It came as a curdling horror to David Morgan to return from school one afternoon and find a ‘For Sale’ sign plastered across the family home. For as long as David could recall, he had lived in the elegant two-storey house in a neat slice of Glen Iris suburbia – just a few streets removed from where Sir Robert Menzies had retired after his second, sixteen-year stretch as Australia’s prime minister. The Morgan family had a live-in maid, not to mention a sparkling new Chevrolet every couple of years. David and his elder sister, Cherry, could tinkle the ivories on a choice of two pianos, a grand and an upright. Their evenings would be framed by the convivial hubbub of black-tie parties.
In that world of quintessential Melbourne gentility, there had been no warning, not an inkling that his parents were in financial peril. But ten-year-old David understood, as he stood frozen in front of that grimly definitive sign, that the certainties in his life were dissolving before his eyes.
Ray Morgan had been declared bankrupt in 1957. The paternal millinery business, Raymor Hats, which at its zenith employed close to 100 people, had become a victim of shifting fashions. Ray’s section of Flinders Lane was once a street paved with gold for Melburnian milliners, but shops were left flailing to adapt to the shift in emphasis from hats to hair. The late fifties saw the rise of the bouffant, upon which the Melbourne Cup’s highly coiffed habitués perched small, decorative fascinators. Even the staunchly conservative Catholic women saw a relaxation of the papal edict that they had to wear hats for Mass. A gentle soul, not given to rage or self-pity, Ray would often voice thanks that at least the Queen, her headwear imprinted on Australian consciousness from the state visit in 1954, would never be so fickle as to go out without a hat.
Where her husband was concerned, Verna Morgan drew no distinction between the failure of the business and the failure of the man. David’s exacting and rather judgmental mother would disparage Ray viciously, often within earshot of the children. She would exacerbate these wounds by keeping newspaper cuttings about more successful businessmen and sticking them in a scrapbook. Ray, born in 1903, would let slip his vintage on visits to the local car showroom by talking indulgently about Rolls-Royces manufactured in the twenties; for Verna, at least a decade younger (although she upheld the Wildean wisdom that one should never trust a woman who told her age), this became another stick with which to beat him. She would seldom pass up an opportunity to remind Ray of how old he was. Behind the curtains of an ostensibly happy household, there was, Morgan reflects, an ‘utter humiliation of a very decent individual’.1
The privations that Ray’s bankruptcy wrought are etched upon his son’s memory. Whenever David spotted the piano teacher, who had not been paid, he would cross the road. If he happened to pass the butcher’s shop, knowing that the man was chasing payment for the latest meat delivery, he would walk on the other side of the street. Bills about which he had once been blasé assumed a horrible urgency. Out of the embarrassment, however, emerged a quiet, implacable resolution. As a child, he glimpsed the distress that was consuming and crushing his docile father, and decided it was a pain too acute to risk enduring himself. He would, he promised himself, do everything within his power not to fail in his own life, either emotionally or economically.
Their straitened circumstances put paid to maid service and forced the family into a rented weatherboard house in about the only part of East Malvern that was not refined. What magnified the desolation for David and Cherry was that their mother did not want to go with them.
While divorce was rare enough in Australia in 1957, the notion of a mother forsaking her brood bordered on unconscionable. The country was just beginning to adjust, too, to a change from the old divorce rule, where the only path out of a doomed union was for one spouse to demonstrate that the other was guilty of cruelty, desertion or adultery. Although this proviso had been softened in 1956, Ray enlisted a private investigator to confirm his suspicions about his wife’s infidelities.
One evening, after weeks of stake-outs, the detective knocked on his door. ‘Is it all right if I talk in front of the boy?’ he asked, pointing to David. Reassured that it was, he announced, solemnly: ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she spent the night with Keith Horsley.’ Horsley, nicknamed Horse, was a local gin salesman with whom Verna had been involved for some time. It had, it transpired, been far from her only dalliance.
For all that a young boy might struggle to grasp the dynamics of a disintegrating marriage, the fact that he did not defend his father’s honour more vigorously in these situations has troubled Morgan ever since.
‘I wasn’t terribly supportive, and yet I would come to the realisation that he was a far more admirable person than my mother, with a more laudable set of values,’ Morgan says. ‘He never blamed her for any of her terrible conduct. He never looked at another woman, never blamed her for any of her affairs. He was just somebody everybody liked, a thoroughly good egg who wasn’t dealt the cards I think he deserved.’2
The loss of self-esteem that these revelations inflicted upon Morgan was severe. The twin agonies of his mother’s exit and Ray’s sense of defeat lodged themselves deep in his psyche. As he puts it: ‘One has sufficient insecurities at that stage of life without the most powerful parent piling them on by rejecting you.’3
For his teenage sister, it was crippling. Already Cherry had, in Morgan’s estimation, a debilitating lack of confidence in her own talents. She could rarely abide company beyond her close circle of friends. The stigma attached to the strife at home was such that she had difficulty forming most other relationships. A mother of one of the boys she courted was even heard to say: ‘Don’t go out with that girl, her parents are divorced.’ Cherry detested her experiences at Korowa Anglican Girls’ School with such ferocity that she decided, within days of her parents’ divorce and in the week of her fifteenth birthday, to walk out. ‘I don’t know how you have stuck it for this long,’ said the headmistress, whom Cherry abhorred.
Verna did little to elaborate her reasons for leaving, besides telling the children: ‘There’s no use me trying to keep you. Your father will only fight me in court.’
‘She simply wasn’t into slumming it,’ Cherry reflects. ‘So, she lost interest pretty quickly. She was terribly selfish. It was “me first”, all the time.’4
It is a curiosity of Morgan’s relationship with his mother that for all he has come to deplore her maligning of Ray, he retained more than a few special dispensations as the younger child. ‘He was the golden boy, and I was the damn nuisance,’ Cherry says. ‘I was often whacked with her wooden spoon.’5
Thrust prematurely into a role as the de facto matriarch, Cherry felt, not unreasonably, that the greater burden of her parents’ marriage fell upon her. In their ramshackle lodgings, with no washing machine and no vacuum cleaner, every household task was hard work, especially when she returned home one evening to find that her little brother and his friends had thrown ice-cream all across the living room. Confronted by such behaviour – about which David later wrote a letter of apology – Cherry elicited scant sympathy from Verna. ‘She would say to me, over the telephone, “Cherry, he’s just a little boy.” And I would reply, indignantly, “Yes, Mum, and I’m just a little girl.”’6
The chronic lack of money meant it was not long before David gave up his school place at the fee-paying Malvern Grammar. This was a mark of scalding shame. In the cossetted, cliquey, distinctly non-meritocratic postwar Melbourne that David knew – where the values of a long-term Liberal government held sway – society and business were rigidly stratified along the lines of where one was educated. It is something of an Australian aphorism that in Sydney, people’s initial instinct is to inquire how much your house is worth, whereas in Melbourne, they first want to know where you went to school. David was convinced that the lack of an elite education would put him at a serious competitive disadvantage.
In keeping with Ray’s noble streak of defiance, he insisted on trying to keep David at a prestigious school. ‘My dear dad would say, “If you really want to go, I’ll find a way to send you there,”’ Morgan recalls. ‘He didn’t have a hope in hell, the poor chap, but it was very sweet of him to offer.’7
To be knocked so abruptly off the comfortable path prescribed by the old school tie felt both wrenching and disorientating. Only when, in 1960, David won one of the few free places at the selective Melbourne High, the first public secondary school in Victoria and not shy of claiming to be the best, did his anxieties start to be assuaged.
‘Brains, not money, should be the passport to the higher realms of knowledge,’ argued Frank Tate, the state’s inaugural director of education, upon founding Melbourne High in 1905. It was an ethos that the school encapsulated, and one that David upheld as if the words were inscribed on tablets of stone. Any environment that happened not to be hidebound by cronyism was, he decided, one where he could thrive. So it would prove.
As if to validate the notion that, in order to flourish, a pupil depended not so much on the overall standard of teaching as on a single pedagogue with the power to inspire, David became the protégé of one Neville Drohan, a fellow whose fearsome directness could be a source of amusement. One can discern Drohan’s polarising character from his obituary in The Age, which describes him as ‘always provocative, often outrageous’.8 He cultivated what he called a ‘savage’ persona and died in 2016 a virtual recluse, having severed contact with most of his admiring former students. One year, he sought to galvanise his economics class by telling them, with a nod to Melbourne’s burgeoning Hellenic population: ‘It’s about time one of you Greeks got the Exhibition.’9 It was not an insignificant demand, with Exhibitions awarded only to Victoria’s top students in their given subjects.
Drohan was imbued with a profound love of economics. He had become fascinated while on an exchange program in the US with how eccentric American entrepreneurs made their millions and would pepper his lessons with stories about ‘Flav-R-Straws’, a wildly popular innovation that made drinks more palatable for children by lining the straw with a strip of chocolate. Drohan collaborated with his friend John Day to write The Australian Economic Framework, first published in 1964 and soon established as the country’s essential text for secondary-school students.
David was captivated by Drohan’s methods, and in David, Drohan identified a promising protégé. ‘I’m grooming you for the Exhibition,’ he announced one day, to the surprise of a young man who had arrived with no ideas about economic theory but who was now front of the queue to win the highest academic prize in the state. It was a stunning example of the effect that one teacher could exert, and sowed the seed of an ambition that would never leave him.
‘Drohan was an entertainer as well as a serious educator,’ Morgan says. ‘You need people like that, with a passion for their subject, who can persuade you to take it far more seriously than you otherwise would.’10
What reinforced their connection was a love of drama. David, who experienced a delayed adolescence that had left his voice stranded in the higher octaves, grasped a part under Drohan’s directorship of the school play in a version of Eugene Labiche’s The Italian Straw Hat – as a girl. An equally riotous turn as Puck, ‘that shrewd and knavish sprite’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was soon added to his repertoire.
It would become a theme of Morgan’s formative years, this impression that puberty was something that happened to other people. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, he barely grew; his insecurities sharpened by his sense of being the only boy who stood four-foot-ten and whose vocal range remained firmly at the falsetto end of the scale. His mother was so perplexed that she sent him for medical tests, a process that was hardly likely to alleviate his self-doubt. But he did discover that his status as what he calls the ‘class runt’ conferred certain advantages from a thespian perspective. As well as being the sole boy of sixteen who could plausibly tread the boards in a female guise, he also became the first port of call for directors auditioning for the role of an eleven-year-old. It was to be a useful mark of distinction, as he found when an opportunity arose in 1959 to join the cast of a children’s television series.
***
Morgan’s transition to the heady world of TV sprang from his mother’s opportunism. Since abandoning Ray, Verna had taken up work as manager of a photographic studio, fielding offers of modelling that she steered shrewdly towards her children. Before he was truly aware of it, Morgan found himself the face of just about every line of boys’ clothing north of the Yarra, from fleecy windcheaters to the finest knitwear the Myer Emporium could offer. Cherry, likewise, was in demand as a ‘house model’, even if it was a bind for a girl of fifteen to spend up to ten hours a day tottering around in high heels. From fashion, at least for Morgan, there flowed a natural route to the glamour of the small screen.
Television was a nascent medium that was teeming with possibilities. Only in 1956 had Bruce Gyngell, original anchor of TCN-9 in Sydney, greeted Australia with the words: ‘Good evening, and welcome to television.’
For Roger Mirams, a former war cameraman, the television revolution was intoxicating. Mirams was born in New Zealand but took Australian citizenship after filming the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. Regarded as rather a Peter Pan character for his habit of turning up for parties in pirate costume, Mirams channelled his passion into the production of The Terrific Adventures of the Terrible Ten.
Mirams was planning to shoot this new children’s series in the Macedon Ranges, close to the old gold rush town of Woodend – ‘Hollywoodend’ to the locals – and it was here, as he fleshed out his ensemble cast, that he encountered a young Morgan poised on the cusp of child stardom.
The Terrible Ten, as it was better known, was a charmingly whimsical show based on a group of ten children being left to create their own town, with its own rules. The precocious residents of ‘Ten Town’ would act out the jobs of police officers or firefighters in their little simulated utopia and encounter all manner of scrapes, from rescuing runaway children to driving a jazzed-up jalopy around Calder Park Raceway.11 In one scenario, they even tried to launch a space rocket.
The premise was unashamedly folksy and homespun, and filming techniques were not exactly sophisticated, either, with a skeleton crew limited to Mirams, a sound recordist and an assistant cameraman, all relying on the time-honoured clapperboard method. It was not uncommon for scripts to be scribbled on the back of an envelope. But the stories themselves, always touching affirmations of childlike enterprise and exuberance, proved phenomenally marketable.
It was the first Australian series to be sold internationally. Over the run of fifty-one episodes, Mirams managed to hawk his concept to eighty-one foreign markets, stretching from Germany to Nigeria, from Sweden to Hong Kong. The swelling revenues from these sales did not filter down to the actors themselves though.
‘We were on about two pounds a day to start with,’ says Gary Gray, then the lead narrator. ‘We never made much money out of it, but I suppose somebody must have.’12 The compensating factor was that they were scattered with the first grains of global stardust. They were celebrities, in a modest sense, even if they never quite perceived the experience as such. Within the Australian entertainment world, the notion of celebrity was still evolving, with the corollary that child actors were grateful just to be given a chance of what seemed an impossibly seductive existence. But Gray remembers receiving fan mail from County Durham, after the UK rights were bought by Granada Television, while Morgan spent one day on set as host to a five-year-old, Graeme Davis, who had travelled with his family from England to satisfy his curiosity about the ways and workings of Ten Town.
A close friendship had been forged between Morgan and Gray from their days taking riding lessons together at Ferntree Gully, a bucolic retreat beyond Melbourne’s eastern extremities. ‘He would travel there from East Malvern, I from Mornington,’ Gray recalls. ‘It was Boys’ Own Annual stuff. There was a farm on site, where you could stay over the weekend. In our minds, it represented an adventure, of the kind that foreshadowed what we went on to do.’13
The difference, perhaps, was that Gray was the more earnest about envisaging acting as his calling. An only child, Gray had determinedly nurtured his talents, first by completing an elocution course and then by attending ‘art of television’ classes that his widowed mother subsidised at a guinea a time. In Morgan, by contrast, he detected signs of uncertainty that this could ever be a viable vocation. ‘David was eager, not to mention generous in the creative sense,’ Gray says. ‘He might have had the idea, but I’m not sure he genuinely had the conviction that acting was what he would pursue.’14
Nevertheless, by the end of 1963, at the age of sixteen, Morgan had left full-time study at Melbourne High because of his many acting commitments, centred on the lead role of Tom Thumbleton in Mirams’ latest brainchild, The Magic Boomerang. The show transplanted the exploits depicted in The Terrible Ten to a fresh realm of fantasy, investing Tom with the power to use his enchanted boomerang – an Aboriginal relic discovered in his parents’ attic – to thwart the attempts of an unscrupulous solicitor to take over the family sheep farm. The boomerang, so the script decreed, was capable of stopping any living creature from moving while in flight, and was possessed of a magic limited to doing good. ‘It was pretty raw stuff,’ Morgan reflects. ‘I blush at the recollection.’15
A sense of embarrassment continues to colour his attitude to his acting career. He looks back at himself as a ‘third-rate actor’, even if the popularity of The Magic Boomerang was widespread. The thirty-nine episodes resonated with children from Canada to Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). They were directed mostly by Joe McCormick, who had already enjoyed prominence as a long-time Australian radio actor. Morgan was inundated with letters from English schoolgirls critiquing his horse-riding technique (some of whose addresses he tried to look up, on subsequent visits to the UK, to no avail).
Morgan’s fame also brought him into contact with a blonde singer by the name of Olivia Newton-John. They were booked to appear together in McCormick’s 1966 feature film Funny Things Happen Down Under, relating the tale of resourceful children who raise money by dyeing their sheep’s wool in bright colours and then selling it as a naturally occurring phenomenon. It was long before Newton-John shot to stratospheric renown through her lead role in Grease, – indeed she was identified more then as ‘Lovely Livvy’ from Channel Seven’s The Happy Show.
Newton-John exuded an effortless stage presence that left Morgan feeling somewhat eclipsed. He was billed initially as the co-star but was disabused of any delusions of grandeur when it came to rehearsing his eight-stanza duet with the leading lady. ‘We did the first take and the director said, “David, drop off your first stanza, and we’ll just start with Olivia.” So, we tried again, and he said, “We’ll do another take, and this time we’ll just run Olivia’s last two stanzas together.”’16 Suffice to say, once the film was released, he had been reduced to humming in the background.
A belief was crystallising in Morgan that, for the sake of his future happiness, he should follow what he was competent at, as opposed to what he loved. Impressionable young minds tend not to be conditioned to such sober, pragmatic thinking, but it was noticeable how his growing list of TV credits did little to dilute his dedication to his studies. Even after a gruelling day’s filming, he could be found wide-awake with a fountain pen in one hand and a spiral notebook in the other.
‘What I remember vividly about David is that he had the most enormous capacity for hard work,’ Gray says. ‘Even if we had gone out to some local dance, I could go to his room for a chat at any time during the night. He would always be sitting up in bed, chewing his tongue, studying furiously.’17
Partly, this was a case of anxiety, borne of being withdrawn from private school. But it was also a question of necessity. Instinctively, Morgan understood that his acting days were numbered. For a start, his voice had finally broken, even if he attempted at first to pass it off as a cold. Thus was he deprived of the versatility that had enabled him to play characters far younger than his actual age. Plus, his sidelining by Newton-John fed the sobering suspicion that, among the hordes of actors harbouring great visions of Hollywood, he was in the front rank of the also-rans. After years spent observing every nuance of TV production, a desire simmered inside him to make the grade as a director.
When a chance arose to become assistant director on the Adventures of the Seaspray, a co-production between Mirams’ Pacific Films company and Screen Gems in the US, he grasped it with alacrity. It helped that there was the promise of a reunion with Gray, despite his old friend having beaten him to the central role of Mike Wells, the son of a widowed journalist aboard a charter schooner – the eponymous Seaspray – as it plied the South Pacific. It was appealing, too, to have a project that he could treat essentially as a sabbatical, having finished his studies for his Matriculation Certificate by correspondence. But most enticing of all was the idea of spending an indeterminate length of time sailing between paradise islands, untethered from anything resembling normality.
It proved to be one of those rare phases of life that was as exhilarating to live as it was to imagine. For eighteen months, Morgan’s version of an office was the 112-foot Seaspray, known in real life as the Fifeath Ban (Gaelic for ‘White Raven’), a majestic topsail schooner still used today for tourist excursions from its dock in Fiji. As for living quarters, it was scant hardship to be put up on the Romunda, a Fairmile cruiser that had been built during World War Two as a submarine chaser. Refitted, heated, and serviced by waiters who could cater to the cast’s every whim, it was just the scene a young man might draw if he were planning his perfect escape from the shackles of everyday living.
When Morgan was not spending a working day looking out across pristine turquoise waters, he was left to his own devices. ‘We were very independent,’ Gray says. ‘We didn’t need much looking after, so we grew up pretty quickly.’18
Wherever the Seaspray docked, from the outer atolls of Fiji to the jungles of New Guinea, life for Morgan and Gray was touched by a spirit of exploration and bravado. The two young men savoured the times when the Seaspray cast and crew would wind up a day’s filming at four in the afternoon by drinking a crate of gin on the cool, wide verandahs of Suva’s colonial-era Grand Pacific Hotel. Together they revelled in night-time bacchanals on the streets of Suva, wooing twin sisters at the Golden Dragon, an upstairs bar across the road from the Grand Pacific. ‘Gary was successful, I wasn’t,’ Morgan acknowledges. ‘But that didn’t stop him from waking me at 4 am on the boat to tell me that he had lost his virginity.’19
When they docked to film in Kioa, a verdant Melanesian paradise, they were assimilated so deeply into island life that their hosts even staged a valedictory dance, a tralala, in their honour. Kioa was an unusual case, a place that Fiji had bequeathed to Ellice Islanders who had been forced from their own communities by the scarcity of land. Until 1947, the only signs of habitation were a small wooden house, built by the island’s former European owner, and a few wild pig tracks. ‘The whole purpose of going there was to find out about people who embraced the subsistence life,’ Gray says.20 He discovered, with Morgan, that it was a happy coexistence. When the day came for them to set sail once more, the local people lavished them with gifts and saw them slip away into the sunset with a soft, haunting refrain of ‘Isa Lei’, the traditional Fijian song of farewell:
Isa, Isa you are my only treasure,
Must you leave me, so lonely and forsaken?
As the roses will miss the sun at dawning,
Every moment my heart for you is yearning.21
Even with a half-century’s distance, the images have not lost their lustrous sheen of perfection. ‘It was out of this world,’ Morgan reflects. ‘As teenage boys, you’re saying, “Pinch me, is this reality?”’22
During one ten-week shoot in New Zealand, the crew was flown on to the Tasman Glacier beneath Mount Cook, only for a vast blizzard to engulf them and cut off all routes for an airborne rescue. Eddie Davis, the veteran American director celebrated for his work on The Cisco Kid and Highway Patrol, was one of sixteen people left stranded by the storm. To escape, he, Morgan, Gray and the rest of their bedraggled party roped themselves together for the perilous descent from the mountain, dodging deep crevasses as they went. The collective response, once they were down, was to head for the bar and drink all day, even if the New Zealand beer, notoriously under-strength in 1966, did not furnish the levels of inebriation desired.
While other young men his age found solid employment as bank tellers or trainee actuaries, Morgan’s occupation was the very definition of chasing rainbows. Professionally, did he want the short-term rush of show business or the long-term crutch of a safe, signposted career path? The choice, at the age of nineteen, was ambivalent; to a degree, he craved both.
As Gray, who to this day addresses Morgan by the Fijian variant of Tevita, puts it: ‘Our parents never had to say, “You must keep doing this.” We just thought, Why would we ever want to give it up? No one else is having the life we’re having.’23 They felt utterly, invigoratingly adrift in the world, earning a more than respectable wage while enjoying a taste of exotica unthinkable to their contemporaries. Morgan wrestled with the question of why he should abandon a lifestyle of such thrilling daring and indulgence, but he knew that the decadence could not last.
Together with his awareness of his shortcomings as an actor, and the pressures of elevating himself from a crowded field, was the fact that Morgan had come to detest the insecurity of it all. He had worked alongside enough head-in-the-clouds vagabonds, whose delusions of the silver screen persisted in spite of having no TV bookings for three months. Some of his companions, including Paul Caro, were still living out of a caravan in Melbourne. Fred Parslow confided to Morgan that there were perhaps only five people in the land who could support themselves on acting earnings alone. Having watched his father’s business go to the wall, Morgan struggled to sustain his appetite for the rootlessness or the risk. ‘There are some people who can live with economic insecurity,’ he explains. ‘But I knew, from my background, that it was like a dagger in my heart.’24
Morgan allowed himself one last hit of razzle-dazzle on a pilot of Birds of Paradise College, an affectionate rendering of life at a girls’ finishing school in the Australian bush envisaged as the female equivalent of Timbertop, the rural outpost of Geelong Grammar that Prince Charles attended as a teenager. Morgan would play the headmaster’s son, while Liza Goddard, the English actress best remembered as Clarissa ‘Clancy’ Merrick in Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, would be among the schoolgirls versed in proper deportment and in such essential etiquette as how to butter a scone when hosting a luncheon. Sadly, the concept did not take off and the coveted order of thirteen episodes never materialised.
It was time to let this particular dream slide. The part of Morgan that viewed acting as wild and electrifying was becoming overwhelmed by the part that saw it as a precarious way to make a living. He could be consoled by no less an authority on the subject than Marlon Brando, who once memorably dubbed acting a bum’s life. ‘It is the expression of a neurotic impulse,’ Brando said. ‘The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the ability to pay for my psychoanalysis.’25 The conclusion that Morgan drew was just as stark: that the talent he saw manifested in his acting rivals was necessary but not always sufficient for success. He could not countenance a future clouded by so much uncertainty and struggle. Besides, he had a university place to consider.
Morgan had never forgotten a promise he once made to Drohan, his old economics master and one who had not stinted in praise for Morgan’s academic prowess, that he would complete his secondary education, come what may. His parents saw it differently. Ray, having lived through the Great Depression, believed above all else in the necessity of finding a trade, while Verna was inherently sceptical of students, keeping articles in her scrapbooks about graduates who could never hold down a steady job. She also enjoyed the reflected glory of seeing her son’s name at the top of a TV credits reel.
However, in Morgan’s mind there could, in the contest between show business and study, be only one winner. This, of itself, brought a certain catharsis.
While his grades had suffered slightly from the distance learning mandated by his strange and wonderful japes at sea, they still earned him entry to La Trobe, a newly founded university campus at Bundoora, north of Melbourne, in what were once sheep paddocks. There was also an offer from Monash, created in 1961 as a rival to Melbourne University, but the thought of joining the foundation class at La Trobe, with a blank canvas and an unfettered freedom of ideas, held much the greater appeal – and he had no time to prevaricate. When he telephoned the admissions officer at La Trobe, he was informed that unless he took up his place within twenty-four hours, it would be withdrawn. What seemed a decision of immense import was made, ultimately, with startling clarity.
So it was that he found himself, on the morning of 14 March 1967, his twentieth birthday, driving out to La Trobe in his mother’s Triumph Herald, with an uncharted road ahead and his acting aspirations receding irrevocably in his rear-view mirror.