Sheena Boughen tells the Four Winds story

Sheena Boughen, Chair of the Four Winds Festival

On Friday 16 March Museums & Galleries NSW, in partnership with South East Arts, hosted Show me the Money: Access to Funding – a full day workshop about writing winning grant applications with representatives from a range of key funding and support bodies.

The keynote speaker was Sheena Boughen, Chair of the Four Winds Festival in Bermagui. The Four Winds Festival has recently completed building a permanent festival site and the story of how they raised the commitment and dollars is truly inspirational.

Sheena believes passionately that participation as a audience member or artist of music of the highest quality is a powerful and essential ingredient of a civilised life. In the following audio clips, Sheena talks about funding indirectly and instead concentrates on the importance of purpose, ambition, partnerships and recognising a winning story in securing funding from multiple sources.

Sheena's Introduction
  Sheena discusses ambition and defining purpose
  Nature's Concert Hall Then and Now

The original Four Winds performance space

Four Winds and Bermagui are cultural tourist sites

The ongoing issues with the Four Winds site

The new designed sound shell and accompanying structures.

  How did Four Winds Festival achieve their vision?
  The 3 Ps of success - purpose, partnerships and people
  Sheena talks about pitching the winning story

Members of The Four Winds Festival team

 

How Yesterday Remembers Tomorrow at Orange Regional Gallery

This week was filled with busy preparation for the launch of our new touring exhibition, How Yesterday Remembers Tomorrow. Opening at Orange Regional Gallery on Friday 23 March, the exhibition features the works of six contemporary Australian artists and collaborative partnerships who are all past recipients of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship for emerging artists, presenting their early works alongside recent projects to exemplify how an artist's practice develops over time through research, experimentation and refinement.


With the artworks ranging from drawing to complex sculptural installations with multi-channel video projections, this proved to be a challenging task for the installation team consisting of myself, Mark Feary (Curator) and tech guru Paul Greedy from Artspace, and the staff at Orange Regional Gallery. The day commenced with laying out the works in the gallery space, taking into consideration sound and light isolation between the various video works while still encouraging a smooth flow for viewers to grasp the progression between the works of each artist.


Once the space had been clearly mapped out, we started tackling the installation of the exhibition and accompanying equipment. It began relatively easily with the hanging of framed drawings and photographic prints, followed by the assemblage of Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy's 1st Draft composed of 16 corkboards with coloured drawing pins inserted to form the central image. Then came the wall mounting of 3 plasma screens for digital video works, 3 more data projectors, media players and speaker sets, 2 sculptural installations with plasma screens attached for Ms&Mr's Frame Drag, and finally Todd McMillan's traditional overhead projector with a twist (featuring an incorporated video device and media player inside). Did I forget to mention Lauren Brincat's fantastic taxidermy cobra as part of her work The Quick and the Dead? Needless to say, there was plenty of drilling, connecting of cables, connecting of more cables, and screen testing.

After some final testing and the addition of theatrical like lighting, the exhibition looked fabulous and was all ready for the launch that evening. Orange Regional Gallery friends, patrons and public gathered to view the exhibition, have a drink and a delicious canapé. Brenda Gray, Assistant Director of the gallery welcomed all and introduced Blair French, Executive Director of Artspace who gave an erudite explanation of the show's concept and an insight into the curator's thinking. Blair outlined the impact the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship and similar opportunities afford younger artists and how this can be witnessed in their practice. After a round of thanks, in particular to the artists Ms&Mr who were in attendance guests once again viewed the exhibition but this time with renewed interest.


How Yesterday Remembers Tomorrow is showing at Orange Regional Gallery from 23 March 2012 - 6 May 2012 before travelling to 6 other venues in NSW and QLD.

For more information, visit the M&G NSW website: http://mgnsw.org.au/exhibit/how_yesterday_remembers_tomorrow/

How Yesterday Remembers Tomorrow is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW as a result of the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy. An Artspace exhibition toured by Museums & Galleries NSW.
A story by Lillian Lim, M&G NSW's Gallery Programs and Touring Exhibition Coordinator.

Image one: Todd McMillan, after the deluge, 2010
Installation view, courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

Image two: Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, 1st Draft, 2009
Cork board, drawing pins, 160 x 120 cm, courtesy of the artists and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

Accessing funding in Batemans Bay

Show me the Money - Access to Funding is a workshop we put on every year in a different part of NSW. Previous Standards participants, local museums, galleries and community arts groups are given the opportunity to hear from a range of funding providers and even chat with them about potential projects for funding. 

Andrew, Cassie and I had a beautiful drive down the coast to Batemans Bay the day before the workshop, and also managed to have a good look around the Old Courthouse Museum. The museum successfuly completed the Standards Program last year and have a range of projects on the go. Our visit coincided with the opening of their new room built especially for their volunteers. 

We also had to be dragged away from Bozo the resident dog who was most disarming. 

Delegates chat with Dianne Dahlitz about the Community Heritage Grant program.

We had a great line up of speakers at the workshop – Dianne Dahlitz who manages the Community Heritage Grants from the National Library; Einar Docker from the Powerhouse Museum’s regional services; Grainne Brundson from Arts NSW, Andrew Gray from South East Arts who represented Regional Arts NSW; and Bea Brickhill from AbaF who spoke about how arts organisations can build relationships with businesses.

One of the highlights of the day was Sheena Boughden’s inspirational keynote talk on the development of the Four Winds Festival – a music festival held every second Easter in Bermagui that Sheena and her team have built up to be a hugely successful enterprise.

The Clyde River and Batemans Bay Historical Society put on some of the best catering we have ever seen, and understandably received a spontaneous round of applause from the delegates!

Thanks to our partner South East Arts and Andrew Gray, all our amazing speakers and the team at the Old Courthouse Museum.

M&G NSW has some helpful resources on grant writing and project management. And don't forget our excellent resource the 2012 Grants and Funding Guide!

Next week we should have several of the talks available through our website and Alert!

M&G embarks on RAP adventure

M&G fearlessly hoping onto the Mari Nawi.
Image courtesy of Andrew Brettell.

A two hour cruise including a course on living on only natural resources might sound like a pilot for a cross-over Survivor/Gilligan’s Island television show. It was instead how M&G NSW staff began their Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) adventure. 

Bravery and faith were required but more of the kind needed to face the unpredictable weather havoc of our la nina summer. With water, water everywhere, thanks to last Thursday’s extreme downpour, our fate was in the hands of the experienced Aboriginal mariners of the Tribal Warrior Association. 

Tribal Warrior is the not-for-profit, Redfern-based organization run by Aboriginal Elders. Since starting up in 1998, it has trained more than 700 Aboriginal mariners, many of them from remote and extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. 

The weather meant some last-minute changes to our program. Walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens and its Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters interpretive display to our docking point was no longer on the agenda. The mob at Tribal Warrior however, held firm that the cruise would go ahead. Sure enough, by the time we disembarked at Clark Island, the sun had come out to welcome us.

Les Daniels gave us the island tour which is easy as it is less than a hectare in size. The fascinating part was in the detail, the commonplace features of the landscape that revealed so much about truly living from the land. We saw the natural rockpools and how they had been adapted as fishtraps: high tide comes in bringing the abundance of the harbor with it and then drains to leave a fish platter. We also inspected the natural aquafier on the island and learnt of the multiple uses of different native plant species found even on this small patch. 

Terry Olsen and M&G demonstrating the emu stance.
Image courtesy of Lorna Munro. 

Terry Olsen then demonstrated some of the many Aboriginal dances of eastern Australia before getting the team up to learn the emu dance. It was great fun and no one was hurt, not even a peck.

Back on board the Mari Nawi, Corey Grech who established bush foods eatery Purple Goanna in Redfern with sister Suzanne, was busy barbecuing up some tasty morsels of kangaroo and seafood with salad for our trip back. Corey is branching out with Kool Purple Kookas, teaching young people to cook healthy bush tucker in a fun way. There were many interesting conversations on the return trip including with Lorna Munro who earlier in the day had given us a presentation on the Aboriginal connections to the Woolloomooloo area and beyond. As living culture, some of these connections are still practiced today but probably invisible to the non-Aboriginal population. The natural landscape, the escarpments and the bays, also reveal land use patterns, including men’s business and women’s business, places where tools were ground and others where ceremonies took place. As an educator, Aboriginal history and politics are natural to Lorna whose bloodlines on both sides mean that such conversations were an everyday occurrence for her growing up. 

 M&G's Steve Miller, Corey Grech and Terry Olsen on the harbour.
Image courtesy of Andrew Brettell. 

The M&G NSW team were enthusiastic about this introduction to Aboriginal culture here in the centre of Sydney. Sydney Harbour after all is one of the most significant outdoor galleries in the world for rock art. As I’ve seen before, it helps to understand the layers and interactions of widely different cultures that have contributed to an area’s development. It adds meaning to a sense of place as something more than where you work or live.
Information on how to develop a RAP can be found on the Reconciliation Australia website.

The Standards Program kicks off for another year

The finale of our road trip around the long paddock was a workshop in Wagga Wagga on Friday, introducing new participants to the 2012 Standards Program. Held at the Old Council Chambers at the Museum of the Riverina, it was a day to meet everyone who we will be working with this year, and let them know exactly what they have got themselves in for!

Ten museums from the Eastern Riverina have signed up for the program of self and peer review this year, and the program is definitely off to an excellent start. Each museum had a chance to share with the group a bit about their museums, and it was great to hear what a diverse range we have on board.

We were lucky to hear from Myfanwy Thompson, who kindly joined us from the Old Courthouse Museum in Batemans Bay. Her museum completed the Standards program last year and successfully made it through in one piece! It was reassuring to hear of their museum’s experiences in going through the program and everyone really appreciated her lively and encouraging presentation.

We are looking forward to the next get together in August, in the meantime we know everyone will be very busy getting stuck into the program activities!

Thanks heaps to the staff at the Museum of the Riverina for all their help in running the workshop and making it such a successful day.

Catching up with Mark Lipscomb and David Mathieson from Adelong Alive Museum.

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The team from Tumut Historical Society and Sandra West from the Up to Date Store with Rachael Vincent, Regional Museum Officer.

Journeys on the Long Paddock

Phoebe and I are currently traveling in the western Riverina and Murray regions of NSW, talking to councils and museums about the Standards program we're planning to run in the area in 2013.

After a delayed flight we arrived in Griffith on Tuesday morning and popped in to the Griffith Pioneer Park Museum where we met with Manager Darryl Collins and Councillor Pat Cox. The Pioneer Park is home to an incredible variety of heritage buildings that have been moved to the site from the surrounding district, including a one room school, small temporary buildings made from scrap materials and covered in canvas bagging from Bagtown (the construction camp for the early 20th century irrigation scheme), a police lockup and a pub.

The Pioneer Park is also home to the Italian Museum. Strongly supported by the local Italian community, the Italian museum celebrates Griffith's large and diverse Italian community, their contribution to the wine industry and the vibrancy of Griffith. We were also privileged to have a sneak peek at the newest display area in the Pioneer Park- a new building dedicated to telling the story of the local wineries. It was great to hear that the building has been strongly supported both financially and through the donation of collection items by the wineries themselves.

The Pioneer Park is clearly a community hub, as we wandered through the grounds, children from the play group that meets there on weekdays were scooting around, the local craft group meets in one of the heritage buildings on a weekly basis as does the local arts society. Darryl also showed us plans for a new entrance building with a small conference facility that he hopes will enable even more community groups to use the Pioneer Park.

After a lovely lunch of sandwiches and cake (with extra supplies gratefully packed for the road) we headed off to Hay where we met with General Manager Allen Dwyer and Corporate Services Director Mark Dowling. Mark is also a volunteer at the Hay Gaol Museum and on the board of Shear Outback so was able to give insight into these museums from both Council's and the Museums' perspective. It was great to meet someone so senior in a council so engaged with the local museum community.



We called in briefly to Shear Outback before heading to Deniliquin. Shear Outback celebrates the significant contribution shearers have made to regional Australia with exhibitions about the history of shearing, interactives that give visitors a sense of the energy used in shearing and video oral histories and images about shearing life. Adjacent to the museum building is a heritage shearing shed where a local shearer provides shearing demonstrations for visitors.

 Leaving Hay we headed south on the Cobb Highway to Deniliquin, the highway is part of the Long Paddock, a droving route used to move livestock from Queensland through NSW to Victoria. Along the route are a series of interpretive panels and artworks highlighting local stories and sites. We were particularly taken with the story of the headless horseman depicted in a series and large cutout metal figures silloueted against the horizon like giant shadow puppets. As the car's airconditiong had stopped working just out of Griffith, we experienced the full brunt of the day's heat and were delighted to arrive in Deniliquin and gaze upon the tree lined river.

An Opportunity to Rethink my Museum

Samantha Sinnayah, 2011 M&G NSW Mentorship Recipient  
Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC), National Museum of Australia (NMA) and surrounding regional museums.

As I work alone at the George Hanna Memorial Museum (GHMM), and have done for the past two years, I was seeking to expand and refresh my curatorial practice. Now in its 16th year, the GHMM is running out of traditional historical topics to cover and will need to rethink approaches if meaningful exhibitions are to be developed in the future.

With this goal in mind, I applied for an M&G NSW Mentorship, funded by Arts NSW, at the Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA).

At the WPPC I was very interested to see how this local government museum managed to continually engage its community with new perspectives on Dubbo’s history through exhibitions like People Places Possessions: Dubbo Stories, and Dubbo 10- Community Voices. Likewise, I’d hoped that my time at NMA would provide me with ideas on how to approach my future exhibition proposal, a social history of Botany Bay, from Captain Cook to the present day. Covering four local government areas, this will be a larger project than any I have previously researched and curated.

My placement exposed me to the different approaches, issues and responsibilities these institutions faced. One highlight was witnessing collection and curatorial meetings at NMA. As a curator of a museum that focuses on one small local government area, I assumed the NMA just had a wider area over which to cast its net. I had no idea how complex collecting for a nation is and of the issues that come with that responsibility.

I also discovered the importance of making history relevant in collection and curatorial practice. NMA actively collect the ‘past’ as it occurs in the present, and, during a trip to Wagga, I found that staff at the ,Museum of the Riverina also link their historical exhibitions to the here and now. At the GHMM, our exhibitions are tied to celebrating the past, partly due to our strong ties to our local historical trust. Linking the past to the present is certainly something I am going to consciously consider in the future, especially as I attempt to build new audiences.

During the two weeks, I also took the opportunity to visit a number of regional museums between Dubbo and Albury. Having the chance to see a wide cross section of museums in NSW gave me a strong sense of the sector as a whole and my organization’s place in it. On a basic level, it introduced me to the depth of collections across the state and the resourcefulness of some volunteer run organizations. On a deeper level, it is has made me think more strategically about the resources I have available to me. The volunteer run Cootamundra Heritage Centre was very inspirational and has opened my eyes to how I may be able to utilize our local historical trust. 

All in all my mentorship was an invaluable experience. Thanks to the frank conversations I had with museum professionals, and to the wide variety of exhibitions I saw, I gained far more from my mentorship than can be expressed in these condensed paragraphs.

Samantha Sinnayah
 

Volunteer Rusty in front of Cootamundra’s curiosity chest – the volunteer organization’s inexpensive but effective equivalent of the glass and steel chests at the Museum of Sydney.

A 3-d collage about the history of Cootamundra. These dioramas where produced in cigarette tins by Jack Mullins the local newsagent.