I

might have thought you were one of the actors, like you were part of the experience.

I went from being a partial thug at Grinn Valley to being a full-blown hippie, in which I was much happier. Podcast, broadcast, conversations with Sarah Kinosky.

Back in your heady hippie years, Jeffrey, what kind of carpentry work were you doing? I

was doing sets for commercials. I worked on Million Dollar Man, I think it was called, some of the really early Australian films, as a set carpenter. And like I did really early Winfield cigarette commercials with Paul Hogan.

What was the set that you had to build for that?

The slogan for Winfield cigarettes was Anyhow, Have a Winfield. And so the now it's the powerhouse museum when it was just a powerhouse up at Altimo, that was a big empty building. I mean, went in there and sprayed the whole building white inside. It was just a giant empty powerhouse. And I made a giant anyhow in huge letters in there. And Paul Hogan was, he was the rep, he was representing Winfield Cigarettes then. And yeah, I was doing that. I was doing huge money. I was clearing $500 a week cash 50 years ago.

And how did he start making sets for theatre? I

moved to the Northern Beaches then and I was mainly surfing in the daytime, body surfing, not board writing. I wasn't really good at board writing. I didn't want to work in the daytime and I heard there was a music called the Neutral Bay which was a melodrama theatre, a theatre restaurant. And someone said, do you want a job? You're a carpenter, you're pretty handy. Do you want a job at night time? And I said, oh, what is it? And you come to work at six and you knock off at 11 and went, cool. And again, that was a group of people I was very, very comfortable in. And the head mechanist, he was also the actor, he often played the villain. He was a brilliant, brilliant man called Rick Dodds. He'd run on the stage and he played the villain. He was, you know, the moustache and all that. And then he'd run off and he'd pull a rope and then he'd run back on and push his thing. And he took me under his wing and he also used the tour of this great company called Snow It and Seven Divorce, which was the longest running theatre show in Australia. And so he said, look, I'm going on tour. I said, oh, what's on tour, Rick? And he said, oh, you work seven days a week and we go to every country town and five days a week we put on the show in whatever hall or shed we can get into. And on Fridays and Saturdays we do a matinee and then on Sunday you drive to a bigger town. Okay, cool.

Sounds like really hard work. Well, wow. It was much harder than surfing every day. Ah yeah,

but you know, it paid and I liked it. And again, theatre was again, which makes me think, was through this conversation, theatre was very, very welcoming. As long as you did your work, you could be pretty loose, you know, like they didn't really mind if you're a bit eccentric or a bit odd. So

did your carpentry skills come in handy on those country towns? What are some of your memories of putting on shows in little towns?

Making things, repairing things. We'd go into a town hall and just go, well, there's one PowerPoint. No, you had to be practical. And Rick's background was in boxing tents. He used to be the truck driver, put up the tent, have a few, go a few rounds in the ring, pack it up again and drive the next time. We're like carnies. And we toured all around and we went everywhere. And so I had to make sometimes help build the stage. You know, sometimes there's no stage where you had to extend the stage or put a hole in the patch of hole because the company of Ruders Theatrical always wanted the cheapest venue they could find.

And always find a way hey?

The show must go on. Always had to find a way which was a great discipline. It was a discipline that carried with me that if you've got all these people on the other side of a curtain, when that curtain goes up you must present what you promised to present them. So you'd have all these country people who were fabulous of course, all the little kids in the front row covering their eyes when the wicked witch ran across. Now they'd be crying putting their faces down into their mother's laps and things. The country audiences were so real and genuine. They wanted to see a show and they brought their family, so they'd be mum and dad and they were country people. And, you know, it was a big thing to go to theatre. So our job was to put on a good show for them. And from Rick's training, because Rick was effectively in this country almost theatre royalty, because he was old school, in amazing respect, from the tiniest theatre to the largest theatre in the whole country, it allowed me then, they said, well if Rick thinks he's alright, he's alright to me too. And so I became a touring flyman. Rick taught me how to be a flyman. What does that mean? In traditional theatres, it had all ropes going from the side of the, either up in the grid or down to the stage in the wings, and all the scenery which goes vertically was either hand pulled up, you had to hold three ropes at once, your hand pulled them up, or they're connected to a counterweight system, and all the scenery went from the stage level up into the roof. That's how we changed, set scene changes. Curtains as well, they all went up and down. Only the house curtain used to go sideways, or even sometimes the house curtain also goes vertically. And that's, the people who do that are known as flymen. We flew things. And

so you were trained to do that?

I was trained to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

is that what you were doing with Sydney Dance Company?

When I started the dance company, I was already been promoted from a flyman to a head mechanist, which means I was in charge of all the non-electrical side of theatre production. So transport, getting the actors on, getting them off, building the sets, rigging the sets, supervising the flime and supervising all the crew. So I was the head of department then.