You eventually become involved with Community Theatre?
In the houses I was living in at that time, (the early to mid-1970’s) I was living with actors like Geoffrey Rush, another actor called Bille Brown, an actor who works over here with a company called Cocoloco, Trevor Stuart. It was an acting household. I was also working with a group of women doing a lot of street theatre in protests.
That whole house went over to Europe in 1975 and 1976 and so I was just experiencing Europe at that time. I was working in all different ways, and I was travelling. I was going down to Covent Garden doing dance and clown lessons, things like that. I returned to Australia in 1977 and that is when I got involved, solidly, with theatre.
What theatre groups did you become involved with?
The first theatre group I became involved with was called, The Grin and Tonic. What that group did was, we travelled round in the back of a truck and we went to caravan parks, to schools, we would even set up on beaches. We would set up and do Shakespeare and Australiana Poetry. I did a year of that.

That led me to go into a really great theatre company called, The Popular Theatre Troup, and that was straight political theatre. It was run by a guy called, Richard Fotheringham, and it was fantastic. He wrote really great, very funny, satirical, political plays. In some ways his work was very cartoonish but it was still very left-wing political theatre.
We took the work into factories, to factory floors. We went in to schools, out to mining areas where we would set up in the local pub where everybody was drinking. We went to mining towns, played at places where Utah Mining was operating. The tyres in our van would be let down, things like that. I did that for two years, from 1977 to 1978.
Were you taking theatre to people who would normally not experience theatre?
I thought we were reinforcing the politics of the workers. The plays had politically charged messages, about workers’ rights, about the position of women, and when we set up in a factory it is true that those people wouldn’t have experienced much in the way of theatre but regardless they really loved us.

I would say we were both delivering political messages and offering theatre to people who otherwise might never have experienced theatre.
It was a pretty rough life really, both of those jobs were, and it did me well for moving into rock and roll which in some ways was much rougher
You then move into music?
I had to make a decision, a choice between playing music or committing to the theatre. I did an audition and got accepted in to The Pram Factory (A Theatre Company in Melbourne) and said no to that.

I was so involved with the politics of Punk and I had committed to playing drums, and that seemed like such a political statement. I thought there was so much you could do with music, so I joined a group called Zero and from there I joined the Go Betweens and that lasted from 1979 through to 1989.
For more information regarding the work of Lindy Morrison see the links below