The year began ‘on the run’ in January school holidays with shows all over Sydney as well as many performances on the Central Coast. Besides regular appearances with ‘Gunther the Pelican’ at The Entrance, Australia’s Pelican Capital, we have regular bookings at a resort up there. Because the kids are up early our shows begin at 9am. Which makes for a very early start from Sydney.

We missed a performance (an extremely rare event for MURPHYS PUPPETS) when raging bushfires closed first the motorway then the old road and we were forced to turn back. Puppetry means a lot of driving (6,000 km in January alone) so it’s inevitable that we should eventually run into hazards.

We hit another hazard on our way back from one of our favourite festivals, Deniliquin’s SUN FESTIVAL. We were involved in the Cootamundra Silo Emergency. A fire in a grain silo threatened to cause a gas explosion so a detour and an exclusion zone were set up. It should not have affected us passing through town but we stopped for coffee then found we had a flat battery. The NRMA responded quickly and determined that a new battery was needed . They had plenty back at the depot - but the depot was inside the exclusion zone! They had to get special permission to go in for the battery.

Other festivals re-visited this year were the massive Newtown Festival, Bondi’s Festival of the Winds, AUSTRALIA DAY in Armidale and the One Van Puppet Festival. We were again part of Darling Harbour’s “HOOPLA!” Festival of Circus and Street Theatre at Easter.

School tours took us to Tasmania, Broken Hill, New England and Melbourne.

Libraries, as always, were a big part of the year. We did a tour of Upper Hunter libraries where Merriwa became our 217th library. The other Career Total Milestone this year was our 9am performance on November 14th at Woollahra Public School. It was our 9,000th performance!! But there was no time then for celebrations as the show was immediately followed by another performance at 10am, another at 11:15 and one at 1:30 - bringing the total to 9,003 by the end of day.

We had a very memorable year filled with a variety of venues, and some great audiences.

(There’s nothing like variety: One Saturday I performed at an RAAF base - in a tent. The next day I was performing at the Art Gallery of NSW. I remember thinking, “One day I do a show surrounded by canvas and the next day I am surrounded by canvases.” )

AHEAD IN 2008:
We will perform at the UNIMA2008 International Puppet Festival in Perth. Then we have just a week to get the van back home in time to fly off to Southern Europe for two months doing research in Italy and exploring the Balkans (Europe with an edge). Brisbane and Melbourne are on the agenda later in the year.

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2006 began at the Art Gallery of NSW on the second anniversary of our first performance there for the Caravaggio Exhibition in 2004. We’ve been going back regularly ever since. This year we’re doing ‘Sunday Funday’ performances in January, March, July and August, as well as the June long weekend and a week of shows in the October school holidays.

After giving nearly a thousand shows at The Rocks Puppet Cottage from 1992 to 2005, we were back performing in The Rocks when the Historic Houses Trust had their “Grandparents’ Day” at the Susannah Place Museum in April. The next week we spent four glorious days over the Easter Weekend as part of Darling Harbour’s “HOOPLA!” Festival of Circus and Street Theatre. There were some great acts on the bill with us but we had five performances a day so we didn’t get to see any of them.

An outlet for all the accent study I’ve been doing is the announcement on our answering machine. The phone has been answered with Cockney, Yorkshire, Southern Irish and Belfast Irish, Standard British and Liverpudlian. From the US we’ve used Down East (New England), Brooklyn, Manhattan and Ozark Mountain accents. Occasionally we let a puppet answer. It’s all terribly confusing for the Indian call centres ringing us.

New WALKAROUND characters include ‘Harold the Hypochondriac Hawk’ and ‘Wahoo’ who is half fur and half feather. We really don’t know what Wahoo is.

More libraries were added this year to the MURPHYS PUPPETS life-time total. Stanmore Library became our 214th library.

After a mere 273,000 km, the old MURPHYS PUPPETS van gave up the ghost. The next day’s schedule called for five performances of two different productions at three different venues so the race was on for a replacement. The new MURPHYS PUPPETS van has air-conditioning and power-steering. Unfortunately it still requires me to do the driving. At least its MP3 player gives me 24 hours of downloaded ABC Radio National programmes to ‘shorten the road ‘ as the Irish say.

2006 Touring takes us to Northern NSW and Adelaide as well provincial centres like Griffith and Melbourne. Thanks to the Sydney-to-Tasmania and Tasmania-to-Melbourne car ferries we have managed to go to Melbourne three times in the past two years without having to drive the Hume Highway.

As always, our greatest privilege is returning to our ‘regulars’
- the kindergartens, libraries, vacation care centres, primary and high schools who book us every year.

As “Murphy’s Second Law of Puppetry” clearly states:

The sincerest form of flattery is a repeat booking

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A very productive year. Between performances over Christmas and the January School Holidays I got to work on a re-write of our latest comedy, “THE TWIN CAPTAINS”

In February I took the new show with me when I went to Tasmania to perform for Terrapin Puppet Theatre. I wanted to get critiques of it from an English puppeteer and a Czech puppeteer now residents of Hobart. After more cutting and pasting, pruning and weeding, it is finally ready for next year’s launch.
(As someone once said “The key to good writing is re-writing.”)

While in Tasmania I also picked up a beautiful new glove-puppet stage built of western red cedar by English Punch&Judy man, Basil Smith. The stage will give me more flexibility for theatrical effects and scenery. But it also meant that before I could bring it home I had to do my tour of Victoria with the new stage suspended from the ceiling of an already jam-packed puppet van.

Milestones:
At the 2005 Newington College Literature Festival I passed a milestone: it was my 7,000th performance since taking on Puppetry full-time 15 1⁄ 2 years ago. As our senior citizen character, Lady Hortense would say,
“Passing a milestone can be a very painful experience. It’s certainly
not something I would want to have hanging around my neck.”

More libraries were added this year to the MURPHYS PUPPETS life-time total. Another milestone was passed. We’ve chalked up performances at 203 different libraries across four states. Numbers 204, 205 and 206 are booked for January 2006. (The disadvantage of performing at libraries is the distinct possibility of spotting an interesting library book and applying for a borrower’s card to get it. I currently have cards from five library systems.)

There has been a population explosion among our Italian-style Commedia dell’Arte glove puppets this year. We are introducing an early traditional character, ”Tartaglia”, who will become the downtrodden accountant to the old miser Pantalone. We also now have a Mrs. Pantalone and a new ‘Feral Godmother’ for the comedy “TO THE RESCUE”. Twenty different characters now cavort through our six Commedia shows.

“Murphy’s Second Law of Puppetry” states that a repeat booking is the sincerest form of flattery. So we were very pleased to return again this year to some of our favourite haunts - we were back at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for school holiday shows and for their Sunday afternoon ‘Funday’ performances. We again played the Italian cultural festival FERRAGOSTO when Five Dock closes off its main street converting it into cafes, market stalls and stages.

We performed for the ‘umpteenth’ time at Bondi Beach’s Festival of the Winds and played Young’s “National Cherry Festival” for the third time.
But our greatest privilege was returning to our ‘regulars’ - the kindergartens, primary and high schools where we perform each year.

2005:
2005 took the puppets to Victoria, western NSW, Tasmania, Queensland and Canberra chalking up 36,000 kms - It was a great year, if you don’t count all the driving.

In 2004 our performances ranged from our evergreen pre-school production, THE PRAM SHOW now in its 20th year, to adult Stand-up Comedy at the One Van Puppet Festival’s cabaret night.

In January we presented our Commedia dell’Arte Puppetry at The Art Gallery of NSW as part of the “CARAVAGGIO & HIS WORLD” Exhibition of Italian paintings. We had a two week season plus Sundays in January and February. We were then asked back again to do Sunday performances in April, August and October as well as another week’s season in the October school holidays. (When performing Commedia dell’Arte in the Art Gallery, the question most often asked is; “Where are the toilets?”) The audiences represented a wide range of people. So much so that every one-liner, no matter how obscure the reference, got a laugh from someone.

Touring took us far afield throughout the year. Loading the primary and secondary schools, we were off to Melbourne (a biennial event), NSW Outback, Riverina (a week of Italian Studies shows in Griffith is a biannual event), four weeks in Tasmania with a chance to visit puppeteer/friends and eat seafood. Two weeks in Adelaide in Spring, a week in New England and another in the Hunter.

The sad news was the closure of The Rocks Puppet Cottage. We had the great privilege of being ‘Guest Artists’ there since it opened in 1992; performing some 840 times, meeting thousands of people from around the world and presenting 12 different productions – many having their ‘World Premiere’ at The Cottage. We greatly miss the place as do, no doubt, the 30,000 visitors who came through each year.

In brighter news we were particularly chuffed when our “Frog Prince” was chosen for “The Spike Fest” which celebrates the life and work of one of our heroes, comedian Spike Milligan.

Festivals gave us our largest audiences. We returned to the huge FERRAGOSTO festival. An estimated 40,000 people took advantage of Five Dock’s main street being closed off. And we were asked back (the sincerest form of flattery is a return booking) to the massive Newtown Festival with some 50,000 people. All up, at least two dozen kids who had seen our school shows came to us during the festivals – each with the same greeting; “Hi. Remember me?!!”

2004 was a terrific year for us; getting to perform to 456 different audiences and meeting some amazing kids.

Ahead in 2005:
* School Touring all within NSW (if you don’t count Brisbane, Canberra, or Melbourne.)
* Taking our fourth production to the Art Gallery of NSW in March and April.
* Work begins on a new production: “The Haunted House”
* “Guest Puppeteers” at The Rocks Puppet Cottage when it re-opens temporarily in the January School Holidays.

In January we will perform at the opening of the new East Maitland Library. It will be the 191st library MURPHYS PUPPETS have appeared at. Jakers!!!!