‘Is it sexier to swerve?': actor Toby Schmitz pivots to his fallback plan
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we're told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they're given. This week, he talks to Toby Schmitz. The writer, director and actor, 47, is known for his award-winning stage productions and roles in TV shows such as Black Sails, Boy Swallows Universe and The Twelve. His debut novel is The Empress Murders.
BODIES
Toby, how's your body going? How's your health? Good! I went for a run and did my press-ups at 6am this morning. But now I just feel like I'm ready for a nap.
Welcome to the mid-40s, right? That's right, but I've gotten back into the swing recently. I'm going to be in a play soon which will be very demanding, and I thought, 'You know what? I need to get as fit as I can.'
Do you enjoy working out? Not for a single moment. It's all hideous; I find it so boring. But podcasts have changed everything. Now I can listen to some tweedy boffin talk about trench warfare in World War I and 45 minutes can pass.
You were never that sporty person at school? No, I was doing so much extracurricular debating, drama and the school newspaper. If I'd been good at it, maybe I would've got into sports more, but I was tall, pigeon-chested and pimply, and never derived pleasure from competition. And I always loathed the idea of there being one winner and one loser.
Yet you're often cast as the handsome, dashing man on stage. Is this vision of an acne-ridden, pigeon-chested Toby real? Absolutely real. I couldn't smile without bleeding and the acne was well down my back. But by the time I got to NIDA, it had cleared up. And notoriously, at NIDA they make you deal with the fact that you have a body. On the very first day, they're like, 'Get down to tights and a singlet.' I'd forgotten to bring mine, so I was down to my silky Davenport boxers. From that point on, I owned it, and started to love my body more.
What else are you noticing nowadays? When my daughter says, 'Whoa, your grey hairs!' or 'Daddy, you look old this morning!', you're like, 'F--- me!' But I'm most aware of it when I've said things like, 'Where's my audition for such-and-such?' And they're like, 'Do you mean the guy in his early 30s? Yeah, look, there's another role we think might be more appropriate for you …' I may have passed Hamlet and Romeo, but it's not Lear yet, is it?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘I'm glad I'm starting again': Eryn Jean Norvill on finding herself at 40
This story is part of the July 27 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Eryn Jean Norvill is no stranger to taking a stand. Throughout her stage career, she has advocated for actors' rights, especially women, and approached her roles with a depth that has earned her critical acclaim. Now, as she takes on her first major TV project, she's even advocating for a dead woman, albeit a fictional one. 'Playing a female victim is something I had a lot of queries about,' Norvill, 40, says of her role in The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer, the third season of thecrime drama series. 'I had all the questions. Is it nuanced? Is it smart? Is it saying the things we want it to say about victimhood in the world right now?' In The Twelve, Norvill plays Amanda Taylor, an English teacher turned wannabe crime author who is murdered while researching a book about the alleged homicide of two young women in 1968. The Sydney-born actor was determined to get the part right, which included asking tough questions of director Madeleine Gottlieb and writer Sarah L. Walker. 'Madeleine and Sarah had all the answers for me, and were open to me having big opinions on what I needed the role to be in order to play a woman who is killed,' says Norvill. 'Playing Amanda gave me the opportunity to activate her agency every step of the way. She is an incredibly strong woman, but learning that a strong woman can be a victim as well is very confronting.' Another drawcard for Norvill is her co-stars, who include Danielle Cormack and series lead Sam Neill. Norvill says Neill was great company on the four-month shoot in Perth, the pair debriefing over burger lunches and beach walks. 'I was grateful to have Sam knock on my door and ask me to get a bite to eat and check in while filming,' she says. 'He is a very generous person. It was a real highlight to hang with him and hear about his life.' Switching mediums in midlife is an emerging theme for actors; Neill, for example, got his start in film. Norvill says she is relishing her break from the stage – 'I have loved coming into a new medium mid-career' – while acknowledging that it will inevitably call her back at some point. Before The Twelve, Norvill had only had a few small TV parts, including in Home and Away (2010), Preppers (2021) and It's Fine, I'm Fine (2022). The switch to television is proving therapeutic for Norvill, whose theatre career was at times consumed as much by what happened off stage as on it. In 2017, she reluctantly became a household name when she made a private complaint about actor Geoffrey Rush to the Sydney Theatre Company, alleging he behaved inappropriately towards her during a 2015 production of King Lear. Details of the complaint, which Rush denied, leaked to Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper. He sued the paper for defamation and was awarded $2.87 million in damages (Norvill was subpoenaed to give evidence at the trial). It's an episode she doesn't wish to relive, or discuss. However, it spurred her to join with her friend Sophie Ross to launch the not-for-profit organisation Safe Theatres Australia with the aim of highlighting sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying in the workplace, and making theatre and the arts a safe place. Norvill says the organisation 'really activated my politics and made me aware of social activism and how that has always been a big part of my life. I got that side from both of my parents, and I was really proud of that achievement. It felt impossible to do, but it was successful.' 'Being in London is allowing me to be curious about what sort of person I am and what is meaningful to me again.' Eryn Jean Norvill, actor Norvill has since stepped back from the day-to-day running of Safe Theatres Australia 'because I felt I needed some space from that kind of work to do some personal healing and processing'. Part of that stepping back – and moving on – has been a temporary shift to London, where she has been working through a process of finding out who she is again, making new friends and leaning into the unknown. 'I know I won't be here forever,' she says of the UK. 'Australia makes incredible art – we have a courage I don't recognise in many other places. But I didn't expect to be starting again at my age, essentially asking myself why, what for, and is it meaningful. 'I wish I was told more about this as a kid – that in this business there are lots of starts and ends, and it will never stop throughout your life.' Norvill is Zooming from the London flat she shares with Australian musician Georgia Mooney (from Sydney outfit All Our Exes Live in Texas), the pair on a similar journey of seeing what might come their way. She is also dog-sitting, spinning her camera to show me a curled-up ball of fur by her side. 'We have a piano in the home and Georgia plays it a lot,' Norvill adds. 'And we go to a lot of gigs together.' Born in Sydney, Norvill recalls her teen years in Malabar, a seaside suburb in Sydney's south-east, including snorkelling at nearby Long Bay, where the MV Malabar was shipwrecked in 1931. 'I'd find pieces of crockery that belonged to the ship all the time,' she says. Unlike the gentrified suburb it is today, the Malabar of Norvill's childhood had a grittiness she holds dear. 'There's a sewage works, a rifle range, the beach, a golf course, cliffs and Long Bay Jail. The inmates would run a nursery every year, and we'd buy trees and play soccer with them.' Her mother, Anita, taught child studies at TAFE, while her dad, Greg, was a marathon runner and engineer who also turned his hand to home renovation. She has an older brother, Ben, with both siblings equally drawn to the arts. 'Ben plays the five-string bass,' says Norvill. 'He is annoyingly talented and loves prog-rock.' Despite growing up in Sydney, Norvill graduated from Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts and built her name starring in productions for both the Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company, including The Picture of Dorian Gray (before Sarah Snook took over the role), Three Sisters, All My Sons, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Prior to the defamation saga, Norvill had co-written, co-directed and starred in Niche with her best friend Emily Tomlins, the sci-fi thriller garnering rave reviews for their company, Elbow Room. 'I am lucky to have my long-time collaborator and friend Emily with me in life,' Norvill says. 'We have always made things together, and Niche is something we spent five years creating. It was incredibly vulnerable and hard; a hyper-feminist piece in which I grew up a lot and got to trust myself as a female maker.' Trusting other female makers is a large part of what drew Norvill to The Twelve. Still, arriving at a career juncture like this comes with plenty of self-doubt and big questions, but Norvill is learning to trust the process. The Twelve has helped her see things differently, too. 'I am actually glad that I am at the point in my life where I have to start again,' she says. 'I think it's because I have had a lot of stop-starts in my career.' In 2019, Norvill went with her brother Ben to Download Festival in Sydney to see UK heavy metal band Judas Priest perform. 'Everyone I met there was so sweet and gentle,' she says. 'I had beautiful conversations, which I haven't had at a festival before. I felt like I got a warm hug from the crowd that day. Who would have thought a metal crowd is where I'd be?' Loading Norvill's curiosity for life has seen her dabble in drawing cartoons, which she does to relax and distract herself from acting. 'Being in London is allowing me to be curious about what sort of person I am and what is meaningful to me again,' she says. 'Finding out what I'm like at 40 feels weird, but I'm reminded that I'm lucky to have deep friendships, a moral circumference, good taste and boundaries – because these people in my life reflect that back in me.'
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
‘I'm glad I'm starting again': Eryn Jean Norvill on finding herself at 40
This story is part of the July 27 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Eryn Jean Norvill is no stranger to taking a stand. Throughout her stage career, she has advocated for actors' rights, especially women, and approached her roles with a depth that has earned her critical acclaim. Now, as she takes on her first major TV project, she's even advocating for a dead woman, albeit a fictional one. 'Playing a female victim is something I had a lot of queries about,' Norvill, 40, says of her role in The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer, the third season of thecrime drama series. 'I had all the questions. Is it nuanced? Is it smart? Is it saying the things we want it to say about victimhood in the world right now?' In The Twelve, Norvill plays Amanda Taylor, an English teacher turned wannabe crime author who is murdered while researching a book about the alleged homicide of two young women in 1968. The Sydney-born actor was determined to get the part right, which included asking tough questions of director Madeleine Gottlieb and writer Sarah L. Walker. 'Madeleine and Sarah had all the answers for me, and were open to me having big opinions on what I needed the role to be in order to play a woman who is killed,' says Norvill. 'Playing Amanda gave me the opportunity to activate her agency every step of the way. She is an incredibly strong woman, but learning that a strong woman can be a victim as well is very confronting.' Another drawcard for Norvill is her co-stars, who include Danielle Cormack and series lead Sam Neill. Norvill says Neill was great company on the four-month shoot in Perth, the pair debriefing over burger lunches and beach walks. 'I was grateful to have Sam knock on my door and ask me to get a bite to eat and check in while filming,' she says. 'He is a very generous person. It was a real highlight to hang with him and hear about his life.' Switching mediums in midlife is an emerging theme for actors; Neill, for example, got his start in film. Norvill says she is relishing her break from the stage – 'I have loved coming into a new medium mid-career' – while acknowledging that it will inevitably call her back at some point. Before The Twelve, Norvill had only had a few small TV parts, including in Home and Away (2010), Preppers (2021) and It's Fine, I'm Fine (2022). The switch to television is proving therapeutic for Norvill, whose theatre career was at times consumed as much by what happened off stage as on it. In 2017, she reluctantly became a household name when she made a private complaint about actor Geoffrey Rush to the Sydney Theatre Company, alleging he behaved inappropriately towards her during a 2015 production of King Lear. Details of the complaint, which Rush denied, leaked to Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper. He sued the paper for defamation and was awarded $2.87 million in damages (Norvill was subpoenaed to give evidence at the trial). It's an episode she doesn't wish to relive, or discuss. However, it spurred her to join with her friend Sophie Ross to launch the not-for-profit organisation Safe Theatres Australia with the aim of highlighting sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying in the workplace, and making theatre and the arts a safe place. Norvill says the organisation 'really activated my politics and made me aware of social activism and how that has always been a big part of my life. I got that side from both of my parents, and I was really proud of that achievement. It felt impossible to do, but it was successful.' 'Being in London is allowing me to be curious about what sort of person I am and what is meaningful to me again.' Eryn Jean Norvill, actor Norvill has since stepped back from the day-to-day running of Safe Theatres Australia 'because I felt I needed some space from that kind of work to do some personal healing and processing'. Part of that stepping back – and moving on – has been a temporary shift to London, where she has been working through a process of finding out who she is again, making new friends and leaning into the unknown. 'I know I won't be here forever,' she says of the UK. 'Australia makes incredible art – we have a courage I don't recognise in many other places. But I didn't expect to be starting again at my age, essentially asking myself why, what for, and is it meaningful. 'I wish I was told more about this as a kid – that in this business there are lots of starts and ends, and it will never stop throughout your life.' Norvill is Zooming from the London flat she shares with Australian musician Georgia Mooney (from Sydney outfit All Our Exes Live in Texas), the pair on a similar journey of seeing what might come their way. She is also dog-sitting, spinning her camera to show me a curled-up ball of fur by her side. 'We have a piano in the home and Georgia plays it a lot,' Norvill adds. 'And we go to a lot of gigs together.' Born in Sydney, Norvill recalls her teen years in Malabar, a seaside suburb in Sydney's south-east, including snorkelling at nearby Long Bay, where the MV Malabar was shipwrecked in 1931. 'I'd find pieces of crockery that belonged to the ship all the time,' she says. Unlike the gentrified suburb it is today, the Malabar of Norvill's childhood had a grittiness she holds dear. 'There's a sewage works, a rifle range, the beach, a golf course, cliffs and Long Bay Jail. The inmates would run a nursery every year, and we'd buy trees and play soccer with them.' Her mother, Anita, taught child studies at TAFE, while her dad, Greg, was a marathon runner and engineer who also turned his hand to home renovation. She has an older brother, Ben, with both siblings equally drawn to the arts. 'Ben plays the five-string bass,' says Norvill. 'He is annoyingly talented and loves prog-rock.' Despite growing up in Sydney, Norvill graduated from Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts and built her name starring in productions for both the Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company, including The Picture of Dorian Gray (before Sarah Snook took over the role), Three Sisters, All My Sons, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Prior to the defamation saga, Norvill had co-written, co-directed and starred in Niche with her best friend Emily Tomlins, the sci-fi thriller garnering rave reviews for their company, Elbow Room. 'I am lucky to have my long-time collaborator and friend Emily with me in life,' Norvill says. 'We have always made things together, and Niche is something we spent five years creating. It was incredibly vulnerable and hard; a hyper-feminist piece in which I grew up a lot and got to trust myself as a female maker.' Trusting other female makers is a large part of what drew Norvill to The Twelve. Still, arriving at a career juncture like this comes with plenty of self-doubt and big questions, but Norvill is learning to trust the process. The Twelve has helped her see things differently, too. 'I am actually glad that I am at the point in my life where I have to start again,' she says. 'I think it's because I have had a lot of stop-starts in my career.' In 2019, Norvill went with her brother Ben to Download Festival in Sydney to see UK heavy metal band Judas Priest perform. 'Everyone I met there was so sweet and gentle,' she says. 'I had beautiful conversations, which I haven't had at a festival before. I felt like I got a warm hug from the crowd that day. Who would have thought a metal crowd is where I'd be?' Loading Norvill's curiosity for life has seen her dabble in drawing cartoons, which she does to relax and distract herself from acting. 'Being in London is allowing me to be curious about what sort of person I am and what is meaningful to me again,' she says. 'Finding out what I'm like at 40 feels weird, but I'm reminded that I'm lucky to have deep friendships, a moral circumference, good taste and boundaries – because these people in my life reflect that back in me.'
The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
‘It has a soul': While the hammer falls on more old pianos, diehard fans persist
This story is part of the July 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 15 stories. What's more discordant than an old, out-of-tune piano? A collision between an out-of-tune piano and a sledgehammer: a cacophonous symphony of strings reverberating with soundboard, a howl of pain and rage. Equally off-key? Watching an excavator's grappling claws lift a vintage piano from a pile of household rubbish and drop it into a steel skip at a waste facility. Anthony Elliott, a Sydney removalist who dumps two or three old pianos a week, keeps a video record of such moments. 'Unfortunately, this is what happens to them these days,' says Elliott in one video, as he pushes an old upright out of the back of a truck. 'Oh my god, oh my god,' cries someone out-of-frame as the piano crashes to the ground. Despite the success of the ABC's heart-warming series The Piano, second-hand sales websites confirm Elliott's sad story. 'Beautiful but neglected old piano – getting binned unless it's rescued,' reads a Gumtree ad for a handsome old Rönisch, priced at an optimistic $5, for pick-up in western Sydney. 'Alternatively, you could help me by dismantling it and taking just the parts you want.' The photos show an antique upright in a garage. Bikes and a tumble of chicken wire fall against it. How can it be that old pianos, household stalwarts for much of the country's post-invasion history, symbols of achievement, refinement, family values even, now face such undignified endings? It would be easy to blame television and the internet, digital pianos and keyboards, apartment living or contempt for heavy 'brown furniture'. But that's not the full story. Invariably, an old piano is not a good piano. 'I restore pianos, rebuild them, repair them. I also put a knife through them – pianos do not last forever,' says Mike Hendry, who has been tuning pianos in Melbourne for 45 years and, with his partners Sandra Klepetko and Peter Humphreys, runs Pianos Recycled, a company that repurposes cast-out pianos. 'We've given the piano a human quality, but it's a product and has been manufactured as a product for a long time.' The piano's history in Australia is as long as European settlement: when First Fleet flagship HMS Sirius landed in Botany Bay, it carried surgeon George Bouchier Worgan – and his 'square piano', a harpsichord-like precursor to the modern instrument. When Worgan left the colony a few years later, he gifted his piano to Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of rebel and pastoralist John Macarthur. The industrial revolution in Europe enabled significant improvements in piano technology. Through the 19th century, the new upright pianos, buttressed with heavy cast-iron frames, flooded in from dozens of manufacturers. When, in 1888, Frenchman Oscar Comettant visited Melbourne as a juror for the Centennial International Exhibition, he claimed extravagantly that there were 700,000 pianos in the colonies. 'How good a piano is depends on how arduous its life has been, whether it's been flogged to death or hardly played.' Mike Hendry Mike Hendry says the 'golden age' of piano-making came just before World War I. 'Some of the finest pianos ever made were made in that period. Even the average piano-makers were buying good spruce for their soundboards, using the right piano-making methodologies.' Pianos came to be 'the first great material possession'. Until the 1920s, buying a home was beyond the reach of most so, for many, a piano was the biggest expense of their lives – and an attainable status symbol. Piano merchants contributed to the boom. 'Our time-payment plan has been a boon and a blessing to those of limited income – has been the means of brightening up thousands of Australian homes,' noted a Paling's Piano advertisement in The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, in June 1912. But Hendry points out that anything built before World War I has now existed for more than a century. 'Something pre-1900 is now more than 125 years old; it's old not just because of age, but technology.' The Australian climate also plays a role. 'How good a piano is depends on how arduous its life has been, whether it's been flogged to death or hardly played; lived in outback Australia where heat stroke and dehydration has probably taken its toll or on Sydney Harbour, where salt in the air has probably ruined the strings.' Loading Unsurprisingly then, sites such as Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace are God's waiting rooms for a parade of elderly instruments with grained and varnished woodwork, elegant carved legs and panels, candle sconces, elaborate column details and manufacturers' brass name plates. Age has wearied most of them – missing or stuck ivory keys, snapped hammers, rusted strings, broken pedals – but their loved ones frequently cling to hopes for their futures: 'Loved by a family, now ready for its next home', 'Would love to see it go to a good home', 'A beautiful old thing with a living history'. Deflation kicks in, too: In Williamstown, Melbourne, 'a gorgeous old' Eigenrac upright, was $100, now free. In Cherrybrook, Sydney, an 'Armstrong' piano, '1900s rare gem': $1. And, in almost every ad, addendums: pick-up only. Very heavy. Removalists needed. In fact, the cost of moving an old piano frequently puts it into negative value. Anthony Elliott charges customers between $400 and $500 to take away their pianos. He has to factor in his time, fuel, wages for another pair of hands, and waste facility fees, which can be up to $500 a tonne. Typically, Elliott breaks down the instruments to retrieve recyclable steel from their innards and save on fees. 'It's my business,' he says, almost apologetically. Earlier this year, Susette (who asked that her last name not be published), the owner of a late 19th-century Rönisch grand piano, started to look for someone who might like to give it a new forever home – gratis. The instrument, and a billiard table, came with a 19th-century property in the Blue Mountains that Susette and her partner bought in 2022. In the years since, the grand house has echoed with guests' laughter – and sometimes with the piano's tinkling, even though it needs tuning. 'We've had some lovely experiences that will stay in our memory forever,' Susette says. One time, a guest sat down and performed Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique. 'The house shook, it was mind-boggling, the speed and power with which he played.' But the changes to the floor plan the couple wants to make during their planned renovation of the heritage-listed house come at a cost: only one of the big things can stay. Friends have opinions: 'One lot of friends has been with the 'Save the piano' movement and one lot for 'Save the billiard table'.' Although the piano is of a similar age to the property, it was not resident through its early years; that knowledge has helped free the couple of sentimentality. Neither Susette nor her partner plays. 'Eventually, we decided that, among our friends, the billiard table brings people together more.' If the decision about parting with the piano was straightforward, the parting itself was not. Initially, Susette and her partner offered their grand piano for free to a musical society and a singers' group in the mountains. Neither was interested. The couple then advertised on Facebook Marketplace, adding the condition that professional removalists were engaged to shift it. They had bites, but prospective buyers' interest vanished when removal quotes arrived. Chiara Curcio, head of decorative arts, design and interiors for Leonard Joel in Melbourne, says there is only a limited market for old pianos, even grand pianos. 'There aren't many people on the market to buy them,' she says, adding that 'the baby grands, the more salon-type pianos', have the greatest resale value. Most recently, in 2023, Leonard Joel sold a walnut-cased Blüthner (Leipzig) Salon Grand Piano from the estate of former Melbourne lord mayor, the late Ron Walker. The estimate for the c. 1913 piano was $3000-$5000. It sold for $42,000. 'The provenance probably pushed it up to that price,' Curcio says. 'For me, acoustic piano has a soul. It's like a human being has a soul and a character.' Zuzana Lenartova But even as huge numbers of pianos are reaching the end of their lives, the instrument itself is far from facing extinction. Professional musicians still adore them, even as digital keyboards become part of their toolkit, and piano teachers see a flow of new students. Sydney piano teacher Zuzana Lenartova instructs her students on a Yamaha grand piano but also has Yamaha's premium digital piano from the Clavinova range. 'Whatever they do, I always say they would never get to the point of replacing acoustic piano because for me, it has a soul,' says Lenartova. 'It's like a human being has a soul and a character. Whatever they do, they will never achieve what you can do with acoustic piano because in the end, it's digital, artificial.' Indie-pop singer Jem Cassar-Daley has similar affection for acoustic pianos. After touring with her red Nord Stage 3 digital keyboard, she returns to the long-time family piano, a Beale, in her parents' Brisbane home. Cassar-Daley, the daughter of country music singer Troy Cassar-Daley, has childhood memories of the piano. 'I'd get in from school and drop my bag and Mum always joked about it, she was like, 'You couldn't walk past it without having a play.' ' Cassar-Daley finds that when she's writing music, richer compositions come when she's on a 'genuine' piano. 'The Beale is really beautiful, ideas flow.' She has known many people who've had to discard old pianos. 'My heart breaks a little bit for them, especially ones that have been passed down for generations.' Mike Hendry's sentimental heart was the impetus he needed to start Pianos Recycled. About a decade ago, he watched as someone put a sledgehammer through an old piano. 'I thought, 'Oh, Jesus, there's a better outcome than that.' ' Now, at his Braeside premises, better pianos he receives are repaired, tuned and donated as 'street pianos' to schools. Others are broken down. Some of the salvaged timber is reincarnated into kits for woodworkers. Other cuts – end plates, front panels, inlaid panels and burr walnut, mahogany and maple veneers – are either sold or turned into coffee tables, drinks trays and pepper grinders. Piano pedals, copper wound bass string, sconces and manufacturers' name plates are sold individually. 'Our work is rooted in something the Japanese call mottainai, which emphasises the importance of not wasting resources.' Loading Nevertheless, Hendry estimates that Australians will toss out about 2500 pianos this year. They will end up at waste facilities, sledgehammered and splintered, consigned to skips, then, ultimately, to stinky landfill graves. 'We try to avoid doing it,' says removalist Anthony Elliott, showing another video in which he delivers an old piano to a charity shop. 'But sometimes you've just got to dump it.' It never crossed Susette's and her partner's minds to dump their grand piano but, to find a new home for it, they had to revise their 'sales' strategy. They edited their Facebook Marketplace ad to say they'd pay for the piano's removal. A woman in regional NSW eventually put her hand up to take it. She wanted it as an ornament for her home.
