Category Archives: My Story

My Story, Rebels

The dingo’s not a maybe

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GUILTY VERDICT The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain has at last been explained (Photo by The GirlsNY)

A Writer’s first lesson in injustice.

I HAVE been obsessed by the Azaria Chamberlain case since I was ten years old. When others in my family would cry ‘change the channel’, I wanted to follow the legal process which led to Michael and Lindy Chamberlain’s conviction in 1982.

It’s hard to get your way at that age, especially when you’re in the minority.

I was the only person I knew who believed the Chamberlains were innocent and was willing to say so. My great-uncle (a retired lawyer) was sure, based on the forensic evidence, that Azaria had not been taken by a dingo but had been killed by her mother. Not surprisingly, his influence was quite strong amongst our circle, and it swung other generally sensible adults over to the ‘Lindy is as guilty as hell’ way of thinking.

A collective energy against an individual has often been called a ‘witch hunt‘, and Australia willingly engaged in one.

I remember the T-shirts at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, the word ‘Azaria’ written in fake blood around the neck.

I remember the time a friend’s mother told me that I wouldn’t be welcome in their home unless I changed my mind and believed that Azaria was killed by her own mother.

I remember getting onto a plane in Sydney bound for Darwin in July 1985, as Michael Chamberlain boarded and bravely ignored the wall of hushed emotion from every single passenger as we craned our necks to stare at him.

I remember the vitriol leveled at Fred Schepisi and the filmmakers behind A Cry in the Dark for producing a movie which told the Chamberlain’s story based on eyewitnesses accounts of events on the night of August 17, 1980, at Ayer’s Rock.

I remember a scene in that movie, when Lindy Chamberlain (portrayed by Meryl Streep) shakily emptied her bottle sterliser as the family packed-up and went to a motel, since Azaria had not been found.

I remember how my mother shuddered next to me in the cinema, as it dawned on her (recalling her own experience of losing a child), that a baby had died that night.

I remember how seeing the accurate portrayal of eyewitness evidence changed her mind about the case.

I remember that one of her friends admonished her for being so easily swayed by something as ‘flimsy’ as a movie.

I remember reading Justice Morling’s 1988 Report, as he unravelled every single rumour about the Chamberlains, and thinking it should be essential reading for anyone who had an opinion about the family.

In 32 years I don’t remember anyone ever coming up with a credible explanation for why they believed Lindy Chamberlain would kill her baby.

I will always remember June 12, 2012, as the day Australia grew up a little, and became a slightly safer place because justice was finally granted to a family who only wanted a truthful explanation for their trauma. Safer not because the dingo had finally gone on record as a predator capable of hunting humans in the Northern Territory, but because our justice system upheld the accounts of eyewitnesses over forensic errors.

No piece of writing could ever rival the case of the taking of Azaria Chamberlain by a dingo. We have lived through events that, if told as a piece of fiction, would be written off as unbelievable.

But it happened. Truth is far stranger, as they say.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Day Jobs, My Story, Stage

Drama School Dream Factory – Act 1

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BRAVE NEW WORLD The mysteries of theatre were revealed at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art.

A Writer’s first backstage pass.

ONCE I’d saved myself from the clutches of academia (for how I nearly ended up an Ancient History professor, read my post on How the Prophet Elijah got me Published), I managed to escape into drama school. Not just any drama school, but NIDA, Australia’s pre-eminent National Institute of Dramatic Art.

I hasten to admit I wasn’t one of the thousands of acting hopefuls, eager to audition. I was a pretty good visual artist, all through secondary school, and in my usual way (which means I worked it out for myself), I decided that in order to make my way in the world, I needed to ‘do something’ with those skills.

I was already drawn to some kind of theatre profession (read about my moving theatre experience in Waiting for Waiting for Godot), but the only way I could see myself in the industry was as a designer.

For me, design was a safer option. It didn’t put me personally on the line, as it does with actors; and it seemed more creative than Stage Management, which I’d tried at university as part of SUDS – Sydney University Dramatic Society.

So I applied, created a design for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and attended an interview with the Head of Design. He seemed interested in the progression my work showed between designing school musicals a year before, to my vision for Shakespeare’s last great play. I was sent for a second interview with the Administrator, and a few weeks later I got the call.

NIDA had recently moved to newly built premises on Anzac Parade in the Sydney suburb of Kensington. Everything seemed freshly minted. New students for all courses were welcomed to an orientation week, and then, horror of horrors, we were all thrown together to co-create devised pieces to present in front of everyone.

I was deeply closeted, painfully shy, and only good at expressing myself on the page. The idea of being up on a stage, away from the relative safety of school, was frightening. I did all I could to be a shrinking violet, and, thinking the point was to show some early skill as a designer, set about making the costumes.

Going with that idea worked a treat – I managed to be up the back with the ‘chorus’, garnered some notice for creating a huge collar out of newspaper for one of the acting students, and got through without having to do anything in the spotlight.

In fact the whole first term was a series of such challenges, the aim of which seemed to be breaking down barriers. But I had one very strong one, which you’d think a young gay man at drama school would need no encouragement in relinquishing, but nevertheless, I resisted.

Meanwhile my class was thrown in the deep end of the exact yet limitless world of design. Right from the get-go it was clear than near enough would never be good enough.

In the classroom I was forever resisting being stretched – commuting to keep up my waitering income meant having transportable designs, so bigger was rarely better for me. Where some of my student colleagues would take over the classroom for their projects, I was happy for mine to fit in my backpack.

In the theatre itself, however, I started to let go and enjoy myself. First year design and technical students served as crew for the main-stage productions of 2nd and 3rd year students. We were expected to learn the highly technical and accurate art of scene and wardrobe changes.

DREAM FACTORY The new facade of NIDA in the suburb of Kensington, Sydney (Photograph by Adam JWC).

During the first technical rehearsal I was ever part of, with endless repetition of the same stage transitions and technical cues, I recall rolling my eyes with a kind of boredom, wondering when we’d be let go so I could catch my train home.

But when the magic of the theatre started to take over, and the transitions were coming together, something changed in me. A day later, the show could not be stopped by stage management unless there was some kind of emergency. We’d all just have to cope if something went wrong.

A new world opened to me, with its own theatrical rhythms, language, and that potential-filled half-light which exists in between reality and fantasy. Ever since then, I have loved being part of technical rehearsals in the lead up to opening night. They are often awkward and stressful, but they are my favourite period of putting a show together.

Working backstage on productions of works by wildly different playwrights like Chekhov, Brecht, Ayckbourn, and O’Casey; through to Australian works, like Too Young for Ghosts by Janis Balodis, was an immediate and thrilling way to learn the art of staging productions in a space.

The three-dimensional theatre world also broke the stranglehold that mere words had on me. Words on a page is where a theatre production starts, but they quickly dissipate into the very air of a theatre space. My writer’s brain began to switch off, because it was not needed.

Three years’ drilling in this creative process was the best performing arts education I could ever hope for, but as I soon discovered, there was a lot more to making a career in the theatre. 

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Rural Childhood

A Writer’s first obituary

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BROTHERLY LOVE (L-R) Nicholas, Michael & Andrew Burge in 1973.

Nicholas Burge (June 1973 – September 1973).

ONE of the earliest original pieces of writing I completed was an obituary, written for my younger brother Nicholas who had died seven years prior from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

I was in the final year of primary school, with an inspiring teacher, a sensitive Welshman, who set us a writing task to record the story of ‘something I’ll never forget’.

I don’t know why I chose Nicholas. Most probably it was because there had not been much talk about him since he died, even though I had experienced first-hand the devastating impact his loss had on my family.

The piece has long since been lost, but I know I wrote about the morning he died. Me (aged three) and my older brother (four) were the ones who discovered the baby, dead, in his cot, during our usual morning ritual of waking him and taking him into our parents’ room.

Not understanding the concept of death, of course we did not see the impact that was coming, when we went to tell mum and dad that the baby wouldn’t wake up.

At the time of writing about the day, I had no more than a mental picture of my mother, flying out of the bed with a great sweep of the pink sheets, and my father trying to wind the old party-line telephone into action. Mum, keening like a seagull, held the dead baby in her arms.

I learned much later that we’d all driven from our farmhouse into town, the dead baby in a carry-basket between my brother and I. We were left with our grandparents while Nicholas’ body was taken to the hospital.

Later again, when I retrieved his death certificate, I discovered Nicholas was buried the very next day in the family plot. Apparently my father was incapable, in his grief, of driving away from the cemetery. Mum took over.

We didn’t last much longer on the farm after that. Despite being encouraged to have another baby, the grief worked its way between my parents, and we left the land for a brief life in town, before they separated and divorced. Not long after, we moved with mum closer to the city where she’d grown up.

There were psychological reasons for everyone’s behaviour in the wake of Nicholas’ death, but this is not the place to explore them. When I wrote his obituary, I was too young to understand them anyway, I was only responding to being asked about something ‘I would never forget’.

Perhaps this was also my first lesson in how powerful words can be? I know it bonded me closer to my mother, to have her son recall with great importance something that was a life-changing moment for her family. When I packed up our house after her death, I found Nicholas’ clothes in a little bundle wrapped inside her wedding veil in a bottom drawer in the garden shed. A photograph of the baby boy confirmed they were his.

When I wrote to my father about the same events many years later, he expressed that he always believed it was better to get on with the care of the living, as opposed to thinking about the dead. At the time, I said nothing, because I didn’t know if I agreed, or not.

But writing about my memories gave Nicholas a place in my life, even though his own had been so very short. Like most of my writing, this little obituary involved looking back, and I have since learnt how controversial that can be. In this case, I believe it was more than worth it.

Obituaries are biographies, often written at acutely painful times. I recall my obituary for my brother Nicholas was very short, like his life. It was an affirmation that he existed, that we knew him, and that we loved him. Sometimes writing is really that simple.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.