Category Archives: My Story

My Story, Rural Childhood

Patricia Burge – the carer who laughed

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CAREER CARER Patricia Crawford as a new trainee in 1956 at RPA Hospital, Sydney.

Patricia Burge (1937-1992).

WORDS cannot really describe the shock and grief that made its way into our family when we knew that our dear Mum, Pat, was going to die.

It was one of the very few times I have been moved to prayer… night seeping into our little home, Mum noticeably absent in hospital, and my sister, just a teenager, waiting for my return. I put my arms around Jen and prayed that we would be okay. I don’t have any firm religious beliefs, but that night, we needed to be heard by something.

Pat Burge was a nurse, an excellent old school carer who knew her stuff. Born at the tail end of the generation of Australian women who were encouraged into teaching, secretarial work, or nursing (and little else), Patricia Crawford (as she was born) did the unthinkable for a North Shore girl and got herself enrolled to train at Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) Hospital in Camperdown.

She described nursing school as the making of her since it gave her female leadership in the form of matrons and older nurses who taught well and cared deeply for their profession. It transformed Mum from a directionless girl into the practical, approachable woman that she was.

When she married, she thought it was high time. Most of her friends were already having kids and she was pushing 30. Like most women of her era, she gave up work completely when she had children in quick succession.

‘The Dream’ of pastoralists to marry city girls and create dynasties to work the land was at its peak, and Mum willingly bought into the myth, relocating to a farm outside Delungra in the Northern Tablelands of NSW and making it into a family home after years of standing derelict.

But ‘The Dream’ lasted only five years, until the death of my younger brother Nicholas.

For the next six years Mum struggled to ‘get on with her life’. She gave birth to Jen, and watched her like a hawk until turning one meant the new baby was past the risk period for SIDS.

Approaching 40, she tried her hand at academia, beginning distance education in English literature. But when her first results didn’t match her promise, she gave up. Being part of the group who needed her, I was unaware of the pain that surfaced, the hopes that were dashed, and the disappointment she brought to those around her as a result of not living ‘The Dream’ to its fullest.

Nobody who hadn’t promised to stick by her ‘for better or for worse’ was affected, but when Pat Burge tested ‘The Dream’, it blew up in her face.

The moment she decided to leave Inverell was one of the turning points of Mum’s short life. No longer was she towing the line for others. She became a self-actualised person, probably for the first time. She sat her kids down and asked us if we wanted to come. I said “yes” without hesitation. What we left that Spring of 1979 was an already broken home. Dad had left, and Inverell held nothing for mum anymore. ‘The Dream’ was over.

The night we drove away, Mum turned the radio up in shock at the news that Lord Mountbatten had been killed by an IRA bomb. Mum was very ‘old school’ North Shore – the Royal Family meant something to her – and his death was like a watershed. She entered a time when there were no more heroes, only herself.

OH, PAT! Sleeves rolled-up for a school working bee, but funny bone always ready!

For the next 13 years she created a world for her children. She surrounded herself with great friends. She returned to nursing and achieved in that field in ways that she never envisaged. She taught us to believe we could do, and be, anything, and encouraged us towards a much broader set of dreams. In doing all this, Pat Burge became a heroine.

It was a bright, brief time, and we all shone.

By the time her cancer was picked-up through exploratory surgery, treatments were all too late.

Mum told me that as she woke from the anaesthetic, she felt for the post-operative tubes and knew her prognosis by virtue of her training, thinking “oh, damn!” for a moment.

Then, true to this heroine, she stayed positive for all our sakes. There was simply no other choice, and she achieved a year of denial with a funny grace – laughing about being pushed around in wheelchairs, caring for the recovering ladies who shared her hospital room, and eschewing chemotherapy until she could almost count the days left to her.

A good friend of Mum’s who was on duty at the local hospital broke the news to me that her death was imminent. He and I told her together and she just accepted it, simply because she already knew. Entering new emotional territory, we decided in a matter of minutes that we would be bringing her home to die.

During those last weeks we talked about the moments in her life that had meant something to her. These talks enabled me to write all but the last paragraph of her obituary.

What happened after that was so profound that I could only describe it as “a powerful death, after a powerful life”.

Surrounded by her nursing friends, who held her, monitored her, and comforted her, Pat Burge died in her own bed after a series of exhilarated breaths, like she could see something great coming. She had farewelled everyone, made peace with her journey, showed no more than a hint of despair and an abundance of humour.

Without her, most of us who had relied on her heroism came to absolutely nothing, and we needed to rebuild from deep within.

But hers was an inspiring death, which in its own time saw my prayer answered. We have been okay, since she had to leave us. We’ve had to grow the seeds she planted, the germ of which is the emotional intelligence that was Mum’s key attribute. When taken care of, they proved to bear wonderful fruit, and still do.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Stage

Drama School Dream Factory – Act 3

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LESS IS MORE Jennifer Kent in Lindy Davies’ production of ‘Miss Sarah Sampson’ (Photograph by Marco Bok).

A Writer’s first lesson in the odds.

Theory was left swiftly behind during my third year at NIDA, and we were on show in a series of productions, the budgets for which were so high I have never worked on any theatre so richly supported since.

I got to work with a great director – Lindy Davies – on a production of Gotthold Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson, a story akin to Dangerous Liaisons, and set in the same period.

Lindy encouraged me in a ‘less is more’ approach, and we co-created a very simple design which evoked the period through costume, but didn’t belt the audience over the head in terms of the set.

This was mainly achieved through the use of fabric, rope, and shadows, sketching a sense of the beams and walls of an English coastal town in the late 18th Century.

I will forever remember Lindy fondly for being the first person to break through my reserve, by demanding, assertively, yet with respect, that I not shut-down and internalise my thought process when we encountered an issue during the technical rehearsal.

It was a refreshing shock, prefacing the kind of collaborator I would eventually become. In some ways it was the greatest lesson I got at NIDA, and it took about 30 seconds to impart.

I was then designated the set design for Stephen Sondheim’s rarely-staged Merrily We Roll Along, with the late Tom Lingwood mentoring me through what was a massive undertaking.

Tom was originally from Britain, designer of the first production at the Sydney Opera House. One of the first things I ever learnt about him was how he survived the bombing of his home during The Blitz. When describing the worst moment of fear he’d ever experienced, Tom recalled having to leap an entire flight of steps in one go, bursting with adrenalin.

Not surprisingly, there was something very grounded about Tom. He championed my ideas, helped get my head around a massive list of scenes, and guided me in taking a positive approach to mopping up the mess made of our work after the director put his stamp on the show’s design.

Tom also responded when my mother started chemotherapy in the midst of that production, not with commiserations, but with action. He covered for me when I needed to get on the train and go home, by painting the entire theatre floor with a detailed texture for me, and saying I’d done it!

MORE IS MORE Poster from the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s complex musical.

In the end I didn’t hit the mark with this show, as a ‘less is more’ designer. I was criticised because the expected level of detail was not there. I suppose it takes passion to reach that level. It also takes emotional involvement, and probably a greater sense of security than I had at the time.

I caused frustration, because I was not open to creative whims at the ‘right’ time, or in the ‘right’ way. I just wanted to cover all the bases. If they wanted icing on the cake, they needed to look elsewhere.

But Tom was always an ally – he’d been in the trenches with me, after all.

My last NIDA production saw me tackling the design of costumes for Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, a truly wonderful play which I should have paid more attention to at the time, since it spoke of the kind of experiences I was going through in my life.

By that time I just hid myself away in the wardrobe department and just put it all together as best I could, counting down the days until I could leave and see to my family.

I also had my eyes on another option. I think working with Lindy was the catalyst – surely there was a way to be creative like her, but perhaps not in Australia? I was about to graduate as a designer, and that was all that was expected of me. The NIDA ‘brand’ was fairly limiting in that regard. Being only 21 I wanted to explore more options, so I looked to England, found a course at a place called ARTTS International, and applied for a scholarship to get myself over there.

Thinking about it now, I can’t believe I had my head together to make such a big plan at that time. Mum was getting sicker, and yet none of us were really talking about it. There may be a kind of ‘future instinct’ when the death of a loved-one is imminent, where you leap-frog, in your imagination, past the death and start creating a new life.

I was successful in getting into ARTTS, and secured a scholarship to get me there. I finished my NIDA course by working in the art department of a feature film as my secondment, and then went home. What I found was about as real as it gets.

NIDA graduate Jeremy Sims once described the Australian Theatre as a ‘cottage industry’, which I thought was very apt. It doesn’t disparage us, but it puts our industriousness into the correct commercial context.

At the time I was at NIDA, we must have been amongst the most funded students in the country, yet we graduated into a world in which the scope did not match the numbers of qualified workers, not by a very, very long shot.

Yes, they tell you that 99% of you will be out of work 99% of the time. Where, in a dream factory like NIDA, did they think they were going to find anyone to listen to odds like that?

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Day Jobs, My Story, Stage

Drama School Dream Factory – Act 2

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HIGH STAKES DRAMA Thalia Theatre Hamburg’s production of Woyzeck.

A Writer’s first lesson in high stakes.

WHILE reading the paper one morning in a cafe during the summer break, I took-in a story about how the city’s best and brightest theatre professionals were being cut down by AIDS. One of the names was John, my NIDA design classmate.

I knew John sometimes struggled to keep up with the physical work, but I’d seen him only weeks before his death made the news, looking well, to all intents and purposes.

Back at NIDA, nobody seemed willing to talk about his death.

The start of my second year saw me in the most receptive space I was ever in while a student. We had a few weeks with industry designers Tom Lingwood and Kym Carpenter, workshopping designs for inspiring plays like Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, and the Greek tragedy Oedipus.

I moved-in with other students, got myself a job at a local cafe (check out my day job in A Waiter’s Revenge Tragedy), and wasn’t such a slave to commuting as I’d been the previous year.

As a result of a little stability, my design skills began to flourish, and I found there was space to actually learn, from experts, how effective designs were executed. I felt stretched, challenged, and supported. Overcoming a few ‘mistakes’ was considered part of the learning process.

But design theory is one thing. Executing those designs on a living, breathing production is an entirely different process. The year’s idyllic start took a very different turn when the stakes started to get higher, and designers-in-training had to start proving our mettle.

As a direct result, a sense of competition began to creep its way into our classroom.

There were two schools of thought in our year. The first was heady, resisted limitations, aimed very, very high and was quite self-serving. The second was more rational, understood creative restrictions, was very grounded, but just a little puritanical.

I never saw myself as the champion of either of these energies, just a necessary participant in both. But battle lines had been set, and lasted until we all graduated, which actually we nearly didn’t, since every one of us was threatened with expulsion if we didn’t find a way to work together harmoniously.

Whether NIDA’s production schedule could have continued without an entire year of design students was dubious, but it was a timely real-world reminder to ‘keep the drama onstage’, as they say.

What was less clear (although this incident tells me it should have been startlingly obvious), was that the trainers at NIDA had a sharp eye on second year students in all disciplines, analysing who had the potential (in their view) to make good in a challenging industry, and who didn’t. The knives were out.

In the middle of this, my mother was having tests for some health problems. She laughed off the constant ambiguous results, was booked in for exploratory surgery, and on the afternoon her three children arrived simultaneously for a visit, she told us all she’d had a huge amount of cancer removed, with part of her bowel, one kidney and both ovaries.

GEEK’S TRAGEDY (L-R) Susan Prior, Annie Burbrook & Emily Russell in Rachel Landers’ production of Antigone, NIDA 1990 (Photo by Marco Bok).

The reality of this situation had no place in the ‘dream factory’ of NIDA. I think mum knew that – she was a keen supporter of the place, donating her original 1970s clothing to the wardrobe department for an Alan Ayckbourn play, and assisting me in scenic painting during an open day. She eschewed chemotherapy, and, as her children’s lives progressed in new directions, to all intents and purposes, nobody was sick.

But my attention was permanently split, from exactly half way through my course. When some of my classmates whined about their difficult personal lives, I wanted to shout at them to just get on with things … at least nobody had cancer.

I completed that year at NIDA designing a student director’s production of Antigone, Sophocles’ tale of a daughter for whom life’s stakes got very high indeed.

Hanging out at student parties, trying to find some way to fit in, still deeply closeted in a gay-friendly environment, I became the kind of person who got very angry if  anyone started to ask me the ‘wrong’ kind of questions.

The bad news about my family, and the stark realities about making a career in the theatre, had settled into my consciousness, just slightly beneath the surface.

Life was getting very ‘high stakes’, but the final act was yet to be played …

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.