GRAHAM SMITH
Dance pioneer
22-10-1931 - 18-2-2016
A pioneer of the Australian classical dance scene in the 1940s, Graham Smith left home to forge a career as an international ballet star in Europe and America.
With his brothers Alistair and Robin, he designed and shaped Australia's first bohemian cafes, The Arab at Lorne and The Abominable at Mt Buller, leaving an indelible legacy in Australia's cafÃ© culture. 
The eldest son of Dorothy McIntosh and decorated World War II officer Lt. Col. George Frederick Smith DSO, Graham Smith was born in Colac. Both athletic and deeply creative, Graham embraced ballet at the age of ten while a student at Hailebury College, Melbourne. He studied art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, uniting his two great passions: performance and design.
In 1951 Graham made his professional debut for the Borevansky Ballet, the dance company established in Melbourne in 1939 by Edouard Borovansky, the Czech Ã©migrÃ© and Ballet Russes alumnus. Local audiences lapped up their lavish productions.
Graham toured the capital cities performing Swan Lake, Coppelia and The Nutcracker with artists Kathleen Gorham OBE and Laurel Martyne OBE. Peggy van Praagh was appointed artistic director in 1959 but after Borovansky's death, the company was disbanded in 1961 and The Australian Ballet emerged.
Like many creative Australians, Smith left the country in 1953, joining London's Festival Ballet Company. He appeared in Roberto Rosselini's film Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman, returning to Melbourne briefly in 1956 to perform in the Australian tour of The Boyfriend, choreographed by Beth Dean. During this stint back home he designed his brothers' new bohemian cafÃ©, The Arab at Lorne.
It was a highly creative period and he danced again for Borevansky alongside Dame Margot Fonteyn when the company performed with guest stars from The Royal Ballet in Sydney in 1957. His final performance for the company was in Giselle in   January 1958.
Smith moved to America to dance for the Ballet of the Two Worlds where he partnered Nora Kaye. Despite Kaye's magnetism, Graham said, "I could see only one person in the company, the other star, Cristyne Lawson". The two dancers fell in love and were released from their contracts, moving to London in 1961 where they married.
They moved to Munich where Graham was principal dancer at the Bavarian State Opera House but returned to London in 1963 for Cristyne to dance the role of Mary for the premier of the Black Nativity. In Christmas of 1964 their daughter, Lise was born and Graham appeared as the Swan Lake villain Von Rothbart in Arthur J. Rank's spy film spoof Intelligence Men.
Considering Australia a better place to raise children, they returned to Melbourne in 1965 where son Remy was born the following year. Graham was appointed design consultant for Esta Handfield's Melbourne public relations firm, Image Australia. He was able to see for the first time another of his creative achievements, his two brothers' winter restaurant, The Abominable at Mt Buller.
While travelling in New Zealand he had designed a series of octagonal structures cascading down the mountainside of the fledgling Victorian ski resort and sent the hand-drawn designs home. Little development existed on the mountain at the time let alone something as radical as Graham's design.
The philosophy of the building was decidedly environmentalist with its forms subsumed by the imposing structure of the mountain itself. Inside, guests in fishnet stockings and kitten heels sat on roughly hewn tree stumps and drank wine from bottles with labels that Smith had also designed. It was not an easy building to construct and Alistair, the carpenter of the family, loyally interpreted his brother's designs despite resistance from his pressured building crew.
Graham's creative impulses were already apparent at Lorne where the Smith brother had opened the Arab cafe in 1956 and the The Wild Colonial nightclub on the foreshore two years later. Graham designed the Arab's Bedouin-style tent structure with its modernist open-air entrance. When Alistair and Graham had met up earlier in Europe they hatched the plan to bring one of the first La Pavoni espresso machines to Australia. Young bohemians flocked to its inner sanctum where they lounged on floor cushions and were served by barefoot bikini-clad waitresses.
When Cristyne was asked to establish a new dance school in Buffalo, New York, the couple moved back to the US where they established the modern dance outfit, Company of Man. It was an intense and short-lived episode culminating in the ballet, The Story of Christ in Vietnam.
The workload took its toll and Graham had a breakdown but his cousin, Dr Iain McIntosh, was practising in Toronto at the time and attended to him. Upon recovery, Graham was appointed head of the dance department of the New School of Performing Arts, New York, and returned to Manhattan. However, the marriage ended and Cristyne moved to California as dean of the dance school of Walt Disney's Cal/Arts in Valencia.
In the 1970s Graham embraced New York City's gay "coming out" party scene.
Many creative projects were commenced and mothballed including a remarkable privately published book based on Roget's thesaurus titled, The Structure of Language. It laid out the complex workings of the mind and the body as a map.
During this period, the creative genius that fuelled Graham became increasingly unorthodox and difficult to harness in a world that was becoming homogenous and conventional.
However, he had the unique ability to sift out the beautiful and truly original from the dross. He set up a design consultancy at the Silverfrost Studio in Soho.
His long list of distinguished clients and projects included the NYC apartment of former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor of Connoisseur magazine, Thomas Hoving and the Montauk summer houses of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Diana Ross.
In old age, Graham moved back to Australia settling in Cairns. When asked why he chose the tropics he replied that having lived in a labyrinthine city such as New York the only way to live in Australia was "off grid". After he developed dementia, his daughter Lise moved from the US with her son Iman to care for him.
He is survived by his sister Jane Smith, Lise and Remy and three grandchildren.