Rotunda went to the lush HIGHLANDS. KIM COOK tells the story here: ‘Writing is a passport to adventure,’ Bruno Letteri says to Hannie Rayson, first lady of the Australian stage. It’s meant to be a conversation about Hannie’s venture into memoir, but the phrase could describe the crowd that brave the cold, mist, rain and mud to hear Hannie and Bruno speak. It could also describe Rotunda itself: born in Footscray and based in Melbourne, it has now made the journey out to Dennis Spiteri’s Highlands Gallery, near Yea. This journey is, unquestionably, an adventure. Born of Rotunda supporters Joan Broughan and Marg McAlpin’s suggestion that Rotunda venture beyond Melbourne and Bruno’s usual flurry of enthusiasm, it begins with an eight am gathering on a rainy Saturday morning before the Rotunda team make a two-hour-plus-morning-tea-stop drive from Seddon to the Highlands. For a team accustomed to Melbourne locations, it’s quite a migration, and at a terrible hour no less, but the muddy road winds its way through lush hills, cathedrals of eucalypts and smothering veils of mist on its way to the gallery, opening up vistas that one will never see from the windows of a Metro train. As we trudge up the mud-slick hill from the carpark to the gallery, umbrellas useless against the freezing rain, we wonder if the weather will turn people away. Surely, despite a speaker of Hannie’s renown, they’ll prefer to stay home, warm and dry in front of the fireplace? Twenty attendees, we decide, for a Rotunda so far from home and held on such an inauspicious day, will be an accomplishment worthy of the journey. The Highlands Gallery is a large, modern building with a stunning view of cloud-covered hills, the walls covered with Dennis’s oversized, colourful canvases, a welcome escape from the grey outside. Three rows of chairs rest in a half-circle around an impromptu stage. We shake off the raindrops and set up for the guests. They come with umbrellas, coats and hats, and they fill up all but a handful of the chairs. Bruno describes Rotunda as a ‘rolling festival of intimate conversations’, and the Highlands Rotunda is no exception. Hannie is real, honest, vulnerable, witty. She opens with ‘The Dinner Party’, a short piece from her forthcoming memoir venture, full of commentary on the dangers of modern entertaining. The audience laughs when she mentions the mouse in her kitchen, a burnt dumpling steamer and the injunction to ‘never inflict your diet on your guests’—how can they not? Haven’t we all survived similar disasters ourselves? They talk performance anxiety, public intimacy, the spirituality inherent in the act of artistic creation, the subversiveness of writing, art as empathy. This isn’t a how-to-write conversation. It’s not about technique or the best way to go about the writing life. This is two people giving voice to something most writers—most artists—know in their heart, although we may not have fully realised its Do we travel to find new places, new experiences? Or do we travel to find the brothers and sisters we have yet to meet? Kim Cook
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 01:46:35 +0000
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