Australian Ballet Artistic Directors.

http://www.australiadancing.org/subjects/3.html

The roots of the Australian Ballet can be found in the Borovansky Ballet, a company founded in 1940 by the Czech dancer Edouard Borovansky. Borovansky had been a dancer in the touring ballet company of the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and, after visiting Australia on tour with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, he decided to remain in Australia, establishing a ballet school in Melbourne in 1939, out of which he developed a performance group which became the Borovansky Ballet. The company was supported and funded by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd from 1944. Following Borovansky's death in 1959, the English dancer and administrator Dame Peggy van Praagh was invited to become artistic director of the company. J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd decided to disband the Borovansky Ballet in 1961.
In 1961, J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust received federal subsidies towards the establishment of a national ballet company. These organisations established the Australian Ballet Foundation to assist with the establishment of a new company, which in 1962 became the Australian Ballet. Peggy van Praagh, who had been kept on a retainer by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd through the intervening year between the disbanding of the Borovansky Ballet and the establishment of the Australian Ballet, was invited to become the founding artistic director of the company. The majority of the dancers employed by the fledgling company were drawn from former members of the Borovansky Ballet. The first performance by the Australian Ballet was staged at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney. The principal dancers in the Australian Ballet's first season were Kathleen Gorham, Marilyn Jones and Garth Welch. Van Praagh also invited the Royal Ballet's Ray Powell to temporarily became the company's first Ballet Master, with Lehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Balleton Kellaway (brother of Cecil Kellaway), a former dancer with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, as the company's first ballet teacher. In 1967 van Praagh established the Australian Ballet School, which was formed specially to train dancers for the company and remains the company's associate school to this day. Excerpt from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Ballet

Miss Karen's first pay packet (which she has kept) was when as a student of Tessa Maunder was selected at auditions for dancers for J.C. Williamson's production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at The Junction Hunter Theatre (later burnt down).