The Brisbane Curator Who Spent Three Years Bringing Fraggle Rock Home

If you've already been through "Make, Believe, Magic" at GOMA, you've met Amanda Slack-Smith's work without meeting her. She's the QAGOMA curator who spent three years turning a courtesy visit to New York into the reason Brisbane, and nowhere else on earth right now, has the real Fraggle Rock sets standing at full puppeteer height.

It started almost by accident. Slack-Smith was in New York with a different show, "Fairy Tales," which had a small Labyrinth section in it — enough reason to pay the Jim Henson Company a visit. "The archive is in New York, and they were so generous and passionate about what they do," she says. "And then in the same space is the Jim Henson Creature Shop. So you've got all this creativity — making, building, you know, drawers of eyes and noses — and just the whole world that was very exciting. So they were interested, I was interested, and there we go."

Three years, one very patient Los Angeles counterpart (Nicole Goldman, the Company's Executive Vice President of Branding) and a lot of transpacific back-and-forth later, that "there we go" became GOMA's entire ground floor. Along the way came the kind of surprise that makes a curator's year: "They might suggest things, and I'd be like, 'Oh my goodness, I didn't know the Thought Lion still exists' — because these things are made to be performed, not archived."

The Great Hall and Doc's Workshop — the exhibition's centrepiece — aren't replicas. They're the genuine Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock production sets, and they've had a busier life than most visitors realise. "It's a set that's been cut up multiple times," Slack-Smith says. "Each time they've used it — between season one and two, and then the specials — they've cut the set, stored it, brought it back out again." The show's own supervising construction foreman flew in from Canada to help GOMA's workshop crew put it back together, and Slack-Smith made sure the join marks stayed visible. "It was important for me that people actually got to see some of that history, because you can walk behind the sets, which is amazing."

Ten days in, she's still clocking what actually stops people. It's not always Kermit. "What I'm loving is people are really deep-diving into the works on paper and the characters they don't know," she says — Sesame Street's Big Bird and Snuffleupagus still land hardest for most, but her own favourite is Taminella, an early Henson character with "this big pink moon face with a fang hanging out."

Amanda Slack-Smith at GOMA. Photo: Phillipe Blake

Her tip if you've only got one visit in you: don't just look, get hands-on. There's a bank of cameras rigged on the Fraggle Rock set itself — six and a half metres of ceiling height — so you can flick between angles like you're directing the scene. And there's a puppet you're actually allowed to pick up and work, screen at your feet, arms above your head, the real Henson method. "See what the Henson method of puppeteering looks like," as she puts it — which is a lot stranger, and harder, than it looks on TV.

That's her real pitch for coming in person rather than scrolling the photos. "When you take a photo of the sets and share them with your friends, they're so well done that they actually look like the TV series — which means you don't get a sense of the scale and immense presence of what it feels like to be walking a puppeteer set," she says. Working sets like these never open to the public, ever, not even during filming. "You will never see this again unless you were a VIP or a reporter." For the next seven months, Brisbane gets to walk the whole thing in sequence — through Doc's studio, through the portal, into the Great Hall, down to Boober's Cave.

"Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company" is showing at GOMA now until 18 April 2027.