On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged.
At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines. “This was literally planted by my mum when I was born,” says Burke, 63. Since then Burke has played on stages from the Sydney Opera House to London’s West End, on screens big and small. “Look how old it is now! Old and gnarled and still puts on a good show, just like me.”
