brunswick west

beginnings, endings, clouds and a plane

Italy, lucca

Melbourne tram

Life's a Stage, Richard Gill

By Michael Quin

At the top of a stairway in an old bluestone hall, a character with glasses and unruly white hair – described by colleagues as ‘intense’, ‘brilliant’, even ‘mad’ – creates operas.

If Richard Gill’s story were set on stage his office could be the set: a cabinet-full of opera records, books titled Callas and 50 Greatest Operas, an Italian-English dictionary. Stage left a black piano with the music of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, one of the most difficult operas to perform, waiting to be learnt.

And if Victorian Opera’s 67 year-old music director were a character, surely he could only be played by himself.

He’ll spend more than a year learning the intricacies of an opera before conducting the orchestra, and when it comes together there is no parallel.

“When it’s working, it’s heaven,” he says. “When it’s all going right and the music is wonderful and it’s absolutely joyous – it’s fantastic. It’s the most wonderful experience.”

But he’s more than a conductor. He selects the season’s repertoire, casts the singers and designers, and mentors young artists while actively campaigning about Australian education after years as a teacher.

When I meet him, the office is sweltering and he’s cursing an out-of-control heater.

If the opening scene for a play about him were not set here – with its intense atmosphere, ringing phones and collection of opera vinyls – it could be in the church at Sydney’s Convent of Mercy school.

The curtain rises to the sound of Gregorian chants, and a young Richard Gill singing in the choir. Mass, which he always saw as an occasion for theatre, was where he fell in love with the stage.

“It was in Latin and there were priests and altar boys in vestments, statues and flowers and incense, bells and smells and god knows what. And lots of boogie boogie. It was very theatrical and very dramatic and I loved it,” he says.

But it was a Catholic education of “brainwashing”, he says with more than a hint of bitterness.

“I hate it to death now, it was hideous,” he says. “I can see that I was seduced by it in one sense, but it was Catholicism in the bad old days and they screwed us up monumentally with guilt. The Jews invented guilt and the Catholics perfected it and my generation are riddled with guilt about everything.”

He excuses himself to open the door as the heat in the room has now become unbearable.

When he continues, he tells me the guilty pleasures of his youth weren’t so guilty at all. When he was suspected of being a ‘communist’ it was for singing Bob Dylan or Peter Paul and Mary songs.

“It was just coming into the age of hippies and we wore duffle coats and moccasins and drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes at night and got back at 10:00, can you imagine? And it was considered way out behaviour,” he says.

As a student he frequented Sydney’s only Italian wine bar, where Monday nights were spent drinking Manhattans and Martinis. Otherwise he could be found at the Savoy cinema watching “continental picture shows” like Virgin Spring, 8 1/2 or The Crucible, much to the horror of his parents.

“They used to use bad words like ‘fuck’ occasionally, and you would occasionally see love-making. There was no full-frontal nudity, but we were ‘depraved’. To go to those movies you were described as being ‘depraved’ and ‘degenerate’,” he says.

Beyond this he admits to never being much of a rebel. As he describes the bookish child with an overactive imagination who never stopped reading or wanting to learn, he’s instantly recognisable.

He sounds all his vowels to perfection and stresses Latin words the way lawyers and academics do. He can speak German and French or analyse Bach in a depth students describe as “mind-boggling”, and then there’s his knowledge of poetry, politics and education.

One conductor he mentors, Nicholas Carter, is convinced Richard’s read every book ever written.

“I’ve never met someone who knows so much about so many different things,” he says.
“It comes not only from years of experience, but also being almost manic in his strive for knowledge. If there’s stuff to be learnt he wants to know it. He’s not content to sit by and learn it another day or leave it to someone else to know.”

When asked to explain his prodigious creative energy, Richard brings it back to imagination, and credits radio with stimulating it.

Every Sunday in the 50s he’d listen to The Goon Show, then with a friend in the street, over the phone, even on buses and trains, he’d perform it for the whole week. Richard tells me that 60 years on, they still ring one another to do this.

The impersonation he offers involves a horrible shrill voice with the confident delivery from six decades of practice.

He sees dramatic material in everyday characters and loves eaves dropping on public transport for “juicy-cool conversations”.

“I find people really interesting and when I’m in a train or a tram, I study people. I look and I listen to conversations,” he says.

He breaks into another spontaneous impersonation. This time he’s a private school girl from the tram whose conversation, full of ‘f this’ and ‘f that’, he seems to thoroughly enjoy retelling.

Despite being 50 years too old and the wrong sex for the part, he gets swept up in the role for a moment.

Then, as if a curtain had fallen, she’s gone and the old opera director with messy white hair is back, and he tells me:

“Theatre is a way of getting in touch with reality.”

Perth, swan river

the killer of time

the row of shells

Back to Beijing for an Itinerant Sportswriter

By Michael Quin

For a quarter of a century Mike Osborne has endeavored to marry his work as a journalist with his personal passions for the game, the race, and the fight.

Now on his way to cover his fifth Olympics, he reflects on the highs and lows of being an itinerant sportswriter.

“The Olympics are something the media gets to enjoy almost as much as the athletes,” he says, “I get to see the world, go to other countries, get to test my professional skills in a high-pressure situation. You know, long hours, late nights, hard partying, and you’ve still got to deliver day after day for 18 or 20 days straight. It’s always a good challenge.”

As chief sportswriter for Australian Associated Press, Mr Osborne is returning to Beijing where he spent two years in the mid 90s setting up AAP’s Beijing reporting bureau.

He confesses to some mixed emotions about his return.

Starved in those days of high-quality sport, he survived in Beijing on a diet of general news and finance, while negotiating unfamiliar political terrain with only enough Mandarin essential for any journalist, “to get a taxi and order some beers”.


“It was challenging at every corner,” he says, “not just the languages, the crowds and the pollution, but just the working conditions. Trying to get information out of a communist government is not an easy thing to do.”

He’s had henchmen follow him through Tiananmen Square, investigations blocked and his phones tapped. It was all in a day’s work as a journalist in China, he says.

Human Rights Watch reported last year that journalists who send news out of China, or who merely debate politically sensitive ideas among themselves, face punishments ranging from sudden unemployment to long prison terms.

The Foreign Correspondent Club of China says foreign journalists are not exempt from harassment, detention, and occasional violence.

Based on his experiences, Mr Osborne has no doubt these reports are true, saying foreign media living and working there have it “pretty tough”.

“Things are being loosened up for the Olympics,” he says, “but I expect they’ll go back to being pretty well controlled after the Olympic Games are over.”

Others, like Chinese academic blogger, Liang Jing, disagree. He saw the lack of state control surrounding media coverage of the Sichuan earthquake - China’s worst natural disaster since 1976 - as “an important watershed in contemporary Chinese politics”.

Mr Osborne is more sceptical about any signs of change, saying it’s inevitable the authorities will want to seize back control of the narrative as soon as coverage is directly challenging them.


Whatever the future for Chinese media, the Olympics will be a whole new ballgame for China, he says.

“There’s going to be 10.000 media from the Western world all camped out on their doorstep and there’s just no way they’re going to able to control the message. So, if something really big happens, they’re just going to have to live with whatever coverage is delivered. What the free Western press does pretty well is get to the bottom of a story, so I’m not worried about them trying to control us at all,” he says.

“I don’t think they have an idea what they’re letting themselves in for. I think they have an idea of what it’s about, but they don’t really have a full understanding of how the Western press works and exactly what it’s going to be like having everyone there.”

The Olympic torch fiasco, says Mr Osborne, showed China’s ignorance of the world’s potential willingness to disrespect official ceremony.

While disagreeing with political boycotts of sporting events – especially while countries continue to have trade and other relationships – Mr Osborne has no problem with people politicising the torch.

“I think the torch relay’s a bit of a joke really. It’s a political event, it’s got nothing really to do with sport, there’re no winners or losers. It’s just a very long promotional tour to push the Games. So if politics wants to get involved with that, that’s fine. I would’ve protested too if I had a gripe,” Mr Osborne says.

Mike says confidently the Beijing Games themselves will be a great spectacle.

“I know China will deliver a great Olympics because it’s a communist country and when they say they’re going to do something, they do it. So I’m looking forward to seeing how well organised they’ll be. I think they’ll be much better organised than the Athens Olympics,” he says.

I ask what’s so special about the Olympics for Mike. He chuckles, no doubt as a collage of amazing moments races through his head.

“Watching Debbie Flintoff-King win gold in athletics in Seoul, seeing Kathy Freeman win in Sydney. It’s the excellence in sport, but it’s also the overall experience that really matters,” he says.

“I mean you can see great sport anywhere in the world at any time, but the Olympics is the pinnacle. It’s the whole experience around having 28 sports all doing their best at the same time, it’s pretty special.”

With a more nostalgic tone he recalls, “Sitting under the Parthenon, drinking Retsina and eating Greek salad was pretty special too.”

Not having been to Greece, I wonder aloud what Retsina is. It’s explained to me as a Greek white or rose wine made since ancient times, which due to its peculiar pine oils, was thought of as wood nymph tears.

He goes on to explain the Games are about whole cities coming to life.

Barcelona, he says, was one of the greatest. With all its street life, eclectic inhabitants, architecture and food, he recalls with the same nostalgic tone when recalling nights under the Parthenon, that living and breathing the city of Barcelona during the Olympics was an unforgettable experience.

But Sydney, he’s convinced, was the friendliest and the best.

“Nothing really tops the Sydney Olympics, the spirit and the atmosphere that was there in Sydney was amazing. I can see why the IOC holds up those Games as the greatest. Athens certainly didn’t reach the same level as Sydney,” he says.

He recalls the spirit of each Games the way socialites describe the vibes of parties: this one was lively and that one friendly, and the next, he predicts, may be a bit more formal.

Interestingly, no matter how excited Mr Osborne may be about the heroes of world sports he’ll have the chance to rub shoulders with, it’s the old fraternity he’ll be sharing this next Olympic party with.

“Most media tend to enjoy the company of other journalists and don’t tend to want to socialise necessarily with athletes,” he says. “I think we’ll leave the athletes to do their own socialising and we’ll get on with our own partying which is probably, you know, in the tradition of journalists, pretty hard drinking and hard talking sort of stuff.”