Glen Innes’ new School of Arts & Music opened to the public on Saturday 20 June with a free community day, marking the start of a two-year Glen Innes Severn Council pilot that will see the historic former Severn Shire Council Building hired out as a creative hub for $10 an hour.
A building that had stood quiet filled with creative connections, laughter and music. Pianos and voices carried down the hall, art supplies covered tables in the garage, and a steady stream of people came through from morning to mid-afternoon.
By ten o’clock the rooms were busy. Three spaces ran activities side by side, all built on one idea: you do not have to be good at something to enjoy it.
In Room 1, Paul Iannuzzelli, Director and Founder of MusicPro, kept the music going from open to close. He had brought in his own instruments and laid them out for anyone to try, and he spoke of music as part of ordinary life rather than something reserved for the practised few. Children who had never held a guitar before were strumming one. Adults who had not sung since school found their voice again.
Down the hall, Julie Miller of the New England Stage and Screen Academy led the movement and performance sessions. She drew people off their phones and into the room, asking them to feel the floor and shake off the week. More than one participant said an hour spent moving among strangers felt like fresh air.
The official opening
At eleven, the day paused for the formalities. Lindsay Woodland, the Council’s Director of Corporate and Community Services, opened the proceedings and introduced Mayor Margot Davis, who welcomed the community members, councillors and guests who filled the room, and traced the line from a single conversation to the building they now stood in. The project had begun when Paul Iannuzzelli came to her, not long after she became Mayor, with an idea: Glen Innes needed a home for music, arts and learning under one roof. It was this that started the conversation; Glen Innes Severn Council asked the community first, running workshops and building the idea around what residents said they wanted and how a School of Arts model would best work. .
The name they chose carries a long history. As local historian Eve Chappell OAM has written, Schools of Arts ran in Glen Innes and its villages from the 1870s, beginning here in 1877 as a public library and reading room. By 1922 the Glen Innes institution had served 700 people and issued 13,000 books, and over the years it held cards, chess, billiards and even a gymnasium, before closing in 1967. More than a century on, the name returns to a new home: the former Severn Shire Council Building at 181 Bourke Street, built in 1910. The old council chambers now belong to the town’s musicians and artists.
Mayor Margot Davis then welcomed pianist Keiko Robertson to mark the occasion. A concert pianist trained at the Toho Gakuen College in Tokyo, with a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, Keiko gave a short recital, then sat down again at the piano for the ribbon-cutting. The Mayor called the building a place to learn, create, perform, connect and be inspired, and thanked the councillors who backed the project, the residents who shaped it, the Lions Club for the catering, and the facilitators who gave their day.
A day made for everyone
With the building open, the program ran on through the afternoon. There was a way in for every interest: a music and wellbeing session; an open masterclass with the Glen Innes Highland Choir; dance and theatre sports by the beloved Julie from NESSA; a poetry and creative writing class; piano, guitar and vocal masterclasses; a songwriting and recording workshop; and a film school sampler for the school holidays.
The makers had their corner too. Anita Stewart shaped clay by hand. Jenny Harrington turned old cloth into new with upcycling and knitting. Owen Windred handed beginners their first banjo to strum, and Anne Vosper brought the Highland Writers Group.
Just outside the garage, the Lions Club had a sausage sizzle going, and the smell of onions did what no flyer could. People drifted over for lunch, sausage in hand, and found Arts North West’s Lauren Mackley running a drawing workshop a few steps away.
Lauren was teaching contour and gestural drawing, a practice that asks you to follow the edge of an object with your eye and let your hand trail behind. Gestural drawing chases the movement of a subject in quick, loose marks before the mind can object. More than one person who came only for a sausage left holding a page they were secretly rather pleased with.
A drawcard for the whole region
People came a long way for this one. The crowd gathered from right across the New England North West, with people from across the region including Tamworth, Tenterfield and Inverell — which suggests the School of Arts & Music can be more than a local venue. It has the potential to pull artists and audiences across the shire lines and become a meeting place for the whole district.
What happens next is up to the community. Council has begun a two-year pilot in which anyone can hire a room for $10 an hour, with rooms suited to art groups, rehearsals, lessons, workshops and small exhibitions. Space is one of the hardest things for a country artist to find, and harder still to pay for, so the offer is a rare one — but the building only becomes a hub when people use it.
Expressions of interest and bookings are through Glen Innes Severn Council: Gregory Ford: gford@gisc.nsw.gov.au.
Media Release: Arts Northwest
