Australia Day Live - Sydney Opera House

Australia Day Live at the Sydney Opera House is one of the highlights of my film and TV career, and one of the best examples of where event management and national live broadcast collide.

A friend and former colleague from my Channel 7 Sydney days, the talent coordinator for the event, asked me to come on as her second for the planning and coordination, working alongside her from the week prior through rehearsals and on the day itself.

Together we were responsible for coordinating talent, getting all our artists from the Opera House green room, through hair & makeup to backstage. Running to a live broadcast schedule with a vast program of events from fireworks to water based performance in the harbour, timing was critical. No room for error.

Nothing prepares you for what it feels like when it actually goes live. All week it is just work, planning, spreadsheets, your head stuck in a screen, and the harbour is just the harbour. Then the lights come up, the performances start, the whole thing takes flight and then literally explodes with fireworks. Even having worked on it from the inside, I could not have imagined the scale of that energy until I was standing in the middle of it, taking it all in.

“A production scale that is hard to describe unless you have stood in the middle of it.”

Working to a live national broadcast schedule demands a particular kind of professionalism, discretion, calm under pressure, and total trust in the people around you, because everyone is one small piece of something much bigger.

It remains one of the most spectacular, treasured memories and experiences of my career, for the sheer scale of it alone.