UTS has received a unique gift with "strings attached" - 125 hand-crafted marionettes that were the pride of the Griffiths Marionette Company for more than half a century.

The custodian of the marionette collection, Mr James Badger, presented the historic collection to the Faculty of Education's Centre for Research and Education in the Arts (CREA).

The historically and culturally significant marionettes "performed" for more than fifty years in fair grounds, schools, clubs and on television in Australia and New Zealand.

The Griffiths marionettes in their new home at CREA, at the Kuring-gai Campus, will introduce a new generation to the age-old art and appeal of marionette theatre.

Mr Badger said he was delighted to give this collection to the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts because he knew that in this setting these special marionettes would continue to be used in performances with children and adults. In addition to the valuable hand-crafted marionettes, he has donated to the Centre important historical documentation on the development of the marionette company in the form of programs, films, scripts, set designs and photographs.

Actors Raeburn and Freda Griffiths, who originally designed and crafted the marionettes and formed the famous two-person puppetry company, started their careers in New Zealand as part of the touring Goodwin Marionette Theatre.

In 1949, they came to Australia to join a film production unit to make puppet films for television. Later they toured their marionette programs in all capital cities in Australia and performed in Europe. In addition to making all of their own puppets, they created the costumes and settings, wrote original scripts and incidental music, and developed over twenty different voices for their puppets.

Associate Professor Barbara Poston-Anderson, CREA caretaker of the collection, plans to revive the art of marionette theatre at UTS. She recalls the thrill she and her drama students had unpacking the dozen crates and chests filled with dancing horses, trumpeting elephants, dainty figure skaters, juggling clowns, and characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest, including Prospero and Caliban.

See the report in UTS News online.