The circus had come to town - and unbeknownst to those present in 1979, it was there to stay.

Tanya Lester was among the 90 child performers who had been hastily-trained in circus trickery by the Murray River Performing Group, who were recent graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts.

Only months before the big top arrived, Tanya had gone to a workshop they held.

"In 1978 they came up with the idea and started writing grants, and it all came off in 1979," Tanya said.

"MRPG employed Jim and Pixie Robertson and they went around the gymnastics and diving squads and what-not to hand-pick people.

"They picked my best friend Jenny, and I was at her house and Pixie rang up and said 'We'd like to do an extra training session on Saturday', and Jenny said, 'Oh well, is it OK if I bring my friend?'

"That's how it happened."

Per Westman was also involved as a result of insignificant circumstances.

"My dad knew one of the guys who was in the show, and they needed a boy for the adagio act, so dad said 'I'll send my son along'," he said.

The show on May 15 coincided with the International Year of the Child and was called 'The Flying Fruit Fly Circus' because of a quarantine station set up on the Lincoln Causeway to suppress the spread of the pest.

They performed juggling, tight-rope walking, plate-spinning with fibreglass fishing rods, comedy and acrobatics.

Among the parents and children in the audience, there was a person involved in the Vancouver Children's Festival.

"He said, 'You guys have to come to our next festival'," Tanya said.

"We had one whole year of really serious training and bringing the troupe down to 35 performers - we did a little regional tour to break the show in of Albury, Wagga, Yarrawonga, and Tumut - and did lots of fundraising.

"That's the only reason the Fruit Flies kept going; it was going to be a one-off."

So in 1982, after a performance in Sydney and a regional tour, the fruities were representing Australia at Vancouver and eight-year-old Tanya found herself winning a Gold Medallion in the Le Cirque de Demain (circus of tomorrow).

"I didn't realise how big it was, but I won a gold medal in the aerial section for under 25 around the world," she said.

From there, it was a whirlwind for Tanya and Per.

"Most holidays we did a season somewhere; at places like Batman Park where the tennis centre is now in Melbourne, and we were a huge community living on-site in caravans, with parents and cooks," Per said.

"It was stuff you couldn't do now, because today you'd have to have a ticket of some sort to work on the tent.

"There were times that we had good fun and times where we were very much on the brink; in the mid-1980s, there was very little money around."

The 1980s and 1990s saw multiple achievements for Australia's youth circus including collaboration with the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe ('they blew our minds but the training was torture'), touring with the Great Moscow Circus and The Gift selling out on Broadway in New York.

The fruities always had a home to come back to in Hovell Street - first it was a clothing factory, then a YMCA, and eventually a purpose-built training facility.

The achievements did not stop after the turn of the 21st century and included representation at the Wold Expo in Japan and Circus Under My Bed selling out at Sydney Opera House.

In 2001, the 10th anniversary was celebrated of an annual national training project bringing youth from all across Australia for a two-week intensive.

The NTP is running this July with budding young artists coming from as far as Broome to join locals from the region.

The circus' artistic director Anni Davey took part in the NTP herself in 1994.

"Circus Oz and the fruities emerged a year apart and were heavily interconnected in the early days," she said.

"In that first 20 years, contemporary circus was invented; before that there was the traditional circus of the tent dynasties.

"It had a Chinese and then a Russian flavour, and then it started to work outwards and we had a really different style.

"In 1984 Cirque du Soleil started as almost a direct reflection of contemporary circus in Australia.

"Their shows created an explosion of awareness.

"Suddenly you didn't say 'No, I didn't run away to the circus, No, I didn't grow up in a tent' - I'm a contemporary circus artist'."

Today, the young people serious about circus know what they want to do and how to get there - first fruities and then contracts, or onto more training in Canada, France and China.

Tanya said each generation was getting more skillful, with the digital age cutting out a lot of trial-and-error.

"It's constantly growing, and I often think to myself, 'How far can it go?'," she said.

"We were good for our time, but I look at the 11-year-olds doing double twists, and I wish I was being taught that back then.

"The equipment now is magnificent, and another big change especially in the last 10 years is body maintenance.

"We were always doing conditioning, but there's a lot of preventative work like toning your body specifically for your skill."

Tanya is currently training youth in the NTP, which is in a way a teaser to the full-time circus program.

Executive producer Tahni Froudist said the fruities typically trained up to 20 hours a week amid study at the circus school, through the Wodonga Middle Years College, for those in years 3 to 9.

"That's why it was so important of us to have our own school, so they had a great education and there was understanding from teachers and the department," she said.

"The Acrobatic Arts Community School started in 1986 and that was through lots of advocacy from the community.

"It's not in Melbourne or Sydney, the cultural hotspots of Australia, it's happening here, and is part of the unique cultural fabric of this region.

"That's pretty special."

The circus school is selective - of 50 kids who are seriously auditioned annually, 15 or less are accepted - and that's purposeful.

"We end up with around 80 students per year and that feels like a good amount for the industry," Tahni said.

"We've found the sweet spot for how many students we take, and we're not looking to double the size in the next 10 years."

What would be ideal in the next decade is an additional space for the fruities, Anni said.

"Possibly it will be our own circus venue, so that we can feature the best circuses in the world, in Albury-Wodonga," she said.

"I would like us to be more visible, and for the community to be extremely proud of us.

"There is not a circus in Australia certainly, and not a major circus in the world, that hasn't featured a Flying Fruit Fly Circus graduate.

"In 40 years, we have significantly faced the shape of contemporary circus internationally."

The first of many celebrations of the fruities' 40th anniversary is taking place at Wodonga tonight, 'The Big Hoorah'.

The sell-out performance is a taste of December's 'Borderville Circus Festival', which will see the return of the big top to Hovell Tree Park.

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It will be the first major show directed by Anni, who took on the role last year.

"It needs to be respectfully nostalgic, but it also needs to look forward," she said.

"The nod to history is really putting it in the place where it all started."

Per and Tanya, who have been back training with the fruities for more than a decade, are looking forward to being back under the big top.

It will be a reflection of contemporary circus today, something Per defines as "expressing the wonders of the human form".

"And questioning - instead of just 'Here's a trick and I'm doing it', it's using that to put forward an idea or a thought, and being able to draw on a lot of different skillsets - movement, circus, dance, puppetry."

The performance will be like a big reunion and for Tanya, a portal straight back to those early days.

"It's a gem of a thing that we older ones protect," she said.

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