Who is Anthony Hill?
A young 83, with a successful career as a journalist, antique dealer, speechwriter for Governor-General Bill Hayden and author of 21 published books, Anthony is thrilled to be starting a new adventure as playwright. He’s adapted his award-winning novel Soldier Boy (Penguin 2001) for the stage. Born in Melbourne, but living in Canberra and district for 48 years, Anthony returned home in 2020 (in the middle of Covid!) to be closer to family.
What would you do differently from what you do now?
A hard question. Stage-struck at the age of three, I first wanted to be an actor until I realised I wanted to write the words the actors spoke. As a novelist I had the best of both worlds, for every story acts itself out on the stage we all have at the front of our foreheads. I give thanks for the creative life I always wanted and wouldn’t wish to do anything else.
But I suppose I might have become a history teacher or an academic historian if I hadn’t gone into newspapers. History and English were my best subjects at school, and historical novels and an historical play is not a bad synthesis between the two.
Who inspires you and why?
My wife Gillian, who I married in 1965 (60 years in October), who has supported me lovingly and with good, solid English common sense to balance my sometime flights of artistic temperament and creative despair. You know what it’s like.
In term of literary inspiration, as a boy I loved Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Kipling and Ethel Turner (Soldier Boy won the NSW Premier’s “Ethel Turner” literary award.) As I grew up, Dickens, Shakespeare, Patrick White, Hal Porter, George Johnston, Austen and the Brontës among other classics.
Strangely, I recently discovered how unconsciously AA Milne’s Christopher Robin poems and stories had influenced my writing style in terms of their rhythm and cadences.
What would you do to make a difference to the world?
In recent years I’ve been drawn back to the Church, although since my late teens I’ve been aware of the transcendent, and the small, conscious self as part of the infinite universe.
If, through my work, I can advance a little understanding of the great Commandment to love one another, to love your neighbour as yourself, I’ll consider it a worthwhile life. The message is as revolutionary, necessary and difficult to achieve in today’s unhappy world, as it ever was.
Favourite holiday destination and why?
Most years we go to Kingscliff in Northern NSW to visit my Aunt Pat who lives with her son and daughter on the Gold Coast, and is now a splendid 104. 105 in September!
Still with her laughter, her zest for life, her delight and all her marbles. Pat’s body may be getting frail, but her mind is as strong and her voice has the same resonant timbre as ever. She only recently gave up the occasional cigarette and even cigar.
Pat is the last one left who can remember when I was born. I said to her only recently, “Imagine, when I’m 100, you’ll be 122!” And we’ll still be going to Kingscliff.
When friends come to town, what attraction would you take them to, and why?
It depends on the friends. If it’s my oldest friend home briefly from Turkey, we’ll go to a decent restaurant on bayside, say Ricketts Point, Parkdale or St Kilda, and spend hours yarning about family, politics, music, literature, life, love and the whole damn thing.
If the friend has the same love of antiques as us, we’ll go to the National Gallery and spend several hours looking at the porcelains, enamels, Old Masters and the Australian impressionists.
If the friend is a musician we may go to a concert in town or even better come home and eat chicken in red wine (I’m a fair cook) and play piano and clarinet. That’s where the best music is always found.
What are you currently reading?
I’ve just finished reading again Orwell’s 1984, an extraordinary prescient, inventive and dystopian parable of a totalitarian future that in many ways is already upon us: the ubiquitous screens on every wall and in our pockets, the data bases that can track our every move and influence through algorithms our very thought. The ability of technology to control whole populations is already evident in some nations.
All too grim for bedtime, so I pulled Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies off the shelf. I didn’t like its high-Victorian didactic moralising much, but interesting (1862) as an early defender of Darwin in a satirical way, and a surprising precursor to Carroll’s infinitely superior Alice (1865). I even found a reference to “mad as a March hare” and many curious creatures – so something worthwhile to be gleaned, even as it puts me to sleep.
What are you currently listening to?
We’ve just discovered the delight of YouTube in our old age, and the amazing concerts we find there. From full length operas and symphonies to music of the baroque which we love: Purcell, Lully, Corelli, Handel and Bach.
At the other end of the scale, as it were, are the recordings and clips of the old ragtimers – Jimmy Johnson, Fats Waller and the discovery of a whole new school of young players who are keeping the marvellous tradition of stride piano alive and well and syncopating the world from St Louis to Harlem to Europe and beyond. But how do we stop the adverts?
Happiness is?
Writing “The End” on the last page of a novel on which I’ve been working for three years. Sitting in the contented silence of the evening with my love and our books. Listening to a Corelli concerto. Passive smoking. Standing on the quarter deck of the Endeavour replica as the grey dawn breaks.
That second just before the curtain rises on a favourite show. Watching a cast of gifted actors bring those words, tapped out on a little iPad, begin to breathe and live in the rehearsal room. Family dinner. And those rare, numinous moments that can occur standing beneath the outback stars, or before a sublime work of art.
What does the future hold for you?
I regret that at my age I have rather more past than future. But I like to think I’ll be able to travel a bit further down the path of a dramatist that quite unexpectedly is opening before me. To do so in company with Jill and our family who have been with me three-fourths of the way. And look forward to a “quiet sleep and a sweet dream” as Masefield says, “when the long trick’s over.”
Anthony is the Author and Playwright of Soldier Boy – which will be presented at Theatre Works from 19 June – 5 July 2025. For more information, visit: www.theatreworks.org.au for details.
Image: Anthony Hill – photo courtesy of Penguin Random House