Tuesday, 30 September 2014
With barely a month left until the Anzac Albany commemoration, it is all go as Cindi Drennan and Ian Lilburne work with artists and actors in Albany this week. The group will record songs and poetry for the projects and create video footage of some scenes with local actors, video artist John Carberry and photographers from the Albany Film Users Group.
Over the months Ian and Cindi have been working on a number of levels with the community, and collaborating with local historians, artists and writers on the different aspects of the projections to come.
Ian Lilburne says, “There is a wonderful community of historians in Albany who have provided us with material. The key figures here are Malcolm Traill at the WA Museum Albany, and Sue Smith from the Albany Library’s history unit.
“Malcolm Traill has hunted down many images for us and conducted a wonderful war memorabilia day where the local community brought in their family heirlooms and war artefacts for identification and authentication by Museum staff.
“Sue Smith has access to an amazing array of Anzac stories and local oral histories, from which some of our narratives have grown.”
Then there has been the Albany Historical Society who, Ian explains, “have not only generously allowed us to use their board room as our makeshift Albany office, but also put us in touch with Roger Cunnington. Cunnington’s book Albany’s ANZAC Convoys has been an invaluable source for our research and provided us with many fine details that will be presented in the Princess Royal Harbour Lights show in particular.”
Amongst the group of established and emerging writers working on material for the commemoration are Dianne Wolfer and Jon Doust. “While most of what we’ve been presented with is written especially for the commemoration, we have taken one extant work, Dianne Wolfer’s Light House Girl and, with her and her publisher’s permission (Fremantle Press), are adapting it and its wonderful illustrations by Brian Simmonds for a projection,” says Ian.
There are many talented photographers within the Albany community, and they have done a fantastic job in developing a series of recreations of 19-teens images – people, horses, cars, etc, some from the war, others from civilian life, which will be used in the projections. Some of the photographers involved are from the Albany Film Users Group (under the leadership of Bob Symons and Julie Holland), John Carberry, Ben Reynolds, and Julian Blogg.
There is also a group of sculptors we’ve collaborated with under the direction of local artist Mick O’Doherty. They will be are putting on a show of sculpture in the Harbour during the Anzac commemorations, and we will be photographing their work and weaving it into the projections.
More recently, a few Albany actors have been enlisted to speak the many parts in the narratives. Simon Woodward, Natasha Rolfe and Belinda Saunders of Southern Edge Arts have been helping with the recruitment of these voice actors, and Ian and Cindi will start to record them in Albany over the coming week with the assistance of Southern Cross Austereo’s – 783 RadioWest Albany.
