Gill Heal

All in a day’s wok

28/6/2014

Chef Tom Liu delights in satisfying the rather strange tastes of his Australian customers.

By Gill Heal

THERE are four of us scanning the menu for something hot among the black bean and sweet and sour when Phyllis our waiter arrives.

“We were hoping for something with chilli,” we say plaintively.

“You’ll be wanting the Dennis Prawns,” she says. We look sceptical. “It’s named after a friend of the chef,” she explains cheerfully. “Dennis loves it so much he talks about it to everyone he knows. The prawns are amazing.”

We’re won over by this logic. “And a second chilli dish?”

The Wichita songman

19/4/2014

Composer Larry Hills draws on his American heritage of choral singing. Photo: Bernadette Walker

By Gill Heal

I DON’T understand music and I can’t sing in tune but I know a good song when I hear it and you’ll find the odd one in my oral history productions. The miracle of recent times is that Larry Hills has stepped in to help. He’ll appear with sheet music arranged for each individual in the cast. The room will ring with the sound of throats warming to the task. At the end of a song I’ll enthuse: “That was splendid!” and Larry will mildly demur: “I wasn’t going to say that actually.”

Larry is a musician, a composer, a conductor who’s also a connector. He helps to make things happen.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Larry grew up in a world in which singing was as natural as breathing. His mother was a lyric soprano. She sang gloriously and freely across the community: in choral societies, in musical productions, in church.

A woman of the world

8/3/2014

Cherie Smirl wanted to make a difference in the world but before she could do that she had to come to terms with her own place in it.

A citizen of the Powlett

8/2/2014

Paul Speirs: "“I can’t save the world but I can make a difference locally."

By Gill Heal

YEARS ago it was a bare watercourse strangled by blackberry.

Today this stretch of creek in Glen Forbes is dynamic bushland. Beneath the blackwoods and eucalypts there’s an understorey of hazel, musk and prickly currant. And under those, ferns, moss and lichens. Fish swim in a spring-fed rock pool overhung with creepers. A Pandora vine is a nest for a ringtail possum. There’s even a Gondwana species, the Austral mulberry. The place is a roll call of lost plants.

This stretch of the west tributary of the west branch of Archies Creek is Paul Spiers’ backyard. It’s a riparian revegetation project he and the owners of several connecting properties have been working on for up to 20 years.

South Gippsland snapshots

30/1/2014

Joan and Gordon Henry preserved the last of the Bass Valley ecosystem . Photo: Landcare

By Gill Heal

AROUND1890, the Thorn family sent their eldest son down to their selection in the South Gippsland forest. He was to clear a space big enough to plant some ground for a house cow and grow some vegetables. Jim Thorne was just 16. By the time the family joined him at Blackwood Forest two years later, he’d partly cleared 20 acres. When he married, Jim took out a mortgage on 110 acres of nearby forest and started over.

His son, Alf Thorn, described his dad as “a sort of a stay-at-home, work-24-hours-a-day farmer”.

Reading between the lines

21/12/2013

GILL HEAL looks back at the first 18 months of the Bass Coast Post and sees democracy at work, with its rights and obligations.

The great defender

16/11/2013

From the personal to the political, Hazel Swift walks a straight line. Gill Heal meets a woman known to many simply as The Cat Lady.

Not a blackboard in sight

18/10/2013

Jack, front, and Cade on their Claymation set.

When students turn teachers, new worlds open for the teachers and the taught. A visit to Bass Valley Primary School was a lesson in learning for former teacher Gill Heal.

The outside view

5/10/2013

Photo: Jim McFarlane

Twenty photographers, 20 perspectives shot over two weekends ... MAPping Wonthaggi takes a fresh look at our familiar world.

The alchemy of light

21/9/2013

The films were always wonderful but what he loved most was the flickering beam that came from the projectionist’s room. Keith Stevens looks back on a lifetime in cinema.

Welcome to our house

31/8/2013

Jan Bourne and LearnShare facilitator Lee Dent.

Sparks can fly – in the best sense – when people work together, Jan Bourne believes.

The search for order

30/6/2013

Hartley Tobin

Meryl and Hartley Tobin’s passions are very different, but they both bring a meticulous approach to their subjects.

Someone to watch over us

9/6/2013

When the unthinkable happens and people are trapped in mangled cars, members of Loch’s rescue unit are quickly on the scene. Gill Heal spoke to one family who will never forget their kindness to a loved son and brother.

A pearler, stitch by thrilling stitch

19/5/2013

Dress: Anna Kentwell; model: Brittany Watters; photographer: Holly Parker; artistic director: Caleb Hooke.

Anna Kentwell’s seaweed dress encrusted with pearls nestled in flowers of coral was a labour of love and imagination.

Back from the brink

26/4/2013

Tom Loughridge, 1969

They left for Vietnam as boys and returned a year later as battle-scarred men. Gill Heal reports on one man's experience of trying to settle back into a life of farming and footy.

Throwing caution to the wind

6/4/2013

There is a tide in the affairs of man, Shakespeare reckoned, and you only get one chance to catch it. Liz Alger was determined not to miss her chance.

The charm of the temporary masterpiece

20/2/2013

By Gill Heal

“SAND is solid,” says sand sculptor, Ricardo Alves-Ferreira. “The trick is to make it look ethereal.” And over days and even weeks he wields a variety of tiny palette knives, smoothing, cutting, rendering, carving tonnes of wet sand to achieve just that result.

Courage under fire

3/2/2013

As Bass Coast’s volunteer firefighters face one of the most dangerous fire seasons in years, Gill Heal asks what motivates them to put their lives on the line for strangers.

Wonthaggi firefighters pictured at the site of their new fire station in White Road. From left, Alistair Lowe, Nathan Stebbin, Stuart Zaffrese, Kim O’Connor, Tye Donohue, Peter Schmidt (CFA regional director), Stephen Piasente, Damian O’Connor, Paul Kennedy, Andrew McCormick, Kathryn Sloan and Michelle Koralewski.

Salt of the earth

13/1/2013

For almost a century, Harry Cleeland and Cape Woolamai were inseparable. Gill Heal recalls a gentle, graceful man much of whose life was governed by the sea but who
admitted he preferred to stick to shore.

The show must go on

8/12/2012

When a regional show official said his show was the only one in South Gippsland that would survive, Rosemary Loughnan decided to prove him wrong. Thirty-five years
later, the Bass Coast Summer Agricultural Show goes from strength to strength.

A man of many parts

13/10/2012

Stanley McGeagh and Judy John

Born in Belfast, trained in a British drama school, actor Stanley McGeagh has naturally got plenty of the blarney. He’s also a fair dinkum Gippslander, reports Gill Heal .

An open mind goes with the territory

22/9/2012

Former full-time political activist Moragh McKay has found common ground with Bass Coast farmers through her work with Landcare.

Raise the curtain and let the magic begin

15/8/2012

Karen Milkins Hendry: Six musicals in seven years
and every one a triumph.

By Gill Heal

IT’S a complex mix, this buzz in the audience before the curtain goes up. They’re there to see Anything Goes, Wonthaggi Theatrical Group’s latest musical, and they know what to expect.

Most people in the sellout crowd know somebody in the show ─ unsurprisingly, since the cast and crew totals over 100. But it’s more than just anticipation and excitement; there’s confidence. They know it’ll be good.

They mightn’t know the specifics of the budget ($80,000 for this latest show) but this audience expects to feel astonishment and pride at the level of skill and commitment. There’s a shared belief that Wonthaggi is a town capable of this huge annual effort; there’s a sense of ownership ─ this is our theatre group. As the house light dim, they sit back and say: “Now, impress us!”

Land of hope and toil

20/7/2012

For Les Kirk, schoolbooks never stood a chance against the allure of a Fergie tractor. In the first of a new series of profiles, Gill Heal reports on a man who’s part of a Krowera farming dynasty.