PHIL JARRATT ENJOYS A COFFEE WITH THE MAN WHO WENT FROM HYPNOTIST’S ASSISTANT TO PLAYING LEADING ROLES IN ARTS AND TOURISM
In October 1967, a Kiwi named Frank Harry Quinn, known to his mates as Pat, but to his sell-out audiences around Australia and New Zealand as The Great Franquin, started what was to be his last tour as a hypnotist with another packed house at Brisbane’s Her Majesty’s Theatre.
It might have been Franquin’s swansong, but it would turn out to be a new beginning for a young bank teller who had managed to snare one of the last tickets. When Franquin called for volunteers from the audience, Michael Donovan was up on stage before you could count to three, and not feeling in the least sleepy.
More than half a century later, the former chair of both Tourism Noosa and the original Noosa Biosphere Foundation, not to mention a dozen other high-powered managerial roles in arts and tourism, rocks back in his chair and laughs at the memory. “Being the sort of person I am, I didn’t hesitate,” he says. “Apparently I did the right things when asked and was funny and a bit outrageous, and at the end of the show he shook my hand and slipped a card into it, which was a free admission to the next night’s show. So I came back and did the same thing and he slipped another card into my hand, but this time it was an invitation to go backstage and have a drink with him.
“Backstage the Great Franquin said, ‘You seem to know how the system works, would you like to join the show?’ So I signed up to travel with the touring show for a year as the audience plant in New Zealand and Australia. I’d change my appearance for each show in a particular place, some nights without my glasses or wearing shades instead. I did what I was told, and I learned how to hypnotise people, even over the phone. I knew all the tricks of the trade. I could read someone’s bus ticket number blindfolded, but I can’t tell you how. I also learned how the backstage crew operated which years later when I worked for the Australian Opera gave me an understanding of the craft of the stage manager. I understood the physical demands of the stage as well as the artistic performance.”
Intrigued, I ask Michael what character traits Franquin saw in him that he might have taken into his later career. “I went with the flow of the show, realising that it was clever entertainment rather than fake. Whether I was actually hypnotised, I think I’ll keep to myself. But I also have always had a good sense of humour and a good sense of timing, and I think he saw that too. In later life I can tell you that I never used hypnosis to get a deal done, but I did learn lip-reading and became very good at it, and used that throughout my corporate career. It enabled me to look into a group of people from across a room and detect what they were saying about the conversation we’d just had, which gave me a slight edge.”
It was an edge that he took with him through a stellar career in theatre and arts management, culminating in him becoming NSW arts manager for the 1988 Bicentennial. In the 1990s he returned to his native Queensland with wife Carol and ran the Brisbane Convention Bureau and the Queensland Tourism Industry Association, among other roles, before relocating to Noosa, where he soon stepped into the evolving tourism scene, becoming chair of Tourism Noosa in 2006 as it transitioned from an arm of council into a stand-alone entity, funded by a council-raised tourism levy.
Although Donovan remained in the TN chair for the next few years, through a lot of rough and tumble within the board and then the pressures of the amalgamation years, he was often seen as a divisive figure, probably because he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but usually softens the blow with a wry smile. (Like Franquin, I’ve always found Michael an amusing fellow, but I’ve also never been in a boardroom barney with him.)
Despite the frequent turmoil, Tourism Noosa’s marketing initiatives helped grow the tourism economy rapidly towards a billion dollars, but Michael Donovan was already juggling his responsibilities there with chairing the Noosa Biosphere Reserve Foundation, a role that was soon equally steeped in controversy and bitter internal arguments. To add to the pressure, Donovan was also playing a leading role in local mentoring at Business Mentoring Noosa and had become chair of Eumundi Markets.
What very few people knew was that Michael’s juggling skills were increasingly hampered by a condition diagnosed after he had collapsed at breakfast in 2012. He says: “While all these things were overlapping, I was found to have a condition called Shy-Drager syndrome, a very rare thing also known as multiple systems atrophy or MSA. I was given five to seven years to live, and it’s now 15 years since I first noticed symptoms. So I’m winning the battle for now, but I can’t win the war.”
In recent years he has pulled back from business and community affairs, although he still conducts training courses in mentoring, and advises various boards. And last week he even found the energy to write an opinion piece for Noosa Today, suggesting that the tourism levy should not only be retained but broadened to include the real estate industry.
“Why are you picking on the poor real estate agents?” I ask as we sit down for a coffee at Gibson’s, for which appointment Michael has motored 20 minutes from home on his mobility scooter. He chuckles heartily, he hasn’t lost that.
He says: “When you look at who should pay for tourism marketing, you need to work out who is part of the cascade of business that benefits from it, and of course it’s not just real estate, but the others are so diverse and so small that getting value for money out of the exercise is problematic, whereas real estate is an obvious one and you could extract a levy from each sale, with the buyer and seller both paying it. You could argue that we should all just pay the tourism levy, but it would be harder to sell than a transaction-based tax. The real estate churn is about 28 percent, so it’s a sizeable amount. That would be a good start. But our brand equity is well over a billion dollars and we all own it.”
He continues: “The funding model should be a collection of funds for fair use of the brand from as many businesses as possible, which is then put back into expanding and improving the brand. Noosa is looking tired. A lot of places need to be overhauled. Service staff need to have far better training, they need better employment contracts too. Australians think that servitude is debasing, whereas in America and Europe they take pride in excellence of service. We need to get that culture into the Australian psyche. Now is the time to do it, otherwise Covid will be a waste of a good catastrophe. Now is the time to do things differently.”
Michael is also disappointed, if not despairing, about the direction the Noosa Biosphere has taken. He says: “I regard the years when I chaired the original Biosphere Foundation as some of the most satisfying of my life. All Biospheres are unique, each of them offering different things. Over the years I’d worked very hard to encourage green tourism, so that gave me a platform to structure the Noosa Biosphere along those lines. The model that evolved out of that had more than 70 people doing some extraordinary things, and what we were able to do in those first three years, UNESCO said we had achieved more than other Biospheres did in 20. I don’t think we’re using the real power of the brand of the UNESCO Biosphere. It could be leveraged a lot more.”
Michael, now 74, says he doesn’t let his condition dictate to him – as if anyone or anything ever could! “I’ve fought it and delivered for 15 years. It’s been a hard fight, but it shows you what you can do with determination.”
Is Noosa in good hands? “Probably, although there are still elements that are unnecessarily destructive and stupid. They should just get out of the way.”
