She's good with her hands

Millie Grenfell likes to entertain but she prefers
to do it with the help of some friends

We asked her what made her become a puppeteer. Back went the head and out came the familiar laugh. Anyone who's met Millie has heard that laugh a hundred times.
"God, ... I don't know ... I think it must have been from when I was quite young, I loved playing with dolls when I was a kid."
"I didn't make puppets, I used to make stuffed toys and I suppose as you get older, there's no excuse to have toys anymore! But I did make one puppet, it was like a grotesque looking bird, inspired by Ozzie Ostrich and the muppets type thing. I think they were starting to become popular and I think that helped partly in making me interested in puppets."
Millie has been a puppeteer for at least fourteen years but she has interests in many other artforms as well.
"Painting, sculpture, whatever! I love pottery, anything 3D just seems to come naturally and I really like illustrating cartoons and painting, whether it be illustration style or painting landscapes or whatever, yeah."
As far as the puppets go, she is not sure if it was just a matter of coincidence or perhaps something that was meant to be. Millie did speech and drama because she was very shy as a girl and her Mum sent her off to speech and drama to try and bring her out of her shell! Millie's mum is in no doubt today that her strategy worked!
Does she still think of her self as a shy person?
"Oh yeah I'm still shy but I do like performing. Although I don't think I would find that possible without the puppets! Because it's not me, it's them. They can say whatever they like and I won't get in trouble!"
There are no heavy messages in Millie's shows but there are stories and morals, for example one of her puppets is a greenie. Unfortunately the 'Great Greenie' was too big to come over from Queensland on this trip. He's an environmentally friendly monster, and he has an environmental type story that goes with him - trying to make kids be conscious of recycling and not making unnecessary waste.
For those of you who are yet to see the puppets in action, we asked Millie to tell us the story line, as seen at the recent Go-Kart Grand Prix. It went something like this:
"King Baby No Shoes doesn't have shoes obviously and his friend Lord Nelson's life quest is to try and make the King happy and find him a pair of shoes! But it's been a while and he hasn't been able to find shoes yet and so in the meantime he tries to keep his mind occupied, as well as the normal baby things that happen with babies, he sort of brings in the entertainment for King Baby No Shoes!
"Then along comes the cat Gumby Cutmore; he tricks you into agreeing to let him tell you a story, but you know he's telling the same story all the time and he just doesn't know when to stop! But he starts out by doing like a really slack magician type trick or balancing a glass of water on his head which is of course velcroed on!!
"Then there are the superheroes - Super Ham and Babbet; she's his cheer squad and Super Ham brags about how good he is at saving the world and wrestling crocodiles and for the entertainment he's going to wrestle sharks, if he can find one in Tennant Creek to wrestle, so he thinks he's pretty safe!
"I get this shark fin and he faints and then I show the kids and we sort of agree that it was a bit of a naughty trick to play on him! So the characters within the show all have their own little act.
"There's Rex the Monster who tells scary jokes, but he's the one who's frightened. None of the kids are frightened of his scary jokes!! He's more frightened of them than they are of him, even though he's really ugly and scary looking! I sort of let them know that Rex is more scared of them and they have great delight in scaring him to death!"
Millie performs mainly for children but she reckons adults get a kick out of the show too.
"Cause, you know, it's not adult humour, but it's funny to watch, and it just brings out the kid in everyone.
"I don't really believe in having the show taken over by great moralistic views and trying to force your point of view onto the kids but I do believe in showing the kids how to be kids and to enjoy themselves. I don't do Punch and Judy. My puppets aren't violent at all, they're just a bunch of softies - a bunch of strange softies! They're very strange!"
Millie says that over the years her puppet's characters have grown, and she find out more about them each time she uses them. How they react with people for instance as their personalities evolve.
"I might find out that they don't eat fish or something stupid like that!"
She has no trouble at all remembering their individual traits.
they're just these little personalities!"