Grahame Bond - Early Career

Early Career

Bond began his career in entertainment at University of Sydney in the 1960s as a founding student member of the Sydney University Architecture Revue, which included his university friends Geoffrey Atherden (writer Mother and Son, Grass Roots), Peter Weir (director Gallipoli, The Truman Show), Peter Best (composer Crocodile Dundee, Wildside) and Rory O'Donoghue. Bond graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1967 and began tutoring in design at Sydney University in the late 1960s, although his performing career soon took over and he spent much of the next two decades writing and performing on TV, radio and the stage.

Following the success of the 1967 Sydney University Architecture Revue "The Great Wall of Porridge", Bond and others (including Atherden and Weir) were invited to stage a professional revue for the PACT Theatre Company and Sydney's Cellblock Theatre, called Balloon Dubloon which (at the request of festival director Sir Robert Helpmann) was also staged at the Adelaide Festival. In 1969, soon after Balloon Dubloon Bob Allnutt of the PACT Theater Company—who was also working for the ABC's religious affairs department—he commissioned Bond and Weir to make a one-hour special, Man on a Green Bike, which was Bond's first TV appearance. In 1970 Bond wrote and performed in another successful comedy revue, Hamlet On Ice.