How a coin toss drove Corey’s switch from the army to juggling

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Is it possible to earn a living from juggling? It’s not your standard, nine-to-five career choice. But in the past two years, Corey Tomlins has proved that it can be done.

When aged in his early 40s, Tomlins left his secure job in the army and turned his hobby of tossing objects into the air, and catching them, into a career.

Corey Tomlins pictured last week showing off his skills at Southbank in Melbourne’s CBD.

And he’s having a ball. He’s performed at the Australian Open tennis, and on King Island and the Gold Coast.

In August, he deftly took the floor at a charity ball at Crown in front of 1400 people.

But Tomlins says his most nerve-wracking gig could be performing in front of Australia’s top jugglers, as well as a few from overseas, at the four-day 2025 Melbourne Juggling Convention, which starts on Thursday.

When Tomlins was a teenager in the late 1990s, juggling wasn’t on his radar, nor was it on his school’s list of prospective careers.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do until, a year after completing Year 12 in Nelson Bay, near Newcastle, New South Wales, he decided to join the army.

Tomlins served at bases across Australia for 20 years and as a peacekeeper in Timor-Leste.

In 2007, after qualifying as an army fitness instructor, Tomlins and a colleague flipped a coin over which of them would work at Singleton base in New South Wales and which at Puckapunyal, in central Victoria.

Tomlins says he was “devastated” to get Puckapunyal because his parents lived near Singleton.

Corey Tomlins in uniform outside his then-home south-east of Melbourne on Anzac Day, 2021.

But it changed his life, he says. During his time off, he would drive down to Melbourne, where he first saw street performers by the Yarra River in Southbank – and was inspired.

“I saw one of them juggle three balls, throw one up, do a backflip, catch the ball and keep juggling,” he says.

“I thought, ‘that’s so cool’.”

Tomlins bought some juggling balls and practised after work at a Puckapunyal basketball court.

Tomlins performing his basketball-themed act at the 2024 Melbourne Juggling Convention.

After posts in Darwin and Sydney, he returned to Puckapunyal in 2017, and busker friends invited him to perform at Melbourne’s Speakeasy Theatre.

While nervous at first, Tomlins grew to love it. In 2023, after a stint working as a recruiter in Melbourne, Tomlins left the army to become a performer.

“It was a good job and I enjoyed it,” he says, of the army. “But I didn’t want to wake up being 55 and go, ‘I wish I had given it a go’.”

Not that juggling is easy. “If I’ve got a show coming up, I put in weeks and weeks preparing music and costumes, and rehearsing.

Corey Tomlins followed his heart and left the army to become a performer.

“Every day, I’m writing down different things I can do, props I can use, how I can make the show better.”

While most of the Melbourne Juggling Convention is for practitioners only, Tomlins will perform at its public show featuring local and international artists, at Circus Nexus in Preston on Friday at 7.30pm.