I’m listening to Judith Durham being interviewed on the
radio and it raises so many memories of entering adulthood in those rather
innocent days of the 1960’s. Judith was
born in the same year as I was and we both turned 18 in 1961. At that time, she was on the road to
international stardom and I was aiming for a career as an accountant. By 1965, I had realised I needed a change of
direction and started training as a teacher, and Judith, with The Seekers, had an
international #1 hit, I’ll Never Find Another You. She's not the fresh-faced girls she was in the 1960's but none of us is.
I hadn’t remembered that Judith went to school in Hobart, in
fact at Fahan, and had her first opportunities in Music and Drama there. Fahan had been established in the midst of
the Great Depression by two remarkable women with very progressive ideas. I don’t know whether they knew Winifred West
of Frensham but the schools were founded on similar ideals: that women should be
known for what they can do rather than who they are married to.
Miss Audrey Morphett, one of the Principals, wrote a play each year for the school
to perform and one year, Judith Durham was cast as the Principal Rat in The
Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was performed
at the Theatre Royal in Hobart. The
other famous pupil who was at Fahan at the same time as Judith was Robyn Nevin. In the photograph, Judith is front row, second from left; Robyn is front row, far right.
Robyn went on from Fahan to NIDA, a member of the first intake in 1959 …
and the rest is history.
No comments:
Post a Comment