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Some of the text in The Australian Ballet timeline is adapted from essays in Luminous. These were written by Valerie Lawson (The Sixties), Jill Sykes (The Seventies), Lee Christofis (The Eighties), Michael Shmith (The Nineties) and Deborah Jones (The New Millennium).
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Marilyn Rowe
Robert Helpmann invites Colin Peasley to join the ballet staff.
16 December 1975
Kelvin Coe is invited back to the company as a guest artist.
August 1983
The Australian Ballet perform Frederick Ashton’s Monotones and Two Pigeons at a Royal Performance for Princess Margaret.
25 October 1975
Marilyn Jones, Marilyn Rowe, Julie da Costa and Maina Gielgud play the bitchy ballerinas in the 19th-century satire Pas de Quatre.
19 November 1986
Marilyn Rowe and John Meehan are invited to dance the lead roles in every performance of the 10th-anniversary season of The Merry Widow.
November 1985
Marilyn Rowe and Kelvin Coe become the first Australian artists to appear as guests of the Bolshoi Ballet.
October 1978
Anne Woolliams becomes artistic director and introduces John Cranko’s Onegin to the repertoire.
1 September 1976
Kelvin Coe and Marilyn Rowe win silver medals in Moscow.
June 1973
The company acquires its first work by British wunderkind Kenneth MacMillan.
May 1973
Glen Tetley creates the sinuous, edgy work Gemini on The Australian Ballet.
March – April 1973
Former stars Marilyn Rowe and Kelvin Coe perform in the company’s first simulcast with ABC TV.
17 September 1983
Marilyn Jones resigns and Marilyn Rowe is appointed ballet director, while the search begins for a new artistic director.
15 January 1982
Marilyn Jones is appointed artistic director and commissions a new full-length work of Anna Karenina.
December 1979
The Australian premiere of László Seregi’s Spartacus.
26 October 1978
The Merry Widow, the first full-length work commissioned by The Australian Ballet, has its world premiere in Melbourne.
