During the first half of 2024 Theatre Heritage Australia held two highly successful talks: one in Melbourne and one in Sydney.
The Melbourne talk co-incided with THA’s 2024 Annual General Meeting and was held at The Channel, Arts Centre Melbourne, on Sunday, 14 April. Sandra Bruce, the newly appointed Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Australian Perfoming Arts Collection (APAC), addressed THA members, supporters and guests, outling her career to date in the gallery/museum sector.
Sandra’s new position follows twenty-two years working in prestigious institutions in Australia, including Bendigo Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. She joins Arts Centre Melbourne at a pivital moment in the expansion of the performing arts collection. As part of the major refurbishment of the complex (that already includes new storage and workrooms for APAC), Sandra will play a key role in the development of a new Australian Museum for the Performing Arts. This new facility, to be located in Hamer Hall on the corner of St Kilda Road and River Terrace, is scheduled to open in April 2025. A three-room gallery, it will be the public face of the collection and its launch will mark 50 years since the founding of the original Performing Arts Museum which operated from 1975 to 1997. Under the auspices of the collection’s first archivist Frank Van Straten, the original PAM presented a series of ground breaking exhibitions including notably They Call Me Melba (1982) and Bourke Street on Saturday Night (1983).
As Sandra noted, there are more stories to tell, and the first exhibition in the new space will celebrate 50 years of APAC: Pulling Back the Curtain on the Performing Arts in Australia, it will celebrate the history of the collection in fifty objects.
Our second major event, presented in Sydney in partnership with the SB&W Foundation, was held on Sunday, 23 June: an audience with actress Lynn Rainbow who travelled from Brisbane for the occasion. Best known for her TV work, notably Number 96, Lynn’s first love is the theatre. As the grand daughter of Sir Benjamin Fuller, who together with brothers John and Walter, managed Fullers’ theatrical and vaudeville circuits in Australia and New Zealand during the first half of the twentieth century, she was destined for a life on the stage.
Lynn enthralled the audience, including many old colleagues from her days in TV, with stories of theatre-going as a child, her first acting engagement with the inimitable Doris Fitton at the Independent Theatre in the 1940s, and her years as a performer in Australia and the UK, notably in touring productions for Cameron Mackintosh. On her return to Australia in the early 1970s, she joined Grundy’s, and as Sonia Freeman in Number 96, she appeared in some 200 episodes during 1972/1973. As she told the audience, with Number 96, Australia lost its virginity!
In addition to these two events, THA also participated in the Sorrento Writers’ Festival and the Australian Heritage Festival. On both occasions, author Simon Plant spoke about his book on George Coppin, which will be published by THA in early 2025. The first event, which saw Simon in conversation with Fiona Gruber, took place at the Sorrento Museum on Thursday, 25 April, while the second event was at the historic Savage Club in Melbourne on Friday, 3 May.