The Unflappable Trish

Across her 80 years, the seemingly unstoppable Trish Ludgate has been a Bollywood starlet, a flying ace, a concert manager, and an international woman of mystery. Which raises the question: has she ever been a spy?

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. For those of us who know Trish only in her later career – as executive manager at Musica Viva Australia – her eventful former life in the diplomatic service is one of high adventure and not a little did-she-really?

Yes, she was in a Bollywood film. Trish in her early 20s was living in London and had decided to return to Australia via the overland route – a three-month bus trip across Europe and Central Asia to Mumbai, and then a flight home to Sydney.

The youth hostel in Mumbai was run by the Salvation Army and talent scouts from the Bollywood studios went there to find exotic-looking extras.

The studio needed dancers for a nightclub scene in an otherwise forgettable film called Spy in Rome.

“It looks very dated now,” Trish says. “I mentioned it to an Indian bloke many years later. He said, ‘Oh, that’s a classic, it’s like Gone with the Wind.’ All I did was disco-dance in a pretend nightclub. I had many offers from rival movie scouts to keep throwing my hair around.”

Trish is recalling this on a sunny Friday afternoon at her flat in Coogee – not far from the beach in Sydney where she loves to swim most mornings. Amusing anecdotes and hair-raising stories tumble out of her. While we talk, her ginger cats, Tigger and Mika, leap onto the table and rub against her legs.

Trish grew up in Fairfield in Sydney’s west and started work as a secretary for an engineering firm. When she turned 21 she made that first trip to London and it was as if the world had opened its arms to her.

In London she loved going to the theatre, seeing Olivier as Othello, and Nureyev and Fonteyn in Romeo and Juliet. She travelled across Europe and marvelled at the sights, all the while keeping copious notes in her journal.

No wonder she still had itchy feet when she returned to Sydney. Wanting to keep seeing the world, she applied for a job with the Department of External Affairs and in 1970 was posted to Pakistan, as personal assistant to the Australian ambassador.

She loved the expat life in Islamabad with other foreign nationals – a world of golf and country clubs, and house parties at a hill station where they were often snowed in.

Her second posting, to Tanzania, had fewer pleasures of that kind, but it was where she learned to fly a Cherokee light aircraft. The final test involved her making a three-point flight from the capital, Dar es Salaam, into a valley in the jungle and back to the coast – all the while navigating with a pencil and pad on her lap.

The Department next wanted her in New York, but Trish was adamant about going to Warsaw, of all places – she wanted to work there with her old boss, the former ambassador to Pakistan.

“That decision was the absolute fork in the road in my life,” she says. “After three years in Pakistan, and nearly two in East Africa, I came to a city that was just astonishing."

At a reception on Australia Day, 1975 she met the man who would later become her husband, Roger Woodward, the Australian pianist who was studying in Warsaw at the time.

Roger was Trish’s introduction to classical music and she travelled with him when he had concerts in Paris or London. Later, she helped manage aspects of his career, which variously involved organising post-concert receptions, collecting a new score from Iannis Xenakis, and entertaining the likes of Lina Prokofieva, widow of Sergei Prokofiev.

Her experience in both music and foreign affairs held her in good stead when Kim Williams at Musica Viva Australia gave her the job of managing regional and international tours.

Trish ran tours across the country and around the world with groups including the Australia Ensemble, Goldner String Quartet, the Song Company, Sirocco, and jazz musicians such as Don Burrows.

“The King of Thailand was a jazz fanatic – so we kept sending jazz people to Thailand,” she says.

Apart from 13 years when she worked at the Australia Council (now Creative Australia), Trish has been with Musica Viva Australia since 1983. Across the decades she has seen an evolution in its concerts, audience and supporters – not least a shift away from corporate sponsorship and towards greater philanthropy from generous individuals.

With her years in the Eastern bloc, her flying experience and unflappable nature, it’s perhaps not surprising that Trish caught the interest of special operatives in Canberra. She was at home in Sydney one day when a man called on the phone and made a rather cryptic introduction: “Hello, my name’s Terry, I’m from Canberra – do you know what I mean?”

This was the 1980s and the endgame of the Cold War, and Trish thinks Terry was discreetly sounding her out about a secret mission, perhaps behind the Iron Curtain.

“I said, ‘Terry, I’m terribly flattered – but I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to go behind enemy lines’,” she recalls. “It would have been getting out spies and their families – who knows?”

We would hate to lose this beloved member of the Musica Viva Australia family to a life of spy games and espionage – but should Trish ever decide on a new career, Terry is only a phone call away.

“I’ve still got his card somewhere,” she says.