Don’t look back: the year the world was finally wowed by our culture

Everything changed in the 1970s. Until then, for almost three-quarters of the 20th century, London was still our cultural “home” and Australian artists as varied as singer Nellie Melba, dancer Robert Helpmann, pianist Eileen Joyce, and actors Judith Anderson and Peter Finch debuted on its iconic stages in order to make names for themselves. Painters like Sidney Nolan, and playwrights Alan Seymour and Ray Lawler also joined this cultural caravan but apart from our most famous diva, Joan Sutherland, Sydney’s arts exiles were more likely to be writers, Patrick White and Christina Stead being the most acclaimed.

The Sydney I moved to in early 1971 was a city on the cusp, transforming itself with remarkable speed and elan from the tawdry town whose distinguishing cultural landmarks had been Royal Randwick, leagues clubs offering glitzy live entertainment, illegal casinos and, of course, poker machines. Coming from Adelaide, in the so-called ‘wowser state’ of South Australia that had abolished its ‘six o’clock swill’ just four years earlier, I found Sydney’s brazen ways almost irresistibly alluring.

But by the end of the decade the city was culturally almost unrecognisable, and all because of its fervent embrace of the arts and the infrastructure needed to perform and promote them. I quickly saw that what it meant to be a Sydneysider, and indeed an Australian, was changing fast and I enthusiastically joined in the partly cynical, partly celebratory self-scrutiny that we now defined ourselves by.

The times were moving fast: Julie McGregor (left) and Catriona Brown were part of the White Horse Players bringing theatre to pubs, such as the Newtown Hotel, in 1976.Credit: Peter John Moxham

The times were fast-moving as we shed the old order with its ridiculous shibboleths and sacred cows and turned with newly acquired assurance to literature, drama, film, art, music and other cultural forms of expressing who we were becoming.

In 1970, actor John Bell and director Richard Wherrett returned from London and teamed up with Ken Horler – a barrister and theatre director – to open a theatre in a miniscule space in Nimrod Street, Kings Cross with the aim of putting on good Australian drama.

A young John Bell (pictured 1971) returned from five years with the Royal Shakespeare company to direct and act at the Nimrod and Old Tote.

I was among the ardent crowds who crammed into the definitely unsafe space (it was closed for a time by the Council because of inadequate toilets and non-existent fire escapes) to watch the latest Alex Buzo play or the first-ever revue by Aboriginal singers and actors. It seemed perfectly natural that the poster plastered on light poles around the city to publicise the revue had been designed by Brett Whiteley.

Then in 1973 came the two events that would forever change how Sydney, and Australia, were seen by the world and by ourselves: Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Sydney Opera House opened.

White’s work was described by the Swedish Academy as “an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature”. He was the first and, so far, only Australian to win the Literature Prize.

With the opening of the Sydney Opera House, the world again took notice. This prosaic former British colony, showing such unexpected style! With its unique white sails, perched on Bennelong Point on one of the world’s most beautiful harbours, this single building redefined who, we had now decided, we were.

In 1973 the Sydney Opera House opened and Patrick White, pictured right with Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Credit: Fairfax

The mere existence of the building (with its tortuous political and architectural history) was “an extraordinary collective act of dreaming in public”, as the Opera House website puts it.

Such “dreaming in public” now defined Sydney, as the city almost frenetically embarked upon embellishing its new-found sophistication with a creative surge, mostly funded by the very pro-arts NSW premier Neville Wran, that ranged from establishing the cultural powerhouses of the future to just providing space for artists of every kind to thrive.

In 1976 the Sydney Dance Company was created by dancer Graeme Murphy, and in 1978 Sydney Theatre Company replaced the now-bankrupt Old Tote, with an opening production underscoring the new direction of prioritising Australian material and talent: A Cheery Soul written by Patrick White, directed by Jim Sharman (fresh from bringing to Sydney his productions of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show) with Robyn Nevin, as Miss Docker, marking a significant milestone towards her present doyenne status.

Sydney’s writers, poets and troubadours chose Balmain or Woollahra, both distinctly more bohemian than today, rather than London, as their natural habitat. While presiding over a huge crumbling house in Jersey Road, Dorothy Hewett produced poems such as In Moncur Street which Robyn Archer turned into a song for her 1977 album The Wild Girl In The Heart.

Over in Balmain, where I lived in the 1970s, the denizens of the London Hotel included writers like Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding who, along with the local poets such as John Tranter, Robert Adamson and Nigel Roberts were having their supremacy challenged by women, Vicki Viidikas, Joanne Burns and Jennifer Maiden among them.

The feminist assault was even more deadly. Never more so than one evening, in a packed poetry reading in the waterfront garden of a ramshackle mansion in Birchgrove, when Kate Jennings read her self-excoriating poem Couples from her 1975 anthology Come to Me My Melancholy Baby to the acute discomfort of her lover, sitting on the grass with his wife.

Poet Kate Jennings was described as “an erudite feminist” when she appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1980.Credit: Fairfax

Almost as explosive was My Brilliant Career, the 1979 film based on the Miles Franklin novel directed by Gillian Armstrong and produced by Margaret Fink (a rare female duo in another very male-dominated sphere) and sending the careers of Judy Davis and Sam Neill heading for the stratosphere. I still remember the gasps of disbelief in the theatre, even from feminists like myself, as Davis, playing the young Sybylla Melvyn, turns down Neill’s Harry Beecham, who is as supportive as he is handsome, because she values her independence over her love for him.

Film producer Margaret Fink photographed during the pre-production of My Brilliant Career in 1979. Credit: Fairfax

The film renaissance began in the 1970s. Initially it was led by Sydney directors Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and, in the 1980s Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously), and Bruce Beresford (Don’s Party, The Getting of Wisdom and Breaker Morant). But it was impossible not to include Melbourne’s Fred Schepisi (The Devil’s Playground, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and the 1988 Lindy Chamberlain story in A Cry in the Dark) and even Tim Burstall’s Alvin Purple that – like Beresford’s equally comedic The Adventures of Barry McKenzie – was widely popular even while being spurned by the critics.

Arts, and entertainment, in 20th century Sydney were confidently Australian, and constantly evolving. Rock music was now an indispensable part of our cultural diet and while Sydney saw the formation of the superstar bands AC/DC, INXS and Midnight Oil, we also could not get enough of Melbourne’s Skyhooks and Men at Work.

A young INXS launch Shabooh Shoobah in 1982.

Theatre and dance expanded, with the powerhouse companies being given competition by two brilliant young upstarts. In 1984, I was one of 600 Sydneysiders including Joan Sutherland, Patrick White and a virtual rollcall of local writers, actors and film-stars who each contributed $1000 to purchase the Belvoir Street Theatre whose Surry Hills premises, in an old tomato sauce factory, were under threat of demolition. It was a brilliant move orchestrated by two ex-Nimrod workers Chris Westwood and Sue Hill over a single weekend. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance company, Bangarra, came into being in 1989, with Stephen Page soon recruited from Sydney Dance Company to be artistic director in 1991.

With Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, entertainment moved from the stage to the streets where performers and audience merged into one huge, exuberant celebration of tolerance and glitzy performance art. There was nothing else like it and the crowds just grew and grew.

Glitz and theatricality moved on to the street: 1998 Gay Mardi Gras Credit: Fairfax

Over the next two decades, the quality and the endurance of the film industry was underscored by instant classics such as Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle, Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. As did the still-continuing exodus of already successful Australian actors to Hollywood. Unlike the earlier cultural exiles to London, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Toni Collette, Rose Byrne, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, Margot Robbie, Rebel Wilson, Naomi Watts and countless others were not supplicants needing validation.

Not supplicants needing validation: Russell Crowe, Judy Davis, Nicole Kidman, winners at the 2002 Golden Globe AwardsCredit: Fairfax

Quite the reverse. They continue to be living examples of how “the Arts resonate the opportunity and energy of Australia”, as Paul Keating put it at the State Theatre in February 1993 when he spoke before a throng of dedicated supporters from every area of the arts who had turned out, the morning after Mardi Gras, to thank him for his support ahead of what everyone assumed was an “unwinnable” election.

Instead, two weeks later, Keating was re-elected. And, despite never-ending funding battles, arts and entertainment are now central today to how Sydney sees herself.

Anne Summers is a journalist and author of many books including the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975).