Glen Innes’ new School of Arts & Music threw open its doors on Saturday, 20 June, with a free community day that filled the historic former Severn Shire Council Building with music, laughter and creative activity from morning to mid-afternoon.
The opening marks the start of a two-year pilot by Glen Innes Severn Council, which will see the heritage building at 181 Bourke Street hired out to the community as a creative hub for just $10 an hour.
By ten o’clock the building was buzzing, with three spaces running activities side by side around a simple idea: you do not have to be good at something to enjoy it.
In Room 1, Paul Iannuzzelli, Director and Founder of MusicPro, kept the music going from open to close, bringing in his own instruments for anyone to try. Children who had never held a guitar before were strumming one, and adults who had not sung since school found their voice again.
Down the hall, Julie Miller of the New England Stage and Screen Academy led movement and performance sessions, drawing participants off their phones and into the room. More than one person said an hour spent moving among strangers felt like fresh air.
At eleven, the day paused for official proceedings. Lindsay Woodland, the Council’s Director of Corporate and Community Services, opened proceedings and introduced Mayor Margot Davis, who welcomed community members, councillors and guests, and traced the project back to a single conversation soon after she became Mayor, when Paul Iannuzzelli approached her with an idea: that Glen Innes needed a home for music, arts and learning under one roof.
From there, Glen Innes Severn Council asked the community what it wanted, running workshops to shape how a School of Arts model would best work for the town.
The name carries more than a century of local history. As local historian Eve Chappell OAM has recorded, Schools of Arts operated in Glen Innes and surrounding villages from the 1870s, with the Glen Innes institution beginning life in 1877 as a public library and reading room. By 1922 it had served 700 people and issued 13,000 books, and over the decades it hosted cards, chess, billiards and even a gymnasium, before closing in 1967. Now, more than a hundred years on, the name has returned to a new home in the old council chambers, built in 1910, which now belong to the town’s musicians and artists.
Mayor Davis welcomed pianist Keiko Robertson to mark the occasion. Keiko, a concert pianist trained at the Toho Gakuen College in Tokyo with a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, gave a short recital before sitting down again at the piano for the ribbon-cutting. The Mayor described the building as a place to learn, create, perform, connect and be inspired, and thanked the councillors who backed the project, the residents who shaped it, the Lions Club for the catering, and the facilitators who volunteered their day.
The program ran on through the afternoon, with something for every interest: a music and wellbeing session, an open masterclass with the Glen Innes Highland Choir, dance and theatre sports with Julie Miller of NESSA, a poetry and creative writing class, piano, guitar and vocal masterclasses, a songwriting and recording workshop, and a film school sampler for the school holidays.
The makers had their own corner too. Anita Stewart shaped clay by hand, Jenny Harrington turned old cloth into new through upcycling and knitting, Owen Windred handed beginners their first banjo to strum, and Anne Vosper brought along the Highland Writers Group.
Just outside the garage, the Lions Club ran a sausage sizzle, drawing people over for lunch before they wandered a few steps away to a drawing workshop led by Lauren Mackley of Arts North West. Lauren taught contour and gestural drawing, a technique that follows the edge of an object with the eye and lets the hand trail behind. More than one person who came only for a sausage left holding a page they were secretly rather pleased with.
The day drew a crowd from right across the New England North West, with visitors travelling from Tamworth, Tenterfield and Inverell, a sign the new venue could become more than a local drawcard and grow into a meeting place for the whole district.
What happens next is up to the community. Council’s two-year pilot allows anyone to hire a room for $10 an hour, with spaces suited to art groups, rehearsals, lessons, workshops and small exhibitions. Space is one of the hardest things for a country artist to find and afford, so the offer is a rare one, but the building will only become a true hub once people use it.
Expressions of interest and bookings can be made through Glen Innes Severn Council, contact Gregory Ford at gford@gisc.nsw.gov.au.
Information for this article was contributed by Arts North West, the regional arts development organisation for the New England North West, which attended the Open Day.
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