Flying as High as the Sun
Sophie Quick, Editor
The Sun Theatre has long been a cultural icon in Melbourne’s inner-west. Now its owner, the entrepreneur Michael Smith (1987), is literally taking off around Australia and the world, taking the Sun marque to even greater heights.
Sunday 1 December 2024
The wing of the Southern Sun seaplane skims past startling blues and aquamarines fringed with white foam, past the sandy cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. The scene, posted on YouTube’s Southern Sun TV channel, captures the breathtaking flight from Ceduna to Port Lincoln on the 42nd day of Michael Smith’s 44-day circumnavigation of Australia.Two days later, on 19 May, Smith touched down at Point Cook in Victoria, having successfully followed – as closely as he could – the flight path of two record-breaking RAAF pilots. Exactly 100 years earlier, pilots Stanley James Goble and Ivor Ewing McIntyre had completed the first air circumnavigation of the continent.In choosing to commemorate that 13,600-kilometre flight, Smith was perhaps looking for a relaxing, low-key project. (Back in 2016, he was named the Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year after circumnavigating the whole globe.)Fearless adventuring, cinematic flights of fancy and a delight in reclaiming historical wonders – these have been recurring themes throughout Smith’s remarkable life and career. It all started at College, he says.‘Out of Ormond College, I learned that the sky’s the limit. Having grown up in the country, I probably had a reasonably narrow sense of where the world was going to take me. But Ormond really opened my eyes … I met people from all walks of life, whether they were from Toorak and Kooyong or the Wimmera or the Mallee or the Omeo Highlands. It was the social experience of being at Ormond that I think set me on the path to where I am today.’During his College days in the late Eighties, the young engineering student was drawn to cinema. He ran double-feature movie nights in the ground floor of Picken B that quickly became legendary. Smith was having ‘a lot of fun’, he says, ‘but there was sort of an entrepreneurial spirit to what I was doing.’ While he wasn’t too sure about his engineering degree, Ormond gave him the courage to try something different.After College, Smith started a successful business designing and installing cinema equipment. By the mid-1990s things were going so well that his workshop was ‘bursting at the seams’. Rather than a warehouse, Smith thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool to get an old cinema’?That’s when he heard about the old Sun Theatre in Melbourne’s inner west. The place was a total wreck. Undeterred, Smith climbed through a hole in the wall to make his first inspection.‘I looked up, and I literally just fell in love with it. It was this magnificent art deco space. It actually reminded me of a 1930s-era ocean liner. It was streamlined, and, I mean, it was just brilliant. And somehow I looked past the fact that the ceiling was upside down on the floor…’Years on, the theatre is nothing less than iconic: its neon sign is the emblem of the inner west. The place is a community hub, tourist destination and even a celebrity magnet. (Quentin Tarantino, Samuel L Jackson and Kurt Russell memorably turned up for a screening of The Hateful Eight in 2016, lured by the classic theatre setting and the 70mm film projector Smith restored especially for the screening.)Since then, Smith has shone his cinematic sun further afield, as custodian of the classic Star Theatre in Launceston and Cinema Loro Sa’e in East Timor – a social enterprise supporting the local economy. These days, he’s also running the Rothwell Estate Distillery, producing an ‘Art Deco Gin’ (naturally) with bottles bearing the same sun logo that shines through so many of Smith’s endeavours – from his classic theatres to his Southern Sun seaplane.Smith may have chosen to embrace adventure and novelty throughout his life, but – as Kenny Rogers once sang – you can’t make new old friends. Despite his high-flying existence, Smith is still in touch with many old friends from his College days.‘Some of my best friends today are the folks I went to Ormond with. Whether it’s that you went to lectures with them, or just ate dinner with them, or you snuck up to the tower when it was closed ... whatever it was that you did that you shouldn’t have done. It’s all those bonds that make it really special.’ First Published in New & Old Magazine | Issue No. 104 December 2024
You know at Ormond, I learned that the sky’s the limit.
Michael Smith (1987)
