Scenes Seen

A stage animal, Jim Daly has been throwing on the greasepaint and wiping it off over seven decades in the dog-eat-dog world of Australian performance. With significant credits across both theatre and screen forms, from the daring plays of Jack Hibberd and Barry Dickins to the celebration of the Brecht centenary year (1998), appearing in both the acclaimed The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Belvoir and in Arturo Ui at the Melbourne Theatre Company, he has ploughed on into the Twenty-First Century with seven seasons of the Aboriginal play Coranderrk, the ground-breaking headphone verbatim theatre of Roslyn Oades’ Hello, Goodbye, and Happy Birthday, and a raft of independent works in ’dirty spaces’, including his own performance-research work on the Katyń massacre. In between, in the scenes seen in this memoir, is the need to survive and support a family, a necessity spinning him through rocky teaching and hospitality scenes, and picking up a PhD for good measure. This is not a warm story of luck. In a country where performers need a lot of it, his story here brings alive the spiky Australian performing world from the working-actor’s point of view. This memoir is a personal career history coloured with dollops of the recent history of Australian performance, theatre especially. Daly is an awarded, chameleonic Australian stage, film and television actor and scholar, known for Pirate Islands, the legendary 100 Metres Track episode with John Clark, and many high-energy solo productions. From the pioneering days of Australian live to air television in the 1950s, through teaching, including a foray into a religious teaching Congregation, and to the mainstages of capital and provincial cities, and through the rocky, uncertain terrain of so-called independent theatre, his career spans over 70 years. Where most fall by the wayside, he has survived.