Month: May 2015

A Piece of Work

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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? I’ve got my reporter’s notebook with my questions written out. And my pen. But my shorthand is that bad (where bad means non-existent) and I never leave enough space to scrawl down the answers fast enough, so I just end up recording the whole conversation each time. I wonder if she’ll think I’m an upstart? I am quite a bit younger than her, and not nearly so experienced in anything at all. I wonder if she’ll …

Katka Adams | Artist

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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. Finishing high school in Sydney, Katka had her heart set on going to art school. “The career adviser said, ‘You’ve really got to look at your other options’, and I said, ‘what other options, there are no other options!’” It is now 20 years since Katka and her husband, Russell, bought their small settler’s cottage on the eastern edge of Clunes. …

Jim and Doris Armstrong | Community Champions

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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. Jim’s only daughter from his first marriage had returned to Sydney with her mother, and Jim moved in with Doris at her Walker Street home. Now 94, Doris attended primary school at Clunes, and has given much of her life to serving …

Anne Thompson | Anti-CSG Campaigner

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“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. “When we knew it was coming to a place near you, well that was it. There’s no turning back once you know that. And if you love the countryside & love …