I thought [Peth] was a very beautiful place because of the lovely frontages and the architecture that you saw there, which have not been preserved. They have nearly all gone, the T & G Building in the Terrace and the United Services Hotel in the Terrace. We'd wander through from Hay Street to the Terrace and look around and give ourselves a bit of a walk. We might make it that we'd go up to St Mary's Cathedral and look around there, because we were great walkers, because we didn't have a car – a good excuse. I can remember the shops were marvellous with their frontages. 

 

I just absolutely adored going down Hay Street, which I don't adore now. It wasn't a mall. The tram used to go through the middle of it. You had to be very careful not to be hit by a tram. It was a narrow street for a tramline, which used to go one way this way and one way that way. But it did have character. I know that big places like Coles weren't there, but there was another one. We had Selfridges of London tried to come out to Perth, Western Australia at one stage and it didn't succeed. Really it was a very good-looking street. Stewart Dawson's was a big jewellers, which was on the corner of Hay Street and Barrack Street. Latterly there was a news theatre in Beaufort Street, between Hay Street and Murray. 

 

There was the Ambassadors Theatre, which was next to a chemist. The Ambassadors Chemist, because it was Ian Percival's theatre. It had a wonderful curtain which I believe is at His Majesty's now. It had a great flowing bird. It was a beautiful outline of a bird which was filled in with all sorts of colours. We had, of course, the usual organist who played there. At one stage they did have a bevy of girls who used to come out and a singer. That was good - it was wonderful. It had a moveable ceiling, which was also painted with stars, so that was the sky. It was open before the show when it was a very hot night, because it seemed then we had a lot of hot nights.

 

It would rise up from the ground – that's right, from under the ground, yes. I can't remember if any other theatre had one. I think that possibly... I don't know whether the Grand did, that was in Murray Street. The Ambassadors did. It had a very, what we thought, was an Eastern décor. It was very much an Eastern décor we thought. Persia in those days - that's Iran today. It was wonderful just to go in there and watch the ceiling go by. It had a dress circle as well... I think it had a dress circle. Am I right? I'm not too sure. But anyhow it had a lot of little alcoves going around the place, with statues in them, yes. I can't think what the statues were at all. I know in the Capitol Theatre, which lasted as a place where they put on large shows in the end, they had heads of Valentino and a head of Greta Garbo and wonderful décor too. That was more restrained, it wasn't Eastern as the other one was. 

 

It was over the top. We didn't think so, we thought it was marvellous, what an Eastern Theatre might look like. We didn't know quite where Eastern was when we used to come up there sometimes. When we got a bit older and would see an afternoon show, a matinee and really enjoyed the luxuriousness of it. The stairs we went up, they were all marvellous.

 

There was another theatre not very far from it in Hay Street, called the Theatre Royal. I don't recall much of the Theatre Royal at all, because I used to go to the Grand Theatre which is in Murray Street, the Metro Theatre which was in William Street, the Capitol Theatre and the Ambassadors I used to go to. But there were more than that. Gosh all this recalls – and it's not a case of recall, it's a case of I should have gone to the Battye Library and looked it up in the books. I haven't been there much to do any study at all, because I've been busy. I've been very busy.

 

I used to read the paper every morning, in fact we all read the paper every morning, there was a fight for it. But on the other hand nothing ever struck me as being that there was going to be a war because I had discovered that I had relatives living in Melbourne. I said to my father after I had been working a while, "I'm going to take my holidays and go to Melbourne and I'll stay with my cousin Monica." He said, "All right." So I went to Melbourne. I saved up the money and I went to Melbourne. I lived in West Footscray. I had saved up two lots of leave, so I had six weeks' leave. I immediately went to the theatre and I saw everything that there was on in Melbourne at that time. I thought this was wonderful and if there was a place like that in Perth I was going to belong to it. I didn't realise I was seeing in Melbourne the professional theatre and in Perth there was only amateur theatre. There was no professional theatre for local people at that time. His Majesty's was going strong and there were lots of things. We went to everything that my father thought proper at His Majesty's.

 

Actually, as I got older I saw quite a few of the shows that were the Tivoli shows, which were lower class than seeing any great Shakespeare or anything like that. I didn't see any great Shakespeare then, but I saw everything that then I could afford.

 

The Tivoli was a variety show, but it was a variety show like the Palladium was in England, which had shows – sometimes French shows in England. Some of the shows would come out to Australia. They were short items that were different. If you saw the Tivoli in Melbourne, you'd often see that one on tour when it would go to Adelaide and then to Perth. Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. A revue show. When shows were done, shows were – now how shall I describe it? This is a revue show. I subsequently wrote a lot of them for the Repertory Club. They were called On the Beam. They all bright, there was no sorrow and gloom and doom in a revue show, nothing like that. They'd open often with a wonderful opening number, very important, which mostly had the name of the show in it like In Paris Tonight, when every number could bear some relation to Paris. If it didn't they made it up. They always had a comic, possibly had two. 

 

The comic sometimes had a feed who would be a man who sang a baritone solo or something like that, and wonderful things of the day, wonderful songs of the day, which were pretty trite, but we loved them, the public loved them. His Majesty's people could tell you all about this, but really they did some wonderful shows. Unfortunately I never saw any straight shows at His Majesty's at all. I always went to the variety shows. I think that was because although I loved plays and straight plays and I loved drama, my liking was for music and I always wanted something musical. A lot of people would say it was the beginning of a lot of the vaudevillians that appeared in Australia at that time.

 

Coralie Condon interviewed by John Bannister, 2007

OH200706 | City of Perth Cultural Collections