By Carol Altmann

It was late November last year when a teenage singer-songwriter named Cooper Lower took to the stage at Blarney Books & Art, Port Fairy, knowing that most of the crowd had not come specifically to hear him – he was a support act to Irish folk artist Gallie.

Those – like me – who had not heard Cooper perform before perhaps expected what I did: a few cover songs belted out with the enthusiasm of a 17-year-old clutching a guitar.

What followed, however, was magical.

Cooper has a voice that is both powerful and gentle, lilting and strong and the intimate Blarney venue combined with Cooper’s songwriting talent, musical ability and stage presence was mesmerising.

[box]Subscribers: We have a copy of Cooper’s EP, ‘Just a Thought’ to give away. Email us at editor@bluestonemagazine.com.au with COOPER in the subject line by Friday Feb 19 at 5pm to be in the draw.[/box]

“Blarney Books put up a Facebook photo that night saying ‘Cooper Lower pouring his heart out on stage’ and that was the coolest thing to read because that is exactly what I try to do every time I perform, and to see that acknowledged really meant a lot to me,” he tells me later.

We are chatting at the dining room table in his family home in north Warrnambool, where he also writes and practices his material in his bedroom that houses a string of acoustic guitars – his favourite instrument.

“I got a guitar for my 8th birthday but I only picked it up and started playing it when I was 13,” Cooper, who is completely self-taught, says.

“I would play and sing along to songs and I started to think, ‘actually, I am okay at this.”

While initially inspired by the likes of rapper Eminem (“I have moved on since then,” he laughs), Cooper began to listen to singer-songwriters such as Jack Johnson, John Butler, Ed Sherrin and Xavier Rudd and found “they really had something to say with their songs”.

He wrote his first song – Utopian Nightmare (listen here) – in 2014, at the age of 15 after being inspired by an English school assignment on dystopian fiction.

“I had thought a lot about the theme for the assignment, so that song just fell out of me in two days….but they are not all like that! Deluded Eyes (listen here) took three months to write. Three months of thinking and working that is compacted into four minutes,” Cooper says.

As he talks about his work, it is easy to forget that Cooper is just 17, starting VCE (he studies at Mortlake College and is also enrolled in the Emmanuel College Cert 3 Music program), with a young girlfriend, and the loping, big-legged stride of a teenager.

On so many other levels Cooper is a wise head on young shoulders. A quietly spoken, polite and measured old soul in a young body, who thinks and writes very deeply about the world.

“I have very high expectations of my song writing. I will never settle for a word or a line unless I can explain why it is there,” he says.

For Cooper, the challenge is to find the right balance between the music and the meaning and to “reach” an audience by striking that balance.

“If you try to tell people how to think, they won’t want to listen, but if through my music I can tell them what I am thinking, then maybe it offers them a new perspective.”

Cooper’s five-track EP, Just a Thought, tackles such issues as depression, mental illness, hope, loss and love – some of it drawn from his own experience, but most from his own reflections. He is now writing more songs for a full album and taking his music to the people wherever he can, from busking in Warrnambool and Melbourne, to a string of gigs around the south-west.

People like Lynny Mast, who is passionate about promoting local musicians and has started a pop-up shop for local music, and fellow musicians Brady James and Tom Richardson have all inspired Cooper to keep following his dream, together with his mum, Michelle, who helps “carry in all the gear” to the gigs.

“Tom (Richardson) once said to me, ‘I know why we play music – you know why you do it –  and you just have to keep doing it.”

At the end of our engrossing conversation, Cooper realises he has missed the bus for a meeting at Flying Horse Inn. As I offer him a ride, I am reminded, again, that one of the most exciting young talents in Warrnambool right now is still not old enough to drive – but he is a certainly a person going places.

[box]You can keep up to date with Cooper Lower’s gigs via his Facebook page. He is also scheduled to perform at Blarney Books & Art during the Port Fairy Folk Festival. Film maker Colleen Hughson has created a series of beautiful clips of Cooper performing that you can watch here.  We also have a copy of Cooper’s EP, Just A Thought, to give away to one lucky Bluestone subscriber: email us with the subject line Cooper at editor@bluestonemagazine.com.au by Friday Feb 19 to be in the draw.[/box]

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The Vault – Carol Altmann

The $63,000 relocation of the former Porter’s shed – sold to the Warrnambool City Council by developer and former councillor Graeme Rodger for $40,000 – has begun.

A Bluestone subscriber tipped us off this afternoon that the deconstruction of the Wangoom Rd shed had begun, but we are yet to learn exactly where it is being moved to and for what purpose.

It is also not yet known how much it will cost to reassemble the shed, which the council attempted to auction shortly after the council purchased it early last year, but the auction failed to attract a bid and the shed was passed in for half what the council paid for it – $20,000.

The shed was bought on behalf of the council by its director of City Infrastructure, Peter Robertson, who by way of his position has the authority to make purchases up to $149,999 under the council’s procurement policy.

The ultimate cost of the shed, however, is expected to be far more than that.

In addition to the $103,000 that will be paid to Mr Rodger for the shed and its relocation, there are the reassembly and fit-out costs including insulation, electricity, water etc.

As it happens, we posed a series of questions about these very issues to the council’s media spokesman Nick Higgins on Tuesday (Dec 8).

The questions include:

1. Where is the shed being relocated to and for what purpose?
2. How much will the council spend on reassembling the shed at this new site?
3. Will the council be reassembling the shed on a concrete slab and, if so, how much will this slab cost? If not, what will the shed be reassembled on?
4. What is the estimated cost of the complete refit for the shed upon its relocation, including insulation, power, water, toilets etc as required?
5. Did the council compare the cost of purchasing, disassembling, relocating and reassembling Porter’s shed with the cost of building a new shed and, if so, what was the difference?

We are yet to hear back from Mr Higgins on this ongoing saga, but you will be the first to know when we do.

(And we know the council – while not a subscriber to Bluestone – is reading stories in The Vault via access to someone’s password, so if you are reading this one, Mr Higgins, I am hoping we can have those answers soon to pass on to our subscribers.)

By Carol Altmann

There is nothing like a tour of the local cemetery to crystallise the mind about how quickly we can forget trailblazers of their time, like Warrnambool musician, photographer and artist Eva Gaspar.

It was during one of family historian Ray Welsford’s gold-coin tours of the Warrnambool Cemetery that I heard Eva’s name raised as one that is slowly vanishing from the landscape since her death in 1978.

Yes, there is a road named in her honour, but perhaps because she was not a sporting hero, never married and never had any children, there are few public memorials to commemorate her enormous – and generous – contribution to developing Warrnambool’s cultural scene in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

It wasn’t always this way.

The original Performing Arts Centre in Warrnambool had the Eva Gaspar Theatre as its centrepiece when it opened in 1983, but the name was dropped when the complex was redeveloped as the Lighthouse Theatre in 2012.

Eva’s portrait is still in the building, but you have to walk to the southern wing to find it, alongside some magnificent tapestries and an assortment of other historic photos.

So who was Eva?

In contemporary terms, apart from her devout Catholicism and serious perm, she is perhaps best described as the equivalent of today’s Helen Bunyon, from The Artery/F Project: a long-term, tireless and generous volunteer to the arts, who was also an artist herself in music, drawing and photography.

“Eva loved photography – she was part of the very big and very passionate photography scene in Warrnambool in the 1950s and 60s,” recalls photographer John (“Jack”) Wilkins.

That scene, as Jack explains, included his own father, Alex Wilkins and Ralph Illidge who, between them, not only photographed just about every wedding and child born in Warrnambool during that time, but also built an impressive social history archive through photography and film.

Eva, Alex and Ralph were all founding members of the City of Warrnambool Camera Club, with Eva holding the presidency from 1954 to 1977, during which time the club hosted the most extraordinary competition of international photography.

“That was in 1964 – it is hard to imagine it now, but they had this whole thing going on in little old Warrnambool and it attracted entries from around the world,” says Jack, in his usual gregarious style.

(Remarkably, some footage from the event is part of the Alex Wilkins’ archive which Jack is now slowly converting to digital and uploading to the internet – he has kindly agreed to us including it here. See below.)

Eva, who later became part of Collett, Bain & Gaspar printers, at one stage worked upstairs in Alex Wilkin’s photography studio in Liebig St (now the office of local MP Denis Napthine), where she would hand-colour the images.

Like any artist, however, she no doubt aspired to holding her own exhibition and through her close connection to the then director of the Warrnambool Art Gallery, John (‘Jack’) Welsh, she finally did so in 1977 – just a year before her death at the age of 65.

The exhibition catalogue (printed by Collett, Bain & Gaspar) lists 39 photographs “coloured with oils”, mostly of local scenes, together with 13 monochromes, again of local scenes, and 10 drawings inspired by religious icons and even Shakespeare.

Eva was a deeply religious woman from a religious family, with a nun and two priests among her siblings, and she was the organist at the St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Warrnambool for almost 30 years.

It is through her music that Eva Gaspar is most recognised.

According to the Warrnambool Historical Society, she formed her own choir and junior orchestra in 1948 to commemorate the birth of Mozart, and this group not only staged elaborate annual performances of Mozart operas, but went on to become the Mozart Choral Society that still operates from Warrnambool’s cute Mozart Hall today (where you will find another portrait of Eva).

Somewhere in between all of this activity, Eva still found time to teach music to young people for free.

For more than 40 years she taught music, singing, wind and string instruments to a legion of young musicians for whom a keyboard had nothing to do with a computer.

What a generous, creative soul was Eva Gaspar.

[box]Bluestone would like to thank Ray Welsford, Jack Wilkins, the Warrnambool Art Gallery and the National Library for their assistance with this story.[/box]

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Analysis – Carol Altmann

Another irreplaceable piece of Warrnambool’s urban landscape has been reduced to rubble without, it seems, a word of warning.

The well-known, pre-war apartment block at 259 Lava St (next to Aldi supermarket) was bulldozed last Tuesday (14/7), to make way for something which has not yet even been decided but which the owners, the Salvation Army, believes will better suit it needs.

Such was the swiftness of this particular demolition that nothing was salvaged, or offered free to others, so passersby watched in horror as window frames, glass panels, doors and fittings were broken up by a bulldozer and stuffed into waiting trucks.

It is enough to make you weep, and that’s exactly how a Bluestone subscriber felt when she sent us a series of photos she had taken of the travesty.

We posted them on our Facebook page where, within a few hours, they were seen by more than 4000 people and sparked a robust discussion about how we should treat our old buildings, but the debate, of course, was all too late: this building is already gone.

And this was a special building.

We know this because the Warrnambool City Council’s own heritage reports tell us so.

According to these reports, the apartments at 259 Lava St were one of only two examples of twin maisonettes in Warrnambool built in the “Interwar Moderne” design. This design was originally developed by one of Melbourne’s most notable architects, Robert Demaine, and, in this case, adapted by Marsh Michaelson.

The only other example of such twin moderne buildings in Warrnambool was the side-by-side buildings of “Sandilands” at 1A Liebig St (the former Madden’s building) and 1 Liebig St, known as Colern.

Sandilands, despite being recommended for heritage protection, was not protected but instead bulldozed earlier this year to make way for a nine-storey apartment block.

And Colern, despite being originally recommended for heritage protection, recently had that recommendation dropped. Why? Because without Sandilands, it has less architectural significance.

This logic means Colern could be bulldozed too.

Can you see what is happening here?

One domino falls and they all fall: from having three fine examples of moderne design, we could easily have none and those people, like Bluestone, who treasure the character of Warrnambool’s urban landscape, are at a loss as to what to do about it.

Because as it stands, the “community consultation”, if you can call it that, is simply not working.

Nobody is arguing that every old building in Warrnambool needs to be saved, but at least some of the shock at seeing great chunks of our streetscape disappear might be lessened if we all had the chance to have a say.

Part of that process, of course, is also hearing in plain English why a building should go: is it beyond repair? Has it been condemned? Full of asbestos? Are there many other examples of that style around? Will something extraordinary or beautiful take its place?

At the moment we are left in the dark and, once a building is gone, it is left to rumour and speculation as to why.

The council can rightly argue that more information is out there, but it is up to you to find it, buried somewhere in council agendas, reports, minutes, special briefings and papers.

We here at Bluestone keep a relatively close eye on council happenings, and we did not see or hear a word about 259 Lava St being earmarked for demolition.

Cr Peter Hulin, who is currently overseas, made a Facebook comment that he, too, knew nothing – and he is on council!

If he doesn’t know and we don’t know, what hope does the everyday Warrnambool resident have?

Surely we can do better than this and surely we deserve better than this.

Even a simple listing on the council’s website – “Demolition Applications” – would help.

(As it happens, Heritage Victoria held a forum in Warrnambool last Friday (17/7) to see how it could improve the 20-year-old Heritage Act.)

Built heritage is critical to a city’s character – Port Fairy knows this well – and while Warrnambool is tearing its down, other cities are finding new ways to revitalise old factories, warehouses, shops and houses: especially those in a CBD, where they become highly sought after, and very cool, housing.

Warrnambool lawyer Luke Taylor is doing just this above 222 Timor St (Biba Hairdressing), which was a virtually derelict dump when be bought it, but the 1850s building will soon house two, gorgeous apartments and its renewal is helping to transform that section of Timor St.

My thinking is that we don’t ever really “own” a building – we are merely custodians for a time – and if we are lucky enough to own a special piece of architecture, then it belongs both to us and the community.

Historian Jennifer Bantow also believed this. She was part of a passionate group of people who saved Murweh, the Fitzgerald’s historic home at the north end of Liebig, from being bulldozed in the 80s.

When I last spoke to Jennifer, who now lives in Geelong, she asked me: “So, is Warrnambool still pulling down its old buildings, or has it finally ‘got’ it?”

Judging by the events of last week, the answer is clear.

By Carol Altmann

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]W[/dropcap]hen artists Peter Bryant, Chris Small, Tony Neylan and Graeme Altmann first decided to exhibit together as the “Gang of 4”, the idea was to do so regularly.

That first exhibition in Warrnambool was way back in 1988 – when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister – and their second will be held this week (opens July 17), a full 27 years later.

(Mental note: do not hire these guys to organise your wedding.)

It has taken a little longer than planned, but the quartet – only Peter and Chris remain in Warrnambool – are eagerly anticipating reuniting at The Artery, which is only a few blocks west of where they held their first group show.

“It’s a bit like getting the band back for one more gig,” says Peter, a print maker and photographer.

“But the question is whether anybody else will give a s***,” he adds, letting out an infectious laugh that sums up how these four artists have always got along.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]T[/dropcap]he four first met in 1985 as first-year art and design students at what was then the Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education and were part of a colourful, crazy, but supremely talented group of young artists (and lecturers) who are all still connected, and still producing great work, today.

This week’s exhibition, 4tified, will provide a snapshot of that creativity, including Graeme’s works on paper and up-cycled boat sculptures, Tony’s delicate, Japanese-influenced ceramics, Chris’s slow-fired raku ceramics and Peter’s limited edition prints and photos, most of which have been created specifically for the show.

For Peter, who runs Shipwreck Coast Art & Design, it is a refreshing return to exhibiting. It has been 12 years since his last show, which was also with Chris Small.

“It’s a bit of an adjustment to go from screenprinting as a business, to screenprinting my own art again, but one that I am enjoying…I think,” he says, with a grin.

Peter’s studio is tucked down a laneway behind the former Fletcher Jones factory, with the famous silver ball water tower a constant backdrop. Not surprisingly, it features prominently in his work.

“Yes, there are some very strong Warrnambool references, for sure, but also a few surprises,” he smiles.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”]A[/dropcap]s we move through the flotsam and jetsam of Peter’s studio, where he picks up various pieces of work-in-progress, you can’t escape the sense that 4tified is more than just an exhibition.

It is also a time for reflection – although not necessarily a quiet one – on each artist’s journey since they were 20-something-year-old graduates, full of hope about their creative futures and dreaming of lives as professional artists.

But as for so many young artists, the other diamonds and demons of life disrupted the best laid plans. Families, mortgages and the need to make a decent living have meant that art has often had to take second place.

4tified, however, has provided a renewed focus.

“I am looking forward to the moment when I can step back from it, because it’s done, but at the same time it is a really good thing that this exhibition has forced me to get back into it and to prepare works by a deadline,” explains Peter, who now has four young children.

“It’s a return to form for me and maybe if I can continue to do this, then who knows what might happen as I get toward retirement: there are now entirely new ways of selling and promoting your work that didn’t exist when we first started.”

You have been 4warned, the Gang of 4 will be back.

[box]4tified runs at The Artery, 224 Timor St, from Wed July 15 until August 1 with the official opening by Glenn Morgan on Friday July 17 at 6pm. Another Deakin/WIAE alumni, Kathryn Ryan, opens her show, A Quiet Place, at the W’bool Art Gallery on Sat, July 18 at 6pm.[/box]

[button link=”http://the-terrier.com.au/subscribe-2/” type=”icon” icon=”heart” newwindow=”yes”]Bluestone needs at least 500 subscribers in 2015. If you read us, please support us.[/button]

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