This weekend kids at Australia’s oldest youth-owned-and-led arts company Shopfront Arts Co-opare reviving their 50-hour act-a-thon fundraiser which helped keep the Sydney company going through tough times in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The act-a-thon is a slightly bonkers theatrical endurance event (which will be livestreamed for the first time) that captures the scrappy and heroic nature of the Carlton company’s history, now celebrating 50 years. Young artists will perform live in one-hour blocks from works they have devised themselves.

“I’ll be performing in the 3.30am slot,” says Nicole Pingon, who first performed at Shopfront at 13 and is now in her mid-20s. “I don’t know what I’m doing yet but I’ll figure it out!”

Shopfront Arts Co-op’s act-a-thon in 1977, in Hurstville, NSW. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op

Which feels about right. Shopfront has been figuring stuff out since it was formed in 1976 by two theatre directors, Errol Bray and Garry Fry. Among its alumni are playwrights Hilary Bell and Andrew Upton, and actors Trevor Ashley and Paul Capsis.

It was a different world to some extent. Back in 1976, kids were being warned about becoming square-eyed watching the colour TVs only just introduced to Australia. The prime minister was Malcolm Fraser. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act was about to be passed. Abba’s Fernando topped the charts for 14 weeks straight. And in Carlton, then a working-class suburb in south-west Sydney, theatre-loving kids were chasing their various dreams.

‘I lied about my age to get in!’ says founding member Liz Hill, pictured in 1976. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op

Shopfront has a radical history. When their landlord wanted to turf them out and sell the building in 1978, the kids, mostly aged 12 to 18, unanimously voted to buy the building. The adults were split on the vote. Some quit over it. But the kids raised a $43,000 deposit through act-a-thons and raffles, and later – with government support – bought the building. Shopfront’s young people continue to have a say over the direction of the company.

“I was one of the kids who did the act-a-thons and costume parades, where we’d go shaking tins up and down the train line on trains and asking people for donations. We really felt that kids could make a difference,” says 61-year-old founding member Liz Hill, who joined Shopfront when she was only 10. “I lied about my age to get in!”

Hill was there on the day the kids voted to buy the building. “It was quite a political meeting with different adult opinions, but we voted in favour of staying and working toward making the building owned by us. It had been an engineering factory and mechanic’s garage, so it was greasy, and it needed a toilet block to get licensed as a theatre. We had to clean a lot of dust and junk.

“I think it’s been a wonderful thing, given how many arts organisations have difficulties paying the rent these days. The fact that the Shopfront Co-op has ownership of a building is pretty amazing.”

Actors Jacki Weaver and John Bell supported an act-a-thon in the 1985 when Trevor Ashley was a small boy. He’s now a West End performer who has just completed over 500 shows in The Producers at London’s Garrick Theatre. He joined Shopfront when he was five years old.

“I was very little and obsessed with showbiz,” Ashley says. “My mum didn’t know what to do with me but then she found Shopfront and I really grew up there.

Ashley, now 46, learned lighting design, screen printing and video editing, alongside putting on shows, including his first drag show, Dressing Room Drags. “I played Carlotta Carefree, and my friend Chris was Libra Fleur. We didn’t even know we were gay yet because it was the 90s. I did Peter Pan where Bryan Brown was the narrator and I did Hilary Bell’s first play. I was in Alice in Wonderland with Paul Capsis when I was five. I was the tiger lily and he was the mock turtle.”

Above all, he says, Shopfront offers children acceptance. Queer kids, First Nations kids, migrant kids and kids living with disability all have a voice here – something often denied them in the wider world or at school.

Trevor Ashley, five, with Jacki Weaver and John Bell at the Shopfront act-a-thon in 1985. Photograph: Shopfront Arts Co-op

“I was a gay child who didn’t really have any positive gay representation in my life apart from at Shopfront, and I really found my tribe,” Ashley says. 

“It was the time of Aids, and I remember being eight or nine, hosting a big fundraising gala with a 17- or 18-year-old boy named Scott Redmond, and he was the first person I knew who had Aids, and he passed only about a year later. I met my first trans person there, who was in Alice in Wonderland with me.

“One day, I walked into the building and never left” Nicole Pingon

“I became friends with amazing people, and when things were hard at home, I had somewhere to go, or I had friends I could go and stay with. It’s a really special place, even for kids who don’t want to be performers or writers.”

Pingon, now a rising director, grew up in Carlton and walked past Shopfront every day to get to school. “One day, I walked into the building and never left,” she says.

Shopfront offered the space for her to figure out who she is as a person as well as an artist. “That’s what makes it so special. It’s a place that gave me so much as a young person and now I want to give that back. It’s not about being the best actor, but actually just being the best version of yourself, or finding who you are. It’s more than a theatre. Once you’re part of Shopfront, you’re always part of Shopfront.”

She’s also a facilitator at Shopfront, which sometimes means organising the fuel for the youth-led meetings. “They eat pizza at the AGMs and talk through everything and vote. It’s fun. Young people are the funniest people with the best sense of humour.”

Shopfront’s 50-hour act-a-thon runs from 10 to 12 October 2026 at Shopfront and will be livestreamed here. Their youth-led conference will be held at Sydney Opera House on 12 October 2026.