Geoffrey Rush’s acceptance speech for the

 2009 AFI Raymond Longford Award.

 Presented 1 August 2009 in Melbourne at the inaugural

 AFI Outstanding Achievement Dinner.

Neil Armfield, theatre director, long-time collaborator and close friend of Geoffrey Rush, presented him with the 2009 AFI Raymond Longford Award. Here is the speech Rush gave from the podium as he accepted the award:

Thanks, Neil. Thank you AFI. The marvellous forty-one year existence of this award pretty much mirrors the extraordinary journey since the rebirth of our industry itself, which has provided most of us here tonight with the mature job descriptions that we now collectively enjoy. The overworn cliché for this kind of moment is Sally Field’s mis-quote which was actually “ you like me, right now, you like me”.

That’s not what I’m thinking.

However, what they always leave out is the more interesting and poignant preface to that emotional flood which was “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect”….not as snappy a soundbite or as ripe for parody but it rings some bells for me. And is probably true of our industry as a whole.

I am moved, tinged with an understandable sense of being over-indulged, in being offered this exceptional accolade. Especially from my most frequent artistic collaborator who also happens to be one of my closest friends. And knowing that over four decades, it has honoured, as well as writers, producers, directors, critics, distributors, five giant names from the thespian pantheon – Don Crosby, John Meillon, Jack Thompson, Bud Tingwell and Ray Barrett. All diverse heavy-hitters. I am humbled to be the sixth.

I was secretly dreaming of a Logie.

That’s not true. But I have just been reading about fractals. You may remember their dazzling intergalactic and fragile microscopic beauty from the opening credits of Robert Connolly’s film The Bank. They are described as a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is at least, approximately a reduced-sized copy of the whole…think cauliflower where each individual floret is a smaller version of the whole vegetable ….fine structures too irregular to be easily described in conventional geometric language. For more vivid examples look no further than natural objects - which include snowflakes, clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, broccoli, blood vessels and pulmonary vessels. To that list I think we can now safely add – a career in the arts.

Initially, I thought, for me it was going to be astronomy.

In the early sixties John Glenn had just orbited the earth, seen the lights of Perth, and in that Cape Canaveral drawl, confirmed from miles above us that we existed. On the ground at that time, Australian adults were apparently moping around hunched and culturally cringing, looking like a John Brack painting, or being beguiled by Menzies into the afternoon light of a long rather bland Presbyterian kind of day, under the pressure of British artistic superiority and centuries-old values and experience scoffing at our colonial inadequacy. But I was feverishly osmosing the daring exploits of the Mercury space program. One map of the solar system in one showbag was the YouTube of that time.

I'd fallen in love with our planetary system. My imagination went ape. The wonder and the scale of it all. I adored the speculation that if a basketball in my front yard in suburban Brizzie was the sun, then Mercury would be a pea about eight inches away, the Earth a marble near our letterbox, Jupiter was an orange in Lutwyche, a couple of tram stops from our place, and so on - with Pluto being a little silver ball cake decoration at my cousin’s place near Coorparoo, on the other side of town. I brought up all this uncontrolled giddy stuff in my pre-pubescent head with the Vocational Guidance Officer in year Nine. “Sir, Uranus is a golfball in the middle of the Albion Fiveways!” – the blunt reply was “You’ll need Maths 2 and Physics.” No-one needs Maths 2 and Physics!

Thank God though my primal Primary school pleasure was getting up and doing skits. Whichever side of the brain it is that fires up and favors this persuasion, I had it – this innate predilection nurtured me through the running of School Drama Clubs and radical University theatre, yet all through that period no-one could ever ever consider this to be a conceivable vocation…It was the no-go zone. The arts landscape, if not bleak, was certainly bare. In ‘68, the year that this award was conceived, and I was dutifully doing Maths 2 and Physics for Matric, I read in the paper that the esteemed but outcast English director, the great Michael Powell was shooting a film not only in Australia but in Queensland. With James Mason and a teenage Helen Mirren. This made no sense whatsoever. Because films just didn’t happen here. And they hadn’t for several decades. Their creation and value belonged somewhere else.

But this wasn’t the case at all with rockbands. They existed in abundance. The pub scene via TV from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and even Brizzie was giving us The Easybeats, The Loved Ones, The Twilights, The Masters’ Apprentices, The Purple Hearts - a list that barely touches the sides. Here was inspiring Aussie-made stuff. So I found some sort of outlet by being in one. My creative energy somehow leading eventually to a gig at the Queensland Theatre Company. And I’ve ridden shotgun with the industry ever since.

A career in the arts is NOT like the slogan “Queensland – Beautiful One Day, Perfect the next.” No, the road chosen is twisty… and you meet more than a fair share of forks and T intersections…with lots of dead ends. In our cultural ranking, it’s always a dirt road… and a back one at that. With soft edges. It’s always nighttime… and foggy. You have no headlights, and definitely no map. Nor in the eyes of those who favour a market-place community, do you warrant a license. Mostly you’re not even sure where it is you’re particularly heading. And this whole metaphor comes from a speaker who can’t even actually drive.

So if there is any valuable meaning to the words Outstanding Achievement, it probably refers to merely having gotten into a car in the first place.

Lest this should sound like a whinge, which is not its intention, let me declare it as a distillation of regular conversations I share with fellow-travellers. Chats too often dominated by a sense of uncertainty, unpredictability, isolation - too frequently laced with a whiff of despair.

The minor slings and arrows mean little. You learn to cope with the misspelt names in reviews…Geoffrey Bush… Goeffrey Usher… the entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Film where the Shine entry leaves out an ‘r’ and I’m Geoffey.

… or, y’know… being told in the mid-seventies by a visiting English director that he had never seen white-hot acting on the Australian stage. A cruel back-hander but one that inspired a life-long challenge.

….The ubiquitous and insidious notion that the box office take is the major measure of success. It only took Wake In Fright 38 years to prove that one wrong…

OR - In the year when I shot or was shooting Pirates, Swimming Upstream, Ned Kelly, The Banger Sisters, and voicing Harvie Krumpet and Finding Nemo, Channel Seven approached my agent asking whether I’d appear on an episode of Where Are They Now?

And what about the swipe at all of us when the AFI coverage in the media from the ceremony at the Princess a few years back was headlined as “Exhibitionists out in force on Exhibition St.” And I’m sorry, Cate Blanchett is much more than just a Helpmann Hottie.

OR - when I was trying online from New York recently to locate the review in The Age for August : Osage County (a major and exemplary piece of work from the MTC) and it just not being there! – nor in the Courier-Mail the review for Bille Brown’s School Of Arts - a play commissioned to celebrate 40 years of the QTC and 150 years of Qld as a state – just not there. Just the latest news about Katie Holmes’ Melbourne sightings, MasterChef’s sizzling ratings, tidbits about celebrity breakdowns and what John Butler, Sophie Monk and Chris Lilley all have in common is they head the list of Australia’s sexiest vegetarians. That’s what you get when you click on the Arts and Entertainment tab.

With the astonishing odds-defying and exponential growth in the film industry from the dry soil of forty years ago, I am baffled by how the disconnect in the media between what we do and how it’s perceived has grown wider and wider and sillier and sillier.

But to top it all off – did anyone ever read this very recent quote?

“Producing elite actors that only act, is no longer appropriate in Australia. The only way people are learning to sustain a real career in the theatre, for example, is if they can write the play, act, make their own costume and sell the tickets. If they’ve got the whole package of skills there’s a very good chance they will be able to find a niche and sustain themselves. The idea of someone being a specialist is a very old view.” End quote. Sadly that’s from an arts bureaucrat, heading one of our major teaching institutions. Education that starts at a point of compromise.

Would the footy fans among you ever accept that demeaning spreading-thin of skills in a Chris Judd or a Gary Ablett Junior?

It makes you realise how Pluto must have felt when it was downgraded to a dwarf planet. You’re just a misshapen rock a long way away from the sun.

But ah! The upside! Working with childhood heroes and mentors like Leo McKern, Willie Fennell, Gordon Chater, Ruth Cracknell, Frank Thring.

Working with and watching younger artists emerging from drama and film schools, schools that have blossomed like cauliflowers - and young artists becoming ‘complete’, supported with the knowledge that an industry has surrounded them since birth.

Working with the mob on Bran Nue Dae – an extraordinary eclectic cast of actors, singers and daredevils battling far greater odds and taking us to unheard of heights.

And above all meeting so many glorious like-minded, resilient and original practitioners who just keep on popping out of nowhere. People with irrepressibly tough spirits. Who know their destiny or at least that their aspiration is in the pursuit of excellence. Striving to be among the elite, yes, in the very best and only possible sense of the word. As applied to any discipline whether in musicianship, art, sport, science. Who have determinedly together hit the road that I spoke of earlier… because we enjoy motoring, taking in the ever-changing scenery, singing to the car radio, getting together - having car rallies.

But just as we are up to speed, we are suddenly at the STOP sign of a new T intersection. And the direction to take I think is really crucial. Turn right and suffer more of the Pluto-feeling of uselessness and not mattering? Turn left to the red-carpet stretching to infinity, a hazard with blinding lights and shrill bleating - meaningless frenzy?

I take rich inspiration from Mr Longford who would advise there’s only one way to go – foot to the floor, crash through the fence and boldly find your way cross country.

Thank you.