Kylie and Nick Fuad

Starring roles

Their first theatre production at UNE was playing husband and wife in the classic Australian play Brumby Innes. Within two years, they’d made it official. Kylie and Nick Fuad have now been married for 25 years and, among other theatrical life events, survived last year’s devastating Lismore floods.

Kylie: “I was fresh out of high school and Nick was a mature-age student, seven years older. We started Theatre Studies the same year. I was too nervous to audition for any of the shows in first year but I saw him perform. I thought he was incredibly talented, but that he would never talk to me.

Nick: My mother was a drama teacher at NEGS – Julie Fuad – and I had been around the theatre a lot as a kid. I recall seeing Kylie on my first day walking out of the drama studio – and there she was, my future wife. I remember her nice big, blue eyes.

Kylie: And I had no idea.

At the beginning of second year, he was auditioning for Brumby Innes and he suggested I audition, too. I just thought he was being nice. We ended up getting the lead roles, playing husband and wife. During rehearsals, I got up the courage to ask him out on a date and we went to The Grapevine, which was a very classy and expensive wine bar for poor old Nick.

Nick: Inviting her to audition was my way of getting to know her a bit more. That meal at The Grapevine was well worth it.

Kylie: We were together from that point on, in June 1996. After living at Austin College and in town with two girlfriends, I moved in with Nick, and that was that. We were married in March 1997, so it was a real whirlwind. I proposed to him, much to my girlfriends’ dismay, because they thought I was totally crazy to get married at 20.

Nick: I loved the practical side of Theatre Studies, but I’m not very academic. There were few males in our year, so I was in demand for roles, but I didn’t end up finishing my degree. I think I was doing too many plays.

Kylie: After finishing my Theatre Studies degree, I did a Diploma of Education at UNE. We ended up in the Northern Territory, working in remote Indigenous communities for 6.5 years and loved it. We had our two children and Nick was the stay-at-home Dad for the first four years of their lives.

Nick: I have always had ideas bubbling away, most of them awful, stupid ones. But a couple weren’t too bad. Because we were living in the NT and had a house in Nambucca Heads we thought we would organise a house swap, but there weren’t any websites catering to that. That planted the seed for an Aussie House Swap website. It was 18 years ago and the Internet was just taking off.

Now we have seven different house swap and house-sitting websites – in Australia, Canada, the US, NZ and UK – and a staff of six people in Lismore. Everything pretty much stopped overnight with COVID, but now we are back to pre-COVID numbers and it’s powering on. House-swapping and sitting is a sustainable and affordable way to travel.

Kylie: I have been involved in the Lismore Theatre Company for the past 15 years and have directed and acted in quite a few shows. In recent years I’ve been involved in the Bangalow Theatre Company, a newer community theatre group.

Nick: I haven’t done anything for a few years now. The businesses have been my creative projects.

Kylie: Twice we’ve been hit by floods – in 2017 and 2022. The second one last year was crazy, big – no-one thought it would be so bad. We lost a commercial shop on the bottom floor and tenants above lost all their belongings. It’s been a year of ups and downs.

We had bought a building in the CBD to put our businesses in upstairs and for years Nick had a dream to open a wine bar downstairs, so we had decided to do that in 2021. We were moving forward, but hadn’t started the build before the flood hit.

Lismore is such a great town and full of community spirit. We understand it’s a flood town and that’s part of living here, but in a way it made us more determined. The community deserves nice things. All of last year we worked on The Levee and now our bar is open and going really well. So many people have come in to thank Nick for creating such a nice place for them to go.

Nick: I don’t think the floods tested our relationship very much. We’re really good friends. We have had teenagers who had given us more grief than the floods.

Kylie: We have been together for so long; we’ve done plays together for 28 years, we’ve worked together in business, we have a family together; we are each other’s best friends. So when something like the flood arises, we band together and try to support each other. We both have a pretty wicked sense of humour and sometimes we get through things by having a joke.

Nick: And a glass of wine helps.

Kylie: I look back on my time at UNE with great fondness. A group of us young women living in Bot 4  at Austin, all studying completely different degrees, became thick as thieves. We found each other again on Facebook years later and to this day we make an effort to have video calls and group holidays.

Theatre studies was wonderful. I was lucky to have the gorgeous Sue Fell in first year and she was the most inspiring and beautiful person, who created such a family environment. It was some of the best years of my life and absolutely life-changing.

At UNE I made lifelong friends and developed a lifelong love for the theatre. It was a beautiful time learning, being challenged and coming of age – leaving home and becoming independent and part of university life. And Nick and I fell in love in that little Theatre Studies studio .