In the olden days, one of my jobs back in, ooh, that was the, the early seventies. I was on the lineup crew and when we had something like, um, you know, Kamal and the ABC show band, we put out about 60 mics and you know, sort of basically one for every instrument. And you know, it took ages of course, and I dunno how they actually mixed it. Cause of the desk only had about 30 inputs. Welcome to season seven of the Prima Donna Podcast, Sonic Portraits of Australian Artists.
This audio was recorded and produced on Wurundjeri Country. I pay respects to elders past and present. The first episode in this series features the infamous Julie Peters, legendary in media. Having worked at the ABC for more than 50 years, and tireless advocate for trans rights. To find out more about Julie, about the project and to hear more episodes like this one, visit prima donna podcast.com.
Well, I fell into the ABC by accident because, well, I was already uni dropout, you know, so I'm, I'm very advanced at my age. I dropped out of uni at 19, I think it was, and what I was finding I was enjoying at uni was student theatre. Then I saw this ad for you know an operations job at the abc and I went, oh, maybe I could just learn about telecine and stay six months or so and, and you know, then I go back to theatre.
But anyway, it turned out that I stayed 52 years, but when I joined in the early seventies, telecine was still black and white. I felt like there was a lot of history because nearly everybody, particularly the production people and the actors, had all come from theatre because telecine was still very new. And it felt like in many ways you're working in theatre, uh, rather than how telecine feels today. Shows were done either live or as live.
In that you'd actually record a segment with four cameras. We did a, a ki's show called Adventure Island. And, um, a soapy called Bellbird. So if you were doing Bellbird, they'd actually roll the opening titles. Then they would just cut to the studio and do the first scene. And once they were happy with that, they would then rearrange all the cameras and go to a different set and do the second scene. And we'd do it as an add-on edit, and there was no post-production.
So we had somebody in the telecine booth who was playing the dogs barking and the, and the birds tweeting and that sort of thing. And on Adventure Island, we actually had a little small band over in the corner. And, uh, what I remember about Adventure Island, the Celeste, the Celeste, gave it a very different feel to a lot of other kids shows. So anybody had an idea it'd go ding, ding, ding on the Celeste. And it gave it a quite a cute feel.
When we started color, most of us didn't know much about it. Cause most of the guys had come from the PMG, you know, postmaster general's department. And so we actually brought some lighting people over from the BBC. They'd give us basic lighting training. And what was interesting at first was that when people first get into colour there, there's a tendency to get really bright colours.
But the BBC guy, was very quick in emphasiding, particularly for drama, we have to be subtle because that's far more natural, and particularly in that first say five to 10 years of color, we had to assume that most people were watching it in black and white anyway.
So we had to be black and white compatible in my first couple of years at the ABC the first thing they'd actually let me do, which was related to performance, was I was a boom operator, and this is way, way before people had radio mics. So when you had six actors in a room in a set, it was always a three wall set.
The cameras were then sitting on the side of the wall so they could get closeups and people looked across the room and in the middle pretty well usually was the microphone boom, an extendable pole I can still remember just turning. You can't see on the radio, but I'm, I'm turning my hand. It was quite performative in that you actually had to fit into the flow of the actor's performance to get the audio correct.
The other thing, which I also learned about was that, that if somebody was in a wide shot, you could actually bring the microphone back because that would give audio perspective. Camera was much the same. The flow of your camera work, because you're a team of three or four camera operators, usually had to totally fit with what the performers were doing. And so, for example, if an actor looked to the right, that was a cue to either pan the camera or cut to another camera.
The bit I found difficult initially was absolute sheer concentration of getting the simple things right every time because in a way they didn't really care if you could do very complicated effects. They're more far more worried about whether or not you cut to the right camera on the news. You know? Because yeah, if you made a mistake on a lot of those proteles, unlike today when we were pre-recording cause we were live to air, the whole East coast saw your mistake.
We hardly do anything live to air. Although, I suppose proteles like Q and A feel like they're live, but normally what happens, which the viewer doesn't realise that we record an hour and a half for an hour and then, you know, try and use the more interesting bits. When we started Recovery, I realised that we owned about 220 parcans, which are a thousand watt narrow lights. That was what was used in all the rock and roll venues around Melbourne pretty well.
But you know, lighting was moving on at that stage and they were now moving lights and protelemable lights and things like that, but we couldn't afford those. So, uh, I managed to find, you know, just lots of really interesting ways of doing patterns with all these parcans. And normally I would pick the colors based on how I emotionally related to the music.
But what was interesting, one of the lighting crew told me that, um, the looks I had created, because I was trying to be as imaginative as possible, and I'll come back to how I chose the colours in a sec, is that, um, those looks were being pretty well copied That following week on, Hey, hey, it's Saturday. I took that as quite a compliment, but I must admit I didn't actually watch to see if that was true. Around about that time, I was also doing a little bit, a few acting classes.
And some singing lessons as well and I realised that, that, uh, particularly in Bel canto singing, that they talk a lot about, there's really only three emotions. Mad, glad, and sad, you know, happy, angry, and sad. Yeah. Sort of in my head I said, well, you know, sad is blue, angry is red, and happy is yellow. So what I would tend to do is when I was trying to decide what colours to use for a band, it became a bit of a formula in my head. I would listen to the music and.
Okay, what emotion do I feel? That means I'll use those colours and then depending on the rhythm. you know Cause a lot of pieces started off with, they're really loud bit at the start and, and they might do a lot of fast light changing, or maybe it started off very slowly and then partway through the song, the emotion changed. That's how I would choose my colors.
In the early nineties, one of the women who was sort of working as a casual in ABC operations just sort of said casually to me, how do you get into lighting? How's a woman get into lighting? 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 people who are, you know, totally at that stage, except for me, nearly everybody in lighting was a bloke.
They're all camera guys on particularly doing news and 7:30 report and those sort of shows. And so I went to the training officer who totally by coincidence, is now the managing director of the ABC David Anderson. And I said, I wanna run lighting course for women, and he looked at me and and said, okay, let's look at this. And it possibly was, it looks good on the figures to run 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 managed to get studios for 10 days. So it was a 10 day course. Because what I realised that a lot of women didn't have is they didn't have like basic sub electricity in terms of, you know, how many lights can you plug into the one outlet without, um, you know, blowing a fuse. And they didn't quite get optics because most of 'em didn't do physics at school.
So I gave them the basics of electricity and basics of optics and basics of colour. Because if you're gonna light, you need to understand colur temperature and the fact that, you know, different likes are different colours. And if you want somebody to, to look consistent or look good, you, you've gotta actually at least understand what you're doing. You can use some, you know, really ugly fluorescent lighting to make some for a baddy or, or to make something look ugly.
Under a lot of circumstances, you don't wanna do that. 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 in lighting, we remember the shape. We don't remember the way the lighting is on their face. And so that, you know when when there's really steep lighting above a face, there's actually quite deep shadows around the eyes and that sort of stuff.
And I, I remember reading about, you know, some of the classic portraiture, um, painters from the 17th and 18th century, and I looked at the lighting they use and I went, oh yeah, that, that's quite interesting. You know, and, and in many ways I felt that that was one of the best ways to start to learn lighting, was to look at paintings and, and, um, then I also start to look at advertising photos and things like that. Photos in magazines.
I like the look of, and so I, I might have been doing that for fashion as well, but I was also doing it for lighting to see Okay, how did they light this particular, yeah, woman in this pose Where I can play the most in terms of just looking at an individual face, because to me, the, the individual face and lighting an individual face is the key to lighting.
I did it on news readers, so you know, I would adjust the light up and down, physical height and sideways, and then I'd possibly put in three back lights. The reason I often put in three back lights is because some people had black hair, some people had white hair, some people had no hair, and so I tended to put one in this dead center on top of the head and the two to the side of that on the shoulders, but not the head, which.
If somebody had, you know, white hair, I could not light the hair and light the shoulders and make that the back light. Whereas other people, I might put all three up, particularly in the eighties with a lot of women with big hair. I could go crazy. But then what would happen is you had to then take into account that particularly in the early eighties, we were still going crazy with chroma key or green screen or blue screen as it's now caught, and they weren't very good in those days.
You get really rough edges around here, particularly if somebody with really curly hair. It was really hard to get a good key. In some studios, we could only do one colour because the studio was wired that way. So if somebody came in with blue eyes and you had a blue screen behind them, you then had to be really careful about, you know, not having the picture showing through their eyes.
Because of the era I was in, we were all expected to do out, you know, outside broadcast as well as studios as well as the news, as well as spending a bit of time in telasinic rolling films to air or whatever. I mean, the first OB I went to was, was a running carnival, but they wouldn't trust me with anything. So all I got to do is the graphic. Which sort of said ABC at the end and the name of the swimmer, or the name of the presenter or something.
In those days we didn't have a graphic generator. We actually had cardboard graphics like letraset on black card, which cameras pointed at, and then the vision mixer would, would combine them. And we did that live and we even, you know, we did the news that way too. Each camera in the newsroom could pan to a graphic standard. And so, you know, the graphics people were making, you know, letraset graphics all afternoon for, for whatever stories were on.
With the lighting courses for women, I, I took the attitude that a lot of it wasn't about them getting into lighting necessarily. Look, some of them did and some of them were like documentary makers. And what that meant was that, you know, they were very much on minimal budgets where they were, you know, if they could help with the lighting, it meant that they could do it with just two people rather than three or four people. I think they were the ones who used it the most.
And you know, that certainly happened. Documentary makers used it because the way I started, I always, I started with with portraiture of a human face and we, we could all practice on each other as well. And then, then I managed to get studio crews. Yeah, we had a full, a full TV studio with four cameras and so we used it a little bit for training you know, camera operators, but also training directors.
So we had, you know, young women who wanted to direct for camera coverage, who would then direct the piece we were doing as well. So we had a rock and roll stage. We had a piece of classical music, which was a lutist and two singers, and we had a drama. So we did a three wall soapy sort of style thing, which was, you know, four cameras. And it was a scene from a play where there was three or four people and, and we were able to cut between all the cameras in, in an interactive way.
So my crew lit those three events. In the first version, it was only a ABC women who did it. And, um, we had people come in from ABC Darwin, ABC Sydney, and do the course. What I thought was also interesting, a number of the, um, people in, in news said, well, how come you're not doing a, a lighting course for men? I went, I said, look around. I can't help it. If you, you, nobody's teaching lighting except me. I get a grip. You know, you totally, uh, control the industry anyway.
But what I thought was just as valuable is that I was actually giving people who wanted to be a director, for example, language for speaking to a lighting person because of the way I approached it. And I, in many ways, I think that was how it was used the most. In the end, it gave these women language, Which meant that they could get a look they liked from a DOP or a lighting director in the future, and I certainly had a good feedback about that.
In fact, one, one of the women was a member of WIFT Women in Film and telecine, and she went to the WIFT committee and said, wow, look what Julie did. Can we get her? Anyway, cut a long story shot. We did it a year later again, but this time it was half ABC and half external industry. WIFT organized AFC funding. Yeah, to help bring external people in. And we, we had some, um, a lot of in, you know, uh, industry people come and do that course, which, um, I was quite pleased at that.
And again, I think the people who appreciate it the most were people who were, who weren't using it for lighting, but using it to understand lighting so that they could get the look lighting looks they wanted from their DOP or or lighting director. I have seen things change in some ways. And it nearly always my opinion for the better.
But for example, There's still very few women I see on camera, but I remember the ABC hiring young women in mid seventies with the idea of trying to get women on camera. But, but in the end, they tended to drift into other jobs like editing and telasini rather than camera. But you know, certainly a couple were on camera for a long time, but, you know, camera can be camera in broadcast telecine in many ways can be limiting in that.
It was broader when, when I was a young youngster because a camera operator could be doing football on Saturday, divine Service on Sunday, and then an opera on Wednesday, or yeah, Wednesday and Thursday, and they were good at all those things. Whereas now nearly all crews tend to be far more specialised. You have people who specialise in drama, people who specialise in sport. And even though to me, I go, what? It's not that different.
And, and, and I feel just as comfortable doing drama sport and rock and roll, but it just doesn't really happen these days. That's one way that industry's changed a lot. One of the reasons I, I don't think many, I I've seen like a huge increase in, in the number of women, for example, on camera at the a ABC, is that we've got so few because industries change, so dramatically.
I remember probably in the early to mid eighties, we would've had 45 people on the camera roster, and I think maybe we had one woman for at that time. Whereas now we've got six people on the camera roster and all the rest are casuals. Part of me is really surprised. I'm still being activist and in fact activist at all. When, when I was particularly growing up in this, you know, uh, when I was trying to think about being trans in the fifties, sixties, seventies, it seems that.
There weren't many choices. If you are going to be trans, you had to pass so well that nobody would ever realise that you were trans and that, you know, people call that going high, stealth, or, or basically if you look, think of it in a sociological terms, there's three choices. Either you can , try and conform to gender norms. For example, a trans woman would portray a very stereotypical, you know, version of womanhood rather than just be themselves.
Another possibility is, which Mary Douglas talks about, is like pollution, where you just push the edges of gender and say, I'm, I might have a beard, but I'm gonna wear a dress. You know? And occasionally you see people who do that, it's really high stress to be, to in sense, polluting. That's Mary Douglass's version of the word. But then, then there's a way of sort of being a bit in between where in some circumstances you sort of pass and other circumstances you are activist or are out.
When you live in the borderlands, there are some parts of your life. Whereas, you know, for, for most trans people, they have lots of family who aren't trans. And so when you go to a family function, some families would insist that they were dressed back in their old gender at those family functions.
But you know, for me, I guess, I guess I am a borderlands person in that, you know, I look quite female, but you know, when I go to the supermarket, I don't wear a sign saying, you know, I'm transsexual. Mainly because I just wanna do some shopping. I don't actually want to spend my whole day talking about gender to people.
And to an extent I find it a bit boring because I've thought about it so much, mainly because I had to, One of my first ways of experimenting with how the workplace would, would deal with my gender nonconformity at one level, I suppose is that when we had parties, particularly if there were fancy dress parties, I would nearly always, if it was a theme. For example, I remember there was a, um, one of the themes was, you know, international and everybody had to dress in international style.
I dressed as a Spanish woman, you know, with a mantilla and you know, big, big dress and all that sort of stuff. And you know, I was very popular at that party. And I went, oh, okay. that's interesting. And you know another one. We had to go as superheroes, and so of course I went as Wonder Woman, which I made the costume myself, was quite good. So to an extent I was experimenting a little bit with how people would deal with that.
What I realised as I, in my twenties and early thirties was I had done is I'd separated my emotions and my logic, my logical brain, my head was saying, you're really a bloke. Just get over it and deal with it. My emotional brain, and this came from a very, very young age, like when I was, you know, three or four, I just thought my parents were dumb for not realising I was a girl, that's part of my emotional brain.
My heart just felt that I'm a woman and they were in conflict, and the way I dealt with that was just by my head and heart, just not working together. So it became very, very stressful in my late thirties. And what happened was that, um, effectively, I, I had to go to mediation between my head and my heart. And so the way I dealt with that was my head said, okay, you can live as a woman. Whereas my heart said, I can live as a woman. It's the same sentence.
And to that extent, we agreed with a bit of a different emphasis, isn't it? And so what that meant was I got to a point where once I had dealt with it, I went, well, oh well, I'm gonna transition now. One of the ways I dealt with my emotions during my twenties and thirties was by trying to turn them off, not have them, and logical me said, well, the way to get have emotions is to do acting.
And so I went and did acting classes and I was of course useless at first cause I couldn't express any emotion or I didn't want to express emotion. But once I started to express emotion, I realised what my emotions were, and all of a sudden went, shit, I have to do something about this. Anyway. So I ended up after the mediation going, okay, well I'm going to transition. So initially I thought, well, I just wanna disappear into society as a woman.
Um, because you know, I'm fairly slight and probably, you know, and probably can. And so I actually went back to uni and finished my degree. I did a science degree in genetics. Unlike electrical engineering, there's a lot, a lot of women in genetics and I went, you know, I could be a lady scientist. When I told the ABC what I was doing, one of the managers offered me a redundancy package within about 30 seconds. And, and I went, oh. He said, well, don't you wanna go away?
And so nobody knows you your past and just deal, deal with it that way. And then I went, if I did that, that means I'm being transphobic. And I realised I did have a bit of internalised transphobia and I thought it would be really healthy to get over my internalised transphobia. Dunno quite how just mostly by just staying. Now I, I've got a lot of angst in those first couple of years from, from straight guys. And you remember, um, um, this happened in 1990, so I was 32 years cuter than I am now.
And one of the guys look in this canteen queue stood back and looked me up and down and said, "you ought to have transsexual tattooed on your head. So blokes like me aren't tricked into being poofs", and I told him he was an idiot , of course. But I realised that was actually in many ways the case in that. Straight guys, particularly we're talking in, in the nineties, if they found you attractive, felt they were being tricked.
But then I realised that if, um, a gay guy found me attractive, you know, people would feel I tricked him into being straight. And if a straight woman found me attractive, people would say, I've tricked her into being lesbian. But if a lesbian found me attractive. Um, people would say, I've tricked her into cis normativity. So I realised that only those who can see me beyond gender can really relate in a healthy way. But once I got through this difficult stage.
And you know, the first stage, I first step, I suppose was just, you know, portraying myself as a, as a woman at work and you know, some of the women were really lovely when guys gave me a hard time in the canteen. A lot of the women will go up, will go up to them and give them a hard time for giving me a hard time, which I thought was really lovely too. Some of the guys just were thought it was, I was now sexually available to them anytime they wanted, which wasn't the case.
So even though part of me feels I just want to rest and, and trans isn't such a big deal, what, what's everybody carrying on about? But then everybody is carrying on about it particular, and you're seeing, we're seeing it in the UK, in the US and, you know, we are seeing, um, anti-trans people running for parliament in Australia. There's an old saying, which I think is a Daoist saying actually you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
And so basically when, when there's a lot of negative stories, um, being about trans, rather than go and argue with them, which I'll just get stressed and they'll get stressed, I rather than that, I go and try and do a positive story somewhere else. I try and do a positive story, um, to try and counter. You've been listening to the Prima Donna Podcast. To find out more about this project and to hear more episodes like this one, visit prima donna podcast.com.