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 case study of Tony Sheldon considers how an actor develops versatility in emotional delivery and the capacity to work in all theatre genres. Sheldon is one of Australia's best known and most successful stage actors. He has appeared in Shakespearean drama, cabaret, musical theatre and contemporary plays written by Australian, British and American playwrights. He is one of a sizeable group of Australian actors of his generation to have learned to act 'on the job' with directors and other actors rather than undertaking formal qualifications in an institution or studio. This article examines Sheldon's experience of learning to act, drawing on a life interview with the actor. It considers the opportunities and the difficulties Sheldon experienced in his early career in relation to boundary blurring and self-belief, trauma, directorial rehearsal styles, typecasting, comic acting in partnership and managing one's character in long seasons. The article explores some of the problems that the actor has overcome, the importance of specific directors in his development, and the dynamics of informal training in the context of an overall ecology of theatre over half a century.

Nick Enright wrote more than fifty plays for the stage, television and radio, translated and adapted plays, and taught acting to students in varied settings both in Australia and the United States. His repertoire included comedy, social realism, farce, fantasy and the musical. In addition to his prodigious contribution to all of these genres, he was a passionate advocate for the actor and the theatre in contemporary society. This chapter summarises Nick Enright's career in theatre and serves to introduce the essays in this volume by locating them in relation to that career.

In August this year an Australian woman visiting the United States found herself in trouble after she answered an air steward with the words "fair dinkum". The young woman was responding to the steward's statement that there were no pretzels. After uttering the phrase, Sophie Reynolds of Queanbeyan in New South Wales, was ordered to hand over her passport to the SkyWest Airlines staff and was told that she might be charged with committing a federal offence. When she disembarked at Pittsburgh, Ms Reynolds was met by three uniformed officers who said: "You swore at the hostess and there are federal rules against that." Reynolds replied: "I did not swear at the hostess, I just said fair dinkum" (Australian, 11 August 2007, p. 5).

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.

In 'Worlds Within', Vilashini Cooppan challenges the idea that the movement of global capital acts as a homogenising force, arguing for the significance of the 'cultural and psychic' connections it engenders, which operate variously with, against and beyond the flow of capital (3). This is important as a way of linking our understanding of individual lives to national life. Australian literature and particularly Australian theatre are located in and connected to world literature in many important and unexplored ways. Yet some significant contributions to this placement, this series of connections with world literature and theatre, are as yet undocumented. This essay seeks to address a gap in the understanding of modern theatre in Australia and its direct connections with European and American theatre. It explores the ways in which the actors Hayes Gordon (1920-1999), Zika Nester (1928-2014) and Henri Szeps (born 1943) lived out, and in Szeps's case continue to live out, what Cooppan calls 'twinned identifications and doubled dreams' (4). Cooppan does not accept that globalisation is a 'heterogenising' force in which national cultures are transcended, instead charting a 'politics of relationality' in which the national and the global are dual ideas held in balance though subject to change (4). This is a useful idea for understanding any nation, including Australia.

'The One Day of the Year' is one of the most provocative plays ever staged in Australia, and was banned for fear of offending members of the Returned Services League. A panel of judges had chosen the play to be performed at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960. But before rehearsals commenced the board of governors of the festival banned it, believing the content to be insensitive to returned servicemen. The decision to ban the play aroused considerable controversy and an amateur group defiantly staged it in a suburban hall in Adelaide several months after the festival, with some funding from the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It was a success and a Sydney production followed. The first professional production of 'The One Day of the Year' opened on 26 April 1961 at the Palace Theatre in Sydney after bomb threats kept the cast out of the theatre for 24 hours.

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.