“I was only following orders” is my only line of response in light of recent revelations about the wiring in the Hall. Admittedly over forty years have passed, standards changed and wear and tear occurred.

Worse, though, is that although I worked on the Hall for a good twelve months I recall few details. Eating far too much toast at morning tea breaks, wonderfully intense and high-spirited meetings of the 30+ strong crew working on the place, moving from the electrics to the recording studio, copying tapes of the New Troubadours, watching Haydn Stubbing painting his mammoth frescoes each summer, Lyle Schnadt, James Hill and Shelley Drogan laying the elegant cherry wood flooring.

I first walked on site in September ’76 when the roof was being prepared on the ground, the last of the roof beams being charred and wire brushed to preserve them. Those days of a vigorous, patchily experienced construction crew working voluntarily (and highly successfully) is SO many hours of negotiations with the Home Office away!

So I initially was put to work on the electrical wiring under the direction of the redoubtable Russell Holland. Renowned for his tendency to channel pretty far-out weird ‘information’ Russell never doubted himself. Thus working with him was pretty much like painting by numbers and all I had to do was follow instructions.

And then the day came when he discovered a wall in the drama/dance studio-to-be had no channel to embed the wiring conduit, so ‘somebody needed to make it’. Guess who? And with a Hilti gun. I’ve never forgotten that intimate experience with the horrendously loud racket uncomfortably close to my ear, my arm muscles straining against (probably should’ve been ‘with’ but I’d never operated a Hilti before, for Gods’ sake!) cement dust, and my complete lack of awareness that I didn’t need to do it. ‘Someone’ else could. ‘ANYONE’ else could for that matter. Why did that never occur to me? I was clearly still throwing off my deep-seated self-sacrifice, masochist phase…

Amanda Haworth