The Australian Ballet’s longest-serving artistic director grew up in Perth. He was noticed in an audition for The Australian Ballet School by founding director, Margaret Scott, who offered him a place then and there. After winning scholarships and plaudits at the School, he was offered a place in The Australian Ballet and danced with the company for two decades, eventually becoming a principal artist. He took over the directorship of The Australian Ballet in 2001; he commissioned major ballets and scores, took the company around the world and steered it through the first year of the COVID pandemic before stepping down in 2021. David also joined The Australian Ballet School's Board in 2021.
David McAllister’s career started with an audience of one – himself. His first memory is of dancing in front of the TV, mesmerised by his own reflection in the glass, with tea towels tucked into his pants so they would flare out as he twirled. “I was emulating a tutu, without knowing what one was!”
As a toddler, David would fall asleep in a wide-legged hamstring stretch, his head resting on the floor (“I could never do that now,” he jokes.) He was constantly dancing to the radio, which was often tuned to the ABC’s classical station. But it wasn’t until the early 1970s, when he saw snippets of Nureyev’s Don Quixote on TV, that he was able to pinpoint his craving. From then on, he pestered his parents for ballet lessons.
In that era, the vast majority of Perth’s ballet schools only had female students. To take on a boy meant learning a whole new syllabus, and most teachers weren’t keen on doing that. By luck or fortune, Evelyn Hodgkinson, a local teacher, had taught boys before and agreed to take David into her school.
“I turned up in jiffies and footy shorts. My parents weren’t going to buy the uniform because they thought it was a passing fad – but it never ended.” Naively, David thought his primary-school friends would be as excited as he was about his ballet lessons, and told the whole class about it at show and tell. “It was social suicide!” He was subjected to intense bullying and ostracism. “Luckily I had a good friend who was also a bit of an outcast, and he stood by me.”
It wasn’t only his schoolmates who looked askance at David’s new passion. His teachers were also unsettled by it. “Sister Domenica called my parents up to the office and told them that ‘little boys don’t do ballet’, and that I was being corrupted. I had been doing plaits in Karen McCarthy’s hair instead of concentrating on lessons for my first holy communion. I was six!” David’s father took umbrage, and told the teacher that no one would dictate what his boy could and couldn’t do. The ballet lessons continued.
As a child, David had some extraordinary opportunities. When the Scottish Ballet visited Perth, he was employed as a child extra in The Nutcracker and La Sylphide. Margot Fonteyn was guesting with the company, and let the children watch from the wings as she slipped into the trick chair that the Sylphide uses to ‘vanish’ in Act I. He also had the dubious privilege of being fired by Rudolf Nureyev, who was staging his production of The Sleeping Beauty in Perth. There was a slip-up in communications, and instead of hiring men that stood at five foot eight, the management had hired boys of four foot eight. Walking down a staircase, holding candelabras, they struggled not to trip over their oversized costumes. A Russian bellow went up from the auditorium: “NO!” The boys were quickly hustled away. “I went home and sobbed!”
Brighter days were ahead. At 14, David auditioned for The Australian Ballet School, and was accepted; but his parents refused the offer. “They knew that the minute I got into a ballet studio, that would be it – I’d never finish school. And actually I was pretty weedy and pathetic. The first time I’d ever done double tours was in the audition! I was well off the pace.”
When he was close enough to finishing Year 12, David’s parents let him try out for the School again. Turning up to the audition, he was shocked to find Steven Heathcote, Paul Mercurio and Darren Spowart, who would all make names for themselves in the dance world, in the studio. “Steve was, well, Steve – tall, beautiful, looked like he was fully formed and ready to go. Paul looked like he was about 25 – muscly, strong, he could do everything. I thought, ‘Damn, I’ve missed my chance, I’m never going to get into the School.’ But Maggie offered us all places on the spot.”
David McAllister during his time at The Australian Ballet School - 1981 - Archives
In January, 1981, David flew with his parents on Ansett’s “midnight horror” from Perth to Melbourne. “I’d never been on a plane. I don’t think I’d slept for the whole week beforehand, I was so excited. On my first day, I got there so early the building was locked. I had to sit there waiting for an hour before anyone else turned up.”
That year, there was an intake of 18 boys, an extraordinary number both then and today. “I walked in to the studio and there was a boy doing splits up against the wall. I just sat on the floor and copied everyone else’s stretches, thinking, ‘I’m going to be the worst in the class.’” The students were greeted by Margaret Scott in her standard uniform of checked navy crimplene pants and pink T-bar shoes. She told them they should never smoke and warned them how quickly a tutu could go up in flames. Then there was a talk about leaving their emotional baggage at the door. “You are here to work – I don’t care what’s happening in your private life. In this room you are just a dancer.”
Because of the unusual numbers, Scott split the first-year cohort in half. Much to his surprise, David was put in the group that were to take classes with the second-year students. “I was like a stick, and there was no physical augmentation in those days. Our gym was the community gym next door. They used to make us run around the oval and play basketball – not exactly fit for purpose! I would really have benefited from some weight training. I did a lot of push-ups at night.”
In pas de deux class, the weaker boys would be teamed with taller girls as a tough-love way of strengthening them up. “You could see the look on the girls’ faces when you got paired with them. I often partnered this very tall, very beautiful girl – we would promenade and I would be in her orbit! I was beyond useless. But in the end, we managed to do our pas de deux, with a lot of praying. I think she partnered herself for most of it.”
In pas de deux classes with Bruce Morrow, David learnt that brute force wasn’t everything. “Bruce was the same height as me but he was very strong, very coordinated. That’s when I realised that you didn’t have to be six foot to be a good partner, you just had to analyse the physics and engineering of how to keep the girl on her leg.” Morrow also looked out for his students’ wellbeing. “At the end of the year, when everyone was zonked, or leading up to an assessment when we were stressed, he’d have us lie down on the floor after class and do some meditation. He was one of those out-of-the-box teachers.” David also loved doing class with Lucette Aldous: “She was Cinderella in the first live ballet I ever saw, and here she was, our teacher. It was like being in ballet heaven.”
Despite still being small and slight, David had obviously impressed the staff at the School. He received the Ballet Society scholarship in his first year. In his second year, he received it again, and was chosen to dance the lead role of the Blue Boy in a third-year graduation performance of Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs. And then came the opportunity of dreams – a short-term secondment into The Australian Ballet. He and Steven Heathcote would be rounding out the male corps in a production of Spartacus. They never went back to school. “Nothing was ever said, and we just kept appearing in the casting notices. We were muttering to each other, ‘Do we have a job?’ Maina Gielgud arrived [to take over the artistic directorship of the company] in 1983, and it wasn’t until my mid-year interview with her that I realised I was actually in. We never did graduate!” (In 1999, when Marilyn Rowe became the director of The Australian Ballet School, she gave both of David and Steven honorary diplomas.)
David’s first big break was being cast in Graeme Murphy’s Beyond Twelve, a semi-autobiographical piece that traces a dancer’s journey from a football-playing Aussie childhood to the end of his career. Three dancers portray the character at different ages. David performed with the stars Paul de Masson and Kelvin Coe. “We joked that we were the ‘big nose’ cast.”
David in Beyond 12 - The Australian Ballet Archive. 1980s.
In the bitter aftermath of the 1981 strike, many dancers had left the company, leaving a huge gap in its middle ranks. Talented young dancers leaped to fill it. David was quickly promoted to coryphée. “It was lucky timing for us, but also, it was just Maina’s philosophy. She didn’t care what rank you were in as long as you were the right person for the role.” David was cast as the Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty, as Lensky in Onegin, in the lead role of Equus. Gielgud had settled on a group of young dancers – David, Steven Heathcote, Lisa Pavane, Greg Horsman, Fiona Tonkin, Elizabeth Toohey, Joady Chambers – and set about making them her new stars. She sent them on a scholarship visit to American Ballet Theatre, which was then directed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, and to the National Ballet of Canada, then directed by Erik Bruhn. “It was just like Disneyland. When you wish upon a star … all of our dreams were coming true.”
In 1985, another dream became reality. Gielgud chose David and his on-and-off-stage partner, Elizabeth Toohey, to compete at the Moscow International Ballet Competition. Kelvin Coe and Marilyn Rowe had won silver there in 1973. “The Russian dancers still remembered them. They’d say to us, ‘Oh, Australiski – Coh and Roh!’ We basked in their fame. Moscow felt like a spy novel. It was summer but so grey, so bleak, no advertising anywhere, just hammers and sickles and posters of clenched fists. But we saw the Bolshoi every night.”
David McAllister and Elizabeth Toohey at Moscow’s Fifth International Ballet Competition - 1985.
David and Lizzie assumed they would be eliminated in the first round, but dancing the Bluebird Pas de deux, the Fanny Essler pas de deux from La Fille mal gardée, and Walter Bourke’s exuberant Tarantella, they captured hearts. “A lot of people were doing, you know, meaningful contemporary work in flesh-coloured leotards. And we went out there in our green and gold, with our tambourine – it woke everyone up.” David won a bronze medal, Lizzie won a special award for artistic merit. They were invited back to guest with the Bolshoi Ballet the following year, a rare honour. Their interpreter took them to a supermarket and pointed out a photo on the wall of them in Tarantella.
Back home, they were media darlings, dubbed by one magazine “the Torvill and Dean of The Australian Ballet”, appearing on Hey, Hey, it’s Saturday. In 1986, David was promoted to senior artist, but then his career stalled. Heathcote, Tonkin and Horsman were all promoted to the principal rank, but he was left behind. “I didn’t think it was going for happen for me, and the air was going out of my tires. I was planning to audition for overseas companies, when suddenly Maina promoted me.”
Part of the problem had been typecasting. “I was always seen as a jumpy, happy dancer. You know, Don Quixote, Coppélia, the Bluebird, the Peasant Pas in Giselle. I always looked like the boy next door. Maina didn’t see me as a prince. I had to prove myself.” Eventually, Gielgud acknowledged his versatility and cast him in all the classical dream roles – Romeo, Albrecht, Prince Siegfried, Prince Florimund – but he did them much later than his contemporaries. “At the time, I was a bit devastated about that, but in hindsight it worked out exactly the right way. It made me hungrier, made me work harder, made me think more about the qualities of the roles. And when I became artistic director, I realised I would have made exactly the same decisions about myself as Maina had.”
David as Albrecht in Maina Gielgud's Giselle. Photo by Branco Gaica. 2001.
David danced with The Australian Ballet for two decades. One of his greatest highlights was eating dessert with Princess Diana after dancing the lead in an opening-night performance of Coppélia at Covent Garden. “One of those pinch-me moments. She made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. She wanted to be on the table with the dancers, and instead she was with all these millionaires.” Another cherished memory is his farewell performance in 2000, dancing Giselle at the Sydney Opera House with Miranda Coney.
Meeting Princess Diana in London in 1992 with Miranda Coney and Maina Gielgud
On that night, the sorrow of leaving the stage was sweetened by the knowledge that he had secured the artistic directorship of The Australian Ballet. “When Maina left in 1996, she told me, ‘I can imagine you running this company one day.’ It planted a seed.” When the directorship came up in 2000, he didn’t feel ready, but he went and ahead and applied, just for the experience – and got the job. He would go on to become the company’s longest-serving director, commissioning signature works such as Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake and Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella; creating his own production of The Sleeping Beauty; securing John Neumeier’s Nijinsky, after a 15-year negotiation; and nurturing a new generation of principal artists, including Lucinda Dunn, Robert Curran, Simone Goldsmith, Kirsty Martin, Lynette Wills, Madeleine Eastoe and Benedicte Bemet. He also took the company on significant tours to London, Paris and New York.
David-McAllister after his final performance at the Sydney Opera House. Photo by Branco Gaica. 2000.
Like all of the company’s artistic directors, he worked closely with The Australian Ballet School. “I felt very bonded to the School as a director. It’s my school, it’s where I grew up. I decided early on that I wouldn’t exclude dancers just because they hadn’t trained there, but also that my first choices would always be from the School, because that’s what it’s there for. I loved working with Marilyn, although I was a bit in awe of her at first – I mean, she was Marilyn Rowe, for God’s sake!”
David’s ambition as a director was to leave The Australian Ballet in an even stronger place than it was at the start of his tenure. “And now, David Hallberg has taken it to a whole different level. To see the company prospering and growing, and to have been a part of that – it’s the greatest achievement of my life.”
David McAllister coaching The Australian Ballet School students. Photo by Ellen Baxter. 2025.
By Rose Mulready
