The road to one of the biggest stages in the world started with a dance at home for Ballarat highland dancer Monique Plover.
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On Saturday Ms Plover will head to Sydney as one of nine Australian highland dancers in the 100-strong massed dance troupe to take centre stage at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
To land her role she had to audition from home via Skype with directors in Scotland, who then sent the performances dances back to those selected to learn.
Next week will be consist of 10 hour rehearsals leading up to the weekend performances.
"It's been a lot trying to learn them all by yourself at home," she said while finishing packing.
It's not the first time Ms Plover has been a member of the tattoo cast - she was part of the last Australian tattoo which took place in Melbourne in 2016.
"It's heaps of fun but a lot of hard work." she said. "It's exciting and really loud. At Melbourne you couldn't see anyone, it was just black ... it's huge but exciting and overwhelming. And even in competition now we usually dance to recorded music, we hardly every dance with live (bag)pipers."
Ms Plover needs to be fit, energetic and able to dance not only highland dances, but other national dances from other Commonwealth nations such as India.
The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in Sydney will feature 1500 of the world's finest pipers, drummers, musicians and dancers from October 17 to 19 at Homebush Stadium.
For the past year Ms Plover has been passing on her love of highland dancing to young students in Brown Hill, with some of her young charges now out and winning local and interstate dancing competitions.
"I love just seeing them improve all the time - that gives me the biggest buzz because I want them to go well," she said.
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