TINA LAWTON .... continued
By 1964 she was probably the most popular folk singer in Adelaide and, in August of that year, was chosen with ten other folk singers for a 'Four Capitals Folk Song' tour of the east coast, beginning in Brisbane and including concerts in Melbourne, Wollongong and Sydney. The group included Gary Shearston, Martin Wyndham-Read and 'Duke' Tritton.  An LP was recorded in Melbourne to commemorate the tour, to which Tina contributed two songs. In Sydney her face appeared on posters all over the city, advertising the country's first folk music festival at the northern beach suburb of Newport.
Local engagements increased and interstate trips became more frequent. When Peter, Paul & Mary visited Australia, she travelled with them to Adelaide, befriending Peter Yarrow and taking him home for dinner with her family.
In 1965 David Zweck, an Adelaide director for the ABC, produced a series of Tina Lawton Interludes which appeared on the ABC in prime time and did much to increase her national popularity. She was accompanied on these segments, each of which presented songs of one particular country, by flautist David Cubbin and harpist Hew Jones.
Then, in December 1965, her first eponymous LP record was released, a beautiful album that received wide critical acclaim and on which, according to one review, “she concentrates on the purity of her unmannered voice and applies it to a handful of songs from the British Isles”. The musical arrangements were handled by the Welsh harpist, Hew Jones, who was then playing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Her supporting musicians included Jones (harp) and Andy Sundstrom (guitar). The review quoted above concluded with the comment that “Miss Lawton is no flash in the folk-singing pan …[she] would have happened, [folk] boom or not, and she has a style and quality which will endure.”
In August the following year (1966), Tina was invited to appear in The Restless Years, a film that used folk music to explore the early history of Australia from 1790 to 1855. It was produced in the ABC's Sydney studios and was directed and compered by Peter O'Shaughnessy. Playing the role of a convict girl, she sang songs like 'The Convict Maid' and dueted with fellow folksinger Marion Henderson. The film was awarded second place (behind Czechoslovakia) in an international folklore competition held in Dublin.
While all this was happening, she was also becoming more serious about developing the capabilities of her voice and enrolled at the Adelaide Conservatorium for singing lessons under the guidance of Nancy Thomas. She also, according to her mother, began to toy with the idea of composing songs of her own and spent hours playing and writing down her ideas.
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