Bass Coast Arts news and features

Into the music

8/11/2025

After the long quiet of lockdown, Anne Olsen found her voice
again in singing with others.

By Anne Olsen

WHEN I moved to Phillip Island I was still working part time as a secondary school teacher. I was looking forward to retirement and had some vague ideas about joining something or other at some stage. Despite my good intentions, after the Covid lockdown I seemed to become something of a recluse. It was only two and a half years ago that I started thinking about joining a community choir.

I’ve always loved music and singing but I had not been a member of a choir since my student days and I was not at all confident about my abilities. I found the Island Harmony Choir through searching online for a choir close to home. Reassured that no audition was required for membership, I turned up at the rehearsal venue … just to listen.

Fleeting moments

16/10/2025

Kate Muir’s and Tessa Hubble’s contrasting styles and painting techniques open different windows on the passage of time for their joint exhibition at ArtSpace.

Kate Muir: Glimpse of Western Port Bay, oil on canvas

Painting with purpose

15/10/2025

Mix art, nature and community and you get the Landcare Art Prize, writes Janice Orchard

By Janice Orchard

A SPECIAL kind of energy will fill the Kernot Community Hall in mid-November, a blend of creativity, hope and a shared love for the land we call home.

Established last year, the Bass Coast Landcare Art Prize brought together artists, families, and environmentalists on Melbourne Cup weekend, continuing a long-standing tradition started by the KernArt Prize six years earlier.

The event hit the ground running in its first year, with almost 250 paintings, sculptures and photographs entered by artists from around the state. A record crowd filled the Kernot Community Hall on opening night to hear the judge Herman Pekel announce his selections.

The art of dishwashing

14/10/2025

“It is a scientific fact that when men have their hands in warm, soapy water, they relax, and their minds inevitably lead to thinking about their life, love and other important things.”
John Mutsaers

Artist and writer John Mutsaers

By Catherine Watson

Inverloch artist John Mutsaers has long maintained that writing is the superior art form because words can paint a picture in the reader's mind.

Now, with the publication of his first book – A Thinking Man’s Manual for Effective Dishwashing – he’s proved his own point.

Dishwashing becomes both a meditation and a framing device for the memories that rise to the surface while his hands are in the sink, readying him for a day in the studio.

Awaiting shoulder surgery and unable to paint, Mutsaers turned his energy to the keyboard. The words, he says, simply poured out. He revisited the small house in Eindhoven, Holland, where he grew up, the fear and shortages of the German occupation, the family’s migration to Australia in 1956, life in the Latrobe Valley in the 1960s, and courting an Irish lass called Mary who was to become his wife, muse, English teacher and "first reader".

Kelp and the Sentient Sea

9/10/2025

WHEN local artist Kim McDonald heads down to the beach, she’s stepping into her studio, a vast, breathing, ever-changing space that feeds her imagination.

Her niece, Jasmine Susic, does the same. A dancer and choreographer, she moves with the rhythm of the waves, feeling for the pulse beneath the surface.

Together, the pair have created Kelp and the Sentient Sea, on exhibition at Berninneit Art Gallery until October 26. A multi-sensory dive into the ocean’s living force, it combines printmaking, dance, film and installation in an exploration of the mysterious relationship between humans and the sea.

Ms Vale is still waiting

9/10/2025

Maggie Millar brings Miss Vale to life.

By Ian Hayward Robinson

MAGGIE Millar’s contribution to this year’s Seniors Month has a fascinating history. In 1990 Maggie had the lead role, Miss Vale, in an ABC radio play by Elizabeth Jolley called Little Lewis Has Had a Lovely Sleep. After the play went to air, Maggie received a card from Elizabeth which began “I have just listened to your wonderful performance as Miss Vale. You were superb. Thank you very much for bringing her to life so well.”

Not long after, Maggie was performing a stage play in Perth with Jacki Weaver. She made contact with Elizabeth and they became friends. So when Maggie planned an evening of dramatic monologues, Elizabeth was an obvious choice for one of the writers, and a reprise of Miss Vale the obvious choice of character.

Reflections of a life

18/9/2025

A Roiling Boil is San Remo artist Marcia Rolfs’ first book, an exquisite collection of her poetry, accompanied by her paintings and photographs.

The striking cover features a turbulent sky, hence the title.

The poems range from amusing accounts of the transitory life in outback camping grounds to sharp observations of nature and reflections on ageing.

Marcia writes: “My poetry is born from reflections on life’s journey, shaped by travels that broadened my perspective and everyday moments that reveal the beauty and complexity and sometimes bitter sweet nature of the human experience.

Proceeds from sales of the book are going to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

They are $25 plus postage. You can email her at [email protected] to order a copy.

We have been singing ...

18/9/2025

Community members gathered at Berninneit on Monday for an event featuring poetry and music from students of the Bass Coast Adult Learning’s English as an Additional Language Program.

By Daryl Pellizzer

WE HAVE been singing. Laura Brearley has set some of our beautiful poems to music, Rhythm And Poetry and other lovely melodies. She came in to rehearse the songs and share her lovely creative spirit with us at BCAL.

It’s a joy. We read and sang, and I improvised some interpretive dance, which I quite enjoyed and it helped the students to laugh.

My brush with art

18/9/2025

Ellen Hubble: “It’s sitting still in one place, being immersed in the environment."

By Catherine Watson

“BYO art materials, water, chair, drinks, snacks, picnic,” the invitation to the first Artists in the Woodlands session stated. I’ve brought none of them. I can’t paint or draw so I’ve brought a camera. My plan is to watch artists at work in an en plein air session.

When we meet at the Dunbabbin Road Picnic Area at the top of the Gurdies the storm clouds are looming and a devilish wind is swirling across the bay. Sensibly, most people have decided to give it a miss so there are just three of us – Ellen Hubble (the organiser and an accomplished artist), Lisa Buckley (also an accomplished artist) and me.

Artists in the woodlands
En plein air sessions are held every second Wednesday from 10.30am-1pm. Meet at the Dunbabbin Road Picnic Area. BYO art materials, water, chair, drinks, snacks. Email Ellen at [email protected] for more information.

The singer not the song

16/9/2025

The Invy Horn Jam heads up McBride Avenue taking their audience along for the ride.
Photo: Dyonn Dimmock

By Alison Chapman

RICHARD Osman, in a British podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest is Entertainment, claimed it took him just 35 seconds and a chatbot to create a band, a song and a video clip. The band was called Quiet Alibi, the song Rewind the Summer, with a fuzzy film of four young men performing.

I couldn’t find it on YouTube (where I had found the Osman podcast). Maybe he was joking – Osman is often very funny, whether on the game show Pointless or in his Thursday Murder Club novels. But toward the end of the podcast, he did play a sample of the “band” performing the song.

That’s the unsettling bit: what is real? Can we even tell?

Maths makes history

10/9/2025

Robyn Arianrhod, left, with the other 2025 NSW History Award winners, defied her own expectations to win a major history award with a book about maths.

By Catherine Watson

BASS Coast writer and mathematician Robyn Arianrhod has pulled off a surprise win at the 2025 NSW History Awards, taking out the General History category with her book Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation.

Thereby hangs a tale

16/8/2025

Tears, laughter, resilience and recipes … the Phillip Island
Festival of Stories had it all.

By Julie Statkus

“I COULDN'T imagine doing it and surviving,” said Peter Greste. I couldn't imagine it either. In June 2014, Greste, an investigative journalist, was sentenced to seven years prison in Cairo. He ultimately served 400 days before being deported to Australia.

Greste was the first of many speakers at the Phillip Island Festival of Stories who generously shared their stories of resilience, the strategies they developed to survive and the discovery of their inner strength.

Over a recent cold wet weekend hundreds of people gathered at Berninneit for the festival, and what an incredible weekend it was. A small group of local people with a vision enlisted the support of council, volunteers, donors and supporters to bring their vision to life.

Stanley McGeagh: a life in many acts

13/8/2025

Irish-Australian actor Stanley McGeagh in UFO, screened in 1970. Stanley died on August 5, leaving behind a Coronet Bay community that claimed him as one of its own.

By Catherine Watson

YOU’VE almost certainly seen Stanley McGeagh on television. For decades he was a fixture of British drama and comedy: Doctor Who, The Bill, Minder, Dad’s Army and Softly Softly, among many others.

He was never the leading man but always a memorable supporting actor, lean of frame, with piercing blue eyes, a presence that stuck in your mind long after the credits rolled.

Stanley – never “Stan” – was born in wartime Belfast, one of five children in a shipwright’s family “poor as church mice”.

A German bomb hit the house opposite, blowing in the front of the McGeagh home. “My father was one of those who came to dig us out of the rubble,” he recalled.

The family found refuge in the tiny coastal hamlet of Ballintoy, a place steeped in fairies, ghosts and the salty tang of the sea. He reckoned it was the place where he became superstitious.

Play it on the porch

13/8/2025

Michael Whelan, on guitar, will be play with the Bass Coast Pickers
on the Berninneit porch.

By Michael Whelan

WHAT if, just for one day, the world stopped – and we all listened to the music?

That’s the simple idea behind Play Music on the Porch Day, a grassroots global event where people step outside, pick up an instrument, and fill the air with song.

On Saturday 30 August 2025, porches, parks and public spaces from Washington to Wonthaggi, from Cannes to Cowes, will come alive with the sound of music.

The storm inside

22/7/2025

Chris Pitman's acclaimed one-man play opens the door to difficult conversations.

By Tim O’Brien

WHEN well-known Australian theatre actor and playwright Chris Pitman brings his critically acclaimed meditative monodrama Shore Break to Berninneit next Wednesday it promises more than a riveting and sometimes confronting theatrical experience.

Described as “an intimate portrait of a lost soul”, Shore Break is one man’s reflection of heartbreak, confusion and isolation and the search for connection and meaning.

Through humour, reminiscence and deft writing, Pitman peels away layers of rejection and regret, discontent and vulnerability – those touchpoints of the human condition that bedevil so many of us.

Sounds and silence

21/7/2025

By Catherine Watson

MORE than a century after the First World War ended, the poetry it spawned still haunts us. A new work from Melbourne Symphony Orchestra violinist and curator Sarah Curro draws that poetry into a concert performance.

The Poetry of War will premiere in Wonthaggi’s Union Theatre on Saturday, August 2, ahead of its first Melbourne showing the following day. It brings together music and poetry in a 90-minute work of reflection and remembrance.

Sarah Curro: “We need that moment to reflect.”
Photo: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

This is Curro’s maiden voyage to Wonthaggi but she says it feels right to premiere the work here. “I know Wonthaggi has a strong sense of community and history. It feels right to begin here, before the city, in a town that understands what remembrance really means.”

She has wanted to do something like this since she was a teenager. A respected violinist with a wide-ranging repertoire, Curro’s early introduction to war poetry came through Britten’s War Requiem, with the words of Wilfred Owen woven into the music. “I just want as many people as possible to hear Wilfred Owen’s poetry,” she says. “It’s some of the greatest poetry about war ever written.”

Pennies, petticoats and power

26/6/2025

Picture this: How would you honour a group of trail blazing women who stepped up
in Wonthaggi’s hour of need?

SOME stories deserve to be set in stone – or bronze or steel – to inspire the next generation of fighters.

One such was the story of the trailblazing Wonthaggi Miners Women’s Auxiliary (WMWA), a pioneering force of women who stepped into the public and political arena in the town’s hour of need.

Funded by the Victorian Women’s Public Art Program, the commission will spotlight the fearless efforts of women like Agnes Chambers and Agnes Doig, who led the auxiliary over several decades and left a powerful legacy of grassroots activism.

Born out of a five-month strike against reduced pay and dangerous working conditions, the auxiliary was the first of its kind in Australia.

Big stories and bold strokes

26/6/2025

By Phil Henshall

FIFTY years ago how could I have known that I was contributing to the changing of our climate? In those innocent days in the early formation of our steel fixing business, my business partner Peter Mammolito and I were given a contract to help in the construction of the Loy Yang Power Station. It was a huge project and we were proud to have been chosen.

It had been many years since I had driven past but just recently Annie and I were on a trip to Gelliondale near Yarram and it took us past the power station that stood out as a surreal fixture on the landscape. The area was first settled in the 1840s at the place where Sheepwash Creek meets the Latrobe River. It was named Loy Yang which is an Aboriginal name meaning "Big Eel".

The art of resistance

25/6/2025

Kathe Kollwitz: Death and the Woman (Tod und Frau) 1910.
Etching and emery through-press process

By Catherine Watson

WHEN Simon Gregg, director of the Gippsland Art Gallery, first sorted through prints from the Robert Smith Collection for Wonthaggi’s Power to the People exhibition, he admits he found the contents pretty gloomy.

"But as I was reading about missile strikes in Iran and Israel, and the devastation in Gaza and Ukraine, I realised it’s depressingly still relevant," he told guests at the opening of the new exhibition, now on in the foyer of the Wonthaggi Union Theatre.

The exhibition features 40 prints from the 600-strong collection donated by the late Robert Smith to Bass Coast Shire in 2017 – a gift Gregg describes as “an incredible asset, not just to Bass Coast but to the whole community”.

Lost in the dream

19/6/2025

In his 90th year John Adam reckons he’s still learning, one canvas at a time

By Catherine Watson

IN HIS 90th year, John Adam reckons he's still learning, one canvas at a time.

Adam speaks candidly of self-doubt and the precarious nature of creative confidence. “From the ’60s up to the ’80s I was very confident in what I was doing. I’m not so confident now, but that’s just physical stuff. I haven’t lost my delight in painting.”

He quotes Cézanne, whom he calls his mentor. “He wrote a letter to his son in which he said ‘Painting is very difficult for me. I paint very slowly now. I can never capture the beauty and majesty of the landscape.’ And I relate to both of those things. It’s always an attempt and you never quite get it.”

From shields to surfboards

8/6/2025

Steve Ulula Parker, with great nephew Esra. His call to country is for all of us.

By Catherine Watson

THERE’S a recurring motif in Steve Ulula Parker’s new exhibition at Berninneit: a diamond shape. It’s in the surfboards, the skateboards, the bark canoe, the shields and the scar tree.

The diamond is a traditional pattern of the Boonwurrung, his people. He’s been researching his ancestors’ stories and connecting with their traditional patterns through artworks and artefacts held in the Melbourne Museum. While those works are off limits to most people he has access as a Traditional Owner.

Touched by the light

5/6/2025

Warren Nichols and Turner’s Falls of the Schaffhausen

By Catherine Watson

SEEING his painting hanging alongside original works by J.M.W. Turner is not something Warren Nichols could ever have predicted. It came to reality on Friday night with the opening of a blockbuster exhibition titled Turner & Australia at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale.

The exhibition draws together key works by Turner from Australian public collections, alongside works by Australian artists who have been influenced by him, including such illustrious names as Eugene von Guérard, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Clarice Beckett, Jessie Traill, Lloyd Rees, Tracey Moffatt, Tony Smibert and Valerie Sparks.

And Warren Nichols. Twelve months ago, the Ventnor landscape artist received an invitation from curator and gallery director Simon Gregg to join the distinguished group.

More than water

16/5/2025

Where Two Rivers Meet by Iryna MacMillan

A SPECTACULAR night sky photo titled ‘Where Two Rivers Meet’ has won first prize in West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority’s (CMA) photo competition.

The celestial image was chosen for its unique perspective of West Gippsland’s rivers. Taken by Sale resident Iryna MacMillan, it perfectly reflects the theme of rivers being much more than just water.

“I was chasing the Milky Way at Swing Bridge. In the image we can see the Milky Way, the planet Venus and a pink Aurora on the left. It was a beautiful night and very inspiring,” said Iryna who moved to Australia from Ukraine over 20 years ago.

The birds are back

12/5/2025

As our migratory shorebirds depart for their Arctic breeding grounds, the Flyways exhibition opens to celebrate their extraordinary journey.

By Ursula Theinert

LAST year ArtSpace Wonthaggi hosted a series of workshops called ‘Across the Waters’ that celebrated the migratory birds of Western Port.

As many as five million shorebirds from 36 species arrive on our shores annually after making the epic 12,500km trip from their Arctic breeding grounds. The route they follow is called the East Asian-Australasian Flyway and it passes through 23 countries. For many of these birds, the mudflats and beaches of Western Port/Warn Marin are home from October till May.

Home is where the art is

14/4/2025

John Adam's mural of Phillip Island history has been rehung at one of the busiest entrances to Cowes.

IN HIS 90th year, Phillip Island artist John Adam is enjoying a purple patch. Last year he was commissioned to do a major work for the new Cowes Community Hospital. In July a retrospective of his works will be exhibited in the Berninneit Gallery. And on Friday John’s many friends gathered at the Creative Arts Station in Settlement Road to welcome back his mural of Phillip Island history.