If you had popped into Newcastle City Library recently, you may have thought you’d walked into the set of a 1940s thriller.
On ‘stage’ actress Nola Wallace was in costume playing a bed-ridden invalid trapped in her apartment with only a telephone. An audience of 40 or more were hanging on her every word.
This reading from the 1940s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number was part of Cooks Hill retiree Peter Trist’s highly entertaining ‘book chat’ program, which runs on the second Thursday of every month. 1030am-noon at the New South Wales library.
Every month Peter gives a presentation around a literary topic. On this occasion, it was ‘suspense stories’.
It’s the full extravaganza – the whole Cecil B DeMille production. And it’s getting more and more elaborate.
“We also read some of Miriam by Truman Capote and looked at Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife,” said Peter, 82. “It was a smorgasboard of suspense.”
But this is no ordinary book club. Peter, who has a lifelong love of literature and theatre and a career working in the media, has been running the book chats for eight years and says he enjoys doing it because he loves performing and “showing off”.
“It’s the full extravaganza – the whole Cecil B DeMille production,” he joked. “And it’s getting more and more elaborate and I put a lot of work into the research and the casting.
“I want it to be entertaining, informative and also to prompt people to read and to borrow books from the library.”
Peter’s love of telling stories stems from his time studying production at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) and his career in radio working with ABC Radio in Papua New Guinea.
He went on to be producer for the drama and features department of what became the National Broadcasting Corporation of PNG.
“Radio was very big in the 60s and 70 and for a while was really the only communication in PNG,” he said. “We would do school broadcasts and I was always cast as the villain!”
Peter moved to Newcastle in 1988 to care for his parents and he started an amateur theatre group.
It was during an open session at the library where the public was invited to read aloud, that a librarian ‘spotted’ Peter and suggested he start a regular session.
“At my first session there was about five people and now I get between 40 and 50 people,” said Peter.
Subjects coming up include Robert Louis Stevenson and 11-year-old British prodigy Daisy Ashford who wrote The Young Visiters in 1919 before abandoning her literary career as a teenager.
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