Rob Brookman AM
Speech notes
As many of you will know, the idea for a Festival of Arts was conceived in August 1958 when, at the initiative of Professor John Bishop Director of the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide and Sir Lloyd Dumas, managing director and editor of the Advertiser, a small group of Adelaide citizens met at Town Hall to discuss establishing a major cultural event for South Australia.
The Lord Mayor at the time, Lance Hargrave, wrote in the 1960 Program Foreword: “With the subsequent backing of twenty South Australian firms and individuals, to the amount of £15,000, we decided to go ahead immediately.” Imagine trying to get something off the ground that fast in these risk-averse times!
AI tells me that £15,000 is worth about $600,000 these days – not inconsiderable as a civic effort but a fair way off the $12 million in public and private support required to mount an Adelaide Festival these days.
From the Festival’s earliest days, it was the generosity of individuals and community supporters that turned an ambitious idea into a living cultural institution. Happily Government joined the party after a while, particularly under Don Dunstan, but philanthropy has always been at the heart of the Festival’s success.
Many of you here lived that history of success. And your ongoing engagement is part of what has allowed the Festival to continue evolving into the event it is today.
Today is all about that connection: bringing together people who share this very particular slice of history.
I thought I’d share a bit of my Festival journey with you which may evoke a few fellow memories and, being an efficient person, I figured I could just quote from my chapter in the excellent Adelaide Festival 60th anniversary book published in 2020 - of which I am sure there are still plenty of copies available for purchase.
Here goes:
The Adelaide Festival has been my awakening, my teacher, my obsession, my heart-pumping triumph, my hilarious disaster, my un-funny disaster, my marathon, my loving cohort, my catalogue of characters (mostly heroes, some villains), my storehouse of anecdotes, my window to the world, and my reflection on our place in that world. That may sound like hyperbole but, coming from a patrilineage of stiff upper lips in the then dull, flat, white-bread environs of Adelaide, the impact of the Festival on me was profound.
From the age of six when, in 1960, my parents took me to the Folk Festival of Song & Dance at the Advertiser Sound Shell in Elder Park (a harbinger of ‘multiculturalism’ and perhaps future seed of WOMADelaide?) through to 2020 and the mind-expanding world of virtual reality in Michel van der Aa’s Eight, the Festival has provided both a chronicle of the times and a cultural metronome (suddenly doubling its tempo when going annual in 2013).
Looking forward through the eyes of that serious little boy, indelible impressions included the enchantment of Noye’s Fludde at the Kent Town Methodist Church in 1962, the unearthly sounds of Hungarian whistler Hacki Tamás in 1968, the Salzburg Marionettes production of The Magic Flute performed to a recording with Streich, Price, Nilsson and Fischer-Dieskau, capped off in the year my voice broke with an appearance as a boy chorister in Peter Maxwell Davies’ O Magnum Mysterium at St Peter’s Cathedral.
This was perhaps the most profound of those formative experiences as I discovered music that did not completely sit within the harmonic comfort of Mum and Dad’s collection of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Verdi…..And I also discovered the thrilling and frightening passion that art can inspire, as Maxwell Davies, a wild-eyed Mancunian and a being like no other that I had encountered, put us through our paces.
The stifling world of my starchy (if thorough) schooling exploded in my teens with the arrival of 1967’s Summer of Love, the revolutionary spirit of 1968 and accompanying mass protest movements. The Festival reflected and amplified these upheavals, challenging Adelaide’s dominant cultural paradigms in theatre, music, dance and art.
Emblematic for me was the moment in 1972 that legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg fronted up on the Barr Smith Lawns at Adelaide University to blow our seething eighteen year-old minds. We chanted, we howled and we sat in rapt attention as Ginsberg gave us his stream (well in his case a torrent) of consciousness. And over at Memorial Drive the youthful Jim Sharman blew our minds in an altogether more showbiz way with his transgressive and spectacular production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
I also had my second Festival gig – this time as an overnight security guard on an inflatable dome in Rymill Park for a young people’s program called Expression 72. As a skinny Charles Atlas 97-pound weakling, my strategy was to befriend any intruders and offer them a smoke. There were two homeless people, a couple of dogs and a bevy of possums that visited in the small hours over the course of two weeks and my mission was fulfilled….
The 70s also saw the next great phase of the Adelaide Festival when it moved from its approach of catching-up on great international high culture (and let’s face it, Helpmann’s delivery of Rudolf Nureyev and Marlene Dietrich was pretty damn cool!) to Anthony Steel’s revolutionary attitude that Adelaide could lead from the front, ushering in an era where Adelaide could lay claim to be on the most sharply-honed of cutting edges.
In 1974 — aged twenty and with nine-months of cultural back-packing in Europe behind me — I won the arts jobs lottery when Anthony decided to hire me as a Trainee Administrator at the newly-minted Adelaide Festival Centre. Happily, this was a time when the Festival and the Festival Centre’s management and staffing was largely combined, so a natural segue at the end of my traineeship saw me enlisted to do anything from finding a hotel with a bed large enough to satisfy Hans Werner Henze’s apparently extravagant nocturnal predilections, to finding the right transport for Sizwe Banzi Is Dead’s John Kani and Winston Ntshona (a canary yellow Mini Moke as it turned out).
Overwhelmed with the fabulousness of it all, I recall rather gauchely gushing my delight to Mr Steel (as I still knew him then) on the Opening Day of the Festival, telling him what an incredible thing he had created. I got the full force of his Steely blue eyes and two words: ‘Of course!’
Anthony brought us the first professional production of a Janáček opera in Australia (imagine….), Merce Cunningham, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (another Australian premiere), the New York Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, Tadeuz Kantor and cricot2, The Wooster Group, commissioned work from Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, the world premiere of Richard Meale’s Voss and so much more. And what an extraordinary coming-of-age those five Festivals provided from 1974–1986, with Christopher Hunt and Jim Sharman’s two brilliant Festivals as the meat in a Steel sandwich.
Across these twelve years, my cultural education paralleled the development of my practice as I moved from amanuensis to Administrator, with an added opportunity for my own bit of programming when I organized the ‘between years’ Come Out Youth Festival (now Dream Big although to be frank I still prefer the deliberate double-entendre provided by its indomitable founder Chris Westwood). Come Out, along with the Fringe, Writers’ Week and WOMADelaide, has been one of the four significant festivals spawned by the mother-ship over the years.
Christopher Hunt’s arrival in 1978 saw a waning of the synergy between Festival and Festival Centre, as a power-play between Christopher and then General Manager of the Festival Centre Kevin Earle played out. Despite the tumult, Christopher’s move to recruit more of his own staff created the best by-product of all—the arrival of Mary Vallentine as Administrator and the start of a life-long friendship and professional collaboration between us.
Late in the development of the 1980 program, Kevin finally won his battle of attrition, wresting administrative control of the Festival back from Christopher.
Much to my horror, Kevin ordered me (still only 25) to accompany him on a trip all over Europe to finalise the negotiations and contracts for a number of key events. It should have been Mary’s adventure not mine, but she gave me her blessing (‘Just get it done, Rob!’).
The high point of that trip was seeing Peter Brook’s mystical Conference of the Birds staged in the courtyard of a medieval monastery in Avignon. The lowlight was the tongue-lashing that Christopher received at the hands of the formidable Micheline Rozan (Brook’s co-director at the Centre for International Theatre Research) as he tried to persuade her that the productions should play out-of-doors when she had previously expressly ruled that out. History, however, would end up on Christopher’s side when Peter finally approved the Anstey Hill Quarry as the site for the season.
Securing Brook’s company was another watershed moment for Adelaide. In one of those moments of utter creative synergy the Festival managed to snaffle a major season of productions from arguably the most influential theatre director of the era and presented them in a setting that complemented and elevated Brook’s work. On his departure, Peter told us of his plan to develop (with Jean-Claude Carrière) a production of the Indian epic The Mahabharata and indicated that, after the experience in the quarry, he knew that this was the kind of space in which it should be played.
Five years later, the French-language production of The Mahabharata (all three parts and nine hours of it) opened at a quarry outside Avignon and three years after that, in 1988, the English language version arrived back in the Anstey Hill Quarry.
I could go on to cover the next 4 decades but to do so might provide evidence that I have entered serious anec-dotage. You can always read that book which is replete with more interesting essays than mine…
And if you’d like to share some stories of your own, we’d love to record some of your Festival memories here today. The team have set up a spot for you to sit and share your memories. It could be...
- Your first Festival show; or
- The artists that changed your life; or
- The traditions you kept up over the years; or
- Even your hopes for future Festival
These stories help us preserve the history of the Festival - not as an institution, but as our community’s lived experience.
You might have gathered that I am rather devoted to the Festival. And that is entirely true. 50 years ago in 1976 I was electrified by a speech that Premier Don Dunstan gave at a bacchanalian Writers Week Opening Luncheon at Chateau Reynella. In that speech he laid out a vision of South Australia not as a great economic power but as a beacon of civilisation where a peaceful, civil and thinking society would hold the arts to be central to our community, not just a comfortable side-show for the better-off. I still carry a torch for that. Perhaps quixotically so…..
And like many people of my age and stage I have pondered what I might do to help secure a future where young minds and souls are offered the opportunities that I was.
Let’s be frank – it comes down to resources. And I don’t see an explosion in Government support around the corner in an age where neo-liberalism is likely to hold sway for some considerable time to come.
We have been arguably the luckiest – and most wasteful - generation in human history. We have largely lived in peace; economic progress has been extraordinary; technological progress astonishing; individual financial accumulation unprecedented.
In contemplating this good fortune, I’ve decided to reserve a chunk of my estate to support the arts. I’m hoping that the realisation of my bequests is still quite some way off but the thinning ranks of my cohort give pause for thought sometimes.
This is the bit that people sometimes think of as a bit icky – my proposition to you that you might like to follow suit in whatever measure seems appropriate.
Apologies if that’s raised any spectres but I’m finding that this is a very active conversation in my generation and, in celebrating 66 years of the Adelaide Festival and the continuing connection of our community, thought it might be timely to put the hard word on you!
And now, to give us a glimpse of the near future of the Festival, please welcome our somewhat exhausted but still very bouncy Artistic Director Matt Lutton!
