The exception was The Rocky Horror Show. Here, Brian Thomson's blue-canvassed cinema-under-demolition set turned virtually every theatre or old cinema we played in into a tent. The transvestite hero of that musical might have owed something to German Gothic cinema, but was also derived from childhood memories of Bobby Le Brun, Sorlie's famous Panto Dame, who looked like a stevedore in drag. Tim Curry, who created Frank in my original production at the Royal Court, kept asking 'How far should I go?', and I always replied 'Just stop before you throw Fantales to the kiddies'. The audience thought they were seeing a hip, streetwise character in a rock 'n' roll show; we knew it was a panto dame in mufti. The vaudeville tradition was a strong influence on the wonderful Hills Family Show from the Pram Factory and on John Bell's, Richard Wherrett's and Ken Horler's Nimrod Company. Barrie Kosky uses the Yiddish vaudeville tradition in his marvellous work for the Gilgul Company. In their differing ways, Barry Humphries, Reg Livermore and Garry McDonald have all kept vaudeville alive. These days, the tradition is seen lurking around the likes of Gerry Connelly and on TV comedy shows. When I invited English comedians from the Comic Strip to the 1982 Adelaide Festival, they were thought a curious and slightly tasteless choice, and passed without much attention. Today, having made French and Saunders, The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous, no doubt they'd be found more culturally acceptable.

Both Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom and Stefan Elliot's Priscilla, Queen of the Desert have a vaudeville grin. (A memorable scene in Priscilla is a mediocre drag-queen dancing in the desert and miming 'I Will Survive' to a dismayed, if amused, Aboriginal tribe. It sums up one view of Australian culture - miming other people's cultures in a desert.) My introduction to travelling vaudeville led to the city version. I witnessed Tivoli shows with the comedians George Wallace, Buster Fiddess and the very Jewish - and very blue - Roy Rene, or Mo. (A favourite memory of the vaudeville era is the staunchly Catholic Gloria Dawn pronouncing 'I don't work blue!'.) Vaudeville gave way to American musicals and my life changed at fourteen when I saw the visiting production of West Side Story, still the greatest of American musicals. The Tivoli also housed visits by the emerging Australian Opera (then the Elizabethan Trust Opera); the season which included my first major production, Mozart's Don Giovanni, was the last in that venue. I remember staying back one night, after rehearsal, just to wander alone in a theatre that had meant so much to me, and soon to be demolished and replaced by an indifferent office block.

All the theatres of that era went: the Empire, the Palladium, the old Royal, Phillip Street (the home of revue), and the Palace, where as a teenager I first saw Patrick White's The Ham Funeral. Later, I was pleased to help encourage Harry M. Miller to revive the old Minerva at Kings Cross as the Metro for the long run of Hair, the Capitol for Superstar, and the Paris Theatre - designed by Walter Burley Griffin - for a brave if short-lived experimental theatre company created with Rex Cramphorn.

The Paris Company heralded a change of era: it brought a new generation of theatre artists to the fore and paved the way for the creation of the now prospering Sydney Theatre Company. Located on what is now known as Whitlam Square, the Paris Theatre was knocked down and replaced by the relatively charmless Connaught Apartments. (In this vista of demolition we owe considerable thanks to Cameron MacIntosh for doing what nobody here had the sense or the will to do: revive the Capitol for Miss Saigon.)

The most influential plays of my youth were Patrick White's The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla. The first, written in London, was considerably influenced by European expressionism - notably by Wedekind and by Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata. To see, in the second, the suburban landscape of my own childhood placed in some sort of mythical context and to hear, from a stage, the language of our own streets - wonderfully heightened - was a revelation. Sarsaparilla painted my own familiar world in a completely new light; it revealed the extraordinary in the ordinary, and began a new phase of theatrical and personal exploration.

At this time - 1976 - I had been directing for a decade. My first production had been a revue, On Stage Oz. I had continued with a volley of mostly experimental work until I earned my professional wings and took off to create a series of populist musicals that spanned the globe. They culminated in The Rocky Horror Show, the one musical I was involved in creating from its first tentative steps, through a series of stage productions in London, America and Australia, to the now well-known film. After this, it was to Sydney and Sarsaparilla that I returned. My interest now was in Australia and its writing.

Along with Ray Lawler, Barry Humphries and others, Patrick White undertook the laborious task of making the much-distrusted language our own. Unlike most other writers, who crafted their plays within a more realistic social context, White operated m the realm of the imagination. My involvement with his work began a journey that involved European surveyors of the soul such as Wedekind, Lorca, Strindberg and Genet, presenting their works in new adaptations that spoke with our own rhythm and language. These productions were interspersed with revivals and with new productions of plays by White, our own explorer of the soul.

He opened the doors to a dramatic tradition and created the landscape now inhabited by the likes of Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and Michael Gow. Co-existing with it is the more realistic - and more popular - school of Ray Lawler and The Doll; Lawler, in turn, heralded David Williamson. In retrospect, the pleasure of all this is that we finally have the beginnings of a tradition. We have Patrick White actors, Williamson actors, etc; we have standards of production to compare and enjoy.

It's actors and audiences, finally, who keep the theatre alive. Shakespeare wrote great plays, but it's the killer roles that keep even the messy ones alive: King Lear, for example. (I'd like to see that play survive a playwrights' conference!) White understood the need for great roles, and our best writers are beginning to understand the importance of humanising ideas through a powerful central character - even one like Brecht's Mother-Courage, written in contradiction to the playwright's own point-of-view. As a repetiteur at the Australian Opera once said about singers performing in new operas: if they want to sing it, it will be sung - for ever, regardless of managements. And the same goes for actors. When we have not only a body of good plays, but a brace of great roles for actors too, we'll be speaking in our own voice, facing our own experience and enjoying our own realm of the imagination. White understood this, and his novels and plays abound with such characters. It was White who was the source of the first major Australian addition to the Australian Opera repertoire when composer Richard Meale and librettist David Malouf created the operatic adaptation of White's novel Voss.

I'm sure Alan John and Dennis Watkins, about to go into rehearsal with their new opera, The Eighth Wonder, are grateful for this charted territory, for the footprints in the quicksand of new operatic endeavour. I am looking forward to The Eighth Wonder - for the promise of Alan John's beautiful score and for Dennis Watkins' dexterous treatment of a complex scenario. It also rounds off a phase of my own activity: the nurturing of new works for the Australian stage. In this, I too am grateful for the inspiration of Patrick White, which I will continue to draw upon in the next phase of my own work, where the emphasis will be more on writing and film. As to the vexed question of the lasting value of Patrick White's plays, time be the judge. A Cheery Soul will always have a special place in my heart and in those of many a local theatre practitioner, including Nita Pannell, Robyn Nevin and Carol Skinner, who have each incarnated the demonic Miss Docker. (Barry Humphries once said that Edna could play her - as a classical role!) After offering a chunk of your life to the Australian theatre, you can't help feeling a certain sympathy for White's marvellous and terrible Miss Docker. The obsessive nature of many theatre practitioners and artists in general, bears a disturbing resemblance to that eternally cheery soul.

After thirty years spent creating theatre, film, musicals and opera, I must confess to now having little sense of anything but the present moment. It is almost as if someone else created that body of work, and I am sure that many - of my colleagues privately share this curious feeling of having participated in the art of creating forgettable illusions. For theatre exists only as a shared moment between artists and audience. Once that moment has passed, it resides solely in the realm of individual memory, there to be reinvented in some other way, at some other time, with the assistance of scripts, production photos, old programmes, archives of contemporary reportage and the regenerative power of the human imagination.

Perhaps there is value in the fact that our theatrical illusions are swept away along with the other achievements and with the detritus of our lives and times. Perhaps it's better that only the song survives, and only the one with a strong and memorable melody at that. Maybe art in general - and theatre in particular - is a perfect reflection of our lives. Passionate and central to our experience in the present, quick to evaporate, lingering in spirit as a record of our inner life which is lived in dreams, in the imagination, in memories that form part of our link with other lives and other illusions in some infinite, if elusive, universal continuum.

The fact that we theatre practitioners might be creating nothing but energy in a void shouldn't invite a sense for cynical nihilism. Quite the reverse: it should inspire us with genuine concern for the quality of our illusions. It is on those, after all, that we must rely for spiritual sustenance; it is in the play, the song, the drawing, the poem, that our true history finally resides. The play's the thing, as the man said. And, after all, it is Shakespeare's poetic and fictional versions of the kings of England that sustain our interest, not the real ones. Artists are both the creators and curators of the illusions that speak of our lives and times in beautiful lies that, at their best, reflect universal truths about the terror and wonder of our lives.

In a young and developing culture it is difficult to establish any genuine sense of our cultural worth, noble or ignoble. Achievements are over-inflated in conformity with the media's notion of world-beating status, or dismissed as worthless efforts in a vacuum. Fashion also plays its part: at one moment it might seem unfashionable to borrow ideas from a touristy outfit like the RSC, but fashionable to borrow from William Forsythe or Théatre de Complicité. Frankly, I don't see the difference. Either way, it means we're missing the point, missing an idea, and we've all gone shopping! We must learn to value what is most original in us, not our cultural 'credentials'. Creativity, our endeavour to inspire, challenge, reveal - these cannot be imposed.

We must continue developing and working with this idea while remaining open to new cultural influences and new generations of practitioners with new and probably quite startling ideas if we are to exorcise finally the ghosts of a lingering colonial mentality and emerge to take our place in the post-colonial world. Otherwise, Australian theatre will remain a quaint relic of lingering provincialism, a colonial rep company stranded between an Aboriginal past and a Eurasian future, a relic soon to be replaced by a compelling form of internationalism in state-of-the-art technology. The Pram Factory, Circus Oz, the Nimrod Theatre, Rex Cramphorn's Performance Syndicate, my own efforts with Lighthouse, Neil Armfield's at Belvoir and those of many others have all been directed towards evolving a more mature theatre culture in this country. They envisage a theatre less driven by commercial and bureaucratic imperatives, more open to the encouragement and development of our finest individual and collective talents. This theatre has a strong philosophical commitment to our own creativity, to writers, actors, musicians, dancers, acrobats, directors, designers working together to challenge the boundaries of their talent and experience.

It is a theatre that places our own concerns in the context of international theatre and of classical traditions dating back to that fire in the cave. It's 1995. We have arrived at a national pattern of dramatic activity based on existing structures: a mainstream theatre company in each city, a strong alternative theatre company, a number of smaller theatres servicing the specific needs of either conservative or adventurous audiences, a Festival or three, and a commercial theatre based pretty much on high-quality productions of imported musicals. This, along with vastly improved standards of acting, design and production, is the legacy of the postwar generation.

It's not bad going, but is it enough for the future? I doubt it. We have provided these structures, but do we nurture individual talents? Is the theatre we have created responding to the needs of our most outstanding and original artists? Or are they merely hired hands engaged to fit into programming schedules, to fulfil an essentially bureaucratic vision? Most established companies are too busy putting on shows to have time to consider, to have an overview, to ask hard questions. Are our actors in a position to develop their craft in new and adventurous ways, or are they too busy perpetuating expected standards? Are we offering our best and finest talents the right conditions to create their work? Having established standards of performance excellence, should we now test them more often?

Should we invite more outstanding artists from other cultures and countries to work with us? Are we asking new generations of emerging practitioners their views on what the future holds, or might hold?

It seems to me that, after sustaining a few decades of remarkable activity, Australian theatre has settled into a comfortable complacency. Who will offer new visions, energy and ideas? While we wait, I hope our attention, enthusiasm, and resources will be put at the disposal of some of the outstanding individual theatre practitioners who have already demonstrated their skill and commitment to the realm of the imagination. They include Neil Armfield, Meryl Tankard, Barrie Kosky, Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Page; I trust that one such artist will be offering thoughts on the theatre and its future in the 1996 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture.

Jim Sharman