He played social cricket for 30 years, involving Mel Gibson, Stewart Granger, Ron Haddrick, Barry Oakley and me in his eccentric teams. He was resident writer at universities in Townsville and Jakarta. He wrote many book reviews and travel pieces, exquisitely. His novels The Search for Harry Allway and Prue Flies North, as delicately wrathful as Jane Austen about fashion and predatory men, lacked form a little and did not do well. He wrote Oxymorons, about commentators' malapropisms and the many shadings of Australian slang, and Kiwese, its companion piece. Andrew Lloyd Webber and high-priced "smart foyer" plays took over. Evatt and the UN) and Shellcove Road (about Cremorne) were barely performed. Marginal Farm (set in Fiji), Pacific Union (about H.V. They mistook his later style, which was closer to Moliere and Sheridan, for that of his energetic rival David Williamson, and so slammed it. Formless, they said, undercharacterised, too lofty, too populist. Though this was his honeymoon decade and his new plays ( Batman's Beachhead, Macquarie, Big River) enjoyed sell-out seasons and roars of hilarious, delighted acclaim, his critics found him wanting. A year later he was resident playwright at the Melbourne Theatre Company. The Front Room Boys, about bureaucrats, played in London, where he saw much rival drama, by Peter Nichols, Simon Gray, Osborne and Pinter, and sharpened up his act. And he wrote Rooted, Tom, The Front Room Boys, Coralie Lansdowne Says No and The Roy Murphy Show, the latter his first assault on the verbal vagaries of sports commentators. He adapted classic novels, including Moby Dick and Bleak House, for Wal Hucker's animation company.
He wrote, or "worked on" the screenplay of the Mick Jagger Ned Kelly. Always competitive, Alex later made it there, too.įame followed, and lashings of perhaps immoderate praise. One, Peter Woolnough, later Peter Allen, "a bit of a sis", played him LP records of musicals and swore he would some day "make it" in New York. The culture shock was great Alex lost his radio serials, and at the Bienvenue State School met people unlike those of Cremorne. When he was 10 his father, accepting a post at its university, moved the family to Armidale. A handy batsman and medium pacer, he was deft and swift on the wing at rugby, and brisk and competitive, always competitive, at tennis. He read comics, listened to radio dramas and the Test cricket, read little fiction, wrote almost nothing, did not excel at Middle Harbour State Primary School and, like many of his male peers, absorbedly played and followed sport.
His mother, Elaine, nee Johnson, and her sister Ailsa, known as Auntie Bib, a movie- and theatregoer, greatly influenced his early tastes. ALEX BUZO's father, Zihni, was Albanian and a scholarship graduate of Harvard in engineering, often building big things out of town.
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