Yes,there are signs of rebuilding and recovery. Lismore put on its annual lantern parade,its first major festival since the natural disaster:a smaller,simpler event with lanterns shaped like tinnies,to honour those who took to the raging floodwaters and saved so many.
At Byron School of Art in Mullumbimby classes have resumed;at M-Art,Murwillumbah’s art precinct,rebuilding got underway as soon as the metre-high sludge tide receded;and Lismore’s artist collective,Elevator ARI,has opened with a restricted exhibition program.
Eavesdropping in the Dragonfly Cafe in Lismore,the epicentre of the natural disaster where tradesmen’s utes outnumber local vehicles,the creator of ABC’sdirtgirlworld,Cate McQuillen,has been heartened to hear fresh talk of art-making. “It’s been so wonderful to hear,” she says.
But parts of the Lismore area are still without power. People have been scattered to lounges,spare rooms,tents,and caravans. Affordable accommodation and cheap studio space,already in short supply before the floods,are diabolical to find. Anxiety remains high among those rebuilding artistic practices that the floods will come again. And funding support is not reaching everyone.
Now comes news that only 60 percent of the submerged 1400 works in the permanent collection of the Lismore Regional Art Gallery are recoverable. These include editions of fine art photographs - comprising almost one fifth of the collection - that were lost but can be reprinted. The gallery’s most valuable object,the Hannah Cabinet,is undergoing treatment before being returned to its maker for restoration to exhibition standards. It will be at least until early 2024 before the council-owned gallery reopens.
Last week 200 representatives from visual arts,screen,musicians and performers came together for the to map the sector’s recovery and discuss ways to future-proof themselves from repeat calamities.
“It’s a place creatives have never been in before,” says organiser Jane Fuller,executive director of the peak representative body,Art Northern Rivers. “We’ve gone from thriving arts and culture industries operating from bricks and mortar buildings to galleries without walls and venues without stages.”
At that forum,NSW arts minister Ben Franklin announced $12 million would be directed to flood impacted regions in coming days to fund the urgent repairs to theatres,music venues,museums,art centres and other cultural organisations. “I’m proud to call this region my home and many of the artists and creative practitioners are my friends. I’ll walk with them on the recovery journey for as long as it takes,” Franklin said.
Manager of Silver Cloud Studios,Robyn Staines in her studio after floodwaters receded.Natalie Grono
The biblical deluge that drowned Lismore hit an area boasting the highest concentration of musicians,artists,dancers and filmmakers outside of Sydney.
The arrival of creatives to these bucolic parts first gathered pace in the 1980s and drew like-minded creatives to a self-sustaining and vibrant circuit of homegrown festivals,art,and music-making that spread beyond the artist bolt-holes of Byron and Mullumbimby.
In Lismore,emerging artists and students from Southern Cross University settled on its south side:flood plain country vulnerable to flooding but cheap enough to sustain a precarious living in the arts.
When stained-glass artist Simon Falomir arrived from Sydney 20 years ago he discovered a tight-knit artistic community well-practiced in staged retreats from the Wilsons River. Not this time. “We’ve been through many,many floods but this was something else,” he says.
Falomir in the rubble of what was his space at Silver Cloud Studios.Natalie Grono
Falomir rented a studio in the old chocolate factory and as rain bucketed down over three days he and fellow resident artists moved art supplies,tools,and works to the building’s second floor.
Upstairs,Silver Cloud Studios manager Robyn Staines thought her kiln,press,ceramic ware,etchings,inks and paintings,some framed for forthcoming exhibition at the Lismore Regional Art Gallery,would be safe from inundation.
After midnight,with water lapping the table on which Staines stood,she and her 10-year-old son followed Falomir onto a precarious ladder propped between the factory’s upper verandah and the roof of a neighbouring home.
From their rooftop position,Falomir watched helplessly as his brick studio was partially swept away,along with his personal belongings and “thousands and thousands of dollars of antique glass and porcelain mold-making equipment”.
Falomir,whose clear thinking Staines credits for helping to save her life,now sleeps in a “half-made caravan under a teepee” on a bush block outside Nimbin. Like many solo artists,Falomir did not have a traditional business set up and was knocked back on a Create NSW grant to help build a studio on his own land. Staines has received some support but has not been able to find herself a replacement studio.
McQuillen is likewise grateful for the $18,000 grant she received from the government’s arts agency,Create NSW,which has directed $700,000 in money and in-kind support to institutions and creatives in the region. The grant money “doesn’t touch the sides,but it keeps us moving”,McQuillen says. She lost valuable live recording equipment,props,and merchandise when her rehearsal and recording studio in the Richmond Valley flooded to shoulder height on that fateful night.
“We’ve gone from thriving arts and culture industries operating from bricks and mortar buildings to galleries without walls and venues without stages.”
Jane Fuller,Art Northern Rivers
Members of her production team were trapped by the rising waters for 18 days and had to be helicoptered out. McQuillen has decided not to rebuild. Production will resume at her home on higher land after September,but as the muck of Splendour in the Grass highlighted,the ground is still too waterlogged to bring in vehicles and heavy equipment.
“With bushfires and COVID,I feel like we have been in recovery mode for three years now,” McQuillen says. “The good news - which is also the bad news when you are an artist - is that you have a driving urge to tell stories,and how sad would it be if the northern rivers was not the beautiful place for arts to happen? The story I’m driven to tell is our relationship to nature and,yet,here I am,sitting in a part of the world hardest hit by the climate shift.”
Art Northern Rivers estimates flood damage to cultural organisations including the Lismore Regional Art Gallery and Byron School of Art to be around $5 million. Independent artists lost more than $4.5 million in equipment,studios,and artworks. “The breadth of the loss is very layered,” Fuller says. “It’s embryonic work right up to work ready to be sold,or ready to be played or ready to be exhibited.”
Abstract artist Michael Cusack runs the Byron School of Art with a small group of artists in a rented industrial workspace in downtown Mullumbimby that at peak flood was knee-deep in fast-flowing water. Cusack has resumed student classes and started over on his September show for the Olsen Gallery,Paddington,one-third complete before the floods struck.
Cusack’s new work is weightier. “Without being too grandiose about it,you can’t go through something like this without feeling something,obviously.”
Artist Michael Cusack at The Byron School of Art in Mullumbimby.Natalie Grono
Seven of Cusack’s paintings were in the permanent collection of the Lismore Regional Art Gallery and showed his maturation as an artist. “To put it in perspective,while my work is important,it is insignificant when one thinks of all that have lost their homes and somewhere to live. The community comes first,” Cusack says.
Visual artist Claudie Frock relinquished her lease on the Arch Studio Gallery after the flood destroyed hanging racks and lighting and has joined Outpost Studio on higher ground. She counts herself lucky to be able to fall back on a permanent position as a community engagement officer with the Lismore Regional Gallery,running collage workshops at the Thursday produce markets.
Artist Claudie Frock surrendered her art gallery lease.Natalie Grono
“It still feels very overwhelming when you go into town and lots of things are broken and there’s still piles of rubbish,” she says. “Even if your homes are not gone,venues are gone to show work,the regional gallery is not functioning as an exhibition space,the art supply shops are not functioning.”
At the Northern Rivers Conservatorium,250 students have returned to refurbished teaching studios,the remaining 350 students to stay at Southern Cross University until ground-floor classrooms can be reopened. The 1902 heritage building took in almost 4.5 metres of water causing $1.4 million in damage,of which the conservatorium still needs to find $400,000,likely to be met by the arts minister’s new funding commitment.
“It’s a really important part of the community’s identity - not just the parents,teachers,and students - that we are back in,and you can hear music coming from the building in the afternoon,” says executive director,Anita Bellman.
She refuses to call the resumption of classes a return to normalcy. “I prefer to say it’s a return to the familiar because impermanence and change are our reality.”
Brett Adlington of the Museum and Galleries NSW is urging all the state’s cultural institutions rethink disaster plans in the face of increasing climate threats. “Lismore,like many,based their planning on known occurrences of flooding. We’ve since learned this was nowhere near enough to what was needed. That is a wake-up call for many organisations.”
Frock now runs a weekly flood recovery art class in Lismore in association with the Regional Gallery.Natalie Grono
Short term,the inclusion of northern rivers artists in venues,shows,and programs scheduled for Sydney and regional NSW through to 2024 “would be of huge benefit” in generating work and income,says Fuller.
Locally,a temporary take-over of the Lismore CBD of pop-up galleries,studios and music venues has her support. “Fringe festivals have been at the centre of regeneration of cities like Edinburgh,and Adelaide,so it’s a very successful model,” Fuller says. “Instead of two months,maybe we could have one for 12 months,something with quick movement potential for the possibility of flood - plinths on wheels,recording studio equipment in road cases,kilns off-site.”
Whatever impetus recovery takes,the region’s creatives will be critical to recovery of all,says Lara Strongman,who lived through the Christchurch earthquakes that left the city in ruins.
Strongman is the director of curatorial and digital at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art,and was head curator of Christchurch Art Gallery from 2014,and planned the gallery’s reopening program after the 2011 earthquakes.
Christchurch Art Gallery made several public art space interventions while the city was under repair,curating art shows in abandoned houses and on vacant lots,running temporary exhibition spaces,and reproducing favourite works from the gallery’s collection on a billboard scale.
“It’s important to set up temporary spaces because people’s physical environments have changed,and it’s incredibly dispiriting,” Strongman says.
In the first years of recovery,Strongman expects public art initiatives will be under a lot of pressure to be useful - to provide tangible evidence of resilience and help communities process shared trauma. But there’s value,too,in a spontaneous flowering of grassroots creativity.
“Disasters have a very long tail and rebuilding is one thing but recovering is quite another,” she says. “People go through disasters together but they experience it differently and separately,and with something of this scale and seriousness I don’t know if one ever gets over it.
“Certainly,the experiences I had during those earthquake years are something I will carry with me for the rest of my life,for better or worse. I know that not just the visual arts,but the writing,the poetry,the performances,songs and dance that happen at that moment of crisis and its aftermath are critical to the community’s recovery.”
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