Elocution

 

For some reason which now escapes me, I did not learn ballet. Despite the fact that most young girls did, that I was skinny and small and that my beloved cousin Penny went to ballet lessons, it all passed me by. (Penny, by the way, does not remember learning ballet so one or other of us has a screw loose.)

Instead, I went to elocution. This was chosen by my parents to offset the Australian accent I was developing. I recall my father being somewhat puzzled at the broad Australian accent – Ocker as we called it – trotted out by even educated Aussies. Bob Hawke, for one, had two voices; one broad Ocker and the other a touch less rough, according to his company; I heard him use both.

We came from England and my parents had a kind of generalised British accent, not posh but definitely not regional. So, to elocution I went. My teacher was a nice little body who had made a very minor career out of performing A. A. Milne poems. But she had much grander ideas for me. Early on in the piece, when I was, I think, eight, she started sending me to the Eisteddfods. My first appearance was as one of 80+ children (all girls if I recall correctly) performing a completely unimportant poem called The Ant.

A year or two later, when I was around 10, I began performing Shakespeare in the category called Under 16 Character Solo Recital in Costume. So there I was, not even a teenager, reciting the sombre speech of Henry VIII’s Queen Katherine trying to persuade him not to divorce her and the passionate speech of Juliet as she took the potion. These were successful and I won more than once; in fact I have kept a cheque for one guinea and its accompanying letter for having won something or another back in 1959. Reciting Shakespeare, is, in fact, my only party trick; I can make sense of the language on sight. Unfortunately it’s not a skill called for these days – or perhaps ever.

I was blessed to attend Abbotsleigh high school under the direction of the marvellous Betty Archdale. Her brother was an actor and she was very fond of theatre. Each year, each class chose a scene from a Shakespearean play to perform for the school. They were adjudicated and the best few performed for the parents. The whole school also put on a play or musical each year. I recall being cast as Hortense, the French maid, in our production of The Boy Friend. Regrettably, to say I couldn’t sing is a gross understatement. So for Hortense’s solo number they had me “sing” it in front of the curtain while someone who actually could sing did so behind the curtain. It must have been convincing because Miss Archdale told my parents she had no idea I had such a lovely voice.

We Abbotsleigh girls also joined the Barker boys from their school up the road in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. I desperately wanted to play Lady Bracknell but was cast as the insipid Cicily instead. After all, Lady B had all the best lines: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

In our leaving year, our mandatory Shakespeare play was The Tempest. The school decided to put on a lavish production involving the entire year in acting roles and other years as helpers of various sorts. Parents were also involved, one having the sole duty of devising makeup for Ariel. I was cast as Caliban, the “monster”, and dressed with my own hair wild and matted and more hair growing from my cheeks; I also wore Balinese dancers’ metal fingertips reversed so they turned down like claws. For years afterwards people would come up to me and say they recognised me as Caliban. Not, I think, an unalloyed compliment.

I always intended to become an actress, planning to go to London and study at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); NIDA did not exist in those days. My parents were very canny. They said that of course I could go to London and study at RADA; they just thought it made sense for me to do a university course first so I would always “have something to fall back on”. They evidently didn’t think much of my chances to earn substantial funds as an actor (or actress as it was then).

Well, I went to Sydney University to study for an Arts degree and became one of the world’s highly educated unemployables. I recall trying out for a role at Uni in a Shakespeare play – The Tempest again – for a production John Bell was to produce; for some reason now forgotten, the play was never staged. Instead of theatre, I became totally immersed in the disciplines of Ancient History and Archaeology, including the very new (at Sydney Uni) discipline of Aboriginal Archaeology which was mostly taught out of the Anthropology Department. This led me to participate in several “digs”, archaeological excavations. One major dig was four weeks in the bush south of Sydney excavating a large cave. As I’ve written before, this not only introduced me to field archaeology but also to digging and sanitising latrines, spending days getting very, very dirty in a bikini for the heat, changing clothes in a sleeping bag and the wonders of a Coolgardie Cooler, a contraption of wood and wet cloth which used the principle of evaporation to cool the food on its shelves. I also dug more than once on the south coast and have fond memories of yarns round the campfire and billy tea just as if I was a real Aussie and not an almost acclimatised Brit.

I put the acting to good use in my early 20s when along with some others I founded the Sydney Jewish Theatre. It produced a number of plays over a few years which the community faithfully supported. My mother and my Uncle Cyril (the one who should have got my piano!) were also part of the troupe, which was rather lovely. Many years later I also performed in a neighbourhood theatre but mostly I have used my theatrical skills, such as they were/are, to “act” the speeches I was increasingly having to give. I had never learned to speak extemporaneously so all my speeches were written, by me or others. Like Winston Churchill, my mother told me. I then read the speeches, but did that with, I think, reasonable flair.

With my memory the way it is, there’s no chance in God’s wide world that I could ever again perform in a play, but I’m still up for speeches should anyone want me.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: From the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in the ‘70s: “The Great Wall, I have been told, is the only man-made structure on earth that is visible from the moon. For the life of me I cannot see why anyone would go to the moon to look at it, when, with almost the same difficulty, it can be viewed in China.”