“For me when I was growing up, I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it, but I probably needed to get out of Burnie to do it at the time. Now, if you did it the right way, you could actually stay in Burnie and do international work in all kinds of fields.”

Tony Thorne is the director of Little J & Big Cuz, Australia’s first animated series aimed at Indigenous kids. Tony is a Burnie boy and Trawlwoolway man who has worked as an illustrator and CG animator on projects such as Happy Feet Two and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. (Tony rendered the cobra which Draco casts to attack Harry.)

Tony Thorne - Last Days of the Mill (2010) — Last Days of the Mill (2010)

Tony was a kid who loved to draw. Fortunately, there was no shortage of paper around.

“My grandfather was working at the paper mill. You’d get these reams of green and pink paper from the mill (Burnie Bond). It was nice paper. That encouraged me to draw.”

Tony attended Parklands High and Hellyer College, the latter being especially freeing.

“All of the kids who didn’t want to be there, weren’t there. It made it a much better place to do work and start to become an adult.”

Tony’s passion for animation was born from a love of comics.

“I would do a weekly trip around book exchanges, there were a couple in the CBD (Burnie Books, Coins & Stamps). I almost never bought comics new. I would only buy Marvels. I’ll always love the smell of decaying newsprint,” he says.

The one thing missing in Tony’s life was peers. He suggests the flipside to If you can’t see it you can’t be it is “I didn’t know I couldn’t do it.”

“I definitely thought there were limited options in Burnie by the time I got to eighteen, but the town had certainly creatively supported me until then. It was perhaps pushing me in directions I didn’t want to go.”

Tony got into art school in Hobart and trained to be an art teacher. He doesn’t feel art school was a good fit.

“I think that’s probably true of a lot of people who go through those institutions. They don’t necessarily go on to be a fine artist.”

Tony went thirty-five years without actually using his qualification.

“I did work shutdowns at the pulp mill while I was at art school. They used to shut the mill for four weeks over Christmas. They’d hire a lot of young people and outside contractors to lubricate machines, clean machines, stuff that couldn’t really happen while they were in production. It was pretty messy, hard work. There were probably lots of nasty chemicals as well,” he laughs.

After hearing that the mill was set to close, Tony wrote to manager Chris Hinds who was receptive to him coming on site to draw the scene. Tony collaborated with Wynyard-born writer Pete Hay to produce the book Last Days of the Mill.

“It was good to come back to Burnie and to be there when the last bit of paper came off the number ten machine [June 16, 2010]. I did some drawing while they were making the last rolls of Reflex. One night the site coordinator touched a roll and said ‘the best printer paper in the world.’ It was an important time for Burnie. It represented a change.”