Lyndoch Living moves past the community that created it
Claire Macrae Drylie’s late aunt, Gwen McKellar, did the pays for Lyndoch in the 60s for free. Claire’s membership application was among those rejected.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
My final profile from the roll call of the rejected. This is Claire Macrae Drylie and her late aunt Gwen McKellar.
In the 1960s, Gwen, or Mate as she was called by family, sorted out the pay packets for Lyndoch staff each week for free.
But now her niece Claire, who has lived in Warrnambool for more than 40 years, is among the 115 people whose membership application to Lyndoch was rejected without reason.
It doesn’t matter a squit that her aunt Mate was one of the many, many people who Lyndoch once relied upon to survive.
Claire is the final person from the long roll call of rejections that I will profile here, and I have chosen her story because it captures the community spirit that sustained Lyndoch for decades.
When Lyndoch was still in its infancy, Mate volunteered her time each week to “do the pays” for the Lyndoch staff, working from the kitchen table in her home in Henna St.
At the time, Mate was working as a secretary and raising two young children, Margie and Andrew, with her husband Colin.
But still she found time each week for her Lyndoch work.
Claire remembers the “pay days” as something like this:
“Mate sitting at a 1960s Laminex table (yellow) with a stack of cash and Lyndoch envelopes, with my sister Annie and I ‘helping’.
“Margie and Andy could be crying in the background because they are hungry, but Mate always put the needs of her community, ie. Lyndoch, first.
“And that’s how Lyndoch was born, on the sweat of ordinary people like Mate.”
Claire has nailed it.
Lyndoch was born on the sweat of ordinary people like Mate.
The Lyndoch board, led by chair Sue Cassidy and vice chair Kerry Nelson, has now decided that these ordinary people are no longer welcome and membership is by invitation only.
They don’t want people like Mate. If Mate was alive and had applied, she would not have made it through.
Such is the new corporate Lyndoch, where residents are customers, and progress is measured in concrete.
It is a community owned asset that has no community members.
And nobody knows why.
Tomorrow night I will write the responses from our community leaders – MPs Dan Tehan, Roma Britnell, Bev McArthur, Mayor Vicki Jellie and the Warrnambool City Councillors – to the blanket rejection.
Thanks for hanging in here this week. On we go.
The pot, the shell dolly and the bower bird
Where to look first? The Drylie home in Warrnambool is an eclectic museum of pieces from the 1950s and 60s and a smattering of whatever catches their eye.
ARCHIVED
Bluestone columnist and architect CLINTON KRAUSE previously worked in Daylesford before relocating his business to Warrnambool. Clinton explores the retro styles that gives our region so much character.
With family roots going back to the settlement of Port Fairy and a long association with retailing in the region, Claire and Tony Drylie are well known throughout the district.
Claire’s emergence as an artist has also brought her work to the attention of our arts community and her intriguing dioramas assembled from religious iconography, retro kitsch and other plastic flotsam and jetsam also just happen to provide a hint of the private lives of this dynamic couple.
I recall my first visit to their home as a visual feast of colour, chaos and clutter that nearly threatened to overwhelm the senses.
It is as if Tony and Claire are actually residing within one of Claire’s complex art assemblages.
An extensive collection of pottery, retro furniture and art sits cheek-to-cheek with the ephemera of kitsch tourism souvenirs, plastic dolls and other miniatures.
Grouped collections of hats, pottery, clocks, genie bottles, cats, Madonnas, donkeys, lamps, ice buckets, and tea sets occupy every available nook and cranny.
The mayhem extends out into the garden where a mob of concrete kangaroos greet you at the entry, metal work sculptures adorn every wall, and pots of every size and colour contain curiously shaped cacti and other exotic plants.
Claire and Tony Drylie. The pair began their collecting with just one ceramic pot from Tasmania and ended up running their own store of collectibles.
To say that ‘Tony and Claire “like to collect” is an understatement and I set about uncovering the origins of this passion.
“It started with a pot in Tasmania,” reveals Claire.
Knowing nothing about Australian pottery at the time, she was captivated by the strong colours of the glaze and the unusual soft and rounded form.
Further research lead to an appreciation and interest in Australian pottery which sparked the pursuit of unusual, quirky and interesting pieces.
This lead to regular visits to local auctions and garage sales throughout the southwest, where the couple’s interest expanded to other areas such as retro furniture, wall art, ceramics and anything that had a certain style or quality of design.
One of Claire’s distinctive assemblages – made from pieces picked up at auctions, op-shops and by friends – which invite the viewer’s own interpretations.
Claire’s artistic eye for great design and a bargain was put to good use when she started selling pieces at a small stall in the Drill Hall at Port Fairy.
Whilst hugely popular with the buyers, Claires mix of retro, kitsch and shabby was at odds with the “serious and staid” antique collections of the other stallholders and when a chance came to open her own shop back in Warrnambool, the couple jumped at it.
With Tony out the back restoring timber furniture and Claire filling the walls of the commodious space in Fairy Street, their business ‘Alternative Antiques’ became a must-visit destination amongst tourists and locals alike.
Fast forward to 2010 and with the couple having kept the supply and restoration of inventory going for well over 10 years, it was time to move on.
The shop had become such an institution that Claire recalls loyal clientele actually getting a bit “bolshy” and emotional when told that the couple were winding down.
After being denied the opportunity to own a shell dolly as a child, Claire has more than made up for it with a huge collection of shell memorabilia with a twist of kitsch.
During the years of the business, a vast repository began to accumulate – a common practice at most auctions is to offer the best pieces thrown in together with ‘job lots’ of items that are impossible to sell.
Claire’s boundless creative energy found a use for all this detritus and she began to experiment with boxed dioramas of religious items, small scale figures and other items that, when assembled, create a narrative for the viewer to explore and interpret.
She is now establishing herself as an artist with the ongoing exploration and evolution of these unique installation pieces and was awarded the runner up prize at the inaugural Southwest International Women’s Day Art Prize in 2015.
This knack for arrangement has been given full flight in the styling of their home and the walls are adorned with montages and groupings of both themed and disparate objects which all seem to come together in a visually pleasing symphony of colour, form and wit.
Oh, and the story of the shell dolly?
Well, there was a girl down the road who had the most beautiful doll young Claire had seen and despite insistent pleas to her mother, it was dismissed as being far too kitsch and common to be bestowed as a gift.
All is good now though, because Claire has a whole shelf of shell dollies, and shell boomerangs, and souvenirs, and hats, figurines, seats, vases, masks, radios, lamps, pots , prints, cushions, caravans, clocks, tea sets, dinnerware, ice buckets, robots…………………………………………
Our quiet heroes: the Drylies
Tony and Claire Drylie with some of the St Joseph’s Primary School display boxes…and the huge display board!
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] W [/dropcap]hat we love about our quiet hero section is that we get to celebrate people doing things that might not always make the news: the small things, the little things that often go unnoticed or happen without much fuss.
This week our quiet heroes are Claire and Tony Drylie, who are well-known around Warrnambool for their kindness, their cheerfulness and, in recent years, their involvement in the grassroots arts scene.
While Claire is an artist, Tony is usually not far from the action, helping keep track of the finances (as he did with the former Quarry studio), or carting some piece of equipment from here to there in his four-wheel drive.
In the past few days, the pair has been involved in putting the final touches to an art project Claire has developed with art teacher Kathryn McMeel at St Joseph’s Primary School, where each of the 180 children in grades five and six have created small ‘portrait’ boxes that they have fitted out with objects that they believe capture who they are.
Imagine a chocolate box, without the lid, and a tiny, individual world created inside: a child’s world.
Capturing little lives: some of the children’s work they have developed with Claire.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] W [/dropcap]orking from an industrial shed at the back of a Warrnambool business, Tony has assembled and painted a 2-point-something metre display board in bright red, upon which Claire has been methodically gluing the boxes in preparation for their display at the school within the next fortnight.
(Ryan’s Removals have kindly agreed to deliver the display board which simply won’t fit in Tony’s four-wheel drive, no matter how hard he tries).
The final display is going to look spectacular.
Artists working with children has to be one of the most mutually beneficial relationships in existence and that is why Claire and Tony, and those like them, are our quiet heroes for this week.
[box] Our Quiet Hero will receive a coffee and cake voucher from this week’s sponsor Lozzar’s Lounge Cafe, Warrnambool – thankyou Lozzar’s. [/box]
