When Jean Bellette (1908–1981) painted this modernist still life in the kitchen of her newly-acquired weekender in Hill End, she could not have foreseen the legacy she was creating for the arts in Bathurst. Her painting won the inaugural Carillon City Festival Art Prize in 1955 and was the first work acquired for the Bathurst […]
Keyword: Hill End
From Doorsteps to Skylines
A chance encounter with a travelling photographer changed the course of young Charles Bayliss’s life in 1866. He was sixteen years old and living in suburban Melbourne when Beaufoy Merlin knocked on the door and asked to photograph the family home. The entrepreneurial Merlin had started a business documenting the buildings and houses of the […]
A Man For All Seasons
After his sudden death in 1992, Brett Whiteley’s daughter Arkie remembered her artist father as a ‘generous, sweet intuitive man’ who would go to eternity wearing his ‘funny little turned up black hat with the frangipani brooch.’ The hat, now in the collection of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, was his ‘good luck hat. He […]
Burning the Midnight Oil
The horses whinnied restlessly as the coachman, Jim Lowe, prepared their harnesses. Nearby, hanging at the entrance of the Cobb & Co booking office, this lantern beamed brightly like a beacon in the pre-dawn darkness. The passengers had been called for at their lodgings half an hour before – their coach was ready to make […]