Have We Met? Peggy Young :: Clunes

“There’s not a lot to tell about my family, I don’t think”, says Peggy, modestly.

“Thanks very much!” replies Malcolm, her eldest surviving son.

A sheepish smile emerges on Peggy’s face. “Well, there is a little bit to tell.”

We are sitting in Margaret “Peggy” Young’s living room on a chilly winter day in Clunes, the reverse-cycle air-conditioner blasting welcome warm air over the three of us.

“My great grandfather’s name was Hely,” Peggy begins. “His father, Frederick Augustus Hely, came out in 1823 to be principal superintendent of convicts.”

The tale goes that Peggy’s great grandfather, Hovenden Hely, just an infant on the boat trip, became an explorer who accompanied Ludwig Leichhardt on his second expedition through Queensland.

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.”

Back in my good books: a story about discovering Irish authors in cyberspace

 

I have previously written about my sense of malaise at not being able to remember what I was supposed to look up online, and about being underwhelmed by the web when I use my phone instead of my computer. I was annoyed with myself that my web surfing had been reduced to quick scrolls with a finger instead of delving down rabbit holes of wonder, and I was always being distracted by what was coming at me via email and various social media channels. My fault entirely, but still hard to get over.

To overcome this, I have been consciously trying to go directly to webpages which I love, or blogs which make me happy, to see what's happening there. That way I get to see stuff I am choosing to see, rather than the stuff choosing to see me (I'm looking at you, facebook).

Recently I found this post on one of my favourite sites, Meet Me At Mikes, and it took my eye because of the reference to a podcast with the children's book author, Oliver Jeffers. We own two of his books, with their immediately recognisable illustrations and their grown up concepts woven into enthralling tales for kids. 

Pip's post on Meet Me At Mikes is about the beauty of being oneself, and not trying to be the same as everyone else. But more than that, and something which resonated with me, it was about the idea of backing yourself. Coincidentally, when my 2015 diary asked me for my New Year's Resolutions, I had written exactly that. 'Back Myself'. Such a simple instruction, but one that's so easily forgotten, or worse, consciously deleted from our self-talk. 

In the podcast (here), Oliver Jeffers speaks about the way that each person's handwriting is different, and expands the idea to apply it to art and even the way our brains work.

"If you didn't have your own handwriting everything would look just like it was printed in a book", he says. "Everybody's got their own little quirks and tweaks that make it theirs. And it's the same with drawing and probably the same with thinking." 

I look at my handwriting in my desk diary open in front of me and notice the letters slightly slanting to the left at times, sometimes narrow vowels and curves, at other times more rounded. Apparently even my handwriting can't manage to be the same as my own handwriting.

...But back to Oliver Jeffers. His point is that we all have our own styles, and we should try to embrace what sets us apart from others, instead of trying to be the same. At a point, Jeffers realised he needed to stop copying what other artists and illustrators were doing, and let his hands draw the way they wanted to. It was then that he discovered his own style which came so easily and enjoyably, and in turn others came to love it as well. I love the realisation that imitation was pretty futile in his line of work, "somebody's already doing that for a living, and it's that guy".

My own discovery that Jeffers has a life outside of kids' books (he's a painter and filmmaker as well) was just another gem I found on this little rabbit-hole adventure. And, as if this weren't enough treasure for one day, thank's to Pip's post I also found out about another great site, Brain Pickings. It is, in it's own words, a cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more. I think I'll be visiting there in the future. Type it straight into the address bar, do not pass Go. 

So, I am back loving the internet, and not just because I have found 7 different posts about how to hide veggies in my toddler's smoothies, dinner, dessert, cupcakes, carpets. Sorry, that last one wasn't online. That was in my actual house. 

Related post: Why it's hard to surf after a feed

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.