Editor's Note: Jack Hibberd died in November. This tribute was delivered by his friend and agent John Timlin at Jack's funeral and, with updates and revisions, at the memorial service for Jack held at La Mama on 19 December.
Jack Hibberd & Dimboola - a tribute
I first met Jack in, would you believe, a pub near the university called the Mayfair. It was a student mecca but also a watering hole for the inimitable down and outs who frequented Carlton like Bill the Slaught (aka Bill Collins) who claimed to have deflowered Germaine Greer. His sidekick, Danny Kramer, was a sometime lethal streetfighter. He maintained a glowering presence on a street bench near the Albion Hotel from whose patrons he would cadge money for booze.
I was introduced to Jack by academic, Dinny O’Hearn, who knew that Laurie Clancy and I planned a new journal called The Melbourne Partisan. I had few literary credentials except for writing the vaguely satirical Student Worker Alliance column for Farrago which Laurie edited.
But there were other more useful qualifications. I was employed testing scales on the waterfront for the Customs Department and my security clearance enabled me to acquire banned books from a few wharfie collaborators for review in Farrago.
I was finally stopped in my tracks when Customs officials searched my ute and confiscated the then banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Capricorn, Portnoy’s Complaint and, amazingly, my birthday present edition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I particularly objected to that confiscation and pointed to the Cambridge University colophon on the cover. “Mate”, the officer said almost conspiratorially, “We know you can’t tell a book by its cover.” I guessed they were right about that but I kept pursuing return of the books. Three months later the Tractatus arrived accompanied by a letter saying that the other books would be retained as evidence of a possible offence against the Commonwealth.
Anyway, Jack gave us a sheaf of his latest poetry and Laurie said later he was knocked out by the sophistication and intricacy of his language given that his undergraduate degree had been medicine. We became regulars at the Mayfair spending some time drinking and a fair bit thinking, particularly about football.
Jack’s job in Kensington as a locum for Dr. Jagoda enabled regular visits to my factory, somewhat grandiosely titled International Weighing but it did have a billiard table for our diversion. By then, his career as a playwright was well under way and I recall seeing White With Wire Wheels at Melbourne University and meeting his collaborators Graham Blundell, Kerry Dwyer and David Kendall.
Betty Burstall had started La Mama in Carlton and originally used this old shirt factory for dinners with the arts community. She had seen La Mama In New York and decided to convert the space to a theatre. The first production was Jack’s Three Old Friends and he had three old friends playing and directing, Graham Blundell, David Kendall and Bruce Knappett,
Of course, Dimboola is probably Jack’s best-known play and derived partly from his reading of a Chekhov play, The Wedding about a wedding reception in which the guests become active participants in the event. Jack wrote Dimboola in Ireland in1969 and posted the script from London to Graham Blundell in two separate envelopes. At that time, Graham was also working with ideas of audience involvement. This script was quite fortuitous. He premiered Dimboola at La Mama in 1969 treating the audience, including many Carlton footballers, as guests at a real wedding.
Jack persuaded me in that year to lease and go guarantor for the rent of a much larger venue, the Pram Factory in Drummond Street, Carlton. Both he and Graham Blundell had been rejected by the Trustee Company administering the property as poor credit risks. It was hard to see how a doctor could be a worse credit risk than an itinerant company director. I suppose it was poetic justice three years later when the CEO of that Trustee Company was jailed for embezzling millions of dollars from depositors.
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| Evelyn Krape, Bruce Spence, APG Production of Dimboola |
The APG’s professional production of Dimboola directed by David Williamson was filmed on 16mm by Ross Dimsey and is probably the best record of an entire Pram Factory production. Everybody here should have a look at that film if only to see Evelyn’s hilarious tap dance routine to the music of Animal Crackers in my Soup. All the performances were memorable and very funny and often punctuated by Bruce Spence as Morry the bridegroom saying a variety of ‘No worries” to every disaster threatening the ceremony.
The play took off after that and was produced in Melbourne at Eddie and Jack Kornhauser’s Chevron Hotel and then at the Bonaparte Theatre Restaurant in Sydney’s King’s Cross I negotiated the terms of the contract with a very sharply dressed John Hartigan and his offsider, Jimmy Ryan whose slightly twisted left arm was left over from his reputedly victorious confrontations with Sydney standover men.
The play was directed by the brilliant Brian Syron, an indigenous graduate of the New York Stella Adler school and co-founder of the Australian Playwrights’ Conference. He had the imagination, prestige and stamina to keep the show running continuously for nearly two and half years. Every 3 months or so the royalties would go into serious arrears, and I would threaten legal action to remove the performing rights. A cheque would arrive usually shaved by some hundreds and off we would go again.
Meanwhile the show had attracted international interest, and we licensed a London production at the Aer Lingus reception rooms. The producers had agreed not to alter the script without the writer’s permission. The first inkling we had of gross rewrites was that a friend said it featured a lot of UK slang and was being presented as a version of the Carry-On movies loaded with ‘cor blimeys’. Jack saw red about this and I flew to London to close it down and seek damages. The threat of an injunction was enough, and it petered out a few weeks later though we were financially well ahead.
By this time a feature film was mooted and the show was attracting investor interest. We were invited to attend a meeting at one of those ancient Collins Street city legal firms named not unlike Barry Oakley’s play Scanlan in which Blaxland, Lawson & Wentworth are described as a firm of solicitors. ‘This is the big time I said to Jack. Better smarten up your bag of fruit for the meeting.”
To say Jack dressed flamboyantly for that meeting would be gross understatement. From memory, he wore an orange jacket covering something like a Beatles T-Shirt, a pair of vermillion flares and carried a brief case full of his poetry and plays. All topped by a bright blue Beanie We were sent to the heavily marbled 31st. floor to await the presence of our legal luminary who dispatched a secretary to usher us in. She had meanwhile done a forensic on my colourful companion, offered a cup of tea and asked when we could expect Doctor Hibberd.
Eventually we were ushered into the presence and shown graphs of currency movements and tax rates in various jurisdictions. He unfolded a plan whereby I as the literary agent would grant performance rights to a company in Amsterdam who would transfer funds to the non-taxable Netherlands Antilles and then to Hong Kong where we could collect the proceeds tax free from a blind trust. Seemed incredibly complicated so I asked what this arrangement would cost. Nearly nothing he said compared to the tax we would otherwise have to pay but he estimated we would up for $2000.00 to cover his costs of travelling to Sydney to settle the deal with his Dutch counterpart’s solicitor. He offered to round up a set of documents in the next office and off he went.
Jack had not exactly warmed to the proposed shenanigans and, as the lawyer left, Jack, quick as a flash, said, “He’s been taking heaps of notes. Have a geek at his diary.” I leant over and reading backwards could see immediately we were not the only party being billed for the Sydney trip and the other three clients were also to be slugged two grand each. We made a polite exit.
There were seemingly genuine inquiries from Europe and the US and soon there were also pirated productions in Zurich, Munich and Dresden all under the banner of Werner Schmidt who denied any debt to Dimboola although there were a few reviews suggesting an antipodean origin. Another surfaced in America but always the argument was that they were plays about weddings and that’s not copyright.
Back in Australia we were experiencing a more than usual delay in payment of royalties, so I decided to front Hartigan and Ryan and flew to Sydney. Surprise, surprise they were no longer around and the cast had been given a week’s notice. I met with our solicitor who said they had left town and were now holed up in Bali, the proud owners of a couple of bars.
However, we did have a shaky guarantee of performance by the owners of the building who were ostensibly leasing it to the producers. Our Pram Factory solicitor, Phil Molan, had moved to Sydney and thought we should issue summonses for the $4000 we were owed. The papers had to be served in person on the two brothers who owned the building and Phil said his professional process servers could not get near them. He thought they were living in the Mandarin Club. Phil, ever the joker, suggested I sign in to the Club using my Chinese name, Lin Tim, instead of the Irish original. I wasn’t happy with this and rang my showbiz friend Leon to seek his advice. It was succinct: If you go into the Mandarin with legal documents, you’ll be used as shark bait by the morning.
So, we never received our $4000 but a few years later the two brothers were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment after their toy importing business was proven to have a white substance in many of their offerings. Their mother was also found guilty of conspiracy and, when sentenced to 3 years jail, immediately dropped dead in the dock. Dimboola had been used as a money laundering front by the family.
I still get requests for the rights to perform Dimboola and over 1.4 million people have seen the play in Australia. Though I have only talked today about Dimboola, there were many other adventures. I have just finished revising and updating his website which shows the depth and breadth of Jack’s achievement across the whole spectrum of the arts.
Jack has enriched my life through his genius and the warmth of our friendship. I went to see him at Boorangarra to make sure the TV was set up properly to watch the Carlton game. I reminded Jack we had attended the 1970 Grand Final which Carlton won miraculously and changed the game forever. It was so crowded we had to stand on our beer cans to see action. I said “Do you remember Jesaulenko’s mark fifty metres from us?” When he heard the name “Jesaulenko” his face lit up and he smiled and signalled one bright moment had shone through his dementia.
On November 5th. we have Guy Fawkes Day, the American election and the Melbourne Cup. This will be the first Tuesday in 50 years that Jack won’t be ringing me to put his $50 bet on the Melbourne Cup.
Valė Jack
John Charles Hibberd 1940 - 2024
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