Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part Three: Dreamtime*
(Painting above - Mount Kosciuszko by Eugene Von Guerard)
*Advisory: Parts Three and Four of the Theatre Chronicles may contain references to places and people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tradition and ancestry and do this with the greatest respect for and recognition of their custodianship of the world now known as the Snowy Monaro region
From the top of Mount Kosciuszko, I watch thick, pink bands very slowly explode into a flamingo fan, like a free Follies floor show on the roof of the world. It is 6.30 in the morning. The Eastern sky is a vast Roman candle blowing green, yellow, pink, silver. To the West, the ring of mountains stretch slowly from their nocturnal slumbers into the first light underneath a white melon slice of crescent moon, while the great soft, sulphur lamp of Venus is shading in the gathering gauze. The sky is crystal and cloudless.
Underneath, close by, fox tracks show up in relief against the snow. Below, gum trees sprout like little frozen Texas gushers amongst the sugared almond boulders. A small snake of mercury runs down Charlotte’s Pass towards the town. I pinch myself.
Sensing movement nearby, I watch, as two flame handlers approach threateningly in silver suits like spacemen on Titan.
I am here on my first ever commercial, a working actor “living the dream”, high up in the Snowy Mountains, in the vastness of New South Wales, Australia, at 6.30 in the morning on Tuesday, 10 June, 1985. I’m here to say eleven words, as I am for two more mornings, getting up at 5 and working as long as light and weather holds, before being left to my own devices for the next six days while my two counterparts do their respective three mornings elsewhere.
Not only am I expected to repeat my eleven words in the right order without deviation or hesitation many, many, many times in slightly, subtly different ways as dawn breaks over Mount Kosciuszko but, for some arcane reason, I have to sound as if I am Ulster born and bred and look “Scandinavian” (I am neither).
It’s not Hamlet at the RSC or even “play as cast” at the National but like all actors except a tiny few, it’s work. And work is work, so you say “yes” to everything when asked. Particularly at a commercial casting. Even more so when you have been to commercial casting after commercial casting over the last three years or so and never, ever, got the job. And especially when you have three children to feed and no other visible means of support other than “Equity minimum” rep (in those days work largely in one’s neighbouring provincial theatres, performing one show in the evening while rehearsing another during the day on a seasonal company contract – a world now virtually extinct) which barely covers the grocery bill, and the occasional lucky scrap on radio or, best of all, tv.
There was also T.I.E. or “Theatre in Education” in those days which sounds a bit dull and was perceived as “lower grade” by many but I found could be the most rewarding work of all in some ways – material for a future chronicle, for sure – except financially.
You see, disregarding the cattle market of castings, commercials were the Holy Grail if you wanted petrol for your car, let alone a car for your petrol, those little things like clothes for the children, should you be so blessed, and the occasional bottle of fizz for Mum and Dad. Not your Mum and Dad. You and the missus.
Well, come on! What’s life about if you can’t let your hair down and pretend to be Richard and Liz from time to time? Up to a point, that is.
Mortgage? Forget it. You have to show earnings over a period of so many years, let alone have dosh in the bank and unless you’re lucky enough to inherit anything from a schloss to a wreck with a roof – actors ain’t choosy – there’s a limit to how far you can push the respective Banks of M&D, if you have one at all.
No. We can mark the life-changing commercial moments in our life as a family by the now somewhat stained and slightly thread-bare, but once tip-top Habitat sofa bed in the sitting-room; the holiday to the Isle of Wight on a whim between jobs; the fantastic company Citroen BX a friend sold us for a song; and so on.
And my life as a successful Man in the Commercials began with this one, the one that took me, amazingly, to the birthplace of my paternal grand-mother, to the top of this mountain, on the other side of the world, where I had never been and, even better, just fitted in with my best tv part to date which began the day of my return. With the worst jet-lag in the world. And a “Scandinavian” look involving dyeing my hair ash blond – not the colour it had been when I’d successfully auditioned for the tv job before getting the commercial. These things matter, you see. But that was all to come.
Up here, it’s - 6°, freezingly cold, and someone has decided to warm me up. With a flame-thrower. Would I mind holding my breath while they did it? Just in case.
Something similar occurred a year or so later when I was doing a dog food commercial (look, I had four kids by then) and was supposed to be sailing a very fast Laser across the famous Salcombe Bar in Devon while being watched by my admiring Golden Retriever from the beach, waiting patiently for my return.
Although I’d said I was born on a boat, could sail anything blindfold anywhere in any weather, the reality was very slightly different. Yes, I had crewed for my uncle, once (never again, please God), a friend, twice, until struck by lightning, and had read the whole of Arthur Ransome, but I wasn’t exactly a Jolly Jack Tar. And, no, I wasn’t sure which way to push or pull the stick except I knew that like a dumper truck it was the opposite way to normal. That is if you could remember after having been pole-axed by the heavy thing that smashed your head in when you weren’t looking. Hence the name. Boom. But, having got the job and then panicked about being found out, I did three days intensive training in the basics on an Army pond before my sailing test on the Queen Elizabeth reservoir – which I passed. Just. On the end of the Laser’s trapeze at Salcombe, however, this daring young man found out what flying was like when the wind blew from 10 different directions at once, which is why people who know what they’re doing love Salcombe.
The joy of being catapulted through the air before smashing into the water and sinking rather than skimming the waves with my bum hanging off the boat like others out there on the bay palled after a while and I decided they should pay me more money. The other actor on the shoot was effectively a mannequin mincing about on the beach who risked a red nose at the most and was on the same rate as me. They forget we talk to each other, these money people, the producers.
They didn’t like it but in the end what choice did they have? All right I lied but I was the only one risking life and limb. The dog couldn’t do it and the mannequin would have been even worse than me. So there we all were, the whole team, money-clock ticking, waiting for this bloody actor to go out there and finish the job. Which I did, after my agent confirmed they’d agreed to a hike. Hurrah!
But here I was, on my very first commercial, on the top of a mountain, having been flown out to Australia, being asked if I’d mind holding my breath while they squirted me with fire, just in case I breathed in at the wrong moment.
Now I know there’s risks attached in a reputation for being “difficult” but I’d not said a word when the make-up lady down below in the chalet had said: “Just need to tidy up the hair a bit, love. Make it a bit lighter while we’re at it, shall we? You know, for the Scandinavian look,” as she stirred the bleach pot with intent.
Dazed from a nine hour journey from Sydney in the coach after stepping from the longest journey in the world on a plane the morning before to be dragged out onto a sunlit Sydney Harbour by a long-lost pal who said, handing me the first of many drinks that day, “You can’t go to bed now. This is Australia!” thus laying the foundation for the Worst Hangover in the World that continued through the coach journey to the Snowy Mountains, home for the next three days, reality only struck at 6.30 that first morning. As the dawn of a lifetime broke on the top of the mountain, I saw with a terrible clarity that my lungs were the least of their concerns.
So I said “No”.
“What do you mean, no?” asked the director.
“I mean, no, I won’t hold my breath. You’ve got a stunt man over there. He can hold his breath. That’s what he’s paid for, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but it’s only for a minute or two. Just to help us with this shot.”
“No.” I said again. “I’m sorry but ‘a minute or two’ isn’t good enough. I’m here to act, not to offer up my lungs on the off-chance I’ll get away with it. I’ve got three children,” I continued, adding hopefully, “My family need me.”
There was a pause while the director looked at me as if considering whether I would hold my ground up there on the top of the mountain, in my parka, inside the kind of sentry box they were proposing to throw flames at. Then he turned and had a quick word with his assistant before turning back to me.
“OK,” he said. “That’s fine. Probably couldn’t insure you anyway. We’ll just do the line and then we’ll bring the stuntman in for the rest of it.”
So that’s what we did. Again and again and again. Over three mornings at 7,310 ft on the highest mountain on the Australian continent.
Despite spending those astonishing mornings, rising in the dark before dawn and groaning into our Alpine gear before swinging up in the big chair lift towards the bacon sarnies waiting for us up at the top being kept warm in the little hut that doubled as a shelter for whimpering Poms huddled round a tiny and inadequate gas heater as the feeling agonisingly returned to hands and toes, and as Australia’s highest toilet – despite my awe and fascination with all things Australian, particularly its history, both natural and social, I never really understood where the name Kosciuszko came from.
It was actually a Polish explorer, Count Pawel Edmund Strzelecki, who named the mountain on one of his explorations of the continent in 1840. He decided to climb it when he noticed that it was slightly higher than the one he and his companion, James Macarthur, were standing on at the time.
The date of this climb was 15th February 1840 and this is how he described it:
“On the 15th February, about noon, I found myself at 6,510 feet (1,984m) above the level of the sea, seated on perpetual snow; a lucid sky above me, and below, an uninterrupted view over more than 7,000 square miles. This pinnacle, rocky, and naked, predominant over several others, elevations of the same mountain, was and always will be, chosen for an important point of trigonometrical survey; clear and standing by itself, it affords a most advantageous position for overlooking the intricacies of the mountain country around. The particular configuration of this eminence struck me so forcibly, by the similarity it bears to the tumulus elevated in Krakow over the tomb of the patriot Kosciusko, that, although in a foreign country , on foreign ground, but amongst a free people, who appreciate freedom and its votaries, I could not refrain from giving it the name of Mount Kosciusko.”
He named it after a Polish hero and famous soldier, General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who joined the American Army during the War of Independence with the British. A close friend of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Kosciuzko was a brilliant military strategist and played an important role in kicking the British out of America in the 1770s and 80s, as he did later for Polish independence on his return to his native country, where he died in 1817.
Whether the General, up in his cloud, was rather less than pleased at having a mountain named after him in what had become yet another colony ruled by the same Empire he’d helped to chuck out of America or no, some mischief-making force seems to have been at work in the story of Mount Kosciuszko.
It turns out it is one of considerable confusion involving the wrong name being given to the wrong mountain, in both European and indigenous Aboriginal cases, thanks partly to a Victorian cartographer who transposed the two neighbouring peaks of Mount Kosciuszko and Mount Townsend.
This was compounded some 45 years after Strzelecki by another explorer called von Lendenfeld who claimed he had found the highest peak in Australia which he said wasn’t Kosciuszko but Townsend, despite standing on Townsend at the time which he thought was Kosciuszko. See what I mean?
Meanwhile, the people who had actually inhabited this area for at least the previous 4,000, going on 60,000 years, known as the Ngarigo people, had no known name for Kosciusko but called Townsend “Tar-gan-gil”. This was their name for a remarkable giant moth called the “Bogong Moth” that according to Macarthur had not only extraordinary nutritional value but made a noise like a flight of Lancaster bombers going overhead, as he describes in his journal here:
“The spot we had now reached was the favourite camping-ground of the natives during their annual visit to feast on the Boogan Moth. Traces of their camps were visible in all directions. Our sable friends arrive thin and half-starved; and in a few weeks’ revelling on this extraordinary food, clothe their skinny frames in aldermanic contrast… The air after nightfall was alive with the Boogan moths causing a deep sounding humming noise like that of a gigantic bee-hive.”
It was more recently felt that, like Uluru, previously known by the name of Ayres Rock, it would be more appropriate to recognise Kosciuszko by an Aboriginal name. Unlike Uluru, there being no Aboriginal name attributed to Kosciuszko, the local indigenous people needed to find a suitable name but here the mischief-making General struck again perhaps. The name they came up with in some of the many indigenous languages meant “snow” and “mountain” but in others meant something rather less delicate than snow. So we wait, still, for an indigenous name for this slippery peak.
However, something very strange popped up in my researches while writing this piece which might have led to the mountain being called by yet another and entirely different name. This was something I was completely unaware of in June 1985 and yet directly connected with the serendipitous coincidence of passing less than a mile from the house where my grandmother was born in 1881, on my hungover way to the Snowy Mountains.
The Squatter’s Daughter By George Washington Lambert - the landscape where Tim’s grandmother was born
