The memoirs of Rees, a legendary figure in Australian letters. He
wrote plays, articles, books... including important histories of
Australian drama. Worked a lot in radio.
He wrote and directed the first ever Australian TV play The Sub Editor's Room and was the first, to my knowledge to discuss the historical import of Australian TV plays.
I'm surprised he didn't do more TV. Before TV came in the ABC sent him around the world to look at TV. He only did a little bit.
Would Rees going into TV had made a change? He too complained about Australian writing. Yet he was so passionate about Australian plays... Personally I think he was wasted in radio. He could have done more in TV.
Still made a major contribution to the arts in this country.
In his book he makes subtle whinges about not being able to access the grants that the later generation could access. But mate your boss sent you around the world to study a medium you never practiced. You did okay.
Below is an article on Rees from 1999.
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| SMH 24 July 1999 |
A VOICE FOR DRAMA; PROFILE / LESLIE REES / WRITER: [Late Edition]
Bennie, Angela. Sydney Morning Herald; Sydney, N.S.W. [Sydney, N.S.W]. 24 July 1999: 3.
ANGELA BENNIE talks to a man who nurtured generation of writers and helped Australiia found its own theatre.
LESLIE Rees, in the full bloom of his 94th year, sits in his flat facing Balmoral Beach. He is looking at the horizon. “Well done, Rees!” he is calling out, his eyes lost in the haze just floating above it. “And then Paul called at me from amongst the ruck, `And you didn’t even know you had done it, did you, Rees!’ “
Rees is delighted with the memory. “It’s true! I had just kicked the goal and it was the only goal I have ever kicked in my whole life, before or since. I still don’t know how I did it! I think I just happened to be there in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”
His eyes are still on the horizon. They are sparkling with humour. He is talking about a football match, a game of Aussie rules, a long time ago, about 1918, it must have been, playing itself out now in his memory around the playing fields of the Perth Modern School in Western Australia - when he kicked the one and only goal of his lifetime.
Around him in his mind are the voices of his friends. “Paul” is Paul Hasluck, who is destined to become Governor-General of Australia. The figure of Stumpy Nugget is there, too, with whom he practises cricket on Saturday afternoons in the lazy suburban streets, using a kerosene tin for a wicket. Nugget is H. C. “Nugget” Coombs, who is destined to become Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
And Leslie Rees? What is his destiny?
Two months ago, Rees, a venerable, isolated figure in his age and of his time, found himself standing before the Australian literati, bowing his fine, leonine head. He was receiving a special prize at the 1999 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. It was the awards’ 20th anniversary.
“He has pursued excellence,” the citation read. “He has held on fast to ideals and visions . . .” He has “helped forge what today is unthinkingly accepted - that we can write freely as Australians with Australian accents”. His has nurtured generations of Australian writers and Australian writing. He has pursued his dream for an Australian drama “with an aggressively, recognisably Australian vision, a love of the country and a firm set of ideals”.
He is to be saluted.
Leslie Rees was born in Perth in 1905. There was nothing extraordinary in his beginnings; on the contrary, if anything they were impoverished and hard. But he saw nothing untoward in this. As far as he was concerned he was just an average boy, growing up in ordinary surroundings among ordinary, hard-working people.
This average boy, however, did have a dream. He wanted to be a writer. More specifically, he wanted to be a writer about the theatre. What was different about this dream, however, was that it was the Australian theatre he wanted to pursue. There wasn’t any. It didn’t exist. He wanted to make it exist.
After Rees graduated from the University of Western Australia, he won a postgraduate scholarship to Britain. His ambition was to study the theatre there at what was then generally regarded as “the source” - London.
“I particularly wanted to study the Irish drama,” says Rees. “It was blossoming then, what with Yeats and the formation of the Abbey, and all of that. You see, I envisioned this as a terrific model for us in Australia.
“But the real university for me was all the theatre that was on there in London. I only had a small amount of money in my pocket - it was in the time of the Depression. I remember it was dead winter when I arrived and it was freezing cold standing in those side lanes, waiting in the queue for a ticket, but I went four or five times a week. But I did it because I wanted to become an expert on the theatre. I had to see as much as I could.”
As it turned out, over his six years in London, Rees was to see something like 1,000 performances in his “real university” - for, over and above his studies, he landed himself a job as a drama critic on the famous The Era newspaper, a paper devoted exclusively to writing about the theatre and entertainment arts.
He was now in the thick of it, attending first-night performances, posting notices on the likes of Tyrone Guthrie and Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft. This was a time when figures such as Bernard Shaw and O’Casey strode the scene, a time of Somerset Maugham and of John van Druten and Emlyn Williams. Olivier was flexing his muscles and Gielgud his voice. It was a time when a young Paul Robeson stormed the white citadels with a searing, scorching Othello, and a “daring young wit” called Noel Coward was enchanting them with his elegant comedies.
He met Shaw - “he had such energy, such exuberance, it was exhilarating just being in the same room with him”; he met O’Casey, who became a personal friend, and Robeson, “with the physique of a heavyweight boxer and a gentleness of manner”.
It was a heady time in the theatre and it was a heady time to be a young man in his early 20s at the centre of it all. AFTER six years, Rees, who by then was married to his fellow West Australian and writer, Coralie Clarke, packed it in and both returned to Australia.
“I was homesick. I was very homesick - we both were. It’s the way of it, I think, for Australians. Others say the same thing,” Rees says. “I knew if I stayed in London, perhaps I might never return here. And I very much wanted to return.”
While he doesn’t spell it out, there was something more than just homesickness. In his autobiography, Hold Fast To Dreams, published in 1982, he says, “It was time to try giving out after so much concentrated taking in.” In other words, he had not lost sight of his goal. His task, as he saw it, was to play some role, “however modest”, in the shaping and the nurturing of proper, true Australian drama; to find, in the words of Shaw, “a drama to fit the facts of society”.
This dream had quite specific parameters. Nor were they superficial nor sentimental nor, indeed, “nationalistic” in any chauvinistic sense. They came from Rees’s fundamental belief that the theatre had an “ameliorating public function”, as he puts it, in one’s culture. The theatre was an artform that, by its very nature, showed us who we were, what our aspirations were and what were our strengths and weaknesses.
“So much of the scrappy Australian drama culture of my early days had seemed so amateurishly imitative, timidly second-hand in tone, overborne by the example and style of masses of imported material,” says Rees in Dreams. Until the Australian theatre found its own voice, expressing its own ethos and values, then that was what we were and would remain - a second-rate, imitative, grovelling, colonial culture of amateurs subsisting on a diet of imports.
At the time of the Reeses’ return to Australia in 1936 - to Sydney - the ABC, which had been formed only a few years earlier in 1932, was setting up a federal department of drama. It was Leslie Rees’s chance. To his delight he landed the job as federal drama editor. He was perfect for it, with his years of training in the international theatre scene, and, more significantly, with his belief in nurturing the home-grown product.
On his appointment at the ABC, Rees immediately set about commissioning Australian writers to write drama for broadcast. At first the scripts were tentative, some “lamentable, woeful”, he says. Over time they began to gain assurance and authority. Many, of course, were merely average; some, on the other hand, were exceptional: the beautiful, tragic Douglas Stewart verse drama, The Fire on the Snow, written in 1941, for example, is still regarded today as one of the finest plays in the Australian canon.
Writers such as Ernestine Hill and M. Barnard Eldershaw, Vance Palmer and Dymphna Cusack, Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland, Gwen Meredith and Sumner Locke-Elliott, Betty Roland and Alan Seymour, all were nurtured, all were given their chance. All were broadcast.
“He was like an oasis in the wilderness,” says the award-winning scriptwriter and playwright Eleanor Witcombe. “You must understand, there was no theatre then, none. Absolutely none! You just couldn’t write about any Australian subjects at all. There was no prestige about writing plays about Australia, and when we did start to do it, our writing was extremely tentative.
“You see, we were unsure of ourselves. We had been put down so often and we had no one to help us through, tell us how we were doing. Leslie was one of the very few people around who would help us with the actual process of writing . . . The place was like a wilderness.”
The wilderness was soon to produce an exotic, however, from which hundreds of hybrids would bloom. In 1938 Rees, along with playwright Rex Rienits and the Independent Theatre’s Doris Fitton, established a body of advisers with the purpose of “furthering the interests of stage playwrights in Australia”. ONE of the many things this Playwrights’ Advisory Board did was institute a play competition, with a small kitty of prizemoney for the winning author and the promise of some help toward a proper professional production for the winning play. It could only be a promise, because the idea of a professional production of an Australian play was simply a joke among any self-respecting theatre management at the time.
In the 1955 competition, a play called The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was among the 130 entries received. “Yes, I can still remember my reaction to it clearly,” says Rees. “It was its humour. I remember it standing out among all the others. The sound of it, yes, the sound of it. It still rings in your ears.
“I put it down as No 1. But the vote was divided - it was between The Doll and Oriel Gray’s The Torrents to win. My vote was for one play to win, and that was The Doll. In the end, we divided the prize into two, so both won.”
Rees then put all his weight and efforts behind the PAB’s endeavours to try to get both plays to production. No-one was interested at all in The Torrents ; and there was only the vaguest, somewhat patronising raising of an eyebrow over The Doll, from the then executive director of the Elizabethan Trust, Hugh Hunt. Rees persisted.
The Doll did get its run: it eventually opened in a small university theatre, the Union, in Melbourne, with its author, Ray Lawler, in the cast, and John Sumner as its first director. The rest is Australian theatre history.
“It’s funny about writers today,” says Witcombe. “Most people forget. Most people don’t understand what a struggle it was for all of us . . . But the amount of talent that has been lost is appalling, absolutely appalling. There are generations of struggle behind today’s theatre. Leslie is the link between us and them - all those generations of lost writers. He was one of the few, the very few, people who tried to get us to recognise our own. He used to say to us writers, `We have our own voice. We must find it.’ That was his strength.”
On his retirement from the ABC in 1966, Rees’s love of the Australian theatre and writing continued. He wrote a history of Australian drama and continued his extraordinary success in writing stories for children - a success which began when Rees first enchanted his two young daughters with adventure stories of a boy “as big as his mother’s big toe”,
named Digit Dick.
He was appointed Australia’s president in the Sydney International PEN movement and the previous year had acted as an international judge in the prestigious Prix Italia.
Today, at 93 going on an active, vital 94, he lives alone in his flat overlooking Balmoral Beach, his wife having died in 1972 and his daughters grown with families of their own. His grandchildren call him Mouse. “I don’t know why - they have their ways,” he chuckles almost to himself while his clear blue eyes sparkle like the sea out there beyond his balcony. There is mischief in them.
Today, his greatest pleasure is to walk along the seafront. He only very rarely goes out to the theatre - “My hearing prevents it. I never seem to get the punch line and people keep shushing me up when I ask what’s just been said.” He reads the reviews avidly, though, anxious to keep up, anxious to know who’s doing what to whom and why.
Today, his legacy is secure. The idea of an Australian theatre is taken for granted. Today, the Australian “voice” is assumed and speaks out to its audience with authority, in whatever theatre language it chooses.
“He had guts to hang on in there,” says Witcombe. “But the most important thing of all was that he was in a position to do something about it - and he did.”
From a long way off comes the echo of those voices on the playing fields in Perth, cheering Rees’s goal, the only goal he claims he ever kicked in his life - that time when he reckons he just happened to be there at the right time in the right place,
when he kicked the ball straight through the goalposts.
RESUME
1905: Born Perth
1927: Graduates University of WA
1929: Wins postgraduate scholarship in London.
1931: Appointed drama critic of London’s The Era.
1936: Returns to Australia, appointed Federal drama editor, ABC.
1938: With Doris Fitton and Rex Rientes forms Playwrights’ Advisory Board.
1943: Frist of 27 children’s books published, Digit Dick on the Great Barrier Reef.
1953: Towards an Australian Drama published.
1965: Judge Prix Italia.
1966: Retires from ABC. Elected president of the Sydney Centre of International PEN
1978: The Making of Australian Drama published.
1981: Awarded Order of Australia.
1999: Special Award, 1999 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Illustration
Caption: ILLUS: Leslie Rees ... “He has pursued excellence.” Photograph by SAHLAN HAYES
Word count: 2436
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