Our History Makers - Graeme Hudson
By Rose Mulready
Perth in the 1950s was generally not a place where boy meets ballet and falls in love. Graeme Hudson got his first taste of dance at the age of nine, when his grandmother asked him to take his three-year-old cousin to her dance classes. At first he would hang around on his bike outside until she was ready to go home, but as boy students were “like hen’s teeth”, the teacher, Evelyn Hutchings, soon invited him to join in. Hutchings taught musical comedy, a watered-down form of ballet and acrobatics (Graeme would later perform a series of backflips in Roland Petit’s Carmen). Her truck-driver brother helped teach the kids tap-dancing.
Graeme’s father, Ted, was against his son taking dance classes. Ostensibly, the reason was that he couldn’t afford it – he and his wife Norma, had five children – but Graeme wonders if it had something to do with his own thwarted ambition. “My father had wanted to learn dancing when he was a kid, but his stepmother told him, ‘You have to have a pair of black shorts to go to dance classes, and I’m not buying you a pair of black shorts.’ Graeme’s grandmother came to the rescue and paid for his lessons. 
“Ted and Norma loved to dance. Twice a week they’d go to ‘50/50’ dancing, which was old-time ballroom dancing, barn dancing, a bit of modern waltz. They went even after Dad went blind, right up until he died. They were beautiful dancers. Mum taught me to do all the ballroom dances when I was a kid. I could always get up and dance with any of the single women (sometimes with the embarrassment of having my nose at the height of their bosom). But, on a dance floor, I was always in my element.”
Each of his teachers at the School had a different approach to their craft. “Maggie kept technique in her classes really tight and developmental. Paul Gnatt, with his Bournonville training, gave us stamina and strength, he worked us really hard: 64 grand battement, then turn around and do it on the other side! Leon Kellaway always had a lot of wonderful tips for us, but he would also have the pianist play something different, and call out, ‘Come on, duckies, let’s all dance today!’ – he gave us that freedom.”
Madame Berezowsky taught them character dance, “such a different musicality and style, which we needed as soon as we stepped into the ballet company, because we had to do Coppélia and Raymonda. Madame’s classes were an absolute delight. She’d give us Russian steps to do, and she’d say, ‘Come on, my boys, come on – let’s really do this! It is hard!’ We would try and do it, and she’d stand up the front, and she’d laugh, and we would laugh, but by the second year, we were doing all these things that we’d thought were way out of our league. She did it all with humour.”
The School was only a two-year course at this stage. At the end of his second year, Graeme still thought a professional career in ballet was beyond him. Betty Pounder, who had taught him at the School, was staging the musical Sweet Charity; he auditioned and got in, starting rehearsals a couple of days before his graduation (“Maggie was furious!”) On the second day of rehearsals, Sue Musitz (now Davidson), an ex-dancer who was working on projects at The Australian Ballet, pulled him out of rehearsals to offer him a contract with Athletes and Dancers, a newly formed group that would visit schools, putting on small performances and introducing kids to the art form. (This troupe would later become the Dance Company of NSW, which ultimately became Sydney Dance Company.) Graeme was torn – he had always wanted to do a musical comedy – but when Musitz sweetened the deal by telling him the contract could lead to a place in The Australian Ballet, he couldn’t refuse. Pounder kindly released him from his contract and he embarked on seven months with Athletes and Dancers, along with three other dancers, including Janet Vernon, who would later run Sydney Dance Company with Graeme Murphy, Arthur Raymond and Sonia Humphrey, who later became a journalist and host for ABC art and ballet telecasts. In 1967, when The Australian Ballet returned from its South American tour, he and Vernon were invited to join the company.
By 1973, Graeme realised that he was never going to get the opportunities he’d dreamed of at The Australian Ballet. He decided to take a training grant from the Australian Council that would qualify him as an administrator. Laurel Martyn and Garth Welch had invited him to work at Ballet Victoria, where they had become co-directors. When he told Peggy van Praagh, the director of The Australian Ballet, she tried to tempt him with a coryphée contract; he was also invited to join stage management, but his mind was made up.
Ballet Victoria, which had previously had great success as the Victorian Ballet Guild under the guidance of Laurel Martyn, had two good years, including supporting one tour, produced by Michael Edgeley, with guests Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, and another, with the Kirov exiles Valery and Galina Panov – until it was laid low in 1975 by a financially disastrous visit to New Zealand and embezzlement of funds by two of its employees. Everyone was abruptly laid off, and Graeme decided to embark on study for a degree in Social Work.
With the brand-new degree under his arm, he found great success as a social worker at the Department of Immigration, introducing humanising strategies to improve detention facilities and building bridges between isolated refugees and local communities.
When immigration policies became more hardline in the 1980s, he decided to retire. “I couldn’t agree with those policies. I’m a social worker at heart, I’m not a detention officer.”
While he’d been working for the Department, Graeme had also been studying horticulture. After his retirement he set up a gardening business in the Blue Mountains, where he and his partner David had built a house. They’ve spent almost 40 years in their “paradise”, with a two-acre garden visited by wallabies and lyrebirds.
Graeme and David like to travel. On a trip to New York, they were at a performance of A Chorus Line when they spotted Janet Vernon and Graeme Murphy sitting two rows in front of them. After the show, the four spent hours reminiscing over Scotch and cups of tea.
In 1992, Murphy had made Nutcracker – The Story of Clara for The Australian Ballet. It was a contemporary version of The Nutcracker based around a fictional Ballets Russes dancer called Clara, who on the eve of her death looks back at her long life. Clara the Elder, a role made on Margaret Scott, has a group of fellow Russian émigrés over on Christmas Eve, and those roles were played by age-appropriate dancers.
“I said to Graeme, ‘If you ever do Nutcracker again, I want to be in it.’ And he said, ‘Graeme, you’ve got it.’ A couple of years later, I got a call from him. The Australian Ballet were putting on a season of his Nutcracker.” The Émigrés in that season included Colin Peasley and Audrey Nicholls, who were both 82. Graeme, at 72, was relatively a baby. The experience was glorious. “All my time in retirement, I’d been thinking, if I could just get on that stage one more time – one more time!”
These days, Graeme involves himself in the history of The Australian Ballet, running a Facebook alumni group, putting together an upcoming book of dancer interviews, and running events for ex-dancers. He is still in contact with The Australian Ballet School and looks back with gratitude on his time there.
“It gave me a real work ethic. I didn’t know what work was before I came to the Ballet School. It was more intense than anything I had ever attempted in my prior dancing, sporting or academic years. But there was a fulfilment in the accomplishment of that learning, and feedback from lecturers that lead us on to harder tasks.
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