Have We Met? The Buckleys :: Musicians

Musical talent runs deep in the Buckley family. Mick, Sharon and their four youngest children have recently returned from the USA, where their family band, The Buckleys, played shows in Nashville, wrote songs with Grammy-nominated country music songwriters, and met with record labels.

They played at the famous Bluebird Café, on the same stage where Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift have trodden. “For them to get invited to play there, that was cool, man,” says Mick.

Sisters Sarah and Molly are out in front on guitar, mandolin, ganjo and vocals, while brother, Lachlan, plays bass and dad, Mick, keeps time on the kit.

“We’ve been around instruments our whole life,” says Molly. “We’ve always been writing songs,” ads Sarah. The US trip was a dream come true for the girls, who love country music. 

“When I was 12 years old, I was going to get to Nashville by the time I was 16," says Sarah. "So everything in the last 4 years has been leading up to that.”   

Lachlan prefers ‘70s and ‘80s rock and roll over country, but he “does what we tell him to”, jokes Sarah. Mick starts singing a Deep Purple riff in solidarity and Lachlan just laughs.

The kids’ orientation towards country music wasn’t accidental. Mick wanted them to have a broad knowledge of the different types of music out there. “I don’t like doof parties and all that sort of stuff and drugs that go along with them,” he says. “So I thought, the furthest away from that you can get is busking on the street at Tamworth.”

The band went to the Tamworth Country Music Festival to busk, and ended up in the grand final of the busking competition, playing on the main stage to thousands of people. Since then they’ve gone from strength to strength, appearing on the bill at festivals up and down the east coast, and winning song-writing accolades in the USA.

Mick was brought up in the traditions of jump swing and 1940s boogie woogie. “I had six sisters, and my dad and my uncle played boogie woogie New Orleans piano. Apparently I used to sit on their knee and all my sisters used to sing in the lounge room in north Sydney,” he says. He got taught a few chords on the piano and the rest is history.

 

Mick has had a successful and varied musical career. He’s played in bands since high school, and has been a professional musician ever since. He spent several years as the drummer for the legendary pub rock band, The Radiators, touring constantly. “Playing 6 nights a week, full houses everywhere. 1980s A Grade rock and roll, really crazy stuff,” he says.

Apart from those rock and roll days, most of the music Mick plays is grounded in jump swing. “You go out and play all sorts of stuff, but it’s always based on that,” he says. “It’s all about entertaining. Smiles on dials,” he grins. It’s how he turned himself from a drummer into a solo pianist playing in clubs around Sydney. 

“I knew how to play rockabilly piano. There was a job going at Penrith Panthers Leagues Club for $350 a night playing a grand piano. So I got that job, wearing a suit and tie. I had an hour’s worth of material, and I needed 4,” he chuckles.

That led to Mick joining the Yee Haa Boys, a country swing band who had several hits and top ten country singles with songs he had written. These days Mick has a number of ensembles that keep him busy: a big band, two duos, a jump swing/rockabilly band and solo work, as well as the family band.

“I like to keep local, because as soon as you start playing on a bigger level you’re touring, and I’ve done that all my life,” says Mick. “All that glitters isn’t gold. I’d prefer to be doing what I’m doing.”

For Mick, that means playing shows up and down the North Coast and in Queensland, and coming home to Clunes in between, where he’s now lived for 18 months. Sharon is a midwife by day and band manager by night, or maybe that’s the other way around. “That’s the big achievement, keeping everyone happy,” says Mick. “We came to Clunes, and everyone is happy.”

At the moment The Buckleys are busy working on some more songs for an album (they’ve got an EP already), as well as co-writing songs with songwriters in the USA. 

They are also looking forward to playing at the Mullum Music Festival in November this year. It’s shaping up to be a good year, and Mick is enthusiastic about what’s coming up. “I can’t help but bloody get excited about it!”

Have We Met? Thomas Rehbach :: Educator, carer, hitchhiker

Thomas Rehbach has been a preschool educator, an administrator, a respite carer, a teacher, a courier, a soccer coach and referee. He’s lived in the area long enough to see kids he’s taught now becoming parents and teachers themselves.

Tom was born in Australia to German parents and grew up in Rosehill. At age 9, Tom and his brother went to live at Dunmore House, a boys’ home in Pendle Hill. 

“We got into enough trouble that we had a choice to go to one of two boys homes,” Tom says. It’s a time he remembers favourably, being part of a large family unit with children of all ages. “I think that was the best thing that ever happened to us. I don’t hold any animosity towards my mum for making that choice.”  

Have We Met? Jim Richardson :: Teacher, Librarian, Environmentalist, Volunteer

The son of a dairy farmer from McKees Hill, Jim Richardson started his education at a one-teacher school at Clovass. Since those early years, he has been fortunate enough to take advantage of the educational opportunities that came his way. They eventually led him out of rural New South Wales, to the city, and the wide world.  

Fast forward to the 1970s, and Jim was a scholarship student at university in Armidale. Originally aiming to become a marine biologist, Jim realised he wanted to be involved with education, so decided to become a science teacher instead. 

Have We Met? Nikky Morgan-Smith :: Artist

Nikky Morgan-Smith lives in Eureka in a house tucked away on the side of an overgrown gully. It’s the house she grew up in, where her parents still lived, until Nikky and her then six-month old daughter, Morgan, moved back from Melbourne about 9 years ago. “We moved in and when it was apparent that we weren’t going to move back out, they moved out”, Nikky says, smiling.  Her parents now live in another house on the family’s 50-acre property, while Nikky and Morgan share the old house with their menagerie of dogs, cats and birds.

Have We Met? Lauren Campbell :: Potter

Photo: Bethany Ryles

In a weathered, open-sided shed behind an old house in the middle of Clunes, Lauren Campbell is in her favourite place. A mud-strewn pottery wheel sits at one end, at the other are shelves laden with vessels in various states of undress. Finished mugs, bowls and platters glisten in the afternoon light, brightly coloured glazes dripping sea blues, lilacs and speckled creams over their earthy bodies. 

“Getting my hands dirty, sitting on the wheel, it’s just a place of calm,” says Lauren.

Lauren discovered pottery about 5 years ago after being captivated by some beautiful ceramics while on a work experience placement with furniture designer, Mark Tuckey, in Sydney. 

Have We Met? Kylie Bridges :: Artist and Collaborator

“We were all set up in Sydney,” says Kylie Bridges, shaking her head in slight disbelief at what she’s about to say. 

“I really didn’t think he’d walk away from it all, but he did and we’re here and we love it”, she says, referring to her husband, Mark, a self-employed bathroom renovator and musician, and their decision to move to Clunes 13 years ago. “I still actually go ‘wow, we really did it’, because we were in a really nice situation, in a little house, great friends, great street”, Kylie explains. 

A chance encounter between their son Josh, a toddler at the time, and a stranger’s playful dog on a Byron Bay beach changed their lives. The dog’s owner told them how he’d lived all over the world but had now settled in Clunes. “‘It was God’s country’, he said, and he told us to ‘do yourselves a favour and just go out into the hinterland while you’re up here’”, Kylie recounts. She never did learn his name.
 

Now primarily a self-employed graphic designer, artist, and mother, Kylie draws on the skills picked up throughout a varied career which has encompassed administration, retail management, call centre work, customer service and hospitality. 

Completing a visual arts degree straight after school, her artistic side has been a constant anchor. “I’ve always done something creative, just whatever I could find”, Kylie says. This year Kylie’s daughter, Elke, the youngest of her four children, is starting school at Clunes Primary, following in the footsteps of her three older brothers, Josh, Toby and Ethan. 

“It will be bittersweet”, Kylie says, of her child-minding days ending and her own pursuits coming to the fore. “This is my year to bring it all together and see what it can be,” she says. “Now I need to work out for me and my career, I’m all grown up. Far out!”  

The past two years have been challenging and enlightening, as Kylie has ventured into the world of hospitality together with her business partner and friend, Emma Nichols. Looking for a way to combine their shared love of art, exhibiting, food and coffee, they took over the Eltham Valley Pantry in 2013 after it was marked for closure. Emma, being a talented cook, and Kylie, being passionate about collaborating and exhibiting with fellow artists, desired to create an art workshop, gallery and coffee house.

“We knew it would be hard but it was so much more than we thought”, Kylie confides.  The pair discovered it wasn’t easy to put their own mark on a space with such a solid, existing reputation, and make it their own. But by the time they decided to move on, Kylie and Emma were able to pinpoint the direction in which their partnership should go next. “Through that process we realised it’s not what we wanted. That’s how Found came to be”, Kylie says.

Found Coffee and Creative was the pair’s second foray into hospitality. A café and a place to exhibit, produce and talk about creative projects in the centre of Lismore, it was a wonderful, if short-lived, venture. While the timing and the building weren’t meant to be, Kylie is proud of what they started there, and the connections they made have continued to bear fruit.

Energised by the idea of connecting with and encouraging fellow creatives, Kylie and Emma have now begun to focus on curating pop-up artisan markets, such as the one held in Bexhill last November. It’s an ideal way to foster a community of talented people and give them access to the public in an encouraging environment.

Collaboration is an essential part of Kylie’s work, both in business and in art. “I really get inspired seeing other people’s talents and creativity. With the portraits that we do, obviously it’s going to have my influence, my style, but I like to know what their scenario is, what their surroundings are”, she explains. Recently, a client was so moved he burst into tears when Kylie unveiled a portrait she’d done of his two sons. “It’s trying to find those stories to put in there, that’s what I really love to do. It’s the challenging thing but the most rewarding part of it.”

www.kyliebridges.com 

Have We Met? David Meldrum :: Paediatrician

Paediatrician, David Meldrum, initially studied engineering at university, but left halfway through his degree. “I couldn’t stand it, quite frankly the maths was beyond me!” he exclaims, sitting in his office in Lismore Base Hospital. After a break working and travelling, David thought he’d give medicine a try, and hasn’t looked back.

After finishing his medical degree in Melbourne, where he grew up, David took a year off to travel in Australia and overseas. He settled in Sydney when he returned, and there met his wife, Kim, who had also just been travelling the globe. It was 1996 and Kim had recently emigrated from England. The two met at a party and immediately hit it off, swapped suitcase stories, and it turned out they’d been to a lot of the same places, right down to both having stayed with the same family in the same yurt in a remote village in western China.

Have we met? Julie Casey :: Milliner

The idea of leaving her career in banking had been floating around in Julie Casey’s head for some time. More time with her only son, Ben, and a change of direction were top of her list.

Looking for something to do from home, Julie began testing the waters with a few millinery courses in Melbourne, the epicentre of the trade in Australia. She had begun to enjoy her new creative outlet, but it was a family accident eight years ago that finally forced her hand and cemented her decision. 

Aged seven and a half, Ben’s right foot got run over by the family’s ride on mower. It had to be amputated, and a prosthetic limb put in its place. Julie took three months’ leave to care for Ben and her mind was made up. “I said, ‘yep, that’s it.’ I wanted to be at home. It’s only a short time that your kids are with you, and I’ve only got one.”

Growing up in Byron Bay, Julie and her husband, Paul, met at high school in Mullumbimby and moved to Clunes to build their own home thirteen years ago. This time of year, leading up to the spring racing carnivals, Julie is at her busiest. There are regular clients who get a hat made each year, plus fashion parades and shops to supply with her striking pieces.

“I like to do things that are unusual and different, starting with a base and creating from that”, Julie says. “Generally where we start is the dress, the shoes and the bag.” A customer’s preferences and the properties of the various materials are crucial in the initial design stage, but from then on Julie is relatively free to come up with a one-off design.

“You can’t force something to do something it’s not supposed to”, she says of the different materials and objects used in millinery. Feathers, straw, ribbon, silk, lace, felt, netting; some are easier to work with than others. “I do love shaping with feathers because it’s a fairly instant result, you can get something dramatic pretty quickly”.

Julie shows off a large, brightly coloured headpiece of hot pink and Gatorade-orange feathers. It only took about 6-8 hours to make, while others have up to 20 hours of work involved, with hand stitching, wiring, shaping and stiffening the fabrics before adding the trims. “But it’s fun!” beams Julie, “and it’s exciting when you finally get to the end.”

Millinery trends closely follow changes in fashion, but some ideas are slow to shift. For the uninitiated, the traditional spot to wear your hat, or fascinator, or headpiece, or even ‘hatinator’, yes, it’s a word, is on your right temple. Recently, milliners have begun to break away from positioning hats on the side, says Julie, led by British milliner to the stars, Philip Treacy, after he caused a stir with his hats worn in the centre of the forehead by guests at the royal wedding in 2011.

Because each hat is a one–off, it’s forbidden to copy other milliners’ creations, Julie says. “To really broaden what you do, you need to do as many courses as you can with different milliners, because they all teach differently and they all teach different techniques they’ve created themselves.” Julie has gathered skills from workshops with many milliners over the years, including well-known Australian milliners Louise McDonald and Neil Grigg.

As well as designing and making headwear from her home workshop in Clunes, Julie and her husband have recently bought a joinery business in Lismore, which is taking up a lot of her energy at the moment. It’s part of the family’s future planning, and also another string to Julie’s bow.

“It’s good to mix it up and do different things throughout your life. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in the same building with the same people for 30 or 40 years.”

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.

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.

Bexhill Village Profile: Andrea & Emily Bonotto, aka Il Carretto

Take 2 parts husband and wife, 1 part Naples sourdough starter and 1 part self-belief. Add 1 wood-fired oven on wheels, a warm Bexhill evening and 50 kids untethered. Combine gently with a flexible spoon and knead regularly for 3 years. Turn out onto a well-worn village hall and enjoy with friends.

If you asked a 17-year-old Andrea Bonotto what he’d be doing today, he probably would have said ‘working in the restaurant at my parent’s ‘otel’. Growing up next door to their hotel in Vicenza, north-eastern Italy, working for the family business seemed certain until his father sold it and Andrea was left wondering what to do. Low paying warehouse jobs, a transcontinental pilgrimage and a teaching degree later, he is back doing what he knows. “It would have been a lot cheaper if I went straight there”, he concedes with a smile. 

Clunes Village Profile - Howard & Elle

“You got me in my gardening hour”, smiles Howard, as we sit down in the bright kitchen of their Clunes bungalow. His vowels still reveal a touch of the classic New York twang even after 27 years in Australia. “I forced him to change!” says Elle, who is originally from Amsterdam where she and Howard met 42 years ago. Together the couple have three children and five grandchildren, and have helped pioneer the local organic herb industry from where we are now sitting.

Howard Rubin and Elle Fikke came to Australia during the open-door immigration policies of the 1970s and 80s, hoping to start a herbal tea business. Having sold everything in the UK, they went on holiday to Bali, met some friendly Aussies there, and turned up in 1987 to a house in Tuntable Falls which had been arranged for them by some herb growers in Nimbin.