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Wendy Blacklock is an actor and comedienne who has worked on radio, stage and television. In the first half of her career, Blacklock appeared in revue theatre, pantomime and musical theatre. She played the leading lady in the first Australian musical television play, Pardon Miss Westcott, broadcast on ATN 7 in 1959, and later on, performed in new Australian plays by David Williamson and Dorothy Hewett during the New Wave period in which Australian theatre and drama were undergoing huge transformation. Television audiences also remember Blacklock playing Edie McDonald in Number 96. Later on in her career Blacklock moved into production and worked for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. In 1982 she founded Performing Lines, an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to developing and producing new Australian works in order for them to tour in Australia and internationally. Blacklock’s innovative work with Performing Lines has enriched Australian theatre, extending its reach and empowering local performers and companies. Blacklock has worked with numerous contemporary arts companies. In particular Blacklock’s work has enabled a wide range of Indigenous Australian plays and performers to present their theatrical events to audiences all over the world.
Performing Gene
Blacklock believes that she inherited the performing gene from her father, who loved to recite poetry for an audience and wanted to pursue acting. The problem for David Blacklock was that he was short in stature, and feared he would never get any strong roles. Instead of performing he went into business, and managed Slazenger, a highly successful sporting goods company, the biggest one in the southern hemisphere. For Wendy this meant a house full of tall and attractive tennis players every weekend. American champions Jack Kramer and Ted Schroeder played tennis on the lawn court at the imposing Blacklock residence in Lindfield, Sydney.
Wendy also inherited her father’s short stature, and both her parents’ good looks. As a young woman, she was dainty and elegant, with an 18-inch waist and a natural ability to perform. Blacklock and her family lived in a large house on three acres of gardens tended by her mother, Lillian Ava Miller, with a swimming pool and stables for horses. Wendy believes her position as third child was a lucky one, as her parents did not worry about her career choices or her decision to perform, although her father insisted she train at secretarial college just in case her plans for acting did not work out. Blacklock attended Presbyterian Ladies College, Pymble, and for her last three years of high school boarded at Annesley School in Bowral, as her parents travelled overseas a great deal. She spent her spare time playing golf with specially made golf clubs that suited her height. When she finished high school Blacklock took classes at the Conservatorium in Sydney, and then trained at the Rathbone Academy of Dramatic Art. Two English women, Judy Rathbone-Lawless and Winifred Hindle ran the Academy in the city. Hindle was a well-known character actress and later on Blacklock appeared with her in a production of Dear Charles in 1954-1955. At the Academy, Blacklock learned to dance, produce her voice properly, recite poetry and to fence. It was a thoroughly British style of training, with the emphasis on vocal control, diction and delivering lines in the manner of Gielgud and Olivier. Her days were full, with the Academy classes every morning, then secretarial college followed by work at an architect’s office, and then evenings at the Kuringai Theatre Guild in Killara (later to become the Marian Street Theatre), where she appeared in a number of plays.
Wendy Blacklock with Alexander Hay in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Old Tote Theatre, Sydney, 1964, Courtesy of NIDA Archive, Photo by James Robinson.
Voice, Accents and Crossing the Nullabor with ‘the Firm’
Blacklock left home in order to pursue her acting career and rented an attic flat in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, sharing the tiny space with Bill Akers, who she had met at the Rathbone Academy. Akers worked as a dancer for the Borovansky Ballet and frequently toured, leaving Wendy the place to herself. Her parents worried about her because the bathroom facilities were shared, and one day the facility was awash with blood after a fight on the stairs. Blacklock was undeterred by the incident, and felt she had to live in the city in order to work as an actress.
At the age of 19 Blacklock set off for England, determined to gain acting experience in the UK. Her parents accompanied her and together they took a round the world trip by air via San Franscisco and New York City. Once she established herself with her sister in a flat in Earl’s Court she set about looking for acting work. Blacklock recalls trudging up hundreds of stairs to see Robert Stigwood in his cupboard of an office in the hope that he would help her secure some roles. Her first job was in Charlie’s Aunt on the pier in Brighton. The performance space was at the end of the pier, the longest pier in the world at the time, and she could see the ocean through the slats on the floor of her dressing room. Soon afterwards Blacklock scored a job in repertory theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne. But when she arrived the manager took one look at her and said: ‘You’re too little. The male juve is 6ft 2, and so is the leading man, and you look like their child’.
He said she could stay and work as an Assistant Stage Manager (ASM) or go back to London and start looking for another job. Wendy decided to stay in Newcastle and soon had digs, once more finding herself with shared bathroom facilities and access to a bath just once a week, on a Tuesday night (if you wanted a bath on any other night, you had to use the public baths). She enjoyed the work and impressed the company with her ability for creating regional accents, especially the North Country accent. Blacklock became the character lady and the Stage Manager after just three weeks. She would rehearse in the morning and in the afternoon seek out the scenery and props. Her salary was 4 pounds and 10 shillings a week.
Blacklock returned to Australia for her sister’s wedding after nearly a year in the UK. Without funds to go back, she set about earning her living, and auditioned for a small role in a J. C. Williamson’s production called Dear Charles with Sophie Stewart and Ellis Irving, and her former acting teacher, Winifred Hindle. The play opened at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne on 8 May 1954, playing 8 shows a week for six months, and then played at the Theatre Royal in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. On the train crossing the Nullabor, Blacklock and Fenella Maguire would leave their seats and walk beside the train, partly for the exercise and partly to evade a suitor who pursued Maguire during the tour. Their walking pace was faster than the speed of the train, and they would giggle as they walked along. The play was so successful that the entire tour took more than a year, and was followed by a three-month tour of New Zealand. Most of the theatres were large on the J. C. Williamson’s circuit, and without microphones the actors had to project their voices. Wendy’s training at the Rathbone Academy paid off – she knew how to project her voice in a large auditorium - and honed her skills during the long tour. Years later when she appeared in huge theatres in the UK, in front of two thousand audience members, she could be heard at the back of the house without any difficulties. Blacklock recalls that actors who had worked mainly on radio found the situation trying as they had become so accustomed to microphones and simply did not know how to project their voice in the large theatres.
In Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly, 1973.
Phillip Street Revue and the Plastic Menace
Blacklock pursued work on the stage, preferring the immediacy of the form and the instant connection with the audience that it allowed. After the long tour on behalf of J. C. Williamson’s she worked as prompt at Phillip Street, and had to climb into her prompt box through a trap door, and come up into her box from under the stage. She was instructed to say every word, and some of the actors who were always busy with radio did not learn their lines and relied on her. One night one of the actors told Rod Taylor that Blacklock would not be in the box and he simply refused to go on, until the actor revealed that he was only joking. Another comic actor from the Tivoli always struggled with Shakespearean language but would simply make up the words, keeping the rhythm of the speech but sprouting lines of his own making – a kind of gibberish – that brought gales of laughter from the audience. Blacklock auditioned for a part in the revues produced at the Phillip Street Theatre. The theatre was managed by the Englishman Bill Orr and his business partner Eric Duckworth, and offered highly polished topical satirical revue shows. Blacklock’s first show was Two to One (1955), playing in a cast of actors and dancers, alongside the musical comedy star Max Oldaker with Diana Field, Gina Curtis, Barbara Wyndon, Paul Miskell, Tommy Merrifield and Diana Bell. The production was choreographed by Ronald Hay, with music composed by Lance Mulcahy, and had a team of lyricists that included John McKellar and songs by Peter Kenna.
The fiery and diminutive Dot Mendoza played the piano, and corrected the actors if they moved awkwardly. Two to One was a great success and Blacklock was invited to perform in another revue called Around the Loop the following year. The production ran for 14 months with eight shows a week, playing to capacity houses, with sketches that changed regularly in order to attract audience members to the show time and time again. Blacklock particularly enjoyed the production and was developing herself as an accomplished comedienne, but it was demanding work, with the rapid changes of scene and costume, and the busy schedule of shows. In addition, the antics of Barry Humphries tested her patience. In one duet with him, Humphries started to sing different words in the middle of the song, ad-libbing wildly, and making Wendy’s part almost impossible. Eventually Around the Loop had to be stopped due to the exhaustion of the cast. Blacklock however had established herself as a revue actress and had made many friends. For example, the comic actor Gordon Chater and Blacklock became firm friends during the long season of the show, and later he agreed to be godfather to her daughters. Their friendship endured until he died in 1999.
Blacklock (on shoulder of Max Phipps) in Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly, Jane Street Theatre, Sydney, 1973. Courtesy of NIDA Archive. Copyright Robert Walker.
Blacklock also worked on radio with another of the Phillip Street actors, June Salter. Together they performed with Peter Brough, a ventriloquist, who invited Salter to London to appear in a show he was creating. Bill Orr was horrified at the thought of losing Salter and said: ‘Not on your Nellie! You’re not leaving’. On the strength of their revue work at Phillip Street, both Blacklock and Salter were invited to appear on television on the very first night of television broadcasting. Blacklock appeared for the opening of Channel 7 and Salter performed for the opening of one of the Melbourne stations.(1) They performed numbers they had perfected at Phillip Street, with Blacklock appearing in a large ensemble piece, dancing around a carousel with Max Oldaker for the opening of Channel 10. The building they used for filming for the opening night’s broadcast was so new it was unfinished and the dressing rooms were under water, making everything difficult for the performers and crew. In one of Salter’s appearances, the sound was not functioning but she sang on, unaware of the problem for the entire number. The technical difficulties of television broadcasting continued for a few years but the actors played on, as they had been taught to do on stage. Television continued to employ actors who performed, as though they were still on stage, and the new medium built on the variety, revue and vaudeville traditions of the stage in Australia with powerful effect.(2)
Blacklock appeared at Phillip Street in the musical Mistress Money (1960), composed by Dot Mendoza, with book and lyrics by Eleanor Witcombe and John McKellar. The cast included Robina Beard, Gordon Chater, Sheila Bradley, Judi Farr, John Unicomb and others, and in a final revue with actors such as Ron Frazer, Kevan Johnston, Peter Kenna, Lyle O’Hara, Jill Perryman and Barbara Wyndon, before the company transferred to new premises in Elizabeth Street. The gracious old theatre was destroyed to make room for new developments including new law courts on the site.
Working with Benny Hill and Prunella Scales
With her fare saved to return to the UK, Blacklock set off again, determined to pursue her acting career once more in London. She secured revue work, some appearances in Saturday Night Spectaculars and performed on television with the comedian Benny Hill. An Australian choreographer called George Carden invited her to dance in a comic television routine, locked in an awkward embrace with the towering Bernard Bresslaw. Blacklock also performed in melodrama Under the Arches (the Charing Cross Theatre) in Picadilly, alongside Prunella Scales who played her mother in The Silver King.
Pardon Miss Westcott
Blacklock returned to Australia to play the lead role in the first Australian musical play to be produced on television. Pardon Miss Westcott was broadcast live on 12 December 1959, as a Christmas special. The musical comedy was written by Peter Stannard, Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke who had written the stage musical Lola Montez. The exuberant, rollicking and hilarious television musical, Pardon Miss Westcott portrayed a convict girl, Miss Elizabeth Westcott, who arrives in Australia and through pluck and spirit, manages to make good in a series of improbable incidents. Miss Westcott was transported for theft of a pig that she stole from the vicar and then served it up to him for dinner at her father’s inn, as the vicar had refused to pay his bills at the inn.
It is a highly entertaining, visually spectacular full-scale production, with vigorous and demanding ensemble dance routines choreographed by Betty Pounder with the Tommy Tycho orchestra providing the music. Blacklock is perfect in the role of the clever, perky and charming Miss Westcott. Her dancing and her singing voice are both excellent.(3)
Blacklock returned to Australia to play the lead role in the first Australian musical play to be produced on television. Pardon Miss Westcott was broadcast live on 12 December 1959, as a Christmas special. The musical comedy was written by Peter Stannard, Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke who had written the stage musical Lola Montez. The exuberant, rollicking and hilarious television musical, Pardon Miss Westcott portrayed a convict girl, Miss Elizabeth Westcott, who arrives in Australia and through pluck and spirit, manages to make good in a series of improbable incidents. Miss Westcott was transported for theft of a pig that she stole from the vicar and then served it up to him for dinner at her father’s inn, as the vicar had refused to pay his bills at the inn.
It is a highly entertaining, visually spectacular full-scale production, with vigorous and demanding ensemble dance routines choreographed by Betty Pounder with the Tommy Tycho orchestra providing the music. Blacklock is perfect in the role of the clever, perky and charming Miss Westcott. Her dancing and her singing voice are both excellent.(3)
The musical opens with a group of convicts singing cheerfully on the ship. Nigell Lovell played the acting governor of the colony, and Queenie Ashton appeared in one hilarious party sequence. Early in the live broadcast Lovell missed a cue and left out an entire section of the script, making a plot point impossible to follow, but because it was live the actors continued. Later they had to record the missing scenes and send the revised version to Melbourne by aircraft so that Melbourne audiences could view it later that night in its entirety. During Wendy’s love duet with Michael Cole the sound failed. The technology was in its infancy in Australia but Blacklock was unfazed, having worked on television in the UK and experienced all manner of technical problems during recording sessions.
Blacklock continued to work on the stage, appearing in plays and pantomime shows. The Elizabethan Theatre Trust engaged her to play in The Happiest Days of Your Life with Margaret Rutherford, and to star as Cinderella in the pantomime for children. At the Old Tote she played Pegeen in a production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1963, with John Armstrong, David Copping, Jeanie Drynan, Jennifer Hagan, Tessa Mallos, Don Pascoe and others.
Blacklock married Ron Patten, a publicist with the AETT. When she appeared in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Old Tote in 1964 she had to withdraw from part of the touring season because she was pregnant. As she was playing a character unable to have children, she had to wear a corset to disguise the pregnancy. After she gave birth to her second child she returned to the production and the tour. Life was extremely busy for Blacklock as a working actress and busy mother. She took her two little girls to Melbourne for the season of Spring and Port Wine in 1968, playing in a cast that included the English actors Alfred Marks and John Scholes, engaging the girlfriend of another fellow cast member to look after the children during the performances. When a journalist from Woman’s Day magazine arrived at her house to interview her, Wendy said to her: ‘Do you mind if I do the ironing while I talk to you?’
Don’s Party
In 1972 Blacklock appeared in David Williamson’s play Don’s Party in its first Sydney production at the Jane Street Theatre in Randwick, directed by John Clark. She recalls the director informing the cast during their first reading of the play that ‘David says we’re to choose which of the scenes we think are preferable’. The idea of actors having choices about the suitability of scenes was a new concept to her, and all the actors sat up and took note. Blacklock played Jody, who is worried she is overdressed and that all the guests at the party will be Labor voters. Blacklock enjoyed herself in the role, adapting some of the Melbourne jokes for the Sydney audience, and adding a line about her outfit coming from Prudence at Pymble. She was resplendent in a purple pants suit ensemble with lightly brocaded dress tunic with a split up to the hips, over tapered pants and matching satin high heels and glamorous bouffant hairstyle.
Blacklock found it an enjoyable production but recalls noticing that Williamson at that initial stage of his career, did not write the women’s parts as successfully as those of the men in the play. For her it meant that comic timing was especially important so that the big comic lines of the male characters did not ‘swamp’ her. Blacklock found the characters recognisable and was thrilled to be playing an Australian woman in a contemporary Australian play. She recalls that it was much more enjoyable to be in a realist and topical Australian play than to be performing in a classic and far more satisfying than revue theatre.
The cast included Pat Bishop, Mervyn Drake, John Ewart, Judith Fisher, Martin Harris, Darlene Johnson, Allan Lander and Barbara Stephens. It was a success and went on to tour, with Nick Tate replacing Martin Harris as Don later on when the play transferred to the Parade Theatre in 1972. Blacklock appeared in Thomas Keneally’s third play, An Awful Rose, in 1972, cast as ‘a nymphomaniac kinky for priests’. She still believes she was miscast in the role but enjoyed it nonetheless. Keneally came to some rehearsals but didn’t say anything to the performers. The cast found his brief presence and hasty disappearances somewhat disconcerting as they never knew what he thought, or whether he was pleased with the production. In Dorothy Hewett’s hyper-theatrical play Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly in 1973, Blacklock made a spectacular Dolly Garden, singing, dancing and holding a graceful and whimsical tableau pose as she was held aloft on Ned’s (played by Max Phipps) right shoulder. The mad romanticism of the play appealed to Blacklock who enjoyed her role in this new Australian play.
In Don’s Party, Jane Street Theatre, Sydney, 1972. Photo by Robert Walker, Courtesy of NIDA Archive, Copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016
Number 96
The television producer Bill Harmon invited Blacklock to play a Mosman housewife in the drama Number 96. He had seen her in Don’s Party and envisaged a character who was not unlike Jody. Blacklock did not want to play a Mosman housewife, remonstrating that she is a character actress, and didn’t want the typecasting that his role for her seemed to suggest. To her delight the writers created a different character, a housewife from Blacktown, who drank gin and took Bex. Later on they toned down her consumption of Bex. Blacklock took on the role of Edie McDonald, thinking she would play it for six months. It suited her to work during the day, when the children were at school, and to be home in the evenings. Number 96 proved to be extremely popular and successful and the series ran from 1972 until 1977. It was set in a block of flats in Sydney, and attracted high ratings for four years, breaking several taboos on Australian television as it showed sexual activities and nude characters, and represented ordinary life in an Australian suburb. The series provided work for numerous actors and Blacklock worked alongside Bev Haughton, Jan Adele, Philippa Baker, Bunney Brooke, Mike Dorsey, James Elliot, Deborah Gray, Frances Hargreaves, Joe Hasham and others. Actors such as Pat Bishop, Anne Charleston, James Condon, Max Cullen, Lynette Curran, Lorrae Desmond, Judi Farr and others played guest roles.
Playing the Clubs: TV Goes to the Stage
Blacklock worked well with the actor who played her on screen husband, Mike Dorsey, and after the television series finished, they went on to play the club circuit for 18 months. Their club act was born at the Blacktown RSL, where they hosted a talent quest as their Number 96 characters. Over time, the shows became more and more elaborate; they were scripted and offered musical numbers and a full orchestra. Thousands of people filled the large auditoria of the clubs for these productions over a four-year period, enjoying the live performance of their favourite television characters from Number 96. It was a reversal of the way in which television in its infant stages had initially taken revue acts direct from live theatre revue and variety acts. The commercial potential for stage acts based on television drama was not a new concept, but the form was not well developed in Australia. A few years later however cast members from another popular commercial television series, Prisoner, toured internationally, playing to capacity theatre audiences in London and cities across the UK.
Blacklock enjoyed performing in the clubs after working on television. Although television suited her, she didn’t enjoy it as she enjoyed performing on stage. But working on stage was stressful in that she couldn’t see her children. Blacklock appeared in George and Mildred at the Theatre Royal in Sydney and toured with the star English actors Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy, who had played the characters on television. But she began to feel that some of her joy had gone out of performing, and that the demands of the long hours and tours were simply too hard.
One day in 1981 Blacklock walked into the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) office in King’s Cross and said ‘I’d like to become a producer’. For five months she worked for the AETT as a volunteer until she said she couldn’t work for them unless they paid her. They offered her a job in the commercial section of the entrepreneurial department. Gradually she developed Australian productions and set up a whole department for promoting Australian plays. The Australia Council supported the activities, and after ten years the Australian entrepreneurial business became independent under a new name, Performing Lines, and was fully supported by the Australia Council. In this venture, Blacklock was free to develop a wide range of performance work from puppet theatre to contemporary opera, dance and drama. She focussed on developing and producing indigenous theatre for an international audience. In 1982 Blacklock arranged for Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man (1975) to play at the World Theatre Festival in Denver. It was the first indigenous Australian play to be staged outside Australia. After the international festival, the production toured to Melbourne and Brisbane.
In 1983, Blacklock facilitated an extended tour of The Dreamers (1982) by the Western Australian Indigenous playwright, Jack Davis, featuring Davis, Ernie Dingo, Luke Fuller, Alan Kickett, Robert McGuire, Maxine and Lynette Narkle, John Pell and Steve Sallur. Shortly afterwards, Blacklock commissioned Davis to write No Sugar. The play premiered in East Perth at the moody, somewhat cavernous Maltings Theatre in 1985, featuring actors Charmaine and Jedda Cole, Dorothy Collard, Ernie Dingo, Morten Hansen, Jimmy Holland, Colin Kickett and others. In 1986 Blacklock toured a production of the play to Vancouver and Ottawa, and two years later to London, where it played at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Blacklock accompanied the touring production to Canada, and recalls that at the Los Angeles Airport the ensemble of 26 members had to explain to officials what the didgeridoos were for, as none of the officials recognised these traditional Indigenous instruments and threatened to impound them. In Vancouver the performers played in the round, in an arena with specially constructed outsize scenery, with the audience members moving with the players around the large space. Davis appeared in this touring production, playing Billie Kimberley. Another of his plays, Honey Spot, also commissioned by Blacklock, became a popular success in Australia, and toured to children’s theatre festivals in Canada and the UK. In Australia the play was performed 400 times.(4) Through her work as a producer, Blacklock contributed in large measure, to bringing Davis to prominence as a playwright of national and international importance.
Blacklock toured Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving (1994), in Australia, and later to London, where it played at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1997. This play focuses on the sorrow of various Indigenous people, played by one actor (for both the national and international tours Deborah Mailman performed the one-woman show), and their aspirations for reconciliation. The play is acclaimed by audiences and critics, and brought Mailman to international attention as an actor-writer. The play continues to be performed in productions all over Australia today.
On behalf of Performing Lines Blacklock went on to work with actor-writer Leah Purcell in her mesmerising, loosely autobiographical monodrama, Box the Pony (1997), co-authored by Scott Rankin, portraying a young woman growing up in an Australian town within a family of boxers. Blacklock toured the play to Edinburgh and London in 2000. In the same year she also toured Deborah Cheetham’s autobiographical one-woman play White Baptist Abba Fan (1997) to London, featuring Cheetham as the Koori singer who transforms from Abba fan to opera performer.
Wendy Blacklock has contributed to major changes in Australian theatre as a performer and a producer. She appeared at the Phillip Street Revue Theatre as a young woman, and in the first broadcasts of television on two stations in Sydney. In 1959 she played the leading lady in the first Australian television musical to be broadcast in Australia and featured in new Australian plays such as Don’s Party and Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly, demonstrating her talent for both spoken word theatre and musical theatre. Blacklock became a household name when she played Edie in Number 96. When she left the acting profession in 1981 she successfully developed Australian plays for audiences in Australia and overseas. Her contribution to building opportunities for Australian performers and the work of Australian playwrights is exceptional. Blacklock has made a particular contribution to the development of Indigenous theatre in Australia, bringing a range of plays by Indigenous playwrights performed by Indigenous cast members, to venues throughout the nation and abroad.
Footnotes
(1) See Anne Pender, ‘Voice and the Transformations of June Salter’, in Voice/Presence/Absence: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Voice and the Humanities, eds. Malcolm Angelucci and Chris Caines, Sydney: UTS Press, 2014.
( 2) See episodes of The Mavis Bramston Show, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, showing June Salter, Gordon Chater, Barry Creyton and Carol Raye performing musical revue numbers that were similar to those they performed at the Phillip Street Theatre.
(3) Pardon Miss Westcott, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1959.
(4) Maryrose Casey, Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004, 162.
Image Credits
Header image: Wendy Blacklock with Alexander Hay in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Old Tote Theatre, Sydney, 1964, Courtesy of NIDA Archive, Photo by James Robinson.
Image one: as header.
Image two: Wendy Blacklock with an unknown actor in Dorothy Hewett’s Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly, Jane Street Theatre, Sydney, 1973, Courtesy of NIDA Archive, Copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
Image three: Blacklock (on shoulder of Max Phipps) in Bon Bons and Roses for Dolly, Jane Street Theatre, Sydney, 1973. Courtesy of NIDA Archive. Copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
Image four: In Don’s Party, Jane Street Theatre, Sydney, 1972. Photo by Robert Walker, Courtesy of NIDA Archive. Copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.