VIBRANT AND VITAL

A chance encounter with Geoffrey Rush gave Nicola Paull the encouragement she needed to escape her small country town upbringing and develop a wide-ranging artistic career.

- KIRSTY MCKENZIE

As Nicola Paull recalls, growing up in a small rural community in Queensland’s Darling Downs in the 1970s, she was always the odd person out.

“The ultra-conservative premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was in power and it was just stultifying,” she says. “I grew up in a family of five girls and the expectation was that we would all make our lives on the land. I felt like the only leftie in a right-wing society and I couldn’t wait to get out.”

The Coke-bottle-out-of-the-sky moment came when the then-emerging actor, Geoffrey Rush, who was also born in Toowoomba, visited her school, Fairholme College. “He was so generous and encouraged me to follow my dreams,” Nicola recalls. “It was just the impetus I needed to get out and give it a go.”

And a red-hot one at that as Nicola headed to Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, where she studied acting and built a career in television shows such as Prisoner, Return to Eden, The Flying Doctors and Neighbours. In the 1990s, she moved to the UK where she discovered the theatre fraternity was “sick of Neighbours people taking their jobs”. Ever resourceful, Nicola turned her hand to producing corporate events and audio programs.