Ouyen residents admire the restored Roxy Theatre, circa 1936, which is due to reopen on Friday.
Photo: Justin Mcmanus
Carolyn Webb
November 3, 2007
IN OUYEN in high summer, the mercury can pass 45 degrees. Working in the Roxy Theatre projectionist box in the 1950s and '60s, brothers Jim and Don Dundee used to almost combust.
Down in the auditorium, Barry Bell would smooch in the back row with his sweetheart, Elaine Richardson, and 12-year-old Colleen Weuffen would sneak out during films such as Elvis' Kissin' Cousins to smoke a ciggie behind the toilets.
The Roxy Theatre in Oke Street, Ouyen, will reopen this Friday after being closed for 36 years. Jim's wife, Betty Dundee, once an usherette, reckons rowdy youths caused its closure in 1971. "There was too much noise and the kids would come up and down the aisle, in and out of the place when the film was running," Mrs Dundee says.
Others blame television. Elaine Bell (nee Richardson) says: "We got married, then you did things at home and had friends around. It changed, we'd moved on."
The Roxy was used as a plumbing warehouse for 30 years, hidden behind an abandoned shop.
Its saviour is Jenny Heaslip, the Mallee campus co-ordinator of the Sunraysia Institute of TAFE.
The cinema has become her antidote to the drought. "The last decent rain was in March," she says. "And there's not a lot of employment opportunities for anybody because there's no extra money from farmers spending money in town and employing people.
"There's the drain of people going to the city. At the end of last year only two young people from Ouyen Secondary College's year 12 were left in town."
More than 250 Ouyenites have worked voluntarily to restore the Roxy. The college's woodwork students replaced hundreds of wooden slats that form the cinema's upper walls.
Barry Bell, 58, now an Ouyen hardware salesman, varnished the floorboards and erected the new Roxy sign. Electrician Rohan Gregg rewired the place.
Karen van Wyngaarden and her children Gretel, 18, Heidi, 16, and Jack, 10, lovingly sanded and oiled an antique wooden counter that stands in the cinema foyer.
A local businessman, Hugo Ingwersen, opened the movie house as the Victory Theatre on September 9, 1936, next to the Fairy Dell cafe that he owned.
It was renamed the Roxy after a 1953 renovation. It is thought to be the only tropical-style cinema in southern Australia. Mr Ingwersen had visited north Queensland and built the cinema with high canite ceilings, fans and wall slats to let in cool breezes. The seats were deckchairs.
The great perk for film projectionists Jim and Don Dundee was getting paid 25 bob apiece to see movies, but there were downsides.
Don says: "It was shockingly hot in the summer time. We used to have to wear these grey dustcoats. The smoke and the ash from the carbon arcs (lights) was not very nice.
"Kids could be a little bit unruly at times. We couldn't get out of the theatre one night, the louts were going to get us. Wouldn't let us out of the theatre, because we'd thrown a few of them out for misbehaving. We had to get the policeman to come down the street to get us out."
"The film used to come by rail in a trunk. There were four spools per box; the boxes were made of galvanised iron, heavy as hell," Jim Dundee says.
The invitation-only gala opening on Friday night will feature a red carpet screening of the Australian film Crackerjack (it's about a community banding together to save a bowls club), and appearances by actors Bill Hunter and Geoff Paine.
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