1. The Film:

Michael Blakemore’s drama documentary is about his relationship with his father, Australian surf and culture, but Blakemore’s subsequent, as a successful theatre director in London and on Broadway is too well known to detail here.

There are any number of resources available online about him - he has a wiki here, and there is an interview at stage.co.uk here, done in March 2017 when he was still working at the age of 88.

There is also a profile of Blakemore and reviews of his several memoirs by Chris Wallace at the Sydney Morning Herald here. 

That mentions two major influences on Blakemore, Olivier and Robert Morley:

....Blakemore reviewed Hamlet in the Sydney University student newspaper, Honi Soit, wrote to Olivier with the clipping enclosed, "explaining that I was a reluctant medical student who preferred to play truant at the movies". Amazingly, Olivier sent a reply, "brief, charming and signed magically in blue ink 'L Olivier'".

Blakemore acted like he was on a roll. The next year, in 1949, after two years on Broadway, Robert Morley toured Edward, My Son to Australia. Blakemore met Morley's young American manager, Morton Gottlieb, at a party. Hearing him talk about Morley's frustration at the Theatre Royal's refusal to do publicity for the play, Blakemore pressed Gottlieb for an audience with Morley and offered himself as publicist for the Sydney season, literally talking himself into the non-existent job.

When the end of the play's Sydney run neared, Morley asked Blakemore, what next? Morley dismissed his answer, theatre director, saying he'd have to "develop a great deal more personality" to do that. He suggested acting instead. Blakemore worked up a piece and auditioned, terrified, for Morley and a clutch of grimly fascinated members of the production. He was good enough for Morley to write to the principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London recommending him. Against paternal opposition and peer scepticism, Blakemore caught a boat to England in 1950 and never looked back.

For more on Blakemore, see this site’s listing of his much later, only Australian-based feature film, Country Life.

For an alternative view of Sydney surfing culture, see Beresford’s version of the Lette-Carey ‘coming of age’ yarn Puberty Blues.

For three film clips from the documentary, see the ASO here.

2. Sydney Morning Herald story:

Katherine Tulich wrote a profile of the film for the Sydney Morning Herald, published 17th September 1983 for the film’s limited Sydney release, under the header Prodigal son returns to Bondi and the surf.

The profile neatly summarises how the film came about - any gaps in this narrative can be filled in via the Filmnews’ interview with Blakemore below:

Michael Blakemore was 22 when he decided to rebel against his traditionalist father and forsake the upper middle-class upbringing that would have ensured him a future as a doctor.

Instead, he decided to pursue an “unmanly” occupation in the theatre. To do this successfully in 1950 he needed to leave Sydney for England.

Blakemore explained: “There wasn’t an indigenous theatre. There wasn’t a Nimrod or a Sydney Theatre Company. There was only the odd good play. Since England was where the culture came from, one really had to go there.

“Also, one had lived one’s whole life under the influence of this British myth and I needed to go to find out what it was like. I don’t think Australians feel that way anymore.”

Well, Blakemore found success in the English theatre as a director and has a list of credits that include Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Design For Living, Privates On Parade and Noises Off (which he will be directing in New York later this year).

But it is his childhood in Sydney and the need to leave that are the subjects of a film he wrote and directed, A Personal History of the Australian Surf (subtitled, “being the confessions of a Straight Poofter”). It opens at the Chauvel Cinema next Friday.

“Leaving was the best thing I ever did in some respects but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a cost and there wasn’t regret. The film is about the divided loyalties you have if you come from an initially colonial background,” he said.

The film’s curious title refers to the pervasive Pacific Ocean and its effect on a childhood spent in Sydney. Blakemore said: “I wanted to make a film on Australia. I hadn’t done any films, only stage plays. I thought it might be a good idea to do something on a small scale and I’d always felt the surf and the beaches were a perfect subject for a movie.”

“There are the American surfing movies which are about skill but there hasn’t been anything about the influence of the surf when you’re growing up,” he said.

He recreates his childhood in the Eastern Suburbs with a compilation of old newsreel footage (Cinesound titles - sic, mainly Movietone - such as Saga of the Surf and Sons of the Surf), reconstructed vignettes with his father and first person narration by Blakemore both on screen and off.

Blakemore also plays the role of his father. “I was originally going to cast an actor in the role but it occurred to me that if I played it myself it would take away any suggestion that I was avenging myself on a parent. I would freely admit my paternity.”

It becomes clear through the film that middle class life in Australia through the 1930s and ‘40s was dictated by English standards. It is the beaches that triumph as the only uniquely Australian symbol.

Blakemore said: “All the institutions one was subjected to - the school, university, law and government - were all based on English models. We never looked around us to see what was here. Our minds were always 12,000 miles away. The one thing we did realise was that the beaches were remarkably beautiful.”

It was the surf that tempered the tide of difference between son and father in the film and it is the surf that still draws Blakemore to Australian shores.

Blakemore has bought a unit at Bondi Beach for use when he is working in Australia and has become involved with the Friends of Bondi Beach, the group headed by the solicitor Graham Cole, which is intent on preserving Bondi and developing the parklands.

“I think Bondi is one of the great neglected glories of Sydney,” Blakemore said. “I was told to look down on it as a kid, but it was all right for a swim. It was so unfashionable, it passed through the era of high rise without being affected. It still looks just the same as when I was growing up.”

To make A Personal History Of The Australian Surf, Blakemore felt he needed the objectivity of living away from Australia for many years. “I think if I stayed I never would have thought it was worth making a film on the subject. Australian films, with some notable exceptions, don’t tend to look at the way people actually live. It’s almost as if people don’t think it’s interesting enough to make a movie about.”

The film deals with a commonplace theme in literature, the personal memoir, but it is a form extremely rare in film. Blakemore feels the reason being that anyone would be sceptical in financing someone to take about themselves. Philip Adams, however, liked the script and gave $100,000 to the project without any clear idea of who to sell it to.

The film was actually made in 1981 but has had distribution problems in Australia. The already chains, Hoyts and Greater Union were interested, but because of its awkward length, 52 minutes, found it difficult to schedule.

It has been shown several times in Britain on television and at the cinema, and won the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy in the London Standard Awards in 1982.

“I made it unconsciously with an English audience in mind, articulating it in their terms. But I think that’s a good way of seeing one’s own country in terms of how others would perceive it,” Blakemore said.

One English critic noted that the film marked “a coming of age” for Australia, that is, that the topic would be considered of interest to the world at large.

This “coming of age” marks an important step for Blakemore, who has tried a number of times to translate to the English stage David Williamson’s plays, such as The Club, Travelling North and Don’s Party.

“There was a certain bemused response from English audiences. They saw them like they might a comedy about life in Naples,” he explained.

Blakemore is now working on an idea for an Australian movie and hopes to return in March with a completed screenplay for prospective financiers.

It wouldn’t be until 1994 that Blakemore would complete his feature adaptation of Uncle Vanya to a Hunter valley homestead in Country Life.

3. Filmnews’ interview:

Peter Kemp and Tina Kaufman interviewed Michael Blakemore for the August 1983 edition of Filmnews under the headers New Film On An Old Wave and Michael Blakemore Interviewed.

The interview began with a brief introduction:

In 1950 Michael Blakemore left Australia for London and for what was to become a very successful career as a stage director. Two years ago he made a film about growing up in Australia. Peter Kemp and Tina Kaufman talked to him for Filmnews: 

Filmnews: As an Australian who is a theatre director who has made his major career in England, how did it come about that you made a movie about Australian surf, about your own growing up in Australia?

Michael Blakemore: I’d always wanted to make a movie of Australia, but since my background was in theatre it seemed people were anxious about giving me a lot of money to make a feature and so I thought the only thing to do was to do something myself, something on a modest scale. I've always wanted to make movies in Australia rather than do stage work. I think my stage roots are in England and by now I’ve learnt England like you learn a script and my connections and contacts are in England. 

But films depend upon a degree of authorship if you are a director. I think that where you spent the first eighteen years of your life is where you get your material from, not as a director but as a writer and as I looked around for a subject that I thought I'd be confident with and feeling that the only thing that you know a great deal about is yourself, I decided to make this film. Once I had thought of the idea, because I do love the sea and that is always a good place to begin, I remembered the old newsreels that I'd seen as a kid and I remembered the fights I'd had about going on stage in the first place and the whole thing sort of came together in my head. 

Then I sat down and wrote the script, which was originally bought by an English woman who is rather big in films, Verity Lambert who used to run Euston Films for Thames Television. She liked it a lot and wanted to do a co-production but the ABC turned it down so she went to Philip (sic, Phillip) Adams and he loved the script. Then we discovered that because of the tax incentives and so on a co-production was out of the question so she let Philip buy her out. I am really absolutely indebted to Philip because I can't think of anyone else who simply on an impulsive response to the writing would have said "OK, here's the money, go ahead and do it". 

Filmnews: How did you physically go about making it, obviously you had to do research to get the archival footage? 

Blakemore: When I was out here with a rather ill fated production of a play called Death Trap - nobody liked it much — I had to have a kidney operation, a kidney stone removed, so I was incarcerated in Melbourne for about three months and that is when I began writing - the perfect opportunity - and when I could move around I went to Canberra and I went through all their archival stuff. That influenced the direction the writing took because I found footage I didn't even know existed, Dr So and So of Bronte who invented the surferplane, and some shark footage.

I went back to England and finished the script and I knew exactly where each excerpt was going to come. Then Verity said "go away and write a filming script". That was most useful because I knew the places so well I could visualise them and I really planned it shot by shot against the words. Although we made some changes and alterations, that meant that unlike most documentaries where you just go in and film and do a sorting out process later, we were going for specific shots all the time, and the only thing that we were dependent on and had to wait for was the weather and a few waves - and we had one wonderful day. 

Filmnews: So how much filming did you actually do? 

Blakemore: We had four weeks which was a very generous schedule simply because we knew that we would need that time to get the good weather. One of the great ironies of the movie is that on the very first day of filming it was an absolutely beautiful March day and Bondi looked crystalline and sapphire, and in fact it was when the sewage strike was on and the water was a thousand times more polluted than the allowed level for safety and you couldn't go anywhere near it, but it looked absolutely lovely. 

Filmnews: Did you do your editing here? 

Blakemore: Oh yes, it was all done in Australia and I had a very good editor called David Pulbrook who was terrific. It was easy to put together because it was well planned, but he had some very very good ideas and a lovely feeling for the rhythm of the piece and that was maybe the most exciting time of all. 

Filmnews: You managed to get a wonderful look about Sydney, it certainly looked like the period... 

Blakemore: That was a terrific lighting camera person, Tony Wilson. 

Filmnews: Did you have many problems finding the right locations, was everything still there that you remembered?

Blakemore: We were terribly lucky. We needed a baths that resembled the Rose Bay Baths that are now demolished which in turn resembled the Domain Baths that are now demolished, that in turn resembled the Dawn Fraser Baths at Balmain which were the last existing old wooden baths, and my church hall where I did my conjuring tricks. About three places we visited were going to be demolished within a month or modernised — the Dawn Fraser Baths, they had plans to completely modernise it, and the church hall was coming down - so in terms of social history we got in there just in time. But being by the sea you could set up the period, there is a scene down at Balley Point (sic, Bawley) which was true, just a small group of people on this deserted beach, we found an old beach umbrella of the period, we found a portable gramophone of the period and with costumes of the period we were there. 

Filmnews: And the seaside houses of the period, they looked so right…

Blakemore: There were a lot of terrific pluses like the guest book that I had forgotten even existed. We went down there on a reccy and I said to the chap who was running it, John McMahon, "have you got anything of the period?" and he said "oh this visitors book may be useful" so I opened it thinking that I would maybe find my father's name or the name of one of his friends and to my astonishment when I turned it over there in a childish scrawl was "Mike Blakemore, Christmas 1938-39" - it was a most curious feeling to be confronted by your past and you had forgotten completely ever writing it. 

Filmnews: It is such a wonderfully personal look at things and yet that is something that you obviously don't do in theatre work…

Blakemore: No that is why the film is so thrilling. It is a commonplace in literature that someone sits down and writes a personal memoir, but to be allowed to do it on celluloid is an extraordinary privilege and I don't think if could be done anywhere but here, there aren't many Philip Adams around. Because it didn't cost much money, $100,000, and because there wasn't a great deal at stake, I was given complete freedom and I did it exactly as I wanted to do it, edited it as I wanted. It is a very modest film but it is as I wanted it to be.

Filmnews: I first saw it at the Sydney Film Festival, and David Stratton said that he had seen it at the London Film Festival and that sitting there in London in the middle of winter not really expecting it, seeing it sent waves of emotion through him...

Blakemore: The Australians in London, some who were just visiting but others who are expatriates like Russell Braddon, loved it, and using Philip's phrase, that Australian films should articulate Australia for Australians, I think it did that. Maybe one of the advantages of being an expatriate is that you suddently (sic) see things that if you were here all the time you would take for granted, and that you see them as particular and special, like Bondi Beach. 

Filmnews: It must be disappointing that more hasn't been done with the film? 

Blakemore: Not much has happened out here but then one of the reasons is that Adams-Packer is winding down and there was nobody there to promote it, and also it didn't cost much so there wasn't much at stake, whereas things like We Of The Never Never cost a lot and had to be pushed. It is pretty Aussie that I should be allowed to make it and be given this very good crew and then once it is made nobody seems to give a damn about it.

But in England I was extraordinarily lucky because first of all it was shown at the London Film Festival and as a result of that got a cinema release, which is very unusual for that sort of subject, it was at the Paris Pullman for four weeks, and has been shown all over the country. As a result it was eligible for the Evening Standard award and it got one, there were only seven given for British and Commonwealth films. Then it got shown on Channel 4, the BBC wanted to do it, and then it was repeated on the more wide ranging ITV 1 as an example of Channel 4's work, to try and boost their viewing figures. It has had the most incredible exposure in England which has been very lucky. 

Filmnews: I suppose we are a bit parochial, we only notice what happens here…

Blakemore: Well I think it is so difficult to believe in the life under your nose. But that is really what films should be doing, that is what literature does and what films should do as well, to try and say "hold on, that is interesting, it is not Dostoyevsky or the Godfather but it is interesting".

What makes Australia such a unique country is that it is the country where nothing happens - the great catastrophes of the world, of the 20th century have bypassed it. Terrible things have happened to soldiers but always overseas, and we are inclined to think that therefore we haven't got material but I think that a peace context is the most fruitful time of the lot. It was in Europe between the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War, an incredibly rich time, because you do focus on individuals and their dilemmas. 

Filmnews: Do you have any plans for making another film? 

Blakemore: Yes I am working on another film now which I am trying to write - I have to go back to England to do some more stage work and I hope to find some time to write and then I am going to come out here with a first draft screenplay under my arm in March and see if I can get somebody interested in that — but the writing is the hard bit. 

Filmnews: Is it something similar? 

Blakemore: No it is an absolute straight dramatised film, a dryly dramatic film, not like this at all. 

Filmnews: I was interested when you mentioned literary traditions before, because the film reminded me more of music or literature than a film. Do you see it fitting into filmic or literary traditions? I found myself thinking of Clive James and Woody Allen and even Kenneth Clark at one stage. 

Blakemore: Really? I suppose you can be influenced by these people without knowing - I think it has quite a literary script but I think the subject is so visual. The subtitle of the movie has caused some consternation in the AFI because they weren't too sure whether it was really a good hook so to speak. I have noticed that it has been put in the publicity, I don't think it should be, because it is the film's first joke, "being the confessions of a straight poofter". I think using it as an advertising or publicity phrase totally misrepresents it. 

Filmnews: About the only section in the film that brought me out of this lovely lulling rhythm was when you actually talked about women and we are confronted with all these topless women and you looking at them, I suppose you could say ogling them. When you see the film again does that strike you as an unnecessarily uncomfortable passage? 

Blakemore: Yes it does a bit, I agree with you.

Filmnews: It doesn't have that lyricism, it is hard focus, they are topless women and…

Blakemore: I agree with you, I don't really like that very much. 

Filmnews: In terms of the extraordinary relationship you had with your father, that loving hate or hating love, I thought it was very honest of the film to exclude mum altogether — was that a conscious decision? 

Blakemore: When you do something autobiographical, no matter how truthful you are, you actually end up with a kind of fiction because of the selection that is necessary to compress everything into fifty-two minutes. Great sections that are very important in your life have to be removed. My mother was terribly important in my life, she supported me in my theatrical desires, but there wasn't room for her - it was about the sea and about my father and about the things about Australia that I loved and hated, and finally the reasons I had to leave. I spent an extremely anxious month before I did the film because I felt I could fall splat on my face with such a personal subject, but when I was actually doing it it was like any other script, it was just getting it right, solving the problems. 

Filmnews: It is not at all a stagey film. There is a very strong cinematic visual sense in all the stage work of yours that I have seen both here and in London — I guess this is explained in the film because you were fairly obsessed with cinema, and so it is a very naturally cinematic film for a first film. 

Blakemore: I am delighted that you say that. I don't think that films consist of dialogue at all, but I take great issue when people say that film is basically a visual medium. Films rest upon concentrated thought and that can only be expressed in language - to say that it is only visual is rubbish, it's not true. This film began with writing, and once I had the writing there then I thought how in visual terms can this be counterpointed?

Filmnews: When I saw the film as an Australian looking at an Australian film, as an Australian who has seen a number of Australian films, it is a little bit difficult not to see it fitting in with that tradition of coming of age narratives tike our cinema seems to be obsessed with, like The Getting Of Wisdom, The Devil's Playground, Storm Boy. But it is different from them because it is a documentary personal history, and it also seems to be much more honest about a number of issues than those other films. It doesn't bypass things tike your sense of sexuality, your cultural isolation — have you seen those other films? 

Blakemore: Yes I have. The great advantage of a narrative film is that you can express so many more ideas. The minute you get into dialogue, then in terms of the territory you can explore quickly, it is very plodding. The convention in feature films is that there are no voice overs at all unless it is a Raymond Chandler type, but I actually love films in which there are voice overs - things like Sunset Boulevarde, you can use it to get on with the story, providing it is used discreetly. The great movie moments are moments that are prepared with words and then there is a silent image that absolutely encapsulates the direction the words are moving in, like "Rosebud" and then you get the smoke rising out of the huge building. It is a thrilling moment. 

Filmnews: Are you sorry that you didn't become a film director? 

Blakemore: Oh yes I am but everyone wants to be in this business and you are lucky to earn a living - I've had a lot of good moments on stage. 

Filmnews: Someone said I came out from your film thoroughly exhilarated and satisfied, but didn't I think it was a culturally elitist film and very much a middle class view of life? 

Blakemore: But that is rubbish — it is a middle class subject but that doesn't make it a middle class view — that is like saying the bourgeoisie should never be represented - I mean the interesting thing about the film is that the bourgeoisie who are very powerful in this country, are very rarely represented, they play their cards very close to their chests. Sure I'm middle class but that is not to say I support those values though I may express them - nobody can say that the Kings School is endorsed, nobody can say that the Royal Sydney Golf Club is endorsed, it is not, it is rejected. 

Filmnews: It was also pointed out to me that there is not enough conflict in the film, that it would have been better if you actually heard the shouting matches between you and your father rather than have you narrating your memory of them. I see it as an affectionate view of a pretty hateful man and I don't think the filmmaker wanted to show him as being that hateful. 

Blakemore: No, absolutely not. There is no dialogue in the film at all, all the dramatised scenes are silent, and that was the intention. As long as the guy doesn't speak, it is just a scene. It was used marvellously for instance in a beautiful thing Ken Russell did about Elgar for the BBC. Elgar was represented by actors but you saw them always from a distance, from the back so that they became mythic rather than real. I just wanted it to be real and the kids would be real but the father was always just seen, with his back, never in the foreground.

But in the Aussie cinema there is a straining after a kind of heightened and slightly phony dramatisation, conflict, conflict, going after genre it is so self conscious and you can think "why are we doing this, the Americans do it so much better?" Newsfront, I think was a terrific film, it was terrific to go to that film because I perceived Australian life in that, I perceived the texture of Australian life which is terribly understated, a lot of the feelings are kept very low key, very laconic and dry. 

Filmnews: You have mentioned Newsfront but which other Australian films have impressed you? 

Blakemore: I did think My Brilliant Career was very good, very deft and well judged and I thought her other film, although apparently not well received, was very resourceful. I saw it outside Australia and it is very strange that often when you see things outside Australia you have a very different response to when you are within. I went along thinking I was going to feel a million years old and it was going to be a celebration of kids jumping up and down, but what I thought was very charming about the film was the way the middle aged were featured. I thought they were lovely - you know the old grandmother and the father or the uncle who comes hack and the woman who runs the pub. I thought it was very nicely done. (Blakemore is here referencing Armstrong’s vibrant musical Star Struck).

Filmnews: What about the life of the film beyond four weeks at the Paris Pullman etc. Is there any opportunity for continued rentals in England? 

Blakemore: Oh yes, it has got a distributor. Contemporary Films, and people ask for it and it goes out - it warms British fingers in the winter, they put their fingers up to the screen.

4. Transcript:

This is not so much a synopsis as a transcript of the narration by writer-director Michael Blakemore. There are a few indications of the visual content, but they are not comprehensive. Where a newsreel reference is available, it's provided.

The main emphasis is on the way that Blakemore, a seasoned actor, tells his story through words.

The film begins with stock footage of an old-fashioned wooden surf life-saving boat struggling to get out past large waves. The life-savers jump off the boat, and other titles run over images in a 1934 postcard style impression of traditional Australian scenes at Bondi beach …

Michael Blakemore’s voice begins over a house: “This is the house I lived in until I was nine …(he walks into shot and points) … and over there, that hill that rises up from the water of Sydney Harbour, is the prosperous suburb of Vaucluse …that’s the view I opened my eyes to every morning of my most impressionable years …

Seeing it again after so long, it emerges from memory like a developing Polaroid snap, all the colours, the details that I thought had faded,  turn out to have been waiting there at the back of my mind all the time … and the curious thing is, that in forty years, it has hardly changed at all …"

(The camera saunters down a well-off street as Blakemore continues in voice over)

"… healthy real estate values, plus the powerful Australian sense of home ownership, have kept it secure …and I feel about it now just as I felt about it then … comfortable, at home, and yet somehow oppressed by its pruned stability…"

(Pruning shears snip a shrub as he emerges from his old house)

"…when I was six, my father gave me a birthday present I certainly hadn’t requested …a pair of boxing gloves … or rather two pairs of boxing gloves, so that I and my best friend Dave could thump each other under his direction out here on the lawn …but my heart was elsewhere … ”

(Cut to hands playing a piano, and a child dancing, reflected in a mirror above the mantelpiece).

Blakemore: “One evening my father returned from his practice to find my mother at the piano …playing You are my Lucky Star, from the Broadway melody of 1936. This was an accompaniment to a modern dance I was improvising over by the standard lamp …"

(Blakemore, playing his father, opens the door and glares at his son, who stops dancing)

"… nothing was said, he simply left the room ..." (Blakemore closes the door and walks away)"… but I knew he hadn’t liked what he saw …the long struggle between us was on ...”

(Cut to Blakemore outside his old house talking to camera):

Blakemore: Modern dance would give way to a passion for drawing, for conjuring, for the films of Boris Karloff, all of which constituted, as far as my father was concerned, a sort of um secret life, of which he preferred to remain ignorant …His task was that of forging me into the ideal of respectable Australia, an ideal which incidentally happened to describe him. That is, a well-qualified doctor, who had boxed and played rugby at a private school, who had volunteered for the armed services in a world war, and who stood up when a woman came into the room, before resuming his conversation with a man he was already talking to …"

(Blakemore sits on some steps to talk in confessional close-up)

"… at seven I was not in a strong position to fight back, and there were areas where we came to terms …one of these was the Australian surf!”  

Cue a title reading “Sons of the Surf” c. 1929, NFSA here, followed by shots of Australian beaches, period intertitles, piano music beach romps, life savers performing a rescue, marching etc.

After “The End”, Blakemore, still sitting on the steps, resumes his talk to camera.

Blakemore: “Most mornings in the summer my father went for a swim before breakfast … and he took me with him."

(Cue father, Blakemore and son emerging from a period vehicle, arriving at a harbour swimming pool).

"Sometimes we went to the local baths, in the sheltered water of the harbour …I can remember my dread as the car door slammed behind me and we approached that ricketty wooden structure, dull green paint above the tide line, dull green slime below..."

(Blakemore's father gestures to the child to follow and they hold hands as they head through the pool turnstile …)

"… I knew that ahead of me was a swimming lesson and a diving lesson in which no fear or panic would be countenanced …"

(Drum beat as child hesitates on the edge of the diving board. His father gestures impatiently, and the child belly flops in slo mo)

"… there was also the ordeal of moving amongst naked hairy men with fearsome genitals …until nine o’clock the baths were an all-male preserve..."

(Naked hairy men move about)

"… they sunned themselves against the dressing shed like basking sea lions … then a bell rang, costumes were donned, and the ladies were permitted to enter …"

(Young girls arrive)

"… what I much preferred were the early morning visits to Bondi beach …”

(Cue the vintage car on the road as hear Blakemore in voice over):

“How many times have I driven along this road? On my left the golf course, on our right the flapping ribbon of red roof bungalows, all different and yet somehow all the same  ..." (We see the golf course and the bungalows).

"In the thirties my father had a Plymouth coupe with a dicky seat, and as he drove along he whistled through his teeth the same curious, rather melancholic phrase ..." (We hear the whistling) " … he was tone deaf, so it was never precisely the music, but years later I recognised it had an amazing coincidental resemblance to a theme of Brahms …and appropriate music it was for an approach to the Pacific ocean …"

(The out of tune whistling mixes to a symphonic version as we see Bondi beach from the air, and then father and son emerging from the Bondi pavilion with the father carrying an antique surfboard)”

“We changed in the club on the front where my father kept his surfboard …the original kind, solid wood, varnished, and as substantial as a church door …"

(They pause for a vintage car to pass).

"…with him balancing its considerable weight carefully on one shoulder, we would trot across the parade, to the beach. I would be left to play by myself on the shore, while he first went out to catch himself a few waves …and here began that dialogue with the fine white sand of Bondi beach ..."

(The child lets the sand run through his fingers, which changes to Blakemore on the beach, brushing the sand from his hands and talking to camera)

"… which, with various changes of subject, to sand castles, to girls, was to be maintained throughout my growing up …digging in it, marching across it, lying in it, cheek against it, the length of one’s shivering body warmed by it. What is it about an ocean beach that so marvellously pacifies a child’s discontents? This mysterious frontier where dry yields to wet like mucous membrane ..."

(The child and others are seen doing various things on the beach)

"... Kids don’t need to be told what to do on a beach, they know it already …”

Cut to a Movietone News newsreel, World of Sport, with commentary by Ernest Walsh (c 1939, Fox Movietone, NFSA here, set in Bronte Beach, the theme is “surf shooting”)

Cut to a deserted beach with more v/o:

"This is the beach at Bawley Point, and this boarding house was once the only residence for miles …"

(Blakemore on the steps of the boarding house, talking to camera):

"… at Christmas time, a handful of professional men, mainly doctors, would drive the two hundred miles from Sydney for a few weeks of summer holiday here …I was ten and part of an extended family that included my father, a radiologist, an anaesthetist, an academic, a lawyer, assorted women folk and three or four other children  …"

"There was no electricity, a chip stove for hot water, forbiddingly primitive sanitation, but it was the best place I’d ever known …"

(After shots of the boarding house, a hand reaches in to pick up a Visitors' book) ...

"Here’s the original visitors’ book that goes back to the time the place was first built ..." (Blakemore opens the book) " …and here’s an entry for Christmas 1938 …"

(His finger points to his signature).

"...Mike Blakemore Rose Bay Christmas (written as Xmas) 1938,  39 'had a pert time' …Hmph, pert, as I remember was current school boy slang for the ultimate superlative ..."

(Over two fishermen with rods).

"Bawley Point was a place of few tears and few prohibitions …there were so many things to do, no one seemed to bother much with what one mustn’t do …

First and foremost there was the beach …only a hundred yards away …where I could practise on my new inflatable rubber surfer plane …"

(There’s a gramophone on the beach as young Blakemore takes his ancient inflated surfing device towards the water)

" …we always had to keep a look-out for schools of fish, because that could signal the presence of sharks …ikies, my father called them …"

(Newsreel footage of sharks taking a bait etc)

"… he fished for them after dark, with special tackle … once in the light of two torch beams on a pitch black night, we beached a sixteen foot grey nurse. It lay on the sand in the wash of the surf snapping ferociously. The whip of its tail could have broken your leg …my father clubbed it senseless with a piece of driftwood …then cut out its jaws with his fishing knife and presented them to me as an item for my recently inaugurated museum. Next morning we propped the jaws open with a stick so that the three rows of needle sharp, poisonously infected teeth were nicely on show, then left the full set of upper and lower to sun on an ant heap. A day or two later, they were picked clean, right down to the yellow cartilage ..."

(Close up of a shot of teeth held open by a stick. Cut to a dog playing with a ball on the edge of the water).

"...There were of course gentler pursuits …"

(Children join the dog playing in the water as music begins) 

Dusk, and Blakemore is on the boarding house verandah.

Blakemore: “At the end of the day, everyone gathered on this verandah …beyond the fact that the kids drank lime juice, and the grown-ups had a gin, there was perfect equality between the generations …being a child was no longer an unsatisfactory stage on the road to manhood, it was a mysterious privilege, effortlessly accorded by the smiling adults, effortlessly accepted by us … I entertained the company with conjuring tricks..."

(Blakemore produces a coin, making it disappear and reappear)

"… accompanied by a strong line in manic precocious patter …Everyone seemed to be amused, not the least my father … At Bawley point I made an interesting discovery …I found I could make him laugh …”

(Cut to father and son walking on to beach with fishing gear)

Blakemore (v/o): “So when I went with him on one of his fishing expeditions further down the coast, it was in my new role as jester …we would pad along beaches as deserted as this one with gums growing right down to the sand …and if I looked back, the only sign of human presence to be seen was our two tracks of footprints, a large and a small …"

(We see the water dissolving the footprints).

"...He fished from the rocky headlands that separated beach from beach. While he stood cross-legged, cradling his rod, and serenading the Pacific with that mournful Brahms whistle, I amused myself tormenting wild life in the rock pools, anemones, into whose disappointed mouths I poked sticks, minnows that I trapped in an old cake tin, crabs that I caught and used as bait to hook an octopus, or an eel. Both of us would be absorbed for hours in our different activities, with our thoughts running,as it were, parallel but apart, from what we were doing …"

"I’m not sure what my father used to think about, probably some fairly authoritarian notion for the better running of society ..."

(Blakemore's fishing father is still tunelessly whistling).

"...He was not the only doctor to have said before the war that Hitler had his good side …”

"My thoughts were a childish attempt to mythologise the landscape. These ancient cliffs and beaches that continue forever around Australia, a coast as beautiful as it was blank of history. Those prints in the sand belonged not even to Robinson Crusoe but to me and some doctors. I wanted to people the landscape as the coasts of Europe had been peopled, with pirates, smugglers, and buccaneers. So I had four-masted schooners break up in these waves with horrendous loss of life …I had flaming beacons signal from these cliffs the approach of an armada …and Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone duelled to the death along the same shoals of rock where I was currently despatching crabs …"

(Max Steiner style music, with still of Errol Flynn with thrusting deadly sword and of young Blakemore killing a crab with knife, then the father emerging with two suitcases from boarding house, and child picking up his shark jaw and surf float).

“But alas Bawley Point was to be no more than an annual Christmas truce in the continuing war between me and my father. He was determined that conjuring tricks should not get the better of rugby football, and just before my twelfth birthday, he sprung on me his secret weapon …an Australian boarding school of the 1940s …"

(Boys in a rugger scrum).

“My old school has long since departed these buildings for greener pastures …and is a vastly different place I’m told from the institution where I was to spend seven long years ..."

(Blakemore looking at a clock on the school building. He turns to camera).

“Boys were sent here to be broken in, like horses. And the bridle and bit was sport ..."

(Young Blakemore boxing, school  brass band marching).

“In those days, instruction consisted of one lesson, implied in the classroom and defended in the chapel. Excellence in sport was the only measure of personal worth. I didn’t mind existing in a state of worthlessness. The problem was surviving amongst the worthy …"

(School photos).

"… I reached for the defences that were natural to me …conjuring tricks, ghost stories whispered after lights out in the dormitory, unkind imitations of common enemies like matron and the teaching staff …so really the school was proving counter-productive in my advance towards manhood …I may have been a little uncertain about what I was, but I was learning fast and emphatically what I wasn’t …”

(Blakemore reading a magic book, confronted by rugger thugs)

“I cultivated a personality of diverting if contemptible eccentricity ... (he makes the rugger people disappear with a gesture)... and was eventually left to myself.”

(Blakemore beside a chapel talking to camera).

“The summer holiday that I was thirteen was the first that I’d ever deserted the beach in favour of my secret life. With two friends, my old sparring partner Dave, and Parkinson, a very brainy boy who at nine had made himself a hookah out of a rubber enema tube and a lemonade bottle to smoke in the lavatory, and who was now interested in the black mass, I approached the rector of the neighbouring All Saints church, to see if he would lend us his church hall …our plan was to stage an evening of magic, charging for admission and donating the proceeds to the Red Cross … thereby doing our bit for the second world war, which happened to be in progress at the time. The rector agreed.”

(From outside the church, into the church hall as narrator Blakemore opens the door)

“The next few weeks were consumed with preparation. Notwithstanding the height of summer, our skins went waxy with indoor activity… and my father noticed! One lunchtime I was summoned to his hospital ... (Young Blakemore heads up the stairs) ... on the pretext of having my eyes tested."

(Blakemore as his father is at his desk as young Blakemore enters).

“Didn’t I realise, he said, it was bad for a boy my age to be indoors all day…what I needed was physical exercise and fresh air …and that the place for me was the beach."

(As the boy’s eyes are tested).

"...He poured ridicule on my assertion that we were putting on a show …and didn’t disguise his suspicion - a not unreasonable one, I suppose - that the show was a cover for other more secret activities common to boys of 13 and 14. I was first indignant, then passionately stubborn

(Young Blakemore takes off the glasses and opens the blind to the office).

"It was our first pitch battle …and I was determined to win …” 

(Cut to Blakemore back in the hall talking to camera)

“The show had to go on …if for no other reason than that I was airily convinced of its success …"

" Here’s um, here’s an original program that will give you a taste of the evening …"

(Reading from the program as he sits on the edge of the stage).

"...Hocus pocus, a magical entertainment …one item is entitled 'a garland of wonders from the fingers of Mike.' At half time I announced I would autograph programs at thruppence a throw, and the demand was so great, the intermission had to be extended by ten minutes..."

(Applause over empty hall as Blakemore emerges from behind the curtain).

"...At the final curtain, and there had been many, I made a presentation on stage of twelve pounds nine shillings and sixpence to a high ranking lady from the Red Cross, who at the request of my mother was wearing her uniform… there was only one small cloud on my horizon …(chewing on his glasses) … rapturously though my conjuring had been received, the succès de scandale of the evening had undoubtedly been the single item contributed by the brainy member of the team, Parkinson! Not even we, his two colleagues, had been permitted to see it prior to the actual performance …in the uh program ..."

(Blakemore picks up the program again)

"…it’s described as the “dance of the dying duck.”

(Close up on him)

"Heavily made up, dressed in a tutu and tennis shoes, and with Swan Lake belting out from a portable in the wings, Parkinson embarked on choreography of his own devising. It was practically an insult to public decency, but it had the audience in the church hall, including the rector, on the floor with laughter. To my knowledge, it was Australia’s first solo drag act to be available to the general public, and was therefore some 25 years ahead of its time.”

(Blakemore emerges from the hall to the sound of applause and talks to camera).

“But my secret life, even at the moment of its greatest triumph to date was in for a nasty surprise …and my father, who was very good at the nasty surprises life has in store, had already divined it..."

(Cut to a school corridor and we hear in voice over)

"Puberty!"

(Students emerge from class).

"That May the first blackhead appeared on my forehead …soon they were proliferating all over my face, like a swarm of ants …by the end of the year, the ants were crawling down my back …I gazed into the distorting mirror of my own hormonal activity, and wondered what on earth had happened to the attractive child who’s precocious treble had delighted the world. All that fluent energy now hopelessly locked in self-consciousness and doubt. Even magic was losing its magic.”

(As a photo of Blakemore and Parkinson recedes like a train into the black, we cut to Blakemore in close up).

“Until the end of the year, I was among the walking wounded. Then I returned to the beach and it was to prove the one link with innocence that hadn’t snapped ..."

(Blakemore steps out and looks over Bondi beach, putting on a straw hat as music plays and he observes beach goers).

"The sun’s rays dispersed the ants, and clothed my bony awkwardness in a glowing tan. The sea not only scrubbed me clean, it became a focus for all that troubled vitality …”

"In gratitude every summer holiday thereafter I was to give myself to it entirely …By nine o’clock in the morning I would be down here at Bondi beach, moving back and forth until mid-afternoon, between the chill-out of the water and the knock-out languor of the sand …"

(Close up of Blakemore on the beach talking to camera).

"...and with increasing physical strength, those dreaded swimming lessons were beginning to make sense …At fourteen I was brave enough to paddle out on my surf plane and join that select band of body surfers who spurned the area between the flags and went looking for the big waves at the south end of the beach. At fifteen, I’d spurned the surfer plane and was a body surfer myself …"

(Narrator Blakemore now stripped in togs and ready for action).

"… joining an increasingly approving parent in shooting the big ones ...”

(Blakemore heads into the water) 

(v/o): “I could spot my father amongst the other surfers the same way my son can spot me now …by the bald patch on the crown of his head …he was extremely stylish in the water, and was a good teacher ...”

(A sequence of slo mo shots of Blakemore body surfing in style, with Vivaldi playing).

Blakemore emerges from the water, rubs himself down with a towel and talks to camera:

“When my father went surfing, other swimmers sometimes watched and pointed, which I think we both found rather satisfactory …”

(Photos of young women on the beach in old hairstyles)

“But in learning to surf there were benefits other than increasing amity between father and son …as indeed Charles Atlas’ advertisements, the weedy youth with sinus trouble to whom no girl will give their time of day, was beginning to fill out … and then of course on the beach with me, were the girls themselves …”

(Music accompanies a montage of topless women sunbaking on Bondi beach).

“And that was to teach me one thing …modern dancer, conjuror, non-footballer, mother’s boy and film fan that I was, I was learning early on where my sexual orientation lay …"

(Blakemore does a beat looking at the naked breasts on the beach, then turns to camera).

“And so the straight poofter was born. A point of little importance, except that it does testify there is rarely anything consistent in the bits and pieces, scraps and throwaways that go to make a human being.”

Cut to the school brass band performing.

“Back at school I soon learned I had an ace up my sleeve. Conjuring and imitations had been helpful up to a point, so had the bands on my teeth which had exempted me from all rough sports, even if at the same time they provided a further pretext for ridicule…”

(More rugger action on an oval. Blakemore turns from watching, to talk to camera).

“However, it had to be conceded, even by the thickest and most brutal centre forward that I was good in the water. Admittedly it was a holiday activity, admittedly it had little to do with team spirit, or competition … but the surf still had a glamour, a particularity in Australian life which none of the other sports enjoyed …”

(Another montage of surfing activities with Vivalid).

“It was after all something that the southern hemisphere had virtually invented, something of our own, which we didn’t owe to Europe or America …and perhaps it was because of this I found I was never to be more at ease with country, content with it, happy to proclaim it, than when I was on an Australian beach ...”

(Cut to Blakemore surrounded by magic items and holding a skull)

“And what of my secret life? (He puts down the skull). Well certainly it wilted a bit during the summer … but with the return of spots and pallor ... (He puts on monster gloves) ... it soon came into its own again …and with a new ingredient. Adolescent desperation.”

(Blakemore makes a grabbing motion with the gloves).

“Also I had discovered the greatest conjuring trick of all …”

(Zoom in on a poster on the wall for The world famed Australian illusionist, The Great Levante).

“The moving pictures!”

(Bogart poster for the Maltese Falcon, Cagney and Yankee Doodle Dandy poster, old style movie music)

“Where once I’d planned to be the new Houdini, now I knew I was to be the next Orson Welles.” (Citizen Kane poster).

(Blakemore outside the old Gowings shop in Market street Sydney)

“But even in the summer the beach didn’t get all my life. In the late afternoons I would catch the tram from Bondi to the city, and with salt in my eyebrows, shoulders still stinging from the sun, like a defector crossing the border under cover of night, these were the dark places I put my trust in …”

(Blakemore has arrived at the State Theatre picture palace and heads inside).

“The State! The Regent. The Capitol. And the black and white ghosts I encountered there haunt me still …”

(The State’s doors and in the distance there’s a still of Citizen Kane on the screen. It zooms into close-up. Bogart and Bacall do the same, then Olivier and Renée Asherson in Henry the Fifth, then Cagney).

(Back at the school location, Blakemore to camera, a young student in cadet uniform opens the wrought iron gate for him)

“My seven year term at boarding school was almost over. I would soon be out on parole. I wanted to be a film director. My father wanted me to be a doctor….”

(Cut to the Royal Sydney Golf Club)

“The field of our second pitched battle was the dining room of the Royal Sydney Golf Club."

(Inside the club dining room, father and son at table).

"We struggled over one long Sunday lunch here, and this time I tasted defeat. He attacked on two fronts. My ignorance of the world, and my ignorance of my advantages. My father was able to make the world seem a very dangerous place."

(The father slowly cuts open a pink steak).

"He had a line in mordant irony of which Somerset Maugham would have not been ashamed. After ten minutes conversation with him, staphylococcie, streptococci, syphlitic spirochetes were coming at you from all directions …"

(Young Blakemore doesn’t finish his steak).

"As for that most dangerous threat of all, one’s own species, it came in three categories. Fools by far the greater number, crooks who battened off the fools, and finally … gentlemen …this last group was very small and mainly British. I was proposing to join the fools and throw my advantages to the winds. My years at the oldest school in Australia, this club of which I would shortly be a member,  but which for others had a waiting list something just short of a thousand years … he drove his point home. Once out, never in again..."

(An RSGC private property sign, as if the club is Welles' Xanadu).

"Too late it occurred to me that the most exclusive golf club in the world is no advantage if you don’t want to play golf …The meal ended on what I thought was a compromise …he knew it to be a victory. I would study medicine. Afterwards, if I felt so inclined, I could do what I liked. In that classic phrase of bourgeois control, I would thus have ‘something to fall back on.’"

(Blakemore back at Bawley Point)

“Years later, on a visit to Australia, and with my father approaching seventy, I was reminded of our lunch at the golf club … we had returned to Bawley Point. The boarding house was still there, but the old guests had deserted it …instead they’d bought plots of land and behind neat fences had built themselves these cottages …others would soon follow."

(A sale sign, and then Blakemore walking past beach shacks talking to camera):

"The days of the commune were over. We were sitting on the lawn on my father’s place, just two doors down from the anaesthetist, when he started describing the life cycle of the hydatid larva, how it reached the ground in the droppings of sheep, was carried into the water supply of unsuspecting country people, how it entered the blood stream, became lodged in the brain, and there proceeded to kill the host by developing the fatal cyst. Presumably then animals ate the corpse, and the cycle went into its next round. He recalled how his professor at medical school would always take his students on their first visit to hospital to see the incurables, in the hydatids ward. Just to give them a taste of what life was really about.”

(Blakemore on a chair in front of a beach shack talking to camera).

“Listening to him here on this lawn, I felt once again all the options in a dangerous world narrowing down to the only safe one … be a doctor. And perhaps he was right about the implacable nature of existence. Sometimes the sea in its more ominous moods, breaking out there on the rocks at Bawley Point seem to come up with the same bleak answer. And at least he was to remain consistent. When he was dying - of cancer of the brain, as it happens - a member of the family, at a loss in the face of terminal disease, muttered some cliche about getting better soon. With that withering impatience, only too familiar to his domestic circle, but to his credit never once visited upon a patient, he snapped back ‘don’t be ridiculous, I’m riddled with secondaries …’ and died a few weeks later, with no complaining..."

(A wave surges into the shore and breaks).

(A hand reaches into a Modern Magic book positioned above Jacobs’ The Rise of the American Film. The hand pushes the books away)

“So it was decided. I would study medicine... (Gray’s Anatomy and a book on Pathology clump onto the desk) … and enjoy my advantages. I was to prove a more able student of the second than the first."

(Gray’s Anatomy topples over. Cut to the young Blakemore emerging from Bondi Pavilion with an old-fashioned surfboard).

“In the meantime, I had three months of summer ahead of me. I had a surfboard made, fifteen foot long and costing a pound a foot. Compared to the boards of today, ours were as big and buoyant as a small boat ..."

(Black and white footage of a board being assembled).

"Made of marine plywood and hollow, they took water and had to be upended and drained two or three times a day. You paddled them on your knees, rhythmic swoops with both hands and an attitude of prayer …by the end of the season you could tell the board riders by the fibrous bumps below the knees, big as pigeons’ eggs, developed to ease the discomfort of paddling …"

"But the old boards had some advantages. If you paddled hard enough, you could catch green waves long before they broke, gliding over the ocean as serenely as Neptune surveying his domain."

"The very accomplished could take a passenger along for a ride ... (a dog is at the head of a board)...A barking dog on the prow or a girlfriend on shoulders …if one of them landed on your head, there was no mistaking it…"

"The skill, once you had the knack of standing up, was to keep the nose just clear of the water. If once it dipped, the board dived straight to the bottom, where, caught in the sling shot of its own buoyancy, it catapulted back into the air like a missile leaving a silo …"

"When that happened, you leapt as far clear as you could, and stayed submerged until you heard the thump of splash-down. If you lost the board on a wave, you were safe, but innocent in-shore bathers were in mortal danger. Five yards of water-logged plywood came in sideways posing concussion to all in its path.”

(After the extensive montage of old surfing footage, cut to Blakemore talking to camera).

“Today’s board-riders, on their licks of plastic, manoeuvre with a skill and daring which we would never have thought possible. But I, like them, was to have some passages of true rapture on my surfboard …”

(Seagulls over ocean)

“I can remember one crystalline morning, when nothing seemed more beautiful than the look, the sound, the smell of the green and white Pacific … I launched my board on to that swaying transparency, paddled it over the rainbow spray and the bucking waves, singing Shenandoah at the top of my voice, and certain that there was nothing anywhere in the world that could match this for joy."

(Vivaldi over another montage of modern surfing action, this time with big waves).

Cut to the University of Sydney.

Blakemore: “On my first day at the University of Sydney, I left at lunchtime to go surfing.”

(Blakemore walking towards camera and talking).

“During my three years at medical school, I was always either leaving at lunchtime or starting at lunchtime. Frequently both on the same day."

"The zealous pursuit of advantages can make a heavy demand on one’s time and energy. There were all these parties to go to …there were drunken college booze-ups, there were parties in private houses, there were dances in golf clubs and balls at government house. After sunset, like Dracula, I was to be seen only in my best clothes and hungry for blood. But what little I tasted was decidedly anaemic..."

(Period photos of a young Blakemore with young women, and then shots of young women).

"Far too many evenings were spent with a hand politely at the waist of a young girl, wearing beneath her party clothes a foundation garment about as yielding as a plaster cast. One had to concentrate the mind very hard on the advantage of being the recipient of all these invitations, to blot out the fact of their remorseless boredom." 

"And the truth is, I would gladly have passed them all by, if just one of those young women smelling of gardenias had slipped out of her plaster cast and taken me to bed."

(Back with Blakemore walking around a Sydney Uni quadrangle talking to camera)

Blakemore: “It was some such hope that kept me going to them. But in those days, love consisted of strictly limited favours, granted after too much booze, and reluctantly, in the back seat of somebody’s parents’ car. One lurched home at 3 am with the silk facings of one’s dinner jacket greasy with orange pancake.”

(Exteriors of old picture palaces)

“I still went constantly to the movies, trailing across Sydney to catch a rare screening of some early talkie in the suburbs … but I was beginning to find my spectator status oddly demeaning, sitting there in the dark, being worked upon ..."

(Back at Sydney Uni to camera)

"… which is probably why I became interested in the theatre. Here was something I could actually get up and do …"

"An American actress, once asked why she went on the stage, gave the best answer I know. ‘To get out of the audience.’ So I began participating in university dramatics."

Later, some of us started a society of our own. The St Paul's College Mummers ..." (The group still had a Facebook page at time of writing here) " … and here, in this quadrangle, we staged an open-air production of the thirties play by Auden and Isherwood, in which I took the role of a drunken playboy who goes to hell in an Alfa Romeo …everyone said my advantages made it ideal casting."

Cut to a title “Saga of the Surf” (c 1956, Movietone News, NFSA here) featuring surf life marching, carnival etc at Bondi.

Blakemore (to camera, at Palm Beach): “The next summer I became a lifesaver, with the Palm Beach surf lifesaving club. This is the view over Palm Beach. Australia presents you with so many of these natural wonders, that the casual prodigality of it all becomes almost intimidating. The landscape isn’t hostile to human beings, it isn’t friendly … it’s just profoundly indifferent. This panorama is just forty five minutes from Sydney …"

"The Palm Beach Surf Lifesaving Club may not have been the best on the coast. I can remember no particular glories at surf carnivals ..."

(Blakemore is now on the beach foreshore).

"... but membership of it was unquestionably one advantage with a capital A. For a shilling a night in the summer, one had a bed on that verandah ...(We see the house) ... surfing by day and freeloading by night at the parties of rich people who owned or rented the houses on the hill." (We see a big house on the hill).

(Dawn shot and swimmers in the dawn light)

“At dawn, hungover lifesavers were to be seen sobering up in an ocean out of which a huge golden sun had just risen, dripping …as a cadet member, I had first to submit to three weeks of fairly easy-going training …"

(Then Blakemore’s on the beach talking to camera, lifesavers in the background)

"… then I got a medal, and was put on a roster to make up the beach patrol at the weekend. During the week we were all supposed to be working, so people were left to drown. So, I was doing what I would have been doing anyway, sitting on a beach, only this time wearing a faintly ridiculous little cap. I think we may have saved somebody some time …we certainly practised doing so often enough …"

"What I do remember, with absolute clarity, during this and all my other summers, were those rare days, perhaps two or three a season, when one rose in the morning to encounter a perfect surf … like garlic in a salad, there was an unmistakeable trace of fear in the exhilaration you felt as you walked down to the beach towards those huge advancing waves …”

(More newsreel footage of wooden surf lifeboats in action, in wild seas, with martial music).

Cut to a shot of a Faculty of Medicine sign engraved in sandstone.

Blakemore: “Back at medical school... (now inside the building, talking to camera) ...my acting was improving, and my film reviewing for the student weekly had come on a treat …every so often however there was this irksome interruption. Exams. I did no work until the last five weeks in my first year and somehow passed. I did no work until the last four weeks in my second year, failed, and then scraped through on post-examinations in the holidays. I did no work until the last three weeks in my third year, and failed so ignominiously that a second chance was disallowed …"

(Blakemore does a double take at a plaster cast of Anderson Stuart - University of Sydney teacher, wiki here)

"I would have to repeat … (emerging from the medical building) ...my idleness, always wilful, was now demoralising …and I knew I was at a point of crisis."

(Shots of students)

"Amongst the people I’d grown up with, gone to school with, was going to parties with, not one of them to my knowledge wanted to be a film director …let alone a writer or an actor. Whatever it was that gave some sense to their lives, it didn’t work for me…"

"In their amiable, sceptical company, my secret life struggled for breath..."

(Back with very young Blakemore in magic mode producing a puff of smoke to movie music, and other tricks) …

"Had it all been pointless then? Those hours practising the Chinese linking rings and the multiplying billiard balls… those weeks in the dark of movie houses …that secret fever of hopes and aspirations that, however ridiculous, had often seemed the most important thing in my life … "

"Would I ever act upon any of it?"

(The young Blakemore breaks his magic stick over his knee).

"Or would I join those numberless bright children who have retreated before unhappiness into fantasy …"

(The young Blakemore knocks his top hat off and walks out of the spotlight)

"… and spent their lives there …"

(Back in the Medical faculty on Stuart’s statue - a top hat magically appears on it)

"No, it was time for the straight poofter to come out of the closet ..." 

(A still photo of actor Robert Morley).

"How Robert Morley came to give me a job, publicising his Australian tour of Edward my Son, how with his encouragement I decided to set sail for England and a career in the theatre, is another story."

(Blakemore in a theatre in front of the closed curtain).

"But it led to the last pitched battle between me and my father. It was a battle I won because I had to, there was nowhere else to go …"

"He said some very tough things, about my character and my prospects, which shocked me, indeed haunted me for years, but which I also recognised as the final offensive of the doomed side …because for all his realism, I was right, and he was wrong …"

(Photos of the real father and son Blakemore)

"Neither of us knew it at the time …but the consuming interest of my generation was to be in communications …just as his had been in science …A parent should never dismiss the games and obsessions of their children. They frequently prefigure a world in the making …all along I’d simply been preparing myself for the work that suited me …"

(Back in the theatre)

"Later on of course we became reconciled. The last time I saw him I’d returned home with the National Theatre production of The Front Page …we’d had drinks at that same Royal Sydney Golf Club …and he’d been at his most sardonic and entertaining …"

(Shots of Sydney harbour and the bridge in the distance from a travelling car)

"… he drove me back to my motel, through one of those scented Australian evenings that only those of us who’ve been away and come back know how ravishing … we swung up and down the hills of Sydney which with every descent showed the glittering harbour in some new and astonishing aspect …

The following day I was returning to England …we both knew it was possible we wouldn’t see each other again."  

(Back in the theatre, with Blakemore still seated in the stalls)

"He was genial and pensive … even a little wistful …I think he was pleased I’d done well in England …though I doubt if he ever considered himself contradicted. Probably he thought I’d been very, very  lucky … mph …it’s nice to be able to agree with him …"

(Cut away to a car travelling around Bondi beach).

"The day before I left for England, I took Robert Morley to see Bondi beach. I thought I might show-off on my surf board, but for some reason kept falling off …it was a brilliant noon in late summer. The foam of the breaking waves was so white you could hardly look at it. Robert squinted at the horizon …"

(Blakemore is now looking out over the sea)

"‘I don’t know, my boy,’ he said, ‘should you really leave all this?’ 

But I knew it was time to go ..."

(Blakemore dons his straw hat, and as he turns away from the sea, we cut to an aerial shot of him leaving the beach, with the Brahms returning, the camera now looking out at the endless ocean)

“Along this coast I’d had some of the most perfect moments of my life …but I also knew that my pleasure in the sea would weigh in exact accord with my youth … that I’d had the best of it, this vast, beautiful, fatally discouraging presence … the Pacific ocean …"

(Cut to London theatres: the Lyric with Dinsdale Landen and Nicola Pagett in Alan Ayckbourn’s Taking Steps; the Apollo theatre with I’m Getting My Act Together And Taking It On the Road, and the Globe , later the Gielgud. We see people walking past the Strand Theare with a sign reading “On 21st February 1979 'No Sex Please, W’ere British' reached 3214 performances and became the longest running comedy in the world")

“These days when I go to see one of the American surfing movies ..."

(Blakemore is coming down the stairs from the dress circle, then pauses to turn to camera):

"...and the board riders try to explain in their awful jargon what it feels like to be out there on the sea, my English friends laugh, and I laugh too …but not so loudly …because I think I know what the surfies are trying to say …"

Cut to a period steamer with streamers dangling from the side …the end credits begin with the song “Give My Regards to Broadway” as the steamship leaves Sydney harbour …

After the credits end, Blakemore is back in the theatre, talking to camera:

“Before we started on this film, I sent the script to Robert Morley, with the suggestion that it might be a nice idea to dedicate the finished product to him. He wrote back on a Christmas card”

(Blakemore opens the Christmas card and reads)

“Loved your script, but think you should dedicate it to your father, without whose opposition you would undoubtedly have become a lifeguard …”

Blakemore puts down the card and addresses the camera: “So be it.”

Cut to a shot of his father with rod, beach fishing, and a more in tune whistling of the Brahms …

The image fades, and the whistle echoes over black until “The End” comes up …

5. Music:

Lyrics of song over tail titles:

The end titles feature an uncredited version of George M Cohan Jr.’s song Give My Regards to Broadway.

Lyrics as heard in the film (the first verse is dropped), sung by a male voice with period band orchestration:

Give my regards to Broadway 


Remember me to Herald Square


Tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street


That I will soon be there


Whisper of how I'm yearning


To mingle with that old time throng


Give my regards to old Broadway


And say that I'll be there e'er long

(A chorus repeats the lines with a response):

We’ll give your regards to Broadway 


Remember you to Herald Square


We’ll tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street


That you will soon be there


We’ll whisper of how you’re yearning


To mingle with the old time throng


We’ll give your regards to old Broadway


And say that you’ll be there e'er long …

(The other verses are dropped)

(For more details on the music in the film, see this site’s pdf of music credits).