Inspired by April’s Heritage Festival, HELEN MUSA talks with a group of volunteers who have discovered some of the big showbiz names who have played at Canberra’s Albert Hall. 

In my line of work, I need reliable sources of information about the arts in Canberra, so one of my best friends is the Australian Live Performance Database, ausstage.edu.au.

For instance, in recent days I was looking for information on publicist Coralie Wood and, in a flash, Ausstage turned up details of a 1978 Fiddler on the Roof at Canberra Theatre. 

Not only was Wood on the cast list as the matchmaker Yenta, I also found the famous baritone Ronald Maconaghie as Tevye, Bill Stephens as director in one of his earliest Canberra productions, leading dance writer Stephanie Burridge as choreographer and founding director of the Canberra Theatre Centre, Terry Vaughan, as conductor.

You can click on any of those names and find out much more. 

It is my melancholy duty to write more and more obituaries of Canberra Theatre identities and once again, Ausstage comes to the rescue, with much more dependable information than you’d hear around the foyers.

I was excited to receive an invitation to visit the ACT Heritage Library, where a team of volunteers, working under library director  Antoinette Buchanan, had just completed a nine-month project to document nearly 500 events held at Albert Hall, well ahead of its centenary in 2028.

With theatre history, you have to be very careful not to rely on idle theatrical chitchat, so the service these volunteers perform is invaluable, as they input details from past programs and playbills, maybe not quite as trustworthy as primary sources such as receipts, but, allowing for human errors and spelling mistakes, pretty reliable. 

When I arrived at the library, Buchanan had laid out an array of sources for the Albert Hall project, including its earliest program from a recital of works for two pianos, presented on September 1, 1928 by the Canberra Musical Society.

I was keen to find out more about the team.

Led by Margaret Goode, most of them – Sheena Ashwell, Kerry Blackburn, Helen Stuart, Yole Daniels, Anthony Ketley and Margaret Thompson – learnt the Ausstage ropes work through the National Library, which Ausstage visited in 2015, but after the national institution dropped the project, it passed to the Heritage Library, where the team of volunteers meets every Thursday for three hours of inputting.

The move to the Heritage Library was largely engineered by Goode. 

“I emailed Antoinette, and I said, ‘I have this team’… she got straight back and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

They’re a mixed bunch, ranging in age from 68 to 90. Most are concertgoers, several are trained in literature and one worked in the old Riverside Huts, where much of Canberra’s early theatre went on. 

Goode tells me they also spend social time together in afternoon teas, lunches and Christmas parties.

All are competent at using the system and the ability to do this online is a key factor and now the training can be done online, too. The job satisfaction is found in the fact that Trove now sweeps the Ausstage database for information, thus widening the audience for what they do.

There were many fun finds, including the Cambridge University Footlights Club at Canberra Theatre in November 1981, with a cast that included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, and the fledgling Richard Roxburgh in The Jewish Wife and The Informer for Theatre ACT at The Playhouse in June 1983.

The Albert Hall project has been especially productive and they were all astonished to find out how many big names had come from Europe during the 1940s, as well as top companies such as the Classical Theatre of China and the Royal Ballet, suggesting to the volunteers that Australia had a reputation for affluence.

“It was our good fortune to have such big names coming here,” Goode says.

The project became a labour of love, as the venerable building was the de facto town hall for Canberra and home to Canberra Repertory, Canberra Philharmonic Society, Canberra Musical Society and even the CSO, who still use it for special chamber concerts. The most recent addition at the time of filing was the CSO’s Folk Melodies on February 16, 2025. 

Buchanan says with some pride that the library is now probably the leading contributor to Ausstage. “The team is making a huge contribution to the community… I feel grateful,” she says.

The Albert Hall input may be viewed at ausstage.edu.au/pages/venue/567

The Canberra and Region Heritage Festival runs through April.