The Magazine of St Aloysius' College • 'Men for Others' • Issue XLVII ...

almost thrown to our own devices to build the sets. The
Wiz was probably the most complicated from our side of
it - co-ordinating all the set changes. It was just big blocks
that interlinked, all different shapes that spun around with a
different scene painted on each face.”
His experience at Aloys’ helped win Fergus a place in
NIDA’s competitive Diploma in Technical Production. As part
of the interview, he had to create a model theatre set. To
the panel’s astonishment he presented a perfectly–scaled set
– built from Lego. He was ahead of his time. Years later,
Fergus would work on an international Peugeot television
commercial, with a massive art department budget of a
million dollars. It featured life size toy cars – one of which
was made to look like Lego.
In 1992 Fergus got his first professional job, as stage
manager at the Ensemble Theatre, the place that had also
given him his first student work experience. “I earned $342
gross a week”, he laughs. “It seemed an awful lot at the
time.” After that experience were stints with the Belvoir
Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company, where he soon
progressed to being a buyer of props and other design and
construction materials.
A talent for organisation and administration, combined
with a broad-based knowledge of techniques from paint
and plastering to carpentry and steel fabrication, and
an ever-expanding network of technical suppliers, made
Fergus a natural candidate as a construction buyer on film
productions. “They talk a different language – I fudged my
way in!” So what’s the difference between set design in film
and theatre? “Money!” he grins.
Star Wars III, made in 2003, employed around three
hundred people in the construction department. “We spent
a million dollars on timber alone,” Fergus recalls. Handling
such major accounts has given Fergus considerable
credibility among suppliers, who in turn will ‘go the extra
mile’ in a crisis. Such contacts are invaluable in an industry
where circumstances change quickly.
On the day we meet, Fergus takes me through Fox
Studios, where Baz Luhrmann’s epic, Australia, is being
filmed. The movie has been plagued with problems –
unprecedented rain on location in Kununurra flooded the set
and equine flu has grounded the horses. With two hundred
and fifty extras hanging around, new scenes will have to
be speedily set up for shooting, demanding vast amounts of
supplies at very short notice – but whether it’s 700 kilos of
shellac, a natural product used for making paint, or bales
of hessian scrim which he imports from India to be the
substrate for scenery construction, Fergus will deliver, often
overnight.
Some people might be fazed by the unpredictability
of the work, but Fergus thrives on it. On his first feature
film, Kangaroo Jack (2003), starring Dyan Cannon, Estella
Warren and Christopher Walken, the water in a huge
swimming pool on set became discoloured. With a delay
in shooting costing half a million dollars a day, it had to
be emptied and refilled over the weekend. The problem
was that it had taken a week to heat. Fergus located an
industrial heating engineer who, by dropping in metal
elements instead of using conventional methods, was able
to have it ready by Monday.
Fergus’s job description varies, from Production
Coordinator and Construction Buyer to Logistics Coordinator
for events such as the New Year’s Eve celebrations in
Sydney, or the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the
Sydney Olympics and the 2006 Asian Games. Lately he
has set up his own company, Scenery Supplies. But what
doesn’t change is the need for good people skills, a sound
practical knowledge of diverse trades and materials, solid
organisation and a big dollop of lateral thinking – qualities
honed in those long days of hammering and planning in the
Great Hall at St Aloysius’.
Back then, the thing he hated most about school was
the uniform. “I still wake up every day thinking, thank
God, I don’t have to wear a uniform!” says Fergus. The
film world is full of ‘misfits and outcasts’, a friend once told
him. They’re his kind of people. Everywhere we go at Fox,
people call out a greeting. “How’s it going Ferg? How are
the kids?” (He and his wife Elisabeth– ‘a Loreto girl’, he
smiles sheepishly – have two children, Aidan, aged four
and Imogen, sixteen months.) It’s a tight-knit world. “I know
almost every film construction manager in Australia and I’ve
probably worked with half of them”, he acknowledges.
The boy who preferred being backstage may never see
his own name in lights, but without him there would be no
lights at all.
Ms Siobhan McHugh
St Aloysius’ College
A Jesuit School for Boys _ Founded 1879 aloysiad / page 43