05 February 2024
Never one to slip under the radar, Heather Croall, who turned her passion for the performing arts into a career, was recognised in this year’s Australia Day Honours for her significant service as an arts administrator, advocate and film maker.
Heather Croall AM
CEO/Artistic Director of Adelaide Fringe
Bachelor of Arts (Communication Studies)
With her bright ever colour-changing hair, and a wardrobe to match, Heather Croall makes a statement wherever she goes. But it’s her extraordinary passion for the performing arts rather than her attire that makes her a real stand out.
The Croall family of five arrived in Australia when Heather was around three. Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, her parents took advantage of the £10 Pom immigration scheme and chose to follow the sunshine to Whyalla in South Australia.
Her father, John, was a gynaecologist/obstetrician and, over a long career, delivered most of the town’s babies – sometimes three generations of the same family. He had a passion for letter writing, reading and tree planting, adding around 10,000 trees to the landscape of his adoptive city from seeds he’d germinated himself in empty dog food cans. He instilled in his three children a sense of confidence and curiosity. In his later years, when his health began to fail, Heather made time to film him and, combining this with footage she had shot over time, produced a moving tribute entitled Yer Old Faither, which premiered at the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival.
It was Heather’s mother Ruth who enabled her love of the performing arts. Whyalla, a thriving town at the time, was on the touring map for many performers, from bands to ballet and theatre. The family would also travel to Adelaide to see shows.
Growing up in what was then a working-class steel town toughened up the young Heather and fostered her resilience. Still, being sent to boarding school in Adelaide must have been a bit of a culture shock, but she enjoyed her time at Pembroke School and still keeps in touch with her cohort.
As soon as her schooling was finished, Heather headed to London to meet her family in the United Kingdom. She worked in the UK and Europe, returning to Adelaide to begin her studies in civil engineering. As one of the few female students – and now sporting pink hair – after 12 months, Heather decided that path was not for her and returned to London to immerse herself in the festival and theatre scene.
Over the next 35 years, she would travel back and forth between the UK and SA, but in the late 1980s, Heather commenced a Bachelor of Arts at UniSA.
Paving her own way, Heather undertook cultural studies and documentary-making at Magill and film and television production at Underdale. During this time, she was working at Adelaide Fringe and managing a venue that now forms part of the City West campus.
“I have had as long an association with Adelaide Fringe as I've had with UniSA. I had incredible lecturers and studied with great people. One of the most valuable lessons I learned at UniSA was the power of different ways of seeing – understanding how to take different points of view and critical thinking.”
What followed was a career making a number of documentaries for SBS, ABC, BBC and Channel 4 in the UK, and UNICEF. In 2003, as the Director of the Australian International Documentary Conference, she created the MeetMarket, a marketplace for documentary makers to secure funding. It was a model she adopted as the Honey Pot for Adelaide Fringe, and again when she became CEO/Director of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, a role she filled for 10 years.
“I've always tried to bring different disciplines together to create innovative projects, and I think a lot of that came from studying at Uni SA and the great teachers who encouraged us to look at multidisciplinary collaborations. I was very interested in the idea of interactivity and film at a time when interactive CD Roms were starting out. It was a really groundbreaking area, and I worked in that space for many years, collaborating with coders and people working in tech and the brand-new days of the Internet. The intersection of art, storytelling and technology has been a big focus of my life ever since.”
The opportunity to return to SA as CEO/Artistic Director of the Adelaide Fringe in 2015 was irresistible, and the festival has blossomed under her guidance.
“It's very rare to see an open access festival on the scale of Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe. There are not many other access arts festivals that transform the whole city as Adelaide Fringe does, and often Adelaide people are unaware of how unique Adelaide Fringe is until they find out that not every city has a festival like this!”
In 2023 Adelaide Fringe ticket sales exceeded the one million mark. This achievement was all the more impressive coming off Covid-19’s decimating impact on the performing arts sector.
“Since Covid, the cost of putting on shows has gone up alarmingly and there's a lot of work that needs to be done to shore up a lot of the arts and creative sector, and festivals and venues. It's a really important moment for the creative industries in SA to look at what's required to look after what we have. It’s really great that there's a review in the cultural policy area in SA, asking for input from the sector and audiences. Hopefully, we will see the next journey for the cultural arts and cultural sector in South Australia.”
Heather joins a number of UniSA alumni in receiving recognition in this year’s Australia Day Honours.
