Back on - Homestead Theatre returns

It is time to give up giving up theatre.

Full time touring is wonderful at first - every town is a new universe, every audience an untried animal. After a while, the detail begins to percolate in - the fuel is expensive, the coffee is dreadful, the money is erratic and the loneliness destructive. Within a fortnight, life becomes voluntary zombieism. Exhaustion, boredom and stress leach the colours away until life is only a half realised thing, easily overlooked.

In the telling, every story is fascinating, but only to others and never to yourself.

There are wonders everywhere. The hall in Koorda has a weird acoustic that splits the echo and sends it back in different frequency streams like a Brian Eno track gone mad. This only lasts until sundown, after that the room is a clean and easy as you could want. I spent an evening in Melbourne talking to a domantrix who was in town with her sample boy for an S & M conference, and who was concerned that her career had stalled at bindings and whips; she wanted to get into knives, but could not make the jump. The road from Hobart to Queenstown becomes more frightening the further you travel it, but coming the other way it is as simple and pretty as a garden drive. I once spent a week in a Chapter-house with a nudist monk. I came out of Glen Innes onto a hairpin bend at two in the morning with ice on the windscreen and nothing but panic to keep me on the road. I had lunch in Port Lincoln with a man whose job it is to travel the world to buy the occasional perfect tuna, which must be sent immediately to Japan; the price covers the luxuries of his lifestyle and the greater luxuries of his employers. The best chefs in Australia are in a defunct copper-mining town in the South Australian desert. The foyer of the theatre in Brisbane was hung with giant photos of vaginas, the work of a lesbian collective, and so confronting that the audience came in, looked once, and went out again. No one came to the show. All this and more is true, but none of it felt like it at the time.

In some ways, Australia is not in normal space, and the vortex of maximum weirdness is in South Australia. The most extraordinary and the most catastrophic things happen there. I have never seen such extremes of public sexuality as in Adelaide, nor such extraordinary outsider art. I love the whole state, but it killed my car. First, the clutch went at Clayton, which meant a tow-truck to Strathalbyn at a huge cost, an overnight stay, and a long day waiting for the mechanics to find the problem. Another year, the gear box ate itself, starting at Port Pirie. I ran through the Southern Flinders with mechanics on standby town by town in case of disaster. I lost fifth in the Clare valley, fourth in the Barossa, third near Parafield and second in Parooka about a block away from the wreckers who were waiting for me with a replacement. And then at last, another year and another trip, and the engine began to burn oil about thirty kilometers out of Swan Reach on the Loxton road. It went nuclear at Berri but still somehow got me to Paringa for the last gig of the tour. And there, in unique SA style, the audience insisted on starting the show late so they could all go home and get spare suitcases for me to pack up the contents of the car so that I could catch a bus back home to NSW the following day.

Some years I was running over 200 shows between February and Christmas - sometimes three shows a day; sometimes three different shows a day. The money was okay, but I was sick all the time and my mind was long lost. The most original thing I could do was play Solitaire. It was time to stop. I actually wept over the car as the wreckers came to drag it away, but I was grateful that it was all over. All I wanted was to get a job with a tractor, with no marketing, no deadlines and no Front of House.

And I did. I sprayed Bathurst Burr, I direct-drilled wheat, I cut lettuce, drove forklifts, sorted asparagus and ended up making fruit products for schoolkids in Canada. The fruit came from South Australia, where it is apparently legal to label everything as apple regardless of the actual content. In NSW we added a few chemicals - nothing natural (Canada, remember) - stirred it around a bit and dried it in huge ovens. This worked well so long as the apple really was apple. If it was something else, then the whole lot was likely to either ferment or mutate and not even the Canadians would take it. Never knowing in advance was fun - it was like alchemy, but with the real prospect of creating something useful.

Then something went wrong with my right leg. After months of misdiagnosis, misdirected treatment and a drug load sufficient to sink a ship it turns out that I have no future except one: theatre. Again.

So, I’ve given up giving up. Homestead is back. This time round, touring will be limited. There is a new corporate personality. Most of the work will be done online, and eventually I will build an electric stage for all the shows I wanted to do, but which were either intractable, impractical or just plain mad. First, though, to record the repertoire of the last few years. And marketing. And deadlines. And FOH electric style. And so on...and on...and on...