Linda Smith, The Mercury, October 24, 2025
She’s starred in popular Aussie TV shows Packed to the Rafters and Play School. But Merridy Eastman’s first love – theatre – was ignited during formative years in Hobart. Now she’s back for her latest role.
Some of Merridy Eastman’s fondest childhood memories involve taking part in theatre performances in Hobart – from flying through the air in a harness as Peter Pan on the Theatre Royal stage, to playing one of the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music.
She has since gone on to become a familiar face on stage and screen across Australia – with roles in hit TV shows Packed to the Rafters and Always Greener and a hosting role on the nation’s longest-running and much-loved children’s show, Play School. She’s also performed in a string of high-profile theatre roles and has earned a name for herself as a best-selling author after publishing three books (with a fourth book currently in the works).
But Eastman, now 63, says it was Tasmania – a place she lived through her formative years and still considers to be “home” – that helped kickstart her love of performing and inspired her to pursue an acting career.
Born in Canberra, as one of three children to parents Berenice and Walter (Wal) Eastman, she remembers moving a lot as a child, but the family became more settled after moving to Tasmania when she was 11.
“Our family constantly moved,” Eastman recalls.
“Wherever the ABC sent dad. He was a radio announcer in Renmark (South Australia), then an announcer and ABC TV presenter in Canberra, and after being regional manager in Rockhampton and a short stint in Brisbane, they sent him to Hobart in 1974.
“As soon as we landed, mum got a job as a teacher librarian at Bellerive Primary School – where she loved teaching a young Essie Davis and was later painted by her father, George – and us three children (including younger brother John and older sister Virginia) went to The Friends’ School, a huge difference from our state school in Rockhampton where we could run around barefoot.”
They lived at Sandy Bay and did plenty of sightseeing.
“My earliest memories are of car trips to Eaglehawk Neck, to Bruny Island, up Mount Wellington, to Coles Bay – all rugged up and exploring this hauntingly beautiful island,” Eastman says.
“And of Salamanca Market where I even got to sell strawberries and cream.”
Theatre and the arts also formed a big part of their exploration.
“Due to Mum and Dad’s huge appetite for the arts, the three of us constantly went to see shows at the Theatre Royal,” Eastman explains.
“Such as the wonderful British actor Roy Dotrice in Brief Lives, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Hollow Crown with Derek Jacobi, and Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage on her Gladdie Tour, who repeatedly pointed to the three of us (we’d cheekily sat in one of the “royal boxes”) shouting, ‘Hello, kiddies in the ashtray!’.”
And as much as Eastman enjoyed watching other performers on stage, she also loved being in the spotlight, performing in various theatre productions in Hobart during her teenage years.
“Apart from being inspired by all the things our parents took us to, including ABC Odeon concerts, art galleries, ballet, opera and theatre, I had a ball playing Peter Pan on the Theatre Royal stage wearing a harness and getting to fly,” she recalls.
“Once straight into the wall as I’d missed my mark on the floor … but it got a laugh.
“I also loved playing one of the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music, directed by the wonderful John Unicomb, and working with a beautiful company including the wonderful Noreen le Mottee.”
Theatre also served as a welcome escape for Eastman, who struggled at school.
“Sadly this was a time when The Friends’ School didn’t have the wonderful speech and drama department it has today,” Eastman says.
“And sadly, at Friends’ I had my first experiences of being bullied.
“Mum was particularly disappointed in my poor marks as she’d put herself through high school and university on hard-won scholarships. I’m sure today I’d be diagnosed with some sort of attention deficit disorder and get support, but back then they just kept testing me for deafness! So we agreed I should go to Rosny College for my HSC where I could at least study speech and drama.”
Despite the challenges she faced at school, Eastman says she was always thankful for her involvement with local theatre.
“I know we are a sport-obsessed country, but I honestly believe the arts, including literature and especially drama, can save young lives,” she says.
“As a teacher librarian who’d had a difficult childhood herself, my mother knew the value of books and at home we swam in them.
“I don’t like to imagine my formative years in Hobart without the theatre community, especially Diana Large at Apprentice Theatre, who held drama classes in the Theatre Royal foyer on Saturday afternoons. Diana cast hundreds of us over the years in all sorts of shows, including my brother and sister – and occasionally Dad! – many that went on at the Theatre Royal. To give children a chance to act was one thing, but to perform on the oldest stage in the most beautiful theatre in the country was an incredible bonus. She also encouraged me to consider acting as a career.”
Eastman recalls that her parents – “who by now could only read my report cards leaning on a supporting wall” – were “incredibly relieved and full of encouragement”.
Eastman auditioned for the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney and was accepted. Although she admits now that she actually lied on her application form in regards to completing her High School Certificate, because – despite gaining a credit for drama at college, Eastman had actually failed her HSC.
Interestingly, it was a theatre performance Eastman saw in Hobart a year prior to applying for NIDA that gave her the motivation to study theatre at a higher level.
“It was an electric two-hander performance at Salamanca with actors Jude McHenry and James Shuvus Williamson performing Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth that really inspired me,” Eastman explains.
“It was dangerous, dark, touching and extremely funny. The next year I auditioned for NIDA and got in.”
Eastman was 18 when she left Tasmania to study, but she always made regular trips back home throughout her career, to visit family and to launch each of her books. She’s now based in Sydney, where she lives near Bondi Beach with her husband Tom, their 21-year-old son Henry (who is studying architecture at university) and their dog, Toffee.
Eastman says she’d happily live in Hobart if she could convince her husband – who runs a successful digital wallpaper business – to move here.
“The three of us (siblings) came back every year for Christmas and any other excuse to see our parents, and to catch up with old friends from our Apprentice Theatre days, as well as lifelong family friends always around our parents as they got older,” Eastman says of her many trips back to Tasmania.
“Hobart is a trove of shiny people and I would move here if Tom agreed … but his business is in Sydney and his business does better than mine!”
Eastman’s parents were well-known arts identities in Tasmania – her dad, Walter, was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2010 for his service to performing arts and the wider Tasmanian community and was also the Mercury’s theatre critic for more than 20 years, while her mum, Berenice, was a published author and a much-loved member of Tasmania’s writing community.
Sadly both died in recent years – Walter in 2018, at age 89, and Berenice in 2021, at age 93.
While the loss has been “heartbreaking”, Eastman does enjoy returning to Tasmania, finding some comfort in visiting places they once enjoyed visiting together.
“As the years go by I feel stronger about being here without them,” Eastman admits.
“When we stay in Hobart we enjoy visiting the same places we’d go to with Mum and Dad – Salamanca Market, Peppermint Bay and Sandy Bay’s Long Beach (where the couple once enjoyed daily walks – there’s now a park bench there with a memorial plaque in their honour).
“My brother lives in London and my sister in Ireland, but I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that Hobart will always be home.”
Her strong connection to family is what actually inspired Eastman’s newest book, which she hopes will be finished later this year.
Her first three books, all published by Allen & Unwin, include There’s A Bear In There, about “my year working weekends as a nervous receptionist in a brothel”; Ridiculous Expectations “about hoping to find romance on my British book tour (and ending up with a tall German)”; and How Now Brown Frau “about adjusting to life in Bavaria at 41, pregnant, without a word of German under my belt, and living there for five years”.
But book four – called I Knew We Weren’t Spanish! – will be a little different.
“About eight years ago I decided to find out – for once and for all – if Dad’s family really were Spanish, as we’d been unconvincingly told,” Eastman explains.
“And sure enough, my research led to an extraordinary discovery. Even Dad didn’t know, but his great grandfather was a Worimi man called John Jonas from the Paterson River in NSW.
“Sadly, Dad grew up at a time when families hid such extraordinary connections, claiming Spanish or Italian ancestry instead. But having heard this persistent rumour of an Aboriginal relative by the name of ‘Jonas’, I kept trying to find any Jonas-Eastman connection, until finally I received a response from my cousin, Dr Bill Jonas. It was a six-page email explaining our entire family tree. Over the next five years, Bill and I exchanged 200 emails, in which he told me not only stories of my Aboriginal ancestors, but of his own extraordinary life, from poor beginnings to becoming a Professor of Geography, to activism for Aboriginal communities, until he became not only our Race Discrimination Commissioner, but also the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner up until 2004. Thanks to Bill, I’ve now met wonderful cousins I didn’t know I had, and have spent much of the last decade educating myself in a kind of clumsy, self-taught Aboriginal Studies course.”
And suddenly, the child who once struggled at school, is an enthusiastic learner.
“In order to write about my family’s story, I’ve had to dive deep into history that wasn’t taught to me at school, that I was too lazy and uncurious to research myself, and I now know my way around archives at Historical Societies, NSW Records at Kingswood, Trove, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the National Library in Canberra,” Eastman says.
“So ironically, after all those years of failing at school, I’ve become a kind of academic, like Mum, (who got her master’s degree at 73).
Eastman is coming to Tasmania later this month to perform in Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Hobart’s Theatre Royal from October 30-November 1, as part of a national tour.
“I love Shakespeare,” Eastman enthuses.
“I got to perform Shakespeare at NIDA, for the Melbourne Theatre Company, and for the Australian Shakespeare Company (playing Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream over five summers in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.) I can’t get over how relevant he is today, which isn’t surprising when you’re dealing with such universal themes as love and loyalty, jealousy and revenge, power and ambition, nature and the supernatural.
“I also find the language a delicious challenge to make accessible, which it is if you do the work, so that the audience doesn’t have to. And Shakespeare was a brilliant comic writer. Playing the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, I get to be a working-class woman in an aristocratic household who loves her work, who is a second mother to Juliet, and whose bawdy humour, love of gossip and inability to shut up or read a room is a constant source of humour in the play. And on top of that, I am finally working for Bell Shakespeare with artistic director Peter Evans, with a company I’ve admired for years, and a lovely cast of incredibly talented young actors whose commitment and courage blew me away in the rehearsal room, and now on stage every night.”
Eastman is best known for her appearances in hit TV shows, but she says she’ll always have a soft spot for the immediacy of theatre.
“I loved being a regular member of two long-running television series – first Always Greener, in which I played a rural real estate agent’s stuck-up wife in a small country town, and then in Packed to the Rafters when I got to play Donna, the slightly unhinged friend of Julie Rafter (Rebecca Gibney),” she says.
“I loved both those series, and working with the writers, casts and crews. But I think theatre is always my first love because I get mostly comic roles, and therefore enjoy the immediate response of a live audience, who hopefully laugh, or at least are there with you in the present moment, a much more exciting dynamic than ‘Cut!’ – and cross your fingers they like it six weeks or three months later.”
And she loves the wide variety of characters she’s able to play across both stage and screen.
“I just want the characters to be well written, and hopefully have a comic element I can have a bit of fun with,” Eastman says.
But being an actor hasn’t always been an easy career path.
“After four years of Play School, I had a decade in Melbourne working every year on stage for the Melbourne Theatre Company, and for other companies like Playbox and on various TV shows,” she says.
“But when I moved back to Sydney in 2000 the phone went dead. Not one offer.”
Which is how she ended up working as a receptionist at a brothel in Sydney’s Kings Cross – a role that inspired her to write her first book.
“I had no idea I could write anything, let alone a book,” Eastman says.
“Sadly, writing is as fickle, unstable and unpredictable a line of work as acting, but luckily I’m married to a lovely, tall, German fella who runs his own successful business.
“As the years go by, I get offered less acting work, but I also turn more things down too. I used to say yes to everything, to be seen. Now, if I know I’m not right for the role I say no, stay home and write. I’m very lucky to be able to do that.”
She also feels lucky to be returning to Hobart for a visit this month, albeit a fleeting one.
“Although it’s wonderful to be back on the Theatre Royal stage, I’m not here long enough,” Eastman says.
“Hobart is just the best – and I can’t wait!”
Merridy Eastman will perform in Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Hobart’s Theatre Royal from October 30 until November 1, at 7.30pm. Tickets from $59 ($49 concession). Book at theatreroyal.com.au
Originally published: The Mercury