Mount Gambier

Distinguished and Famous people from Mount Gambier

🎭 Robert Helpmann

Robert Helpmann was born in Mount Gambier in 1909, before his family moved to Adelaide when he was five. Dancing lessons there led towards an exceptionally wide-ranging performing career: ballet dancer, choreographer, actor and director. His work took him onto major international stages, but the beginning of that story belongs to Mount Gambier. He continued performing almost until his death, with an appearance in the ballet Checkmate only weeks before he died in 1986. Helpmann’s career refuses to fit neatly into a single job description, which seems appropriate for a performer whose talents ranged well beyond the ballet studio.

🎵 Kasey Chambers

Singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers was born in Mount Gambier in 1976. Much of her early childhood was spent on the Nullarbor Plain, where her parents combined fox and rabbit hunting with playing music in country pubs. She later performed in the family’s Dead Ringer Band before launching her solo career with The Captain in 1999. That album carried her distinctive country sound to a much broader audience. Mount Gambier supplies the birthplace in a story that soon became a travelling one, with family music-making and an unconventional childhood helping shape the performer who emerged.

🎤 Dave Graney

Dave Graney began making music with friends in his hometown of Mount Gambier, forming the punk band the Slunks in 1978. Adelaide, Melbourne and London followed, along with bands including the Moodists and the Coral Snakes and a long musical partnership with Clare Moore. In 1996 he received the ARIA award for Best Male Artist. His acceptance involved a pink crushed-velvet suit and a tongue-in-cheek claim to the King of Pop title: understated stagewear was evidently not compulsory. Graney’s local story is the formative Mount Gambier scene from which an idiosyncratic songwriter, performer, author and broadcaster emerged.