Not just a day of bad tattoos and jingoism

JONATHAN Biggins is conflicted about Australia Day, as his latest play shows.

120420 arts biggins

FOR a man who claims his greatest sporting achievement is having gained selection on the high school debating team, Jonathan Biggins is giving a thoroughly convincing impersonation of an athlete.

The actor, director and playwright dashes through the empty foyer of the Sydney Theatre, taking a moment to offer a conciliatory wave before vanishing into a cloakroom. He emerges a minute later, brandishing a backpack, his face flushed, hand outstretched.

"Sorry," he says, momentarily breathless. "Forgot my bag. Phew. Bloody busy . . ."

It's a suitably theatrical entrance for one of the nation's foremost satirists, who is on his lunch break at Sydney Theatre Company's salubrious Walsh Bay digs. And despite being just hours away from premiering his new Actor on a Box series, Biggins is here to talk about something far weightier; something that has been playing on his mind.

"I'm talking Southern Cross aprons, bad tattoos, Kochie on Sunrise," he begins. "That whole idea of Australia Day: the jingoism, the commercialisation of it all on television. It hasn't always sat well with me."

He adjusts his thick-rimmed, Buddy Holly-issue specs. "When did we start saying 'Happy Australia Day' to each other anyway? I don't know when that happened. What does that even mean?"

The annual celebration or commemoration, "as the case may be", on January 26 of all things Australian, and the social milieu surrounding it, form the backdrop to Biggins's latest play, Australia Day. The co-production between Sydney and Melbourne theatre companies, starring Geoff Morrell and Valerie Bader as Australia Day committee members in a small coastal town, premieres next week in Melbourne.

Biggins, an urbane, left-leaning 51-year-old Sydneysider, may not seem the likeliest candidate to pen a script detailing the state of patriotism in rural Australia. But he is better qualified than most: he has been chosen four times as an ambassador for the NSW Australia Day Council, given speeches at citizenship ceremonies and attended his fair share of damper bakes, thong-throwing competitions and sausage sizzles.

"Look, I had the usual inner-city, bleeding-heart, leftie-type reservations about the suitability of celebrating on that day," he says. "There's the idea of invasion day for the indigenous, and other people have their own issues with it. I was pretty ambivalent about it, really.

"But when I went out to regional NSW and actually saw what the committees did, and how passionate they were about it, things changed. Talking at the citizenship ceremony was quite moving. You realise coming to this country means a lot more to them than it does to us."

First selected as an ambassador in 1994, Biggins didn't take long to realise "there's a play in this". The process of getting it down on paper, however, was beholden to his "painful" writing formula: "I spend 50 per cent thinking about it, 40 per cent avoiding it and 10 per cent actually writing it."

Directed by Richard Cottrell, Australia Day -- an "affectionate satire" -- follows the triumphs and peccadilloes of the fictional Coriole Shire's Australia Day Planning Committee, a spirited group of community leaders and political aspirants dedicated to ensuring the annual community celebrations go to plan. What they don't count on is an unseasonal deluge, a bout of food poisoning and yawning political divisions that remain a hallmark of this country's social fabric.

"This little fictional committee in a fictional town is a real microcosm (of the population)," Biggins says.

Television and stage veteran Morrell heads the cast alongside Bader, Alison Whyte, Peter Kowitz, David James and Kaeng Chan in a production that will travel to Sydney in September following its Melbourne run.

Biggins, best known for directing the Wharf Revue and Avenue Q, and for his long list of writing and acting credits, says his ambassadorial roles in the NSW regional hubs of Speers Point, Hunter Valley, Campbelltown and Singleton opened his eyes to the best and worst of what it means to be Australian.

"You tap into the beliefs of these people whose political views are the antithesis of yours: xenophobia and homophobia," he says.

"But you meet them, and they're not bad people. You think, 'How did they make those decisions?' That's the interesting thing, I think. How those ideas came to be."

Biggins admits the play deals with these "touchy" notions of racism and colonialism from an inner-city perspective, "the point of view of the theatregoing public".

"There's this idea with inner-city people that all these battles of prejudice have been won," he says. "The truth is, they haven't. Go out west, and things are vastly different. The veneer of civilisation is wafer-thin."

Biggins winces at the mention of the 2005 Cronulla riots, and acknowledges the shameful legacy the infamous clashes have left on the national psyche.

"It's a terrible stain. Terrible," he says.

"But the truth is that could have happened anywhere. Melbourne is no different to Sydney in that respect. I'm sure a lot of people swept up in the whole thing felt pretty tacky the day after."

Biggins knows Australian beach culture well: he grew up in Newcastle, the beachside labour city 200km north of Sydney. "In Newcastle we all had an ingrained sense of its own inferiority," he says, laughing.

That feeling was happily reaffirmed when Biggins returned to Speers Point, a small town south of Newcastle, as part of his Australia Day duties. "I got out there and no one had any idea who I was," he says with a grin. "We went for a spin around the park with the lord mayor, and the good thing was that even fewer people knew who he was. Unless you're a high-profile sportsman, no one has heard of you."

Which brings us back to those sporting aversions. Biggins is mysteriously reticent to confirm or deny his involvement in the numerous thong-throwing contests he has witnessed but bravely owns up to declining "the offer to play in the cricket match at Singleton".

"I'm not a sporty person," he says. "It's never been my thing."

But wait, isn't that . . . un-Australian? "Not at all," he says. "I've watched some great Australia Day concerts."

As for what the future holds for the national day, Biggins is sanguine.

"It is a delicate tightrope we tread on Australia Day every year," he says. "But you can be proud of the achievement of the society you belong to. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, is there?"

Australia Day opens at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse on April 26; Parramatta from August 22; Canberra from August 29; and Sydney Opera House from September 7.