0:01

In the olden days, one of my jobs back in, ooh, that was

0:04

the, the early seventies. I was on the lineup crew and when we had something like, um, you know,

0:11

Kamal and the ABC show band, we put out about 60 mics and you know, sort

0:16

of basically one for every instrument. And you know, it took ages of course, and I dunno how they actually mixed it.

0:22

Cause of the desk only had about 30 inputs.

0:29

Welcome to season seven of the Prima Donna Podcast, Sonic

0:33

Portraits of Australian Artists. This audio was recorded and produced on Wurundjeri Country.

0:38

I pay respects to elders past and present.

0:42

The first episode in this series features the infamous Julie

0:45

Peters, legendary in media. Having worked at the ABC for more than 50 years, and tireless

0:50

advocate for trans rights. To find out more about Julie, about the project and to hear more episodes like

0:57

this one, visit prima donna podcast.com.

1:07

Well, I fell into the ABC by accident because, well, I was

1:11

already uni dropout, you know, so I'm, I'm very advanced at my age.

1:14

I dropped out of uni at 19, I think it was, and what I was finding I was

1:18

enjoying at uni was student theatre.

1:21

Then I saw this ad for you know an operations job at the abc and I went,

1:24

oh, maybe I could just learn about telecine and stay six months or so and,

1:28

and you know, then I go back to theatre. But anyway, it turned out that I stayed 52 years, but when I

1:34

joined in the early seventies, telecine was still black and white.

1:44

I felt like there was a lot of history because nearly everybody,

1:47

particularly the production people and the actors, had all come from theatre

1:51

because telecine was still very new. And it felt like in many ways you're working in theatre, uh, rather

1:56

than how telecine feels today. Shows were done either live or as live.

2:03

In that you'd actually record a segment with four cameras.

2:09

We did a, a ki's show called Adventure Island.

2:13

And, um, a soapy called Bellbird. So if you were doing Bellbird, they'd actually roll the opening titles.

2:19

Then they would just cut to the studio and do the first scene.

2:22

And once they were happy with that, they would then rearrange all

2:26

the cameras and go to a different set and do the second scene.

2:31

And we'd do it as an add-on edit, and there was no post-production.

2:34

So we had somebody in the telecine booth who was playing the dogs

2:37

barking and the, and the birds tweeting and that sort of thing.

2:41

And on Adventure Island, we actually had a little small band over in the corner.

2:45

And, uh, what I remember about Adventure Island, the Celeste, the

2:48

Celeste, gave it a very different feel to a lot of other kids shows.

2:51

So anybody had an idea it'd go ding, ding, ding on the Celeste.

2:56

And it gave it a quite a cute feel. When we started color, most of us didn't know much about it.

3:06

Cause most of the guys had come from the PMG, you know,

3:10

postmaster general's department. And so we actually brought some lighting people over from the BBC.

3:16

They'd give us basic lighting training. And what was interesting at first was that when people first get into

3:22

colour there, there's a tendency to get really bright colours.

3:26

But the BBC guy, was very quick in emphasiding, particularly for drama,

3:29

we have to be subtle because that's far more natural, and particularly in that

3:33

first say five to 10 years of color, we had to assume that most people were

3:36

watching it in black and white anyway. So we had to be black and white compatible

3:44

in my first couple of years at the ABC the first thing they'd actually let me

3:48

do, which was related to performance, was I was a boom operator, and this is

3:52

way, way before people had radio mics.

3:55

So when you had six actors in a room in a set, it was always a three wall set.

4:00

The cameras were then sitting on the side of the wall so

4:02

they could get closeups and people looked across the room and in the middle pretty well usually was the

4:07

microphone boom, an extendable pole I can still remember just turning.

4:12

You can't see on the radio, but I'm, I'm turning my hand.

4:20

It was quite performative in that you actually had to fit into the

4:23

flow of the actor's performance to get the audio correct.

4:32

The other thing, which I also learned about was that, that if somebody was

4:36

in a wide shot, you could actually bring the microphone back because

4:39

that would give audio perspective. Camera was much the same.

4:48

The flow of your camera work, because you're a team of three or four camera

4:53

operators, usually had to totally fit with what the performers were doing.

4:57

And so, for example, if an actor looked to the right, that was a cue to either

5:01

pan the camera or cut to another camera.

5:05

The bit I found difficult initially was absolute sheer concentration

5:09

of getting the simple things right every time because in a way they

5:12

didn't really care if you could do very complicated effects.

5:14

They're more far more worried about whether or not you cut to

5:17

the right camera on the news. You know? Because yeah, if you made a mistake on a lot of those proteles, unlike

5:23

today when we were pre-recording cause we were live to air, the

5:26

whole East coast saw your mistake. We hardly do anything live to air.

5:34

Although, I suppose proteles like Q and A feel like they're live, but normally

5:38

what happens, which the viewer doesn't realise that we record an hour and a

5:41

half for an hour and then, you know, try and use the more interesting bits.

5:52

When we started Recovery, I realised that we owned about 220 parcans, which

5:57

are a thousand watt narrow lights.

6:00

That was what was used in all the rock and roll venues

6:03

around Melbourne pretty well. But you know, lighting was moving on at that stage and they were

6:07

now moving lights and protelemable lights and things like that,

6:10

but we couldn't afford those. So, uh, I managed to find, you know, just lots of really interesting ways of

6:17

doing patterns with all these parcans.

6:21

And normally I would pick the colors based on how I

6:25

emotionally related to the music. But what was interesting, one of the lighting crew told me that, um,

6:31

the looks I had created, because I was trying to be as imaginative

6:34

as possible, and I'll come back to how I chose the colours in a sec,

6:37

is that, um, those looks were being pretty well copied That following

6:41

week on, Hey, hey, it's Saturday.

6:44

I took that as quite a compliment, but I must admit I didn't actually

6:46

watch to see if that was true. Around about that time, I was also doing a little bit, a few acting classes.

6:57

And some singing lessons as well and I realised that, that, uh,

7:00

particularly in Bel canto singing, that they talk a lot about,

7:03

there's really only three emotions. Mad, glad, and sad, you know, happy, angry, and sad.

7:08

Yeah. Sort of in my head I said, well, you know, sad is blue, angry

7:14

is red, and happy is yellow.

7:17

So what I would tend to do is when I was trying to decide what

7:20

colours to use for a band, it became a bit of a formula in my head.

7:24

I would listen to the music and. Okay, what emotion do I feel?

7:28

That means I'll use those colours and then depending on the rhythm.

7:31

you know Cause a lot of pieces started off with, they're really loud bit at

7:34

the start and, and they might do a lot of fast light changing, or maybe it

7:38

started off very slowly and then partway through the song, the emotion changed.

7:42

That's how I would choose my colors. In the early nineties, one of the women who was sort of working

7:51

as a casual in ABC operations just sort of said casually to

7:55

me, how do you get into lighting? How's a woman get into lighting?

7:58

And something clicked a few days later and I thought, well, I should run a lighting course for women because you know, most of the

8:04

people who are, you know, totally at that stage, except for me, nearly

8:07

everybody in lighting was a bloke. They're all camera guys on particularly doing news and 7:30

8:12

report and those sort of shows. And so I went to the training officer who totally by coincidence,

8:18

is now the managing director of the ABC David Anderson.

8:21

And I said, I wanna run lighting course for women, and he looked at me and

8:27

and said, okay, let's look at this.

8:29

And it possibly was, it looks good on the figures to run

8:32

a lighting course for women. I don't know. I don't know the logic of how I got it up, but what happened was I

8:38

managed to get studios for 10 days.

8:41

So it was a 10 day course. Because what I realised that a lot of women didn't have is they didn't

8:46

have like basic sub electricity in terms of, you know, how many lights

8:50

can you plug into the one outlet without, um, you know, blowing a fuse.

8:53

And they didn't quite get optics because most of 'em didn't do physics at school.

8:58

So I gave them the basics of electricity and basics of

9:01

optics and basics of colour. Because if you're gonna light, you need to understand colur temperature

9:06

and the fact that, you know, different likes are different colours.

9:09

And if you want somebody to, to look consistent or look good, you,

9:12

you've gotta actually at least understand what you're doing.

9:19

You can use some, you know, really ugly fluorescent lighting

9:22

to make some for a baddy or, or to make something look ugly.

9:27

Under a lot of circumstances, you don't wanna do that.

9:29

You just want them to look like them. And it's interesting when we look at a human face and the human face is moving

9:35

in lighting, we remember the shape.

9:37

We don't remember the way the lighting is on their face.

9:40

And so that, you know when when there's really steep lighting above a face,

9:45

there's actually quite deep shadows around the eyes and that sort of stuff.

9:49

And I, I remember reading about, you know, some of the classic portraiture,

9:53

um, painters from the 17th and 18th century, and I looked at the

9:57

lighting they use and I went, oh yeah, that, that's quite interesting.

10:01

You know, and, and in many ways I felt that that was one of the best

10:04

ways to start to learn lighting, was to look at paintings and, and,

10:08

um, then I also start to look at advertising photos and things like that.

10:12

Photos in magazines. I like the look of, and so I, I might have been doing that for

10:17

fashion as well, but I was also doing it for lighting to see

10:20

Okay, how did they light this particular, yeah, woman in this pose

10:30

Where I can play the most in terms of just looking at an individual face,

10:34

because to me, the, the individual face and lighting an individual

10:37

face is the key to lighting. I did it on news readers, so you know, I would adjust the light up and down,

10:44

physical height and sideways, and then I'd possibly put in three back lights.

10:48

The reason I often put in three back lights is because some people

10:51

had black hair, some people had white hair, some people had no hair,

10:55

and so I tended to put one in this dead center on top of the head and

11:01

the two to the side of that on the shoulders, but not the head, which.

11:05

If somebody had, you know, white hair, I could not light the hair and light the

11:09

shoulders and make that the back light. Whereas other people, I might put all three up, particularly in the eighties

11:15

with a lot of women with big hair.

11:17

I could go crazy. But then what would happen is you had to then take into account that

11:22

particularly in the early eighties, we were still going crazy with

11:25

chroma key or green screen or blue screen as it's now caught, and they

11:29

weren't very good in those days. You get really rough edges around here, particularly if

11:33

somebody with really curly hair. It was really hard to get a good key.

11:37

In some studios, we could only do one colour because

11:39

the studio was wired that way. So if somebody came in with blue eyes and you had a blue screen behind them,

11:44

you then had to be really careful about, you know, not having the

11:48

picture showing through their eyes. Because of the era I was in, we were all expected to do out, you know,

11:56

outside broadcast as well as studios as well as the news, as well as

12:00

spending a bit of time in telasinic rolling films to air or whatever.

12:03

I mean, the first OB I went to was, was a running carnival, but they

12:07

wouldn't trust me with anything. So all I got to do is the graphic.

12:10

Which sort of said ABC at the end and the name of the swimmer, or the

12:13

name of the presenter or something. In those days we didn't have a graphic generator.

12:17

We actually had cardboard graphics like letraset on black card, which

12:22

cameras pointed at, and then the vision mixer would, would combine them.

12:26

And we did that live and we even, you know, we did the news that way too.

12:29

Each camera in the newsroom could pan to a graphic standard.

12:32

And so, you know, the graphics people were making, you know,

12:34

letraset graphics all afternoon for, for whatever stories were on.

12:47

With the lighting courses for women, I, I took the attitude

12:50

that a lot of it wasn't about them getting into lighting necessarily.

12:55

Look, some of them did and some of them were like documentary makers.

12:59

And what that meant was that, you know, they were very much on minimal budgets

13:03

where they were, you know, if they could help with the lighting, it meant

13:07

that they could do it with just two people rather than three or four people.

13:12

I think they were the ones who used it the most.

13:14

And you know, that certainly happened. Documentary makers used it because the way I started, I always, I

13:20

started with with portraiture of a human face and we, we could all

13:24

practice on each other as well. And then, then I managed to get studio crews.

13:30

Yeah, we had a full, a full TV studio with four cameras and so we

13:35

used it a little bit for training you know, camera operators, but also training directors.

13:42

So we had, you know, young women who wanted to direct for camera

13:46

coverage, who would then direct the piece we were doing as well.

13:55

So we had a rock and roll stage. We had a piece of classical music, which was a lutist and

14:00

two singers, and we had a drama.

14:04

So we did a three wall soapy sort of style thing, which

14:09

was, you know, four cameras. And it was a scene from a play where there was three or four people and,

14:15

and we were able to cut between all the cameras in, in an interactive way.

14:19

So my crew lit those three events.

14:27

In the first version, it was only a ABC women who did it.

14:30

And, um, we had people come in from ABC Darwin, ABC Sydney, and do the course.

14:37

What I thought was also interesting, a number of the, um, people in, in

14:41

news said, well, how come you're not doing a, a lighting course for men?

14:44

I went, I said, look around.

14:47

I can't help it. If you, you, nobody's teaching lighting except me.

14:51

I get a grip. You know, you totally, uh, control the industry anyway.

14:55

But what I thought was just as valuable is that I was actually

14:59

giving people who wanted to be a director, for example, language

15:03

for speaking to a lighting person because of the way I approached it.

15:10

And I, in many ways, I think that was how it was used the most.

15:13

In the end, it gave these women language, Which meant that they

15:18

could get a look they liked from a DOP or a lighting director in

15:22

the future, and I certainly had a good feedback about that.

15:25

In fact, one, one of the women was a member of WIFT Women

15:28

in Film and telecine, and she went to the WIFT committee and

15:32

said, wow, look what Julie did. Can we get her?

15:35

Anyway, cut a long story shot. We did it a year later again, but this time it was half ABC

15:41

and half external industry.

15:44

WIFT organized AFC funding. Yeah, to help bring external people in.

15:49

And we, we had some, um, a lot of in, you know, uh, industry people

15:52

come and do that course, which, um, I was quite pleased at that.

15:55

And again, I think the people who appreciate it the most were people

15:59

who were, who weren't using it for lighting, but using it to understand

16:03

lighting so that they could get the look lighting looks they wanted from

16:06

their DOP or or lighting director.

16:13

I have seen things change in some ways.

16:16

And it nearly always my opinion for the better.

16:19

But for example, There's still very few women I see on camera, but

16:24

I remember the ABC hiring young women in mid seventies with the idea

16:30

of trying to get women on camera. But, but in the end, they tended to drift into other jobs like editing

16:36

and telasini rather than camera.

16:39

But you know, certainly a couple were on camera for a long time,

16:43

but, you know, camera can be camera in broadcast telecine in

16:47

many ways can be limiting in that. It was broader when, when I was a young youngster because a camera

16:53

operator could be doing football on Saturday, divine Service on Sunday,

16:58

and then an opera on Wednesday, or yeah, Wednesday and Thursday, and

17:02

they were good at all those things. Whereas now nearly all crews tend to be far more specialised.

17:08

You have people who specialise in drama, people who specialise in sport.

17:13

And even though to me, I go, what?

17:16

It's not that different. And, and, and I feel just as comfortable doing drama sport

17:20

and rock and roll, but it just doesn't really happen these days.

17:24

That's one way that industry's changed a lot.

17:28

One of the reasons I, I don't think many, I I've seen like a huge increase

17:32

in, in the number of women, for example, on camera at the a ABC,

17:36

is that we've got so few because industries change, so dramatically.

17:41

I remember probably in the early to mid eighties, we would've had 45 people on

17:46

the camera roster, and I think maybe we had one woman for at that time.

17:51

Whereas now we've got six people on the camera roster

17:53

and all the rest are casuals. Part of me is really surprised.

18:11

I'm still being activist and in fact activist at all.

18:15

When, when I was particularly growing up in this, you know,

18:18

uh, when I was trying to think about being trans in the fifties,

18:21

sixties, seventies, it seems that.

18:25

There weren't many choices. If you are going to be trans, you had to pass so well that nobody would ever

18:31

realise that you were trans and that, you know, people call that going

18:35

high, stealth, or, or basically if you look, think of it in a sociological

18:39

terms, there's three choices. Either you can , try and conform to gender norms.

18:45

For example, a trans woman would portray a very stereotypical,

18:49

you know, version of womanhood rather than just be themselves.

18:54

Another possibility is, which Mary Douglas talks about, is like pollution,

18:59

where you just push the edges of gender and say, I'm, I might have a

19:03

beard, but I'm gonna wear a dress. You know? And occasionally you see people who do that, it's really high stress

19:09

to be, to in sense, polluting.

19:11

That's Mary Douglass's version of the word. But then, then there's a way of sort of being a bit in between

19:16

where in some circumstances you sort of pass and other circumstances

19:20

you are activist or are out.

19:23

When you live in the borderlands, there are some parts of your life.

19:31

Whereas, you know, for, for most trans people, they have

19:36

lots of family who aren't trans. And so when you go to a family function, some families would insist

19:41

that they were dressed back in their old gender at those family functions.

19:47

But you know, for me, I guess, I guess I am a borderlands person

19:51

in that, you know, I look quite female, but you know, when I go to

19:55

the supermarket, I don't wear a sign saying, you know, I'm transsexual.

19:59

Mainly because I just wanna do some shopping. I don't actually want to spend my whole day talking about gender to people.

20:05

And to an extent I find it a bit boring because I've thought about

20:09

it so much, mainly because I had to,

20:15

One of my first ways of experimenting with how the workplace would, would

20:19

deal with my gender nonconformity at one level, I suppose is that when we

20:25

had parties, particularly if there were fancy dress parties, I would

20:28

nearly always, if it was a theme. For example, I remember there was a, um, one of the themes was, you

20:34

know, international and everybody had to dress in international style.

20:39

I dressed as a Spanish woman, you know, with a mantilla and you know, big,

20:43

big dress and all that sort of stuff. And you know, I was very popular at that party.

20:48

And I went, oh, okay. that's interesting. And you know another one.

20:52

We had to go as superheroes, and so of course I went as Wonder Woman, which I

20:55

made the costume myself, was quite good. So to an extent I was experimenting a little bit with

21:02

how people would deal with that. What I realised as I, in my twenties and early thirties was I had done

21:12

is I'd separated my emotions and my logic, my logical brain, my head

21:19

was saying, you're really a bloke. Just get over it and deal with it.

21:23

My emotional brain, and this came from a very, very young age, like when I

21:27

was, you know, three or four, I just thought my parents were dumb for not

21:31

realising I was a girl, that's part of my emotional brain.

21:34

My heart just felt that I'm a woman and they were in conflict, and the way

21:38

I dealt with that was just by my head and heart, just not working together.

21:42

So it became very, very stressful in my late thirties.

21:47

And what happened was that, um, effectively, I, I had to go to

21:50

mediation between my head and my heart. And so the way I dealt with that was my head said, okay,

21:58

you can live as a woman. Whereas my heart said, I can live as a woman.

22:04

It's the same sentence. And to that extent, we agreed with a bit of a different emphasis, isn't it?

22:10

And so what that meant was I got to a point where once I had

22:14

dealt with it, I went, well, oh well, I'm gonna transition now.

22:19

One of the ways I dealt with my emotions during my twenties and thirties was

22:24

by trying to turn them off, not have them, and logical me said, well, the way

22:29

to get have emotions is to do acting. And so I went and did acting classes and I was of course useless at first

22:35

cause I couldn't express any emotion or I didn't want to express emotion.

22:39

But once I started to express emotion, I realised what my emotions were,

22:42

and all of a sudden went, shit, I have to do something about this.

22:45

Anyway. So I ended up after the mediation going, okay, well I'm going to transition.

22:51

So initially I thought, well, I just wanna disappear into society as a woman.

22:56

Um, because you know, I'm fairly slight and probably,

22:59

you know, and probably can. And so I actually went back to uni and finished my degree.

23:04

I did a science degree in genetics. Unlike electrical engineering, there's a lot, a lot of women in

23:09

genetics and I went, you know, I could be a lady scientist.

23:18

When I told the ABC what I was doing, one of the managers

23:20

offered me a redundancy package within about 30 seconds.

23:24

And, and I went, oh.

23:26

He said, well, don't you wanna go away? And so nobody knows you your past and just deal, deal with it that way.

23:32

And then I went, if I did that, that means I'm being transphobic.

23:37

And I realised I did have a bit of internalised transphobia and I thought

23:41

it would be really healthy to get over my internalised transphobia.

23:45

Dunno quite how just mostly by just staying.

23:48

Now I, I've got a lot of angst in those first couple of years

23:52

from, from straight guys. And you remember, um, um, this happened in 1990, so I was

23:58

32 years cuter than I am now. And one of the guys look in this canteen queue stood back and looked

24:04

me up and down and said, "you ought to have transsexual tattooed on your head.

24:09

So blokes like me aren't tricked into being poofs", and I told

24:13

him he was an idiot , of course. But I realised that was actually in many ways the case in that.

24:21

Straight guys, particularly we're talking in, in the nineties,

24:24

if they found you attractive, felt they were being tricked.

24:27

But then I realised that if, um, a gay guy found me attractive,

24:30

you know, people would feel I tricked him into being straight.

24:33

And if a straight woman found me attractive, people would say, I've

24:35

tricked her into being lesbian. But if a lesbian found me attractive.

24:38

Um, people would say, I've tricked her into cis normativity.

24:42

So I realised that only those who can see me beyond gender can

24:45

really relate in a healthy way. But once I got through

24:48

this difficult stage. And you know, the first stage, I first step, I suppose was just, you know,

24:54

portraying myself as a, as a woman at work and you know, some of the

24:58

women were really lovely when guys gave me a hard time in the canteen.

25:03

A lot of the women will go up, will go up to them and give them a hard

25:05

time for giving me a hard time, which I thought was really lovely too.

25:09

Some of the guys just were thought it was, I was now sexually

25:11

available to them anytime they wanted, which wasn't the case.

25:19

So even though part of me feels I just want to rest and, and trans

25:29

isn't such a big deal, what, what's everybody carrying on about?

25:32

But then everybody is carrying on about it particular, and you're

25:35

seeing, we're seeing it in the UK, in the US and, you know, we

25:39

are seeing, um, anti-trans people running for parliament in Australia.

25:46

There's an old saying, which I think is a Daoist saying actually you catch

25:49

more flies with honey than vinegar.

25:52

And so basically when, when there's a lot of negative stories, um, being

25:57

about trans, rather than go and argue with them, which I'll just get

26:02

stressed and they'll get stressed, I rather than that, I go and try and

26:06

do a positive story somewhere else. I try and do a positive story, um, to try and counter.

26:18

You've been listening to the Prima Donna Podcast.

26:21

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