John Stewart and Leonie Lane :: creatives - Clunes

When government arts funding was slashed and courses cut from TAFE campuses two years ago, ceramicist John Stewart went back to his first love. At the time he was head teacher of Creative Industries at Lismore TAFE, and he left a long and successful teaching career to get back to his workshop outside Clunes.

John discovered ceramics as a teenager, teaching himself the techniques from books. When he chose it for his Higher School Certificate his teachers were surprisingly supportive. “Everyone was so relieved because I was a dreadful painter!” he says.

Acrophobia or something like it

It was the Giant Drop at Dreamworld that undid me. Sitting, waiting, nothing out in front, nothing below. Only a metal harness preventing me from free-falling 39 storeys onto concrete and fake rocks below.

I wanted to get off. I couldn’t get off. I pressed my back into the plastic seat as far as it would go. I didn’t speak. When the carriage was released we rushed to the bottom, gut-in-throat, and I vowed never to go on it again. I’ll be sticking to the pirate ship, me hearties.

I wasn’t always this paranoid about heights but it’s getting worse. It’s no wonder theme parks aren’t built for adults to enjoy, when your aversion to risk is properly formed and your body’s equilibrium is so easily disturbed. But what about climbing the bell towers of medieval European churches? The Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb? Surely people past puberty can tackle those? Perhaps I just pushed it too far, did one too many. These days I barely want to go above the 3^rd floor in a high rise.

Have We Met? Anne Thompson :: Eltham

“The first real blockade I went to was at Glenugie about two years ago. I slept in a tent for the first time in my life.” Anne had joined coal seam gas protesters trying to prevent Metgasco accessing a drilling site. Getting up before dawn, surviving on little more than a cup of tea all the hot January day, she faced the police riot squad as they marched her slowly but determinedly out of the way. “They kept pushing me in the back and I said, ‘Do not push me! I’m a 76 year old grandmother and I will not be pushed!’”

Now a familiar face of the anti-CSG movement and Knitting Nannas Against Gas, Anne had never been an activist before. But when the British-born grandmother heard of the threat of CSG being mined near her home she could not sit idly by.

A piece of work

I get sideswiped by doubt each time I think about calling my next interviewee. What if they’re not home, what if they are but they say ‘no’?  What if they say yes?

I just pick up the phone and dial, no thinking, no hesitating. It’s got to be done. Otherwise I would never write another profile. I must.

Today I show up at the arranged time only to find my subject not at home. I should have called in the morning to re-confirm. I thought to, but didn’t. What if they had wanted to back out at the last minute?

Clunes Village - Jim and Doris Armstrong

James Byron Armstrong will tell you that one thing can change a person’s life. For him, that moment came in 1969 when he was elected to the now defunct Terania Shire Council by just one vote.

Keen to accurately champion the needs of his new constituents, Jim needed a way to connect with them. “I decided to do something in every district, so I knew what the people wanted”, he says. Already playing table tennis at Dunoon, he took up bowls at Rosebank, and started attending euchre in the under croft at Clunes Anglican Church. It was at euchre that he met Doris Warburton, and in time Jim was invited to go dancing with her group of friends at the Casino RSM club. They married, both for the second time, in April 1974.  

Clunes Village - Katka Adams

When Katka Adams and her mother arrived in Australia as refugees they didn’t speak a word of English. It was 1969 and Katka was seven years old. Escaping the political repression of communism in Prague, Katka and her mother moved through several migrant hostels, including Bonegilla near Albury-Wodonga, before settling in Melbourne.

“They just stuck me in a class of regular kids. I had to relearn my whole way of writing, and I didn’t understand what the words meant”, says Katka, in her now strong, easy Australian accent. The language barrier meant Katka spent a lot of time alone drawing, even as a young child, and developed a fondness for art that never wavered.