This essay documents and analyses the work of actor Maggie Dence, exploring her early training with Doris Fitton and her early success playing Mavis Bramston in the iconic television series 'The Mavis Bramston Show'. The essay examines Dence's career on stage and television over more than 50 years, focusing on her many comic roles as well as her contribution to Kingswood Country and the television adaptation of Nevil Shute's 'A Town Like Alice'. The essay also focuses on Dence's recent performance in the popular new Australian play 'Seventeen' and her own approach to this and other particularly demanding theatrical roles.

This essay documents and analyses the work of internationally acclaimed actor Jacki Weaver, examining her early career on stage and on television and analyzing key performances in her career over fifty years. Weaver is one of the most successful Australian actors of all generations, and yet most of her career has taken place on the mainstages of Australian theatre. This essay focuses on the distinctive contribution Weaver has made to Australian theatre, Australian acting and in recent years to international cinema.

This essay documents and analyses the work of actor Elspeth Ballantyne and her career on stage and on television. Ballantyne trained at NIDA in the first graduating class, worked for many years on stage and became a household name when she played Meg in Prisoner (for eight years), a television series of immense popularity that is now regarded as a cult classic internationally. The essay reflects on the contribution of Ballantyne to the profession and its significance for actors in Australia.

This essay documents and analyses the work of New Zealand-born John Clarke as an actor and writer. It explores Clarke's genesis and background as a sketch writer and his work on radio, television and film in New Zealand and in Australia. The essay focuses on the ways in which Clarke has transformed sketch comedy on television and on his contribution to the democratic project of satire in Australia over several decades.

This essay documents and analyses the work of actor, writer and director Tony Sheldon. It offers an extended discussion of Sheldon's life as a child star on television and his training on the job with many stage directors including John Bell and Terence Clarke, his development as a lead in musical theatre and his international success in a range of musical theatre productions. The essay offers an account of the distinctive contribution of Sheldon to theatre as a working actor who learned from directors and other actors rather than in a studio or training program.

This essay documents and analyses the work of English-born actor Julia Blake. The essay explores Blake's early career and training in the UK and her move to Australia, discussing her development as an actor on stage, television and feature film over five decades. The essay focuses on Blake's approach to her craft, the range of her theatrical contribution and her own views of the complexities and demands of the work of an actor.

Children are usually the most reliable witnesses of the activities of their parents. When Emily Humphries was just four years old and living in Little Venice in London, her father, Barry, brought home a large, white, blow-up sofa, and set it up in the living room. It was a very expensive and rather uncomfortable piece, and Emily's mother, Ros, was distinctly unimpressed. But Barry liked its novelty value, and thought it should stay. In fact, Ros was furious that Barry had bought such an item when they were short of money. The next day, Spike Milligan appeared at the front door. He walked around the sofa, and then sat down on it, as the Humphries family waited for a reaction, a verdict. A second later he lit a cigarette. took a few Duffs, stole a glance at Barry and then, a look of triumph on his face, stubbed out the cigarette on the seat of the sofa, reducing the controversial purchase to a wrinkled, stinking mess on the floor. From that day onward, Barry knew that two comedians in one room was a dangerous thing.

What is a typical Australian death? In this compelling history of death, grief and mourning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century in Australia, Pat Jalland focuses on a subject that has not been widely researched. In the introduction to her study Jalland explains that her emphasis on examining records of death at sea during the voyage to Australia, and her work dealing with death in the bush as well as death and destitute members of society, yielded distinctively Australian experiences that demonstrate very little continuity with European cultural norms. Moreover, as Jalland reveals in her final chapter of this book, the experience of the Great War of 1914–18 brought about a massive change in attitudes to death in Australia. It ruptured the traditionally held Christian culture of death that had dominated in Australia and it led to a decline in Christian mourning rituals. These rituals were already in decline, which Jalland partly attributes to the secularizing influence of rituals surrounding death in the bush.

This article examines the significance of cross-dressed burlesque comedy and satire of two iconic Australian performers: Barry Humphries, who played a 'farewell tour' in 2012-13,and Reg Livermore, who retired in 2011 and is best known for his 'perfect' portrayal of Frank n' Furter in 'The Rocky Horror Show' (1974). Both of these performers are among the most influential male-to-female burlesque entertainers of our time. Humphries, born in 1934, and Livermore, born in 1938, are consummate burlesque performers, who worked together at Phillip Street Theatre in the 1950s and set their sights on the West End early in their careers. Both performers presented solo shows in London in the 1970s, that marked career turning points. Through their burlesque performances, Humphries and Livermore have outraged and charmed audiences in Australia since the 1970s. Livermore's one-man shows are associated with 'truculent avant gardism' by international critics, and Humphries with alternatively savage and gentle, but always topical, satire. Humphries and Livermore provided an extended satirical attack on a range of targets and defined an era of peculiarly Australian burlesque. Both parodied gender constructs and categories. Humphries charmed audiences with his ability to draw out burlesque performances from guest performers on his television chat shows, and his use of burlesque-inspired satire has increased gradually over his fifty-six-year stage and television career. Livermore performed some of the most provocative burlesque acts in Australian theatre history in his one-man shows, reprising some of his characters after a long interval in the 1990s.

This essay documents and analyses the work of actor, writer and director Helmut Bakaitis, and his distinctive contribution to children's youth and community theatre in the role of writer, director and artistic director. It also analyses Bakaitis' own career as an actor on stage, television and film.