Pioneer of WA TV bows out
Perth entertainment pioneer Coralie Condon, hailed as the grande dame of Perth theatre and First Lady of WA television, has died, aged 99.
A writer, actor and director, Condon was a founding producer at Channel 7 and the first woman on WA television in 1959.
She was a lead actor and playwright at the Playhouse Theatre in the 1950s and co-founded the Dirty Dick's theatre restaurants in 1970 with Frank Baden-Powell.
In 1993, Condon received a Medal of the Order of Australia for service to entertainment.
Her 1958 Playhouse musical The Good Oil, inspired by the hysteria after oil was found in the North West, was produced on Channel 7 in 1962 and starred husband-and-wife team Jill Perryman and Kevan Johnston.
At a 2010 event when the Playhouse closed, Condon predicted the WA theatre scene would bounce back from lean times.
"There are too many people sitting at home in front of a computer who will tire of that and want to get out and get a taste of seeing actors in the same room as them," she said.
Dirty Dick's, where bawdy wenches and merry minstrels served "olde English" medieval merriment with the three-course meal of roast and plum pud, grew from Perth to the Eastern States, New Zealand and, briefly, the US.
Condon closed the Perth restaurant in Wembley when she retired in 1997 but the name continues over east.
"After Frank died (in 1992) I was keeping it going and then I thought, this is ridiculous, because I was still working 100 hours a week at Channel 7," she said in her final interview with _The West Australian _this year.
The shows may have dripped with lewd double meanings but they were always directed as if it was Hamlet.
"When I looked through the old scripts, I saw a lot of good fun," she said.
Before television, Condon supplemented her theatre income as a ledger machinist for the Public Works Department.
Sensing her theatre experience could be handy in TV, she moved to Sydney and wrote for a children's pirate show on the ABC before heading back to Perth.
"I was walking down St Georges Terrace, when I ran into Brian Treasure," she said.
"You know a bit about TV, don't you," he asked, and naturally she assured him she was a full bottle.
"I was a dogsbody," she said. "When I first walked in, there were gaps in the floor."
With Beverley Gledhill, Lloyd Lawson and Penny Hoes, she helped pick the first on-air staff for Seven and later hosted afternoon women's program Televisit and produced a variety of programs for children and adults.
Born in Fremantle on May 16, 1915, Condon was the eldest of three children. She never married and had no children.
Blinded by macular degeneration, she died peacefully early on Christmas Eve.
