporary Australian circus, eventually based in the Illawarra. The original Monoxide was entirely a T/M graduate project, Linden Tierney, Ben Garfield, Hall Murray, Phil Glen, Inthasone Phetsiriseng, Jane Patton, myself plus other T/M guest acts and others My current job as Artistic Director and co-CEO of Circus Oz was a direct result of that group of people and those resources. Were it not for the workshops, students and staff of T/M, Monoxide would have never come to life, and I definitely wouldn’t be doing what I do now. One nice circularity is that this year Circus Oz plays BMEC in Bathurst, the site of my first directing job, co-directing Mountain Madness Cabaret.

 

I think I negotiated my first wage at Circus Oz by saying I’d take it as long as it was more than the dole. So I clearly wasn’t in it for the money, although obviously it’s quite good to be paid to do something you love. I originally thought circus was for people with a short attention span. Sadly for me that isn’t true. It can take years to make a good circus act. I’ve had to learn to slow down… The thing I love about Circus Oz is that there’s something for everyone, and from so many angles. Ballistics, physics, comedy, big people, music, small people, graphics, psychology, theatre, politics, rigging, architecture, acrobatics, surrealism, international travel, national travel,.. It never gets boring.

 

I grew up without a television living 10 miles out of the nearest town, Armidale in northern NSW. We had to make our own fun out of lumps of wood, interesting novels, various flammables, drawing pencils, soldering irons, radical ideas, puppets and old bicycles. Finding the Theatre Media course simply gave me permission to turn those things into a career.

There was also the drive and commitment of the staff of the Theatre/Media course and the various Communications disciplines around it, lecturers and tutors who were in it for the fun, the challenge, the discourse, the parties…..

 

My mother, My daughter, The famous anarchic French circus ‘Archaos’, Che Guevara, George Orwell, Hilarious women like Kate Smith, Cath Duroux and Emma Beaumont, passionate rule-breakers like Bill Blaikie, Laotian circus trainer Inthasone Phetsiriseng, Circus Oz (the early version!), all my collaborators over the years, gifted scammers like movie producer and alumni Matt Hobbs, raving loons like Jerry Boland, the late, friendly and endlessly energetic Tim Durick, Peter Carey’s book Bliss, the incredibly unlikely Barack Obama, the notion of ‘the group’, a diverse team of subversives…

 

Travel. Take a group of half a dozen or so like-minded friends with you. Live with very little money away from the big cities for a while. Don’t give a toss about money while you have no kids to support. Read Epicurus. Jump in, boots and all. Stay away from high-priced rental markets. Don’t worry about things. Live in a caravan. Live each day like it’s your 2^nd-last one. Say yes to everything. Don’t worry about your ‘Career’. Graduate if you have time. Make friends with interesting people. Stay friends with the people you go to uni with, they may well be your best friends for your whole life. Remember, if you accept that the universe is neither completely good nor completely evil, then you have no other choice but to burst out laughing.