Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows actor, writer, director and filmmaker Wayne Blair describing his acting career, which includes musical theatre in Queensland and film and television. Footage and black-and-white still photographs from the musical The Sunshine Club open the clip. Blair is interviewed and heard in voice-over. He talks about his role in Conversations with the Dead as scenes and stills from the play are shown. He then speaks about his feelings of being an actor over scenes from an episode of Fireflies.

Educational value points

• Wayne Blair (1971–) is a Butchala man from Rockhampton who started acting when he was 23. His many theatre roles have included Othello in the 2008 Bell Shakespeare production and roles in Conversations with the Dead, The Sunshine Club and Skin. He is a regular performer on television and in 2005 received a Deadly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film and Television for The Djarn Djarns, which he wrote and directed.

• Conversations with the Dead is about playwright and filmmaker Richard Frankland’s experience working as a field officer for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Frankland, a Gunditjmara man from Victoria, dramatised his traumatic experience of liaising with families of Indigenous Australians who had died while in custody. The play has been widely performed including at the United Nations in 2004.

• The importance to Blair of being able to tell stories significant to Indigenous people is communicated in the clip. His roles in The Sunshine Club (1999), a musical about racism and discrimination, and Conversations with the Dead (2003), which he describes as 'the real deal’, explore the experiences of Indigenous men trying to negotiate the sometimes contradictory loyalties of Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies.

• Blair talks of giving things his 'best shot’ in developing his career and of trying new things. Since Blair’s career began in Queensland in the 1990s he has been in continual demand as an actor, but has sought new fields of expression including drawing on his own life experiences to create films such as Kathy, Jubulj and the award-winning Black Talk and The Djarn Djarns and writing and directing plays.

• The clip shows scenes from The Sunshine Club, hailed when it premiered in Sydney in 2000 after performances in Queensland as a new landmark in Australian musicals. Written by Wesley Enoch with music composed by John Rodgers, it tells the story of an Aboriginal soldier returning to Brisbane in the 1940s and finding racist attitudes unchanged. Rodgers and Enoch received a Deadly Award for Excellence in Film or Theatrical Score.