“Two Strong Hearts” performers Jeff Fallon and Anita Spring with the Queen of GPAC, Pat Bourke, helping her celebrate her birthday. Photo: Kelly Bourke.
Even when she was busy raising her children and helping husband Tom run Shuttle’s general store in Goulburn, Pat Bourke still found time to travel to Sydney for live theatre performances.
That was more than 50 years ago. Remarkably, and thanks to the arrival of the Goulburn Performing Arts Centre (GPAC), Pat is an even bigger fan of live performances these days.
So much so, she has been crowned Queen of GPAC.
The two artists performing at GPAC on her recent birthday, Anita Spring and Jeff Fallon, who presented a tribute show to Olivia Newton-John and John Farnham, sang their best wishes to her and had their photos taken with her.
Pat is known as the Queen of GPAC for good reason. In 2022, when the centre first opened, she bought tickets for 59 of the shows.
“When I went down to look at the program, there were 59 things that really appealed to me,” she said. “I always went to Sydney at least once a month to shows and I am beyond doing that now.”
Even though she had a subscription for many years to the opera and the ballet at the Opera House, and enjoyed shows with her daughters at the Capital Theatre and other venues, the journey to and from Sydney became too much for Pat.
“But having GPAC on the doorstep, I feel like I have died and gone to heaven,” she said.
Her family’s interest in the stage goes back even further, to the days when her father, Bill Boland, was a policeman on the beat around Circular Quay.
He walked everywhere, as police did in those days. To rest his weary legs he would slip inside a theatre and put his feet up a bit. That’s where he met the organist Eileen Carabott, who was playing for silent pictures on the big screen, setting the scene with her keyboard skills. She also played for Radio 2SM three nights a week accompanying live tennis broadcasts.
Little wonder their daughter grew up with an abiding affection for everything on the stage.
Years ago, after Pat left the workforce, where she had been a bookkeeper at the Goulburn Evening Post, she struck up a friendship that endures to this day, with Father Frank Jones, at the time a newly ordained priest at Saints Peter and Paul’s Old Cathedral.
Sharing the joy of live productions and the journeys to and from them, Pat and Father Frank’s bond became so firm she went to South America twice to visit him when he was a missionary there after leaving Goulburn, staying for six weeks each time.
Throughout this year, Pat has enjoyed just about every one of the GPAC shows. She said artist Peter Byrne’s Neil Diamond tribute, “Forever Diamond”, was absolutely fabulous.
“His voice is even like Neil Diamond’s. Sweet Caroline nearly brought the place down, he had the whole audience singing that,” she said.
GPAC recently launched its 2025 season with Classics and Legends, giving audiences of more than 300 patrons a preview of what’s to come next year. It includes Swan Lake by the Victorian State Ballet, 1984 by Shake and Stir, and Romeo and Juliet by Bell Shakespeare. We can count on Pat being there, the Queen of GPAC in her element.
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