Peter Goers

And she was at Woodville High.

She was intelligent enough to go to university.

But, of course, in that period, unless you won a Commonwealth scholarship, and they were very hard to get...

You couldn't afford to go to university.

Her parents just could not afford to send her.

So I think that was a great shame until Whitlam, of course, made that much more accessible to so many of us that...

People were denied education.

But she was a loving woman, very loving, a good mother.

How much of herself did she surrender to make a lovely life for you?

Lots.

Yes, she did everything possible for my sister and I. No, she was a good woman.

I was in year five, grade five at Woodville Primary and I had this wonderful teacher called Mr Martin who stood in front of the class for the entire year drinking Coca-Cola and smoking Benson and Hedges cigarettes.

Naturally he became a great role model and for some reason, since I'd never been to the theatre because we were not in any way a theatrical or artistic family, you know, I'd never been to the theatre but for some reason I just decided that I would perform

The trial scene from Toad of Toad Hall, Wind in the Willows, my mother typed it out and ran it off on a Gestetner.

I played the main role, the judge, which is a good part, and also directed it with other members of the Grade 5 class in front of Mr Martin's class and parents and friends.

And so, you know, for one brief shining moment, I was the Orson Welles of grade five at Woodville Primary.

Then I had a wonderful teacher, Mick Rivers, who was a Broken Hill man and a South Adelaide footballer who had the sense.

not to exhort me onto the football field in which I would have been hopeless, but he said, you're an actor and he put me in a little play and thus, you know, my life turned on that.

You see, I was a disappointment to my parents because they were both sporty.

They'd both played different sports for the state and along I come completely hopeless at every kind of sport.