The final curtain
Jan 16, 2026 - Gill Heal has left the theatre but a touch of magic remains. By Catherine Watson
Jan 16, 2026 - Gill Heal has left the theatre but a touch of magic remains. By Catherine Watson
 Chris Davies with Charlie (left), Meg, Willow and Drift Chris Davies was a horse woman through and through … until the day Charlie the pet kelpie decided to herd some sheep.
 Reg Toull and companion. Photo: Terry Francis By Gill Heal
IT’S THAT kind of morning in Coronet Bay. Clear sky, light breeze off the water, sun warm on your back. 7am: dog walking time. Joy Button and her border collie are heading home up Cutty Sark Road. Four days to go to Coronet Bay’s 11th annual Christmas lunch for people who’d like to be among friends. She’s mentally ticking off jobs to be done by the planning group. Sixty diners coming from as far away as Nyora and Clyde plus 16 volunteers. Ham, turkey, Christmas pudding, pavlova and berries ... $12 all in. And a takeaway box for the mince pies, shortbread, rumballs, Christmas cake. All home-baked fare. Walking down the hill towards her is Reg Toull, his Jack Russell pulling at the lead to get to the water. Reg is close to 90 and he’s a bit of a legend.  Artist Tom Murray-White has learned to turn off the part of his brain that makes words. By Gill Heal
MEET Tom Murray-White, street artist, the VCAL teacher who’s collaborated with local artists and young people over eight years to bring Wonthaggi its laneway art. “A couple of those students are doing amazingly original work,” he says. “That’s rare!” Or Tom Murray-White, twice winner of the Great Southern Portrait Prize, having fun challenging the conventions of portrait making. One of his entries, titled “I Love Claudia”, was a glass jar full of tin lids each with a drawing of his wife. Tom never signs his work. He likes the fact that the judges have no idea who the makers are. There’s a third, very different art maker. This is Tom Murray-White: visionary painter, whose work is to be exhibited in Wonthaggi from next weekend.  After 70 hours recording three novels for Audible, Fiona Macleod welcomes the chance to read to a live Bass Coast audience. By Gill Heal
WHEN Melbourne actor Fiona Macleod was invited to read for the latest “Readings at the Old Dalyston Deli” event, she was quick to say yes. She’d recently spent 70 hours recording three novels for Audible, the world’s largest publisher of audiobooks, and relished the work. But she’d read at Dalyston before and she knew that narrating a short 20-minute story to a live Bass Coast audience brought a different kind of pleasure. Nominated for Green Room awards for her stage work, Fiona appreciates the lure of theatre and film. But she and her colleagues are also aware of the unique satisfactions of book narration. An audience creates a well of silence. The narrator reads into this receptive space. “One of my favourite things I get to do is read stories aloud,” says Fiona. By Gill Heal
I’VE been thinking about values and patriotism and I think I know what our prime minister means. We’re a first world country; we’re out in front of the pack. And we should be proud of it, not doubt it.  By Gill Heal
DONALD Trump was elected six months ago and we’re still here. We’ve watched the world’s most powerful leader spin fantasy, insult and demean, and legitimise ignorance. And the sky hasn’t fallen in, yet. Life goes on. But there’s a fallout. The quality of public debate is already jeopardised. We are increasingly unable to filter the information that comes from a plethora of voices. Trump just gives the stamp of approval to our worst behaviours. So we become more cynical, less trusting, more willing to settle for arguments that confirm what we already believe. We choose to believe that things are simple: black and white, good and bad, us and them. It’s acceptable to jeer.  Peter Brooks valued music and theatre almost as much as medicine. By Gill Heal
THERE’S a memorable moment in To Kill a Mockingbird when Atticus Finch sits, defeated, in the emptying courtroom. As he rises to exit, the black townsfolk in the balcony stand as one. “Miss Jean Louise, stand up,” says one of them, nudging Scout. “Your father’s passing.” It was a little like that last week when more than 300 people pressed into the Wonthaggi town hall to celebrate the life of Dr Peter Brooks. There was the same sense of deference, the same need to mark a significant event. Hundreds of people: family, friends, former patients, people from all over. There to celebrate the life of a good man and to reflect on its significance. Peter Brooks was at home in his adopted Wonthaggi. The son of a miner, he’d grown up in a Welsh mining town. He knew about work and its value.  Tracey and Ross Denby want their new cafe to feed the soul as wellas the body. By Gill Heal
PAUL’S Table is the stuff of dreams. Or, to be more precise, of faith. It’s an unlikely idea that’s been forged by life experience and finally made real, here in Bass Coast. Run by Tracey and Ross Denby, Paul’s Table is an unusual cafe which opened at the Bass Valley Community Centre last Sunday. Paul was their son, who died in 1999 aged 13. The journey here has taken years. First and most profoundly, there was Paul’s debilitating disease and their gratitude for the times people opened their hearts to a beloved son and accepted his difference. Like the owners of Loch’s Stockyard Tea Rooms, who responded to a boy lying on the floor as if it was the most natural thing in the world.  Gardening taught Carolyn Rowson to understand the seasons of her own life. By Gill Heal
IN 2002 Carolyn Rowson was a city woman running a childcare centre. On stress leave from work and holidaying in Inverloch with her mother, she saw an ad in a real estate window. The photo showed an old house in a bare paddock in a place called Kongwak, “The Valley of Peace”. It was the first house she’d seen that didn’t need a lot of work done. She took it. For two to three years it was her holiday house, a retreat. “But ultimately,” she says, “I realised I didn’t want to go back to the city.” The twin towers had fallen not long before. “You could feel things weren’t right with the world. The systems weren’t working.” Kongwak had become a kind of sanctuary.  Little Shop of Horrors was the Wonthaggi Theatrical Group’s first blockbuster. This time it’s being performed as it was written, with a small ensemble, and in the group’s new home. By Gill Heal
WHEN Karen Milkins Hendry took her proposal for the cult classic Little Shop of Horrors to the Wonthaggi Theatre Group in 2006, few punters would have backed her chances. At the time, the risks to this cash-strapped organisation seemed enormous. There wasn’t a recent history of large-scale musicals in the arts centre, nor of big attendances. “It got up by one vote,” says Karen. Since then, the WTG trajectory has been upward and out: a major musical every year; sell-out audiences, prestigious theatrical awards, training of every kind, investment in youth and now, amazingly, an all-purpose home of their own. “Home” these days is a very new, very big tin shed at the State Coal Mine Historic Reserve. “Humble on the outside and incredibly resourced on the inside,” says Karen. “It has an art deco foyer attached, with a performance/rehearsal space that allows us to replicate the performance space at the Arts Centre.” Director Josh Gardiner leaves us no place in hide in his production of The Diary of Anne Frank.  From left, Albert Dussel (Brad Beach), Peter Van Daan (Adam Turner), Mrs Van Daan (Jaz Kaye), Anne Frank (Cluanie Swanwick), Mr Van Daan (Adam Turner), Edith Frank (Bron Kalos), Margot Frank (Jaz Hendry) and Otto Frank (Simon Furniss). Photo: Geoff Glare  The city fascinated the young Darren Talbot but when it came to setting up home it had to be within sight, sound and smell of the sea.
 By Gill Heal
ELEVEN years ago, Mariamma Cheriyan arrived in Australia with little more than a passport and a certificate of nursing. She had limited English, almost no money, no job and she’d come alone. Left behind in India were her husband and three young daughters, the youngest just six and four years old.  Maddy Harford and Harry Freeman didn't expect their new lives to be so interesting, they tell Gill Heal.
 Being an actor is a weird job, Rowena Wallace tells Gill Heal, because the boundary between acting and real life isn’t always clear.
 The 'Pippin ensemble' with Leading Player Will Hanley. Photo: Tony Dall Masetto There were a few nightmarish moments on the way to Wonthaggi Theatre Group’s dream-like production of Pippin, director Karen Milkins Hendry tells GILL HEAL.
 Jaquelina Alves Ferreira at Australia Zoo Taking a year away from study between school and university is sometimes seen as a slightly dangerous diversion. GILL HEAL spoke to five local students who followed their own paths and found unexpected benefits
At their best, newspapers connect us to something bigger and better than ourselves, writes GILL HEAL.
 GILL HEAL knows just how Ursain Bolt feels, thanks to her mother’s exquisite sense of timing.
 After a lifetime of biochemical research, Dick Wettenhall is now mastering the mysteries of soil, yeast and oak. GILL HEAL meets the prize-winning vigneron.
 It began as snippets scribbled on bits of paper in the depths of a mother’s worst nightmare: a daughter's mental breakdown. Gill Heal reports on Heather Murray Tobias’s new poetry collection, The Glass Staircase.
 Andy Thomas In uncertain times, the days of farmers blindly doing what their fathers did are long gone. The Post spoke to three who are responding creatively to new challenges.
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