In The
dam that Zihni built I posted a scanned colour transparency of the
completed Oaky River Dam,
a small hydroelectric dam about 40 km from Armidale which was constructed in
the early 1950s under the supervision of my classmate Alex Buzo’s father Zihni.
In that post I said I did not have any photos from the construction phase, but
that turns out not to be so; going through some old papers a few days ago I
discovered an old photo album from my primary school days, which contains six
photos I took on a trip out there with Zini, Alex, Alex’s younger brother
Adrian, and I think another school friend - I have vague memories of Ian Storey accompanying us, but the person to the left of the last photo looks like Harry Pidgeon. They were interesting
trips; the New England Tableland was at one stage of its ancient history under
the sea, and as well as talking to us about the dam construction and taking us on
the steep ride to the bottom of the gorge on the cable-winched trolley, Zihni
would show us how to crack open the right kind of rocks to reveal the fossils
of the ancient life-forms they contained.
These are not great photographs; the camera I had in those
days was very basic – a “Baby Brownie” or similar, taking a 127 roll film, with
a lens such that the film could only be contact printed – the quality was not
good enough to permit enlargement. Nevertheless they are a record of happy
times, and of the construction of a local hydro station in the early post-war
years. My best guess is that these photos were taken in 1953. I daresay the
gent to the right of the fifth picture is Zihni himself.
For my friends with Armidale connections, and perhaps even more importantly for all of her friends in the Sydney theatrical world who will not be reading country newspapers, the 9 March edition of The Armidale Express had a nice piece, Play for tolerance, about Emma Buzo’s return to the town in which both her parents grew up, to manage the Michael Hoskins Creative Arts Centre, and to teach drama.
It discusses the enduring significance of her father Alex’s play Norm and Ahmed, and makes the connection between subject of the play and the experiences of Emma’s Albanian-born grandfather Zihni, who came to Armidale to work as a civil engineer in 1954.
A rather nice piece on Emma Buzo was published in the Monday 21 February edition of The Sydney Morning Herald. Unfortunately it does not seem to be in the online edition, so I reproduce it in full below.
For an earlier post on Emma and the company she founded to promote her father’s work, see The Alex Buzo Company.
A father’s legacy takes centre stage
Natalie Muller
Few people follow in their father’s footsteps to the extent that Emma Buzo has done.
The Sydney-based actor and theatre producer has moved to Armidale to teach at The Armidale School, where the late Australian playwright, Alex Buzo, first discovered his love for language and drama about 60 years ago.
She is also teaching his first play, Norm and Ahmed, which rose to national prominence in the late ‘60s after being at the centre of a fierce censorship battle, being banned in three states.
Now the work is part of the HSC drama syllabus and year 12 students at The Armidale School would be hard pressed to find someone more qualified than the author’s own daughter to teach it.
“They’re being taught by the daughter of the playwright at the school the playwright went to,” Buzo says. “I know the background and can talk about the inspiration behind it that hasn’t been published anywhere.”
After the theatre great’s death in 2006, Buzo founded the Alex Buzo company and produced several plays, including Norm and Ahmed, under its banner. Then she lobbied to get the text included in the 2010-2012 HSC syllabus.
The play’s themes of racial tension, as valid today as they were in the 1960s, are talking points in the classroom. “It’s eerie, the journey of that play,” Buzo says.
“Since 9/11 and the Cronulla riots, it’s only gathered momentum.”
Buzo says exposure to theatre was lacking in regional schools.
Besides teaching drama, she will also manage the school’s Hoskins Theatre, a 200-seat performance space, where she is hoping to bring theatre professionals from around Australia.
Buzo says she is excited to evoke the potential in her students.
“It only takes one teacher who sees the potential in a student,” she said. “I hope I can light the flame, because once an interest is established they’ll seek more.”
The school’s headmaster, Murray Guest, says her experience in the industry is a plus.
“That means a lot for the boys, that she is not a teacher pretending to be a theatre producer, she’s the real thing,” he says.
Buzo has been a teacher for the last 15 years and has taught at NIDA and the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).
In The Alex Buzo Company I introduced the company founded by the notable Australian playwright’s daughter Emma to produce, promote and perpetuate his work, and in Alex Buzo Company double bill I foreshadowed the August 2009 revival of Alex’s first play, Norm and Ahmed, at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, under the direction of Arne Neeme, in a double bill with a contemporary reworking by award-winning playwright Alana Valentine.
On Friday 25 September 2009 Emma took Norm and Ahmed to Armidale to kick off The Armidale School’s Old Boys’ Weekend with a performance in the new creative arts centre, the TAS Hoskins Centre.
The great news for the School, and for the town, is that from the start of first term next year Emma take up duty in a newly created position in which she will both teach drama and manage the Hoskins Centre. This is a very entrepreneurial move by the School, and a demonstration of its strong commitment to the arts and producing well rounded boys. Emma’s energy, creativity and professional eye for what works, combined with her teaching experience, will be a great asset, and she will be in a position to build on a long history of live performance at the School, of which a little more in later posts.
Two of Emma’s boys will start at TAS next year, making three generations of Buzos with a connection with TAS.
All of Alex’s former classmates will join me in wishing her well in this career change, and the move from Sydney to Armidale.
This week is your last chance to see the Wayne Harrison’s new production of Alex Buzo’s Macquarie. It is being presented at the Riverside Theatres, Parramatta by The Alex Buzo Company to commemorate the bicentenary of the great Governor’s arrival in the colony of New South Wales. The season closes on 31 July, so don’t miss out. Tickets may be obtained by visiting the Alex Buzo Company’s website here.
For some more background on Alex and the company his daughter Emma founded to produce, promote and perpetuate her father’s works, see my previous post The Alex Buzo Company. See also The dam that Zihni built.
In addition to his great contribution to Australian theatre and his non-fiction works, playwright Alex Buzo was a very elegant writer of travel pieces for the newspapers, and contributed two fine obituaries of our former school masters. One of these, a tribute to Brian Mattingley DFC, was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 February 2005.
Anzac Day seems a good occasion on which to remember a great educator man who had a distinguished war record, and I republish this piece as a tribute not only to him, but also to my former classmate Alex.
Joe held the Arnold Line at Armidale
Brian Mattingley, Teacher and war hero, 1914-2004
"Sedete omnes," he would say as he swept into class. Others may have said "Sit down, everyone", but he always made an entrance, and like many teachers of his era he was a performer. Brian Mattingley, long-time senior master at the Armidale School (TAS), has died at 90. The letters after his name, DFC and BA, tell the story. He was a war hero and an educator.
In the quadrangle at TAS, where he taught English and Latin for 40 years, he cut quite a figure, being tall and pigeon-chested and known behind his back as "Joe". No impersonator could complete his act without the stabbing accusatory finger and the strangled cries of fury ("Mou! Mfff!"). In his study he kept a cane called Horace, for those who did not get the message: this was an Anglican boys' school dispensing the muscular Christian philosophy of Rugby's Dr Thomas Arnold.
One of three brothers whose father was a dentist, Brian John Mattingley was born in Tasmania and educated at Launceston Grammar; after university and a sojourn in Adelaide he joined the staff at Armidale in 1939.
The Mattingleys were to make quite an impact on Australian education; brothers Max and David had distinguished careers at Geelong Grammar, Prince Alfred College and All Souls, Charters Towers. Brian served as deputy and acting head of TAS, where he "really ran the place" at times.
In World War II, Flight Lieutenant Mattingley was a navigator in the RAAF, flying 36 missions over Europe for Bomber Command. Having proved he had the right stuff, he returned to Armidale in 1946 and set out to do well in the tricky climes of peace. A conservative Anglican, he favoured tweed jackets, drove a Wolseley, and devoted himself to the profession of schoolmastering, as it was called.
He looked like a film star, one of those Michaels (Craig, Denison, Redgrave, Wilding) who abounded in postwar English cinema, and made quite an impact on speech days. My mother liked him, and she was not Robinson Crusoe. He was seen by the school hierarchy as "good for recruitment", but he was married to the job and was essentially a Catholic priest in a Protestant setting, even attracting the same "waste of a good man" comments from the female public.
From his office located at the T-junction of the school's main corridor and the covered way, he could see a cloud of smoke, hear an obscenity and sense a crooked tie or egg-covered face. It was a reign of terror, with the amused approval of parents. I felt the wrath of Horace only once, but it was enough to know that Joe was not all talk.
He often went on patrol, his curious bent-kneed walk suggesting both Groucho Marx emerging from a hotel room and Slasher Mackay going out to bat. Helped by rubber-soled brogues, he liked to materialise unexpectedly and catch out smokers, bullies and Joe impersonators.
No entrance was more spectacular than his appearance in the 1956 staff revue as a dancing, twirling Spanish senorita. Not being a method actor, he saw no reason to shave off his RAAF moustache - and stole the show.
The Rugby School philosophy has been criticised for its paramilitary aspects, and Mattingley was its faithful servant, but he lightened Dr Arnold's game plan with his whimsical humour, quoting jokes from 1066 and All That or regaling us with chunks of James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Like many teachers of the period, he created a character, or "adopted a persona", so that when the heckling comes, as it always does, he could rationalise that it was the Latin-spouting cane man who was being attacked, not him.
The attitude to performance was always an amateur one. After a world trip he showed us slides, including one of Hollywood. It was just the scrawny hills above Sunset Boulevard, but I was entranced. "Impressive looking place?" asked Joe. "Yes sir!" I gushed. There was a pause. "I don't think so," he said, to murmurs of assent from the rest of the class. Dr Arnold's schools were supposed to turn out empire builders, not poodle-fakers.
Contrary to belief, these rugger academies were not completely sports mad. B.J.M. was bored by cricket and football, and as school swimming coach he was all stopwatch and no stroke correction. At his farewell in 1979 he said "there are too many takers in the world and not enough givers". What he gave was his time, and with it his life.
Many of his decisions were improvised Solomon. I was upset by a missing tennis racquet on the last day of term and he hauled one out from behind a cupboard, asking, "Did it look like this racquet?"
"Well, I ..."
"Do you think it's possible someone could have mistaken yours for this?"
"I suppose it's ..."
"Then why don't you take this one?"
"Thank you, sir."
Schoolmastering ... it was a seven-day-a-week job, and teaching was only a part of it.
As a teacher, Mattingley was in the front rank - as his public exam results proved - and his classes were never boring. When we did Richard II for the Leaving Certificate in 1960, he said the play had been criticised because the ultimate hero, Bolingbroke, was absent for such a long time. "But what could Shakespeare do?" he asked the class. "Should he have brought Bolingbroke back sooner?" There was a pause. "No sir," I blurted, "because that would detract from his victorious entrance later."
It had just been Joe's way of making things interesting, but in that instant I crossed over to the other side and started looking at writing creatively. Many years later he came to see a performance of Macquarie and, true to form, said nothing about the play over supper afterwards. Did I detect a "what have I started?" look? There was something pretty close to it.
As a grammarian, Mattingley was of the old school, but again, he made it interesting, however Pavlovian the responses he instilled may have been. "Nice" was outlawed ("It's a meaningless word"), as was "different to" ("It's similar to, different from"), while "different than" was an abomination. Even today, if I hear someone say "between you and I", an involuntary twitch ensues.
We were also introduced to literary conventions, such as not writing or saying "William Shakespeare" or "Shakespeare's Hamlet" - it insults the intelligence. I wonder what he would have made of the latter-day American announcers and their "That was Fidelio by German composer Ludwig van Beethoven who was born in Bonn, Germany".
The 1970s brought rebels and precursors of student rights, culminating in the 1973 Monckton Shield swimming carnival, where the entire school turned its back on the pool - unthinkable in the '50s, but how could Horace hold the bridge against so many? In response, the school did not turn its back on Dr Arnold, but gradually embraced the more liberated theories of Kurt Hahn, the long-time head at Gordonstoun.
At his valedictory address in 1979, Mattingley reiterated his educational philosophy, that "change just for the sake of change is an exercise in futility" and that class sizes, streaming and so on were as nothing compared to the "ethos or character of a school". The gymnasium was named after him, and then he left Armidale for good.
Change did come to TAS, beginning with the appointment of a day boy as senior prefect in 1980. Previously a scorned minority, "daygoes" from the town's professional community had diluted the school's traditional stream of graziers' sons.
More change was to come in the '80s. The anachronistic uniform worn since 1894 had included a Norfolk jacket with gnarled leather buttons that gave much merriment to the "townees". It was replaced by a single-breasted blazer with plastic buttons. By this time, Mattingley was living in Tasmania and had been ordained as an Anglican priest. "He was wise to retreat to the cloth," said Philip Bailey, who had taught with Joe during the turbulent '70s.
Some older teachers gradually switch off and by the end are phoning it in, but Mattingley had an active old age. He had always been involved with Missions Abroad and Legacy and did some coaching of children with learning difficulties, deriving satisfaction from "breaking down the wall".
At his 1993 testimonial in Sydney there was a record turn-out of TAS alumni and I remarked, "This is a tribute to you." It was no more than a mild pleasantry, but back came the reply like a rifle shot, "You don't know how many refused to come, do you?" He had never played favourites and did not expect to be played as one.
The classics of school life - To Serve Them All My Days, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Corn is Green, The Browning Version, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - threw up vivid characters who were not at all like Mattingley. Were their visions false? Many of these people, especially Mr Chips, had an ingratiating quality that was missing in Joe. A hard man to the core, he was certainly not nice to everyone, but he was a great educator.
At 90 he was still active, albeit with a walking frame, and made it to Christmas, but then "crack'd a noble heart" and was found dead by a carer. He is survived by his brother David and sister-in-law Christobel.
Alex Buzo
Alex Buzo, playwright and author, was a student of Brian Mattingley's. A memorial service for Brian Mattingley [was] held in the TAS Chapel on February 20 at 10am.
We are advised by the front page of today’s edition of The Age that Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, has become one of the best-selling non-fiction books, selling 300,000 copies in one day.
What I want to know is, who decided that it was non-fiction? As my late friend Alex Buzo wisely observed, autobiography is a form of literature “with greater recognition given to the author” (see Alex Buzo, A Dictionary of the Almost Obvious, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1998.
Other examples:
- Bill Clinton’s My Life (is there some deep metaphysical reason why he gave his autobiography the same name as Trotsky’s – Моя Жиэнь?)
- The Peter Costello book. Even the name of the author is fictitious – his father-in-law wrote it: it’s “Peter Costello with Peter Coleman”. Buzo foresaw all this in 1998:
– Mostautobiographies were the work of ghost writers, then came the ‘as told to’ brigade, and now, finally, ‘with’.
In The Alex Buzo Company I introduced the company founded by the notable Australian playwright’s daughter Emma to produce, promote and perpetuate his work, and in Alex Buzo Company double bill I foreshadowed the August revival of Alex’s first play, Norm and Ahmed, at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, under the direction of Arne Neeme, in a double bill with a contemporary reworking by award-winning playwright Alana Valentine.
On Friday 25 September Norm and Ahmed will come to Armidale to kick off The Armidale School’s Old Boys’ Weekend with a performance in the new creative arts centre, the TAS Hoskins Centre.
Tickets, a steal at $15 per ticket, are available from TAS Reception on (02) 6776 5800.
The performance will commence at 7.00 pm, preceded by drinks and nibbles from 5.30 pm.
For an amusing recollection of Graeme Blundell’s brush with the Vice Squad when Norm and Ahmed was first performed – Blundell’s first gig as a director – go to Graeme Blundell on Norm and Ahmed and follow the links.
To read Graeme Blundell’s amusing recollection of his brush with the Vice Squad on the occasion of his first gig as a director, published in today’s edition of The Australian, go to this link.
The year was 1969 and the play was Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, which The Alex Buzo Company will be opening in Sydney on 5 August as part of a double bill directed by Arne Neeme.The companion piece is a contemporary reworking of Norm and Ahmed’s theme in a new play by award-winning playwright Alana Valentine, entitled Shafana and Aunt Sarrina. It promises to be a great evening.
Visit the Classic and Contemporary page on the Alex Buzo Company’s website for further details about the plays and the Alex Buzo Memorial Lecture, for booking links and for an opportunity to make tax deductible donations to the company through the Australian Business Arts Foundation.
