Words & image: Eve Lamb

ELECTRIC vehicle owners are keenly watching to see when the newly installed charge station at Creswick will come online.
It’s one of three being installed under a collaboration involving Hepburn Shire Council, the state government, Chargefox and Hepburn Energy.
New charge stations are also set to be installed at Hepburn Springs and at Trentham over coming months, while the new Creswick station is next to the town’s visitor information centre.
This follows Chargefox securing $89,500 through the Victorian Government’s Destination Charging Across Victoria Program to enable installation of the new 50kW DC fast-chargers at the three locations.
The program is the first launched under the Acceleration of Zero Emissions Vehicle Adoption Program – part of the Zero Emissions Vehicle Roadmap. The Roadmap is a $100 million package of policies and programs to encourage the adoption of zero emissions vehicles.
The program aims to install about 141 EV fast-charging stations at 116 key tourist destinations and high-use locations across Victoria by July this year with the charging stations to be deployed on the Chargefox network, the largest EV charging network in Australia.
“We are excited to expand our network in the Hepburn Shire, which is a beacon of sustainability initiatives,” Evan Beaver, head of Charging at Chargefox, said.
Hepburn Shire mayor Cr Brian Hood said the Creswick station would open soon.
“Connection to the network is under way and it just needs to be tested and then there’ll be an opening.”
Each of the new 50kW DC fast-chargers are to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy, and availability of underground electricity supply has been a key factor in determining the locations for the new charge stations.
A little further down the track, the installation of a new EV charge station is also slated for Clunes. “We’ve got a further one planned for Clunes. It’s a ‘this-year’ project. That will take the number to five,” Cr Hood said.
Into the longer term, a second EV charge station is also mooted for Daylesford, complementing the town’s existing charge station located outside the town hall. And an EV charge station is also planned for Glenlyon as part of “the longer term plan”.
Installation of the new charge stations is just one of multiple efforts being made
by Hepburn Shire to drive down carbon emissions, Cr Hood says.
Under the council’s Sustainable Hepburn strategy it’s also aiming to make inroads
in areas including regenerative farming, transitioning its own light vehicle fleet to
electric, and establishing a circular economy. It’s currently employing its first circular
economy officer.
“Together with the Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance and Hepburn Energy
we’re also looking into neighbourhood battery storage. We’re doing feasibility and
technical studies into how it would work and what role local government would
play.”
As to the new charge station at Creswick, Clunes EV owner Patrick Hockey, pictured above, is among the many closely watching – and discussing – the movements in this space.
“The convenience and economy of using an EV is profound,” Mr Hockey said.
“Making charging infrastructure available is a no-brainer. The location (of the
Creswick charger) will be very convenient, near the supermarket.
“I’d like to see a rank of 12 as the next step.”

Creswick’s Craig Barrett is one of the region’s accomplished artists whose love of landscape and the natural world and the way human endeavour has interacted with it, resonates through his creative output. He has works held in the National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and the Shrine of Remembrance in addition to private and corporate collections. He chatted with journalist Eve Lamb about his love of art and his personal arts practice.

Eve: Does your arts practice conform to any particular genre and if so which?
Craig: None at all. All over the place, it depends on what interests me at the time. Over the past 45 years I have ventured through impressionism, abstraction, symbolism – wherever seems to be my sweet spot at the time.
Eve: How do you prefer to describe your artistic style?
Craig: For the past 20 years, since living in the south of France with my then wife Kendry, I have been heavily influenced by Romanesque art of the 10th-12th centuries. I like its pared back simplicity. Things are implied rather than spelt out. A stripping back of detail. Detail is a distraction from the essential, the important.
Eve: How did you come to art?
Craig: Art came to me – by magic. Nobody in my family had any interest in art. As a child, there were no original artworks on the walls, only those classic flying ducks – and ceramics. A friend of my mother’s gave me a small box of oil pastels. The glory of that rainbow of colours and the smell of those pastels remain with me. My eldest brother gave me a small set of oil paints when I was about 13 or 14. New smells of paint and turps. Hooked from thereon.
Eve: Which artists, current or historic, have influenced your own work?
Craig: Wow! As teenagers, I think we all fell in love with the French Impressionists. As I grew older, learnt more and travelled the world, I became more influenced by artists that looked inward rather than outward. Someone like Pierre Bonnard, the way he could paint a bowl of fruit as a spiritual journey, as with a Chardin still life study. Perhaps the master of all, Giorgio Morandi who found endless possibilities in a few bottles, vases and tins. When in Spain, I discovered Arshile Gorky. I was moved to tears by his intensely personal abstract paintings and drawings. Gorky himself used to say he was “with” Cezanne, or Picasso or whoever was his influence at the time. I feel like that also. Since my time in France, my main influence has been that of the great unknown and nameless artists of antiquity. Extraordinary sculptures, paintings, stained glass windows and architecture. Not the current “celebrity artists” of our time.

Eve: What is your medium/media of choice?
Craig: I pick up whatever seems to suit the idea. Painting, drawing, etching, sculpture. They all have a particular response.
Eve: What is/are your subject matter of choice? Why so?
Craig: Crikey. What takes my interest at the time. I do seem to come back again and again to some subjects. I have great empathy for people working the land. The hardships and the rewards of that. So, there are a lot of rural themes returning. Also, I am a sucker for heavy industry as well.
Eve: What are you working on at the moment in your current arts practice?
Craig: In September 2022 I had a small retrospective exhibition at Stephen McLaughlan Gallery in Melbourne to celebrate the 25 years that I have been showing with him. The Berry Consols works that were on loan to the Eureka Centre in Ballarat in 2021 will be touring to the Central Goldfields Gallery (Maryborough) in 2023. Currently, I am about to start a new series – still secret.
Eve: When you work do you like to play music?
Craig: Always have music when I am working. Always Baroque. Cello, viola. Sublime. Music never got any better in my book.
Eve: To date, what have been your career highlights as an artist?
Craig: Buggered if I know. It is always one foot in front of the other and don’t look back. I have works in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, the Shrine of Remembrance in addition to private and corporate collections. I did get a thrill though when I saw a drawing of mine at the NGV hanging between two heroes – Max Ernst and Paul Signac.
Eve: Do you have any unrealised artistic goals towards which you are striving?
Craig: In 2001 I had three exhibitions in Melbourne – at Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, at the Shrine of Remembrance, and at McClelland Gallery. At the time, I thought this was the launch of a great career. By the time my wife Kendry and I returned from France, all I could think about were the truly great anonymous archaic and medieval art works that I had encountered. There was no ego in those works. They were simply great. Now, I am just happy to make what I make. If someone else enjoys that, that is enough for me. However, it would be nice to see in print the children’s book Bonne Chasse! that Kendry wrote and I illustrated while we lived in France. There’s a dream still to come.
Eve: What do you think are the main challenges for practicing artists today?
Craig: The absolute terror of online ‘art’ markets. Picture framing, I see so much digital crap that is just wallpaper. Why would any person of sound mind buy something they have never seen in the flesh? Also, the generations that used to actually collect real art are now disappearing. They are downsizing their homes and their collections. The young ones have no art literacy and are buying digital garbage – very sad.
Eve: And the main rewards?
Craig: For the true believers, art-making is its own reward. What else would we do?

Words & images: Eve Lamb

When driving through Creswick on the main drag headed to Ballarat, it’s hard not to notice the abode of Dot and Laurie Porter.
You know it. It’s the one on the left with all the Christmassy extravagance.
Over the past decade Laurie and Dot, their children, and now their grandchildren have continued to add to the front yard spectacle celebrating the season.
It’s hard to image now that it all started with some comparatively modest Christmas lights, because as Dot and Laurie explain, after Laurie’s Christmas-loving brother, Mickey, passed away their residential yuletide decorations became somewhat more elaborate.
“Mickey loved Christmas,” Dot says.
When Mickey left some money behind, they decided to use it to honour his memory with something they knew he would have loved. And so, what has today become locally known as “Christmas House” began to take on a life of its own.
Christmas trees, reindeer, sleighs, bud lights, candy canes, elves, baubles, Santa sacks and angels abound.
“We haven’t added much this year – only that train there, and the reindeer over there, and the nativity scene over there, and the new snow machine,” says Laurie who has fine-tuned his bubble recipe to create ‘snow’ for the snow machine.
“It was so cold last night when we turned the machine on that the ‘snow’ was still on the ground this morning. The kids just love the snow machine.”
Besides their now grown-up 17 grandchildren, Dot and Laurie also have 23 great-grandchildren to enjoy the Christmas spectacle in honour of their Great-Uncle Mickey.
“It’s for the kids. To see the smiles on their faces,” Dot says.
“Some of our grandchildren dress up as elves on Christmas Eve and everything lights up. We’ve got solar-powered lights and also standard electric lights. The nativity scene is powered by solar. At night when it lights up, it’s really nice.”
Suffice to say the overall effect attracts plenty of fans in the countdown to Christmas, particularly after dark on Christmas Eve…and it’s even rumoured that Santa sometimes makes a guest appearance.
But he wouldn’t be the only one. Over the past couple of years the Creswick Brass Band has also rolled up to pay a special pre-Christmas visit to the Porter residence at 166 Ballarat Road, and dispensed some musical yuletide cheer there as well.
In fact, Creswick Brass Band members say they are now getting set to play carols at the Creswick IGA from 6.30pm to 7.30pm this Friday, December 23, and after that will also be playing carols at the Porters’ place for an hour or more from 8.30pm this Friday and then again on Saturday, Christmas Eve from 8.30pm.
No doubt Uncle Mickey will be smiling down from somewhere – and loving it.

IT WAS probably a bit of a “pinch me” moment.  Liz Liddle had been running a soap making/bath products business for about five years when she saw a callout for Uncovered at the Sydney Opera House.

In its third year, Uncovered is a platform for Australian artists, makers, creatives and artisans to showcase their artistic excellence at the Opera House’s on-site and online retail shop. The Creswick businessperson, who runs Mwerre, saw the opportunity, applied and was accepted – as were just two other creatives.

Only three businesses are selected each year. “I saw it on Facebook, as you do, and thought it was a really good opportunity to get into a major cultural institution. Having this accessible program really gives people a bit of a foothold and builds awareness of your brand, it’s a fast track.” But Liz, who has a small factory at Eganstown, realises that success also comes down to customers – and they are loving what she does.

“It is still pretty early days, we only recently launched, but the feedback I am receiving is that of the giftboxes and the bar soaps I produce, it is the giftboxes which are selling really well and to international tourists.

“I think that is because they are well packaged so people can travel with them where the bar soaps are fairly naked in their packaging. After the pandemic, I really didn’t think international visitors would be the ones that would be buying most of my products.”

Liz is also busy thinking about production, with the lead-up to Christmas for her wholesalers, and increased demand from Sydney. Like all small business owners who start because of a passion, she is now working out how to continue to make her handmade products in a sustainable way.

She is also working on product design. “I am looking at how I can be fairly sustainable but also meet the needs of the product. For example I originally started with a cloth ribbon on my packages but now I have moved to paper because it is recyclable. It is little things like that where you discover new and better ways of doing things.”

Liz said she believes Mwerre was chosen over other businesses for Uncovered because it uses high quality, indigenous ingredients to produce soap and skin products, honouring the traditions of the Arrernte people – a First Nations language group from Central Australia – to protect, adorn and heal skin. Mwerre is a 100 per cent certified Aboriginal-owned business. There were also no competing products for sale, another factor in Mwerre being chosen, Liz says.

As for how she got started in her business, that is “a long story”. “About 20 years ago I was working in the spa industry in Daylesford and I had this idea for clay products. But at that time I was much younger, didn’t have any money and just didn’t have the skills or resources to think about how to make my own brand and get into manufacturing. All that stuff.

“So, fast forward 20 years and the landscape has changed quite a bit with social media and support for small business. It is much easier to get into developing a brand and the idea came up again. But, on the other side of things I wanted to be a baker. I love baking. I started thinking about that as well and was making all this stuff and testing potential things I could sell – and we just ended up eating it all. Which wasn’t good for the waistline.

“I then discovered that soap making was the same as baking. The same process, same technical things, mixing ingredients, cooking it and pouring it into a mould. I thought, that is a really good idea, I can fulfill my need for baking and I don’t eat it.”

Until the Sydney opportunity came long, Mwerre was mostly sold in Melbourne with a few outlets in Bendigo and Creswick. It’s also online at www.mwerre.com.au  and as Liz says, it’s now “onwards and upwards” along with a trip next year to check out her new “store”.

Sydney Opera House Tours, Retail and Projects general manager Nicky Brandon said those chosen for Uncovered had to have similar values to the Opera House including creativity, excellence, collaboration, accountability and safety.

“Uncovered was basically created as a way for us to showcase up and coming Australian creatives from across the country. We took the opportunity to create a program that could support smaller businesses and artists just starting out or more established, and showcase what they have on offer within our doors.”

Nicky said Liz’s application was inspiring with its links to health using indigenous clay and minerals from the land. “That is something we are passionate about here, how we connect back to country. Her products really engaged with us, they are beautiful and smell absolutely divine and now our entire store smells amazing. We were so excited to connect with Liz.”

Nicky said she came up with the idea of Uncovered in 2017 and it had been fantastic to see the first cohort come through in 2020. “We really want to embed what we do with another round every year and build up an alumni. We choose three artists each year and all nine are still in the store. And it is fantastic to be promoting them not just locally but also internationally, seeing people take Australian products, like Liz’s, home with them.”

Links: www.mwerre.com.au | www.sydneyoperahouseshop.com

Words: Donna Kelly | Images: Contributed