The Adagio Flier

Carie Richardson's adventurous journey

She started late and mastered ballet and skating quickly, unusually tall with the look, the line, the quality. Her partner was physically strong, also a strong skater, strong enough to continue with other partners. They did not try to be some other pair or try to outdo anyone or chase points. Deep in the Golden Age of Ice Shows, they got better and better until the World Champion credentials over the entry seemed almost an afterthought. They forged an act on the mercurial surface of show ice from the blistering circuit of international tours, working hard and partying harder. No one raked over the complexities of what they were doing. The synergy was quick and alchemical. We are here, they said. We are clean and precise.

Young Carie Melbourne, late 1950s.9

THE YOUNG turistas leaving the cheap hotel are twenty-something. Pert, blonde, and headed south through old Rio towards the natural playgrounds of Copacabana and Ipanema, Pão de Açucar, Corcovado, Cristo and other places that roll off the tongue like a silky bossa nova melody. Everywhere, late morning humidity shot through with the meaty, garlicky whiff of simmering feijãois, a soupy reminder of approaching lunchtime.

On the far side of the dismantled Santo Antônio Hill, where construction on the massive cathedral has begun, the empty, ramshackle streets of Lapa, Rio's bohemian quarter, are still asleep. Breathless at the top of two hundred and fifteen dilapidated steps, they turn toward the sleepy hillside village of Santa Teresa, then off down the slope with the jaw-dropping vista of Botafogo beach along Guanabara Bay. Nothing prepares a traveller for this totem of natural magic. "Wow..." one calls to Sugarloaf Mountain. "Just, Wow!"

The walk to Zona Sul and Rio's famous bits is less paradisiacal more obstacle—tunnels, noisy traffic, and pollution. They cross artfully, bodies in sync with the barely discernible rhythms of the Mas que Nada samba now drifting in from the beach at the other end, from that irresistible shimmer of the four-kilometre arc of white sand, one hundred metres deep from water's edge to the pavement.

They dodge a hand-painted Kombi on Atlantica Avenue to reach the famous wave of black-and-white mosaics inspired by Lisbon's Rossio Square. "Paz, gringos!" smiles the marvellously hairy driver, two fingers in the air.

"Off to the Hippie Fair?" she calls cheekily. "Maybe Nirvana!"

Sandals off, they tip the dreadlocked samba saxophonist and disappear with the priestesses strutting among the faithful on Copacobana beach, smoking cigars and drinking Caipirinhas. No prizes for guessing what they worship. Here it is obvious why Henry Miller named his twin erotic books Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn.

Emerging from among the rows of bronze bodies and shade brollies, they round the corner to Ipanema, the sun now high overhead. The peaks of the Dois Irmãos mountains loom over the far end like giant breasts pointed at Heaven, God's poetic nod to the highest and best use of this sandy real estate.

On Posto 9 they join the urban tribes gathering to watch surfers making the drop around the new pier. The artists and actors, the music-makers and poets, the writers, hippies and homeless, the intellectuals, all learning to love one another in this place of free expression.

On the Tropic of Cancer, the late Sixties—where the samba beat rocks until dawn, where violence can erupt at any moment over drugs, money, and love—the focus of fashion is not clothes. Not in the favelas, nor in the respectable asfalto. It is the body beautiful, and the women here are the most beautiful on earth.

"Audition?" she parodies someone unseen while stabbing a bright coloured umbrella in the sand.

"La-di-da," smiles Liz, glad now that she joined her friend in the chorus of Holiday On Ice. "With impresario Morris Chalfen!"

"For a place among the stars?" pouts Carie, parading a towel like a gown. "In the biggest ice show on Mars!"

Falling backwards, she keeps on falling, laughing, and tumbling into a luxurious dream world of hand-coloured postcards and dance. "We're not stars," she sighs to herself, dusting sand from her cheek. "We just are. What happens happens."

Rio harbour is shining like a natural wonder, the inky black spills of its granite mountains silhouetted on the deep red canvas of approaching dawn—now bright red, now orange, now yellow—the most beautiful thing, in the most beautiful corner of the world. Right here after dancing the night away with No. 1 friend and a couple of locals.

"Joop and Carie are already a skating pair," she reasons. "We can make more money negotiating our contracts. Joop van der Sluijs is a beautiful man. We just met, I know, but he's skated in the show before and for Holland at the Roller Worlds in Miami.

"I see what he wants, lots of acrobatic lifts, and less of the rest. We both have a burning desire to be an adagio team—and be good at it—we've only practised lifts on the floor, and we're a pair at an audition just four months on.8

"I wouldn't imagine there is anyone who knows Joop who thinks anything other than he's a lovely guy. He's the brother I always wanted."

The afternoon reverie is already homeward bound when the South Atlantic Ocean takes her softly out to sea.





IT'S JULY 1943, AND LESLEY RICHARDSON is on her way to Melbourne from South Perth, just a few weeks old. Her father, Charles, is Royal Australian Air Force. Her mother Phyll has a bakery, then a florist shop, and later a plant nursery. Even at three years old, Lesley's big desire is to come out in front of a red velvet curtain and bow to all the people. As she grows older comes a yearning to travel and see the countries pictured in her storybooks.5

Living in bayside Cheltenham, Lesley attends junior school on the beach at Mentone Girls Grammar, although this is misleading. It is a holding pattern, the calm before the onset of a lifetime of wanderlust. Soon she'll say things like: You get used to living out of a suitcase delivered city to city. I once found a whole week's pay at the bottom.

By the start of Melbourne's Friendly Games in 1956, Lesley lives in Townsville, the unofficial capital of North Queensland. The tropical lifestyle is to die for and, good at sport, she medals in swimming at school and takes up ballet.

Back in Cheltenham, the aspiring dancer enrols at the Melbourne Academy of Russian Ballet in the city. Also known as the Borovansky ballet school, its master is an examiner for the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus. Later he will dance professionally with the Borovansky Ballet—The Australian Ballet.

"I think I'll put you up a grade," says Martin Rubinstein watching her at the barre. In the centre he instructs the class to do six or so steps together, but Carie needs to see them first because she is not sure of one.

"Do it again!" he roars, whacking the floor with his cane. She knows the steps, not that one name and, no matter how she tries, he bellows just the same.

Rubinstein, she later learns, does not bother with a pupil he does not think is good. But the girl he humiliated in front of his class is not the ballerina she dreams of being. She is young and shy, and she leaves, never to return.

Still 15, Lesley starts ice-skating at St Moritz Ice Palais in St Kilda, inspired by a poster for Swan Lake of Austrian skating champion Ingrid Wendl. Not quite 16, she meets her life-long friend, Liz, and takes lessons from Jack Gordon like most top skaters in Australia and New Zealand. Disinterested in competition, she quickly picks up skating and ballet, retiring as an amateur at 17 to turn professional in 1961.

Off the ice, she practices acrobalance poses and movements involving stationary balance. Horizontal, vertical, or even upside down on someone's feet, hands, shoulders, knees, thighs, back, and every combination—an adagio flier in training.





THE CAST OF Holiday On Ice is jubilant. Two weeks off before opening in Djakarta for a tour of the Far East. Lesley, now Carie professionally, flies from Rio to Djakarta on the plane with the costumes and sets, then buys a Qantas ticket home. No one anticipates a two-hour wait for the connecting flight, least of all the marmoset monkey fast asleep in her barrel-shaped handbag.

Loco the monkey, an impulse purchase in Brazil, seemed like such a good idea at the time. Not so much now he is wide-awake in the air. They do have an entire row to themselves, and Loco does seem satisfied with the breakfast fruit she tosses into the handbag when no one is looking. One high-pitched screech and game over.

Carie picked a young customs officer from a distance. Now, as he looks up from the passport and peers into her eyes, he seems more like her executioner.

"What is your profession?"

"Professional ice skater," the smile just wide enough to invite investigation away from her handbag and knocking knees. "Oh, Rio is such fun," she says with a wink. "A barrel of monkeys! Super! Have you not been? You can't be serious! You would love it!"

Carie phones home at the airport exit. The line is busy, so she takes a cab from Essendon to Cheltenham.

"Surprise!" she yells when the front door opens. Then she screams. Hugs, kisses, and tears all around.

"And, by the way, here is a monkey for you."

Joop and Carie wait out the rest of the break at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Cathy Steele is also visiting, and they work with her at the Olympic ice rink. Steele and Romayne, stars of Ice Capades in America, are considered the best adagio team in the world. One tip from Cathy changes their performance, and they are forever grateful.

Morris Chalfen did offer Carie and Joop a contract with Holiday On Ice in Rio. They are pleased to be an adagio team, but they negotiate their pay for every show from then on. After Buenos Aires, Chile, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and a fortnight break, they toured the Far East: Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Philippines, and Singapore, then Kuala Lumpur, Thailand, Penang, Korea, and Japan again. Their contracts are up on the second tour of Japan. For the first time in almost two years, they can explore other opportunities.

The ice show's magic mix of skating, lively music, slapstick comedy, and lots of pretty girls in glamorous costumes has been an international success for a quarter-century.





THE SMALL GROUP EXPLORING the island and Expo 70 find the spiritual heart of modern Japan among the wooden houses and culture capital roots of historic Gion. In the exquisite emptiness of a Zen garden with robed monks shuffling quietly as mice between architectural masterpieces, and the chants of meditating faithful, scent of cherry blossom, and wafts of burning incense invading their senses.

Okuni of Izumo started on a stage along the riverbank with jugglers and freak shows in the heart of the imperial city of Kyoto. Against a backdrop of dynastic conflict, social turmoil and civil war, the peasant temple dancer did not want to give up her dream and the things that made her happy for nothing. The dancing priestess travelled far and wide soliciting money for her Shinto shrine. She defied convention to invent Kabuki, a rich blend of music, dance, mime, and spectacular staging and costuming.

Many a young woman in Okuni's dance troupe escaped a life of prostitution in brutal patriarchy to become cultural sensations, blending the rhythms and movements of religious festivals with the words of popular love songs. The young dancers transformed their affairs and rivalries, their infatuations and jealousies, into the very fabric of their performance, anticipating contemporary forms of gender-bending, cross-cultural, pansexual joie-de-vivre.

In 1629, the shogun thought the sensuality of the dances undermined public morality and officially banned women's participation in Kabuki. For a time, boys and young men performed the female roles while dressed as women.

Although little of Okuni's life is extant, historians portray her with enormous talent, enough talent to be resented and betrayed by those with whom she had only been generous. Okuni could only find respite on the stage. A creative mind and a performing body require steady nourishment to avoid being depleted by their exertions. Okuni seems to have delved deep into inner resources, the loud appreciation of commoners among her audience, and the exhilaration of her travels. In one fiction, the shrine maiden tells herself repeatedly the day she stops dancing is the day she'll die. Once she succeeds in spreading the influence of Kabuki throughout Japan, she disappears, steeped in fame.

For nine months, Carie and Joop work all around the island with Holiday On Ice. They practice relentlessly for hours each day through the heat and three-show days of the tour. The tricks merge effortlessly, faster than ever before, and their reward is a contract with Ice Holiday in India choreographed by Australia's Reg Park. They are the only non-British skaters in a cast of professionals.

The new show runs until mid-August 1970, finishing earlier than planned when the promoter fails to deliver the required work permits. Two of the cast go to jail.

Very few appreciate the degree of difficulty in Carie and Joop's adagio routine. Of course, that is exactly how they want it.

In 1971, the team skate exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland.

In apartheid South Africa, performing in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg, they are the first ice show to allow nonwhite people to attend in the years before the UN-approved cultural boycott, the reforms of the 1980s, and the slow collapse of the oppressive system. Nine performances sell out, again choreographed by Reg Park. Ronnie Quibell, one of South Africa's biggest promoters, hopes more nonwhite people will be permitted to see international stars.

In 1972, Carie and Joop skate in the show Paris Sur Glase in the Bulgarian cities of Sofia, Plovdiv, Haskovo and Yambol. They miss weddings, reunions, holidays, and other family milestones in a lifestyle choice each artist makes to live their waking dream.

When cast and crew want to head home from exploring a host city, they head back to their performance space and cheap hotels. That is where their new family lives, where they regroup and recharge. More a mental construct than a physical place, they train and live in this unique travelling home and, when they step inside it, they are at home in whatever city they set up.





THE LOW BARS of fin de siècle Paris may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for a new dance. After all, they were hangouts for the kind of young street gangster the Parisian press call Apache after the ferocity of their savagery towards one another. But Maurice Mouvet and Max Dearly did pillage the violent duet dancing of this Parisian underworld for both the moves and the name of their new dance.

To describe it in words, one might say Apache re-enacts a violent discussion between a pimp and a prostitute, complete with mock slaps and punches, the man picking up and throwing the woman to the ground, or lifting and carrying her while she struggles or feigns unconsciousness. Sometimes Apache shares more in common with stage combat than dance, and sometimes the woman fights back.

That is what transfixes the eighteen-year-old standing in the wings of her first professional ice show whenever Wim de Jong and Dorothy Dee dance their Apache number. Pat Gregory and Hal Downey's show is touring Australia, and the pair's work in Ice Follies of 1962 turns out the seminal influence on Lesley Richardson's future. It is the jump on skating the young performer needs, and its Apache number sets the height of the bar.

The door to finishing school and the big-time shows beyond is thrown open by one of its American skaters. Bill Christopher writes Lesley a letter of introduction to Terry Rudolph at the Casa Carioca nightclub, high in the Bavarian Alps.

Classical ballet training can give an athlete a sense of carriage, musicality, and body awareness. Gradually a skater might translate it to the ice floor. But Ms Rudolph teaches ballet and choreography specifically for figure skaters, show skaters, and ice dancers: from performance versatility to tricks for skating a long career.

Moreover, Ms Rudolph's pupils receive a true ballet class, not one, but multiple times a week. They train with access to it and regularly present developments in their performance skills to a house of six hundred and fifty patrons. Rudolph blurs the divide between theory and practice at the Casa, and every aspiring professional here loves her for it.

With an emphasis on presentation, stretch, and body alignment, students learn core strength, posture, and carriage, of course, also facial expression, head positions, conveying a feeling to an audience, and more.

Rudolph works directly on a number or program on the ice, critiquing it from its starting position to its final bow and exit. Every day is a training day, and often the littlest things count. That is why the Casa is the best training ground for all the top ice-skating acts in the world. Casa students know no other way.

It's showtime! Carie Richardson is born since every girl on a glamour mission overseas needs a stage name. She lives and works at the Casa Carioca in Garmisch from 1962 until former Olympic champion, Dick Button, picks her for his Ice-travaganza show at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair.





AN IMMORTAL HERCULES, the most badass plane in the world, waits for take-off clearance on the runway at RAAF Station Butterworth in Bagan Ajam opposite Georgetown on the Malay island of Penang. It is probably on a sortie for the US Air Force in the war in Vietnam, hauling cargo, dropping leaflets, or delivering weapons on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Screwed down on the Straits of Malacca shoreline, the airbase is home to a squadron of Mirage interceptors waiting in the adjacent flight line to counter Soviet-built bombers flying out of Indonesia.

A whiff of the nearby prawn factory drifts in on the light breeze, and nut palms sway gently all around her. The stench is sickly in the tropical heat and humidity. No one seems to mind. Thousands of Australian airmen and their families live around the state, in Butterworth, and on the island, particularly in Tanjung Bungah, Tanjung Tokong, and Batu Ferringhi. Signs of British occupation are scattered all over the island —from colonial mansions to the street grid of Georgetown.

Down south in Ipoh in 1970, communist insurgents are making trouble for all things American when the ice show there is cancelled. Carie rarely sees her parents, and since her father Charles has been an airman all his life, she has the thought of flying home RAAF. Yesterday she called the base and ferried over to fill in the ubiquitous forms.

"Where is your father stationed?" asked the big man in Wing Commander uniform seated under the fan. The room temperature jumped a few degrees.

"Melbourne," she answered, cheeks flushed and dabbing her brow. They said not to mention Dad is retired unless specifically asked, and so her heart sank when the duty officer picked up a book and flicked through.

"Is your father retired?"

"Yes."

"I cannot authorise a flight for you because your father is a civilian."

That is when she had burst into tears. "When I first phoned, they led me to believe I would get a flight even though my Dad was retired," she wailed. "My Dad's sick," she sobbed uncontrollably. "I haven't seen him in such a long time." Try as she might, she could not stop the crying. She was embarrassed, and so was the duty officer.

"Please take a seat outside," he said.

A box of tissues and coffee arrived, but they made no difference. She was still blubbering when summoned back.

"I have signed your papers."

The noise from the Hercules is deafening as it winds up for take-off. It is an ambulance and a gunship, it drops paratroopers, it carries cargo, it is a TV broadcast system, aerial refueller, forward air controller, hurricane hunter, fire tanker, Antarctic resupply aircraft, search-and-rescue platform.

Today it carries a helicopter, four metal coffins, and a show skater with an overnight bag.

"How much was your fur coat?" asks the customs officer in Melbourne. She had modelled it for an English furrier in Buenos Aires.

"A wig," she smiles innocently. The Englishman's wife had indeed fallen in love with Carie's wig.





CHINCHILLA DRESSES, capes of black-and-white tiger skin pattern made from Russian broadtail, white Persian lamb suits. These are among the prettiest things in the expensive numbers when fashion meets skating in Dick Button's lavish New York production. One hundred and fifty skaters, headed by former Olympic stars and comics, perform in ten romantic vignettes around a horseshoe-shaped ice rink. Smaller spill-out rinks pour skaters and props onto the skating area. Elaborate gardens, ballrooms, ski slopes, St Valentine Day cards, and zoos keep the show moving at all times, but like others at the Fair that charge admission, this one also fails to draw audiences. Facing a sea of red ink, Ice-travaganza closes very early during the 1964 season.

In the thrill of the Big Apple, carefree and with no ambition, Carie is just happy to skate her first international and see the world. It is here in delirious New York that she comes of age. She says she's shy, but no one believes her. She can be extraverted in the extreme after a few drinks, but acrobatic skating on ice is a dish best served sober. No amount of charisma will avert a fall.

On top of this, the ice show business is strange for the novice. Hand-to-hand flying is one of the oldest disciplines in a circus. And make no mistake; the ice show business is a circus.

She can skate and do the shows, she loves to travel, but she can also be pedantic, and she never delegates believing it will be better if she does it all herself. Nothing about an ice show is perfect. Show ice, for instance, is rarely pristine. Everything that happens on an ice floor happens randomly compared to a wooden dance floor or a grassy football field. It is in a constant state of wanting to melt. Other times it's just too hard. Show ice is a slippery slope shared with skating chimpanzees, performing dogs, and even mules.

A pair skater wants a perfect partner, too, but no such thing, just human factors, human error, and the role of bad luck. She read somewhere humans make between three and six errors per hour, regardless of their activity or task.

Add to this the likelihood she won't become a glamour girl overnight. Not even with a glamour coach like Terry Rudolph. Not even with help choosing the right costumes, the right stage make-up, or coping with the harsh realities of show life.

Can this much chaos hold the secret to success? Humans do become stronger amid disorder by choosing different routes, cutting corners, or crossing streams along their creative path.

For Carie Richardson, this is the adventure. From unearthing more treasured ice time for jumping and spinning drills on top of the ice time for rehearsing show routines to discovering a revered role model, a complimentary skating partner. To find oneself, for goodness sake! The great adventure of adagio on ice is much like the great adventure that is Lesley Richardson herself.

A year flies by, and then another until Carie moves back home for six months of 1967. She skates a solo blues number in a small nightclub show. The following year, she and Liz successfully audition for the chorus of Holiday On Ice Australia. Its slogan is, "Totin' Ice Around the World".

Down Under in 1968, the show has already conquered the world. Carie continues through many cities in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Israel, Spain, and Portugal. Then on to South America, where she meets Joop, her skating partner to be.





THIS ODE TO THE PARIS of sparkling lights and glittering feathers is not poetry, but a sensual, intimate, elegant, and spectacular dance, a waking dream that takes your breath away and leaves you dazzled. A fantastic whirlwind of hand-to-hand wizardry led along by the artistry of the ice-skating. The affinity between ice-skating and theatrical dance comes to the fore at the legendary French cabaret Lido de Paris, just as it has in every production since 1952. Carie and Joop are the stars of the small ice measuring eight by eight metres. Now in their prime, the international adagio pair has seamlessly adjusted to support one another for a decade.

Apart from neckband and strategically placed burgundy patches and beads, Carie's sheer slip bodysuit is more a see-through thong leotard or even body art. The headdress of pale turquoise feathers drips pearl coloured sequins over the forehead and ears. Sprayed a luminous copper, the skates and laces are almost indistinguishable from the lithe body directing them. Nudity is not a requirement of erotic dance either.

Satisfied after a romantic pas de deux, the man tosses her away. She spins like a top on one leg with the other extending seductively but instead of coming to rest, she returns. Scooping her up into a sit lift, he raises her overhead like a barbell, legs split and rotating faster and faster, two humans intertwining with the same impact on the audience's senses as a sensual game.

Dropped suddenly to his shoulders, she corkscrews up into a swan and down before he spins her away again. She accelerates into a barely visible blur and, when she stops, we are spent and surprised to see only two arms and two legs in the afterglow of the dance's metaphors.

While she rolls, twirls and cartwheels over Joop, it seems she must have eight arms, each with thousands of suckers, or perhaps the soul of a hummingbird.

A skater can practice a series of movements repeatedly until it is as close to perfect as can be. But hand-to-hand flying requires someone else without whom the skater cannot transition between the various stationary balances. Joop is the base, the steady contact with the ice, on which Carie balances when in the air.

The chance of snafus, wardrobe slips, or prop and lighting malfunctions is ever-present in ice shows, but the true artists know how to keep the show on track. They constantly adjust in many small ways throughout a performance. The bigger the tricks and the greater risk, the stronger the connection needed to pull it off. Yet, they are never together for hours on end, and perhaps that is why they continue to get along.

Before Carie is thrown, swung, and twirled across the ice in the arms and hands of Joop, they strengthen their physical and mental connection, equivalent to a team hug or huddle like an ice hockey line. They do this at morning rehearsal and again when they're limbering up together before the show. They reinforce it whenever they can with eye contact before and during their number. Other than that, they lead separate lives with their partners.

The adagio tricks continue to push the limits of what their bodies can do, giving them more variables to assess in less time. They're not in it unless their reaction time is getting shorter, so they must perform at a high level regularly. Ask the skaters about their focus as they perform, and be struck by how important connection is. It is part of what makes adagio on ice so different from other performing arts.





FROM THE MID-40s, Britain's King Of Pantomime Tom Arnold produced everything from classical plays to films, revues, operas, rodeos, circuses, and variety productions. After Arnold's death, his business partner continued to produce ice pantos choreographed by Australia's Reg Park at Wembley Empire Pool London, where they had first received international attention.

Carie and Joop perform in Sleeping Beauty On Ice from Christmas 1972 and Aladdin On Ice in 1974. "The royal maid, So Shy, was the show-stopping skater," writes one well-known journalist on Carie's performance in Aladdin. Wembley had some great pairs over the years, and so a letter from the producer is memorable. "You were certainly the best pair we ever had at Wembley," it says. "You can quote me on this if you wish." Someone in the show suggests they compete in the World Professional Championships.

In between, the team skates with star billing in another fabulously staged nightclub show at the big Casino du Liban in Beirut, Lebanon. The headdresses used to conceal Carie's head padding have become her signature look.

Here they step off the ice onto "slick" plastic ice to skate into the centre of the audience who are seated at tables positioned hard up against the side of the passerella. Sharp skates are essential on plastic ice but there is nowhere here to get skates sharpened.

An ice comedian in the show likes the ice hard and dry, so he does not get wet when he falls, but Carie and Joop prefer it softer for their blunter skates. Joop bribes the locals looking after it with cigarettes. It is always soft, much to the annoyance of the comic.

Back in England, the young show skater points the Ford Capri from London to Nice in Southern France where rehearsals are soon to begin for the new Holiday On Ice show. It will tour France, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland in 1975. She leaves the car where it conks out somewhere in the middle of France.

The Rover bought in Nice is also a lemon. The steering pulls to the right, the oil leaks, the clutch goes, and the brakes are dodgy. The caravan is so cold it makes her teeth chatter. Carie's mother Phyll joins her for several months at the start of the tour. Everyone knows the car is in need of repairs in every town.

Most of the cast stay in hotels blissfully unaware of these problems. Carie would, too, if not for her beloved Collie dog, Saida. An infected tooth needs an operation leaving a hole in Saida's cheek, but at least she is not freezing to death like Carie.

In early April, at Jaca in the Spanish Pyrenees, Carie and Joop win the title of World Professional Pair Champions. At thirty-two, the girl from bayside Melbourne is the first Australian woman to win a world professional title since Sadie Cambridge in the 1930s. Judged by a panel that included Jacques Gerschwiler, the team beat out four others for the title: Gobl and Ningle from Germany; Inga Schilling and Tom Lawler; Lisa Illsley and Daniel Henry; and the Meiers of Switzerland. "It should increase our value to show producers," Carie tells a writer for a skating magazine.

After the last Holiday show in Paris, Carie joins her fiancé in Athens near where he works on an oil rig in the Mediterranean. She loves the lifestyle and soon makes friends with a delightful American whose partner also works on the rig. She does not miss the show life. She is free to eat a meal at a usual time instead of late at night after a show. She is free to see a sunset and do many little things that she has not done for decades. Now in her early thirties, she wants children.

In 1978, Carie's fiancé moves to Singapore to work offshore, and she follows. After she realizes she does not want to marry the man, she approaches the ice rink at Kallang Park for a teaching job. She loves Singapore and does not want to leave.

The best Singaporean girl is among her assorted local and international students. One is the daughter of the managing director of a big oil company, and Carie stays in their magnificent home when they go on vacation, waited on by all the servants. She befriends one of the young women and develops a love of durian, the stinking fruit few westerners like.

In 1979 Carie teaches Go Skate inline. She produces, directs, choreographs, and skates in a show at the opening of a Go Skate rink in Surabaya, Indonesia.

At the yacht club, she crews on a little Hobie Cat. One day a conversation starts up with a Canadian who has recently sailed in. He finds work as a captain of a tugboat at an offshore oil rig and, after a relationship develops, she moves into his 28-foot ocean-going yacht. They fall in love, and she falls pregnant a year or so later.

In 1980 at seven months, Carie returns to Australia to give birth to her daughter, Aura Chantal. Her name means a cool breeze. Aura means everything to Carie, and she works flexible hours as a make-up artist living in an apartment near her family in Cheltenham.

"Can you run my weekly aerobics class until I get better?" Chris Caldwell lives an hour away, but her class is only once a week. This acrobatically-trained Englishwoman performed in Peter Pan On Ice at Wembley in the early 1960s and often partnered with Ed McCormick in Holiday on Ice Europe. "Why aren't I doing this?" thinks Carie when Chris returns to work. She runs her own classes from a church hall in Cheltenham several times a week, then from Elwood Community Centre.

Carie's old friend Liz no longer lives in Melbourne. Apart from being a Mum, she finds little in common with the people she meets. For the first time, she misses show people—all seventy-five in each show, and all outrageously extraverted and funny. The endless travel she loved is over, too. After the excitement of show life, the suburbs are routine and ordinary.

Approaching forty in 1982, Carie choreographs an exhibition in which she also skates and takes it to Hong Kong for the opening of an ice rink at City Plaza. She returns the next year with her own production, Carie Richardson's Ice Fantasy, in which she is again a skater and choreographer.





THE WOMAN SPEAKING TO THE MAN near the fireplace is seemingly unaware of her sartorial elegance. The black dress and turban look like Callot Soeurs, yet made to fit, and the silk stockings and beautiful shoes look equally chic. Her figure is excellent, and her looks, exceedingly dashing as you might expect from the Parisian house of traditionally dignified fashions fifty years ago.

Carie has just judged the contest for Miss Travel Industry in the lead-up to the Miss Australia Quest at the invitation of her friend Diane. They stayed in touch, best friends from that time when they met at Jetset Tours. The man she speaks with is here with a brother who once lived next door. Graeme lost his wife to a brain aneurysm a year earlier. They become friends over time and marry a little over five years later.

"Generous, charitable, and creative," says Graeme when asked to describe Carie, "sensitive, sensible, and loving". The retired accountant has already descended from a renovation ladder somewhere overhead to deliver a declaration of pride in his wife's accomplishments. He adores her.

The former world's professional skating champion reads and keeps herself informed about the world: autobiographies, anything on travel, and anything that inspires her. Will to Live by an author with no arms or legs, The Barefoot Investor for Families, and Intrepid Journeys. She also finds Turia Pitt inspiring.

Egypt, Varanasi, India's spiritual capital, and Japan were top of Carie's bucket list of places to see after retiring. She and Graeme discovered the most wonderful, in your face, spiritual place she has ever seen in Varanasi.

"The thing that hits you most about Japan is the respect the people have; we could learn a lot from them, and also its cleanliness." Carie went back with Graeme recently. "I particularly love any country that does not westernize. I love seeing temples and their culture and, as you can see from my collection of Asian artefacts, I love the Orient."

Not long after returning home permanently, Carie lost a special Aunt to cancer. Trying to make sense of it, she started a journey, which she is still passionate about, as a volunteer in hospitals with the Look Good Feel Better cancer program.

"I have volunteered with them for over twenty-one years. They asked me to manage the program in Victoria and Tasmania, which I did for four-and-a-half years. I had to step down. Mum had Alzheimer's, and I had to go to check on her every day. I did continue volunteer work for them.

"In the years since, I have supported many charities, both volunteering and donating. I have been to Cambodia eight times to visit my sponsored children and do good deeds. I have had such an amazing life, been so fortunate. Volunteering is my way of giving back—helping those less fortunate than me—this is my passion."

Should you ever chance upon the bulging scrapbooks and other memorabilia recording Carie's excellent adventures in Ice Show Land, you will surely come upon a postcard she wrote home from her last show with Holiday in Europe. In it, she is upset at having to return to the border after arriving without a permit for a fur coat.

The skates were always going somewhere there, but cars were Carie's big troubles. Driving around with a caravan and large dog, no maps, no language, and a car garaged for repair in every city must take its toll. Carie's postcards home open up about her trials and tribulations, and Phyll had seen it first hand.

Sometimes there were technical issues. Ice quality could be a problem on open-air tanks with Holiday On Ice. Management sometimes decided to start the show before the ice had set to avoid refunds. In one town in Asia, Carie and Joop were taken out of the show because the ice was just too dangerous.

Perhaps poor weather also threatened the team's progress in other ways, but not according to Joop. "No, we were strong," says the base. "Nothing stopped us. We were the best." There were no shipwrecks or giant waves, just gravity wagging a warning finger at the shooting star now that she is back in the atmosphere.

For Carie, the highlights of a long international career are winning the World's Professional Pair Skating championships, starring at the Lido in Paris, and starring in Holiday On Ice all over the world. "Determination, Dedication and Discipline," says Carie, "is the mantra for success that I live by".

For nearly a quarter-century since turning professional in 1961, Carie Richardson flew across the ice of forty or fifty countries, jumping, spinning and twirling her way through the constellations above every continent except Antarctica.

After Aura was born, Carie took her to see her father in Canada. Her father visited Australia every second year or so, and she often visited Phuket to see him from the age of fifteen. Aura now has a daughter, Tori.

Carie has many friends, but she met six special ones at a gym when she first moved to Brighton in Melbourne thirty years ago. They see each other every week, celebrate each other's birthdays, and occasionally go away on girl's weekends.

Liz has lived just over the Victorian border in New South Wales for many years now, but they are still best friends. Carie keeps in touch with other friends from ice shows on social media, seeing them every couple of years at skating reunions, usually somewhere in Europe.

Carie and Joop talk on WhatsApp most days. Joop said recently, "It was a beautiful and delightful time to perform all over the world".







1. Joop and Carie, New World Professional Champions Rejoin Holiday On Ice, Howard Bass, Close Up, Ice and Roller Skate Skating World magazine, 1975

2. Conversation with Carie Richardson, Melbourne, 14 May 1975

3. Carie Richardson structured interviews, Ross Carpenter, May-June 2021

4. Reference, Frank Parsons, former ISU judge, Ice Skating Australia, 30 Nov 1981. Requested for opening an ice show in Hong Kong.

5. Unidentified article extract, 1971. Translated from a magazine or newspaper article given to Carie in South Africa.

6. Dick Button Enthusiastic, Busy Over World's Fair, Cleveland Press, 11 March 1964

7. The Casa Carioca, Randy Gardner and Susan Austin, Pro Skating Historical Foundation, 2003.

8. Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA, 1 April 1964.

9. Carie Richardson Archive with special thanks to Graeme.


Carie & Joop, Aladdin On Ice, London 1974. 9