Ballet found Graeme Hudson late in life, after he’d already had a career as a television dancer. Natural talent got him through his audition for The Australian Ballet School, which honed his skills and propelled him on an adventurous career through the 60s and 70s.
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 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 my 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.”
Ted and my 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.”
He moved on to a second teacher, Gail Chipper and was soon winning scholarships and even the State Cup, which had never been won by a boy. But now he started splitting his after-school time and weekends between sport – swimming, football, tennis – and dancing. He also passed his Junior Certificate and got a job with the National Bank. At 17, through Chipper, he also got a job with the inaugural troupe of Perth Channel 7 Dancers. While he worked away at the bank, his feet under the desk would be practicing the routines.
At this point, he had still never seen a ballet performance, but the film of West Side Story was a revelation – he went to see it over and over again, and tried to incorporate the style of the dancers into his own work. Then he saw Black Tights, a film of Roland Petit ballets starring Zizi Jeanmaire, it was the first time he’d ever seen real classical ballet, or pointe shoes.
Bill Pepper, one of the Channel Seven Dancers, told him, “Graeme, you know, you’re never going to be a proper dancer until you do ballet.” Pepper took him to do classes with Kira Bousloff, the Ballets Russes dancer who founded the West Australian Ballet, and Diana Waldron, who founded Perth City Ballet. After only a couple of months of studying with them, Ray Powell came to Perth to hold auditions for The Australian Ballet School. For Graeme, it was a terrifying experience. “Ray Powell setting all these twiddly steps – I’d never seen anything like it before. I couldn’t do a pirouette. I couldn’t jump properly!” Nevertheless, he was offered a place, and given a bursary to boot. (Graeme would go on to spend “every last shekel” in his bank account and, if not from the support of the School bursary, he could not have started his dream).
Now came one of the biggest decisions in his life to date. He had begun doing some ‘Exhibition Ballroom’ with his teacher Gail Chipper, who was only a few years older than him and already a professional State and National Title-winning dancer. Her partner was not strong enough to dance ‘exhibition’, so The Wrightson Dance Studio asked him to partner her, as a professional team. He loved all styles of ballroom dance but it didn’t take long for him to decide that he loved stage dance and ballet more.
Then came the sealer for the offer. Mrs Roberts, who was the student counsellor, student accommodation officer, etc, etc, she took on lots of roles and was a wonderful woman, had been offered by Garth Welch and Marilyn Jones, the ground floor of their home in Carlton. It would accommodate 4 students. The rental was set to suit those “very poor” students. He accepted the very timely and generous offer and made preparations to travel to Melbourne.
Along with three other WA boys; William ‘Billy’ Pepper, Ron (Erceg) Bekker and Arthur (Smirk) Raymond, who had been accepted by the School, Graeme crossed the Nullarbor in Ron’s old station wagon. (The other Perth boy accepted that year was Neville Burns, who travelled separately). Their first class was with the School’s director, Margaret Scott. “Without Maggie, I wouldn’t have had a career. She taught me about weight, about movement, about jumping, about balance – things that had never even been suggested to me. I credit her with making me a dancer. We were in fear of her, but at the same time, we just adored her. The fear was of not being able to do what she wanted of us. And she wanted us to be good because she loved us.”
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 gave us stamina and strength: from his Bournonville training, 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 that stage. At the end of his second year, Graeme still thought a professional career in ballet was out of his league. 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 alumnus-dancer who now worked 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.
Graeme stayed with the ballet for seven years. He toured to Southeast Asia, Japan, England and Soviet Russia; he was part of the 1970/71 American tour headed by Rudolf Nureyev and Lucette Aldous, and was a dancer in Nureyev’s film of Don Quixote. That notorious shoot was a nightmare for the dancers. Nureyev insisted on real candles lighting the scenes, which created a beautiful ambiance but took ages to light and then we had to get the scenes finished before they burned down too much; and real fruit and vegetables and meat in the peasants’ barrows which, given the Summer heat inside that aircraft hangar, both of these market stands became environmental hazards to sensitive nostrils. “He went and got stallholders from the Victoria Market – they looked fabulous and really knew how to present a fish!” The dancers, driven by the perfectionist Nureyev, had to repeat their performances over and over on concrete floors in the extreme heat. “It was such a hard slog. But we produced a film that was world class. I admired Rudy for what he went through to become a dancer, and his skill, and he made men in dance ‘pop’ – but, as a person … leave me with the image of him as a dancer, but don’t ask me to like him!”
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 …he needed to get a ‘proper job’. A ballet dancer’s occupation was not seen as a ‘proper job’ in those days.
Ballet Victoria had two good years (that continued on from its’ many, many successful years under the guidance of Laurel Martyn in its’ previous life as the Victorian Ballet Guild) – including supporting one tour, produced by Michael Edgeley, with guests Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, and another, under BV’s own auspices, 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. (Interestingly, it was the time of The Whitlam Era, when university study was free and because of the circumstances of becoming unemployed, I was eligible for a Government training grant which helped finance me through study. But essentially, for the second time in my adult life, I was penniless again). With a brand new degree under his arm, he found great success, as a Graduate Social Worker, at the Department of Immigration, introducing humanising strategies to improve detention facilities and building bridges between isolated refugees and local communities. Most of his time was spent in Sydney but he also took short postings in Melbourne and Port Hedland. 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 2-acre garden visited by wallabies and lyrebirds.
Graeme and David like to travel. One trip, while in 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 a contemporary version of The Nutcracker (Nutcracker – The Story of Clara) for The Australian Ballet, based around a (fantasy) 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 friends (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, ‘Grace, 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 fulfillment in the accomplishment of that learning, and feedback from lecturers that lead us on to harder tasks. When I was dancing, I’ve had people say to me at functions, after performances, ‘Oh, you must be so dedicated to be able to dance like that.’ I didn’t see myself like that, I just liked to dance. But now I realise that we really did have to be dedicated to be at the Ballet School. Many of us were away from the home for the first time; we put yourself into the hands of these people who were going to train us. Now I tell my little granddaughter and goddaughter, ‘Doing ballet is setting you up for life. It teaches you discipline, it teaches you how to multi-task, it teaches you so much about respect for people who have more knowledge than you.’ Dancers are always looking upwards. That was what it was like at the Ballet School. We not only had those wonderful teachers, we had the Company training and rehearsing in the same building … Now, when I’m at the gym, and I see people giving up, I always think, I can do two more. Because as dancers, we always did two more.”
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