The Butcher, The Babysitter And The Bbq
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday March 13, 2001
Quambone has seen a few meat raffles in its time, but Meat, the play, was the town's first taste of professional theatre, writes Peter Cochrane.
``It doesn't matter if it's Humphrey B. Bear or the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, they're a good group of people and they'll all turn out for a good cause," says Liz Woodhill, the indefatigable secretary of the Quambone Parents & Citizens' Association.
Indeed, the good people of Quambone, a village near Coonamble in north-western NSW, did turn out on Saturday night. Not for Humphrey Bear, not for the SSO, but for Nick the butcher, or rather, Nick Meenahan, ex-butcher, now the star of a touring butcher-shop cabaret called Meat.
In Gulargambone the previous night, Meenahan had been breezily informed by a local woman after an incident-filled show: ``You're lucky to have me here, with the Choirboys [a Sydney rock band who topped the charts in 1987] playing in Coonamble tonight." He did not have such stiff competition in Quambone on Saturday, save for a wedding in Dubbo.
Quambone is home to about 80 adults. The village boasts a general store, a pub, two churches, a school with 40 pupils, a swimming pool, a hall and a library.
The library, not much bigger than a garden shed, opens for one hour two days a week. The stacks are changed every six months; school principal Jane Kibble reckons she has read every book on its shelves, bar the one about U-boats.
Quambone is a closeknit community, one which has resolutely weathered the vicissitudes of life in an isolated, sparsely populated area where drought can be followed by serious flooding, as happened in November.
It's where you usually create your own entertainment. Quambone's social calendar is dominated by the Marthaguy picnic races in July, when about 5,000 racegoers converge on the village overnight. But that's just one weekend of the year.
In the interim the P & C provides other opportunities to socialise with its fundraising efforts: in the past, they have included walkathons, a trivia night, a wine-and-cheese night to complement a photography exhibition in the hall. Meat raffles are a nice little earner.
However, on Saturday night, it was Meat, Quambone's first ever taste of professional theatre. ``We were nervous [about making a profit] at first," confesses Liz Woodhill. ``Particularly when originally it was going to be a Sunday night."
But, moved to Saturday, the show soon became a sell-out.
Nevertheless, preparations consumed Wood and her co-workers for 31/2 weeks. On Saturday the day began at 7am with a working bee at the hall. Trestle tables were set up under the village's Peace Tree, the freshly ironed and edged tablecloths laid, and bougainvillea and trumpet vine cut for table decoration. A makeshift bar was erected and outdoor lighting rigged up (further illumination was to be provided by a full moon).
After depositing their children, armed with sleeping bags and videos, at the school, the adults crammed into the Quambone and District War Memorial Hall, its tin roof cooled by a brief downpour earlier in the evening (which was fortunate, as the three ceiling fans are more decorative than functional).
Sitting on hard metal chairs, they watched a butcher turned actor play a butcher ``pleased to meet you, meat to please you" his catchcry the set dominated by an authentic butcher's block, the floor covered in sawdust. Over the course of an hour they saw him carve up a side of lamb local lamb, killed the previous day while ruminating on life in general, and the struggle of the old-fashioned family butcher to survive against competition from supermarkets in particular.
``A metaphor for the plight of country towns," observed the tour manager, Peter Hurry, from Albury-Wodonga's HotHouse Theatre, which is providing the technical support.
The male members of the audience many of whom work on or own farms, and as such are amateur butchers craned to check out Meenahan's technique when he started to sharpen his knives. Satisfied that he was, indeed, the genuine article, they relaxed back into their chairs.
In Gulargambone three men in the audience actually stood up to get a better view as Meenahan began to slice into the side of lamb. That was before a woman fainted, and the show had to be stopped for 20 minutes while the local volunteer ambulance officers, who had just returned to their seats from a call-out, attended to her.
However, in Quambone no-one passed out, nor as can happen did Meenahan have to cope with a barking dog next door, or with the sound of ring-pulls being ripped off stubbies of beer while he was in mid-sentence. The butcher's musings, punctuated with song-and-dance routines to taped music, struck a chord with the Quambone audience.
Both sexes laughed the men perhaps more uneasily at his observations about the relationship between a butcher and his female customers.
At the barbecue afterwards, Coonamble butcher John Scott gave Meenahan the thumbs-up, both for his skill with the boning knife and the veracity of his observations: ``A woman opens up to her butcher like a man does to his barber," Scott concurred.
Meenahan was rewarded with heartfelt, sustained applause at the show's end.
So was Karen Flakelar, who in absentia, received two rounds of applause.
Flakelar played a crucial role in the night's success.
Many of those who turned out in Quambone had paid $15 for the ticket and barbecue dinner which followed, and then chipped in $5 a head to pay Flakelar, the village's babysitter for the night. She had looked after 24 of Quambone's youngsters, aged between nine months and 12 years, in a classroom at the school while their parents went to the theatre.
Meat had been originally pencilled in for Quambone on Sunday night. But the babysitter who works for Home Care was committed that night, so the performance was brought forward 24 hours.
Flakelar, for her part, donated her fee towards the cost of a tree-planting scheme in Mungi Mungi Street, outside the school.
One of the happiest faces at the barbecue belonged to Cath Fogarty, the Coonamble-based regional arts development officer (previous job: working in education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in The Rocks).
After rolling her car on a gravel road in her first week at Coonamble, Fogarty bounced back to drive 65,000 work-related kilometres around the seven shires that comprise her region last year.
The Meat tour, which covers one-third of the State, has been organised by Outback Arts and South-West Arts and partially funded by a $20,000 grant from the NSW Government plus $5,000 in sponsorship from Clyde Agriculture.
In each centre a local presenter has been signed up for a standard fee of $800 (for towns with a population of less than 2,000) or $1,000 (more than 2,000).
In some towns it's the shire council, or perhaps the bowling club, which assumes the role of local presenter; in others, it's surprise casting in Berrigan, for example, Meat is being proudly presented by the National Party; in Barham by Machismo, a male support group.
Alas, a tour such as that by Meat is possible only about once a year.
``Meat was perfect for us," Fogarty said. ``Being a one-man show, it can be toured to small towns, and what's more, it's new Australian theatre not Shakespeare, not a Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and it's interesting to men."
Footnote: Yesterday marked the beginning of a three-day break for Nick Meenahan, his first since the tour began. He relaxed by cooking a leg of lamb for Cath Fogarty in Coonamble.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald